Centralizing corporate IT departments into a centralized help-desk and operations support has been standard-operating-procedure for over the last decade. ITIL best practices and IT Controls and regulations such as SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) have put this on an aggressive fast track. Read more...

Unless an organization is starting jobs using an adhoc method, scheduling plays a major role in EDI implementations. Scheduling during EDI projects is unfortunately very often taken for granted. However, very frequently a lot of EDI jobs error out in their first few weeks of production because enough thought does not go into the scheduling process.

 

Read more...

Some organizations (especially Fortune 1000 companies) chose to use enterprise level job scheduling software (aka Workload automation) for all IT jobs not just EDI. The enterprise scheduling software is maintained by the IT operations team and includes dozens of other jobs in addition to EDI such as mainframe jobs, SAP jobs, PeopleSoft jobs and etc. The scheduling software has adapters installed on the servers where the jobs are actually executed and they run as a service. Then the operations team uses a client version of the software to set up the jobs and monitor them. Some examples of popular job schedulers (in no particular order) are Control-M, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, BMC CONTROL-M, and IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler. There are a also half-a-dozen open-source job schedulers out there as well.