Batch Scheduling - ORSYP

Dollar Universe, ORSYP’s Batch Scheduling solution

A batch job is a process that runs in the background, often deffered 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 to 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 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).

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

Most operating systems and some business solutions software come equipped with native batch 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 scheduling including national and regional variations in the working calendar, sequence variations according to the day of the month, the triggering of jobs by the successful completion of preceding jobs, the elimination of gaps, and reduced batch windows. Major benefits of basic batch 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 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 scheduling are drastically amplified when job schedulers can handle the end-to-end automation and monitoring requirements for all background operations.