Batch Job Scheduling - Dollar Universe

Dollar Universe, ORSYP’s Batch job scheduling solution

A batch job is a process that runs in the background, often deferred and unattended, to process data in groups (batch) rather than by individual transactions (e.g. a monthly phone bill rather than a bill for each individual phone call). A batch job executes a sequence of programs and technical instructions that are stored in a command file. Progress and error messages are output to a log file allowing users to determine, at any time, if the batch job completed successfully or identify the cause of the problem. Because batch jobs run in the background they are less visible to the end user.

In a business-computing context, batch job scheduling implies the automatic execution of background tasks (batch jobs) at pre-determined points in time (e.g. every day at 8pm, midday on Wednesday).

3 types of batch job scheduling can be distinguished: native, basic and advanced batch job scheduling.

Most operating systems and some business solutions software come equipped with native batch job scheduling tools that provide a limited service (e.g. Windows Scheduled Tasks, UNIX crontab, SAP CCMS) locally to each installation. However, business processes may span multiple platforms, applications, countries and companies. Their complexity may require much more functional power as provided by basic batch job scheduling including national and regional variations in the working calendar, sequence variations according to the day of the month, triggering of jobs by the successful completion of preceding jobs, elimination of gaps and reduced batch windows. Major benefits of basic batch job scheduling are enhanced productivity, operations reliability and cost-reduction. For e-business applications that require real-time processing, the distance between interactive individual processing and batch processing tends to decrease. Advanced batch job scheduling can handle these advanced requirements: event-driven scheduling for a real-time synchronization with interactive processing, just-in-time scheduling to run operations as soon as possible, cross-platform and cross application services for the entire IT landscape, real-time overall monitoring to track background operations for all applications on all servers.

The standard benefits of batch job scheduling are drastically amplified when job schedulers can handle the end-to-end automation and monitoring requirements for all background operations.