OpCon Reviews

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 throughout the enterprise, company-wide.

Utilizing OpCon has enabled us to achieve almost 98 percent automation throughout the enterprise. We have over 15,000 jobs in OpCon.

The solution has also streamlined operations. We were utilizing six people to do our processing and sustain our environment prior to using OpCon, and now we are only utilizing one person for that. And that person, who is currently working primarily on OpCon, has been freed up to do other work, other scripting. He's also able to do additional admin work within the IT environment.

OpCon has taken employees out of day-to-day, manual operations and given them an opportunity to grow in other areas of IT. They have been dispersed throughout our IT department in various other functions and roles where we needed additional staff, including our client services PC area, our server support area, and some of the other admin work areas. They no longer have to do repeatable, menial tasks just running batch operations.

In addition, nightly processing would take about 10 hours prior to OpCon. Now that we're running on OpCon, it takes two.

• The most valuable features are its integration into Windows, into VM, and into AIX, as well as SQL.
• The job automation and ability to run scripting are also important for us.
• It's relatively easy to use and utilize. If you have knowledge and understanding of network technologies, it makes it much simpler.

We have not explored the possibility, but one of the areas for improvement would be more integration into Active Directory, to where it could do the creation of user accounts and the additional work to integrate third-party systems into payroll systems.

We've been using OpCon for almost eight years.

It is a very stable product.

So far it's been scalable in our environment. We haven't had any issues with the scalability of the product.

We have plans to increase the Self Service capability and to integrate it into additional business units. As far as some of the other environments go within our infrastructure, we do have plans to add automation to our document imaging system and any other new or auxiliary products that we purchase.

The technical support staff is knowledgeable about their product. We have had a turnaround time of less than four hours in most instances where we've had to call in for support. But the product in and of itself is very stable so we have not had a lot of technical support calls. Contacting them has been more for when we've had to implement new products or new services and we were making modifications.

We did utilize another job scheduler prior to OpCon called JFS, which was not robust enough to do everything that we needed done. That's why we opted to look at the OpCon solution as a replacement. JFS was more tedious in terms of implementation. It was not robust enough to do individual calendar scheduling, nor did it have the ability to do a lot of these single transfers or to initiate any scripting for SQL or AIX. It was very limited.

With JFS it did not take long to implement automations; a couple of hours to automate a process and to be able to add jobs to it. It's just that it was very tedious and we had to consistently manipulate the schedules to fit our needs because it did not have a calendar system like OpCon does to be able to manipulate jobs and do schedules by date.

Overall, JFS was not scalable. It didn't meet our needs. It required a lot of manual intervention. We had outgrown that product very quickly. We had been on that product less than four years before we decided that it just was not good enough to sustain our environment. Currently, our environment has over 240 servers and there was no way we could have managed that with the old schedule.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The SMA group came out onsite to assist with the implementation. It was done in two phases, upon our request, because we didn't have the man-hours to be able to do it all in one shot. They came out and did some initial training with us and then we asked them to come back four weeks later. Upon their return, because of the training we received, we were able to tackle a lot of the automated processes and they helped us with the more complex schedules.

The deployment itself took a couple of hours.

The implementation strategy for us was to tackle the nightly process first, and the second item was to tackle all FTPs. The third was to tackle the complex scripting for all other SQL or AIX. The last step was to do Self Service.

We reached our return on investment from the first year that we purchased the initial product, simply because of the number of man-hours saved. We were paying $200,000 in personnel costs to sustain our operations environment. We removed that from our budget as far as salary is concerned, from the operations area, because we didn't need as many personnel to run operations on once we implemented the product. We ended up adding new roles to take on new initiatives and we were able to expand our IT area into other things.

Our annual maintenance costs are $45,000. The initial cost is separate.

Initially, we purchased just the standard OpCon solution. We upgraded to the OpCon elite solution, the enterprise edition. That did include some Self Service licensing. But if we want to expand to more Self Service licenses, we will have to purchase them. We may look at that in the near future.

I don't recall which other options we looked at. We did attend an educational conference where this product was offered and we decided to explore its capabilities. Because we had a job scheduler in place prior to purchasing OpCon, we didn't weigh it against many other products. We looked at some of the features that it had and the robustness of the product and we liked the presentation that we were given, as well as the possibility for expansion. That's why we took it on as a job scheduler.

Step back and look at your enterprise and purchase enough licensing to cover all of your servers. When we first went into the product, we only purchased the minimal, standard licensing. It was just the 10 licenses. Fewer than six months after the purchase of the product, we had already used up all the licensing that we had purchased. If we had really taken a look at our overall infrastructure and seen the number of servers that we had, and taken into account the utilization of this product — because it's so robust it can be used for many things — we could have made a better decision on the purchase and gotten an enterprise version of it instead of just the standard.

I have about 15 users of the product. Three of them are operators, about five of them are in the development realm, and the rest are batch users who initiate schedules using the Self Service feature. For deployment and maintenance of OpCon we require two people. They do monthly security patching, which is normal maintenance, as well as yearly upgrades.

The biggest lesson I've learned in using OpCon is that you get your money's worth. The robustness, scalability, and expandability of the product are things that every company should invest in. OpCon is a very good product.

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.

We use it as an automation tool to send and receive files and process batch jobs on our core banking system. It can also archive files for us. We use OpCon to automate anything that we can automate.

If I did not have OpCon, I would have to hire full-time employee to do all of the work that OpCon does. We probably save about $40,000 to $50,000 a year by being able to schedule everything. Plus it's reliable. If an employee doesn't show up for work, someone else has to fill in, and things might be late. OpCon works. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I check is my text messages. I see a text message from OpCon that End-of-Day was successful the previous evening. That way I know people can come to work and everything is on schedule.

Another benefit is that, in the past, employees would have to call the IT department to run certain batch jobs in our core banking system. We don't want to give the privilege of running a batch job to an accounting clerk because they could accidentally run a batch job that they shouldn't and cause serious problems. We were able, with an additional piece that we purchased from OpCon called Self Service — a web-based platform — to create a button for the accounting department to click. 

As an example, we have to process ACH and when an ACH file comes in, the accounting department needs to look at it for certain exceptions. And then our support services department needs to look at it for certain exceptions. When each person is done with their job, they go to their Self Service page and push a button. When OpCon sees that two buttons have been pushed, it knows it can continue with the job. So the employees don't need to call IT. We've programmed OpCon to take over the job when it knows the employees have done their jobs.

We have about 40 schedules on an average day and, within some of those schedules, multiple jobs are done. When we moved to our new core banking system, we had to do everything manually. Once we put OpCon in place, it took over doing close to all of that; about 99 percent.

We continue to look for things that OpCon can do. There might be a scenario where an accounting clerk has to download a file and open it up and put files in certain places. When we find something like that, we see if we can work through the process and let OpCon do it for them, or do part of the job for them. I know there are still things out there that can be automated.

OpCon has definitely freed up some employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. During our first month on our core banking system, because I was responsible for that system, I or my systems administrator pretty much spent all day manually downloading files, running batch jobs, uploading files, processing things, and moving them to archives. That was good because it was a new system. Neither of us had done those kinds of tasks. So we now understand what's involved. When it came time to program OpCon, we knew exactly what we wanted done. It was very nice to move those jobs to OpCon, one-by-one, and free up our time to go back to our regular work.

We're a small organization, there are only 35 of us. OpCon freed up three people in IT and probably the equivalent of another FTE. Someone else had to deal with getting files from the Federal Reserve and sending files and they don't have to do that anymore. OpCon does it. We're now free to work on other projects or other problems. The things that OpCon does, they're routine; it's the same thing day in and out. Go to this credit card processor and get a file, bring it over here, upload it here, run a batch job, and send out an email. It gets very boring doing that every day. There's more interesting work we can do.

We also have some jobs that take a lot of network bandwidth and we use OpCon to schedule them to run at two in the morning and they're done by four. That way, people aren't affected during the day, so we've made better use of our bandwidth.

Finally, we're in Oregon, so about once a year we might have snow to the point that they shut the city down. My SA or I can remote into the credit union and check on OpCon and make sure that all the jobs are running. We have a couple of managers who can remote in and do their pieces and push the OpCon buttons to tell OpCon to finish up the job. In the past, we had to have at least two people come into the organization to process ACH or payrolls, etc. Now, we have the ability to work remotely if necessary.

The most valuable feature is being able to schedule tasks so that they reliably occur each day, each week, each month, or sometimes several times a day. We are a financial institution so we need to have our core banking system up to date. We also want to make sure that the work gets done. For example, we use it for ACH deposits and payments. So if you are depending on your paycheck to be there on a certain day of the month, OpCon makes sure it's done. The scheduler works as it should.

It is a complex product to use. Programming the schedules is complex. It does require training from OpCon. As an example, I went away for a week of training. The week after I came back from that, OpCon was onsite to set up our initial schedules. At that point, my systems administrator really took over. I should have sent him to the class, but it was good for me to learn the basics. A year later, my SA ended up going to an advanced class.

I haven't been on their website in a while, but I would like to see some online training, some videos. When I bring in a new employee — as an example, my helpdesk person is going to be moving into some network tasks, and she'll be working within OpCon down the road — it would be nice if there was some basic information for her to look at to understand this program. Even for my systems administrator, it would be helpful if there were tips and tricks available. We're always looking for more learning and more education on how we make the most out of this product. Whether it's online videos or periodic webinars that are accessible online at a later time if necessary, that would be great.

The only thing that OpCon cannot do is the following. OpCon runs a batch job on our core system that creates a file. That file needs to go to a third-party vendor. The only way to get it to that vendor is through their website which has a secure login. OpCon cannot log into a website. It only uses secure FTP. So every Wednesday morning, one of my employees has to take that file and manually log in to the website and upload it. We're waiting for that third-party company to come up with an SFTP solution. Once they do that, then things will be completely automated. I don't know how complex it would be for OpCon to log into a website, but pretty much everyone uses SFTP for file transfers these days.

We have been using OpCon for a little over three years.

It's a very stable product.

The only time we have to be careful of is if we have an extended power outage. We've learned that we have to bring our SQL database server up before we bring OpCon online. That's true for several other systems that we run. But otherwise, OpCon tends to work as expected.

I'm sure there's a lot of scalability, but as a small organization, we're using it as much as we can. We've not experienced any problems. 

Our company has about $130 million in assets. I know credit unions that are billion-dollar companies and they use OpCon. So I have no concerns, as we grow, that it will continue to meet our needs.

The support is good. When we run into issues, we can rely on SMA to walk us through how to correct any problems or do something in a more efficient way.

We did not have a previous solution. One of my requirements, when we decided to go with our new core banking system, was that I did not want to spend my time doing these routine jobs and tasks every day. So I went out to my colleagues at other credit unions and asked them how they were managing these things. Everyone said, "You must have OpCon." I researched a little on OpCon. Our core banking platform, Corelation Keystone, put me in touch with the OpCon salesperson. They did a demo for me and I was immediately sold.

Because we had an expert here from SMA, it was somewhat straightforward. He knew what he was doing and we had confidence in him. We didn't have any problems that I recall.

We started automating our first process on the second day of the deployment. We created some schedules and jobs that ran so that we could make sure that they worked.

An example is End-of-Day. That is a program that's done on the core banking system at the end of the day and it closes out a lot of information for accounting purposes and so forth, and then sets the date to the next day. For example, certain accounts might need dividends applied to them or loan interest charged on loans. Late notices and certificate notices need to be prepared. If it's the end of the month, there may be a statement file that goes to another vendor. We need to make sure that End-of-Day is successful. We could see the next day that yes, it was. We immediately kicked in and started getting things done.

After the OpCon person left, my systems administrator started to create new job schedules for some of the other processes that we did. One-by-one, we started moving our manual processes over to Keystone until they were all done.

OpCon assisted us in our initial setup. They were here for three for four days. That's how long it took us to deploy the solution.

OpCon is expensive for us as a small organization, but on the other hand, it's a lot less expensive than hiring another full-time employee.

We pay for licensing annually, including the Self Service module, a connector license to our Corelation Keystone banking platform, and for a license for each server that it's on. A lot of these are rolled up into one, but the initial implementation was a chunk of money. Now, we just pay annual maintenance.

I did not look into other products. The recommendation for OpCon came from most of my colleagues in my industry working at other credit unions. I did not find another solution. Everyone used OpCon, and everyone really liked it and highly recommended it. So it was an easy decision. 

And SMA has a good working relationship with Corelation. They worked with Corelation to write unique jobs that run in OpCon for credit unions. That was also a very good selling point.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that you really need an individual like my systems administrator who understands how a program like this works. Creating these schedules and working with the language that's required to get things done is very specialized. You have to have someone like that. Could I do it? I could, but it would take me 10 times the amount of time that it takes Sean. You do need someone on staff who understands systems, system deployment, systems operations. That's how you're able to make the most of it. The programming side of it is very basic. It's not that complex. But you have to understand how to tell it what you want to do.

Our primary user is our systems administrator; he programs everything in OpCon. I can access it when he goes on vacation and make sure that all of the jobs are working fine. At times there might be a job that failed. For example, a person is supposed to prepare a file from a third-party vendor but if they don't rename it appropriately, OpCon doesn't know what to do with it. Another example is that one of our third-party vendors will send us a file that is incorrectly prepared. OpCon won't process it. It will catch the problem and then we have to reach out to the vendor and ask for a new file. OpCon allows me to catch any mistakes that a human being makes.

We have two people using OpCon. Sean programs it and has overall responsibility for it, including deployment and maintenance. I fill in when he's not here. Luckily there aren't too many issues. I'm going to get my third IT employee involved with it more next year, to do what I do. And 10 or 12 other employees each have access to their department's site in the Self Service program. So if they're responsible for looking at the bounced-check file or ACH exceptions or paper payroll that we receive from small companies, they can do their work and push their button and that allows OpCon to finish the job.

We've been very happy with it. We're always looking for ways to use it more. We ask, "Could OpCon do that?"

I am always careful about giving someone a 10, because there's always room for improvement. But I hate to give OpCon a nine. I give them a 10.

We're using it to automate our nightly processing work, such as transfers and the actual integrations into our core banking system. We do a lot of file transfers and complicated job processing. We have a lot of processes that have two jobs that have to run before other jobs can run, and based on the output of one job it may need to do one thing or another. OpCon allows us to build complicated workflows that handle all of that.

It performs flawlessly. We were able to go live the first night with zero problems.

We're able to complete our nightly processing about 10 percent faster. We've also been able to eliminate manual touches on our systems and we're down to five actual touches to make nightly processing go. The ideal is for us to become a "lights-out" organization at nighttime. We're really close to that. Before OpCon, there was a team of five that was doing nightly processing, almost through the night. It's always difficult when you're changing people's processes and you're changing their work, but they've been able to handle the differences in their jobs. Overall, the reception has been positive.

We've automated hundreds of processes since deploying OpCon. We're up to 78 percent automation of nightly processing. Being able to automate the nightly processing is super-useful. It has been streamlined through the process of automation, which is great. The nightly processing is easier.

For daily processing, we haven't seen results yet when it comes to freeing up employees to do more meaningful work, but eventually we will. It's just a matter of getting through the process. Once we get this down we'll be able to free up more people to do more work in different places.

OpCon has also reduced daily processing times; not as much as I would have expected, but that's because we haven't really optimized anything.

The core system is the most valuable part: being able to view the processes that we've never really been able to view as a whole before. That is super-helpful, as is being alerted when issues arise.

For example, we've had problems with a vendor that has not been providing files in a timely fashion. OpCon actually alerts our teams that this file has not arrived yet and that allows us to get on the phone with the vendor, make sure we get the file, and get all of that working so that we have accurate records to start with the next morning.

We use SMA as a managed-service provider to actually build automated processes. It makes it easy for us to build work orders for them to execute. That is useful.

The process of getting automations done and the process of testing them is a little complicated. Anything with daily processing and nightly processing, which is something that's very critical for our organization, is always going to be tough. The testing of it can be really difficult.

The navigation could use some work to be able to get to the flow charts. Coming from the high level, all I want to see are the flow charts and where we are at with the workflow. Whenever I go in there, I have to remember how to do it again. It's not intuitive, at least for me.

Also, we could not use the FTP agent it has. Their protocol and that piece has been difficult to work with. It has definitely been a little bit weird. They did figure out a way to get to ServiceNow, but having some plug-and-play integrations to different ticketing systems would be good. They've been responsive. They did put together that ServiceNow integration, but they had to build it.

We started the OpCon project in January and it went live about five months ago in June.

OpCon has been incredibly stable. We haven't had any issues with the core OpCon system. It has not died.

We haven't dealt with scalability yet, but I think it would scale relatively well, beyond what we have.

We're continuing our automation process. Any sort of data processing will go through this system. Once we're done with that, then we get to look at anything else that could work with it. That's our plan.

Tech support is amazingly responsive. We've had multiple times where they've responded within 20 minutes when we've had an issue with a workflow at night. I've been happy with that.

I've used many automation tools in my career and the time to implement OpCon, compared to some of those other tools, is about the same. This is a specialized job-automation tool, instead of a generic automation tool. The way it works is a little bit more job-like than some of the other automation tools. That's really the difference between OpCon and a full-blown orchestrator-type of tool, like Automation Anywhere. It's important to keep those separate and use OpCon for what it's good for and other tools when you need things to be a little bit more diverse.

Other job-automation tools are not specific to credit unions and financials. There are some hooks that OpCon has that other tools don't, which is why credit unions go to them.

Tidal Workload Automation sits in between OpCon and full orchestrator tools. It's not as fully functional as some of those big automation toolsets, but it does some things very well.

The total cost of ownership of OpCon is quite comparable to other automation tools I've used. For a financial institution, in particular, OpCon makes a lot of sense. We're replacing another tool, Automic, that would have been comparable. There are certain things you can't do in Automic, or it's costly to do.

The initial setup is complex. The first pieces of it, while they weren't really easy, went off well. When we got into the FTP processing, it got a little bit more bumpy. The deployment, overall, was an iterative process. We started in January and went live with the first step in June.

It was pretty easy to put our first processes together. It was just a matter of making sure they were fully tested and that we had the right test environment to make it work.

We have about five people who are working on it right now, since our deployment is ongoing.

I would like to have seen a little bit more of a plan at the beginning. SMA should have been guiding us through the process of automating these things in the most efficient way possible.

It's going to reduce the time that data processing takes, certainly. We're also going to see a quality improvement, meaning fewer human errors. I expect we'll see a meaningful difference in another year or so.

It's not cheap. It's a licensing system. It costs money to put it in and it's a subscription-based system. The managed service costs money on top.

We looked into a tool called Jantz, which is a competitor. They're great as well. But this made the most sense financially, considering our size.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using it is plan really well. Line up your resources and don't be afraid to do a big cut-over to it. It's a stable system. But definitely be cognizant of the fact that there are agents involved, and whenever you have agents involved you need to make sure that the agents continue to be stable.

Consider how well you understand the processes that you're looking to automate. This is going to work the best if you have more traditional types of automations that you need to do, like batches. Make sure that you've already detailed what those processes do, because the more detail you have, the quicker you can actually get to automating the work. And make sure you have complete buy-in by everybody in the organization.

When people are working with the SMA product teams it's really important for both sides to be really clear on what the testing scenarios are like. You need to make sure you're really good at writing your work orders in an accurate fashion and recognize that, as a credit union, or any sort of enterprise, you've got things that you need to do as well to make it work. Any time you deal with agents that are sitting on multiple systems it's going to be problematic because you're always going to have agents that fall apart or something happens to them. Keeping on top of that type of thing is important in order to be successful.

It's not easy to do. I've never seen these types of things be easy. You need to put a lot of effort into it. It requires working a lot with the teams who have some of these processes, who need these types of files, to make sure that everything you automate works and that the output works for them. It definitely isn't simple to implement.

In our organization, there are about 200 people who specifically work with these types of things.

I would rate OpCon at seven out of 10. It's taken a little bit longer than we thought to get it done, but the team on their side has been great.

We use OpCon for scheduling batch jobs on the Unisys mainframe. It controls all of the batch work. Therefore, if we want to rerun a job or add a new job in, It is used for controlling this Unisys batch work.

It allows batch work to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

If we are talking about a one-off job, it takes roughly five minutes to set that up, which is very quick.

Results are pretty much instantaneous. It depends what frequency you put on the job. It could be a job that will not run for another couple of hours. But, if you set up a job and want it to run straightaway, it will do it straightaway.

OpCon has streamlined operations. 

Going back 20 odd years ago, everything used to be controlled manually before. Now, it's just a flow of jobs. You kick one off, then there are just dependencies, one after the other. These jobs just follow those dependencies and do it all automatically, instead of somebody having to sit there and do it manually.

From when it was first deployed, the solution freed up around 100 or so employees to do more meaningful work as a result of the automation.

It reduced data processing times when it was first deployed. Back then, it probably saved a good six or seven hours on a daily basis. The amount time has shrunk since then, but that is not due to OpCon. It is more due to reduced processing times on the Unisys mainframe.

It is very simple and easy to use, but that might be because I've been using it for a long time.

The things that we use most often are:

• NIST view
• Job Master
• The quick search option.

The way to view a schedule is called perch view, and that's not always the greatest. It can be quite slow.

Any issues we did have with earlier releases have since been addressed in later releases.

We are looking at something called Solution Manager which comes with it, because we don't use that currently. This shows more performance and is an easier way to access them. You can also set trends and do more analyzing.

I have been using it for 12 to 13 years.

The company has probably had it for about 20 years.

The stability is very good. We don't ever seem to have any issues or major problems with OpCon. It's always been quite good.

We have currently been looking to upgrade to version 19. So, we are testing that.

The scalability is quite good. The amount that we have on it doesn't ever cause any issues. I am not too sure how much more it could cope with, but I imagine it's a lot more.

We have approximately 50 scheduled jobs running various different processes. It varies between 20 and 100. Because it's a big organization, these automated process are not a massive part of the organization: Approximately 15 to 20 percent. I don't see this figure going up since a lot of stuff tends to be moving into cloud-based stuff.

Our use of OpCon needs improvement because I don't think we use it to its full capabilities.

There is a team of us who do the maintenance. There are mainly three people on the team with another hundred other people using it for view only purposes, such as viewing data results and what times certain jobs finish. They don't have access to make any amendments.

The technical support is very good. I think we have a designated person who we contact if we ever have any sort of issues, etc. Their response time is fairly quick (within 24 hours).

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. They give you some good user guides and information on how to do it.

If we are upgrading, it probably takes about two to three hours. We start the automation process within this two to three hour time slot. It is pretty quick.

When deploying a new version, we have to do a lot of testing. We have DR boxes which we do our testing on first. That's what we're currently doing it at the moment. Then, we have to run it through our change management to make sure all of the various other areas in the department are happy.

SMA is pretty helpful, if we do ever have any questions. They are pretty quick to respond.

For upgrades, three or four are required. There are three of us on our side involved in upgrading it. Then, there is one person from SMA to help, if need be.

Compared to other solutions that we have in the organization, OpCon is a lot quicker to deploy. For example, Control-M takes almost double the time to deploy.

We use OpCon for Unisys and Control M for more server-based jobs.

it's definitely an application worth considering and looking into. It is a pretty good tool. I don't really have too many issues with it.

My biggest lesson since using it has been to learn how to upgrade it. This is part of the process, as I've gone from the scheduling side of it, where no one else scheduled jobs to the next step of learning how to upgrade it.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10). The product is always available and easy to use. I like the overall general feel and view of it.