Long-term planning

The long-term plan is a high-level schedule of your anticipated production workload. It lists, by day, the instances of job streams to be run during the period of the plan. Each instance of a job stream is called an occurrence. The long-term plan shows when occurrences are to run, as well as the dependencies that exist between the job streams. You can view these dependencies graphically on your workstation as a network, to check that work has been defined correctly. The plan can help you in forecasting and planning for heavy processing days. The long-term-planning function can also produce histograms showing planned resource use for individual workstations during the plan period.

You can use the long-term plan as the basis for documenting your service level agreements. It lets you relate service level agreements directly to your production workload schedules so that your customers can see when and how their work is to be processed.

The long-term plan provides a window to the future. You can decide how far into the future, from one day to four years. You can also produce long-term plan simulation reports for any future date. IBM® Z Workload Scheduler can automatically extend the long-term plan at regular intervals. You can print the long-term plan as a report, or you can view, alter, and extend it online using the dialogs.