Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is a comprehensive suite of integrated global business applications that enables organizations to make better decisions, reduce costs, and increase performance. Using Oracle EBS involves a combination of manual tasks, such as using the menu systems, entering data, and submitting forms, and submitting requests, such as running a report and processing data. While some tasks may occur interactively in E-Business Suite, an internal Concurrent Manager—the job scheduling feature of Oracle—is provided to run tasks that do not require user interaction. Automating some of your Oracle tasks means that you can schedule tasks that require more resources to run during off-peak times as concurrent requests, reducing the impact on users during the normal business day. The Concurrent Manager includes basic functionality for scheduling and monitoring these requests.
Oracle E-Business Suite is central to many large organizations. Though it is not platform specific in any way—it can run on Linux, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows Server, etc.—its job scheduling capabilities are limited to its own interface, which precludes you from building an enterprise-wide schedule from within your Oracle system.
The Oracle Job Scheduler: What Are The Limitations?
Most Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications include an internal scheduler for the running of batch or background jobs that typically need to run on a schedule or are simply too resource intensive to justify running during normal business hours. These internal job schedulers typically do not have any contact with external systems, which are often dependent on the results of the ERP job, or vice versa. Alternatives to the internal job scheduler include the UNIX cron daemon or at command as well as Windows Task Scheduler, but they have their limits and lack monitoring and reporting capabilities. Without the ability to monitor the success or failure of a job, they are unable to support dependency-based scheduling—the ability to create job streams based on the success or failure of one or more previous jobs.
Through the Oracle job scheduler, it is possible to create, schedule, and view the history of concurrent requests that have completed. Concurrent requests created directly within Oracle only allow for limited start conditions, meaning that a new concurrent request—the job that you want to run—cannot trigger a program from the start of a prior run or the completion of a prior run.
Additionally, combinations of conditions with and/or logic cannot be applied using the Oracle job scheduler, which limits the ability to build a dynamic and complex job schedule. Oracle does not allow users to build alternate reactive paths that suggest multiple conditions based on the success or failure of any given job. However, Oracle’s CONCSUB utility allows an external scheduler to start and monitor requests, providing the potential to build a more comprehensive system of scheduling and running them.
The Benefits of Enterprise Job Schedulers
Enterprise job schedulers offer extended flexibility for running Oracle concurrent requests. They provide more sophisticated solutions for using and/or logic and other modern scheduling requirements, including job monitors, file transfers, SNMP traps, notification, and audit history. More specifically, job monitors can watch for jobs that started later than expected, ran shorter than expected, or ran longer than expected. Operating independently from the Oracle system, external schedulers can facilitate enterprise scheduling using connections to both non-Oracle and additional Oracle systems. This expands the possibilities for your current Oracle E-Business Suite requests within Concurrent Manager because your completed Oracle jobs can be the trigger for starting a job on a completely different system outside of Oracle.
Integrating Your Systems
With one centralized enterprise scheduler, each step of the job scheduling process is started automatically, as soon as the required steps are completed. This ensures that the process completes within the allotted time. If there is a problem at any step, notification is sent to the designated individual or team. Automatic and custom notification features like this allow for the scheduling issue to be corrected before anyone else knows there is a problem.
Enterprise job schedulers allow you to set up jobs that react to any failure and, depending on the error handling capabilities, could solve the problem and continue the process without lag time and manual intervention.
Automate Schedule: An Affordable Solution
Automate Schedule is a powerful, flexible, and affordable enterprise job scheduler that runs tasks across multiple systems and applications.
Automate Schedule users can easily build complex schedules for Oracle E-Business Suite concurrent requests. These requests can be included in centralized job scheduling across multiple systems and applications, such as backups or file transfers, without additional scripting.
Any concurrent request can be added as a command within a Automate Schedule job. That same job can include commands from other applications, including:
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SAP NetWeaver
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Informatica PowerCenter
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MS SQL Server
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Windows Task Scheduler
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Cron
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AutoMate
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And other command-based batch jobs or background processes
In addition to its scheduling flexibility, Automate's interface to Oracle EBS lets you:
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Add multiple parameters to a single request
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Run requests under various EBS users and application settings
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Assign program names and run numbers
Automate Schedule can also be set up to monitor the successful completion of each concurrent request before starting the next command or marking the Automate job as complete. All Automate Schedule-defined concurrent requests are visible in Automate Schedule's forecast reports, Schedule Activity Monitor, job flow diagrams, and other powerful analysis and reporting tools.
Setting Up Your Oracle Integration
With Autoamte Schedule’s integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, it’s easy to integrate your scheduled Oracle concurrent requests into your larger enterprise job scheduler.
Step 1: Installation
Install Automate Schedule on a system away from Oracle. This takes the load of scheduling and managing enterprise-wide jobs off the system, allowing it to focus on critical business processes.
Install a Automate Schedule Agent onto the Oracle system where the concurrent requests will run.
Step 2: Configuration
Define an Oracle System Definition within Automate Schedule.
Create a Automate job, assign it to the Oracle Agent, and add one or more Oracle Concurrent Request commands.
Step 3: Schedule and Run
The Automate job may, among other options, be scheduled and/or set up as dependent on another job or event (reactive).
For making the connection to the system, ensure a valid Oracle User account exists that is able to connect and run Oracle jobs.
Though Oracle E-Business Suite is integral to operations at your organization, the Oracle job scheduler is not up to par. Integrating your scheduled Oracle jobs into an enterprise job schedule will not only streamline your operations, but it will also give you more scheduling options to leverage your Oracle system. Learn more about scheduling E-Business Suite concurrent jobs with Automate Schedule. If you’re ready to integrate your Oracle implementation into an enterprise-wide job schedule, start a free trial of Automate Schedule.