How many tasks do you run through Robot/SCHEDULE?

How many jobs or tasks do you launch each day through your job scheduler? Have you been able to reduce your run book? Do you work with end users to bring more into your scheduling solution? Do you allow staff members to use the WRKJOBSCDE command? (My suggestion is to lock down or deactivate WRKJOBSCDE; it only causes problems.) Do you need to run tasks on other machines besides IBM i servers?

Last year, one customer told us they ran over eight million batch processes on their IBM i server. That's a staggering number of tasks, and they all ran totally unattended. I doubt that most of us run that many jobs each year, but how many of us even know? How about the percentage of end user jobs that go through the scheduler? And do you know what your success rate is for running jobs? Are you meeting your service-level agreements (SLAs)?

Built-in schedulers like Cron, WRKJOBSCDE, and the Windows Task Scheduler are handy, but they lack the oomph that modern data centers need. Today, we need to be able to pull metrics to measure how we are doing each day, month, and year. We need to know our percent of success and whether we improve from year to year. If you don't provide metrics to management, they'll have no clue about what you're doing when it comes to budget talks.

Why Robot/SCHEDULE Can Help

Our founder, Richard Jacobson, was an auditor for many years before he created Robot (Robot/SCHEDULE). He believed that automation software had to provide historical information for reporting and monitoring. That basic principle has carried through the Robot Automated Operations Solution over the years. Today, we provide historical data to help you build the metrics you need to justify why you use the tools you do.

One popular feature throughout the solution is our Good Morning Report (see Figure 1). This report summarizes a product's activity. For job scheduling, it shows total jobs, total successful jobs, total failed jobs, and deviations from the normal run. These metrics help you report to management about the success of your automation projects.

Figure 1: The Good Morning Report provides a summary of your jobs. (Click images to enlarge.)

A Single Scheduler

Are you struggling with trying to find a simple view of what's going to run next or trying to understand what dependencies exist between processes? Robot/SCHEDULE's Job Schedule Blueprint (Figure 2) offers a visual snapshot of the dependencies between your jobs in a flowchart format. That makes it easy for you explain how your nightly processing works without having to spend hours reviewing programming code or gathering system information.

Figure 2: A Job Schedule Blueprint shows the discrepancies between jobs.

Learn More

If you really want proper IT metrics and total control over your processing, try Robot/SCHEDULE. It's been on the market since 1982. Nowadays, it schedules jobs in 120 countries and runs millions of tasks daily. Reliable, adaptable, flexible, high-quality, and efficient are just a few of the words used to describe Robot/SCHEDULE.

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Tom Huntington is Executive Vice President of Technical Solutions at HelpSystems, and has been with the company for nearly 30 years. He works with business alliances, acquisitions and large customer relationships and ensures that the HelpSystems software works with other major software and hardware vendors worldwide.

Tom often speaks on enterprise scheduling, security, automation topics, IBM i technology, and the HelpSystems products, and hosts technical presentations on a variety of automation topics. He is the author of the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey and has written articles on automated operations, security, cloud computing, and business intelligence for leading trade journals and newsletters. He was named an IBM Champion in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 for over three decades of advocation and thought leadership on the IBM i platform.

Contact Tom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..