Automated job scheduling can greatly help with managing government regulations.

Are you working too hard in production control to keep up with SOX audits, HIPAA requirements, or any computer operation audit? Does your team spend a considerable amount of time assembling paper documents, filling out checklists, or manually updating run books? Do you have to work overtime to fulfill these requests? Preparing for audits around production control should not be this difficult.

In today's world of computer operations, there should be very little manual intervention required to provide the reports that prove you are running your nightly processing in a controlled fashion. One of the prime benefits of automated scheduling is the elimination of manual paperwork. Your job scheduling database should have the answers you need.

I recently visited a customer site where the operators were manually filling in a list of job names and their start and end times for management! Why? This is a complete waste of effort. Your job scheduler should provide a database you can query, and reports you can run, for your management team. After a quick two-minute demonstration, I was able to show the operator how to schedule a report job in Robot/SCHEDULE to produce this information automatically.

Job History Helps with SOX and Other Audits

Robot/SCHEDULE was developed by an auditor. Consequently, its database shows the past history of a job. You can access this database online, in a report, or through any query tool, such as SEQUEL. Figure 1 shows an example of the job completion history display.

Figure 1: Robot/SCHEDULE's Job Completion History is a complete record of job activity. (Click images to enlarge.)

Several predefined reports also help you access job history. The Job Completion History report is a chronological listing of jobs with dates and run times. Customers usually need this type of report for auditors or managers. You can even target this report for a particular application or group of jobs. The Good Morning Report provides a summary of batch processing, showing total jobs processed, jobs that ended abnormally, jobs deviating from their normal run time, and a list of the offending jobs. You can run the Good Morning Report for a single system or multiple systems (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Good Morning Report summarizes job activity for a system or a network.

Who Changed the Batch Process?

After working with Robot/SCHEDULE for 20-plus years, I can't even count the number of times I've heard someone blame Robot/SCHEDULE for running the wrong job or running a process out of order. Yet 99.99 percent of the time, it was someone on the staff who forced a job to run or put a job on hold. Robot/SCHEDULE's built-in audit log makes it easy to determine what happened (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Use Robot/SCHEDULE Audit Log Summary to see who changed a job.

Robot/SCHEDULE Makes It Easy

Robot/SCHEDULE really helps you track the pulse of your critical nightly processing jobs, while its job monitors make it much easier to meet your service-level agreements (SLAs). Give Robot/SCHEDULE a FREE 30-day trial. You won't be disappointed! To learn more about Robot/SCHEDULE, click here. And, check out Help/Systems' other offerings in the MC Showcase Buyer's Guide.

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..