Years ago I worked for a telecom as an IT shift supervisor. We had IT staff physically on the headquarters' premises 24/7. We provided support to remote telecom sites during the day, and on the night shift we took care of the maintenance and support that was easier to do when nobody was working.
Eventually one routine daily task got added to our job description: We ran batch jobs for many different applications for the business from 4 p.m. until midnight, optimizing the time when the repair staffs at the various remote sites were off-duty.
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One of these applications created work orders that resulted from customer calls to the service centers for phone repair, new installs, additional lines, configuration changes, and related work. These work orders would be compiled by the application jobs we ran and transmitted to printers at different sites throughout a five-state area late in the evening. They would then be printed out and ready when the repair staffs came to work in the morning, so they could sort through, make their assignments, and plan the day.
Since these printers were in offices that did not have any employees physically present while the print job ran, employees at the remote sites would make sure each day as they left to go home that the printers were turned on and had a good supply of paper forms. Surprisingly, we had very few problems, and it turned out to be an efficient system.
However, the occasional breakdown would occur. One site in particular became a thorn in our side for a few days.
We began getting complaints that service orders sent to the site's printer were not printing as scheduled. The orders wouldn't start printing until the staff arrived at work in the morning, and the repair staff were then having to wait until the printing was done. This was impacting their workday schedule, and if not remedied soon the telecom's bean counters would start asking serious questions about the site's productivity and bottom line.
