OpCon Reviews

We host OpCon on a virtual server onsite. We do not replicate to a backup database. There are some other redundancies built-in, but we just have a single production server.

Working at a credit union, it does all of our back-office processing. We have a smallish IT staff and we wanted to relieve the IT staff from having to do the daily manual processes that were in place at the time.

OpCon handles all of our automated loads, uploads, and integration with our core financial application. We have expanded it to use their self-service options so that users may generate reports on the fly, or they might have manual steps along the way in their process. It allows them to check the results, review, work any exceptions and then continue the process just by clicking a button. They really like that part. It also has given us the opportunity to allow users that don't have access to the core to generate reports from the core and have it usually placed in a network share for them or emailed to them.

The biggest example in which OpCon has improved my organization is that we have to download and process files from the federal reserve several times a day. If we don't do it in a certain timeframe, we can be penalized. It's the fact that we can download these files, process them, get our accounting teams the information they need to work the exceptions that is one of the most important roles.

It's also nightly processing. When we do our overnight processing, if there is a delay to a job, we can set up alerts to let us know that a particular job is running longer and the person on-call can log in, take a look at it, and see if everything is progressing normally or if there's a problem before it becomes a big issue the next day.

Having the ability to monitor the process along the way with checks on a job when it's too long, it didn't finish on time, or a dependency is missing has been very helpful.

OpCon saves our IT time. We eliminated our backroom processing, which would be all of the IT-related functions. So most definitely it saves IT time. Conservatively, it has saved two and a half hours daily just because of some of the things that we were doing for other departments and now the other departments can do that themselves. 

Since we implemented it in 2016, a lot of other tasks have been incorporated into it. So if those other areas would have wanted us to do those tasks, it would have added to our burden. If we have free time, they're going to find a way to fill it. It does free our time to do other things, to concentrate on things that require brain power rather than just entry.

Our overall productivity has also increased.

At its core, OpCon is a scheduler, but it can do so much more than that. The fact that it integrates with the core was the primary motivator in choosing this product. I was recruited for the position I'm at because of my experience with OpCon and my current company wanted to implement it.

Its flexibility would be the greatest benefit to it. You can really come up with some creative scheduling solutions. You're only limited by your imagination with some of the stuff. There are some limitations to it, of course, but I would say the biggest plus is the flexibility that it offers and its integration to the core. 

We use the self-service feature. We use it in our IT department, our mortgage department uses it, and our accounting department uses it. We're slowly introducing the features to other areas. As more users see it, I'm hoping more users will embrace it so that we can expand it even further.

Our mortgage servicing users use it to run their daily processes. We have an integration with FICS, which is the product we use for our mortgage servicing. So they're able to utilize it to generate reports and do their daily postings.

Our accounting department uses it for ACH and even to set the prompts to close the general monthly general ledger. Our lending department also uses it for some of their jobs to process uploads that go to other vendors.

It's very helpful for reducing the complexity of the technical aspects of workload automation. It can be used as a simple checklist where you click the button. There are some things about it that might be improved upon as far as adding some features. That would be some nice things. SMA has always been very responsive to those types of input.

The self-service feature increases users' productivity because some of the tasks that they still have to do manually are automated, but those manual checks give them a place to stop the process rather than having to do each step along the way annually. They still have those manual interventions that they have to do, but the self-service button allows them to put that check-in there so that they can do what they need to do and then begin a certain process rather than having to do the whole thing.

It has also reduced calls to our IT department with the way we're using it. Previously a process might require the user to email IT staff to have us do the next step, to upload a file, something like that. Now we're removed from that situation and they just do it themselves.

The same goes for the closing of the general ledger. It used to require notifying IT and then we'd have to set the job accordingly. Now IT is taken out of the mix. So the end-user department has control over that process.

The automation of manual tasks has without a doubt reduced human error. Whenever you can automate something, as long as you have it set up correctly, to begin with, you totally reduce the chances of transposing a number or something like that.

At my previous employment, once we implemented OpCon we pretty much eliminated one FTE position. The person didn't lose their job, but he had other tasks that he took on. They reduced the amount of workload by one person. That was a much larger credit union.

If we had to do all of this manually, it would add up because we've added more tasks than what we originally had.

I have been using OpCon at my current employer for about five years and at my previous company for another four or five years as well.

We're on version 18.3 and we're looking to upgrade to the 20.0 version in the next month or so.

In the time that I've worked on it, I've had one problem where the transaction log locked up. That was seven years ago. It was a while ago. It's solid. You have to do your due diligence with your typical maintenance and paying attention to things, but it's a solid product.

It seems to scale well, but then again we're limited. We only have one server.

We have people in our indirect lending who use OpCon. They deal with our auto loans. We have our mortgage department servicing mortgages. We have our accounting people that manage the ACH and they rely on it also for downloading reports from various vendors that we use. Our contact center uses it to run reports and retrieve reports from the core.

IT, of course, uses it. We manage everything for it. I use it for a variety of things from downloading reports to emailing to notifications. Most of our stuff is centered around the core. Most of our usage is centered on the core, but we're slowly branching out.

We have plans to deploy a failover server, and we also anticipate doing more with our order servicing software, automating more processes for that.

Technical support has been great. They've come up with solutions and they're very timely. They seem to be good people too.

The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already. 

It integrates fairly well with things like basic scripting programs which is good. 

OpCon is very powerful. That means it tends to be very complex. It doesn't always translate to usability. You can do anything in any way if you have the time and the knowledge, but it can be tricky figuring out how it's done. I haven't used much of the APIs other than some of the connectors, but I hear they've got some good support that way. I don't have any one thing that I'd say would be an improvement upon it except for perhaps making the calendar, the scheduling functionality a bit more intuitive. Some of the ways that they implement the calendar functions aren't as intuitive as they could be.

For some jobs, the setup is very straightforward. For others, they required more complexity. I have some that when we first set it up, the complex ones were downloading our federal reserve files and processing those, but the technical account manager that assisted was great with working with us on that. 

Having them there with implementing it certainly is required. But beyond that, the people that I've encountered, even when I was at a previous employer, were always very good at helping us get through what we needed to do.

There have been times that I've sent in a question to their support and I'll get a couple of different people emailing me back saying, "Oh yeah, I heard about this. Have you tried this?" Everyone's very active in trying to assist clients if they have some expertise there.

We worked with both our SMA technical account managers and then we were assigned someone through Jack Henry Symitar Episys, through their automation group. 

Once we got everything implemented, I had time with my technical account manager to set things up, but prior, I had time with our core provider and their implementation specialist to go through our nightly processing the critical stuff and making sure we had everything set up. That was the baseline process to get us started. After that, it was up to us what we wanted it to automate.

They took care of our nightly processing and then our account manager helped me do some of the daily processes. Since I already had previous experience, there were a lot of things I felt that I could do. He'd come up with solutions for the things I didn't feel that way for.

The deployment took a week.

It was through our core provider that we got the product. Since we went through them, that was the primary thing to get automated and they provided it in collaboration with SMA.

The people at SMA have been great as far as working with them. They're responsive. When I've interacted with them, they've always been great. The company has been very good.

ROI has been great. It does keep me busy because I'm the one who manages it, but it eliminates work for a lot of others. And my goal is to automate a lot of stuff so people can spend their time thinking about how to fix the complex stuff, not remembering that they have to do the little stuff.

The licensing has just changed recently. They just moved over to a new tiered pricing model and so I'm waiting to see what shakes out with that.

When we got ours, we had bought add-ons at the time, but with the tiered pricing, a lot of those add-ons are included. I'm not aware of any additional costs at this time.

The company had been recently sold and there were some hiccups with their new pricing, their tier pricing, but our salesman worked with us. Our account rep worked with us and got us something that both sides are agreeable to. OpCon does very well trying to do right by its client base. I can't fault that.

Advice that I would give to people considering OpCon would be to really understand what your needs are, understand how OpCon can fit into your environment, and realize that it can be very complex and can become very cumbersome if you're not careful. You can automate a lot of things and have a lot of different processes automated, but you still need to document and have a clear goal as to what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Take the free training that they have. Go to the biannual conference they have. You can pick up a lot of information that way. Immerse yourself in the product, in the documentation, and understand what's going on with it.

Have a clear plan before you start doing anything on how you want to handle it if a job fails. Do you want to have it restarted? Do you want to have it notify someone? You have to have a clear plan on what you hope to accomplish with an automated task before you put it into production.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that error checking is important. When you have a failure, you need to know. You should have a plan on how to handle job failures so that, if the primary person is available, the backup can either take care of it or the process will automatically self-recover.

I would rate OpCon a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

We use it to run our core system, Corelation KeyStone, as well as all of our batch processing and file movement, automation, and extract processing. We also use it to automate custom Keystone updates with Infuzion, a third party tool which streamlines input to the Keystone API. 

It's important to keep in mind that OpCon and KeyStone, together, are a completely different animal than Spectrum and UC4. They are separate systems. They work differently. What we gained with OpCon was the ability to continue to automate everything. That was the real key for us. It's not that we got better at it. We were just able to continue that level of service, which was our goal. I can't tell you what it would be like if we switched from another automation tool to OpCon for the same core system. That's not what we did. It's just that OpCon happens to work so well with KeyStone. I don't think there's another automation tool out there that's going to be able to touch it, although other vendors have since entered this space. Automic now has connectors to KeyStone and offers a viable alternative.

Total automation is our key and Corelation, which delivers the KeyStone product, is not looking at automation. I think they know they have a good partner with SMA, so they don't think about it too much. Their point of view is that they want you to do the batch processing from within the core. SMA's perspective is, "No, you want to automate all of that." Of course, that's what we wanted as well. SMA's vision was the same as ours. What OpCon really gains for you is the ability to have total, lights-out processing in a way that the core vendor doesn't quite understand or have experience around. And it's okay the core vendor doesn't have that experience because SMA does, and that's where its real value is. It will get you to the place where you can have complete, lights-out automation.

We've automated everything that runs in the batch or customization-batch updates for KeyStone. A typical day for us has 70 schedules and 496 jobs. At our credit union, we haven't had an operator since 2003. An operator is in the role where, when someone at a certain time of a day is running a batch job through the system, they're watching to see what happens with it. They're making sure the files are in the right place and the output goes where it's supposed to. We replaced that in 2003 when UC4 it started doing all that for us. OpCon has just picked up where we left off. It handles everything. And whenever it comes time to implement something new at the credit union, we're going to make sure that OpCon's driving the batch-automation on the backend.

If we're running 70 schedules and almost 500 jobs every day, we can't watch all that. There's no way. And we shouldn't have to. Automation tools are so robust, and they have been for 15 or 20 years now, that automation is a given. Any credit union is going to be automating as much as they can.

In terms of freeing up employees through automation, we've also been automating processes for other departments, not entirely with OpCon but with other solutions as well. We haven't eliminated positions as a result, but we've helped free people up to do other work by taking away repetitive tasks. OpCon allowed us to do that. They have been freed to do more challenging tasks. We would never get rid of a position because their stuff has been automated. We would just free them to do other more valuable tasks. By using Solution Manager in OpCon, we've been able to automate tasks for seven departments. Each one of those represents a task that was repetitive that we were able to automate, at least somewhat. We don't look at it as individuals or FTEs, but rather as departments that have we helped become more efficient by our automation process.

It's the entire automation landscape that OpCon provides which is valuable. The way it works with Corelation KeyStone is probably unmatched for that core system in the credit union industry. SMA has created four connectors that work with KeyStone in a way that allows us to automate basically every batch-processing or back-office task. That's the true value.

In addition to that, there's also a self-service solution manager, I believe it's called Solution Manager, that allows us to enable staff to run complex automation tasks by clicking a button and entering some information. They don't have to have access to the OpCon environment to kick off those kinds of events.

It would be great if you could create physically separate "clients," as I call them. I wish I could have a production client and a testing client and that they would be separate. We have since upgraded our license model with SMA which allows us to license a test server, which will give us better flexibility for separating prod from dev.

I know that SMA is making a push to move everything into Solution Manager, a web-based interface with OpCon. Frankly, I will be sad to see the Enterprise Manager go away. Enterprise Manager is difficult to learn at first, but once you learn it, it's very powerful and very quick to get solutions in place, to troubleshoot, and to observe your production. I really like it.

In a production environment, at our credit union, we've been using it since October 2017.

OpCon has been rock-solid. It works day in and day out and is very robust. It runs on Windows Servers, but it is a very high-availability, robust scheduler automation engine.

In two years, we've had one OpCon database issue that woke people up overnight. It halted production and SMA had a fix for it pretty quickly. That's one time in two years.

I haven't seen any concerns about scaling OpCon to automate what we need. It's been very robust and it can handle whatever we throw at it. I'm confident that as we continue to add processes into our core system, OpCon will be available to drive whatever automation we need.

We don't really plan to increase usage, but as we add new products to our core system, by default, we'll use OpCon to automate whatever we can. For example, we added mobile check deposit last summer as a product for our consumers. I realize that most financial institutions have had that for a long time. On KeyStone, our new core system, that became possible. OpCon has automated quite a few pieces of that for us, such as eligibility and sending restriction lists to the different vendors, picking up posting files, etc. We never thought otherwise, that we were going to use something else. We just said, "Okay, how are we going to get this into OpCon?" 

That's how we approach every new product that we add to our KeyStone system for our members. How are we going to automate it? Anything we can put into the automation tool, we're going to.

Their support is excellent. It's one of the best I've worked with, for an automation tool, in my career. They'll pick up the phone when you call them. If you've got a simple question they'll answer it. If it's more complex, they pass it along to the right people. If you have a technical production issue, they jump on that really quickly. They do have after-hours support that we've taken advantage of. All of those things have been very valuable for us.

With UC4, our prior core system, we had to go through a core vendor and, if there was a software issue, it would take a little while for UC4 to have a fix. I don't know if that's changed with Automic, but support definitely felt once or twice removed, whereas with SMA it's very immediate.

In addition to that, SMA's development is also aggressive. They're very good. If you've got something that you want to automate, they will help you get there. They'll make a connector for it. They will enhance the connectors they do have. They will come up with a solution. That's where I think they are definitely best-in-class: their support and their development.

I wanted to see if Automic was going to work with KeyStone, our core system that we were converting to. Automic pledged to help us support that and come up with a connector for it. But in doing my due diligence, I read over what OpCon provided for KeyStone and, just by reading the documentation, I realized that we probably should go with OpCon, even though it wasn't something that I knew and it wasn't a bench strength for our organization. I realized that we weren't going to find a better partner, with robust features for KeyStone, and that we should switch.

If I had been coming into automation cold, and OpCon was the first thing I had seen, I think I would have found it a little complex to understand. But since this is the third automation tool in my career, it was a matter of just applying what I already knew, as fundamentals, to how OpCon does things.

One thing that really helps is that SMA sends a technical account manager onsite to help you do the installation and do your configuration. They give you a block of days and you can split that up so that they will come back. Our technical account manager came out three times and, each time, we did something a little more complex with OpCon. By the time he left, the third time he was here, we had not only the basic stuff installed and ready to go, but the more sophisticated stuff, like LDAP integration, the Solution Manager, Self Service, Resource Manager — the different pieces of OpCon that were more complex or more subtle. The value is that SMA guides you through that. They provide that kind of onsite assistance.

Our deployment started in February of 2017 and we went live in October of 2017. After the initial deployment, it took us just a couple of minutes to automate our first process.

We've definitely seen return on our investment by going with SMA. When we went live with KeyStone back in October of 2017, all of our batch production was automated. In fact, we had to convince Corelation, our core vendor, to let us turn it on. They wanted us to run things manually and I said, "No. We're ready. Let's turn this on and let it do what it's supposed to do."

These are ballpark figures and the ones for Automic are pretty old. Back in UC4, we converted to version 8 in 2012, and that cost us on the order of $50,000 to upgrade. 

OpCon cost us $80,000 in 2017 money, and that included everything: support, installation, onsite assistance during the conversion, etc. It's been a worthwhile investment by far. I don't recall how much our yearly maintenance is, but it is worth the money because, when it comes time to do an upgrade, we can do it ourselves and they'll support it. We don't have to pay anything extra for it. And training is included. If I want to send some of my team members to go to training, I just have to pay for travel and expenses. So the cost of ownership has been very worthwhile.

The only additional cost with SMA would be if we need additional licenses for agents. They provide 10 licenses with the standard installation. We're using seven of them. We have three left to use. After that, we'll need to buy additional licenses for agents. We haven't gotten there yet.

In my career I've used three automation tools, going back to something called Maestro made by a company called Tivoli, and then UC4, which is now called Automic, and now OpCon. Of the three of those, UC4 was probably the most intuitive and easy to use. OpCon, once you learn it, is easy to use, but it's a little bit of a harder interface at first. If you've come from an environment like UC4 or Automic, you don't quite have that ease of adoption that you might have had with that tool.

Once you get to know OpCon, you realize that it does all the fundamental things an automation tool should do. It does all the things that UC4 does. The fundamentals are there, and it's the same thing with Maestro.

Something that UC4 does better is something I've told our technical account manager at SMA when he came up to visit. During our implementation, our technical account manager asked, "What does UC4 do that OpCon doesn't?" One of those things is that it offers logically separate clients for doing production. UC4 allows you to set up a production client and a test client and a training client and a development client. These are all physically separate logins with separate containers. What that means is you can point your production environment to entirely production agents, and you can point your testing client to entirely testing agents. And then you can make a logon such that you can't ever cross over between areas. So there's greater safety when it comes to non-live environments.

OpCon is one database. Everything exists in one bucket, so testing schedules are there alongside development and production. So we have to be much more careful about where a given schedule is running. SMA's solution to that is that you buy a separate server and separate licensing and do that same thing. Why? I could do that with UC4 by spinning up a separate client. That's one area that UC4 has a better design than SMA, in its architecture for the system. This isn't going to change anytime soon, so we have since upgraded our license model with SMA which allows us to license a test server. This will give us better flexibility for separating prod from dev, and is something we'll work towards this year. 

Another area is running processes in an ad hoc fashion. UC4 was better at that. I could execute a job plan or a job any time I wanted to, outside of regular production and it was not a big deal. I could execute it and say, "Don't run until two days in the future at 1:30 p.m.," and it would sit out there and wait and then run. UC4 did that better.

On OpCon's side, it does all the same things that UC4 will do but its connectors to KeyStone are the real keys for us in our environment. That's what makes it so valuable for us. The best differentiator is SMA's support. Their support is unlike any support I've had with an automation tool in my career, so that is the real advantage.

It's been a while since I've used UC4/Automic. That was the last automation system we used with our prior core system. It matched our core system, at the time, very well. It was all script-based, script-driven, so if you are comfortable writing scripts that drive programs, UC4 was the solution for you. We were very adept at writing script-based solutions with it. That's definitely one of is pros. I have no idea about its support. We didn't really have to contact them very much, but then, of course, we were using a static version of UC4 for five or six years. Whereas with OpCon, we can take advantage of what they're developing every year if we choose to. Some of those advantages would be such things as connectors directly into the SQL database. That's something that's new that SMA is working on. It's a pretty valuable connector.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that it is perfectly suited to Corelation KeyStone. Automic entered the KeyStone arena in 2020 with their product, which has the same connectors now that OpCon has. Although I haven't seen it in action I know of one credit union who coordinated the integration and uses it in production. I'm sure for 
CUs converting to KeyStone who already are enterprise with Automic, this will be welcome news. For us, though, we decided to go all in with OpCon for KeyStone and do not regret the choice.

On my team, we have seven people and all seven are at least familiar with logging in and observing production with OpCon. Three of them are tasked with implementing new solutions into OpCon and supporting configuration and troubleshooting of existing solutions. We've also got seven departments using it through Self Service, with multiple people in each department using OpCon. One department has almost everyone in there. That's a lot.

SMA has a real vision and they support it. They've got the development team and the support team behind it.

I give it a nine out of 10. That one issue about a blurry line between production and development and test is the one thing that might slow us down a little bit when we are testing. We have to be very careful. Otherwise, the product itself is rock-solid. It's got everything in there that you need. Their support is excellent. Their development is aggressive. There's really nothing more that you could want from this vendor. It really is one of the best out there that I've seen in my career. It's perfectly suited for KeyStone. Now, if I looked at Automic for DNA, I might have a different opinion, but those are completely different systems.

Our use cases for OpCon are expanding. We initially went with it because we're a Unisys mainframe company and they were the only scheduler that did what we wanted it to, and that also supports Unisys. But we have branched out into running Windows SQL jobs, and we will soon be starting up API interaction. Hopefully at some point, because we are going cloud and the mainframe is going away, we'll start interacting with that also. We'll start doing that change within the next three to six months.

I've been here from day one, and it has gone from us manually writing out schedules, and operators having to remember pre's and posts, etc.—all done manually—to getting that automated. Once that was all automated, it was a huge improvement for us because there were considerably fewer errors. The errors are very minimal now. When someone implements a job, if they have a typo or copied a similar job and forgot to change something, those would be about the only errors that we have now. We're down to hardly any. We now have less than one a week.

The improvement with the Solution Manager, so that the programmers can become more aware of what's going on within the scheduler, has really helped us.

OpCon has also saved our IT department time. There is a lot less interaction with the developers. Developers are aware of the information they need to give us to place something into the scheduler. We've set up a template, they send in that information, we get it implemented for them, and they're up and running. We used to ask them to give us two workday weeks to get something implemented for them and, depending on the complexity, that's down to a day or less, at times.

With IT time freed up, we've been able to move forward with other business needs, especially now because of the switchover and the mainframe going away. It has enabled my staff to start studying other aspects of our IT areas.

With the Self Service feature, person-hours have decreased. We still don't use it to its full potential, but it's helped on the development side for testing. It has definitely sped up the developers' testing processes, and it enables them to get things to production a lot quicker. They're happy with that. The Self Service has also reduced calls to our IT department when it comes to testing, for sure. As a result, my staff has a little more time to work on other things, rather than fielding calls left and right from the programmers. That helps a lot.

Now that we can get into the API and we're starting to learn that, it's really nice. 

We're also starting to use its Self Service and Solution Manager. My team in the data center and some of the development team use the Self Service. Developers are using the Self Service for upon-request jobs for their testing. They used to have to go through us to schedule testing and now they can just go on and kick it off all they want. They have also really appreciated that they have access to view and/or submit jobs.

Working with the various APIs has actually allowed us to keep the scheduler, because there were those in our company who were thinking about looking for something else, given that they were considering it to only be a mainframe scheduler. As new options and agents and connectors have come along, that's opened their eyes a little bit more.

It's been a while since we've asked for tweaks. Because we're a little bit of a slower company, they have something out by the time we start checking into, "Hey, can you give us an idea on how this works?" or "This is how we want to use it."

An example is the API. Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth. 

When they initially set up SQL agents, they helped us set up that too.

I have been using the OpCon for 16 to 18 years.

The stability has been very good.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. I've been to a few of their conferences where there are banks that are OpCon customers and they have thousands of jobs that they run, or even hundreds of thousands of jobs. We've got plenty of room to expand.

I'm hoping, with our moving off the mainframe, that we will have a chance to really branch out. Initially, the company just looked at it as the mainframe scheduler, so we weren't really able to ask for additional instances. Hopefully, as we go along, we may be able to grab some of the other options.

We're running on the order of thousands of jobs monthly. Our future usage depends on how well we can get everybody to jump on the bandwagon, but I see it staying at that amount, if not increasing, as we move towards the cloud and other options.

From our dealings with them, I think they've done an excellent job when we're in a crunch. They get more than one person on the phone and we haven't ever had any bad experiences with them. When new levels come out they've helped us. And the marketing guy, Christian, he checks in all the time.

Deployment would not take very long now, with the way they have the install set up.

We usually do a test server to start with, just to make sure everything went well before we do production. This last one took about an hour or two on the test side. We ran into something with updating the database. It was something on our side that the database administrators had locked down, so it wasn't working quite right between when we installed in test and installed in production; they had tightened the permissions down. Other than that, it takes us about an hour to get through what we need done.

My implementation strategy for deploying it for the first time would be to put it to test in our test database, and then grab a few jobs from each type of job we run and see how it works with the test database. I would then check with the developers that everything looks like it ran okay and then we would take a weekend and deploy it to production. Of course, we would do testing there as well. Since it's VM, we just have the VM guys ramp up a new server, so it's always a new install and, if it doesn't work, we can always fall back to the old version and the old server.

For deployment, we usually bring two of us in, and that's it. For maintenance of OpCon, we only have one or two people, as backup. We have operators per shift who actually run it, but for maintenance there are only a couple of people. One of them is me, in my role as a data center manager, and the second individual is part of my staff.

In terms of the number of users of OpCon, the numbers have dropped now that we're moving off of mainframe, but we'll be picking back up. Currently there are about 100 programmers that could possibly have access. We don't have that many yet in Self Service. And there are 12 on our staff that use it, including a couple of admins, a couple of implementation people, and the rest are operators.

When we first had it installed, there was a really great guy who came in, who doesn't work with them anymore. We had some training onsite while he was here. We weren't really involved at that point in time in installing it ourselves. It was always an OpCon representative showing up. Now, it's more the case that we install and get a hold of them if we have any issues.

We've always been on our own with this scheduler, so it's helped out our department and I feel it's helped out the programmers quite a bit. It has automated a lot of things, which should help our IT as a whole, because we haven't had to have the largest staff.

At the same time that I'm trying to keep it in our company, everybody thinks it's very expensive. We haven't looked at other schedulers or what they can do for us, but that's what I'm always told.

Aside from the standard licensing fee, there aren't any other costs that come with it. We have the enterprise option so it's one annual fee for whatever we can do with it. You have to have the enterprise level for the mainframe, and that gives us room to grow.

It's awesome to have the automation and to let it do things for you, but you need to stick with it and really figure out how to optimize it.

I'm still working on trying to explain to others in our organization that when it comes to server reboots and things like that, OpCon can do that for them too. They may not be interested in that as they have their own third-party software. I haven't gotten a lot of them to hop on the bandwagon yet. Our VMware guys are still stuck to their guns. We'll have to find out how much we do go into the cloud or on-prem to see if we can't help them out in those areas.

We don't use OpCon's Vision feature yet. Our company is very conservative, so it's a slow process. Unless you can get a lot of people onboard, it's hard to get things pushed through. I'm hoping others will see how well it interacts with the various types of systems and how it processes the jobs back and forth, through the various versions, and that they'll see a little more use for it. Another aspect is budget, because right now we're trying to move to the cloud and a lot of people are being trained at the moment and having to run legacy, side-by-side, versus new. So there's a money-crunch thing.

It's a good product. They can run almost anything you need to run, as far as I am aware. And the staff is really great to work with. It's a plus on all sides, in my opinion.

We use it a lot for file transfers from SFTP sites down to our network folders, and we also use it for other kicking off processes in our core platforms. We also run some PowerShell scripting through it. It does quite a bit.

We're looking at eventually using it for some Active Directory pieces, but we haven't gotten there yet. 

The automation of processes has taken tasks that would have been done manually by somebody and moved them to a platform without us having to think about them. The time savings in not having to manually do those types of processes on a daily basis means we're much more productive and able to provide front-end staff with better solutions than we were able to before.

It has also reduced human error, and that helps save time for our IT team because there is less time spent having to figure out what somebody might have potentially done wrong. It saves us about a full-time employee's worth of time per week.

And with IT time freed up, our company has been able to move forward with other business needs. It used to mainly be a programmer who was in charge of figuring out the human errors. Having reduced the time needed for that, we've been able to move a full-time programmer into just doing programming, and that has been helpful.

For us, the most valuable feature of the solution is the file transfer piece and being able to automate the moving of files around between our various vendors. It reduces the time involved versus somebody having to individually move the files around. It has reduced what we would have done manually at one point by 98 percent. 

There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like.

We've gotten around that by writing PowerShell scripts that run after the files have been transferred, but it would be very nice if it had just the raw, built-in ability to rename multiple files with a date stamp added to them.

I've been pretty much been able to accomplish everything else with what it provides out-of-the-box.

I've been using OpCon for about two years.

It's very scalable. What we use it for, overall, is probably significantly smaller than some other larger corporate clients do. But in terms of the cost and what we get out of it and the knowledge that if we ever do need to increase the number of jobs that can be run, there is a wide range in what it can handle.

There is definitely room to grow. We currently have about 400 jobs that run per day. When we get closer to month's end, it probably jumps up closer to 600 or 650 jobs that run in a day.

I have used SMA's technical support on occasion, both for issues that have arisen and for general support to help to finish off the creation of complex jobs with their Professional Services team. I've never had an issue with getting a hold of somebody or getting any issues resolved in a very timely manner.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in time and efficiency and freeing up staff to provide better support to our employees and the membership that we serve.

The pricing is very reasonable.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is just the sheer flexibility that these types of systems make possible. They've built a system that gives you a lot of capabilities out-of-the-box, but that also gives you some of those extra pieces where you can bring in outside tools to make it even better.

It provides a lot of power. Even though there is that limitation I mentioned in terms of being able to rename files on multiple downloads at the same time, there is the built-in ability to run scripting as well, whether they are Visual Basic, PowerShell, or Python scripts. It gives you a lot of tools. You can have it do an initial process and then launch one of those scripts to do something that is not inherently built-in.

There are about six of us who utilize it on a daily basis. Most are programmers, but we also have a couple of our service desk guys who work in it too.

We are an in-house Fiserv Premier bank. This solution allows us to automate a lot of the core processing. 

This is outside a bit of the day-to-day. We recently did a branch acquisition of another bank, though not a full bank. With that, we had to convert all of their ACH transactions. It was a very complicated product that we received from our core provider, Fiserv, for some translation programs. It was very cumbersome to run through the process, convert it out, get output files, etc. Without anyone touching it, I was able to automate the full process from pulling in the files from this other bank, converting everything needed, and posting it to our customer's account 24-hours throughout the day.

We run the ACH process around the Fed window about four times a day: 2:00 am, 10:00 am, 2:00 pm, and 7:00 pm. We are not staffed all those hours. If someone were to actually run through all those steps, it would take maybe 15 minutes per each file.  This is if someone were to manually do it. So, that adds up. The main thing is we can let it run at two in the morning without staff.  It of course ran in less than 10 minutes, since it was automated. 

The product allows our full-time employees to be repurposed, not eliminated. We turn ourselves from operators who used do everything to reacting or being proactive. 

We have a night operator whose whole evening was just initiating, running everything, and watching it. My predecessor and I have been doing a staggered approach, taking these tasks out of the night operator's hands and putting them into OpCon. This still gives her the control where she can initiate via the Self Service portal. Now, we're hitting that phase where I can start to let it run on its own. She's become more reactive with the handful of things that she's still doing.

Our night operator loves it. Granted, she is one of those people who is always up for change and improving things. The way that she used to run things in the IBM mainframe was more isolated. She would see the output as a whole: That process A and process B were running, but she didn't actually know the details. With OpCon, she likes to have it up to watch it (not that you have to have someone watch it closely). She uses OpCon because it is easier for her to troubleshoot if something were to come up by seeing where things are at, what step it is on, and observing colors change.

The team members' reaction to the change has all been positive. Everyone has a different feel for it, but everyone sees the positive. I do my best to put a positive spin on it. It's not so much taking anything away from anyone. It's just converting it into OpCon, running it, then determining, "Is intervention needed? Can it run on its own?" 

Anything that is file movement related is awesome. Whether you are outsourced or an on-prem in-house bank (like us), you're not just fully in-house anymore. There are so many different third-parties that you work with now. With the amount of files going back and forth between end users or simply from the core to different vendors, this is the best part about the solution, streamlining and letting it run. Whether that's constantly throughout the day, certain times of the day or month, or a specific 16th day of the month, that's probably the most helpful because there is no operator that you have to wait on. We can just push it through a traditional FTP or SMTP.

It's very helpful, as we can move quite a few files all at the same time from a server level instead of having someone at their workstation downloading a 100 files. E.g., I created a process with our recent branch acquisition that we did early last year, where files were moving between the acquiring bank (us) and the selling bank. I put on our Self Service portal buttons for execution, that said, "As file's become available..." Then, my conversion team could have access without waiting on me to pull in stuff. If they knew that the selling bank put out some large conversion files, they can go out and simply hit a button. It would go out, grab it, and in a matter of minutes, be available to them on our public shared drive versus trying to pull that down via a secure site. 

The solution is what you want out of it. It's not something you can just quickly grab, try, run, and play with. You have to get the knowledge and train yourself. It was easy for me, but I also took the time to throw myself into it. There is a learning curve to a certain extent. You have to learn the rules. There are so many different ways that you can do things in it. If you were to survey five of my peers and me, I'm sure we all work on it differently. There is no one outcome of it. This is not to say that you can't pick it up out-of-the-box, but the way SMA trains you is on their standards of using it. You have to know the concepts of it, the different terms, and how you apply things. If you are using Windows, patch scripts, or mainframe things, it's not always an apples to apples thing. There's a bit of different translation into the product.

There is a current way to help hone in on detail that you are trying to visually show. For example, they have an add-in product (Vision) that we haven't purchased. The way the add-in product works is taking tagged data and categorizing it into a tiled report view.  It's actually live and constantly updating.  I like the visual / workflow side of OpCon, since I take the time to make it viewable from a visual standpoint.  Right now, I have a hard time if I want to translate what I'm doing to show folks who aren't users an overview. While I know SMA has an option for this, it's just more data. How can I show everything without my CIO needing to login to OpCcon and having me showing him the flowchart? A different way to report visually for other people to see processes would be my only improvement.

I would like to see more connectors to other various things. However, this has more to do with other vendors holding back with their applications.

Custom Templates for common jobs.  I do a lot of copying and pasting for jobs, that it would be easier if I could have my own templates.  Also Custom Documentation, that could flood to multiple job types vs. similar documentation on the same job being typed up.

A little over two years now.

The stability is good. The only time we've ever had an issue was simply due to internal system issues. For example, we recently had something where our SQL Server had connection issue.  All systems were down. I've never (knock on wood) had an issue with any of the agents or application itself. 

70 percent of our manual day-to-day processes have been automated by OpCon. 30 percent of the overall daily and nightly processing take more time to do. Taking individual processes that were standalone and putting them in was one thing, but then taking and tying them altogether is that 30 percent. Basically, if you're taking the human element out of it, you have to build it so you are comfortable with it and can rely on it. That is where the time comes into it. I'm very thorough. I go through it and make sure I can cover common outcomes. For example, "Is this going to make sense? What if this happened?" You build in all this stuff so the way you rely on it, you do not have to worry about it. Whereas, with that human element, they know what to do and where to jump around. Someone who is seasoned will know how to make decisions along the way, and you have to sort of program some of that in. This doesn't apply for everything, but in some cases, it does. 

To get it expanded out to that additional 30 percent, it will probably be done in the next year with everything that is going on. Though, I would love to have it done in the next couple of months, but when an acquisition comes in, that is the priority.

I like going out throughout the entire bank and finding behind the scenes processes that other people are doing which we could help with. If it's just file movements, taking data that they are manipulating, moving things around, or simply just triggering a process, that is the fun side of my job. To sit down, look at a process, take it, and if I can, free up a quarter of someone's day by automating it, that is fun. Working with other departments in the bank, getting to learn a bit about their areas is a fun learning opportunity. Their tasks don't have to be automated either, it can be streamlined by giving them Self Service buttons. It is about making the task more efficient for the user.

The more things that are new and introduced in our environment, they go right into OpCon. It's more understanding, "How do does OpCon help us do that?" and, "Is there a tie in for it?" 

The scalability is huge.

I am the primary who maintains it. There are also two other individuals who are in a similar role to me: my immediate supervisor and another colleague. They both have access. My supervisor just relies on me to train him as needed, then the other colleague is able to jump in and interpret a lot of my stuff. However, we're divided. He's in charge of this and I am in charge of that, but we do cross-train. Beyond that, there is a night operator. She is Tier 1 support. She can help react to job failures and work on smaller things. If it's above her, then she defers it to me.

There are three different departments who use the Self Service besides us. They don't use the automation side of it, though. They use the Self Service to run a process or generate something. This is mainly our accounting department. They are very tied into it, but they don't see the automation side of it. They just know that they need to push a button and things happens. Also, our item processing area and the conversion team use the Self Service.

You have to put the effort into the training and learning. SMA is big on free training. They do monthly training down at their headquarter office. As long as you own the product, the only thing you pay for is your employees' travel expenses. The training is free. They are willing to train people and give them the knowledge. That way, you are equipped to do what you need to do. Then, obviously, they're available for support and assistance from there, but it's only for what you need above and beyond on that.

The technical support is good. I don't use it that often because they're very good about training you. It's more if I have a question, or something small comes up, then I can open a case. Otherwise, I have what they call blocks of hours. E.g., if I'm scratching my head or trying to think through how do I want to develop something? Then, I tap into my block of hours with a dedicated specialist who is assigned for our bank. It all depends on what's going on. If it's something brand new or different that I'm doing, then I'll touch base with them and run it by them. Otherwise, the block of support hours is mainly for upgrades and stuff like that.

Before, we did use file transfer stuff, which was a bunch of "if" and "then" statements. We were executing with that. But, that was very limited to what the application could do. Whereas, OpCon is a whole different game changer of what you can do from an enterprise level.

As a bank, there used to be a lot of full-time employees who would just run checklists all day doing manual steps. Whereas, with this product, we can automate the full day to a certain extent. There is still some intervention or items that are more user driven. Instead of our operators running the day-to-day, they just initiate certain phases of it. Then, we rely heavily on the Self Service portal and building out that stuff for our operators to use. They very much enjoy that.

Prior to OpCon, the organization used a lot of scripting in its own server. A big selling point for OpCon was its automation on an enterprise level. Converting everything to OpCon moved everything to one place. 

The nice thing at Frandsen is management sees the need and results of all the automation. They took an investment with my predecessor buying the product and we continue to see great results.

I was not here for this bank's initial setup, but I was previously involved with the setup of OpCon at another bank.

I've worked at five different banks and each bank operates differently in the way they have things locked down or how things are completed for projects. The setup was pretty straightforward. You just get the database and application up and running, and then, the mainframe agent up and running, which is especially important for a bank,. 

The database and mainframe side of the setup are always sort of tricky no matter what application you're working with, but it was pretty straightforward. It was up and running, then we trained and helped start to set up things for how we wanted to move forward. So, I thought it was good.

The deployment took about a day, but the bank that I worked for was very locked down when, e.g., trying to get things to open up and the right resources from SQL DBA. But, the actual application on the mainframe side, that's a no-brainer and seamless.

It took a couple weeks to deploy our first process because you have to test and get comfortable with it. We only automated a couple core things at the time because the main focus of getting OpCon in the bank was that they wanted a very cumbersome process streamlined.

At my current organization, I know that deploying the first process took them a couple months because they wanted to a lot of testing before they implemented it.

My implementation strategy is going for the easy stuff first to get a feel for it. Then, I can quickly turn things around on a small scale. Afterwards, I will graduate to that larger scale. With each implementation that I did, I evolved myself and how I wanted to do it, what I learned, etc. Because the other bank versus this bank were on two different mainframes, I had to translate a bit and think through things differently. I like doing the smaller things first, but now that I'm two and a half years into it overall, I can chew off the big things right away too. I'm not afraid of them, and they're fun, exciting, and more thrilling than the easier stuff.

We deployed it ourselves.

To deploy OpCon, you just need someone who is fluent on SQL DBA. SMA tells you there are two different approaches: If you want a whole group of people to help or if you want a train the trainer approach. 

When you take the human element out of it, someone is not interrupted nor are they delayed. They are not hung up on another thing that they are already working on. That's the nice thing about OpCon. We have the time to react to things and are not holding things up. So, if you add up those 10 minutes 15 times a day for our processes, that's quite a bit, especially for the repetitive stuff. It's easy to automate it, then it just does what you need it to do. It just runs. 

This has overall reduced our data processing times in our environment by approximately 50 percent. The nice thing is we can spread work out. If you need to have employees onsite for the ACH processing, someone has to come in early, then probably stay a bit late on that end of the shift. Now, we're spreading it out. With the ACH, if you're doing it with just an employee, then you're only doing it during working hours. Now, we can run things over a 24-hour span, spreading it out. 

There are different add-ons, like the Self Service or Vision model. It all depends on what agents you have in your environment. We have a mainframe and Windows, and while I think SQL is free, SAP or anything beyond that has different connectors that might need a license.

At my previous company, we did not look at other solutions because we knew SMA was the most well-known within our industry. 

At my current bank, they did look at HelpSystems. It was between HelpSystems or SMA OpCon. Ultimately, they went with OpCon.

Take your time. Think about it. Once you start to create different concepts and learn them, come up with naming conventions, your own rules, and go by them. This way, everything is similar. It's easier for me to train my operators if it all looks the same.

Ease of use depends on how you set it up. It is there, but it all depends on what you want to do with it and how much time you want to put into it. If you just want to move some files around and keep things looking the same, it is easy to use. But, if you want to do some tricky stuff, you have to put some time into it, making it look clean and understandable for you and everyone else. You also have to document a bit, but that is sort of case by case.

I come up with rules, trends, conventions, prefixes, etc. that I'll find sometimes six months later. Then, I'm like, "Ah, I like this a lot better. I'm going to set this as my own standard going forward." I am evolving myself and constantly making it easier for me to use.

The solution expands my creativity when looking at processes.

I would rate the solution a nine (out of 10). It is in its own league. OpCon makes my job so much easier. SMA is a great company and partner.

We use OpCon to run a multi-institution environment. It allows us to keep tabs on all our customers at the same time. It's convenient in that way. If anything fails, we don't have to have our operations staff log into a credit union, or a specific institution, to find out what is going on. OpCon will tell us what is going on in each one. Therefore, our operators are free to continue on with their manual work and not worry about what is supposed to be automated. They only look into an institution when something fails. An operator can't monitor 10 screens at the same time and see everything that is going on. OpCon allows us not to need to do that.

We are using OpCon's service off the cloud (SaaS).

Before we put OpCon in, we had some institutions which we tried to keep running in the same way, as we have standardizations. However, there are certain times of the month, such as the end of month, where some of the institutions want to run special jobs at a certain time during the process. When we run them manually, sometimes those jobs would be forgotten. The operators would forget to run them or run them too late. With OpCon, once they are in the schedule, the operators no longer have to think about it. Once we put it in, it is done every month at the same time, then our customers are happy because they are not missing jobs that they wanted run at specific times.

It makes everything simpler. Once OpCon is in, it just repeats day after day. We don't have to worry about whether a process will be missed. It will run every single time. We are not dropping jobs or missing stuff. When you have multiple institutions, it's very easy to miss jobs. You get on a roll, start doing things, and then forget somebody. With OpCon, everything is done.

It runs faster, especially with automation, because one job runs after another. It has to be much quicker, though your speed will depend on your system. E.g., jobs that used to take us a month are getting done by six in the morning, freeing up the morning schedule. End of the month used to take us a long time to run. We would be bumping up against the next day's window. Now, we don't have any issues with that.

OpCon mostly allows employees to concentrate on manual jobs, or extraordinary jobs which come along. They can concentrate on other things, not worrying about the day-to-day process. So, it frees up their time to concentrate on their other work, instead of actually running the system. OpCon frees things up where we don't have to hire an extra person when someone is gone. A backup isn't needed; one person can do the whole thing.

Employees love it, because they were overburdened before. They will not be replaced in their jobs because of all the manual processing and everything else that they are doing. We are not letting anybody go because of OpCon.

The daily scheduler is its most valuable feature. We don't really use too many of the other features of it for our environment. As a data center, we can't use features specific to an in-house system, like the Self Service. We're not responsible for those features and just use the scheduler.

There is room for improvement needed around setting up the calendars and frequencies. I would like more flexibility in what jobs run. Sometimes, with frequencies, I can't find what I want to without putting a little more labor into it.

Since 2007.

Stability has been great over the years. We had a bit of a hiccup this last year with it. We are still trying to work through that. Prior to the latest release, it was great. We didn't have any problems with it. We have had a little issue going on now that we need to handle.

My boss and a couple other people are involved in OpCon's administration. We have a couple other employees who work with it too. 

I don't see any limitations with the scalability. We haven't hit anything that is stopping us from what we need to do. 

We have automated 7,000 to 8,000 jobs since deploying OpCon. We have a lot of jobs since there are up to 35 institutions with us. 80 percent of our manual processing has been automated by OpCon. We would like to automate more but the customer won't let us. They want to control the process. They may want to do something first, like check some accounts. They just don't want to let go of it and want us to run it prematurely. Therefore, we rely on them to do some things before we can run their process, but most of the main part is done.

We will be working on trying to automate some of these manual processes. We will probably end up working with the customers, trying to calm them and telling them that we can automate it. They don't have to babysit their process. It's an educational thing. We are in the process of moving our entire data center, so it's on the back-burner right now. We have other things going on so we can't devote time to doing this.

There are four employees who can work on the OpCon solution. OpCon has worked for us as a solution, allowing us to grow. We can have 50 credit unions and still be able to operate with the same staff. It gives us that flexibility.

Their support is good. They will spend as much time with you as you need. E.g., If you need help setting something up, they'll help you get it going. They usually handle it right there unless they have to do research themselves with some of the complex stuff. This usually what I end up having: complex items nobody else has. They end up having to get a Level 2 involved or someone who understands what's going on, but they get back to you no matter what. 

If you have a down system, they will stay on the line with you until your system is back up. No matter how long it takes. I once had them on the phone for six to seven hours. It was a complex situation, and they stayed on the line. This was their standard support. This is what they do. Even if it is not them, they will stay with you to try and get OpCon back up.

It was proprietary scheduler for our operating system. We had another job scheduler that couldn't quite handle the flexibility we needed. It wasn't as sophisticated as what we needed it to do. The frequencies and dependencies were lacking. The jobs that you could set up had to be Windows jobs, so there were a lot of things that we couldn't do. It required a lot of manual tasks. There were interruptions and interventions, so we couldn't get anything done. We didn't stay with it long, as it didn't take us that long to figure out we could not be successful without OpCon. 

The previous solution was cumbersome to work with. OpCon took us about two weeks to install and deploy.

I wasn't quite involved with the installation piece of it. We wrote a Unix script for it.

It took us minutes to automate our first process.

It's very flexible and pretty easy to use. You can go into complex modes if you have to for complex jobs. It depends on what's needed. Most of it is very simple to use and setup. You do need a logical brain to understand what you are doing in some way as you can get lost in some of the features and options, like setting up dependencies and thresholds. If you're not aware of what's really happening, you can mess those up pretty badly. However, as long as you know what you're doing, it's pretty easy.

We only worked with SMA who does most of the deployment. They train you. After that, you do what you need to do. If you ever get stuck, you can just call them up. They will walk you through it and help you out.

It takes one or (at most) two staff members to deploy it. 

It has freed up hours for our five operators working on 35 systems doing the monitoring. They don't have to monitor what's going on anymore. They just have to watch their jobs, then react to those.

We are not committing errors all the time, and that's huge. When you miss reports every month, customers get mad after awhile. There is a lot of stress on us from the customers knowing that every day they need to get their requests which shouldn't need follow up. That type of perfection from OpCon is less aggravation for everybody. We are not wasting our time running jobs again because it wasn't right the first time. If customers are going to leave, it won't be because of this solution. It will be because of other reasons, and that is big.

Cost depends on your environment. We are doing stuff now with failover and recovery, so we have boosted our costs. 

Compared to AutoSys and ISE, OpCon was a lot cheaper to put in. AutoSys is hundreds of thousands of dollars to just install it because they don't have an interface into our system. You have to teach them what your system does. 

It is better than some of the other systems that we have looked at. It can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want to make it. It's up to you and what you need to do with it.

We have looked AutoSys and Cisco ISE. AutoSys seems a bit more old school in the way they handle things. They are very limited and can't allow the flexibility that we need to run our company. They couldn't allow customers access. Right now, we have customers who can run their own jobs (OpCon Self Service). Therefore, our customers can run jobs that we set up for them. 

With our manual processes that we haven't got to, those are forwarded to be handled in the Self Service funnel. We can set them up and customers can get the job when they're ready. This is where we will be going next to get around the babysitting part. We are looking to implement this feature within the next year. 

Pick the right scheduling tool. If you pick the right one, your jobs are easy. If you choose the wrong one, you can get in a lot more trouble signing up your jobs. OpCon gives you more flexibility with the way that you can do things. Its only your imagination that limits you. If you can write programs or code, that's even better.

I would recommend OpCon to almost anyone. Look at it and learn it. Compare it to the competition. It's great for multiple institutions.

They have everything you really want and would expect schedules to be able to do.

You should have some type of logical background. If you're just a plain operator, you might have trouble trying to understand the concepts. You have to remember which institution you're working with when you start setting up jobs so they aren't operating on the wrong system. So, it's just understanding what you're doing.

I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10). It works for us on a multi-solution data center. It gives you a lot more options and does a lot more things, as an in house system. 

We use OpCon for scheduling production tasks in many kinds of environments. The main ones are located on i5 i-series, OS/400. But we also use it in our Windows environment and on SAP. It handles around 10,000 jobs a day for us.

A lot of the jobs that are now in OpCon were already automated, but they were on other platforms and systems. For example, the world production batch that is running on OS/400 was automated on OS/400, with OS/400 programs. We moved the automation of the system to OpCon. We improved some of the parts, but we kept the main core of the production plan.

Using OpCon has brought us better visibility into our world production tasks. This is the essential point in my opinion, because when a lot of jobs are scheduled on different platforms, without any interaction possible between them, it's very difficult to manage things. With OpCon we avoid this difficulty. It's very visual.

Many of the tasks of one of our ERP systems, the invoicing and so on, are managed by OpCon. All the BI jobs that run on a daily, weekly, or a monthly basis, launch from OpCon and it gives us the capability of doing very clear follow-up.

We are a small company so we don't think about it in terms of how much it has freed up employees. But it has helped us to share responsibilities with a third-party in charge of the 24/7 monitoring of our system. In that way it has saved time, at least for our infrastructure team.

In addition, because we can manage each type of trigger differently, that alone helps save time.

• It's very scalable.
• We have experienced very few lags or issues, so it's very stable. 
• It's a very versatile product. You can schedule everything you want in many kinds of environments. We have never faced a limitation in this regard.
• The support is very responsive as well. They have replied to all our questions on time.

The SQL part could be improved. We sometimes have a large number of jobs on the SQL Server and we can experience a very light lag in job starts. The lag can be a few seconds. It's never more than one minute, but sometimes we can experience some lags. Maybe that could be improved.

We have been using OpCon for about eight years.

We have a very good relationship with them. We have known them now for a lot of years and they always reply to our problems and questions. They always have a solution, although we really haven't had a lot of problems with the product.

Our system analysts requested it, so it was easy for us. They are happy now to have it available and to use it on a daily basis.

We had the help of the Professional Services of SMA, but the setup was not difficult. The technical installation did not take more than one day.

Our strategy was to merge all activity, from everywhere in our environment, and to have everything running from the same place.

Our ROI is that it has saved about 10 percent of one FTE.

The cost is based on the number of jobs. You pay for what you use. For us, the support cost is between €20,000 and €30,000 per year. It's too expensive.

There are no additional costs.

There were only two solutions on the short-list. We did a lot of research on the internet about other companies, but a proof of concept was only done with Dollar Universe and OpCon. We choose OpCon because Dollar Universe had some issues regarding OS/400 at the time we tested it. That was close to 10 years ago, so maybe it's better now.

In terms of the extent of use of OpCon, I could see us using it for other stuff, but for the moment it's complete, as far as our production plans go. We don't have new directions or a new environment planned. Maybe, if it is possible to schedule things in the cloud, for example, in the future, we would do so. I don't think it's possible now to schedule things in the cloud, like Office for 365.

The ease of use depends on the person who is using it. For me, I learned it very fast. I found the product very user-friendly because it has the ability to add jobs for OS/400, and not all products have that kind of functionality. And that's true for SAP, for example. It's relatively simple to use if you have time to manage it on a daily basis. If not, it's very difficult to understand how it works.

Although it is possible with the product, at this time we haven't given access to the solution to all our people, those who are on the functional teams. For now, it's restricted to the technical team only. There are 10 or 12 people using it out of 2,200 employees. The majority of the users are system administrators.

We manage all the tasks run on the IBM.

We have automated 95 percent of our processes since deploying this solution. 

We use it to process our entire nightly update when we are running our updates for our DDA savings, CDs, and loans. It runs everything in order. We set up dependencies, where one job can't start before another. So, it's good for making sure that things stay in a good order and run the way that they should run.

The solution has freed up at least one employee to do more meaningful work as a result of the automation. We only have five FTEs in our group.

We can view what is going on with the system. We have better control of when things are run and how they are running their statuses. It just gives us a complete overview.

It allows us to organize everything into a process flow throughout the day for our different tasks that we have to run. So, it keeps everything organized. It is easy to monitor and adjust, if we need to.

Automating tasks is pretty easy for the most part, though you can get more complicated. For most of our tasks, it's relatively simple.

There is a learning curve. We had to go to class, learn, and take their training classes, then come back. We got assistance from OpCon as well to convert our processes on the Unisys machine over to the IBM. Now, when we add new products, it's pretty straightforward to write a new process and schedule it, then run it at a set time of day.

I have been using this solution since December 2016.

The stability is really good. It stays up. It is functional 99.9 percent of the time. Usually if there is an issue, it's on the server back-end or the SQL database.

OpCon requires three people for deployment and maintenance.

We run with a very slim staff for our group. We only have one employee, at most times, who monitors and oversees things.

Its scalability is pretty good. We are a lot smaller shop than a lot of OpCon clients, but we don't have any problems adding additional jobs. It doesn't seem to slow anything down.

There are two or three main users who write processes or jobs. I manage the computer operations and my assistant manager will write some schedules. We have another IT person whose function is to try and make automation processes better throughout the company, and he uses OpCon. It also has a Self Service feature where you can push out particular jobs to users throughout the company. E.g., if they want to start a job, they can do it on their own without contacting the IT department. So, it's a web GUI front-end. They have a button if they want to create a certain report, then they can at their workstation.

The technical support is good. They will work with us and get issues resolved pretty quickly.

We were on a Unisys machine and used their workflow language to write automated jobs. But, it's sort of apples and oranges comparing the solutions, as they are pretty different.

We had a process in place before we switched to the IBM and were on Unisys, when we used to be on a different tool. It wasn't as consistent and would get things out of order, not running properly. Switching to OpCon, employees have found other things to fix their time on.

It is a lot easier to schedule things with OpCon than with our previous solution. We have jobs which run every 15 or 30 minutes, and it's easy to schedule those. You can use it to check and make sure other things are not running at the same time. 

OpCon was much easier and quicker to set up than our previous solution because we could set up schedules and copy them over, using them for other functions easily. Overall, it was 50 percent easier.

We were still running things on the Unisys system on a daily basis. So, we would copy our files over to the OpCon system, then run them through a simulated update just like we had on Unisys and compare the results.

We did use some of the OpCon consultants for the deployment. The main consultant who helped us was George Loose.

It took three to four months to get everything fully converted over. That is partially on the people who were in charge of doing the switch over. They were also in charge of running the daily operations on the Unisys machine and their time was not fully vested in the switch over.

In reference to the deployment being loaded, I wrote a process the week after I came back from the class. It didn't take too long.

1. We are running with less full-time employees. 
2. The daily processes are running smoothly. We don't find a lot of issues, so we have more time to devote to other tasks other than just keeping the system going.

This solution is slightly more expensive than our previous solution. Right now, we are paying about $40,000 a year. However, we think it's well worth the cost to keep things automated, reducing our staff.

The decision was made before I moved into this department.

It can get as complicated as we want to try to get it. We use it pretty extensively to run things on other machines and processes on other servers other than the IBM. So, we use the solution pretty well. It's fairly easy to use and straightforward.

Our data processing times are dependent on the IBM running. We switched to IBM at the same time that we went to OpCon.

OpCon is used fully on the IBM. We may increase usage in the future, as we always look for more automation opportunities as they come up. However, right now, it's just as we add new products or applications, then we'll add new schedules for those.

I would give the solution a 10 (out of 10).

We are using it for automating our core processing system.

Probably 65 to 70 percent of our operations have been automated by OpCon.

It currently runs all of our primary operations throughout the day, as far as we schedule everything through it. Our plan is to continue to automate the remainder of our processes, which are not automated, so we can get as much automated as possible.

The solution has streamlined operations. A good example is our ACH processing. We used to have somebody come in early in the morning to do all of our ACH processing (our incoming items processing). They had to be here early and run all the jobs manually. They did all the processing by hand. Now, it runs automatically at three in the morning. When they come in, all the work's done. They come in later and don't have as much work. It's reduced our workload drastically.

The solution has freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. They don't have to sit there and wait for files to download. They don't have to stare at the screen while a process is running. It all runs in the background, doing it for them. When it's ready and prompts them, they know that they're ready to go on with the next part of their job which requires them to do something. A lot of employees love OpCon because it was a very mundane, cumbersome task to sit there and download files, waiting while it was processing. It was not exactly fun and exciting.

It's not so much that we have freed up an employee or gotten rid of an employee. It's just that they have more time to take on more duties. We haven't really had to add employees.

The overall ability to automate all our processing is the most valuable feature so we don't have one scheduler doing this, while another scheduler is doing that, and somebody doing this manually. We are able to automate our processing completely.

About a year and a half.

It's rock solid. We've never had any issues with it.

There are four of us who do the deployment and maintenance of the system, but that is not full-time. We work on all the systems.

We are planning on upgrading to version 19 in January.

We've yet to exceed its scalability. OpCon would appear to be able to handle a lot more than what we're doing. We are continuously finding new ways to utilize it.

We have four people in the IT department who are the primary management users of OpCon. However, we also utilize the Self Service portion of it, and the majority of the organization has access to that. There are 20 to 25 users of the Self Service, which allows them to execute jobs without being in the scheduling software. It's actually a web based portal where they can go, and there is a button there they can press to execute whatever job they're trying to execute.

We have had really good results from the technical support. Every time we needed anything, they have been right there. They usually have a really good answer or solution to the problem.

We find it very simple and easy to use. We had a previous product that was a scheduler which was overly complex and extremely difficult to use. We're very pleased with this one.

When we changed our core systems, the new core system supported OpCon. It didn't support our older product. As part of our conversion, we changed over to the OpCon product. This was one of the better things that we did.

One of the things which has really helped us is the time it takes us to build jobs and automate things. For example, if we decide we are going to go out and do a new process tomorrow, our previous system would take a week to 10 days, then require assistance from a third-party support company to get it to work. With this solution, we can do it in a matter of minutes without additional support.

I am coming off of a system that was so cumbersome to use that we couldn't even get it to do basic things without having to involve support all the time. Whereas, we've had to involve support very little with OpCon.

OpCon overcomes limitations of our previous automation tool. Our previous tool didn't work well with anything other than the particular core system that we have. For example, it didn't work well with Microsoft Servers, moving files around, and doing things like file transfers. Whereas, this system does that very well.

The initial setup was fairly complex, but we had great support from OpCon. They came onsite and helped us set everything up. From that aspect, it was very easy because we had them here helping us and working through all the issues. Once we went live with it, they were available again to help us make sure everything was working okay, and that moving forward, everything stayed working.

The deployment of OpCon took about three to four weeks. This deployment was tremendously faster than our previous automation tool, which took almost a year to get in place completely. Even then, we still struggled with issues (with our previous solution).

We did the deployment of the solution at the same time that we were setting up processes and automating it. We went live with OpCon about two months after we'd finished the implementation.

We were in the process of converting, not just our scheduler, but all of our core systems at the same time. So, we were doing everything at once. Our plan and schedule was to get it to work as fast as possible, then move onto the next thing that we had to get working.

It was internal on our part, but staff from SMA came out to help us set it up. They were actually onsite. We sent a person back to their facility for training. Then, after that training was complete, they then came back and helped us complete the onsite part of the installation and configuration.

It has reduced our processing times.

The total cost of ownership is about the same to our previous product. The costs are relatively similar.

The purchasing price was in the $30,000 or $40,000 range, but I don't remember how much of that was licensing or installation and how it was broken out.

We looked at a couple of different solutions. We looked at keeping the product that we had. We look at OpCon. We looked at another solution, but weren't impressed with it at all. It came down to OpCon or trying to figure out if we could interface our existing product with the current system that we had. We determined that wasn't going to be feasible, so we decided to change over to OpCon completely.

One of the problems that we ran into with our existing system, and why we were looking, was the overall technical support. It was very poor. It was a foreign product from Germany, and their technical support was not particularly strong.

Make sure that it fits well with your environment. Understand that it's not simply a single product automation tool. It can automate everything.

We were not utilizing automation as fully as we could. Once we got on the OpCon product, it really made a huge difference in that.

Because there is always room for improvement, I would give it a nine (out of 10).

Primarily, it is used for automation of our daily processing with our core system, Symitar. There are the jobs that we run every day. We also have weekly and monthly jobs setup. These jobs have to do with different departments or reports run on specific days of the week or month. 

We process all of our ACHs and shared draft or check processing in OpCon. Also, VISA credit card processing is all done through OpCon.

We are running anywhere between 400 to 500 jobs a day, on average.

The biggest benefit, as a department, is it has allowed us to move away our focus from manually processing all daily processes with our ACH and shared drafts, reports, etc. It's allowed us the opportunity to work on different projects and upgrades within our organization. It's given us time back from needing to have someone onsite manually processing everything from 6:00 am until 10:00 pm at night.

We are about 92 percent automated right now.

It has streamlined operations, specifically with the timing of our processes. We don't have to worry about if things are going to run at a certain time. The automation allows us to say, "Okay, we want this to run at this time, and this to not run until that is done." So, it has really streamlined the accuracy and timeline of when jobs run throughout the day.

Employees have been very positive, as far as the changes in their tasks are concerned. For example, our payment services and accounting department use Self Service. This has helped them from their old manual process of taking anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes for a job started to a simple click, then the job is done. So, they have been very excited to not have to go through such a rigorous process just to run one step.

The most valuable process that we use is just the basic automation with the use of Enterprise Manager, which is their user interface. We also use a bit of their Self Service product, but not as much as we want to. Our primary feature is just the Enterprise Manager, which is essentially their basic version. This feature allows us to create, modify, and test different automation processes. It also allows us to be notified in the case of jobs failing to finish, or if for some reason the job doesn't finish in time. It can tell us that information as well, but it gives us a good overall view of OpCon processes and where we are at for the day.

I would definitely rank basic ease of use as very high. It is very user-friendly. There are some processes and functions which are a little more advanced. Overall, it's something that is very user-friendly, as they have designed it to be that way.

I don't think there's a change that needs to be made other than little minor bug fixes here and there.

There are limitations to this product and certain things that it just can't do. It does not have the ability to interact with third-parties via the web/Internet. We have certain processes where we have to interact with a third-party on a website, and unfortunately OpCon just cannot do that.

We have been using OpCon for 11 years.

The stability is amazing. Because everything is on-prem, we control the network environment from OpCon to other servers within our networking environment. As far as the product goes, there has only been one time in the 11 years that we've been using it when the product has gone down. It was due to our networking going down, so it wasn't even the product. It was an internal issue.

Deployment and maintenance really only needs one person. OpCon is that user-friendly. With the right support, one person should be able to build, maintain, and administrate it. This is actually my primary role.

Our department isn't very big. As far as people that this would specifically affect, we only have about four employees. As far as overall in the organization, it has really helped out a lot with our accounting, payment services, and card services departments. Including those departments, we are looking at 45 to 50 employees that OpCon has affected as far as automating their processes.

Its users are primarily in our IT department. We have five in our IT department, but then we also have our payment service and accounting departments who use the Self Service feature. We have about 25 actual users that have hands-on contact with OpCon. Most of those are with the Self Service. Internally, with IT and the Enterprise Manager solution, there are only about five of us who really touch that part of the product.

We are not one of their bigger clients, but OpCon definitely has the opportunity to grow. We have increased substantially from when we first started. We were only running about 200 jobs a month, and now, we are running anywhere from 400 to 500 jobs a day. The allotment for growth is there. We have just gone to enterprise licensing, which allows us to install the agent anywhere on different servers. We are just getting ready to install it on another four or five machines. The scalability is definitely there. With our program or agreements, we have that ability to grow exponentially.

They are absolutely fantastic. Since I've been the primary administrator, I've worked with OpCon support multiple times. Every single time I've worked them, I've not had a bad experience. They've been able to resolve any type of situation that I may have or help with any technical assistance needs. They have been very consistent. Even with changes of support reps there, it's still been very consistent as far as the quality of support that I've received.

OpCon was our first workload automation tool.

The initial setup was quite complex. Because we have been on it for quite some time, the process to initially establish and build OpCon was substantially different than it is now. Now, if we were a new customer going onto OpCon, the process would be much simpler.

We weren't familiar a lot with the solution at the time of the initial setup. Also, it was more of a scripted program when we initially installed it. Whereas, now, even though the scripting is still there, the process of installing and upgrading is much simpler even for an initial install. A few years back, we upgraded from our really old version to a newer version. The upgrade only took a couple of hours. The initial install was two weeks of hands-on writing jobs, scripting jobs, and doing all of that. Now that they've built job functions into the program, a lot of that scripting isn't required. It's already built in.

Our first processes were automated during the initial install, but we were extremely limited at that point. We only automated maybe five percent of our daily processes. As far as regular implementation and automation of those processes, we really started getting into that and getting stuff active from a testing environment within a month or two. After a couple of months, I was familiar enough with the product to where I could start just going in and building automation. To get comfortable with the product, it took about two months.

As far as implementation strategy overall, after the initial install, we really tried to focus on the standard daily processing, such as ACHs and share drafts/checks. From there, we expanded into daily reports running for different departments. Now, we are even to the point where all of our credit card processes are automated. This is an ongoing strategy in which we try to automate as much as possible to alleviate the need for manual processing. The manual processing of files, or even file transfers, is a really big thing that we've been doing a lot recently, e.g., uploading and downloading files from third-party vendors.

Their consultant came onsite and performed the install. We did an initial training on it as well.

We have absolutely seen ROI. It has allowed more time for our staff to work on projects which affect the organization on a greater level than just daily processing. This has allowed us to expand our base. It has really helped out with that.

As far as data processing in the manual entry, we are saving overall two hours a day. This would be instead of manually going eight hours. Therefore, it has saved about 25 percent of data processing time.

Annually, we pay $29,000. This is for a blanket policy that covers everything, like licensing and support. 

If we choose to purchase consulting hours, that is an additional cost. However, we've been lucky enough that we've not used all of our allotted consulting hours. Therefore, that is not something that we have had to purchase a lot of. The last time that we purchased consulting hours was roughly two years ago. We purchased a block of 10 for $2,500. It was $250 per hour.

It's definitely worth the cost. It will help with your time management. It helps take the human error out of some of the day-to-day or mundane things, such as processes that have to be done manually. It gives you peace of mind to know that something that you scheduled will run, and if for any reason it doesn't, you have the support to help get you back on track and troubleshoot any issues.

There is not a whole lot that needs to be changed with the program. I think it's a fantastic program. I wish that we, as an organization, were utilizing it more to its full functionality. Otherwise, their functionality and processing are fantastic. Overall, it's a great product and doesn't need to change.

The biggest lesson that I've learned from using it is to not underestimate it. They have recently changed their slogan to, "Yes, that's possible." That's one of the things that I've really learned and have accepted with this program. There have been multiple times where I was quite resistant to what it could do. It opened my eyes to how powerful it is and what it really can do.

I would rate OpCon as a nine (out of 10). Nothing is perfect, but it's as close to it as you can get.