Example of a Business Process Schedule

This example of a business schedule shows the timer schedule, daily schedule, weekly schedule, and monthly schedule.

This example consists of four scheduling activities:

  • Scheduling a business process at several time intervals each day (timer schedule)
  • Scheduling a business process every day at a specific time (daily schedule)
  • Scheduling a business process one day each week at a specific time (weekly schedule)
  • Scheduling a business process adapter one day a month at a specific time. (monthly schedule)

Your business includes various types of processes, from simple to complex. At the heart of many processes are acknowledgments. Acknowledgements are very important to conducting business with your value chain partners. Sometimes, you do not receive the acknowledgments from your trading partner, which may indicate the business process ran in error, or did not run, or is in a waiting state.

You can schedule the predefined business process OverdueAckCheck to run at a regular time interval each day to track business processes that have not received an acknowledgment.

In addition, you may find that you want to create a business process that runs every day and provides performance statistics for comparison to your benchmarks, or that you can save resources by submitting data in a batch to your trading partners during non-peak hours, or you can send invoices to your smaller trading partners once a month, instead of several times a month.

By analyzing your past processing trends using your Business Process Usage Report and other reports and statistics in Sterling B2B Integrator, you determine that your business has peak processing hours from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. and has moderate to heavy processing volumes that use large amounts of Sterling B2B Integrator resources during the peak processing times.

Using the preceding analysis, you determine that you must schedule the following:

  • OverdueAckCheck business process every day every 30 minutes to check for business processes that are awaiting an acknowledgment.
  • A performance test business process every day during non-peak hours at 11:00 p.m.
  • A business process that submits map updates in a batch to your trading partners from a file system on a weekly basis.
  • A business process that submits invoices in a batch to your smaller trading partners on a monthly basis.

The following list describes the schedule parameters you set for the business processes:

OverdueAckCheck
Business Process to schedule: OverdueAckCheck (predefined in Sterling B2B Integrator)

Timer or Clock: Timer

System: node1

Execution Day: Every Day

Scheduled Time(s): Every 0 hours and 30 minutes

Excluded Time(s): None

Excluded Dates: None

At startup: No

Run As User: Admin

Performance test
Service to schedule: Performance test business process that you create

Timer or Clock: Clock (Daily)

System: node1

Execution Day: Every Day

Scheduled Time(s): 11:00 p.m.

Excluded Time(s): None

Excluded Dates: None

At startup: No

Run As User: Admin

Map update
Service to schedule: Map update batch business process that you create

Timer or Clock: Clock (Weekly)

System: node1

Execution Day: Sunday

Scheduled Time(s): 11:00 p.m.

Excluded Time(s): None

Excluded Dates: None

At startup: No

Run As User: Admin

Small trading partner invoices
Service to schedule: Invoice batch business process that you create

Timer or Clock: Clock (Monthly)

System: node1

Execution Day: LDOM (last day of the month)

Scheduled Time(s): 11:00 p.m.

Excluded Time(s): None

Excluded Dates: None

At startup: No

Run As User: Admin

The following figure shows the business processes running on schedule and the results of each business process:

Business process schedule
  1. The OverdueAckCheck predefined business process runs every 30 minutes, checking for business processes that have not received an acknowledgment.
  2. A list of business processes without acknowledgements is produced.
  3. At 11:00 p.m. every day, the performance test business process that you created runs.
  4. The business process statistics are available for you to compare against your benchmarks to verify performance levels are as expected.
  5. Every Sunday at 11:00 p.m., the map updates business process that you created to send updates of your maps to your trading partners runs.
  6. The updated maps are sent to a file system where your trading partners scheduled File System adapter collects the maps and invokes a business process to import the updated maps automatically.
  7. On the last day of each month (LDOM) at 11:00 p.m., the business process you created to send invoices to your smaller trading partners runs.
  8. The invoices are submitted at one time to your smaller trading partners, reducing resource usages in Sterling B2B Integrator.