How Informer 5 Scheduling Helps Customers
Top of mind for managers within many organizations is improving operational efficiency. Managers understand that by eliminating unnecessary tasks and automating manual workflows, employee time can be freed-up to focus on higher value business activities. This leads to increased productivity and profitability.
When it comes to the use of data, people in different roles often have different requirements. Some may need summary updates throughout the day as changes occur. Others may need all the relevant refreshed data sent to their local system for analysis.
Across your organization, Informer 5 provides reliability and consistency. It does this by delivering to management and staff, the necessary information to meet their unique requirements, on time and in the right format.
Informer’s Jobs scheduling functionality gives you control over:
- what Dataset(s) or ad-hoc queries you want to work with
- how recently the data should be refreshed
- how you want the data filtered
- where and how the information should be sent (i.e., email, FTP, file system)
- and, how often these actions need to occur.
Scheduling Within Jobs
The scheduling component within Jobs enables you to determine the interval of your schedule. Intervals offer a wide range of options including:
- minutes
- hourly
- daily
- weekly
- monthly
- yearly
- or custom.
Each schedule can be customized for your needs.
When Southern Supply Company was initially looking to bring in a BI tool, they wanted to do up-to-the-minute alerting and reporting on different production business flow activities taking place throughout the day.
According to Jesse Owsley, Project Manager at Southern Supply Company, “One of the things that was super important to us was being able to schedule refreshes for our various Datasets. And, to refresh queries in both the time span we needed and in the frequencies we need. Some things we only need to see once a day. But, there are a lot of things that we need to keep track of up to the minute. There are two pieces to this: first, having control over when we do the queries. And second, the fact that Informer is usable enough and agile enough for us to set the parameters ourselves without having to rely on a consultant.”
According to Michael Graham, Director of Administrative Information Services at California Lutheran University, “We really enjoy the [Informer] scheduler. Being able to create a report for someone, schedule it, get the report emailed to them without them having to do anything but opening their email and click on the link that links them back to the report.”
Keeping People Informed – Alerts
Informer plays a big role in supporting Barry University’s quality control initiatives by keeping departments informed if something happens out of the ordinary. Reports are scheduled within the registration department that say, ‘notify me when certain student information doesn’t match or where the social security number is missing.’ It also enables managers to have a report that highlights specific records that need to be reviewed instead of reviewing all the data. For example, international students, student athletes, and some graduate programs are required to maintain predetermined credits.
Regina Lopez, Informer Implementation Specialist, recently joined Entrinsik from Barry University. According to Regina, “With Informer 5’s secure FTP option in the Jobs feature, a schedule can be set that says, ‘send this file out to that server and here are the credentials.’ It’s so much more efficient than the traditional FTP process. For example, Barry University generates a report that includes data based on the specification provided by its vendor-managed bookstore. It gets scheduled and SFTP credentials are added. Every night the schedule runs automatically, and the file appears in the bookstore’s servers with the courses that were created that day.”
Staying Informed Using Schedules
For Southern Supply’s e-commerce orders that come in throughout the day, the operations team needs to see the new orders and their fulfillment status. It has been key to the team to be able to receive status reports as frequently as they require.
“I have products delivered throughout the day. And, I need to keep track of those deliveries to see the status in both our delivery software and ERP system. I have been able to keep track of where those orders are throughout the day because Informer gives me the ability to schedule those data queries and data refreshes in the frequencies that I need, in both systems and at the same time,” said Owsley.
To learn more about Informer 5’s Jobs scheduling functionality, read more here. Call 888-703-0016 or informersales@entrinsik.com
