Case study - Monmouthshire County Council

When Monmouth Borough and Gwent County Council were amalgamated as part of local government reorganisation in Wales in 1996, the new unitary authority found itself coping with a complex range of inherited legacy systems. The council migrated to a UNIX^® open systems environment and, requiring effective system management, it selected COSprint and COSbatch from COSMOS, OSM’s suite of flexible management tools for distributed computing environments.

The structure of local government in Wales has dramatically changed over the past decade. In 1996, the Local Government Act of 1994 amalgamated the 45 county and borough councils into 22 unitary authorities. As a result, Monmouthshire County Council, formed from the merging of Monmouth Borough with a portion of Gwent County Council, is now responsible for administering a sizeable area of 85,100 hectares with a population of over 80,400.

Monmouthshire County Council inherited a complex mixture of environments, including IBM mainframe and Universe running on BULL DPX20s under UNIX. A new infrastructure was essential for consolidation and to cope with the demands of the new authority. An IBM SP2 (rack–mounted RS6000s) was installed and applications were migrated or replaced with UNIX–based applications.

Problems in print . . .

Monmouthshire County Council’s most urgent problem was the failure of its production printing systems to cope with a vastly increased workload. The council needs to print 3,500 thousand payslips for employees within the authority every month, while council tax demands at the end of each year alone require a print run of 30,000 bills and reminders.

Janet Villars, Monmouthshire County Council's Technical Support Manager, explained that users were unable to cancel and restart jobs in progress from specified pages – a flaw that had serious consequences. The council’s payslips, for example, are printed on multi–part slips which are prone to paper jams. Under the council’s old system, if just one payslip was damaged, the entire 3,500 print run had to be re–done from scratch. Worse still, staff had to manually oversee this huge reprint to ensure expensive stationery wasn’t wasted.

"It was a nightmare," Villars conceded. "Not surprisingly, printing delays were a bone of contention between ourselves and the payroll department."

There was another reason why Monmouthshire needed better print management tools as well. The council is required to meet standards set by ‘Local Agenda 21’, an environmental initiative to conserve paper reserves. Clearly, paper wastage caused by the old system was increasingly unacceptable.

. . . and in batch processing

Printing was not the council’s only IT problem. Like most large organisations, the council’s IT system has to perform an enormous number of batch processing tasks – or jobs – such as runs of benefits payments, housing rent transactions and other mission–critical end–of–day procedures. These processes were semi–automated, but the council still had to pay operators shift allowances to stay until all the batch jobs were completed. Budget constraints led the council to seek a completely unmanned system that was flexible enough to increase efficiency and, ultimately, the quality of service provided to its end users.

The COSMOS solution

To find the right technology partner to meet its strategic objectives, Monmouthshire County Council despatched surveys to a large number of potential solution providers.

After a rigorous selection process, Monmouthshire chose software solutions from COSMOS, OSM’s suite of system management tools. COSprint, OSM’s network print management tool, offered the council flexible control over its printing tasks. COSprint’s ease of use for non–technical operators, and the fact that it allows users to make print requests from any computer on the network impressed Villars. "The concept of users being able to treat the system as if it were a single machine is very valuable to us, and OSM’s tools let us do that," she commented.

When it looked for a way to automate its end–of–day processing jobs, the council found COSbatch’s versatility as a batch scheduler equally appealing. Villars believes COSbatch is unique because it extends mainframe–class functionality into the UNIX environment.

"What impressed us most about OSM, though, was the comfort factor," Villars added. "From the outset, they demonstrated professionalism, expertise and commitment. Budget constraints and restricted resources make these things essential for us."