OpCon Reviews

OpCon is used as our primary scheduler for our Epysis core and related systems. We make use of user-initiated jobs from the web-based dashboard in addition to the core features of OpCon. A number of agents are installed on systems allowing OpCon control of tasks on those systems such as Powershell and SQL.

Automating file downloads is another area that is useful. Additional support for FTP clients outside WSFTP Pro would be a great boon to the software. There are a few others I wouldn't mind being able to test out.

OpCon has assisted in automating many tasks. Any number of task schedulers could also have performed the same function likely for a lower cost. This was the bundled scheduler with the system.

As users don't have access to the back end of OpCon (obviously) all issues that are automated become an IT problem. Plan to train your IT staff in all areas that will be automated.

The user-side web interface is nice, yet it l lacks read-only capabilities that are on the road map. Users will want to know the progress of their job but unless you're willing to give them admin control, they won't see it.

It schedules tasks.

The user-side web interface generally works but fails for more complicated tasks. Self-service buttons that are paid for to be created by OpCon support are not tested and left in a non-functional state. After four different SMA reps "fixed" it only to find when it was used that it still didn't work we simply gave up on some of the functionality.

Expect a lot of "the documentation says this will work" only to find it doesn't.

Failover is another feature that would be exceptionally useful if it worked. The database was corrupted and support has been unable to resolve it.

Licensing would be the first part I would overhaul. Each time a new licensing paradigm comes out, more features are removed and costs are added. They "add" features that are rarely used and increase charges for the number of jobs run. I'm sure someone in finance got a raise for their brilliance but the end-users won't thank them one bit. Expect price hikes and threats when you hold them to account at every opportunity.

Support could also use additional training. It is a bit of a crapshoot if support will be able to help or not. Seems they've been told to push their automation as a service which reduces the value of paying for support significantly.

We have been using OpCon since 2019.

OpCon is relatively stable once running. We will give it credit there where it is due. 

It seems like it would scale well. We are using an on-prem deployment with a failover.

Tech support was excellent. It has since degraded in quality noticeably as the best techs were moved to automation as a service. 

I am unaware of the previous system used for our other core. It was prior to my tenure here.

Licensing was initially far better for small to mid-size operations. SMA has a need for additional funds so licensing went through a rather large hike. The setup cost was high but relatively fair if all the things in the setup worked. However, they didn't.

We purchased a package that included OpCon, unfortunately. We are now looking at other options and would advise others to do the same.

Carefully consider all available options before settling on OpCon. Account managers were non-existent until new ones were hired that specialized in high-pressure sales. The best automation specialists were moved from support over to automation as a service, so expect lower quality support going forward unless you're shelling out for someone else to write the automation.

We are a mid-level financial institution. We specifically used OpCon to help schedule important tasks that could not be trusted to human error. We picked it up as a tool to make lives easier for all of our different departments. We began working with MAS a few months ago as our scheduled jobs became too much for a few people to handle while we were experiencing high turnover. We became bogged down with users who did not understand the system and did not have time to train them. MAS stepped in and made this transition a lot easier for us. 

OpCon has made our lives easier by taking out the guesswork and removing tedious activities from employee's workdays when their time is better spent elsewhere. OpCon also helps because it is easy to "read the job" to know what the job does, why, and how to do it manually if needed. 

Through the use of self-service buttons, we have been able to give the option to run jobs whenever the user needs without having to manually do an entire process. Many of our end users use this without any complaint. It is simple and easy to use. 

MAS is by far the best feature, although not a feature of the software specifically. MAS has more knowledge than our employees, so we have been able to develop schedules that are far beyond our own skillset. 

They have also helped with maintenance so we can be assured if something goes wrong, MAS is there to fix it. Our on-call schedules are easier and we get full nights of sleep. Our team morale has greatly increased since we began working with MAS. Another great feature is the exit codes which help us understand why things are failing so the jobs are easier to fix. 

The only downside to OpCon is that its features can be complicated and really must be taught. Most of our users don't have training beyond the free Basic Training that SMA provides, so for fresh eyes, it is kind of difficult to understand some of the language used. 

Another thing that is difficult to understand is that not all failures explain why they are failing. Some give generic exit codes. 

Otherwise, I have no complaints. Working with the MAS team has really simplified everything for us. They're easy to reach, knowledgeable, and quick.

Personally, I have been using the solution for two years, but our organization has been using it for five or more years.

The software has many features that are even beyond my knowledge, having worked with it for two years. Working with the MAS team, I have learned even more. 

You will often find that you speak to the same people over and over again so you develop a rapport. Everyone is always helpful and very nice.

We did not use a different solution. We were doing all of this manually. 

The initial setup can be complex, however, transitioning with the MAS team was very easy and straightforward. 

We used a vendor team. Our engineers developed a close relationship with them. 

It is not the cheapest solution on the market, but it is relatively easy to use. I absolutely recommend splurging to hire the MAS service to make the transition easier. They can help teach your users how to use the program and they are able to quickly build jobs so you see an immediate impact. 

I am not entirely sure if there was an evaluation as this was before my time, however, knowing management, I assume that they had many demos with other vendors as well but eventually chose SMA.

We currently use Opcon for our daily job scheduling. We also use it to transfer files after jobs have been processed. Being able to let Opcon run these jobs and file transfers have saved us time daily.

It has saved our morning and evening shift time by processing tedious jobs so they're able to get more involved in other tasks. Soon we'll be able to roll it out to other departments and handle some of their tasks.  

The workflow designer is a wonderful feature to show to users. It seems so simple - and yet there's a lot going on which can be easily explained. Having the jobs laid out while attaching dependencies is a nice addition to the program. 

The service that they offer is amazing. Ryan Compton has helped me more times than I can count. He does a great job of explaining things and it has gone a long way.

The logs are a little daunting to look at the first few times, however, as you begin to understand what you're looking at, it becomes easier. 

We've been using Opcon Since February 2021.

We switched to a different core and Opcon was definitely a better replacement for the solution that we were using. 

For anyone interested in Opcon, make sure you have a few users in your company attend the training classes.

Our primary use would be for the enterprise data that we are utilizing, receiving files, and inputting jobs in and out of our core.

We have been using it quite extensively for important things: any ACH processing, remote deposit processing, file transfer protocol, and for any files that we need to send back and forth everyday.

My roles include anything with our core, things relegated to OpCon, and any ATM processing. These three things are my primary function.

It is so simplistic that it gives us peace of mind. Before, we had all these processes that were run manually, such as different file transfers and jobs running for our core at certain times. Now, all that stuff is done automatically.

We watch and make sure it's doing its job, which is mostly good. Basically, we go in and check multiple times a day to make sure jobs are still up and running, even though we get contacted as well. 

One of the manual processes that we moved to being automated is uploading jobs to our statement vendor. Previously, we would have to upload all of our statements manually and get the files physically, then transfer protocol them over to our statements vendor. When we built that into OpCon, we were able to build the job to run it at 7:00 in the evening on the days that statement needed to be uploaded. It will go into run the appropriate core job to pull the core member data that it needs, then pull it out and store it on one of our network drives. At which point, it will get moved, zipped up, and then moved through our OpCon FTP servers.

Our employees are freed up to do more things automation-wise. It also gives us the ability to look at taking on new tasks that we typically didn't think of because we just didn't have the time.

The most valuable feature would be the contact feature. You have this awesome automation tool, but then it also has the ability to contact and page you in the event something goes wrong. This is nice. It gives you the warm fuzzy feeling in IT, if you're not receiving calls, that everything is going well.

I would like more web-based training from SMA. That would be nice. Our primary OpCon representative is phenomenal, but we would like some training opportunities for learning on our own. When I started utilizing OpCon, the sheer breadth of it made for a very daunting task. I was almost fearful to start, not to mention fearful to go change things and possibly hinder a job. 

We've been using OpCon for probably six years. I've been in this department for two years now.

It is very stable. They have a great foundation. 

However, to increase stability, they will need to create more online learning. So, somebody who lives in San Antonio (in my case) doesn't have to drive to Houston.

OpCon takes six individuals to operate and maintain it.

The sky's the limit.

We have six users who are developers in our organization.

We have automated probably hundreds of processes. As a ballpark figure, I would probably say about 60 to 65 percent of our manual processes have been automated.

They have good tech support when you call in. Typically, you can get the answer that you were looking for relatively quickly. 

You do run into people who are new there from time to time, but they still have a good core foundation. As far as their tech support, you can tell that they are good with teamwork because I've had calls where maybe somebody didn't understand what it was that I was referencing. However, they were able to reach out to somebody more senior and we got the answers that we needed.

I'm not sure if anything was used before.

The setup looks complex, but it becomes simplistic relatively quickly. E.g., looking at a job to edit and change things, you have different setups. One of them might be running a core/FTP job, where you have essentially have three to four different selections within those or you can choose command line. 

The implementation was internal.

The solution has very much freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. It is really matter of having boots on the ground to keep working to automate more than that roughly 60 percent. 

Our department is relatively small. I would probably say five employee have been freed up.

The solution has reduced data processing times.

We have some plans in the works as far as how we want to utilize this in the future. It really all boils down to just not having to do processes manually, instead making them automated. The only function we utilize it for in this case is to free up more manpower.

I would recommend doing this solution. In the beginning, it appears to be daunting, but it makes a lot of sense once you started utilizing the tool. 

After training, I learned through a sort of trial by fire. However, it didn't take long to pick up. With the scripting portion, everything was simplistic to learn. If I was going to rate ease of use from one being the hardest to 10 being easiest, I would probably rate it a nine.

There are tools like this out there. You don't realize what automation looks like prior to seeing it from the back-end. It's pretty cool. I often call it, "The middleman between two points," because it connects the bridge.

I would rate the product overall as a 10 (out of 10).

They are here to stay as a vendor.

We use OpCon as our central scheduling system. It runs a bunch of automations for our core system as well as for any automated system that needs to be scheduled.

OpCon has eliminated man-hours spent doing repetitive things, and it's also made our execution much more reliable. To do what we are doing currently, it would take at least four or five people, full-time. Clearly, we've cut a bunch of FTEs out of the equation, so that has been a big deal. They have been reassigned to other things. Everybody loves it because they're able to now work on higher-value things.

It also allows us to see metrics of how long our automations take, and control or manage to that to those durations, so we're able to reorganize and rearrange things at a rapid pace to get them completed faster.

We have automated thousands of processes using OpCon. I believe we've automated 100 percent of our processing. I can't think of anything we're doing manually.

In addition, OpCon has reduced our data processing times by, as an estimate, 25 to 30 percent.

The most valuable features are 

• the ability to chain jobs together 
• the integration into Symitar. At the end of the day, that's what makes the big deal for us.

The ability to chain jobs together allows us to create complex interdependencies between our jobs, and the integration into our core system is important because it allows us, through an automated system, to do a huge number of things that used to be done manually.

It is as easy to use as it should be. There is a learning curve, but that's because it's a powerful system.

I'd like to see the product include a view where you can see everything about a specific job on a single screen.

We've been using OpCon for more than 10 years.

The stability of OpCon as a solution is excellent. We never have any issues with its stability.

We have had no issues with scalability. 

We have plans to increase our usage of it. It's primarily used in IT and programming, but it is automating jobs that are requested by, and the results are used by, everyone else in the company. We have automated processes for the lending department as well as branching, account services; everyone.

We have five to seven people who use it on a daily basis. They are either OpCon developers or programmers who are testing new deployments. We need less than one person for OpCon system administration.

SMA's technical support for this solution is excellent. They are responsive, they are knowledgeable, and they've always been able to address our questions, which is impressive.

We did not have a previous solution. Our company went with OpCon because it has a very tight integration to our core system.

I was not around for the setup and it's been so long since it was done that I don't think our experience would be indicative for anybody else.

For the most part, upgrades are pretty straightforward. And they've been pretty solid too. We generally do them with the help of SMA consultants.

We have absolutely seen return on investment with OpCon. We've eliminated the FTEs. We have increased the speed at which our automations run, so we're in nightly processing for a shorter period of time. We've been able to run more fraud tests and to run control reports on the nightly run than we would be able to run manually, so that we can identify problem areas or fraud and address them immediately. We use it for all sorts of things.

I believe our cost is about $150,000 annually.

There are add-ons you can buy, which have an additional cost, including products and Professional Services.

We really have not evaluated other options. It is the state of the art for our core system, and we have been happy with it.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that using an automation system like OpCon forces us to really understand the business object of a goal we are trying to accomplish and to be able to articulate it clearly and precisely.

Automating your operational tasks the way that OpCon does is absolutely a better way to do it than any manual system that you may have in place.

We're a credit union, so we use it for daily operations. We have over 1,700 jobs automated. We are still working on it. The list is growing every day. I add two or three whole, automated processes — schedules with projects — every two weeks.

This isn't our first automated system, so it's hard to say how it's improved anything. The best thing is that the communication with our host system is better. It allows us to have more security. It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems. That has been an improvement.

This solution has streamlined operations by giving end-users the ability to run things without having to get permission within the host system. That eliminated the need for other departments to have to send messages to operators in IT to run processes and host. Now we can give them access to run very specific jobs without giving them access to those systems.

It has also freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. There are multiple departments within this organization. We use it throughout the organization so it's huge; it has affected hundreds. The employees, as far as I can tell, are okay with it. They like it. I don't have a lot of contact with end-users after the development is over, so there may be different ideas, but I haven't had any complaints.

All of the features are important. The best thing about it is the communication listing.

There's a learning curve, but it's a fairly easy system to use. It doesn't require a lot of technical skill.

The system needs better communication, better advanced warning, and better stability with SQL database systems. The latter is the only Achilles heel to the software. The SQL database connections are the only time that we've had issues with reliability and stability of the software.

We've been using OpCon for three years.

The stability is really good.

It is vastly scalable. We've grown up to 1,700 jobs and it hasn't had any problems. As we grow, with each development, we're learning more about its capabilities and pushing limits of what we feel is safe, and it has never failed us.

It is used in a lot of ways and it's used every day. It's a critical component of our daily ops, and we are going to continue to expand and include other departments in IT, helping them manage some of their systems.

SMA is great at replying to inquiries. Their support is great.

Before we got OpCon we did have another automated system, AutoMate. We switched due to OpCon's capabilities of communicating with the host system. And OpCon runs faster than the last one. There are some scenarios where it has been more capable and some where it has not been.

In terms of the time to implement OpCon versus our old solution, they're very different. The last system was geared closer to, and was more in tune with, developers than OpCon. It was very capable, as long as you had the skillset. Whereas OpCon is very simple and the GUI is very click-and-point. OpCon is faster at delivering some of the smaller things. But when it comes to more complex things, the last system was better because it was more prepared to handle those systems.

The initial setup wasn't difficult. It was pretty straightforward. The install wizard is easy to follow and there weren't a lot of hidden things to look for. We also had SMA staff on site, so they made it easier.

Our initial install was done in about an hour-and-a-half to two hours.

Because this is part of a conversion project, it's been managed by a PMO, and we follow a scrum-board, sprint-style implementation plan. That's pretty standard though.

Our first process was automated in about 10 minutes after install. The first one we did was one of the easiest things and it was done in a second. It was very fast.

There's a lot to be said about using the embedded script systems and having good error handling. Hopefully, anybody who's doing development with scripts, writing code, is not a novice, because that part is really important.

The biggest thing I've learned using OpCon is convention. With the last solution, it wasn't such a big deal because the UI design was very simple. With OpCon, it handles schedules and jobs differently, so convention is very important with this: Learning to stick to a standard.

When it comes to end-users they are only using the Self Service option to click a button. Their roles vary within the different departments, but it's still the same thing. They log in and click a button. But when it comes to developers, there are only three of us, including me. For maintenance, there are three of us involved. Two of us are primarily developers and one is an operator who will monitor and report.

OpCon is a good eight out of 10. There is room for improvement with every system, of course. As I mentioned, the SQL database is the weakest link. There are some changes that have happened since our initial version that may not have been the best. Those types of things are really hard to improve because it just has to happen. That's an evolution.

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'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.