Informatica is a powerful tool that helps your organization extract, send, verify, and replicate data.  If you’re using Informatica, it probably interacts with many of the systems critical to your business, including CRM, ERP, and others. 

But if Informatica isn’t fully automated and integrated with the rest of your environment, you’re not maximizing your investment in the software.  Pat Cameron of HelpSystems recently hosted a webinar to demonstrate how an enterprise job scheduler augments the power of Informatica. 

What is Enterprise Job Scheduling? 

The term job scheduling can mean a lot of things, from a tool built into a business application like Informatica or SAP to a comprehensive platform that automates your entire organization.  Enterprise job scheduling refers to a sophisticated brand of scheduler that consolidates automated workflows across all your systems and applications and gives you central control.  Enterprise schedulers also typically come with advanced features like event-driven scheduling, audit logs, and notifications. 

Why Replace Informatica’s Job Scheduler? 

Research shows that data-driven companies outperform their competitors.  The good news is, you probably already have a lot of data in your organization, and employing software like Informatica is a good first step towards managing it effectively.  But your data needs to be used by a wide variety of disparate systems and applications, some on premise and some in the cloud. 

Often, the jobs running in these applications are dependent on jobs in other applications or on other systems completing.  The basic scheduler built into Informatica PowerCenter and Informatica Cloud can’t handle those dependencies—it only schedules jobs within Informatica.  An enterprise job scheduler like Automate Schedule can provide centralized, application-agnostic automation of all your jobs. 

Being notified of problems quickly and automatically is also an important aspect of enterprise job scheduling.  You can choose to be informed by email or text if there are issues like job failures or delays, or for other events like a critical file arriving.  If the job scheduler can interface with your help desk software, you can even have it create a ticket automatically. 

Almost every business has to comply with industry regulations like SOX, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.  A good enterprise job scheduler will help you achieve compliance by providing a detailed log of everything that happens within your automation environment. 

Informatica Scheduling Use Cases

In the webinar, Pat outlined several business processes that could be streamlined with enterprise job scheduling.  The first example is order and payment processing.  A company receives orders from its website and payments from customers—all of which need to be processed immediately.  The scheduler can be set up to monitor for these files arriving and start the processing right away.  The order information also needs to go into the ERP system, but that job can be delayed until after hours.  In the end, all the data is fed into Informatica.  Each of these steps executes without manual intervention. 

Another example is CRM processing.  The example company in this use case has a variety of jobs running in the CRM, all of which feed into Informatica.  The jobs are all on different schedules—some run daily, some only at month end.  Some jobs only need to execute if another job fails.  An enterprise job scheduler can handle all these specialized schedules as well as alternate reactive paths. 

Pat’s final use case is ERP processing.  As with the CRM, the ERP system is running several processes on different, customized, schedules before loading the data into Informatica.  The ETL load kicks off a different set of processes, such as uploading the data to SharePoint or other business applications. 

Cross-Platform Reactivity with Automate Schedule

Automate Schedule can consolidate automation across your enterprise.  The scheduler has the Informatica Seal of Approval and is also SAP Certified.  It can typically automate anything with a command line interface or any web service request, and if you already have jobs in cron or Windows Task Scheduler, you can easily migrate them to Automate Schedule.  Read more about Automate Schedule’s integrations here. 

Automate Schedule provides the features you need for truly enterprise-class job scheduling, including: