Joseph,
The reasons you are doing this are probably different than ours.  We have
production processes that need the backups synchronized with them.  The
production control department must be able to hold backups if things are
running late or reschedule at a 5 minute notice.  Or hold everything because
there is a problem being worked on.  And, of course your basic reasons.

However, you will find that the open systems 3rd party schedulers are not
like a mainframe scheduler in the ability to give you status on running
process.  The basically throw it over the wall and put a message if the
process does not finish by a certain time.  However, if your processes do
not hang up, you will get return codes back that can be used to influence
the overall schedule as necessary.