_Batch Job Monitor: Windchill’s new User Interface to simplify executed job tracking for one of the top world luxury goods manufacturers

Summary

A leading luxury goods group – with a focus on high-end watches, jewelry, fashion, and accessories, present in key markets around the world, including Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas, and the Middle East – was always using a big quantity of custom CLI (Command-Line Interface) administrator tools for managing different aspects of Windchill.

They have been using this way from simple mass-updating attribute values on different objects to complex activities like manual downstream branch creation. Each such tool has been developed without any common architecture, and furthermore every time for execution required extensive Linux knowledge. The company wanted to simplify this process by having one common framework for implementing these tools with a simple graphical User Interface for managing the executions.

They turned to Transition Technologies PSC (TT PSC) for custom solution development that combined all CLI (Command-Line Interface) administrator tools into one and introduction of a new User Interface directly in Windchill as the Batch Job Monitor.

Business Challenges

• There wasn’t any common architecture shared by the existing tools. #LackofCommonArchitecture
• All existing tools had to be reviewed and reverse-engineered to ensure that business logic would not be lost during the refactor. #MaintainingBusinessLogic
• A whole new approach to running these tools had to be designed and introduced to the end users. #ChangeManagement

Solution

TT PSC has designed the new fully-fledged Java framework for admin tools from scratch. All necessary legacy tools have been rewritten to use the new common and business logic.

Additionally, TT PSC has created a new User Interface directly in Windchill, which allows to monitor executed jobs, see their input files and output logs, and create new jobs with the simple, user-friendly wizard full of support and examples.

Everything is wrapped with custom access control to ensure these tools will only be used by specific people. Underneath, TT PSC has implemented an asynchronous job runner to make sure that job execution doesn’t block anyone, and the progress of such a job can be tracked in real time.

There’s also an automatic tool discovery, so each time a new tool is created, no manual action is needed to make it work. Moreover, each object modified with such a tool is stamped with a comment to track changes.

Results

Introducing a new User Interface as the Batch Job Monitor allowed the top-tier luxury items conglomerate to simplify the process of running standard administrator actions.

The people responsible for them no longer had to learn complex Linux commands, which differed for each tool. They can now use a simple User Interface to guide them through job creation and allowing easily manage all previous modifications. And every change is now tracked, so seeing what is happening with objects affected by admin tools is straightforward.

There are also visible benefits on the developer’s side. A common framework has significantly reduced the time needed to implement new jobs. Additionally, the resulting code is much cleaner and easier to maintain.