How To Schedule An Enterprise, Part 2

This week we finish our story about how Yvonne Schumacher, one of our intrepid Technical Training Consultants, spent her summer working on-site with a large customer helping them implement Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise and automate their job scheduling and operations across their mix of Windows, UNIX, Linux, and System i servers.

“The first part of the process was to get all of the jobs defined into Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise and understand the schedule and its dependencies. The Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise Blueprint feature was invaluable because I was able to create a visual picture of their entire job schedule, complete with dependencies, across their servers, and show it to their batch monitoring team, project programming teams, and supervisors. Whoever said, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, really knew what they were talking about. Basically, the blueprints became the key to understanding the schedule.

“Reactivity was a new concept for some of the people who had only worked on the Windows or UNIX side of the house, so the blueprints helped with that, and I also geared my training materials to helping them understand the concept of cross-platform dependency processing. Logistically, the implementation was a phased process because we had to create the jobs and batch schedules on test agent servers, test and fine tune them, then re-create them on the production agent servers and test some more before we were ready to go.

“All in all, it took about four months to completely organize, test, and implement a schedule containing hundreds of dependent jobs. But, when we were done, we had a completely automated job schedule that ran unattended across Windows, UNIX, and System i servers, with automatic e-mail notification (courtesy of Robot/ALERT) in the event a real person needed to intervene or there was a problem. It was a great feeling of accomplishment.”

I asked Yvonne what she learned most from the experience and she said simply, “Even very large-scale, cross-platform job scheduling automation can be done. But, you need a good plan and good people to carry it out. And, a big bonus is the lasting friendships that you can make!”

After completing this project, Yvonne returned to Help/Systems and was very excited to help two more Help/Systems customers with Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise implementation and training. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise really is the answer for enterprise scheduling. So, don't be afraid to tackle that next automation project, or to give us a call—we can help!