Flag completion of activity

I automatically run many, many... programs from a scheduler (System Scheduler). Ocassionally for any number of reasons normal execution may fail. I would like to do "something" that would allow me to know that each step has executed more or less normally. I realize that there is no fool proof solution to this problem but I hope there are some creative ideas out there.

Programs are:
- dos copy/move/delete/rename
- Excel macros
- Access macros

Many thanks in advance.

abe