“We’re still seeing about 5% year on year growth in jobs, but our executions continue to explode,” says Haynes. “We've seen about a 20% increase in executions year over year.”

While Raymond James has achieved consistent growth over the years, Haynes and team have found workflow orchestration doesn’t only help scale IT ops, it actually helps drive more business growth. It’s fuel for the fire. “We can do more while maintaining stability,” says Haynes. “Whether it’s creating new services that didn’t exist before, bringing more data to an existing service to add value, or setting up new SLAs to optimize quality, we’re agile with all of that.”

From regulatory compliance to day-to-day business, the ability to orchestrate file transfers in near real time is critical for Raymond James. “File transfers are about 35 to 40% of our daily workload and it continues to increase,” says Haynes. “We’re delivering hundreds of thousands of files at a breakneck pace and our ability to handle that is a big part of our success and stability.”

Raymond James uses Control-M Managed File Transfer Enterprise (MFTE) to give business users the power to automate and monitor their own file transfers and other workflows via extensive self-service features. The company also increased file transfer capacity by using MFTE’s cyclical process functionality, bundling up to five transfers into single, repeating jobs. “If five different applications need the same file, we can feed it to them in a single job,” says Haynes. “That's meant cost savings and tremendous efficiency gains for us.”

The company’s experience with MFTE also exemplifies how it has partnered with BMC over time for mutual benefit. “This is part of the relationship with BMC that I really appreciate,” says Haynes. “We looked at MFTE several years ago, when it first came out, and there were some things that we wanted to see advanced before we could buy into the product. It wasn’t long before BMC had really closed the gap, and we were able to move forward with the functionality we needed. And that’s a trend we’ve noticed: BMC continues to take the product to the next level.”

For everything from wealth management analytics to account balancing to internal administrative processes, Raymond James uses Control-M SLA Management for real-time reporting and performance forecasting. “The data we pull from it is helping us drive non-stop improvements,” says Haynes. “We set SLA alert times an hour or two in advance of where we're projected to miss an SLA, so we're able to see issues early and take proactive action.” The team also uses Control-M to create self-healing scenarios, automating actions when thresholds indicate an SLA is at risk.

It also helps that Raymond James has buy-in for optimizing performance from all levels of the enterprise. Over the years, Haynes and team have actively promoted Control-M’s self-service capabilities—not just for workload orchestration and file transfers, but also for creating and managing SLAs. “When we started we had around 30-40 associates looking at SLAs. Now we're around 800 associates from all across the enterprise—senior leadership, all the development managers, our app support teams, our command center. When you have that kind of buy-in, it really drives improvement.”