Job Scheduler - ORSYP

In a business-computing context, a job scheduler programs batch tasks to run in the background on the required day, at the right time, in the required order and in the right circumstances. Job schedulers are most often applied to recurrent data processing tasks that may be of either a business or a technical nature. 3 types of job schedulers can be distinguished: native, basic and advanced job schedulers.

  • Native job schedulers as provided by embedded job scheduling functions either in operating systems or in business solutions:
    • A native job scheduler as provided in Windows Scheduled Tasks or UNIX Crontab, provides simple date and time-based scheduling but nothing more, no notion of working calendars, workflows, sequencing, resource dependency, event triggering, monitoring or reporting.
    • A native job scheduler as provided in SAP CCMS provides simple date and time based scheduling, poor concepts of working calendars, workflows, sequencing, resource dependency and limited function of monitoring and reporting.

  • A basic job scheduler provides:
    • Scheduling services, including sophisticated date and time based scheduling, integrating notions of working days and holidays. Jobs can therefore be scheduled to run for example every working day, the last working day of the month, the 5th of each month, with an automatic offset to the next working day if the 5th falls on a holiday or a weekend etc and to take in account regional and national variations in the working calendar.
    • Sequencing services, including inter-job dependencies. Jobs can therefore be triggered on the completion of one or several previous job executions.
    • Monitoring tools necessary to track and intervene on the background processes.

  • An advanced job scheduler enhances the benefits of a basic job scheduler by providing:
    • Event-driven and dynamic job scheduling. Batch jobs are triggered and synchronized on events to provide optimum flexibility.
    • Cross-platform, cross-application event-driven job scheduling, based on the IT Workload Automation Broker concept,
    • Autonomic job scheduling, able to react autonomously to external events and continuously adjust the execution of the workload to new conditions.