According to big data statistics, 90% of business leaders consider data and analytics as key to their organization’s digital transformation. Yet, they can only use 12% of their data. Such stark differences between goals and current capabilities exist in numerous tech domains and batch processing can help close these gaps.
Automated batch processing is a method for organizations to collect, store and process large amounts of data and transactions in batches simultaneously and continuously with no or little human intervention (See Figure 1).
Business executives must be aware of batch processing applications to identify similar use cases in their organizations. Therefore, we gathered the most common 41 batch processing applications and assigned them to 11 categories (e.g. general processes, sales, finance, customer service management, and industry-specific processes).
General batch processing applications
1. Data Processing: Batch processing can process large volumes of data in batches. Some examples of data processing are data cleansing, aggregation, and transformation.
2. Report Generation: Batch processing can analyze and summarize data to create reports for financial, operational or performance reporting.
3. Backup and Recovery: Batch processing can ensure data integrity and availability by applying backup scheduling, backup file management, and data restoration.
4. Batch Job Scheduling: Batch job scheduling is another type of batch processing application that can schedule and run a series of batch jobs (e.eg. monitoring and execution) automatically.
5. Integration and Interoperability: Batch processing can help with integration and interoperability between different systems and applications through data exchange, synchronization, and integration.
Applications in Business Functions & Industries
Batch scheduling in sales
6. Lead Management: Leads can be enriched with other data sources and prioritized in batches before the start of the day for sales personnel. This way, the sales team can save time by focusing on high-value leads first.
7. Sales Reporting: Sales reporting involves analyzing sales data to gain insights into the sales process. Batch processing can automate sales reporting, allowing sales teams to quickly and accurately analyze big data.
8. Order Processing: Sales teams can use batch processing to manage the order fulfillment process, track inventory levels, and manage customer information faster and more accurately.
9. Campaign Management: Batch processing can help manage sales campaigns by analyzing large numbers of leads or prospects in batches. As a result, sales reps can focus on specific segments or groups.
10. Customer intelligence: Batch processing can investigate sales data to identify customer behavior, buying patterns, and trends.
Batch scheduling in marketing
11. Email Marketing: Batch processing can seamlessly send large volumes of emails to a list of subscribers in batches, ensuring quick and efficient delivery of emails.
12. Ad Campaigns: Batch processing can enable marketing teams to optimize their campaigns by processing ads in batches and tracking their performance.
13. Social Media Marketing: Batch processing can be useful for social media marketing since it can schedule and publish posts on social media platforms. This way, marketers can save time and ensure that posts are published consistently.
14. Marketing analytics: Batch processing can provide insights on customer behavior, engagement, and ROI by fastening the analysis and segmentation of customer data, leads and campaign data.
Real-life marketing example
Lamar Advertising needed real-time orchestration for 24×7 digital billboard data streams, but homegrown scripts and schedulers couldn’t handle massive, continuous job loads.They adopted ActiveBatch, resulting to:
- Running ~3.6–4.4 million jobs/year (10–12K jobs/day) with ~99% success rate, handling everything from webcam updates to ETL for ad analytics.
- Eliminated custom scripting: built nearly all jobs with ActiveBatch’s library of prebuilt templates, speeding up development and maintenance.
- Automated critical workflows: uses ActiveBatch for secure file transfers (e.g. payment data) and real-time ETL. IT now focuses on core advertising services, with far fewer errors in billing and reporting.1
Batch scheduling in finance
15. End-of-day processing: Financial services companies can leverage batch processing to automatically and accurately perform end-of-day processing to reconcile transactions, generate reports, and other tasks.
16. Fraud detection: Batch processing can detect fraudulent transactions by analyzing large volumes of data and identifying patterns and anomalies.
17. Risk management: Batch processing can help the finance sector identify and mitigate risk in a more data-driven way by analyzing data and identifying potential risks.
18. Compliance: Batch automation can simplify complying with regulatory requirements for financial services companies by automating compliance tasks and ensuring the consistency and accuracy of the data.
Real-life finance example
Virgin Money could not scale to support surging batch transaction volumes during a cloud migration. The company migrated workloads into RunMyJobs by Redwood’s cloud platform. The results the firm obtained include:
- Scaled transaction throughput ~9× (from ~7M to ~60M transactions)
- Empowered business analysts with self-service reporting (data access previously bottlenecked through IT).
- Cut maintenance overhead: centralized cloud scheduler eliminated many manual on-prem tasks, dramatically reducing IT maintenance.2
IT processes
19. System Monitoring: Batch processing can allow teams to process system logs, event data, and metrics to detect and resolve issues quickly.
20. Reducing manual activities: With batch processing, IT teams can schedule and automate recurring tasks, such as database backups, patching, and system maintenance. This way, IT organizations can save time for more value-added tasks and ensure that critical tasks are completed on time.
21. Resource management: Batch processing allows IT teams to manage server resources, allocate memory and disk space, or optimize database performance.
22. Optimize costs: With batch processing, IT organizations can reduce the costs allocated for expensive hardware or infrastructure, saving on operational costs by running jobs during off-peak hours.
Batch processing tools can also orchestrate complex file transfers involving multiple stakeholders. However, if a business only needs a tool to orchestrate complex file transfers, MFT solutions or SFTP Server software can be great alternatives to batch processing tools.
Batch scheduling for customer service
23. Ticket Management: Another batch processing application is the management of high volumes of service requests, incidents, and changes. Therefore, IT teams can prioritize and handle tickets more efficiently.
24. Data management: Batch processing ensures data integrity by backing up, archiving, and transforming company data.
25. Feedback Management: With batch processing, customer service teams can process and analyze customer feedback in batches, such as surveys and reviews, to identify trends and issues more efficiently.
Batch scheduling in logistics
26. Order Processing: Batch processing can help logistics teams handle orders more efficiently by automatically fulfilling a large volume of orders.
27. Inventory Management: Batch processing can manage inventory by automatically tracking stock levels, shipments, and other information.
28. Shipping and Tracking: Batch processing can ease the processing and tracking of a large volume of shipments and delivery information, improving the accuracy of the information shared with customers.
29. Improved performance: With batch processing, logistics teams can improve supply chain performance, demand forecasting, and operational efficiency.
Real-life logistics example
Proactive Distribution Co.n had hundreds of orders and batch jobs were run on disparate schedulers with no monitoring, causing frequent missed jobs and ERP downtime. They migrated to RunMyJobs by Redwood and obtained results like:
- Centralized all scheduling: IT gained a single cloud dashboard to orchestrate every branch’s jobs across platforms
- Real-time alerts eliminated silent failures: IT staff are notified immediately of any issue, preventing ~120 business interruptions/year (saving ~$380K)
- Automated maintenance and upgrades: servers now reboot on schedule and software upgrades apply seamlessly, enabling a 24×7 centralized IT operations model.3
Batch scheduling in retail
30. Promotions and Discounts: Batch processing can allow retailers to apply discounts to a large volume of products by processing data in batches.
Real-life retail example
Staples struggled with manual, labor-intensive distribution of 800+ sales and operational reports daily (800 documents taking days to process). The firm deployed Redwood Reporting to automate report generation and bursting. They achieved:
- Automated delivery for ~2,000 users: ingests data from diverse systems (Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc.) into unified reports.
- “Burst” 7,000‑page P&L into store-specific, 3–4 page reports, cutting what was a 46‑hour manual task to minutes.
- Secure, on‑time distribution via a centralized portal with audit trails; stores receive only their own data, eliminating manual emailing and printing.4
Batch scheduling in telecom
31. Billing and Payment Processing: Batch processing can ensure telecom companies process and manage billing and payment more efficiently.
32. Managing Call Detail Records (CDR): With batch processing, telecom companies can process and manage a large volume of call data, such as call duration, location, and usage.
33. Network Traffic Analysis: Batch processing can analyze large volumes of network traffic data to gain insights into network performance, traffic patterns, and usage.
34. Detecting fraud: Batch processing can help in fraud detection, such as call spoofing or SIM cloning.
Batch scheduling in healthcare
35. Electronic Health Records (EHR) management: Batch processing can help process and manage electronic health records (EHR), including patient records, lab results, and clinical notes.
36. Improving Medical billing: Batch processing helps improve billing accuracy by automatically processing and submitting medical bills to insurance companies or patients.
37. Easy patient care & diagnosis: Batch processing can optimize patient care and diagnosis by analyzing large volumes of patient data, such as medical history, demographics, and clinical outcomes.
Real-life healthcare example
Children’s Hospital of Omaha had multiple siloed schedulers that ran data‐warehouse and BI workloads without central control. This caused delays and “domino-effect” failures in delivering patient and operational reports. They replaced these schedulers with ActiveBatch WLA across all platforms, achieving:
- Eliminated disparate schedulers, so all ETL and report jobs run under one system.
- Triggered jobs on data/file arrivals instead of fixed times, removing idle waits and ensuring up‑to‑date reports (saving ~50 staff-hours/year on one process).
- Centralized monitoring and automatic restart of dependent tasks prevent cascading failures. BI reports (e.g. daily Excel reports) are delivered reliably with no manual intervention.5
Batch scheduling in education
38. Student Records: Automated batch processing can be useful to manage student records, such as admissions, enrollment, grades, and transcripts, more efficiently.
39. Course Management: Batch processing can allow educational institutions to manage courses and course-related data, such as course schedules, assignments, and exams.
40. Financial Aid Processing: Another batch processing application is streamlining financial aid management where educational institutions can manage financial aid, such as scholarships, grants, and loans, more efficiently and with fewer errors.
41. Using educational data: Educational institutions can leverage batch processing to analyze data and gain insights into student performance, attendance, and behavior.
Batch scheduling in manufacturing
While this article focuses on batch processing in IT and enterprise scheduling, the term “batch processing” also exists in manufacturing, referring to a different concept. In manufacturing, batch processing refers to producing a fixed quantity of material or products under controlled conditions before moving to the next batch. use cases include:
- Recipe-or formula-based production (e.g., paints, specialty chemicals, biologics).
- Heat treatment and curing (e.g., aerospace components, composites, glass tempering).
- Quality traceability (each batch has its own record for compliance like GMP or FDA).
- Flexible small-lot production (high-mix/low-volume manufacturing).
To effectively manage these manufacturing batch processes, companies often employ specialized production planning tools. These tools assist in scheduling, resource allocation, and optimizing production runs to ensure efficiency and compliance. Companies can also adopt manufacturing AI solutions, digital twins and process mining in manufacturing processes to improve their operations.
FAQ
What is batch processing & how does it work?
Batch processing is a method used to process large volumes of data or transactions in batches, rather than individually in real-time. It involves collecting data over a period, processing it together, and then outputting the results.
Typically, batch processing runs scheduled jobs automatically without requiring user intervention, which can include tasks like data cleaning, report generation, and system backups.
This approach is efficient for handling repetitive tasks and can optimize resource usage by executing jobs during off-peak hours.
Further reading
Explore more on batch automation and workload automation by checking out:
If you believe your organization can benefit from automated batch processing or other workload automation tools, use our data-driven and comprehensive list of WLA vendors.
External Links
- 1. https://www.advsyscon.com/en-us/activebatch/case-studies/lamar-advertising
- 2. https://www.redwood.com/resource/virgin-money-case-study-2/
- 3. https://www.redwood.com/resource/anonymous-distribution-case-study/
- 4. https://www.redwood.com/resource/staples-case-study/
- 5. https://www.advsyscon.com/en-us/activebatch/case-studies/read/children-s-hospital
- 6. Spotfire | Exploring Batch Processing: Definition, Use Cases, and Benefits.
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