About Us

Case Studies | Past Times

“Halcyon gave us the best overall value for money and service”

Halcyon Products

All parts of Halcyon Operations Center

Objectives

To improve service and system availability while reducing costs

Business Benefits

Increased efficiency and reliability in the scheduling process. Halcyon is now managing by exception as far as operations are concerned. Improvements in reporting.

Application Software

Island Pacific

Servers

IBM iSeries 520

Mobile Services

Paging out of problems
Paging out sales information

“We use all elements of Operations Center,” says Simon Watson, Senior
Business Analyst at Past Times. “That includes job scheduling, paging,
monitoring spool files, TCP/IP monitoring, device filters, user profile filters,
service level reporting tasks and restricted tasks management.”
How Halcyon Operations Center is used

Based in Witney, Oxfordshire, Past Times (www.pasttimes.com) owns High Street, catalogue mail order and internet outlet retailer Past Times and Manners (a division of Past Times) and runs services for furniture company Ocean and outdoor clothing specialist Hawkshead. These services cover all warehousing, IT and financials, distribution and replenishment.

The management and monitoring of the Past Times operational schedule and technical support on the System i™ (iSeries™, AS/400™) was originally outsourced and, says Simon Watson, Senior Business Analyst, “There was always a delay between a problem occurring and our Helpdesk being aware of it. We were getting good service but not the best value for money. We therefore brought the management and monitoring of the schedule and System i™ (iSeries™, AS/400™) support back in-house.”

“We have a very small number of in-house System i™ (iSeries™, AS/400™) specialists, so in order to make sure the software we selected was the best option for Past Times, we spent three months on a full evaluation of Halcyon Operations Center and one other leading market product.”