Creating and extending the current plan

About this task

You must create a current plan before HCL Workload Automation for Z can schedule work. You must also create a new plan if you have performed a refresh of the long-term plan (see Creating the long-term plan). Once you have created the current plan, you continually extend it.

Follow these steps to create the current plan:

Before you can create a current plan, you must create the long-term plan that is used as input to the daily planning process. See Producing and modifying the long-term plan.

Select option 3 (DAILY PLANNING) from the main menu. The PRODUCING DAILY PLANS menu, shown in EQQDPLNP - Producing daily plans, is displayed.

Figure 1. EQQDPLNP - Producing daily plans

 EQQDPLNP ----------------- PRODUCING DAILY PLANS --------------------------
 Option ===>

 Select one of the following :

 1 REPLAN           -  Replan current planning period
 2 EXTEND           -  Extend the current planning period
 3 TRIAL            -  Produce a trial plan
 4 PRINT CURRENT    -  Print statistics for current planning period

Select option 2 (EXTEND).
Specify a start date and time, and the end date and time of the planning window required, or the length, in hours and minutes. If you specify a length (extension period), you have the option of counting all days or only work days as part of the extension. For example, assume that Sunday is the only free day in your calendar, and you extend the current plan at noon on Saturday by 24 hours. If you include all days in the extension, by specifying A in the TYPE field, the plan is extended to noon on Sunday. If, however, you specify W in the TYPE field, the plan is extended to noon on the following Monday. Because Sunday is a free day, HCL Workload Automation for Z ignores this day when it calculates the end of the current plan.
When creating a new plan, it is best to choose a future start date and time, so that jobs do not start running before you have time to check the messages, and so that operations do not have UNDECIDED status.
Create a report on the contents of the plan. For details of report options, see Producing reports using daily planning.
Inspect the plan, and use the MCP panel to manually correct any differences between the intended and actual plan contents. The first time you create the plan for a production environment, such differences are likely to occur for the applications that are planned to run at the start of the period. This is especially true if these applications are already running but are not controlled by HCL Workload Automation for Z. In this case, HCL Workload Automation for Z might mark an occurrence as completed before full control of workload submission is in place.
Use the MCP panel to display a list of the occurrences with UNDECIDED status.
Select the occurrences one by one, and either assign the proper status to them or delete them.
Obtain a list of all other occurrences that you suspect might have an incorrect status and correct them.
Submit a REPLAN job. This updates the long-term plan with the new occurrence data and lets HCL Workload Automation for Z recalculate the input arrival times of the remaining occurrences with the new current plan data.