At night, your interactive menus require that an operator be present to run processing. With applications like MAPICS or JDE World, this hurdle can keep you from automating the last 5% (or more) of your nightly processing. What choices do you have?

Choice Number One
Do nothing. Continue to run the same old way by having an operator fill out interactive screens manually every night. Obviously, this is boring, error-prone, and inefficient. Also, you need to find someone who is responsible and willing to do this night after night, week after week, year after year. Click here for a better way.

Choice Number Two
Rewrite your menu systems (assuming you own the code) so that the processes can run in batch, including necessary control parameters like end-of-day or end-of-month dates. Often, these are legacy (core) applications, making this a very expensive and time-consuming process, especially with the amount of testing required. Click here for a better way.

Choice Number Three
Use Robot/REPLAY to automate these unautomatable processes. Robot/REPLAY can "learn" any series of 5250 screen images (a menu system) and run the processes as batch jobs using Robot/SCHEDULE. Robot/REPLAY uses dynamic variables for date items like end-of-day or end-of-month. Your operator can implement this choice without help from development or a system administrator. After Robot/REPLAY learns the panel images as a Replay object, you use Robot/SCHEDULE to schedule the object and run it unattended.

Figure 1: The interactive panel needs data parameters to run correctly. (Click images to enlarge.)

Robot/REPLAY objects scheduled in Robot/SCHEDULE can be parts of group jobs or reactive jobs and can be scheduled for end-of-day or end-of-month processing. The possibilities are unlimited. Robot/REPLAY has been used to automate applications such as MAPICS, Fiserv, Infinium, ICOMS, JDE World, Kronos, and many others.

Figure 2: The reserved command variable from Robot/SCHEDULE is used to substitute the correct date.

Lights-Out Automation

As many of our customers have learned, Robot/REPLAY lets you take the final step to lights-out automation. So what are you waiting for? Learn more about Robot/REPLAY by clicking here. And check out Help/Systems' other offerings in the MC Showcase Buyer's Guide.

Tom Huntington is Vice President of Technical Services for Help/Systems, Inc.
He can be reached at 952.563.1606 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Tom Huntington is Executive Vice President of Technical Solutions at HelpSystems, and has been with the company for nearly 30 years. He works with business alliances, acquisitions and large customer relationships and ensures that the HelpSystems software works with other major software and hardware vendors worldwide.

Tom often speaks on enterprise scheduling, security, automation topics, IBM i technology, and the HelpSystems products, and hosts technical presentations on a variety of automation topics. He is the author of the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey and has written articles on automated operations, security, cloud computing, and business intelligence for leading trade journals and newsletters. He was named an IBM Champion in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 for over three decades of advocation and thought leadership on the IBM i platform.

Contact Tom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..