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Time and again customers are approaching SAP and complain that 20-40% of the daily system workload is caused by background jobs that are no longer required. Unfortunately those customers do not know what the 20-40% of jobs are as no or only insufficient job documentation exists. Then the cumbersome work starts to go through all running jobs one by one, re-document them, find somebody responsible and decide if the job is still needed or not. If you have 10.000, 50.000 or 100.000 job executions per day in your system you can imagine how much fun this tedious work is.

But how to avoid this situation in the first place?!

A necessary prerequisite is that you have up to date job documentation for all your background jobs, including of course responsible contact person information. As described in previous blogs you can utilize the Job Documentation application in SAP Solution Manager in order to document your jobs. This application provides Best Practice job documentation capabilities containing business requirements, scheduling information, contact persons and error handling procedures et.al. Every job documentation as well as a corresponding overview page can be centrally accessed via web browser.

Besides many other features the job documentation contains a field for expiration/validity date

When you create a new job document then per default this field is automatically filled with a date one year in the future. You can then change this date according to your requirements.

Now if you utilize not only the job documentation as a stand-alone application but the integrated scenario with the standardized Job Request web-form then you can find the same field also in the Job Request form

If you change this date and create then a Job Documentation based on this Job Request then the expiration date field in the documentation will be filled with the corresponding value maintained in the previous Job Request.

"Okay, I got the supposed expiration date in the Job Request and Job Documentation but how does this help to solve the problem of forgetting about jobs?"

If you access the Job Management Work Center within your SAP Solution Manager then you will see that two standard queries exist ("Expired" and "For review") in the view Job Documentation.  

These queries return a list of job documents where the expiration date lies already in the past ("Expired") or where the expiration date will be met in the near future "For review").

Now as long as all jobs are documented in your SAP Solution Manager you can always keep track on your jobs and check out where you should review the one job or the other in order to decide if the job is still required, if the job requires some adjustments or if the job should be discontinued.

 

Frequently asked questions around the topic of Job Scheduling Management are listed and answered under the following link http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/FAQ+Job+Scheduling+Management

If you are interested in further reading. The following blogs provide further details about Job Scheduling Management functionalities within the SAP Solution Manager.