NATURAL PROCESS Extends NATURAL to Operations Center

The Coastal Corporation Relies on
Software AG's Customer Support.
Ralph Jenks, Manager of Corporate Data Administration, The Coastal Corporation,
Houston, Texas.
The Coastal Corporation's numbers
are impressive.
Coastal is a Houston-based diver-
sified energy firm with $7.6 billion
in assets. With principal operations
in natural gas transmission and
storage, gas and oil exploration and
production, refining and marketing,
coal and trucking, Coastal has over
17,000 employees worldwide. That
ranks Coastal at number 57 on For-
tune magazine's 1987 list of the 500
largest industrial corporations in
the United States.
To process the data needed
run a corporation of such enormous
proportions, Coastal has the products
of Software AG of North
America, Inc, in use at three mainframe
computer locations in Houston,
~etroii, and Colorado Springs.
Together, those three sites average
19 million calls per day to their
production mainframe data bases,
with occasional peaks reaching up
to 50 million calls per day.
With volume of such magnitude,
Coastal's Information Systems per-
sonnel do not want to wait when
they need help. That is why they
have come to rely on the technical
expertise available from Software
AG's Customer Support.
Customer Support the Software AG
way
According to Ralph Jenks, Manager
of Coastal's Corporate Data Admin-
istration, one incident points out
especially well how Coastal de-
pends on quick and accurate an-
swers from Software AG.
One recent weekend, Coastal's De-
troit staff made a mainframe switch
from a single to a dual processor.
The following Monday afternoon,
the staff encountered attached buf-
fer problems that prevented their
nightly batch jobs from running. A
Coastal employee call Software
AG's Customer Support, and was
immediately put in touch with a
Support Representative. The Reure-
sentative first supplied a "work-
around" that
Coastal to continue processing
batch jobs through the night in a
serial fashion, rather than in their
normal concurrent manner.
Next, Software AG's Support Rep-
resentative consulted a co-worker
who checked on the status of a fix
tape which was in a final test phase
at several customer sites. Although
not yet ready for distribution to all
Software AG customers, the Repre-
sentative knew the tape could be
modified and used to solve Coast-
al's attached buffer problems. The
Representative made the modifica-
tions, then sent the tape to Coastal
via overnight mail.
The following morning, still work-
ing hand-in-hand with Software
AG's Support Representative, Coast-
al installed the fix tape. After run-
ning tests to be sure everything was
functioning normally, Coastal went
"live" with the fix tape and their
1
Detroit operation was soon running
smoothly again.
Jenks says, "We were thoroughly
impressed-not only with the
speed of Customer Support's re-
sponse to our crisis, but also with
the level of expertise and profes-
sionalism of the Software AG Sup-
port Representative who helped us.
He was extremely knowledgeable
and helpful."
Depending on Software AG's
Customer Support
To provide some perspective of the
magnitude of that particular problem,
Jenks points out that their Detroit
operation, in addition to many
other functions, is responsible for
computing and sending an average
of $5 million in invoices per day to
Coastal customers. Having their Detroit
data processing operation out
of business would have meant huge
-and costly-problems for
Coastal.
Because Coastal is a long-time user
of Software AG products, Jenks says
many of their Information Systems
employees have a great deal of experience
and a high level of expertise
with the Software AG products
in use at Coastal. Nevertheless,
Coastal depends on Software AG's
Customer Support for three kinds of
help: for answers to questions that
come up in the normal course of a
day, for confirmation that a particular
plan they have in mind is the
best course of action, and for help
in times of crises.
No matter how Coastal's Information
Systems employees choose to
take advantage of the services offered
by Customer Support, they all
have one requirement: they must
have accurate solutions supplied
quickly.
"I can't say enough good about
Software AG's Customer Support,"
says Jenks. "We run a tight ship
here, so an accurate and speedy answer
to a question is almost always
the only kind which is acceptable
to us. And that's exactly what we
get whenever we call Software AG's
Customer Support."