Group Jobs Are Greater Than Ever

In Robot/SCHEDULE 11, managing group jobs is easier because the Job Schedule List lets you use a sort that includes the group control job with the members of the groups. This got me thinking about group jobs vs. reactive jobs.

Robot/SCHEDULE had group jobs even back on the System/38; reactive jobs were developed later. Many customers only use group jobs because they’ve never explored reactive jobs. I like to start with group jobs and add reactive jobs to build a schedule that’s logical and easy to report on.

Group jobs organize your schedule into logical business processes. You can tie common end-of-day, end-of-week, or end-of-month business processes serially: one job runs, then the next, and so forth until the group finishes.

Some customers have hundreds of jobs in single-threaded runs. Group control jobs establish run criteria, like date and time or reactive events. These jobs run until all members of the group finish. It’s easy to see the entire group in the Job Completion History or Schedule Activity Monitor (SAM).

It’s common for customers to combine reactive and group jobs. Many Robot/SCHEDULE reports, like the Completion History report, cover individual group processing. You can sort the Job Schedule List by group, view the Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer by group, and run queries against individual groups.

Group jobs are easy to use and very logical. And, we made them even better in Robot/SCHEDULE 11, so be sure to check it out.