Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Companies running ERP software from SAP on an iSeries server can now automate their ERP system's jobs using OS/400-based scheduling software from Help/Systems. Last week, Help/Systems announced the availability of its new Robot/SCHEDULE interface to SAP, which gives Help/Systems users expanded capabilities to incorporate SAP jobs with processes occurring on other applications, even if they're running on non-OS/400 platforms.

Robot/SCHEDULE was Help/Systems' first systems management tool, and it is still the 20-year-old, Minnetonka, Minnesota, company's most popular. Late last year, Help/Systems released Robot/SCHEDULE 9.0, and more than 9,000 companies around the world use the software as the basis of their strategy to automate scheduling and execution of batch jobs on OS/400 servers.

For most types of OS/400 applications, it's fairly straightforward to program to-do lists into Robot/SCHEDULE's brains. For more complicated schedules, such as schedules that must adhere to the properly ordered execution of outside events, Help/Systems developed a fourth generation language (4GL) called Operator Assistance Language (OPAL). Help/Systems even developed an add-on product to Robot/SCHEDULE called Robot/REPLAY that the company says "automates the unautomatable." Such difficult tasks include automating batch jobs that must be set off from an interactive 5250 panel in popular OS/400-based ERP systems, including BPCS, J.D. Edwards, Infinium, Island Pacific, Lawson, MAC-PAC, MAPICS, PRISM, and others.

And then there's SAP. The venerable German software company is well-known for writing extremely powerful ERP applications that manage some of the world's largest multinational corporations. But SAP's software is also extremely complex, and abides by its own precepts for how it does certain things, such as message queuing. Building an interface to SAP's software is no casual, plug-and-play affair.

Help/Systems remedied the difficulty of integrating with SAP by building a special SAP interface into Robot/SCHEDULE, the center of its Robot suite of operation automation solutions. Now, using a special SAP command, Robot/SCHEDULE users can automate their SAP processes running on iSeries, Unix, and Windows servers; monitor the status of their SAP jobs; and run non-SAP jobs in reaction to SAP jobs.

Any SAP process can be run with the new Robot/SCHEDULE SAP command, Help/Systems says, and up to 10 SAP processes can be executed with a single command. By returning the status of SAP processes, the new feature allows users to determine if a process ended normally or abnormally. If it ended abnormally, an error message will appear on the OS/400 job log.

Other Help/Systems products, such as Robot/ALERT, Robot/CLIENT, and Robot/REPORTS, can also get into the SAP act. Robot/ALERT can be used to automatically send SAP error messages, to pagers, cell phones, or e-mail programs. Robot/CLIENT, the company's systems management extension to Unix and Windows servers, can be used to automatically kick off another process running on another server, in reaction to the SAP process running on an iSeries server. Or a customer could use Robot/REPORTS to view SAP documents that the Robot/SCHEDULE SAP command sent to the iSeries output queue.