OpCon Reviews

The primary use was to automate and schedule batch processes for a banking core system. As OpCon is more capable than our previous job scheduler, we have automated more jobs. 

We quickly found it was capable of doing much more, and expanded the uses. As the ability to schedule processes is so flexible, we now use that to start SQL agent jobs, SFTP processes, file transfers, and backups. 

We also have automated daily processing on a loan servicing system as well, which lets is run batch processes during low usage times overnight without having staff scheduled for those times.

The biggest change was having a robust way to schedule critical processes. Once it was set up, things just worked. Input errors were eliminated and we can quickly see the status of jobs, with instant error reporting in case we have an issue. We were able to automate processes and increase productivity so staff could focus on more complex tasks and project work that move the organization forward. That, and the peace of mind of knowing things run on time, are the biggest improvements for the organization.

Reliability is always important, and the reliability of the system is outstanding. The ability to link processes, have dependencies, and monitor things like file arrival has let us automate some fairly complex processes that previously involved a lot of user time.   

Being able to do this, and present it to staff as a self-service button that takes one click to submit was a big win. We have a large number of files, from multiple vendors, that must be accessed through FTP, and being able to get these files, unencrypted, and process for reporting or ETL processes overnight has streamlined our mornings and lets us deliver reports much earlier than we would otherwise.

We don't have a lot of asks, and the limitations are typically in deficiencies of the APIs or interfaces on other proprietary systems. OpCon would let us, but some vendors don't have that attitude. 

A way to select multiple jobs in the UI for a quick change or to hold, release, et cetera, would be nice. For example, I was testing a process where after a job finished, a multi-instance job for splitting out 12 report runs. When I made my adjustment to re-run, I had to click on each job separately to restart. It was time-consuming.

I've used the solution for about 5 years.

The solution is very stable. We have had no outages that I recall.

It is highly scalable. We can't imagine pushing against any limits.

We rarely contact support. When we have had to, its typically a very fast single call resolution. 

We had a different product, and it was limited. OpCon was less expensive and did more.

The initial setup was straightforward and the learning curve was that after a few days building things in our test environment we rapidly moved jobs to live.

We had an OpCon person on site, and the experience was very helpful.

The ROI is hard to quantify as it is so much a part of what we do, however, it does the equivalent work of a few staff members, for much less than the cost of one person.

We found it was a better value than our other option. I'd advise users to ask a lot of questions when setting up as chances are there is a way to do it. Having a lot of examples of processes was useful in expanding. We could copy a job, modify it, and be off and running. 

We compared this solution to our previous product ISE Enterprise Scheduler and spoke with other Opcon users.

It always works and we rarely need support.

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

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

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

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

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

It schedules tasks.

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using OpCon since 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use JHA SYMITAR Episys (Currently running through EASE). Our Episys server is now hosted at Symitar and they run most of our OpCon schedules, and we run a version of OpCon in-house and connect to the Episys server at Symitar through OpCon "Ease Connector". We've used Episys Batch/On-Demand in-house job scheduling (2014-2019) and Episys Batch/On-Demand Ease Connector job scheduling (2019-present). We also use OpCon to schedule non-related Episys jobs, such as file transfers to/from vendors. Everything is automated.   

It has eliminated the need for a full-time Operator. All Batch jobs are automatically scheduled. We do not have IT Operators overseeing Batch jobs. All FTP's are done through OpCon also. We have OpCon set to notify the team by email if any job fails, or notify front office staff when a job is completed. Some jobs are scheduled with the OpCon feature "File Watcher" and will run a job when a file is present in a Network folder - eliminating the need for intervention by staff. If files are not present when they should be, OpCon can be set to let you know a schedule is past normal run time.

On-Demand access allows the front office to run jobs on their own, making it unnecessary to contact IT when they need on-demand reports run.

We get email notifications for failed jobs, jobs completed, schedules past run time, etc.

File Watcher can run jobs when files are made available in a folder. 

We would like to keep a previous version of a job/schedule just like UC4 used to do. 

We would like a display of the created date, created by, and last modified date, as well as modified by.

I've used the solution for 7 years, since September 2014, and I have used 5 OpCon in-house and 2 OpCon EASE Connectors.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

The setup is a little complex. We couldn't have done it on our own. You must work with SMA to get set up and have training, but once you become familiar with it you should be good to go. The only time we consult them now is when we are upgrading to a new version. The instructions have never allowed us to do it on our own.

We have an in-house team for the in-house version.

We needed the Symitar OpCon team to work with us when we switched to Symitar Ease and to document all the schedules/jobs. 

We could not work efficiently without OpCon. It eliminates the need for full-time operators.

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.

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 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).