TEMENOS T24

Close of Business

User Guide

Information in this document is subject to change without notice.

No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without the express written permission of TEMENOS Holdings NV.

Copyright 2005 TEMENOS Holdings NV. All rights reserved.

Close of Business

Table of Contents
Introduction.............................................................................................................................................. 3
Application Overview ........................................................................................................................... 3
Initialisation .......................................................................................................................................... 4
Start COB with Users Signed On ..................................................................................................... 4
Initiate the COB Service ................................................................................................................... 4
Batch Output ........................................................................................................................................ 9
Error Handling.................................................................................................................................... 10
Error Messages.................................................................................................................................. 11

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 2 of 12

Close of Business

Introduction

Close Of Business is the most important T24 activity that brings together the events of the day for the
bank and processes them. The events could be in terms of loan schedules, accruals, internal bank
accounting and could be reports. These constitute important financial activity and more importantly are
scheduled for a specific day. Temenos Close Of Business is a robust mechanism through which the
above facility can be achieved with scalability in terms of performance and reliable in terms of
recovery.

Application Overview
T24 Batch Processing is handled by the Close Of Business (COB). Close Of Business is used for
processing events, calculating and posting interest, rolling the bank date forward and productions of
various reports. The Close Of Business triggers various activities based on the scheduled date and
based on any specific condition.

The Close Of Business consists of the following five stages in sorted order.

Figure 1 – The five stages of Batch mode

The Close Of Business runs various processes based on the order above. The Close Of Business
runs the process in sorted order of stages and within the stage based on the sequence number.

Each Batch stage consists of a number of processes with same or different sequence number , which
correspond directly to records on the BATCH file, and each process consists of a number of jobs
which are routines defined on PGM.FILE as type ‘B’. Each Batch process defines the stage and
sequence at which it has to be run, the jobs to be run and the frequency with which it has to be run.

At no stage, the stage and the sequence of the batch process will be violated thus ensuring data
integrity and proper processing of jobs if they are dependant on a earlier stage.

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 3 of 12

Close of Business

Initialisation
T24 COB is run as a T24 Service.

To begin with Close Of Business (COB) record needs to be created in the TSA.SERVICE with the
key as COB. The key is hardcoded and shall remain the same for global close of business. This
service has to be defined with the appropriate profile and the server it has to run and the OPERATOR
who will be running the Close Of Business. The profile can be defined in the
TSA.WORKLOAD.PROFILE record. The profile also contains the number of agents with which the
Close Of Business has to be invoked. Other details such as the REVIEW.TIME and DEATH.WATCH
have to be specified in the TSA.SERVICE record otherwise the details will be defaulted from the
TSA.PARAMETER record.

Once the COB record is created, the service status can be set to START thus making the service
ready for running.

Temenos Service Manager runs the COB service as a background service by invoking the appropriate
agents as defined in the profile of COB service.

If there are any unresolved errors on the EB.EOD.ERROR file (which were produced as a result of a
previous Close Of Business) and if the errors are critical, then the Close of Business will stop for the
errors to be resolved first.

Start COB with Users Signed On

Non Stop Processing and Close Of Business complement each other. Close Of Business disallow
input and processing of records in all applications other than one supported by Non-Stop service.

The applications that are available in NS stop service will be available without any restrictions and will
be using the next working date for processing thus ensuring the concurrent transactions are not picked
up processing by the Close Of Business which is running in parallel.

To support this, Close Of Business distinguishes the dates by two different records per company in the
DATES application. Close Of Business at the beginning cycles the dates record and restores the old
dates record with the key as the CO.CODE-COB thus ensuring that all COB processing happens
based on the -COB record in DATES and online processing happens with the cycled record in DATES
application.

Initiate the COB Service

To initiate the COB service, the record in TSA.SERVICE application called COB has to be marked for Starting.
If the TSM service is not started, then it needs to be started before the COB is initiated.

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 4 of 12

Close of Business

Figure 2 – Starting the Temenos Service Manager

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 5 of 12

Close of Business

Figure 3 – Invoking the Temenos Service Manager

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 6 of 12

Close of Business

Figure 4 – Starting the COB Service

This makes the COB service available and also TSM allocates the number of agents that are available
for running the COB. The agents replace the Desktop sessions which were used to run the job in a
multi thread architecture to save upon the time and to maximise the system resources.

Temenos Service Agents are invoked to run the Close Of Business and they run and update the file
TSA.STATUS of their progress and status.

Multiple Session End of Day

T24 COB processes have been designed to run in multi thread way to reduce the time taken and to
maximise the usage of system resources. Multiple agents can be used to run the COB and load on
the jobs will be shared by them.

However, this will not affect the sequence or the verification of the COB. The agents will compliment
each other within the same stage and sequence and will not violate the agents thus ensuring data
integrity.

The number of agents can be defined in the TSA.WORKLOAD.PROFILE record, which can be
attached to the TSA.SERVICE record COB.

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 7 of 12

Close of Business

Figure 5 – TSA.WORKLOAD.PROFILE Record

The agents available for the COB record as defined in the profile will be used by the Temenos Service
Manager to run the COB sessions. Close Of Business will be invoked in parallel for the ‘n’ number of
agents as defined in the profile.

Thus the COB can run with the help of multiple agents and the performance could be improved.

COB per company/company group

There is a facility in Close Of Business to run it specifically for one or a set of companies. This ensures
that Global Processing feature of T24 is maintained. The companies could be grouped together and
COB shall be run only for them. While the COB is running for a company, the other companies will be
in online mode and will perform on a different date.

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 8 of 12

Close of Business

List Files
Every job during the Close Of Business uses a LIST file for storing and sharing the records for
processing between different agents. The LIST file is dynamically determined based on the availability.
The other agents processing the same job use the allotted list for sharing their load of the job. The list
file is empty at the end of the job thus making it available for a different job. To define it further, a
session starts processing the job by determining the available list file and populates the data to
process in the list file. This session along with the other free sessions now share the load on the list
file and process the job.

TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT

The jobs run as a part of Close Of Business are wrapped under transaction management.
Transaction Management covers the population of the list file, the processing of the records in the list
file as well as updates the LOCKING/BATCH.STATUS and BATCH files. This ensures complete
rerunnability of the process and ability to skip through errors. Partial updates are avoided. Transaction
Management is not available for reporting jobs. Transaction Management for the batch processing is
wrapped around a single T24 transaction.

COMO
Since the introduction of multi threaded architecture, the COMO will be written with the session no to
distinguish processing between different threads. The COMO will be written with the key as
tSA_<agent no>_datetime. The COMO will contain information on the jobs processed with the
complete run time information.

Monitoring COB
Three enquiries are available that help in monitoring the progress of COB and the records processed
with the time taken. They can be accessed via the Temenos Enterprise Console (tEC).

COB.PROGRESS – A listing of active companies and an indication (progress bar) of their time to
completion
JOB.PROGRESS – This enquiry lists all active and completed jobs by descending start times (i.e.
current on top).It shows the start time, end time, elapsed time, contracts processed, total
contracts to process, throughput (contracts/minute) and individual server rate. The latter
is the number of contracts processed in one minute by a server process – this will be
compared historically to see if thee job is slowing down as time passes.
JOB.HISTORY – Drilling down from JOB.PROGRESS, the user can see a graph of the elapsed time
of the last ten runs of the job and the individual server rate. If the latter figure rises over
time, this indicates a problem – which could be badly sized files.

Batch Output
All reports, COMOs etc. produced by the batch system are output using the T24 report control system.
This enables the operator to determine the destination printer, user addressing, number of copies etc.
The following applications are used in this process:

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 9 of 12

Close of Business

Figure 9 – COB Output Applications

It is recommended that all COB COMOs be retained securely for at least six weeks.

If there is an occasion to restore and rerun, then the COMOs should be printed or copied to a secure
medium before the restore takes place.

Error Handling
As described in the introduction, a process can consist of any number of jobs, which in turn can
execute a number of programs or operating system commands. If an error occurs the system may
return immediately to the monitor screen and display the process and the job in error, or in the case of
less severe errors, update the record for the current batch run and the current company on the
EB.EOD.ERROR file and continue.

The details of these errors can be found be examining the records on the EB.EOD.ERROR file and on
the EB.EOD.ERROR.DETAIL file.

The COB processes are wrapped around jBase transaction management. Hence, in case of any
crashes during COB the concerned transaction will be rolled back and the COB will continue. This
ensures that COB can continue after an error and partial updates are rolled back to keep the database
in sync.

Jobs can abort for a variety of reasons, both system and application orientated

Any system related crashes will be sensed by the Temenos Service Manager and the dead agent will
be started again. The Temenos Service Manager if there is no activity in a agent for a period of time
as defined in the DEATH.WATCH field of TSA.SERVICE, restarts the agent thus ensuring that the COB
Crashes are monitored and restarted by the Service Manager.

Any application related crashes will write into EB.EOD.ERROR with the information on the job name,
the record and the text of the crash. The underlying record from the .LIST file will be removed and the
updates done till then for the particular transaction will be rolled back.

Again locking clashes time out after a minute thus ensuring that agents don’t wait endlessly on a lock.
Also this avoids the possibility of deadlocks on the system.

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 10 of 12

Close of Business

Figure 10 – EB.EOD.ERROR Record

.

Error Messages
There are a number of error messages produced directly from the COB monitor which are:

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 11 of 12

Close of Business

Figure 11 – Batch Control Error Messages

TEMENOS T24 User Guide Page 12 of 12