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As a user of TWS, you know how important this system is for the planning, automation, and control of your batch processing. With perhaps thousands of jobs running every night, TWS is critical to the completion of your batch production. However, as projects grow, they become harder and harder to manage. When you are faced with problems, change requests, or simply the need to have TWS information readily available, can you:
Create net plans to graphically display and print applications, schedules, jobs, dependencies and so on?
Easily view the entire batch production or even selected portions of it?
Automatically create documentation of your application description?
Create and print the results of your run cycles and run rules in a timetable showing one whole year at a glance?
Search every data field in your application description with functions similar to DB2, using "or, and, equal, not equal, greater than, less than" operators?
Display all predecessors and successors?
Automatically create batch loader statements from your application description?
Modify your TWS database definitions graphically? (For example, delete, create or modify applications, operations, schedules, dependencies or special resources?)
Provide additional information to users, operators, customers, managers, controllers and so on?
Print or plot net plans in black and white, gray shades or color?
Monitor your zOS production?
With TWS/Graph you can do all of this and much more besides!
TWS/Graph has been developed by experts who specialize in the management of IBM's Operation Planning and Control (TWS). TWS/Graph has been on the market in Europe for seven years now.
TWS/Graph consists of both PC and host components:
TWS/Graph PC presents TWS application descriptions, current plans, symphony and mozart files as net plans on a PC.
TWS/Graph Host prints net plans directly on host printers.
TWS/Graph Doku produces easy-to-understand documents on the Host directly from your application description database.
TWS/Graph XRef provides a query approach to TWS.
TWS/Graph's PC component displays your TWS data in a way you have never seen before: Applications, schedules, operations, jobs, internal and external dependencies, run cycles, run rules and special resources, etc., as symbols and lines. And all of this with the comfort of the graphical user interface that you are used to (Windows 9x, NT, Me, 2000, XP) And it of course allows you to use all of your usual PC printing capabilities.
Your information is presented as an easy-to-understand net plan. Symbols can be customized for clarity and convenience, for example, special resources can be displayed differently.
Search for jobs or streams to be displayed in the net plan using all fields available in your TWS databases. For example, all applications "RVT22*" with status "A" and calendar "DEFAULT" having at least one job named "ON*" and a special resource "DB2*".
Click an application or an operation to get all the information "on it". Use the arrow buttons to navigate between predecessors and successors (you can’t even find these using TWS), or click the pop-up lists to get more information, for example, operation data, run cycles, special resources and so on.
Your application programmers can use TWS/Graph to define a first layout of any new application graphically. They can insert operations and dependencies without additional software. Your production people can correct these definitions, can insert some special resources, run cycles and more. Finally they can generate batch loader statements with TWS/Graph.
There is no faster and more convenient way to transfer new applications from one department to another!
Production is normally divided into organizational units. These include critical applications, backup jobs, jobs for different departments and so on. In larger organizations, different people are responsible for different areas of expertise. These users do not want to monitor the entire batch production, but only those sections they are responsible for.
Using the status monitor, you can define a structure that mirrors those responsibilities. In this structure, operations and applications are assigned to groups and subgroups. Also, because it only consists of the applications and operations you want to monitor, each group and subgroup can contain any number of applications and operations.
Use TWS/Graph to create and update application descriptions in the AD database. With the batch loader, you can use the batch environment to do many of the things you would otherwise have to perform online using the (sometimes cumbersome) TWS dialog.
Use TWS/Graph to monitor your current plan. Display your jobs as a net plan on a time axis or in a bar chart. Both graphics are available with planned or actual start and run times.
TWS/Graph Docu lists all information defined in the TWS AD database. It can be generated in DCF and standard output format (HTML has been available since summer 2000). The output even includes a table of contents and an index that allows you to find every single application, special resource, etc.
TWS/Graph's cross-reference feature provides a query facility for application description data. This feature offers:
Various selection criteria for all data fields within the AD database.
The use of wildcards ("%" and "*") within the selection criteria.
Supports all comparison operators (equal to, greater, greater than, etc.).
User-defined input panels and output lists.
Using the TWS/Graph cross-reference feature, queries such as the following are possible:
Which operations are dependent on the availability of special resource A.B.C?
Which applications are using calendars other than DEFAULT?
Which operations are planned to run on workstation CPU* or PRT?
Which applications have the period WEEKLY and offset +001 or use the calendar SPECIAL?
The result of a query is written to an output dataset. An interface to TWS/Graph allows the printing of net plans and reports with selected data.