Beware the One-Hour Abyss

The end of Daylight Savings Time (DST) is just around the corner. To most of the world, it means one more hour of sleep. But, those of us running computer operations and managing job scheduling have to be more concerned.

Last year, an article in an industry newsletter made the complaint that Help/Systems doesn’t automatically switch Robot/SCHEDULE’s internal clock. That’s true—we don’t know the best time to move the clock forward or back for your schedule. If we did this automatically at midnight, you might miss or rerun jobs because of the “one-hour abyss”.

Officially DST in the US begins the second Sunday of March and ends the first Sunday of November. For 2009, it began Sunday, March 8 at 2 a.m, and ends Sunday, November 1 at 2 a.m. (In many western European countries, DST begins on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Sunday of October.) The clock moves ahead one hour in March and back one hour in November (hence the saying, "Spring forward; Fall back").

To change your Robot/SCHEDULE time, we have a procedure you can run in Robot/SCHEDULE at a time that is convenient for your schedule. Follow the URL http://www.helpsystems.com/robotnews/2009/02/11/changing-daylight-saving... for the documentation on this topic.

You and your operations team should control your Daylight Savings changes because you understand your business schedule. For instance, some customers change the time before night processing; others wait until 7:00 a.m. to switch. Either way, everyone can enjoy that extra hour of sleep this fall, especially since Robot/SCHEDULE is on the job.