We own the solution ourselves on-prem, but our core system is cloud-hosted.
It runs all types of jobs to make changes to our database. From our end, we primarily use it to pull and push information to our cloud-hosted system: moving files around, making changes to files, and those types of things.
People use the tool in every job role that we have. Our organization is a financial institution, so we have people in lending, people in member services, people in operations, risk, and marketing.
Previously, we would receive a file from a vendor, then we would have to go through and make changes to individual accounts in our core system. There are probably between 10 to 20 accounts any given week. It probably took around five minutes for it to run through the report and make all the changes, and that was if there was nothing complicated with all very straightforward changes. Now, that is done in 30 seconds.
We receive a report once a month of bad email addresses. Someone would have to go through and search each one of those individually, and there was a time when there was 300 email addresses on that list as we were working through putting in tens of thousands of email addresses in our system. As we're working through those on marketing campaigns and getting bounce backs, we've been gradually removing them. That used to take an extremely long time for someone from marketing to go through, search each individual email address, and remove them from all instances and places where it resided in our system, where there could be 10 to 20 on any given account. Since implementing that process, it takes five minutes. Now, it does it all automatically. It looks at every possible location and removes it in all areas. We've been able to clear out that list and completely remove it from the vendor system, so we aren't getting charged for the bounce back.
This solution has freed up our employees to do more meaningful work. Some portion of everyone's job has been automated, and that's probably by two to three hours a week. So, that is 120 employees times two to three hours a week.
The change has all been positive. Employees don't have to do the simple busy work anymore. They are able to spend more time doing the stuff that impacts our members in a positive way.
IT is probably the biggest area of our organization that has seen incredible improvement, since we were the ones doing a lot of the batch jobs and running a lot of the group jobs that would impact multiple accounts. However, every department has had reports automated.
The most valuable feature and reason that we bought the solution is because of the RSJ connector, which we use to make changes to our database.
After attending the pretraining as well as the advanced training that they offer, I would say that the product is very easy to use. What can get complicated is if you're doing anything more than just the built-in jobs. If you're using the more advanced features, troubleshooting becomes extremely complicated.
We converted in 2016, so we have been using it for about three years.
We have had it go down one time, which was not related to the system itself. The server went down, which was an issue on our end. That is not OpCon's fault. Now, the only issue with this, which is OpCon related, was that it didn't send any errors except for one alert, one time. Then, because the server was down, it was unable to send us anything ongoing.
If there was some way that we could set up monitoring on a separate server that would look for specifically OpCon related tasks, then that would be more helpful. But, as for the stability of the system, we have never had it go down that was its own fault.
We have automated hundreds of processes, if not thousands, since deploying this solution. We have 120 employees who are impacted by its use. They use the reports that it runs on a daily basis.
In the terms of people administering it, I am the primary person responsible for setting up new jobs, making sure it's running, doing updates, etc. We also have five other people who may login to do basic troubleshooting on it. I am a systems developer, so I handle the development of OpCon as well as a couple of other systems. As for the other people who can login, we have four people on help desk along with our director of security.
We have not had to scale OpCon beyond the initial setup. We have the controlling server and two others that it is connected to setup. We previously had three, but we moved that third to a cloud-hosted solution. It doesn't matter how many people we have or how big our core system is, we don't need to scale it for that.
We had some previously automated processes. In the sense, they had to be scheduled manually, but once scheduled, they would run through a list of things. So, that part was already partially automated. At this point, we probably still have 20 percent of our manual processes that cannot be automated because they require someone to go in and physically look at the information. We have maybe five to 10 percent left that can be automated or can be partially automated that haven't yet been.
If we wanted to move it to more servers, e.g. have multiple data centers, then I think it would scale excellently. However, we haven't had to deal with that yet.
The technical support is always excellent. Having a network which can help you troubleshoot and build the best possible system is probably the most valuable thing that I have learned:
We used Windows Scheduler before to automate some general file movements and stuff, but we couldn't do anything within our core system with it.
We switched our core system. Originally, we were using a system provided by Pfizer. We switched to a system provided by Jack Henry & Associates, and they were not compatible with Windows Scheduler. So, we were doing everything manually for a while, until we adopted OpCon. This solution overcomes limitations from our previous automation tool.
The initial setup was straightforward. We set up the original server as well as the ones that we would need it connected to. The basic system has been in place since the initial setup.
We had folks onsite for two weeks, but we have been continuing to automate more new, existing processes over the last three years. So, we had the bulk of our official setup done within three months.
After deploying the solution, it took us 10 minutes to automate our first process. After we got it setup, creating a job is very simple.
In general, getting up and running is extremely easy. Once you get the basics installed, creating and running jobs is very easy. However, when you get into the more complicated, advanced features, then it becomes much more complicated.
We had someone from the SMA team come onsite to help us set up the server. We installed and connected it to the appropriate additional environments. Once we did that, it was completely straightforward. It did help that we had someone come onsite to help us set up some of our more complicated jobs while we were still very new with the system.
Our experience with the SMA team was excellent.
We have seen ROI. We are becoming an automation forward organization instead of just a financial institution that does everything manually. We have been able to move so much reporting from paper. We are digital because of OpCon.
We don't have people manually doing processing anymore. The fact that I can do five minutes to three hours of work in 30 seconds is a significant improvement.
OpCon was the only one that did exactly what we wanted. We needed something that integrated with Jack Henry's Symitar Episys solution. We wanted something that would be easy to set up and maintain, which offered a lot of training.
The biggest difference between OpCon and Windows Scheduler is that Windows Scheduler does not work with our core system. It didn't really work with the old one or the new one. Originally, we were only using it to move files around, so we could have continued to use it in that sense. But, when moving to a new system, we wanted to have something that would interact directly with that system.
OpCon offers a lot more complicated criteria when scheduling the types of jobs that you can run. OpCon is a complete automation solution, where Windows Scheduler is just a scheduler.
Pick the right team and send them to training. So, pick people who are going to invest in and use the system on a daily basis. They should also be curious and creative. Then, send all of them to training, both the free and advanced training. They also offer a certification now, which is also extremely useful.
I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.
