OpCon Reviews

We initially used it for core job scheduling, but our focus shifted to managing file movements with vendors through FTP as tasks were outsourced. It now functions as a comprehensive server monitoring tool, overseeing file transfers, scheduling jobs based on received files and managing dependencies. OpCon facilitates efficient updating of our internal database with vendor files and plays a vital role in failure notifications, job holds during issues, and alerts via email or text. Currently, we handle around twelve hundred unique jobs, resulting in sixty to seventy thousand job runs monthly.

The primary advantage lies in labor savings and the capability to monitor and respond to task outcomes effectively. OpCon facilitates not only scheduling but also provides continuous communication through email or text notifications. This ensures real-time updates on the status of critical processes, whether they have run successfully, encountered failures, or require attention. 

The notification feature enhances control and allows prompt responses to operational events. 

OpCon has empowered us to handle more intricate schedules that span diverse systems, especially during our transition to a new platform. Some schedules are quite complex, involving sub-schedules within them. For instance, a single job for the data warehouse comprises around two hundred and fifty unique tasks. This flexibility allows us to break down jobs individually, making it easier to address failures at a granular level, simplifies troubleshooting, and facilitates more efficient processing by releasing the next job once an issue is resolved. 

It has freed up our staff's time, enabling them to engage in higher-value projects. While we still encounter occasional failures, their frequency has significantly reduced. Instead of the manual check-off sheet approach, where someone would meticulously oversee processes, we now have the freedom to work on diverse projects. 

We've successfully automated numerous processes that were previously carried out manually. While I can't provide an exact count, the estimate falls within the range of hundreds, potentially around a hundred and fifty to two hundred unique items. 

Quantifying the time saved by OpCon is challenging, but to justify its purchase and ongoing maintenance, I would estimate it frees up the equivalent of at least two full-time positions. 

The cost savings are significant, considering the annual hours and salaries involved. While the platform requires ongoing maintenance and updates, it has effectively replaced the need for two full-time staff members engaged in manual processes. 

Implementing OpCon has significantly reduced errors in executing complex processes. Previously, relying on manual checklists left room for typos, sequencing issues, or overlooked details. OpCon addresses this by allowing a one-time setup and comprehensive review, minimizing possible errors. 

The platform supports various actions, including job submissions, file copies, and native execution of PowerShell scripts, eliminating the need for manual intervention. As a result, failures are now less frequent, with most issues attributed to file-related issues or occasional user errors, rather than OpCon-based job errors. 

We observed benefits right from day one, especially in terms of scheduling automation. Upon going live, the advantages were significant due to the automated calendars and frequencies. 

The most impactful feature was the ability to handle dependencies. In cases where one element failed, others could proceed, minimizing disruptions.

The most valuable feature of OpCon is its scheduling capability, particularly for automating file transfers with vendors. Before OpCon, this process was manual, requiring someone to log in to vendor websites daily for file transfers. With OpCon, this task is automated based on specified frequencies and calendars, reducing the need for constant manual intervention. This scheduling feature has extended to other areas within the credit union, allowing staff members to trigger automated processes by submitting files or using a self-service feature. OpCon is a significant labor-saving tool by automating formerly manual functions and streamlining operations across the organization. It is a centralized control hub, managing operations and consolidating tasks across five instances, including two for production and others for documentation, service, and development. The organization plans to expand this centralization to involve additional IT areas and departments seeking to automate manual tasks. We utilize the self-service feature for specific IT tasks, and we've extended its use to several departments within the credit union. The impact of the self-service feature on our processing and business efficiency has been significant. Rather than manually scheduling or relying on complex processes tied to specific criteria, the self-service button is provided to departments. It offers the capability to support older systems if needed.

The only feature we're anticipating is the ability to access and control OpCon through devices like the iPhone or iPad. Currently, when a failure occurs, we receive an alert, but to take corrective action, the on-call person needs to remotely access the software. Looking ahead, we hope for the capability to initiate tasks remotely. It might be beneficial if OpCon offered a more streamlined version at a lower cost, focusing solely on core functionality. The current software is robust and powerful, but a lite version with essential features could be a cost-effective option for organizations that don't require the full range of functionalities provided by the comprehensive solution.

I have been using OpCon for fifteen years.

The software remains stable, effectively monitors servers, and executes jobs, and I can't recall the last instance of it encountering any significant issues. It's highly stable and reliable for the range of tasks it handles. Considering the volume of processes we run each month, the occurrences of failures or issues requiring attention are typically job-based or related to user errors from other departments. I would rate it ten out of ten.

OpCon is highly scalable, offering a wide range of capabilities. If they adopted a pricing model per module, it could further enhance scalability as numerous functions can be performed with the software. Its complexity is flexible, allowing users to customize it based on their specific needs, making it suitable for both simple and intricate tasks. I would rate it ten out of ten.

The customer service has always been excellent, and we recently added managed services to our contract, allowing OpCon to assist us remotely for up to fifteen hours a month. It consistently excels in customer support, standing out among the various vendors we interact with regularly. Their support team is knowledgeable, responsive, and provides accurate solutions. Even in cases where further assistance is required, the option to pay for additional support is available. I would rate it ten out of ten.

Positive

We conducted a review for purchase several years ago, initially opting for MOVEit as it aligned better with our older core system, which was more tech-focused rather than GUI-based. However, we soon identified a significant limitation with MOVEit—it lacked a dependency component. After six months of in-house use, we recognized the weakness and transitioned to OpCon. Since changing vendors in 2005, we have exclusively used MOVEit and transitioned to OpCon.

The deployment of OpCon has been straightforward, and we initially handled it internally for several years. Their server setup and configuration instructions are clear, contributing to a smooth implementation. Over the past four or five years, we've opted for their paid support for implementations and software updates. At the time of deployment, there were likely two individuals involved in the process.

The pricing is reasonable. Given our plan, which allows us to run two productions and multiple failovers and development boxes, we find it to be a fair investment. While it suits our needs well, I'm aware that smaller credit unions may have found the cost challenging in the past. However, if an organization processes enough jobs and can justify the cost by realizing savings in employee roles, OpCon pays for itself.

I advise others to consider the benefits in terms of failure reduction, dependency management, and labor savings. OpCon's value becomes evident in the streamlining of operations and the automation of tasks. While it can be as straightforward or intricate as needed, having individuals who truly understand it can unlock its full potential and enable credit unions to achieve more with the platform. Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

I use OpCon to automate processes in a financial institution.

OpCon provides a single point of control to orchestrate workflows and file moments which is incredibly important.

With the implementation of OpCon, we require minimal to no staffing on weekends or nights. The automation enabled by OpCon has streamlined our operations, reducing the number of personnel required while simultaneously enhancing our operational capabilities.

OpCon has enabled us to manage more complex schedules. We have seen a mass reduction in error rates and a lot of time savings in the target business units and operations.

I don't have a dedicated staff. Instead, I collaborate closely with a wide range of individuals. OpCon has enabled us to accomplish more with a smaller team by empowering project management teams to direct the processes. Consequently, we prioritize tasks that they deem valuable.

In the rare instances where we utilize the self-service feature, it empowers our end-users to handle their tasks independently without the need to submit tickets or contact the operations team. They can complete their processes at their convenience, allowing for flexibility in their workflow. This flexibility ensures that they are not required to execute tasks at a specific, predetermined time point.

We use OpCon to manage legacy systems alongside modern systems, which has allowed us to maintain functionality and efficiency. While some legacy software can be cumbersome and we are unable to eliminate all of it, OpCon enables us to make the most of these systems. Integrating OpCon with new components has streamlined our operations, creating a cohesive and user-friendly system.

Our company has implemented OpCon for over a decade, and we currently execute more than 2,000 processes daily. Achieving this level of process automation was not a sudden accomplishment; it has been a steady and gradual growth process. Quantifying the precise impact of OpCon is challenging due to its long-term integration into our policies, procedures, and processes. However, we estimate that OpCon has saved us hundreds of hours per week.

OpCon minimizes errors regardless of the task's complexity or whether it's a repetitive task with a predictable outcome. Therefore, complexity is not the primary factor contributing to errors; repetitiveness is.

The time to value with OpCon is immediate because it instantly frees up one person's workload. That's a win right there. No matter how big or small the automated process, it's one less manual task that someone has to do. While we may not see an immediate return on investment at the corporate level that executives crave, the positive impact on employees is immediate and tangible.

I find OpCon's ability to monitor files and folders, and its integration with other software to be the most valuable.

The UI is very dated, click heavy, and has a very unintuitive layering with in some screens. It is often difficult to see all aspects of what is entered on a given screen. 

OpCon's pricing model has become increasingly à la carte, with numerous individual components available for purchase at varying price points. This fragmented approach could be improved by implementing either bundled pricing or a more streamlined pricing structure.

I have been using OpCon for ten years.

I would rate the stability of OpCon ten out of ten.

OpCon is scalable.

Unfortunately, we can no longer reach their technical support by phone. They now only assist through email or their ticketing system. While we miss the convenience of phone support, their email and ticketing system responses are notoriously slow. However, when we do connect with a representative, they are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. It's just that there's no sense of urgency, and we're left waiting for a response indefinitely.

Neutral

We utilized a significant amount of Azure's native functionality. Azure offers a wide range of services, with some having multiple designations. Primarily the Azure automation.

OpCon is far more functional for us because not all of our applications are hosted on Azure. Therefore, OpCon's cross-platform compatibility allows it to connect to our legacy system, while Azure automation is limited to the Azure environment.

The initial deployment was straightforward. I can complete the deployment myself.

OpCon's pricing is quite fair. The task-based model is appealing because it allows us to scale up or down as needed. We're primarily focused on scaling up, and the model has been working well in that regard for some time now. However, the introduction of à la carte offerings on top of the base price is becoming a concern. While the base pricing is reasonable, the à la carte options are making the overall cost more complicated and potentially problematic.

I would rate OpCon a nine out of ten.

Regular maintenance is necessary for OpCon, encompassing updates, patches, and server reboots. These activities are similar to the standard maintenance required for other software applications.

We have OpCon deployed within our production environment and development environment.

Before implementing OpCon, it is crucial to have a thorough understanding of our current processes. The processes we intend to automate must be well-defined and documented to ensure a successful automation endeavor. Additionally, a realistic commitment of time and resources is essential for automation projects. As we gain experience and expertise in automation, the process will become faster and simpler. However, allocating appropriate time and resources remains paramount throughout the entire automation lifecycle. This includes time for understanding the processes, integrating them into OpCon, and conducting thorough testing to validate the processes within OpCon.

We have OpCon in our test environment, we're testing that right now and putting it into production next month.

Our primary use cases are for our core system that does batch processing for our core system, which is Symitar. We have automated about 90% of our daily processing. And we have started to branch out to utilize it more for Self Service where our other business units can automate some of their processing as well.

The fact that if you automate your core processing, in our case, alleviates the need to make sure that if somebody is running late or somebody calls in sick, your jobs are still going to run, they're still going to be on time. It has notifications built-in to let you know if something has failed or has missed the start time. It really keeps your business flowing and with proactivity. That's been the biggest example for my institution. It's the fact that we're a 24-hour shop. There's no downtime. It keeps us running and moving. We're about 90% automated if we look at our core processing. 

The automation of manual tasks has reduced human error by at least 40 hours a week. It's essentially saving another person. 

It has saved our IT team time by automating things a lot less wait time for people waiting for my team to actually run processes or transfer things. There's no delay in between the time when something is supposed to happen and when it happens.

We are able to move forward with business needs. My team is now able to learn, do additional training and other facets of IT. Rather than spending the time blending jobs, transferring, and doing things manually, they're now able to work on other projects within the organization. They're learning more about different areas of how other things function within IT. We become more project-oriented than process-oriented. We're able to identify things within the business that we can automate or that could be changed. We've gone from reactive to proactive

We are at least 80% more productive. 

There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key.

OpCon is pretty easy to use. I'm not a programmer, I had no formal training. They offer some basic training courses. They also have a lot of documentation online and their support staff is super helpful. So it's pretty easy as long as you can take the time to familiarize yourself. It's a pretty easy application.

For the Enterprise Manager, the UI is okay. It puts your processing in alphabetical order instead of the actual processing order, but they are building a new UI. They really are on track to make it even more user-friendly. It's like they're listening to some of the common complaints from their customers, or they started to build out what we need or what we are looking for.

We are setting up the Self Service feature right now. That's going to be our biggest list in our organization. We just installed it and went through our training a few weeks ago. My team is building Self Service buttons in our testing environment right now.

Enterprise Manager is a little clunky which I know they're addressing in the solution's manager. 

It's annoying that our processes are listed alphabetically. It should be listed in dependency order or order of processing. That's one thing that drives me crazy. That's my biggest issue.

I have been using OpCon since October of 2010.

They've gone through some changes recently with the owner, but I know that they're on the right track. I feel that they're very stable.

They see that there are other competitors out in the market that do what they do. So they want to make sure that they stay relevant and are able to keep up with changing technology. They put a lot of stuff in the new release from 19 to 20. The team has been working really hard to take that stuff into account, like how to future-proof and make this more flexible. I think it's very scalable.

Currently, six of the admin users are me and my team. And we are primary users of OpCon, which means that we are monitoring and setting up. And then we have our Symitar administrative, our core host system administrative who's also involved. We also have our payments team who used to do ACH and draft returns. They are primary users as well.

For deployment, you really only need a couple of people, but I'd like to ensure that my entire team is well trained. You don't necessarily need seven people, if one or two people have a backup is plenty. My team's official title is Computer Operators. They're basically responsible for batch processing and file transfers within the credit union.

Right now 90% of the usage is my team with a small bit with our payments team. So one thing we've been able to do is learn more about the product, go out to our business and see what their needs are. With the new version and the Self Service features, we plan on branching out because Self Service allows business partners not to have to log in to either our core system or the OpCon system, it's through a UI or URL. And so the thought there is that we will be able to branch this out to accounting collections. The payments team has the other items and the card services team as well. There are certain processes in the run in our core and we would like to automate those so that they can just either run automatically or they control when they run them through.

We will start with Symitar and sometimes Symitar will refer us back to SMA. They work really well together and we're able to come to a resolution, but sometimes it's both systems in OpCon and Symitar that have an issue.

SMA support is super helpful. They're a great team.

We also looked at DMC. OpCon has a relationship with Symitar. That was a selling point for us because they have a close relationship and they already have several Symitar clients using OpCon and they came with great reviews. DMC had several other core systems that they were automating but Symitar wasn't the main system. So we just felt more comfortable going with SMA.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had a great team. We had both SMA and Jack Henry, which is our core vendor. They were both on-site. They worked really well together. They were very hands-on in training and had me and my team involved in the whole process.

The deployment took us two weeks. We wanted to implement it in the test first so that we could see how it interacted with our core and our other systems within our network. So that's where we first installed it so that we could do our basic setup and testing. And then once those testing passed, then we set aside some time to set it up in a production environment. Because we obviously didn't just didn't want to gung ho and go back into production.

We use Jack Henry. They are our Symitar, which is our core processor, our integrator.

They told us about SMA because SMA has a relationship with Jack Henry as a core processor. They did a lot of their automation. Jack Henry told us about SMA, which is how I came to bring them on board. Because they had already built a lot of automation for our core processing. They already had a business relationship. 

We currently renewed with one of their new technology bundles. It's around $36,000 annually. We run a query of our SQL in our SQL database to see how many jobs we run. They're charging us per usage and whatever add-ons you want to use with OpCon.

My advice would be to ask a lot of questions. Make sure that you involve your entire staff from beginning to end. OpCon was a really easy experience. Having them on-site, sitting next to you with hands-on experience, you can't beat it. They're not hiding anything. I really appreciated the amount of effort that they put into showing up, training, and following through as well. Whenever something did go wrong, they're always there to support you.

We consider OpCon to be one of our tier-one applications, meaning it's almost as critical and important as our core host system. We haven't done any vendor comparisons in ten years because we're very happy with them. 

Typing matters. A lot of what you enter is manually typed. So watch your spacing, watch your fat fingers and copy and paste or copy schedules wherever possible. And then the other trick is eventually you always have a frequency. Those are the few things that I mess up on that really make my whole deployment delayed because I can't find why it's not working and it's always usually because I have an extra space somewhere or character I didn't need. Watch your typing and have a second set of eyes.

I would rate OpCon a ten out of ten. 

We run thousands of processes/jobs on z/OS (mainframe), Unix/Linux, and Windows. In many cases, these processes have cross-platform dependencies. 

We also have two separate OpCon databases - one for production and one for development. This is the usual case of implementing and testing new jobs/schedules in development prior to promoting them to production.

We literally run our business on OpCon and as such OpCon needs to be, and is a 24/7 enterprise scheduling system. It cannot be down. Thus far, we have found it to be very resilient.

It is still early in our OpCon implementation, however, thus far it has shown its value in ease of use - both in terms of maintaining and implementing jobs/tasks and through its use of a relational database, which gives us enormous power in reporting and updating information.

Change does not come easily to people. That said, due to OpCon being a modern, graphical system our schedulers and developers have enthusiastically embraced it and this has made the transition from our previous system much smoother than we had anticipated. 

The most valuable aspects of the solution for us are:

The GUI. Our previous scheduling software had a graphical user interface but this was nothing more than an add-on. It constantly had problems and eventually was abandoned due to its unreliability. Since migrating to OpCon we are now in a purely graphical environment. This provides more information in a smaller space and makes administration a point-and-click process.

The Database. OpCon uses an SQL Server as its data repository. This has given us substantially more capability for reporting and updates.

The deployment. OpCon has a deploy concept which is a methodology to implement change management to schedules.

We cutover to OpCon from a previous solution approximately six weeks ago so we are still in the early stages of our implementation. That said it is difficult to ascertain what improvements could be made at this early stage.

If I had to select something I'd say that the web based interface, Solution Manager, should have more functionality. Enterprise Manager, the desktop interface is extremely powerful but SMA's strategic direction is Solution Manager. We have found it difficult to have people rely solely on Solution Manager.

We recently migrated to OpCon from another vendor's scheduling system and have now been running our shop's tasks for approximately six weeks. 

Thus far we have only had a few minor problems, all of which the vendor addressed quickly. We have not encountered any major problems. The product is very stable and reliable.

Scalability is dependent on the underlying database. Given that OpCon uses SQL Server, we are very confident in its ability to scale.

Thus far, we have only had a few minor issues but the vendor's responses were quick - as were their solutions. We have no complaints.

We switched from a different vendor's scheduling system. We implemented a project that encompassed a requirements definition, a vendor questionnaire, demos, and finally a selection of a product.

We switched from our old scheduler for multiple reasons. First, the vendor was asking far too much money for an upgrade. Also, we found this vendor's support weak at best. Finally, we wanted something that presented a modern user interface, which the old system tried to implement but it was a poor attempt.

We migrated from a mainframe-based solution using a proprietary database to a Windows-based solution using a SQL Server database. Given the enormity of this level of change, the transition and setup were remarkably smooth. I consider this to have been a straightforward setup.

As part of our migration to OpCon we contracted SMA Technologies, the OpCon vendor, to perform the migration in concert with our scheduling team.

The SMA team was excellent. Their knowledge of SQL Server, z/OS and Windows was extraordinary. I cannot say enough good things about them.

As of right now, the ROI is undetermined.

Be sure to consider post-implementation costs. In our case, we contracted with the vendor for ongoing assistance given our lack of experience and manpower with a Windows-based solution.

We considered CA's Workload Automation but they would not return our calls. They had recently been acquired by another company so perhaps that had something to do with it.

We also considered Tidal Workload Automation but decided it was not a good fit for our environment.

We had previously attempted to migrate to IBM Workload Scheduler but could not make this work.

BMC's Control-M was given very serious consideration but we did not like the way BMC treated us. Control-M surely would have worked but the marketing team caused us concern.

I highly recommend OpCon to any organization considering either a new implementation or a migration from a previous vendor's system. In our case we migrated from a previous system and SMA Technologies did what another vendor could not. It took six months and the cutover went remarkably smooth given the level of change.

We use OpCon to automate daily operational jobs.

We implemented OpCon to remove risks associated with manual processes and improve efficiencies to reduce the time for those operational jobs to complete.

OpCon provides a single point of control which is extremely important to our organization.

The benefits of OpCon were seen immediately. It took a little bit of time to set up all of the automation, But once it was created, we began seeing benefits immediately.

OpCon enables us to manage complex schedule steps and multiple systems.

Between 25 and 40 percent of our staff's time has been saved to focus on higher-value projects.

We've rolled out self-service buttons to the business units, empowering them to handle their requests without involving our department. This has been highly beneficial.

We have used OpCon to manage legacy systems along with modern ones for file transfers.

We have approximately 300 processes that were all manual before using OpCon to automate them.

OpCon has helped save between 15 to 25 hours per week.

Errors have been reduced when running more complex processes, resulting in a positive effect on our organization.

My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.

I would like OpCon to implement a reporting feature on the dashboard that displays historical data for specific jobs. Ideally, this feature would allow us to view the past seven days or the next seven days, but with a specific focus on highlighting instances where a particular job has historically failed, particularly on Saturdays over the past year.

I have been using OpCon for nine years.

OpCon has been completely stable.

The scalability of OpCon is reasonable.

The technical support is excellent.

Positive

There was a lot of work involved in the deployment but it was straightforward.

The implementation was completed in-house.

While the overall cost is reasonable, I'm interested in exploring options for making the managed automation solution, specifically the mass solution, more cost-effective.

I would rate OpCon ten out of ten.

Maintenance is required for licensing and periodic updates.

It's crucial to review current manual tasks and prioritize those offering the greatest potential cost savings, considering both risk mitigation and time efficiency. To determine if automation is worthwhile, we need to assess the time users currently spend on these tasks.

We use it predominantly, and almost exclusively, for core processing with our financial system.

OpCon makes it so we are lights-out for most of our morning and evening processes. 

It makes it super easy to notify us when something is wrong. It allows us to incorporate a wide range of custom processes or notifications. It's pretty agnostic in terms of how it does things. It doesn't matter how you've been doing things. As long as it can be called and given a command line parameter or interface parameter of some sort, it works really well. The biggest attractor is it allows us to incorporate so many different processes that wouldn't normally work together, making it a seamless schedule of events that happens and is really easy to both manage, update, change, and review. It's just a really slick piece of software that makes things super easy.

From the sixth through the 17th, that is where we have some sort of processes that have been out for the day. We have 324 schedules, 177 subschedules, and 2,996 jobs defined. Everyday, we have about 30 different processes defined. On special days, like end of month, first of the month, etc., we have a lot of stuff to find in there, which means there's no person doing it. It's all done by the system, taking that workload off of having a person. We are able to make sure that we have people concentrate on the things that really require a person and not the remedial tasks. This has been a huge advantage to having the software.

Our manual processing has been automated in the realm of 70 percent by this solution. There are only a few things that we still do which require a human touch.

The solution has streamlined operations. We have written custom jobs to do particular things, but OpCon is definitely the one that manages running them at particular times. Often times, those jobs have to run after hours. So while we still develop and spend time and man-hours writing code, once it's done, OpCon is running that in the afternoons or evenings. This is usually done during off hours when a person would normally be required to be here and do it. Instead, OpCon is available, consistent, reliable and easy to get things in and working quickly once we develop and get them working. OpCon takes care of the entire process, including notifications that we define if something were to happen so we know what to do next. Again, it's simplifies the entire process.

The solution freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. However, tasks like managing user credentials, permissions, or access takes a human eye to determine what to do next unless it's something very straightforward. I can't really have OpCon go through and determine that user X needs to be moved to group Y unless it's a scripted piece. That still takes a human eyes and is done by people. OpCon has taken away things that happen repetitively every day, regardless of what's going on. It has definitely allowed us to separate those two process.

We have three employees (four including myself) who have been doing these processes in some capacity in the system. The workload that I would normally be doing, I push a lot of those jobs over into this and define a lot of them. Probably anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of what I do, I've been able to offload in OpCon. For the other staff, the evening and morning procedures are the biggest in terms of freeing up time because these are the things that we do before we open and after we close. Of those processes, nearly 90 percent of what we would normally have done with a person have been moved over.

Our employees are happier doing things that require them to think. When you're doing the same task over and over again, it's pretty remedial. It is nice to have a system take care of that for you. People tend to want to be able to think about what they are doing and have some brain processing going on instead of doing simple data entry. Overall, I expect that they're happier about the piece that they're working on versus doing the things that OpCon never complains about, which is the same thing every day.

• Scheduling
• Job concurrency
• Failover
• Failed job notifications 

The schedule processing is our biggest reason for using it.

As you're doing a scheduler, oftentimes you end up doing some of the same things over and over again as you define jobs. There are generally some well-used use tools available that the system can interact with. My suggestion is try to find ways to have built-in interactions with those pieces of software. As an IT person, and I say this with caution because I know what it means to code something to a piece of software you have no control over, I would like to have an interface with PowerShell.

PowerShell has a lot of functionality. We use it a lot because we're a Windows shop. Having a built-in tool or interface with PowerShell would go a long way. At the same time, it's not like I can't do it externally. This is probably more like a suggestion than it is a complaint. 

The solution was purchased before I got to the company, which was in April 2012,

The stability is near perfect. I won't say it is perfect, but I've never had a database error (knock on wood), corruption, or system loss that wasn't due to something else, like a power failure. The software has always operated. It always returns appropriate messages. It's very reliable.

The director of IT and a data center analyst are the ones who manage it overall. We write the jobs. We do the initial QA, essentially maintaining the system directly.

I know that we use only a portion of what is available. While we do a lot in it, we don't actually do any multinet code. We're very limited on most of our processing, which is sequential, since we are a financial institution. Almost all of our schedules are: job one, job two, then job three. This is versus doing a lot of submitting of maybe hundreds or thousands of jobs at one time every few minutes. We're really linear, so we're not even using the full capacity of the scheduler, which allows for things where you do several different nodes producing different jobs at different intervals which all interact or don't interact. We don't do that. We're pretty straightforward.

We have four people who directly use it. We then have a group of about six individuals who use the extended version. This is an interface that goes through a web browser that then pulls jobs and runs them.

The direct users are called computer operators. They are the ones who run jobs on the core financial system, which is what this is primarily doing. They will interact with failed jobs. They will, in some cases, manually start jobs and review processing to ensure things are working as expected. There are two subsets of those individuals that actually create new jobs and make changes. The additional six people that I mentioned are just users. They will go in and specifically call a select number of jobs to start processing in any particular process.

We have small plans to increase usage. It comes down to whether or not it can be fully automated and does it benefit the institution as well as us to automate it. In some cases, it's a very small task where you're maybe modifying a file and sending it somewhere. That may or may not be easy to automate. In which case, I am less inclined to put it in because it takes too much time to build up. Other times, it's a process that gets filed from a vendor or posted to the core, then sends out an automated report. Those are the things that I like to put in it because I don't want to touch it at all. Therefore, it really depends on the complexity of the process, then the value of automating it. 

Overall, we are primarily focused on things that relate to our financial activity. There are 10 to 15 percent of the jobs that we have defined that don't do something directly related to the financial system. That probably will increase over time, but not nearly as much as what we do for the financial system.

The technical support is very high in terms of quality and response. I have open up maybe four or five tickets over the course of a year. The type of tickets that I open are either clarification on a new feature or a request for support on doing an upgrade, and that's just to make sure I have someone to fall back on since we have never had an issue. The last ticket I open typically every year is a status update on our new license after renewing. So, it's pretty limited on what we ask for. Again, we're sort of a specialty organization. Being a credit union, an automation of jobs is generally focused around the financial system with most of our jobs being linear. This kind of limits the complications that we've run into. For us, the support has been a great resource that we rarely call.

On a scale of one to 10, where 10 is simple, super easy, and effective, that's what I would give it. At my prior work, we had another scheduler, and it was okay. It did its thing, but OpCon is, by far, super awesome.

The solution I used previously was called ISE, and it was related to another core provider and the solution that they provided. This was probably at least 10 years ago. I switched because I came to this institution who was using SMA before I got here. So, I adopted it simply because it was the resource that we had. I don't regret it one bit.

I'm kind of jaded now because I've been using this solution for so long. My previous solution was obviously an older version, so I'm comparing against something from way back when it was more convoluted. It was harder to get the results that I wanted from the interactions with different jobs. Having used OpCon for the last eight years, I'm familiar with how all the different pieces of how I set something up. It's super easy to set things up. At this time, I don't know that I have a good comparison against another software.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's a nice piece of software that gets installed. There's a database configuration with a the support crew. 

We scheduled the deployment for a day, and it took just a few hours.

It didn't take so long to put it together. It was pretty simplistic. It took maybe 30 minutes to an hour to get something in there and test it out to the point where we were happy with how it was operating, then using it going forward and making any changes. Initially, it probably took 30 to 60 minutes to get something in there (the first time). That's mostly going through testing as well as developing. It isn't just putting it in there. Putting it in there, you could probably get a reasonable schedule defined in less than 10 minutes. But, if you're talking about running it, fixing errors, etc. related to scripts, not necessarily related OpCon, it takes probably about 30 to 60 minutes. Nowadays, setting something up, it takes me less than 10 minutes to define a simple or basic process.

The deployment was all internal; it was the staff here. We educated ourselves. We didn't even go through any formal training. We had a few remedial schedules that had been built before I started with the help of SMA just to define a few processes. From there, we used those as an example for QA, testing, etc. to find out what worked best for us. We developed those through actual use and best practices internally.

The way it was initially set up, support crew got in and validated the installation that the database was correctly set up and the interaction between the software and database was good. It was pretty straightforward and smooth. We did an upgrade. We paid for SMA to do a review of our system, as well, to ensure the upgrade was good, and there were no issues with that. It was a pretty clean install, and it worked out really well.

Our implementation strategy was mostly to define the processes that required no interaction from a person to begin with and create those jobs and schedules in OpCon, then test them out. From there, we would move onto more complex processes that may have required file drops or something like that. So, there was a trigger. Initially though, it was just to find the jobs that could be done right now that required no interaction and have those all implemented, tested, and working, then move into a more complex mode. Over the course of three to four months, we moved from having basic jobs to adding in a bit more complexity, then flushing out the defined larger shifts, like morning and evening.

It has reduced data processing time for some processes in the upwards of 50 percent. This is because the amount of time it takes someone to go in and type something or copy/move something over has exponentially increased. It's faster when the system is doing it because you don't have to wait for user input, so it's not necessarily that the overall process has gotten faster because searching for things or making documents still takes time. It's just the system, when it's through an automated scheduler, can go a lot faster because it can do all these things faster, not necessarily because the process itself has improved. There is definitely time savings.

If we're talking about posting a particular file, then that will definitely be done in the system a lot faster because there is no user input. As soon as the next is available, it is off to the next process. Whereas, if your user were doing it, there's evaluation, checking to make sure it worked right, and looking at some of the output. All this can be evaluated by the system very quickly, so it definitely has increased the time. I can think of one example where a morning process, back when we did a lot of it by hand, probably took anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes. Now, we're talking about 10 minutes flat.

The cost of ownership for what we have now means that I don't have to have another full body. What I pay for this software is at least one-third of what I would pay for a full body. That's a direct cost savings.

Before the solution was fully flushed out, we had someone here until well after closing and at the end of every month when we have special processing. So, there is someone always processing at the end of the month. It was a drag on both staff and personnel because anyone who did processing during end of the month or during those off times would not be here during the week at certain times or come in later. Therefore, the scheduling was sort of off. The morning process is still one where we have some additional things required of them, but the evening is totally lights out. Once we close business for the day, it's about an hour, then the staff member goes home and nobody is here. The system takes care of the rest. We've definitely seen that return, as we don't have to have that dedicated person in the evening.

It is a pricey solution. Comparatively speaking, you can certainly find schedulers which are cheaper. In some cases, you can find ones that are free or use free solutions. However, OpCon is by far the superior quality product, and you pay for that. This also has a cost savings associated with an FTE, so you can more than outweigh the cost of the solution if you were to reduce the staff that you have onsite. Plus, this means that you don't need to have someone during irregular hours.

One of the things that I run into is when you have staff that work irregular hours, this means you don't have that same staff (or that same availability) during the time when people are here. When people call on the phone, they don't want to talk to a system. They want to talk to a person. I would much rather pay to have a person here than have a person here during off-hours when there is nobody calling. The cost savings, removing the FTE, and having the system process everything automatically, as well as give me notifications in the same way that it does it everyday and I can always expect it at the same time, that is phenomenal.

I came in after it was already purchased and in place. If I remember correctly, the CIO did the evaluation. This product was making the rounds. It was heralded by other institutions and had a good reputation.

The cost is just shy of $20,000. That's for two licenses annually, production, and failover.

Spend time flushing out the processes that you want. Add everything you possibly can so you don't have to do it.

Look hard at the solution that you want. I highly suggest looking at OpCon. Frankly, that's all I ever tell people about when they talk about the scheduling. I ask if they're on OpCon and if they know about it. 

Overall, I don't really have any complaints. The system does exactly what I want it to do. In this current iteration. If it never changed, it still does what I need it to do, and it does it the way I want it to happen. I'm content with the way it operates. 

I would rate it a 10 (out of 10). It doesn't have to have another version increase. It doesn't have to add any change to complete what I need it to do right now. If it stayed exactly the same, I would still be happy.

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 automate everything we can with our core banking software, including daily and nightly processing and any other recurring IT jobs that can be automated. A lot of our employees access OpCon via its self-service feature. We're a financial institution, so various business units use it, including some people in our mortgage or insurance department. It's mostly used to start processes or run reports on demand and that sort of thing. It's a set-it-and-forget-it solution. 

The most significant benefit is time savings, which translates into money savings. It's hard to quantify how much time we've saved. When we first installed it, we could maybe calculate that, but at this point, we rely on it so much that I have no idea how many person-hours it would take somebody to do these tasks anymore. 

With the processing time freed up, we could focus more on the other business units to implement what they need and work on other special projects. In general, it made us more productive while reducing calls to our IT help desk. The users can do what they need to do without opening a ticket with our IT department or waiting on IT resources to be available. They know they will use the same criteria, so there will be consistency in what they do.

The most valuable feature is the automation in general. We don't have to rely on somebody to manually do the same process over and over again, risking human error. We like the consistency. It's the same way every time. Moreover, it integrates well with our core software.

I'm sure there's plenty that could be improved, but some of the biggest pain points aren't necessarily a fault of OpCon itself. For example, the FICS integration is a little bit clunky. We've had some tickets with their support team, and sometimes they couldn't figure it out, but that probably has more to do with FICS than with OpCon. If there were room for improvement on the SMA side, it would probably be cross-training. They have a person, maybe two, who deals with FICS. Nobody else knows it.

I've been using OpCon for probably four or five years.

OpCon is stable. We've only had issues with problems we probably should've known how to prevent, so the solution itself is stable.

OpCon is highly scalable. We don't necessarily have a need to scale it beyond what we have now, but it's easy to see it scaling up. However, we don't have any plans to scale up significantly. We'll scale but not a massive amount.

I'd rate SMA support an eight out of 10. We haven't had to contact them much aside from FICS integration and support. If it's a simple issue, they can knock it out without any problem. However, when we've called with more complex problems, we haven't gotten those fully resolved. 

Positive

I think our previous solution was called AutoMate. It wasn't nearly as robust as this, and it relied on on-screen scrapes, etc. It was pretty dissimilar to this, and we retired it as soon as we had this in place. 

The setup was relatively straightforward, but we had someone from SMA on-site, so they walked us through it and showed us how to automate some of our more complex processes. I think the whole setup took two weeks. 

For maintenance, it only takes two or three people in IT. Everybody else has access to it, but we have a core group that maintains it, and then there are around half a dozen to a dozen self-service business users. But from a day-to-day perspective, it's low maintenance. If you're not changing anything, you don't have to do anything. If you're setting up new processes, that takes a little work, but you don't have to babysit the solution.

I'm certain we've seen an ROI. I haven't run the numbers myself, but I'm sure it's probably reduced the number of full-time employees we need by at least one person.

The licensing and pricing model changed this last year, so we're getting used to that. I think it's ultimately going to end up being more expensive. It depends on the scale of the business. It used to be per machine, so we had X number of devices licensed. Now it's not. If we had a lot of machines, the new license might have decreased the cost. Unfortunately, we didn't see the same gains. There wasn't any consolidation of licensing with the shift.

I rate OpCon eight out 10. If you're considering it, I don't think you'll regret it.