Retail companies run on information. There are constant updates to sales and inventory data, often from many different locations. E-commerce sites collect browsing and shopping cart information to better advertise their offerings. An increasing number of brick-and-mortar stores have integrated with mobile apps to allow customers to learn about products while they shop.
All of this data is essential to daily operations and to effectively reaching customers, but it’s also very complex, especially for companies that have locations across the country or the world. A cross-platform workload automation solution with sophisticated job scheduling capabilities like Automate Schedule can turn your complicated data streams into actionable information.
Managing Essential Data
Many retailers seek out an automation tool for the same reason: they need to pull sales and inventory information from all their stores each night and feed it into their central ERP system. Sounds simple enough. But what happens when no information is received from one of the stores? It could be because the store was scheduled to be closed that day, or it could be because of a system error. Is your basic job scheduler smart enough to know the difference and react accordingly? Automate Schedule is.
A robust enterprise job scheduler can allow for alternate paths in the job schedule. If the store was scheduled to be closed, the workflow will continue without that store’s information. If the store was open, a different next-step can be triggered, like an error notification to the operator or a delay to wait for the data.
Exceptions are the Rule
Schedule changes over the holidays mean that scheduling your jobs for 2:00 every Friday, for example, doesn’t give you enough flexibility. If your stores are in different time zones, they may have to run their nightly processing at different times.
Many retailers have a certain time of year—in the U.S. this tends to be Black Friday—with an extremely high volume of transactions. Workload automation software can help this busy time go smoothly by delaying less important tasks to divert more processing power to essential jobs.
Easy Compliance through Automation
Businesses that deal with credit card transactions face increasing security concerns. To protect customer data, these businesses are expected to be PCI compliant. You may not think that PCI compliance has anything to do with your automation tool, but an enterprise job scheduler with the right features can make meeting compliance requirements easy. For example, Automate Schedule offers:
- Audit history
- Exception reporting
- Role-based security
This recorded webinar demonstrates how job scheduling software can be your secret weapon in fighting data breaches and working to meet PCI compliance.
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Read more about Automate Schedule's workload automation features or try it out yourself with a free 30-day trial.