Holiday Season Enterprise Job Scheduling
The holiday shopping season is great for consumers – it’s full of opportunity, excitement, great deals, and purchases. Retailers, though, can experience undue stress as they try to keep up with ever-rising consumer demands. It’s not just the stores themselves that feel the pressure. During holiday shopping seasons, IT teams must ensure that the company’s infrastructure and processes keep up with the increased amount of transactions during the holiday season.
Retail IT teams need to ask themselves questions – Is the order placed online – on the company’s site, or another site where the company sells products? Are inventory totals properly reflected between online and in-store? When an order is placed or canceled, are processes ensuring that totals are updated properly in real time, or is the company leaving itself exposed for short (or long) periods of time where inventory is not correct?
According to Deloitte research, the holiday season will see another 4-5 percent increase in total holiday revenues over last year, with a possible 18 percent increase in e-commerce sales.
How can retail IT teams handle this rush?
Enterprise job scheduling solutions empower retailers to automate the daily transactions and processes like file arrivals, online orders and processing – and schedule them to run automatically based on any necessary prerequisites. When retailers automate daily or repeatable tasks, their IT teams are free to focus on keeping systems up and running to support the demand of the holiday season.
What’s more, JAMS enterprise job scheduler keeps processes secure during the busy holidays with a native Active Directory integration and built in audit trail that ships with full version control features. An unexpected edit or source code deletion should be the last thing IT Teams need to worry about during the busy holiday season.
Holiday Processing Challenges for Non-Retail Companies
Retailers aren’t the only businesses with special holiday season job scheduling needs. The normal processing schedule needs to – and should – change over a holiday season. Daily reports and accounting backups may not be necessary when an office is closed in the US for Thanksgiving, but need to run in the UK on that same day. To properly manage and respond to a global holiday season, businesses need robust scheduling and calendaring features.
Critical failures can happen. A network or node can go down, files could become corrupted, and integrated applications could encounter issues. Those failures can have an even larger impact during the holidays, which is why alerting and notification is vital. In JAMS, two-way SMS text and two-way voice alerts give users the ability to restart a process without getting up from the family dinner.
How can I Holiday-Proof my Processes?
Automation takes the complexity out of holiday season job scheduling. Even with high levels of holiday traffic, retailers can stay on top of transactions without taxing the IT team. Learn more about holiday processing with a short demo.
