While running a single report or another on-demand job may not be very time-consuming, keeping track of all of the reports that need to be run along with running them could turn into a big job. With EMUE, this entire process can be automated.
Mike Laukaitis of Community Medical Center in Missoula, Montana has requests for 185 on demand jobs, so he has created scripts to remove the burden of this process. The script that he submitted requests a particular report, waits for it to run, and then directs it to the proper printer. This script could easily be tweaked to run other on-demand jobs like running updates and performing room and bed maintenance.
When the script is run in EMUE, it can be scheduled to run automatically on whatever schedule is appropriate.
This particular script can run in OLIE, but using a few of EMUE's features, the script could be enhanced to do even more. While this script does not use an input file, it could read from a file, spreadsheet, or database with a list of on-demand jobs that should be run. Then, without having to modify the script, more jobs could be added to the list. In order to fully automate the process, any information that varies depending on the job could be added to the input file so that EMUE could handle each job properly. The input file or spreadsheet would need to include the name of the report, the frequency that the job should be run and any other information that is particular to the job. If you have not used EMUE to read from a spreadsheet before, you can find instructions in this script spotlight article.
Using EMUE's Date-Processing commands, this enhanced script could be scheduled to run daily, then each day, the script could decide which on demand jobs needed to be run that day.
This script is available for download in the script library.