Daylight Saving Time brings changes to our clocks, losing one hour on Sunday, November 1. If your system is not set up properly to handle the time change, you may miss critical jobs including billing, ageing, etc. Are you prepared for how your WMS and WLM systems will handle the time change?
What needs to be done to safeguard software systems?
There are 2 ways to mitigate the impact of Daylight Saving Time.
- Solution A – Disable the automatic Daylight Saving Time feature and use UTC Time. This is very popular if you can just put your server in UTC time and forget it. This is great unless you need your server in local time.
- Solution B – Avoid setting any jobs to run from 02:00 to 03:00 on Sundays. For example, when the time change occurs in the spring typically at 02:00, on most systems the clock will magically go from 01:59:59 to 03:00:00 (you can test this on your Windows PC for fun). This means any jobs schedule to run from 02:00:00 to 02:59:59 on the day of the time change will simply not run at all. If this is when you send your invoices, run your on-hand pallet billing or run some backup job, it potentially will never run. So the simple and robust solution is to not schedule jobs during this window of time. In the fall, your jobs can run 2 times if they are scheduled during the Daylight Savings Time window which could have equally undesirable results.
Call (866.359.4437) or Email Open Sky today if you need help in working through the impacts of the time change.
Here’s more on Daylight Saving Time – enjoy!
Daylight Saving Time – from Wikipedia
Daylight saving time (DST) is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks during the summertime so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn. Modern DST was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson and it was first implemented during the First World War. Many countries have used it at various times since then; details vary by location.
The practice has been both praised and criticized…although an early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity, modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly, and research about how DST currently affects energy use is limited or contradictory.
DST clock shifts present other challenges. They complicate timekeeping, and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Software can often adjust computer clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST protocols are changed.
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