Interfaces with Robot Schedule

If you’re using EnterpriseOne or SAP, it may be to take a closer look at the security and business process automation that Robot Schedule can offer these key applications on IBM i.

We don’t talk enough about the integration we’ve done between Robot Schedule and EnterpriseOne (formerly JD Edwards, now owned by Oracle) and SAP. These integrations have been in place for more than five years now, but both of these products have their own job schedulers. Why should someone want to buy Robot Schedule as well? Let’s take a look at the benefits.

JD Edwards Interface

Also known as E1, JDE EnterpriseOne, or OneWorld, EnterpriseOne is a very robust application with thousands of users on IBM i. This product has its own internal batch engine called the Universal Batch Engine (UBE) and a scheduler called Sleeper. Some drawbacks to this scheduler are that it is date- and time-oriented, and lacks integration with processes other than E1. For example, if you want to run backups or queries, you cannot make these processes dependent on the UBE processes.

Integrating with Robot Schedule provides three primary benefits:

1. Secure the passing of the E1 profile and password into the UBE process. If you use the RUNUBE command, you are passing a profile and password which can easily be seen in the job log. Robot Schedule encrypts this information. 
2. Interrogate the internal files of E1 for success and failure of the UBE. Here, RUNUBE again fails you because all jobs finish successfully unless you look into the internal files. Event-driven processing is impossible if you don’t know whether the previous task finished successfully.
3. Send dynamic parameters into the Data Selection Objects. With Robot Schedule, you won’t have to have as many report versions. This is great for different dates or dynamic values and will save your critical staff CNC resource time.

SAP Interface

With the SAP integration, we wrote our interface from IBM i into the SAP Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI) application programming interface (API). These are the APIs that control the batch processing in SAP. Again with this interface, it allows Robot Schedule to run SAP processes plus anything else you need to do on IBM i, such as backups and other reporting activity. The Robot Schedule Reactive Job and Group Job features give dependency processing that is always needed in today’s world of data center automation.

Customers using these applications are often dealing with server processes on other platforms like Windows, UNIX, and Linux. The Robot Schedule solution can be extended to other operation systems with Robot Schedule Enterprise. Maybe your E1 process contains steps on IBM i and a Windows Server. These can all be integrated into one enterprise scheduling solution.