Manual or Semi-Automated Schedules

If you're running a manual schedule, it's very difficult to provide timely and accurate information. It's even harder if you've written your own utility to run your schedule! Auditors have no sympathy about how much work you need to do manually to provide answers to their questions.

There are many ways to submit jobs to batch on the System i platform. You can use the IBM SBMJOB command; you can use the built-in job scheduler (WRKJOBSCDE); or you can buy one of the many job schedule software packages for sale. The problem is that most of these options provide very little, if any, historical information about the changes to the schedule or the actual running of the jobs. The auditor still needs the information.

Automated Schedules

If you have Robot/SCHEDULE, Help/Systems job scheduler and batch management system, these questions aren't hard to answer. And if you have Version 10.02, it's even easier. The new GUI makes it easy to cut and paste information into Excel. You can provide answers in minutes, if not seconds. Those who must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) audits typically use the following Robot/SCHEDULE features:

• The Good Morning Report—Robot/SCHEDULE's Good Morning Report summarizes your night batch processing. It shows the number of jobs that completed normally and the number that ended abnormally.
• Security—Robot/SCHEDULE has its own security system, above and beyond i5/OS object-based security. Robot/SCHEDULE job security controls who has access to the job schedule, and you can produce a report that lists access control.
• Job Completion History—Every batch process that runs on your system is tracked in job completion history, including jobs submitted by end users and those submitted by Robot/SCHEDULE. The history provides information about start/end times and dates, as well the duration of the job.
• Audit Logs—Robot/SCHEDULE maintains audit logs that track schedule changes and actions on the schedule. It even tracks when an operator forces a job to run immediately.
• Product Master—The Product Master allows you to create jobs on one partition or system and send them to another. Many people use this as a change-control mechanism for batch jobs. You can create a job on the development partition, test it, and then send it to the production partition. These activities are logged in Robot/SCHEDULE (10.02 or higher) and Robot/NETWORK 10.0.

Capture Changes to Production Control Schedule

So, how easy is it to get this information? Using Robot/SCHEDULE's new graphical interface, open the Audit Log window, shown in Figure 1. Highlight the data you want to show the auditor. Right-click and copy this information to the clipboard. In seconds, you have captured the changes to your production control schedule!

Figure 1: Audit Log shows entries for all users except RBTUSER, RBTADMIN, and TOMS. (Click figures to enlarge.)

Once the entries are on the clipboard, simply open Microsoft Excel, your email client, or another program and paste your data, as shown in Figure 2. Most auditors seem to prefer receiving information in Excel format.

Figure 2: Send an Excel spreadsheet to the auditor for analysis.

Capture Job History

Robot/SCHEDULE Job Completion History provides another handy list of data for auditors and managers. Most of the time, you don't think about this data, but when you need it, it's really great to have. The Job Completion History is a revolving group of records about your batch processing. The Good Morning Report, job schedule forecasting, and other reports get information from the job history. You can easily copy this information to Excel, just as in the Audit Log example above.

Figure 3: Copy job completion history to other tools.

Robot/SCHEDULE Makes It Easy

Robot/SCHEDULE helps you take the final step toward providing the information that management and auditors need for your production control environment.

You can learn more about Robot/SCHEDULE by clicking here. And check out Help/Systems' other offerings in the MC Showcase Buyer's Guide.

Tom Huntington is Vice President of Technical Services for Help/Systems, Inc. He can be reached at 952.563.1606 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..