Industrial-strength job scheduling across your IBM i-centric enterprise
Save Time and Increase Efficiency with Job Scheduling Software
Every data center manager wants their IT team to be efficient, meet service-level agreements, and avoid processing errors. Automated job scheduling and batch job management frees you and your operators to be more productive. And Robot Schedule is the starting point for any automation project requiring IBM i.
Let Workload Automation Simplify Processes
Robot Schedule’s workload automation capabilities allow users to automate everything from simple jobs to complex, event-driven processes on multiple platforms and centralize management from your most reliable system: IBM i. Just create a calendar of when and how jobs should run, and the software will do the rest.
Trust That Everything Will Run Right
Your operators have enough tasks on their plates to worry about babysitting scheduled jobs in order to ensure they run on time and in the right order. You and your team can rely on Robot Schedule to provide powerful workload automation for a smoother, error-free job schedule.
Key Job Scheduling Software Features
System Requirements: IBM i 7.2 or higher
Reliable, flexible job scheduling
Whether you’re running daily batch processing or month-end jobs, Robot job scheduling software will ensure these processes run on time, in the right order, and according to pre-set schedules. Choose from more than 25 scheduling parameters, like day of the week or according to the fiscal year or office schedule.
Automated dependency processing
Want the completion of one event to trigger the start of another specific event? Event-driven scheduling allows you to automate processes that aren’t simply time-based, like running report processes once the day’s sales figures are in or running a backup when a specific tape device becomes available. You can also reduce downtime between jobs with reactive scheduling, telling jobs to run only when certain prerequisite conditions are met.
Mobile job schedule management
Enjoy easy access to real-time job status information from anywhere on any mobile device. With its mobile-ready web interface, Robot Schedule makes mobile job schedule management simple, whether you need to view your job queue, start a new job, or review live flow diagrams. Mobile access allows for secure job schedule monitoring, providing proactive visibility into jobs without the need to be in the office or attached to your desktop.
Configurable dashboards
Configurable dashboards offer visibility into key metrics for critical jobs and job streams. Optional guest dashboards make it possible to give executives visibility into pre-defined metrics without requiring an IBM i profile.
Job flow diagrams
See a single job stream graphically represented in a job flow diagram, providing a real-time view of everything currently running and its status. You can see the relationships between jobs and information like job name, job type, and override codes, which is helpful for troubleshooting, meeting SLAs, and anticipating the impact on upstream and downstream jobs when making changes to the schedule.
In-depth job schedule details
When you need to see your entire job schedule in a single pane of glass, Schedule Activity Monitor (SAM) tells you what’s coming up, what’s currently running, and what has run. With the critical jobs list, you can define a cross-system view of those jobs that have the biggest impact or are the most important to you to instantly see their status.
Compliance reports and internal security
Use historic audit logs of who created or changed job flows to create reports to satisfy compliance regulations as part of HIPAA, PCI, or SOX. With internal security features beyond what’s built into IBM i, you can also easily adjust user access to functions, data, and jobs.
Notifications for meeting SLAs
When jobs run too long, end too quickly, or start too late, Robot Alert works with Robot Schedule to notify operators via text, email, or SMNP, helping you meet your service-level agreements (SLAs). Alternatively, you can specify certain actions to take place when issues arise, like automatically ending the job.
"We use it to schedule all recurring jobs on our IBM i systems—except if they require QSECOFR authority level. It saves a lot of time in job set-ups, and also job tracking. It's been an integral part of our production environment for (literally) decades."
— Bruce K., Director of IT Operations & Global Web Acquisition
Enterprise Scheduling Across Platforms
Do your nightly processes need to integrate with non-IBM i servers? Is IBM i data a prerequisite for your batch processes to run on AIX/UNIX, Windows, or Linux servers? Robot Schedule Enterprise can help you integrate all of your operating systems.
Centralize and control your Windows, AIX/UNIX, and Linux processes from your most reliable platform (your IBM i) to help streamline your enterprise job scheduling. When you pair Robot Schedule Enterprise with Robot Schedule, you can schedule jobs across platforms and allow dependencies between data center platforms—all from a single, modern graphical interface.
With the cross-platform job scheduling abilities of Robot Schedule Enterprise, you can monitor essential services and daemons, schedule batch jobs across your enterprise (SSI packages, scripts, and BAT files, for example), monitor file arrival and directory creation or modification, provide event-driven scheduling across different platforms, monitor for return codes from your scripts to determine job success or failure, capture output from agent systems for troubleshooting, verify availability of the server, and control the user and working directory on the server.
Workload Automation for Interactive Processes
When it comes to interactive job management, you have three options:
- Continue to manually repeat your current interactive processes
- Make the investment to rewrite your code
- Leverage workload automation to automate interactive processes
Together with Robot Schedule, Robot Replay enables you automate the entire operation of your IBM i—and there’s no need to rebuild your job schedule to accommodate interactive jobs.
Robot Schedule works with Robot Replay to automate the un-automatable. Robot Replay records screen images and information as you enter it on the screen, stores it as an object, and mimics the very same screens and keystrokes later by memory. Your automated processes can now run safely, quickly, and on time, saving you the time, money, and effort required to rewrite interactive processes.
Get Started
Find out how IBM i workload automation software can help you improve the efficiency of your job schedule. Request a free demo today.