Event Based Job Scheduling Management

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Introduction

Businesses must be prepared for unplanned growth and be able to solve unknown problems or demands. Meeting those challenges requires an extremely high level of flexibility and capacity for change. In IT you must be able to adjust components individually or collectively to meet those variable demands. This flexibility is only being useful when IT enables business to automate more real life scenarios.

Today companies are growing to job volumes of millions of batch jobs per day. They use multi-platform distributed systems around the clock. SAP Solution Manager has come up with this new functionality known as Job Scheduling Management. This paper explains bit of Job Scheduling Management and its tweaking with Event based JSM.

What is Job Scheduling Management?

Within a highly complex and distributed landscape, job scheduling management is important to manage data and its processing. Even in today’s more real-time data environment, the need for having jobs running in the background is high. Further, jobs are concatenated to huge job chains, usually containing many dependencies on the sequence of jobs. If one or several jobs abort and cancel, the alert system has to inform the appropriate support level, or has to be in a position to start an automatic error handling procedure and restart the job(s). Another aspect of job scheduling management is the efficient use of the available system resources (for example, CPU and memory).

A typical requirement is the coordination of activities of concurrent online users and background jobs that need the same time window and system environment. This requirement needs to be managed to avoid system or performance bottleneck situations or delay in the business data processing.

The job scheduling management standard explains how to manage the planning, scheduling, and monitoring of jobs. The job scheduling management process starts with request for a new job or to change the schedule of an existing job or job chain. This request needs to be planned, scheduled and integrated into the monitoring procedures and alert mechanisms and checked that it was successfully fulfilled.

The standard also recommends setting up a dedicated team for job scheduling management as part of the business process operations or support organization. This team is responsible for the central management of the job schedule concept.

Job scheduling management is owned by business process operations, which executes the required tasks mainly in cooperation with the business process champion and SAP technical operations. The main benefits of job scheduling management are the automation and acceleration of business processes and the prevention of business process interruptions.

Need for Job Scheduling Management

Job Scheduling Management effectively integrates Job Request, Job Documentation and Job Monitoring in a single system that is Solution Manager. Irrespective of the managed system, JSM can create, document and monitor the jobs. Moreover in case of existing jobs of managed system we can import all the jobs along with the documentation and monitoring which is effectively controlled as required through a single system. Hence Job Scheduling Management is a comprehensive tool which can manage all activities related to creation and maintenance of jobs which helps to leverage job management in a complex IT Landscape.

Event Based Job Scheduling Management

Job Scheduling Management of SAP Solution Manager provides a feature to schedule jobs in the managed system based on the event which is triggered in the managed system. It provides a user friendly interface in Solution Manager whereby a user can simply select an event through ‘F4’ help existing in the managed system and schedule the job based on such an event. As soon as the event is triggered in the managed system, SAP Solution Manager can schedule job as configured from SAP Solution Manager.

Moreover Event based Job Monitoring is also supported by SAP Solution Manager Job Scheduling Management standard, monitoring is only triggered as soon as the event is scheduled in the managed system. Hence Job Scheduling Management supports creation as well monitoring of jobs based on event from the managed systems.

Business Case – 1: Materials Requirements Planning

Materials Requirements Planning is a well-known concept in SAP. It’s widely used for raw materials planning specifically in manufacturing industry.

Business growth drives the materials planning at each minute level, but organization wide, consolidation is must. Hence, It raises a question for a situation, where planning can be optimized through automation. For example, there are multiple plants in an organization and planning is carried out at each plant level. Once planning is over for all the plants, system should generate a consolidated planning file for all the plants.

We have come out with the proposed solution with the concept of JSM in Solution Manager and Event Based Job Scheduling in managed system. Below is a flow diagram for planning jobs.

Execution Steps to Replicate the Scenario

• Create 3 Jobs which are required to run in the managed system, the data of which will become the base for the 4^th Job. E.g. 3 Jobs are created from Solution Manager to the managed system along with the scheduling information are as under:

Job 1:

Job 2:

Job 3:

• Customized ABAP program which is created in managed system (i.e. in ERP)  is run through on the basis of job with respective variants of Event – ZN1 and ABAP program of all the above 3 jobs. The Scheduling information of that job is as under. This job will check that whether all the 3 pertaining jobs which is the base for the 4^th job.  If all the 3 jobs are in the status finished then this will run event ZN1 as defined in the program. This job will run every 10 minutes.

Custom Program for triggering an event:

• The fourth job will be the base for the all the 3 jobs which are completed and hence this will be triggered based on the event. E.g. ZN1 in our case

• Job Execution has been checked by Monitoring in Solution Manager ensuring timely completion of all the jobs which are required to be run in parallel as well as the job which is to be running subsequently all the jobs as required.  E.g. In our case 3 parallel jobs as well the 4^th successor job which is required to run only when all the 3 predecessor jobs are completed.

Execution of Parallel Jobs

• Job which runs based on event

Job Execution of Successor Job

• All the jobs are monitored through Solution Manager to ensure that all parallel jobs as well as subsequent jobs have been completed on timely basis

Business Case – 2: Consolidation of MIS report

In many of the organizations, work is distributed according to business unit needs. For example, an MIS (Management Information System) report is required for each business unit. But at corporate level, only consolidated information is important.

Here, there are three main components for MIS: Production Report, Stock Report and Dispatch Report. These reports are generally executed at plant level. Now, to consolidate it at company level, all information needs to be dumped in to excel and then reformatted. But this again depends on emails getting from each plant.

To overcome these, suggested solution is to generate series of jobs and based on that identify whether each job is completed and then run the final Job for consolidation. The same requirements can be catered in a way explained in earlier business case. We can create three different jobs for three different reports and then finally consolidated in to one customized report and that will be scheduled in background.

Conclusion

Concluding the scenario, we can understand that how Job Scheduling Management of SAP Solution Manager can be used to cater to the requirement of parallel scheduling of jobs as well as triggering a subsequent job which collects the data executed by its preceding parallel running jobs.

Successor job will be scheduled only when all the preceding jobs are completed which has been based on event based job scheduling by SAP Solution Manager. The role of Z Program in managed system is to trigger an event only when all the parallel jobs are completed. Job Documentation and Job Monitoring capabilities are also delivered integrated into the existing scenario which is catered by Job Scheduling Management standard.