New Robot/SCHEDULE GUI provides drill-down access and more!

Have you had a recent business audit on the production control (job scheduling) area of your computer operations? Is your management team asking for reports detailing who changed what batch job for night processing? Did the auditor ask about who has access or authority to change the jobs in the schedule? Did the auditor ask for a report that lists all the jobs that ran last night?

Manual or semi-automated schedules
If you are running a manual schedule, it is very difficult to provide timely and accurate information. It is even harder if you have written your own utility to run your schedule! The auditor has no sympathy about how much work you will need to do manually to provide the answer to his or her questions.

There are many ways to submit jobs to batch on the System i platform. You can use the IBM SBMJOB command; you can use the built-in job scheduler (WRKJOBSCDE); and there many job schedule software packages for sale. The problem is that most of these options provide very little, if any, historical information about the changes to the schedule or the actual running of the jobs. The auditor still needs the information.

Automated schedules
If you have Robot/SCHEDULE, these questions are not hard to answer. And, if you have Version 10.02, it is even easier. The new graphical user interface makes it easy to cut and paste information into Excel. You can provide answers in minutes, if not seconds. The following Robot/SCHEDULE features typically are used by those who must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) audits:

1. The Good Morning Report. Robot/SCHEDULE’s Good Morning Report summarizes your night batch processing. It shows the number of jobs that finished normally and the number that finished abnormally. It also provides a list of the jobs that did not complete normally.
2. Security. Robot/SCHEDULE has its own security system, above and beyond i5/OS object-based security. Its job security controls who has access to the job schedule and you can produce a report that lists access control.
3. Job Completion History. Every batch process that runs on your system is tracked in job completion history, including jobs submitted by end users and those submitted by Robot/SCHEDULE. The history provides information about start/end times and dates, as well the duration of the job.
4. Audit Logs. Robot/SCHEDULE maintains audit logs that track schedule changes and actions on the schedule. It even tracks when an operator forces a job to run immediately.
5. Product Master. The Product Master allows you to create jobs on one partition and send them to another. Many people use this as a change control mechanism for batch jobs. You can create a job on the development partition, test it, and then send it to the production partition. These activities are logged in Robot/SCHEDULE (10.02 or higher) and Robot/NETWORK 10.0.

Capture changes to production control schedule
So, how easy is it to get this information? Using Robot/SCHEDULE’s new graphical interface, open the Audit Log window, shown in Figure 1. Highlight the data you want to show the auditor. Right-click and copy this information to the clipboard. In seconds, you have captured the changes to your production control schedule!

Once the entries are on the clipboard, simply open Microsoft Excel, your e-mail client, or another program and paste your data, as shown in Figure 2. Most auditors seem to prefer receiving information in Excel format.

Capture job history
Robot/SCHEDULE Job Completion History is another handy list of data for auditors and managers. Most of the time, you don’t think about this data, but when you need it, it’s really great to have. The Job Completion History is revolving group of records about your batch processing. The Good Morning Report, job schedule forecasting, and other reports get information from the job history. You can easily copy this information to Excel, just as in the Audit Log example above.

Robot/SCHEDULE makes it easy
As many of you have learned, Robot/SCHEDULE helps you take the final step toward providing the information management and auditors need for your production control environment.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 10:22 am and is filed under Excel, Robot/SCHEDULE, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.