Overview

Many Control‑M users have production environments spread around the world, and need to schedule jobs based on the time in a time zone other than that on their local system. Because businesses are often situated in locations very remote from each other, the work day on a particular date may span as much as 48 hours in real time.

The Time Zone feature of Control‑M enables you to ensure that a job runs during the time span you require, even though the limits of that time span may be set within another time zone. By this means, you can schedule and link dependencies between jobs that must run on a specific date in one time zone with jobs that run on the same business day in another time zone, which may be very far away.

If you set the TIME ZONE parameter of the job appropriately, Control‑M calculates the corresponding times automatically, and the job runs only during the hours you require.

In order to ensure backward compatibility, jobs that do not use the Time Zone feature continue to run as they always did prior to version 6.1.00. The existing concept of a working day is not affected.

As of version 6.1.00, ODATE has an enhanced definition, in which ODATE has either a VALUE or RUN attribute, which is of particular importance in relation to time zone jobs. For more information, see the discussion of date definition concepts in the introductory chapter of the Control‑M for z/OS User Guide.