Business challenge

A large retail industry customer had an issue installing the latest release of the software for Uni2000 (our mainframe-based payroll application, designed to process large numbers of employees through complex payroll scenarios quickly and accurately).  Due to change in personnel at the customer, they had a lack of experienced users and so were unable to find the output from the program links.  

Payroll is a time critical application and this particular customer processes approximately 360,000 employees each pay period.  With weekly pay runs, being able to install an upgrade in a timely manner, particularly when new legislation is contained therein, it means time is of the essence for installing new releases and getting it live for processing. 

Transformation story

The customer’s team reached out to the mainframe technical support team at Zellis for assistance.

The Zellis technical team are very experienced at gathering the right information to assist in resolving problems.  They quickly ascertained that the root cause was most likely to be an issue with the customer’s JCL. 

We investigated the customer’s JCL and discovered that the output had been written to a member in a partitioned dataset (PDS), rather than to the print queue.  The customer had not realised the implication of the line in their JCL and had not realised they were writing to a file rather than directly to the print queue.

In their JCL, they had the following line:

//SYSPRINT  DD DSN=IBMUSER.PRINT.OUTPUT(UEIPAYC),DISP=OLD  

When what they really needed was:

//SYSPRINT  DD  SYSOUT=*

Results

The Zellis team resolved their issue by providing a modified version of our UEINS01 program, which meant they could successfully upload and link to complete their installation on their zSeries, finding the output where they expected - ie, on the printer.  The customer was then able to stay compliant with legislative requirements.

IBM Z provides the performance, and agility that our customers rely on for such a critical application.  Calculating high volumes of employee payroll data without delays needs powerful processing.

With IBMz, we ensure that our applications can evolve with the demands of the market, while maintaining the stability and backward compatibility our customers need to keep their critical systems running smoothly.

“The Zellis Unipay team are very knowledgeable and always on hand for us to raise any issues, discuss problems we need help with, and offer advice and guidance.”

Halil Hassan, Technical Programme Manager, Tesco