OpCon Reviews

Our primary use case is file movement.

It cuts down on phone calls from other departments because they can monitor their own work, once we set up their projects.

I've got eight individuals who work for me and, before we had OpCon, I lost about two of them a day to processing our Check 21 files. That whole process is now completely automated. Instead of performing the work, they're just monitoring it through OpCon. I've gained back two full-time employees to use in other areas. Instead of being "button-pushers," they now monitor the processes. Five of my team members, and me, have been through the OpCon training, and they're getting more and more involved every day. They're slowly rolling out some new jobs and learning how to tweak and manage it.

With ACH, I get about a half an FTE back. I haven't had to add anybody to my department, whereas without OpCon, I would have had to add one or two bodies.

In two weeks, OpCon has done 15,677 jobs that an operator would normally have had to do. It has significantly streamlined operations, and it does things right, every time.

All of its features are valuable. We use the heck out of it. I just went to a conference and there were only three of us who had our hands raised every time they asked about a different level of OpCon and how we have it deployed.

One of the things we like about it is that you can open it up to other departments so that they can see their own tasks running. We were one of three at that conference that said they had it deployed to other departments.

At first, it's a little clunky, but once you learn it, it actually is very simple. You have to get over that initial learning hump.

In addition, right now I've got two servers that are using 2008 and that's holding me up from getting to version 19.0 of OpCon. There are key products that I just can't ignore. I can't just upgrade. I wish SMA could go back a little bit further or give a little bit more support for older software, like 2008. I understand their point: The 2008 software is out of date, technically. But trying to get a vendor to update its application to work with something newer is out of our hands. I wish I didn't need to lock up my whole OpCon because of this process that probably does 600 jobs every two weeks. It's a big process that came in about three years ago and, when it came in, OpCon was key in getting it deployed into our bank. But the latest operating system it works with is 2008. I'm at the point now where I want OpCon 19.0, but I'm held to my current version because of that one application. It would be nice if they had a way that you could upgrade and still work with an older version a little bit longer.

We've been using this solution for four-and-a-half years.

The stability of this solution is awesome. It's the only product I've ever seen that you can actually build to fix itself if it has a problem. You'll build something and, if you find an issue, you can say, "Hey, if this happens again, do this to correct it."

Scaling is pricey. We've got 20-something servers and six AS/400s tied to it. If I want to add another five servers, it would be pricey. 

We currently have about 40 users. All they're doing is monitoring. Only five operators and I are actually making the changes, adding new procedures, etc.

In terms of increasing usage of OpCon, at the moment we're okay. It just depends on new products that the bank says it wants to buy. Currently, we have enough work for the next five years to get OpCon built and up and running 100 percent.

Technical support is awesome every time I call. Now, when I call I'm asking more, "Hey, can I do this?" and they'll say, "Yeah, try this or this." It's really simple and I hang up the phone and away I go. At first, I was on the phone with them for quite a bit, but now I might make a phone call once a month.

We used to use Robot, but that was strictly AS/400. It had a lot of limitations. OpCon is way easier to use than Robot was, and OpCon goes across multiple platforms, which makes it an even better solution.

At the time, I was number two in terms of setting it up. My manager was the key person in rolling it out. I was working to keep the lights on and to keep the business going while he was learning about OpCon and doing the setup. He got let go and it became my responsibility.

My manager worked on it for about one-and-a-half years before he was let go, and at that time we probably had 1,000 jobs running, in total, every two weeks. And out of that, we really didn't have a high success rate. He didn't share some of the key utilities with us so that we could work on it. When he got let go we got the entire, "Here's the product. Do it." We were able to figure out the problems. He had set stuff up initially but he had more test stuff in there than he had production stuff. Once I figured out what he was doing, it didn't take me a week or 10 days to start making changes.

He didn't have it working perfectly, and it took me about two months to correct some of the issues that he had and actually make it worthwhile. Now, I've got myself and five others trained, and it's really doing a lot for us.

We're up around 94 or 95 percent success on jobs that run.

We've done a couple of upgrades, and their upgrades are getting simpler. The more stuff that comes out, the easier it does get.

Given that it's running, eventually I'll have to have one person for each shift just to monitor it. When we do deploy some of the new SLAs and some of the new features that are in 19.0, we will be able to even better manage it. Eventually, someday, we'll be a lights-out organization.

We used OpCon consulting a little bit. We paid OpCon to come in to help us with our ACH. When you're moving millions of dollars, you want it to work right the first time. So we had someone come in from OpCon and he was with us for a week. We got ACH to process about 95 percent through it. We still have a little tweaking to do here and there, but it's doing files every day now.

We're licensed by the number of servers we have, and as long as we don't increase that, we just pay the maintenance on it. They've got a new pricing model out where you pay for the jobs. But looking at that, we'd pay a lot more than what we're paying today, so we'll just keep adding servers.

The TCO, compared to Robot, is a little bit more expensive, but it goes across many platforms, so we get more bang for our buck.

If anybody were to ask me if they should buy this product, the number one thing I would ask them is, "Do you know operating systems? Do you know DOS?" If you know file structures, etc., this product will be easy. I started back with the old 8088 PCs. You had to do everything you could just to be able to use the computer. This is a great tool to use if you've got that knowledge.

If you are bringing OpCon in, make sure you have somebody who can spend the time on it to get it implemented. Our company brought it in and said, "Here is a tool you can use." They didn't assign any one person to implement it. If that was my only job, I could stay very busy. Part of my problem getting it rolled out is that I'm an operations manager. I'm running a department that is 24/7 and, for the most part, projects that come into the bank are about 90 percent of what I get to do on OpCon.

We still have a long way to go in terms of the number of processes to be automated. We have automated about 10 percent of our jobs, but we have some other factors that are holding us back at the moment. Our core software has just done a big upgrade, which is affecting the way that we use it. OpCon can work with it, but the screens have all changed. The security is being upgraded in our core product and there are going to be new menu options. This is Jack Henry's biggest security change in 20 years. It's called global security. It's supposed to be fully deployed by March of next year. We're still in the process of waiting for that before we can start building day-to-day processes into it, through our core application.

We probably do between 170,000 and 200,000 jobs a year. Some of those jobs take two minutes and some of those jobs take eight hours. We haven't quite got all our time back yet, but we have been working on key applications, trying to free people up to do other things.

Overall, I'd give OpCon 11 out of 10 if you'd let me.

We use it for batch job automation and batch processing automation.

It has reduced our manual processing times by a good 75 percent. We had over 500 processes a day, since we process jobs for over 40 clients. We were able to automate all that.

OpCon has definitely freed up our resources and allowed us to continue to bring in more clients without adding additional FTEs. Because we are a 24/7 operation, we have 13 employees. We have doubled our client volume without doubling our employees.

As far as streamlining, goes, the scheduling allows us to schedule jobs with different frequencies, and it prevents manual errors and eliminates keystrokes.

All of it is valuable. We've been very successful with it and really reduced our manual keystrokes and manual errors. The greatness of it is the flexibility of the scheduling and the integration of all platforms and processes. We have integrated it with everything from AIX to Microsoft Servers; with pretty much anything that we can.

The product is easy to use and it's simple to automate processes. It's a GUI interface. You don't require any special programming skills to use it.

If there is anything that needs improvement, it would be the file watcher. That could probably be simplified and easier to configure. To configure the file watcher you have to have a good understanding of OpCon. If they could improve the process of how it looks for a file, as well as the configuring, that would help.

Some additional logging-information reporting would also help. They have all the information there but you still have to search around and look back. It's not right there for you, where you click and can get the reporting. You have to know the system and do some additional searches. So reporting is another area that they can build on by simplifying it. 

Another area for our improvement is the upgrade process. We continue to need to bring in SMA OpCon to perform upgrades. If they simplified that and give more direction to the clients for performing upgrades, that would be good.

But other than that, we've been really happy with the product.

We've been using OpCon for over five years.

It has been a very solid system for us. We really haven't experienced a long period of downtime. And when there were issues, SMA support was able to come in and resolve them immediately.

There hasn't been a problem with the whole system, but there were certain releases that created problems. We got a temporary workaround from SMA. But it was nothing major or something that kept us down or made us divert to manual processing.

We have been going from release to release with them and they've continued to add features and improvements. They have also added on products. So I think they are on track. They really have a solid system and I have confidence that they will continue to scale and bring in more features for our automation.

Their technical support is excellent. There have been several times where I have had to reach out to them and they responded immediately. They always have the answers to my questions and come up with solutions. I haven't had an incident where anything was extended over a long period of time. They have definitely been very helpful and knowledgeable.

Autobatch was one of the solutions I used previously. It was a free product that we downloaded, and then someone wrote some scripts. We didn't get to the point of purchasing it. OpCon is more of a high-end product. You get what you pay for. I don't know how we would continue to grow our operation without the help of OpCon.

The limitations in Autobatch which OpCon overcame are due to OpCon's ease-of-use and the configuration. I wouldn't have been able to train my team to start building jobs on the other solution if they didn't have a good technical background. With OpCon, it's much simpler.

The initial setup was straightforward.

When we first started, the deployment took about one week, and that includes training from SMA OpCon as well as Jack Henry Symitar. After that, all the upgrades take about two days.

Many of the other solutions I've used require a lot of scripting and coding. OpCon is more a GUI interface and I was able to get a lot of my team training on this with ease, without sending them to any classes. A lot of my team members can build jobs, from simple to complex, with SMA OpCon, without going to any additional classes.

It's very efficient and straightforward to implement a new job. If I get a request today, I can do it within the hour and have it ready to run. That's how simple it is. I don't need four hours' advanced notice. We started deploying things ourselves immediately after training. They came in and trained us, created some sample jobs for us, and we took the sample jobs and were able to recreate them. We just followed the steps and started applying them. That feature, where we can copy one job to another, is great.

As for our implementation strategy, we have a live system and we had a test system, so we built two systems. We started to build the schedule and the jobs on pre-prod system. Once everything was tested we went live, and we kept the test system for any other testing that we might need to do. Eventually, we got rid of the test system because we were able to do everything on the live system. We're able to test a job — not actually run it, but test it — before we deploy it.

When the SMA technicians came onsite during the initial deployment, our experience with them was good. They were very knowledgeable. They had a good understanding of the system and they gave us very good pointers. They were very efficient and on-schedule. The whole implementation process was seamless and very smooth.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment with OpCon. As I mentioned, we have doubled our client base without needing to increase our workforce. 

We are able to take on additional projects. Our operators are not just running batch jobs, they're monitoring batch jobs and it has allowed us to use them as resources for other things. They have been happy to be assigned to other projects, and they also like to learn more about OpCon. They enjoy building the jobs and doing the automation.

The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually.

There are additional costs with some of the upgrades. When we need to do upgrades, we will have Professional Services help and we have to pay for that. But the cost is maybe a few hundred dollars. Upgrades usually require two to four hours of their time.

I've used other job schedulers before and the flow of the automation wasn't that efficient, where OpCon's is easy. It's a lot of drag-and-drop. You can copy one schedule to another. You can copy one job to another. It's very easy to use and does not require heavy, intensive knowledge of OpCon.

There wasn't much else out there, at the time, for our core system. OpCon partnered with Jack Henry Symitar, so it was a product that was recommended by the maker of our core system. We didn't really do a search for an automation vendor. We were using one that was out there for free and when the opportunity came for OpCon, with the right pricing for our budget, we took advantage of that. Since then, we've been on OpCon.

What I have learned from using OpCon is that everything is possible within OpCon. Each time we have a new process, that's what we look at first. We try to build everything around the automation.

You will definitely see the efficiency and improvement in your day-to-day operations by using OpCon. My advice would be, during the implementation, to try to build as many sample jobs as possible so that you can reuse them.

OpCon is now managed by my computer operation team. Right now don't share it out to other users. We use it to automate our batch processing for over 40 credit unions that we support. When I say support, that means we do their core processing, their batch processing.

In terms of deployment of upgrades and maintenance of the solution, it's normally just one or two of my team members, or myself, working with SMA's support. They come in and we work with them and we get the upgrade completed and then we go live.

We use OpCon for job automation for our core financial software. The majority of it is pushing files between vendors and our core, for processing, marketing mailers, and reports. We also have their Self Service software, so employees can kick off a job manually and it fires off certain jobs in our core. It then pushes and pulls files and sends them off to vendors. It could be processing file maintenance. There are a whole host of things that we use it for.

We're on Symitar's cloud software, EASE, and they have their own OpCon that our OpCon, on-premise, talks to.

Before we migrated to EASE, we were running about 2,000 to 3,000 unique jobs a month. Now, we're running about 1,500 unique jobs a month or about 300 jobs a day.

When we first got the solution in 2009, we were on-premise for our core vendor as well. We had two operators, full-time positions, who would run our Good-Night. Over time, probably within a year or so, both of the operators retired and we didn't have to hire new staff. So it replaced those FTEs.

We used to have to process all the ACH warehouse items manually. Now, with EASE and OpCon, it's just done through notifications and all we do have to do is correct exceptions on a daily basis. That's allowed us to be more "deep-disaster-recovery" ready. Personnel don't have to be onsite to do that now, they can do it remotely.

We definitely have been able to repurpose employees and free up a lot of the busy work and let them focus on the important parts of their jobs. I would say 30 to 40 employees have impacted over the years. They have reacted very positively. Our queue is always full of new ideas about what to implement. The well is deep in terms of what we can do with OpCon. It's just getting the man-hours to automate.

We're 10 years into the software. It's hard to gauge how it has affected our data processing times, year-over-year. But at first, kicking off jobs and scheduling jobs was entirely manual and we had all these different holiday schedules we had to keep track of. It was just a mess of paper that our operators would use. OpCon was able to just have all those frequencies built to the point where we can just review them on a daily basis. At that time, it improved things almost 100 percent.

• Being able to automate jobs and have a central location where we can see how the day is progressing.
• Getting alerted when something fails, and be able to escalate that with our employees.

Those are the most valuable features for us.

Also, while there's a learning curve to get your mind around how their schedules, jobs, and frequencies of the jobs operate, it's a pretty fast tool to learn. There's a lot of depth to it, so you can really get down in the weeds and become an expert in it. It's a fast learning curve. It took about a month to be able to get a pulse-check and see where we were at in jobs. Being able to create and modify jobs and schedules takes about three months, tops, to be able to do them comfortably. You could probably do it from the onset, but it's always shaky learning something like that.

I know they're getting ready to remove the thick client. It would be nice to go to a fully thin client.

Also, it takes something of a learning curve to learn the interface. Some of it isn't quite as intuitive as it should be. They definitely have roadmap items that they're working on to improve that.

We've been using OpCon since 2009.

I would rate the stability high, with our situation. They've got a lot of baked-in support with Symitar and they're very much a VIP partner in how we run our business.

It's very scalable. Right now we're barely scratching the surface of what it can do. I've looked at Symitar's instance of OpCon and they're running something like 13,000 jobs a day with all the clients that they have. So it can go from small use cases like ours to enterprise-level.

Their standard technical support is very helpful. They're very quick to respond. They're quick to set up a WebEx and look at a problem. I've never had any problems with getting support from them, both technically and from Professional Services.

The initial setup was pretty complex. By nature, it was complex. They had to sit down with us for a few weeks and go over how we ran our jobs. We were building that into OpCon and verifying it, and we were doing that while learning the software. It was a lot to take it on, but they were with us every step of the way and they answered all our questions. From an implementation standpoint, I don't think it could have gone better. They also had staff present from Symitar, our core, so it was like a hand-in-hand operation.

The implementation took about a month.

At first, there were a lot of meetings over the phone to go over how our infrastructure was set up and to outline all the different jobs and processes we were doing. They had different experts that we talked with to set up each part of OpCon. It was many meetings and then, onsite, it was a full week to get us ready to go.

We consulted with OpCon's staff onsite. 

Our experience with them during the deployment process was great. They were very helpful, very friendly. There wasn't a stupid question that we could ask. They were quick to answer and provide us reference material. 

And over the years, they've been that way. We occasionally contract hours with them if we want to do something that's a little bit more complex than our staff can handle. They're very patient over the phone. They always offer onsite consultants as well, for a fee, but their remote consultants are great. We always buy contract hours, dedicated support, when we want to add something new. That's not to fix something that's busted.

On a yearly basis our cost is between $25,000 and $30,000. I don't know if our contract is different from what a new client would get, but we have unlimited users with our Self Service. That gives us a lot more scalability. We can spin up different machines and different servers all over our network.

I wasn't involved in the discussions, but I don't know of too many solutions that would have the same level of features. OpCon is the only one that I know of that has a connector to the EASE environment.

My advice is to set aside as many resources as you can — personnel and time — to make sure that your implementation goes smoothly. Involve everybody in your organization who might find a use for it. Also, have a good communication plan for when you implement it so that people know that things are changing and, if there are issues, who to contact. And make sure you have staff trained and ready to put out any fires. If you don't have the staff, then make sure to set aside budget items to have OpCon Professional Services ready to go, after the fact.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is what's possible. It's still a learning curve even after 10 years. You hear what people are doing, at conferences, and you didn't even think that that was something that could be done. Recently I heard about a situation where a credit union wanted to monitor social media. They had a use case where they could set up an Azure listener that would go out there and aggregate anytime somebody mentioned that credit union, and then it would pull in the comments. Then, it would build a report that would go off to the credit union's marketing department. That way it could escalate. If someone said something negative, they could respond quickly.

Automation is a work-in-progress. There's always room to automate. You get a lot of people who are a little nervous when we approach their department and ask for automation ideas because they don't want to be automated out of a job. But every year we tackle new processes. There are some things that are still done on paper, here at the credit union, things that are hard to give up.

OpCon has features that we haven't had time to even use, so I'd say we're happy with where they're at when it comes to the feature set.

In IT, there are three programmers and I who use it at a high level. There are another 15 to 20 people who use it with the Self Service portal, where they can fire off a job manually that we set up. We have 350 employees and most of the stuff is behind the scenes for the departments. It's like the plumbing in the wall. They don't really see it, but they know they can turn the faucet on and get water.

I would rate OpCon a 10 out of 10. I'm very pleased with the product.

We have it running batch processing across our mainframe and Windows Server environments. OpCon also integrates with a third-party SFTP tool and through that we have OpCon driving all of our file transfers as well.

We've automated hundreds of processes with OpCon, representing a good 80 percent of our processing.

One thing that we had to introduce about three years ago in our bank was exchanging high volume monetary files with other banks on a mission critical hourly basis. We would start doing the exchange at about 9.30 a.m. every day and it would go through until 2 a.m. the following morning. It was very time-driven. Our customers were heavily reliant on it because it was money that was coming to fund their accounts. OpCon allowed us to fully automate the process, right down to when it went wrong for any reason, it would alert us. Rather than having to employ three staff members to manage the process over the period, it just runs. It tells us what has gone wrong.  Every day, every hour, we do two full exchanges and they just happen.

Another thing we've been able to do with OpCon is to give our business users a level of self-service and automation for themselves. We don't have to be here to do things for them. OpCon will just do them for them. OpCon has absolutely streamlined our operations. We went from getting requests to do something and the end-user waiting for however long it took us to get around to doing it, to their being able to do it for themselves.

We actually got rid of our third shift with one of the operators going off to work in another part of our IT division. Now, the third shift effectively goes on unmanned. We allow OpCon to run things for us.

In addition, with the automation, the solution has definitely sped things up enormously. There's less human interaction that has to go on now.

We just wouldn't be without OpCon.

The most valuable features are the 

• automation 
• repeatability.

Since we got it configured, it has just done the job day in, day out. Being able to rely on it and know that it's going to happen, whether there's a person over it or not, is really good.

The ease of use and simplicity in automating processes are good. They get better every time they put out a new release. When we first got it, a long time ago, it wasn't as intuitive as it is now. That also comes, a little bit, with our having used it for so many years, so we're more used to it. But I have a guy who started working with me about three years ago, for example. He had never touched anything like this but he was able to pick it up and run with it. And he absolutely raves about it. He thinks it's the best product he's ever worked on - this from a person with many years of IT experience.

I might like to see a little bit more of a seamless user interface. That would be good. They're moving towards a browser-type interface, rather than the Java application that we currently use. Also, a little bit more built-in self-service would be good, rather than a standalone product.

We've been using OpCon for around 15 years.

The stability gets better all the time. Where we've had problems with stability, it's been partly our fault. We run it on a VMware server but we haven't recognized that the workload has increased and haven't increased the capacity of the server it's running on. It's because of things like that that OpCon has had the odd issue. But in general, the product in and of itself is pretty reliable.

It's absolutely scalable. It will just take whatever you throw at it. As long as you make sure that the hardware it's running it on will cope, it seems like it has endless possibilities.

It does all of our batch processing. Absolutely everything is run under OpCon. As we add more processes, it's a no-brainer; we put them into OpCon. We only use it for our ClearPath mainframes and Windows Servers. If we were to move to another operating system, we would definitely take OpCon with us. It has that flexibility to run on different platforms as well.

Technical support is really good.

I brought OpCon into the company. Prior to that everything was done manually by people.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were a very small IT shop when I first came here and OpCon was one of the first SQL databases that we had that had any great importance in our world. We had local New Zealand support to help us. They were really good. We were a little bit wary of jumping in and using it, and they really helped us to step into the product with small steps to start off with. That allowed us to gain a comfort level. It was a good implementation.

We were a little bit shy and timid about automating things. We started out playing with it quite a bit. It took us a while from the time we deployed it until we automated our first process, and that was because I decided to approach it by rewriting a lot of the code that we ran, to make the best use of OpCon. We used to have one great big job that ran everything, and I really wanted to break it down and use OpCon to bring everything to the surface, rather than it being all hidden in one big job. My wanting to do that made it take longer; it was a few months to really get something going "in anger."

The game plan was to try and take away as much of the manual processing as we could. There was a lot of checking that was done every single day.

The fact that we were able to eliminate a staff member entirely from the area and move him to another area has definitely paid dividends in terms of what we pay for OpCon today.

I have worked in an IBM environment, so I've worked with Control-M and the old CA 7. OpCon was the only option that was available, at the time, for a ClearPath mainframe. But it's been a good option.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is: Don't try to do things manually. It's a really good automation tool. Really, really good.

Go for it. If your aim is to gain reliability and automation, and making sure that when you want things done they'll get done, then OpCon is a really good tool.

One of the very good things about SMA as a company is that they actively seek input from us as customers. Where it makes sense, they take our suggestions and they develop them and they implement them. There are a couple of features in OpCon I'm aware of which have come from a number of customers here in New Zealand, including myself. They listen and they improve where it's appropriate. There's nothing significant in the product that needs improvement. It's a really good product.

There are four of us who look after the production environment, and we have about 10 or 11 people who are using it in development work, running their processing. There are two of us who do maintenance of the solution. The only reason there are two of us is that people go on holiday. It really is easy to maintain.

Over the course of my 15 year use, we automated dozens of processes with easily hundreds of tasks. Then, almost six years ago, we outsourced a large number of processes so we didn't do them in-house, and as a result OpCon wasn't doing very much for us for a time. About two years ago, we started automating new processes. Now, with OpCon, we have automated about half a dozen good sized processes.

I am using a very recent version.

Our most recent automation project had to do with our mortgage origination system where we automated virtually all of the steps being done by a human. This was about two hours worth of work each day, if done manually. This has to be done 365 days a year (weekends or holidays, it doesn't matter). Now, OpCon runs those steps each day. It finishes in under a half an hour and is done before people even have to come into work. This was a project that benefited us tremendously. 

With this project, we made people's time available to do more effective things. We didn't eliminate any staff, but we weren't even trying to. We were trying to make tasks able to be done more consistently and automatically, then allow the staff that used to do them to work on other things.

There used to be either one or two people who had to do this job every single day. So, the automation project affects those two people. Indirectly, it probably benefits 20 to 30 people by having work automated and time available to do more effective things for the company. 

At first, people were skeptical that the work could be done properly. They wanted a solution, but were afraid that it might not work or would not perform as well (as them). However, they are very happy now with the fact that they don't have to come in at 6:00 a.m. and work on holidays, etc. The solution streamlined our mortgage operations. 

While somewhat small, we just recently added automation to an everyday process. This is just one of those things where now nobody has to do it. There was a file that needed to be downloaded from our credit card servicer and moved to a different place on our network, then renamed. You also need to archive the file that was there from yesterday. This was a relatively straightforward set of tasks. I don't think the automation project took very long to do, probably a couple of hours, likely less; it took somebody 15 minutes a day. Now, nobody has to even think about it, as it's just there automatically. We have had two similar, recent projects where it was a question of downloading files made available on a daily basis, putting and renaming them where they need to be, and then managing archives of the files afterward. 

It can run scripted tasks automatically over and over without intervention. That is what it does and the part that I really like because repetitive tasks need to be done over and over, day after day, no matter what day of the week it is. It is difficult to have staff do these manually and accurately, especially over weekends or through the night. Instead, you can have OpCon do them.

I wouldn't call it the easiest to automate. It has to be learned, training is required, then you get better at it over time. There are right ways and wrong ways to go about it (think standards, best practices, conventions). It isn't realistic to think that OpCon is very easy and you can just start clicking around to do complex things. It's flexibility and rich feature set also make it challenging at first.

There is one thing I wish OpCon could do. I'm not sure if it should be expected to, but we have tried to get it to where it could start a process on an external database. I'm sure SMA would say that in some cases it can, but we have a specific application where it can't. Therefore, if there were some tools which allowed us to interact with this external database automatically, that would be helpful. 

I have been using the solution for about 15 years. Those 15 years that I have been using OpCon span two different employers.

It is very stable. It is rarely offline or not functioning because of some internal error. This happens once in a great while, so I would call it very stable.

It can be deployed and maintained by as little as one person or a fraction of an FTE. It's not a full-time job taking care of it, not at the scale of our company.

My impression is that it scales incredibly, because of the size of some of the institutions that it has been used in, even being used by our own banking solutions provider at their large multi-tenant level.

OpCon is capable of running automation for multiple servers and multiple businesses, e.g., many dozens of institutions like ours. There are very large scale deployments of OpCon, but I don't know how many servers, consoles, or employees that it takes to run them. 

70 percent of our manual processing has been automated. I guess we have more to do!

For our environment, OpCon has daily schedules doing jobs throughout the day and night. It is fairly extensive. I would consider it a critical piece of our operations. 

There might be as many as a dozen employees who touch it in some way, shape, or form. There are maybe two or three employees capable of working with it as administrators. Perhaps a couple are power users. The are indirect consumers or beneficiaries of the service. Also, there is a module called self-service. We have a number of users in back office type roles who use self-service buttons to accomplish some tasks by kicking off a process or task. 

I would rate the technical support very high. They know their product very well. OpCon also knows our industry and is very commonly deployed in our vertical, which is financial services, and in particular, credit unions. They implement their own best practices and can therefore easily build on work their consultants have previously accomplished.

I did use another automation tool before OpCon, but there is almost no comparison. It is certainly not apples to apples. I have used Windows Scheduler to do very simple things, but again, there is no comparison to what OpCon can do.

OpCon was implemented at my former company while I was there, and when I came to work for my current company, the solution was already in place.

I was involved in initial setup in my other job a long time ago. It was relatively complex, but SMA does it for you. From that standpoint, it made the initial setup straightforward for me.

For the two employers that I have done this solution with, the strategy was to identify the most important processes that we wished to have automated. It might be important because of the process's criticality to the company or because of how annoying it is to have to do it every day. Those are identified, then documentation is gathered together. It might also be information inside people's heads. So, you have to do some interviews or onboarding meetings where you get the information together required to make it able to be automated. You work with an SMA engineer to do the initial automation along with training, then you place it into production. My strategy from there is to use the onsite expertise to help identify the next tier of things that should be automated so we can work on them ourselves as we go forward.

SMA normally does the initial deployment. They come onsite for your first implementation and spend a week. Then, they often will come back and spend a second week as part of the deployment plan. By the time they are done, there are usually a great number of identified processes which have already been automated. From the initial deployment to getting things up and running on a server to having things automated in production, you can easily have these results inside a month.

The solution has reduced data processing times in two ways:

1. With the mortgage servicing example, that was a large project. It accomplishes the work in a much shorter amount of time. Nobody has to waste their time waiting between cycles and tasks. Essentially, it cuts down drastically on how long the process takes. 
2. In the case of one of the more recent smaller examples, it does its job in something close to minutes, even possibly under a minute. Whereas, if a person had to go to their workstation, sit down, login, and transfer the file, then rename it, it would take them perhaps five minutes or more. On a percentage basis, that is a huge time savings.

Offhand I would say it's at least a 75 percent time savings. We have not done a formal ROI. However, looking at our licensing costs on an annual basis and showing how that saves in terms of staff time/efficiency and getting tasks done after hours (365 days a year), we do see return on our investment.

There are standard licensing fees and annual maintenance. They also have a subscription model that is a hybrid managed service. We have also invested in ancillary API and connector licences specific to our environment and use cases.

At my previous company, we did evaluate other options. We evaluated another process automation commercial package, and we decided instead on OpCon.

We chose OpCon because of how feature rich it was. The other products could have done the immediate things at hand that we wanted to automate. However, we pictured OpCon as being able to do more than that down the line, so we wanted to invest in a more robust solution.

Technically, almost anything can be automated. However, there is almost an equal amount of work that has to be done to have the people part accept and trust it.

My advice to overcome the people factor would be to adopt a fairly formal project management approach and bring those people in as stakeholders. Listen to what they want, then try to ask questions for the rest, as there are things that they just won't tell you. Get as much possible information from them so they understand that you want to help them and are not trying to take their job away. That is the big thing: people shouldn't feel like their job is threatened at all. Work through a project management process showing them how progress is being made, what the results are, and help them to start trusting the solution along the way before it goes live. The big key is communication and information gathering.

The solution is very good. It's robust and scales. OpCon comes with good tech support. There is always room for a product to grow or be a little easier to use or maintain. I would give it a nine (out of 10) overall.

We use it for automation of our nightly workflows as well as automation of our internal processes that are happening all day, including moving files, and running jobs on our core system. We also interface it with a lot of the database servers. We use it for a lot. 

We automated our nightly update process and, in doing that, we freed up employees to be able to do something else and not have to worry about that. In my area, we have six or seven who have been freed up, and I've also expanded it out to more of our operations. For example, before, people would tell us that something was ready to be run and we would ask somebody to actually run that job on our core. By using the Solution Manager that OpCon provides, employees can kick that job off themselves. So it has freed up even more people. The employees involved have embraced the changes. They are happy to be able to focus their time on more meaningful tasks. Giving them that button via Solution Manager, they are happy to hit that button and that they don't have to wait on anybody else. It has saved us time. It's more efficient.

It's just streamlined our entire IT operations. Before, we had batch files running on certain servers and they were all over the place; this server did this, another server did that. But now, everything is streamlined into one. All the automation, processes and moving, is happening straight through OpCon. The run of a day is all happening through this one server. In the past, when an issue would arise, we'd have to troubleshoot and figure out where it was running, what's happening, why it was not working. Now we have a central point to focus on to be able to know what's happened and move forward.

We are running 13,935 daily jobs through OpCon, which represent approximately 1,200 daily schedules that we're running over the course of a month. We have automated about 75 to 80 percent of our manual processing. And we're still building and adding things to it every day.

In addition, if a process used to take 20 minutes to do, it may only take 10 minutes now because somebody has the whole process in their control. The nightly update process, that used to take at least a few hours, now that it runs automated, runs in an hour-and-a-half or so. So there are some significant gains. If I had to estimate, I'd say our data processing has improved by 70 percent.

The automation of processes is the most valuable feature. One of the major hurdles for us over the last few years, before we found OpCon, was to make our nightly process happen automatically. Being a bank, we have nightly update processes that have to happen for posting transactions, for example, and it was a huge load off our department to have that automated.

It's pretty easy to use. They have help information built right into the program so anytime you're trying to build something and you need help, you just hit F1 and there's documentation on what you're trying to do. OpCon does offer training, and I did attend both the basic and the advanced training, which were very helpful. But if you understand PowerShell and things like that, you could, potentially, build OpCon without going to formal training. I do think it is easy to use.

I think that they're working on this, but I wish that there was a more centralized area to be able to see what other people are doing and use the OpCon community, per se. I went to their annual conference and I gained a lot of contacts from that. I keep in touch with them and we talk, but it'd be nice to have more of that be more readily available. They have a community platform for OpCon users, but I want to see more of where somebody is doing this process in that way. They have a great community platform right now, but I feel that it could be developed.

We've been using OpCon for almost three years.

The solution is very stable. I haven't seen any stability issues with the product to date. They tell you what exactly what is to be expected. They provide documentation of updates and what you should do and what you shouldn't do. I feel that as long as I follow the guidance from them, I won't have any stability issues.

We started using it as well for running our database maintenance at night. We have multiple database servers running in-house and we were able to start doing that with OpCon. There are many solutions that it interfaces with and, while we're not leveraging all of them, we're using a good number of them.

Their technical support is very good. I called them more in the beginning when we were doing the implementation, but I'll call them anytime. For any of the processes that I'm trying to work with, they always have somebody who will help. It's been a very good experience using their support.

They have very knowledgeable resources. Everybody that I talk to over there has always been a big help. I went out to the conference and met a lot of people that I hadn't necessarily talked to on the phone and they all were very knowledgeable and helpful.

We did not previously use an automation solution. We had done things like using PowerShell and doing scripting on the servers, but we had not used those things exclusively as an automation platform.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We knew what we were getting. When we finally made the decision to purchase it, our rep reached out to us and told us exactly what was going to be happening with the implementation and when he was going to show up. We got that all scheduled, he showed up, and everything took off from there.

Our experience with the SMA tech during implementation was awesome. He was very knowledgeable. He had years of experience in the field that we are in. The gentleman who came out to us had worked in IBM for many years as a programmer, so he knew what we were doing and how we were trying to do it. He was able to take the processes that we were already doing and develop them after we got OpCon in place. He came out for one week of just implementation of OpCon, and then he came out for a second week to develop these things. He was very resourceful and knowledgeable, and if he didn't know the answer, he found it within a reasonable amount time.

Technically, OpCon was up and running on the first day, but we were still moving things into it during that first week. Within a week we had processes that were being automated. It wasn't long at all. We already had a good understanding of what was happening. We just took what was happening and moved it into OpCon. As long as we had file permissions, it wasn't an issue.

Our major focus was on our core processing. Our core has numerous file moves and transfers and hundreds of jobs that run every day. We wanted to automate the nightly process and include the jobs that were running on the core all day. We took those processes and migrated them over from the IBM Advanced Job Scheduler into OpCon. That was our immediate focus. From there, we branched out and started doing the stuff that was happening on the Window Servers. We moved all of that over into OpCon, including FTP from our core vendor, as well as the moving and posting of files.

We have absolutely seen ROI in terms of having our update process automated. That was costing our IT department quite a bit of overtime, because employees were working their normal schedules and then they would have to be responsible for the nightly update process. They would be on a rotation of course, but overall, the overtime expenses have gone down as a result of installing OpCon. And the processes that we no longer have to focus on, on a daily basis, allow our employees to be more efficient in doing other things.

We looked at a couple of solutions a little bit before we found OpCon. We found OpCon at a user group meeting for our core provider. We had looked at others and we hadn't found one that was suitable for all the uses that we'd need it for.

One solution we looked at was iRobot, but that was strictly IBM-driven. It was just running on the core but it didn't have any logic within it. OpCon has the agent on the IBM that can look at like dates and interpret them and give it an answer based on whether things line up or not. And the iRobot program had the ability to kick off jobs, but it didn't have any logic built into it.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that anything is possible. There is literally nothing that I have found yet that it can't do. I've called support and shared with them what I think is a crazy idea, and they'll say, "Oh no, we can do that." We talk about it and figure out a solution and go from there.

When you first look at it and look at everything that has to be done, you need somebody who is going to be dedicated to the product. It looks like there is a lot to do, but the reward far outweighs what it looks like upfront.

There are about 10 users of OpCon in our company. Half of them are in IT and the other half are in operations. In terms of our frontline retail staff, only one person there is using it. The rest are the operations area. They're the ones who kick off the processes through Solution Manager. In terms of maintenance of OpCon, there are three of us who work together exclusively on OpCon.

I have to give it 10 out of 10. It's done great things for us and it continues to so every day.

We use it for pretty much everything. We purchased it when we converted to Symitar and that was the primary reason for using it. But we use it for all different vendors, downloading files, and running Oracle queries and VB scripts, etc.

When we converted to Symitar in 2013, by getting OpCon we eliminated two of our operator positions because we automated everything with it. We repurposed both positions and assigned them more meaningful tasks to do. 

We've automated several hundred processes and no longer have any manual processing. OpCon eliminates operator error by having it all automated. It gives us consistency.

The automation part of OpCon is the most valuable for us, with all the core processing. It's really mostly hands-off unless we have failures. In our old days, we'd spend a good part of the day doing processing via manual tasks. We don't have to do any of that any longer.

We've been using OpCon for about six-and-a-half years.

It's definitely been pretty stable for us. We run things 24 hours a day, so sometimes we run into issues related to putting server patches on it. We have to find a time to stop everything to load Windows patches and the like.

The scalability seems fine.

We always increase usage. We're always having new processes and adding new servers for different things. We definitely have plans for increasing usage, almost daily.

We don't need to use technical support very often, but to begin with, it was really good.

I have noticed lately that their first answers tend to be, "Let's upgrade it to the latest and greatest first," without looking into anything. The last couple of times I've logged a ticket that's been the response, which is a little frustrating. We're not big on just upgrading on a whim. We do full testing.

We had a tool before OpCon, but it's been so many years that I can't remember the name of it. It was not nearly as robust as OpCon is. Implementing things is a lot easier with OpCon. Most things don't generally take that long to implement. The way you can calculate different dates, and all the different types of contingencies make OpCon a lot more flexible.

Also, OpCon was the preferred partner of Jack Henry, which we were converting to. That was our primary reason.

Another reason was that OpCon enables us to do all these other external processes, outside of the core, with other vendors, like downloading bond files. We did not have any of that before.

The initial setup seemed fairly straightforward to begin with, but we didn't get into a lot of the more complicated features. We've grown into those features over the years. It was just set up to do the basic processing in the beginning.

Jack Henry, the vendor of Symitar, came onsite when we converted and they were here for a week. At that point we had all of our main, "good night" tasks and the like in OpCon. Gradually, over time, we've added everything else, such as our mortgage processing, which is outside of Jack Henry software. We purchased an API and we were able to automate all of that processing with OpCon also.

The SMA techs were really good to work with. They're very responsive. We didn't have any complaints about them.

After OpCon was deployed we automated our first processes right away.

Our strategy was to make sure we had no manual processes by the end. And going forward, we wouldn't take on processes unless we were able to automate them with OpCon.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment by going with OpCon. With all of the automated processes, we eliminated two positions. We also have an initiative where we're going into other departments in the credit union and finding processes that they're doing manually which we're able to automate. Using OpCon helps reduce the time our staff works on manual processes and, instead, they can spend time working on things that directly affect our members.

It's kind of hard, in the beginning, to picture it all until you start using it.

We don't roll it out to the whole company. It's centralized just within our IT department. We have three users who actually use it and manage the processes. Two of them are more primary, me and one other person, and the third person is a backup. We also have the ability to put an icon on a person's desktop and let them click the icon, and that will actually run a process in OpCon behind the scenes for them. We have about 10 of those.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It's not a 10 because of some of the support responses recently.

We use it for automating business processes.

We're currently running 900 daily jobs in the system and OpCon allows us to do more because we don't have the human resources to run that many jobs. Now, with a system that can automate things, we are able to add a lot more volume to our day and to increase our job count. It allows our business to process a lot quicker. We can process more in real-time instead of waiting until the next day. It has enabled us to move from traditional batch processing to more real-time processing with a lot of our processes.

We've automated close to 250 tasks. In our IT space, we've automated 100 percent of the jobs that were running manually. We have also automated some tasks in our accounting and our item processing department. The automation on the accounting side drastically changed their jobs. I know because I was involved in working with their teams. And on the item processing team, close to 75 percent of the manual tasks around the core system have been automated.

OpCon has also reduced our data processing times because of the way you can build out workflows. It can run things in sequence. It's not restricted to a linear process, so you can run multiple jobs at once, allowing for multi-threaded jobs. As a result, we have been able to cut our nightly processing job from three hours to two hours.

The most valuable feature is its integration with our core system. There is a very limited number of vendors that integrate with our core system. OpCon allowed us to reassign three part-time people who were running jobs manually. OpCon is running those jobs automatically and those people now work in general IT support, instead of running manual jobs all day. Those people were very receptive to the changes because it was a lot of tedious and error-prone work and they were pretty happy to get it off their plates.

OpCon is also fairly easy to use, as long as you have some kind of process background for understanding workflow. If you understand workflows at a very basic level, you can use OpCon.

The biggest area where there is room for improvement would be integration with their code. They've got a function for embedded scripts and it would be nice if that worked with a code or versioning management system, like GitLab.

Overall, we haven't run into too many roadblocks where we tried doing something and we couldn't do it.

We've been using OpCon for four years.

We only have it running in a single instance, but they do support a failover cluster. It is supported to run in a high-availability mode. I wouldn't see any problems with the application's stability. We've never had issues. We run it on a virtual machine.

It scales easily. The only thing you have to be mindful of is licensing, because you pay per task. Other than that, it has handled as many jobs as we've thrown at it. We tried a few thousand in one day. It scales nicely.

It handles all of our critical-to-business processes. It handles all our ACH, our check-processing, our nightly processing, and various other daily tasks. We'd be in rough shape if we didn't have OpCon running.

Our plan is to always increased usage. We have a "continuous improvement" mindset here. If we can implement something in OpCon, we do.

SMA's technical support is excellent. They've always helped us out.

We did not have a previous automation tool. The reason we went with OpCon is that it has an integration with our core system.

The vendor handled most of the setup but it's more complex than other systems. We had some issues with setting up our service users with the domain. There is still some complexity with that — with which users have to run which jobs on which servers — because of permission models. That was the only thing that really was complex about the install. Actually installing the application is very straightforward, but the permissions model behind the service accounts is complex.

The complexity is because they allow you to do things in so many different ways. They didn't want to make an out-of-the-box setting for how you do things. Some of it is left up to the user to figure out the best way to handle things. In our case, we decided to use an Active Directory domain user and it was a little more complicated to do that because of security issues.

The installation itself, to where there was a usable product, took about two hours with their support team. Our experience with them during the initial deployment was very good.

After the initial deployment, it took about 10 minutes to automate our first process.

As for our deployment plan, we had all our manual jobs in a checklist and we ranked them all with a complexity rating. While the OpCon support was on site for our implementation and we had their attention, we worked through the more complex issues. After they left, we picked up the low-hanging fruit.

We have absolutely seen ROI. I don't have any way to measure it, but it's probably the most critical system to our organization, after Active Directory and email.

Yearly, we're paying about $62,000. OpCon has an all-inclusive feature and module license, but you pay per task. We have a 500 daily task count. Recurring tasks only count once. There are only additional costs if you want consulting hours for working on new projects. I think that cost is $250 per hour, a pretty standard consulting rate.

We evaluated one other solution, but I don't recall its name.

My advice would be to definitely involve the business units early in the process and get them all onboard, because you don't want to buy a tool that the business isn't ready for. They should be involved in process mapping.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using OpCon is not really about the tool itself, but more from going through the process and mapping with other departments. There's a lot of room or potential for OpCon, because the users in your company are definitely doing more manual processing than you could ever imagine. It made us realize how much manual work we are doing. It put eyes on that. We became hyper-aware of everything going on and would say, "Oh yeah, let's put that and that in OpCon". That went on nonstop for two years.

It's ongoing. We're still definitely growing the tool. There's always new stuff. Some teams were a little apprehensive at first and now they're more interested in it. When you talk about automation, it's always about someone's fear of being replaced by a machine. That wasn't the case with the core team for the critical pieces. All of those teams were willing to move their stuff because of availability and the criticality of what they were doing. They realized that automating it was a good move.

In our company, OpCon is primarily run by the IT department. The only other team that interfaces with the tool is accounting, and they use the Self Service feature. We have 12 users using OpCon on a regular basis. There are two people in IT who maintain it.