Robot/SCHEDULE makes programmers productive and happy.

To automate any platform, you need batch commands and scripts. Every programmer calls programs and passes parameters to them. For most tasks, another task must run first. Data must be pushed or pulled from a different server in the network. Documentation is necessary to determine the impact of changing an application.

When was the last time the operations team woke you because they were confused about how to run the next task in the schedule or they ran something out of order? How much time did you spend resolving the issue?

Dependency processing, determining which parameters to pass, and being awakened in the middle of the night should not be your headache. But, in reality, the people impacted the most by these things are the application development team—the people who are supposed to be programming, not fixing issues from the night processing.

Robot/SCHEDULE Is a Good Thing

Robot/SCHEDULE has an impact—a positive impact—on your application development team. For years, development teams have benefited from its reserved command variables, reactive jobs, group jobs, automated FTP transfers, and job schedule blueprints.

For example, reserved command variables can pass dynamic date values, such as today's date, today's date minus seven days, today's date plus seven days, the end of month date, and more. Robot/SCHEDULE offers a large number of preconfigured variables (see Figure 1) that you can modify to fit your needs. You don't have to re-invent the wheel each time you need to pass dynamic information.

Figure 1:  Robot/SCHEDULE offers a list of reserve command variables. (Click images to enlarge.)

Dependencies Become No Big Deal

Think about how difficult it is to build dependencies into your applications. Imagine how hard you work building the night job queue process, only to have the operator release it early. Why did the backups run before the night processing completed? Who submitted the update before all the data was transferred?

We can go on and on. Robot/SCHEDULE's reactive jobs and group jobs solve these problems. These types of jobs run millions of batch processes every day worldwide, in or across partitions and spanning different operating systems. Their flexibility means that you can change dependencies easily without rewriting code or recompiling a program.

Figure 2: Robot/SCHEDULE reactive jobs make it easy to handle dependencies.

How much time do developers and programmers waste trying to build a complex job stream to handle dependencies? Robot/SCHEDULE won't submit the next job to batch until the previous job finishes. This avoids a big bottleneck of jobs waiting in a job queue. And what about service-level agreements (SLAs)? Robot/SCHEDULE automatically checks for jobs that ran late, didn't start on time, or completed too quickly. You and your team stay on top of the batch run.

Learn More

Robot/SCHEDULE helps you document the processes you build and coordinates parameter passing, dependent jobs, FTP processes, and SLAs. It gets rid of the midnight calls caused by keying mistakes. Robot/SCHEDULE is a programmer's best friend. If you don't already own it, you'll want to get it and incorporate it into your night processing; you'll be amazed at the impact it will have on your application development team. Get a free trial!

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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..