OpCon Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is very stable. They have a great foundation. 

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

OpCon takes six individuals to operate and maintain it.

The sky's the limit.

We have six users who are developers in our organization.

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

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

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

I'm not sure if anything was used before.

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

The implementation was internal.

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

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

The solution has reduced data processing times.

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

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

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

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

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

They are here to stay as a vendor.

We use it for batch processing and online processing.

I work for a government department which represents 43 sub-departments, so our department literally has thousands of systems. We have about 25,000 automated jobs set up in OpCon, but I don't know what percentage that would represent, overall, of the jobs in the 43 departments.

I can't really provide many metrics showing the way OpCon has improved our organization functions because we have been using the product since 1997. So any metrics we would have had before we started using the product would be relatively useless because of how much we've increased our production loads since 1997.

The solution has definitely streamlined our operations and makes onboarding of new applications very easy. And OpCon has most certainly freed up some 50 to 75 employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation.

The most valuable features for us are

• job dependencies
• auditing
• notification
• robustness. 

Those are things we rely on all the time.

I find the solution has quite a learning curve for beginners. It's challenging. I wouldn't rate it as super-easy to automate processes. It's medium-weight. I've used more complex software, but I've used simpler software.

I was involved in supporting the solution for about 14 years. When I stopped supporting it, we were on version 16. Our organization still uses it and we're into version 18, in production, now. I installed and fixed any issues with OpCon and was a liaison between the vendor and the users.

It's extremely stable.

We have found it scales very well. We run thousands of thousands of jobs every day, and sometimes thousands of jobs in a few hours. We do use it extensively, and we use it for mission-critical processes.

The tech support has been excellent. They're the best that I've dealt with in 25 years of supporting software.

We've had a close relationship with SMA, the vendor, and they've been very attentive. We have made requests in the past for added features, and they've been very responsive and put them in.

We didn't have a previous automation tool at an enterprise level.

Back then, the setup was complex because of the number of processes that we initially automated. Our initial deployment took about five months. The installation of the software took a day, and then we spent several months creating our automation, within the tool.

We had the help of SMA and used our internal resources.

We have seen a return on investment from OpCon.

We did an RFC and had vendors bid, but I was not part of that process.

My advice would be to invest in education on use of the product and I would recommend planning the deployment, and administrating users and roles, carefully and thoughtfully. A careful implementation of roles and responsibilities for the users of OpCon will save you some issues in the future. 

We don't have a high number of users of the product, although we have a high number of processes that are defined within it. Our actual user base is closer to 50 specialists. 

In terms of deployment and maintenance, we have about two-and-a-half employees involved. Their roles would include upgrading the software and installing the agent software throughout the organization. They are also responsible for identifying any software bugs, memory leaks, or issues within the software itself. And because they know the product so well, they're often called on to troubleshoot automation logic.

The biggest lesson I've learned using OpCon is that you can automate more than you think you can.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of 10. If somehow they could improve the user interface to be somewhat more intuitive, that would help. Our users find it overwhelming and it has quite a fairly steep learning curve to begin automating jobs. It's like sitting in the cockpit of an airplane: You're doing something complicated.

But I love the product and I love the company.

We use it for automating with our core system, Symitar. We've automated some 100 processes with it. Of what we can automate, about half is now automated.

Before OpCon, it was a person's job to just manually run a bunch of things, like file transfers. And someone had to set up nightly processing within our system. Now, nobody has to do those things, and nobody forgets to do them. It just does them. It has improved our efficiency. We don't have to log in and download files and transfer them.

We haven't freed up a full person's job using it, but there are a good handful of people for whom it has freed up about half of their time. And those employees love it. A lot of tasks are based on certain times, and they're no longer stuck doing those things at those times. We don't have to have anybody coming in early anymore. They can focus on the processing part of their jobs instead of the file moving and downloading.

The solution has also reduced our data processing times by about 20 percent. We're still in the building process. We have a lot more to go.

For us, the integration with Symitar is the main reason we got it. But we're also able to automate everything. We don't have to do things manually anymore. It takes out that human error.

I don't really think anything needs to be improved within the functionality. The only struggle I had, when I first started using it, is that it depends a lot on the command line and I didn't have that experience. So more built-in, basic commands or more education on commands would be good.

We've been using OpCon for two years.

Overall the stability has been great.

We've had a few issues but they're not because the system isn't stable. They have been more a case of known issues, but, until something broke, we weren't notified that we should fix things. That was a little frustrating. They knew it was happening, but they didn't tell us, "Hey, this is happening. You should do this before it breaks."

One issue had to do with pulling a file, because you can't use wildcards for file names all the time. SMA had a different FTP solution that they gave us, one that one of their programmers wrote. We're using it, but it's outside of the core OpCon system. Since we got it, things have been good. It just would have been nice if we could have done it all within OpCon instead of having to have a separate process.

SMA's technical support is great. They've been very helpful. What has been a little difficult because is the time difference. They are in America but they're two hours ahead of us. Sometimes things happen at the end of our processing day and their tech support is closed. But other than that, it's been great. Their online system is good and when we call it's good.

There is on-call support, but they make it very clear that unless processing has stopped, there's a fee for that level of support.

We had MOVEit before. The time to implement that solution, versus OpCon, was about equal. But OpCon can do much more than the other one could. In terms of automating processes, they are similar. MOVEit did not depend so much on command lines, so it was a little more straightforward when we wanted to work with dates or file names. But it didn't integrate with Symitar. For us, that was the huge part.

OpCon's TCO is a lot more but we didn't have support with the other solution.

The initial setup was complex. There's so much it can do. But we had a lot of support from SMA, so we got what we needed. That complexity goes back, in large part, to the command-line issue. The simple things, like downloading a file and saving it, are really easy. But if you want to do more stuff, it takes a little while to get through that and to understand how it works.

SMA came onsite for the initial week and set it all up. We went live right away with several things at that point.

Our implementation strategy for OpCon was to get the nightly processing stuff set up. That was the most important initial goal. Then we made a list of all the things that were run by people manually and we went down that list.

Our experience with the SMA techs was great. They were onsite and that was helpful. They're very knowledgeable. They explained everything and they gave us best practices.

We have seen ROI in terms of people being able to work more efficiently, which helps with the cost of employees.

We just switched to task-based pricing, instead of annual agent pricing. There are the licensing fees and a maintenance fee. And we have costs for maintaining servers, our main server and our DR server.

We didn't really evaluate other options because OpCon is endorsed by Jack Henry. We were able to talk to other Symitar clients to get their experiences. OpCon was the logical choice.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that we do a lot of things manually that we don't need to be doing manually. Also, as we're automating people's processes, we're able to analyze what they're doing and find a more efficient, better way to do things.

My advice would be to learn about the command line. Also, start early on making a list of all of the things you want to automate and write out the steps for each process. That's been taking a lot of time: Trying to get people to explain the different steps they do and then trying to figure out the best way to set that up in OpCon. Starting on those things early will help speed up the implementation.

There are about 10 people using OpCon's Enterprise Manager and the Self Service, in our company. There will be more. We're slowly expanding. Among the users are our systems analyst, our system administrator, and some of our accounting, operations, and compliance people use it. We also have a network specialist who uses it for file cleanup on different servers.

We have three people involved in maintaining the solution and each has a role. Some of us create, some of us upgrade it, as needed, and some of us monitor it daily. We don't have our developers using it. They develop something and then we usually incorporate it for them.

Our usage of OpCon is still pretty moderate. We have a lot of plans to increase it. It's just a matter of time. It touches all departments, but we want to utilize it more within each department.

I would rate the solution an eight out of 10. It's pretty good but I don't think it's miraculous. It's definitely better than our old solution and I'm pretty happy with it.

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).

We use it for batch job automation and batch processing automation.

It has reduced our manual processing times by a good 75 percent. We had over 500 processes a day, since we process jobs for over 40 clients. We were able to automate all that.

OpCon has definitely freed up our resources and allowed us to continue to bring in more clients without adding additional FTEs. Because we are a 24/7 operation, we have 13 employees. We have doubled our client volume without doubling our employees.

As far as streamlining, goes, the scheduling allows us to schedule jobs with different frequencies, and it prevents manual errors and eliminates keystrokes.

All of it is valuable. We've been very successful with it and really reduced our manual keystrokes and manual errors. The greatness of it is the flexibility of the scheduling and the integration of all platforms and processes. We have integrated it with everything from AIX to Microsoft Servers; with pretty much anything that we can.

The product is easy to use and it's simple to automate processes. It's a GUI interface. You don't require any special programming skills to use it.

If there is anything that needs improvement, it would be the file watcher. That could probably be simplified and easier to configure. To configure the file watcher you have to have a good understanding of OpCon. If they could improve the process of how it looks for a file, as well as the configuring, that would help.

Some additional logging-information reporting would also help. They have all the information there but you still have to search around and look back. It's not right there for you, where you click and can get the reporting. You have to know the system and do some additional searches. So reporting is another area that they can build on by simplifying it. 

Another area for our improvement is the upgrade process. We continue to need to bring in SMA OpCon to perform upgrades. If they simplified that and give more direction to the clients for performing upgrades, that would be good.

But other than that, we've been really happy with the product.

We've been using OpCon for over five years.

It has been a very solid system for us. We really haven't experienced a long period of downtime. And when there were issues, SMA support was able to come in and resolve them immediately.

There hasn't been a problem with the whole system, but there were certain releases that created problems. We got a temporary workaround from SMA. But it was nothing major or something that kept us down or made us divert to manual processing.

We have been going from release to release with them and they've continued to add features and improvements. They have also added on products. So I think they are on track. They really have a solid system and I have confidence that they will continue to scale and bring in more features for our automation.

Their technical support is excellent. There have been several times where I have had to reach out to them and they responded immediately. They always have the answers to my questions and come up with solutions. I haven't had an incident where anything was extended over a long period of time. They have definitely been very helpful and knowledgeable.

Autobatch was one of the solutions I used previously. It was a free product that we downloaded, and then someone wrote some scripts. We didn't get to the point of purchasing it. OpCon is more of a high-end product. You get what you pay for. I don't know how we would continue to grow our operation without the help of OpCon.

The limitations in Autobatch which OpCon overcame are due to OpCon's ease-of-use and the configuration. I wouldn't have been able to train my team to start building jobs on the other solution if they didn't have a good technical background. With OpCon, it's much simpler.

The initial setup was straightforward.

When we first started, the deployment took about one week, and that includes training from SMA OpCon as well as Jack Henry Symitar. After that, all the upgrades take about two days.

Many of the other solutions I've used require a lot of scripting and coding. OpCon is more a GUI interface and I was able to get a lot of my team training on this with ease, without sending them to any classes. A lot of my team members can build jobs, from simple to complex, with SMA OpCon, without going to any additional classes.

It's very efficient and straightforward to implement a new job. If I get a request today, I can do it within the hour and have it ready to run. That's how simple it is. I don't need four hours' advanced notice. We started deploying things ourselves immediately after training. They came in and trained us, created some sample jobs for us, and we took the sample jobs and were able to recreate them. We just followed the steps and started applying them. That feature, where we can copy one job to another, is great.

As for our implementation strategy, we have a live system and we had a test system, so we built two systems. We started to build the schedule and the jobs on pre-prod system. Once everything was tested we went live, and we kept the test system for any other testing that we might need to do. Eventually, we got rid of the test system because we were able to do everything on the live system. We're able to test a job — not actually run it, but test it — before we deploy it.

When the SMA technicians came onsite during the initial deployment, our experience with them was good. They were very knowledgeable. They had a good understanding of the system and they gave us very good pointers. They were very efficient and on-schedule. The whole implementation process was seamless and very smooth.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment with OpCon. As I mentioned, we have doubled our client base without needing to increase our workforce. 

We are able to take on additional projects. Our operators are not just running batch jobs, they're monitoring batch jobs and it has allowed us to use them as resources for other things. They have been happy to be assigned to other projects, and they also like to learn more about OpCon. They enjoy building the jobs and doing the automation.

The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually.

There are additional costs with some of the upgrades. When we need to do upgrades, we will have Professional Services help and we have to pay for that. But the cost is maybe a few hundred dollars. Upgrades usually require two to four hours of their time.

I've used other job schedulers before and the flow of the automation wasn't that efficient, where OpCon's is easy. It's a lot of drag-and-drop. You can copy one schedule to another. You can copy one job to another. It's very easy to use and does not require heavy, intensive knowledge of OpCon.

There wasn't much else out there, at the time, for our core system. OpCon partnered with Jack Henry Symitar, so it was a product that was recommended by the maker of our core system. We didn't really do a search for an automation vendor. We were using one that was out there for free and when the opportunity came for OpCon, with the right pricing for our budget, we took advantage of that. Since then, we've been on OpCon.

What I have learned from using OpCon is that everything is possible within OpCon. Each time we have a new process, that's what we look at first. We try to build everything around the automation.

You will definitely see the efficiency and improvement in your day-to-day operations by using OpCon. My advice would be, during the implementation, to try to build as many sample jobs as possible so that you can reuse them.

OpCon is now managed by my computer operation team. Right now don't share it out to other users. We use it to automate our batch processing for over 40 credit unions that we support. When I say support, that means we do their core processing, their batch processing.

In terms of deployment of upgrades and maintenance of the solution, it's normally just one or two of my team members, or myself, working with SMA's support. They come in and we work with them and we get the upgrade completed and then we go live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using OpCon for three years.

The stability is really good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use OpCon for job automation for our core financial software. The majority of it is pushing files between vendors and our core, for processing, marketing mailers, and reports. We also have their Self Service software, so employees can kick off a job manually and it fires off certain jobs in our core. It then pushes and pulls files and sends them off to vendors. It could be processing file maintenance. There are a whole host of things that we use it for.

We're on Symitar's cloud software, EASE, and they have their own OpCon that our OpCon, on-premise, talks to.

Before we migrated to EASE, we were running about 2,000 to 3,000 unique jobs a month. Now, we're running about 1,500 unique jobs a month or about 300 jobs a day.

When we first got the solution in 2009, we were on-premise for our core vendor as well. We had two operators, full-time positions, who would run our Good-Night. Over time, probably within a year or so, both of the operators retired and we didn't have to hire new staff. So it replaced those FTEs.

We used to have to process all the ACH warehouse items manually. Now, with EASE and OpCon, it's just done through notifications and all we do have to do is correct exceptions on a daily basis. That's allowed us to be more "deep-disaster-recovery" ready. Personnel don't have to be onsite to do that now, they can do it remotely.

We definitely have been able to repurpose employees and free up a lot of the busy work and let them focus on the important parts of their jobs. I would say 30 to 40 employees have impacted over the years. They have reacted very positively. Our queue is always full of new ideas about what to implement. The well is deep in terms of what we can do with OpCon. It's just getting the man-hours to automate.

We're 10 years into the software. It's hard to gauge how it has affected our data processing times, year-over-year. But at first, kicking off jobs and scheduling jobs was entirely manual and we had all these different holiday schedules we had to keep track of. It was just a mess of paper that our operators would use. OpCon was able to just have all those frequencies built to the point where we can just review them on a daily basis. At that time, it improved things almost 100 percent.

• Being able to automate jobs and have a central location where we can see how the day is progressing.
• Getting alerted when something fails, and be able to escalate that with our employees.

Those are the most valuable features for us.

Also, while there's a learning curve to get your mind around how their schedules, jobs, and frequencies of the jobs operate, it's a pretty fast tool to learn. There's a lot of depth to it, so you can really get down in the weeds and become an expert in it. It's a fast learning curve. It took about a month to be able to get a pulse-check and see where we were at in jobs. Being able to create and modify jobs and schedules takes about three months, tops, to be able to do them comfortably. You could probably do it from the onset, but it's always shaky learning something like that.

I know they're getting ready to remove the thick client. It would be nice to go to a fully thin client.

Also, it takes something of a learning curve to learn the interface. Some of it isn't quite as intuitive as it should be. They definitely have roadmap items that they're working on to improve that.

We've been using OpCon since 2009.

I would rate the stability high, with our situation. They've got a lot of baked-in support with Symitar and they're very much a VIP partner in how we run our business.

It's very scalable. Right now we're barely scratching the surface of what it can do. I've looked at Symitar's instance of OpCon and they're running something like 13,000 jobs a day with all the clients that they have. So it can go from small use cases like ours to enterprise-level.

Their standard technical support is very helpful. They're very quick to respond. They're quick to set up a WebEx and look at a problem. I've never had any problems with getting support from them, both technically and from Professional Services.

The initial setup was pretty complex. By nature, it was complex. They had to sit down with us for a few weeks and go over how we ran our jobs. We were building that into OpCon and verifying it, and we were doing that while learning the software. It was a lot to take it on, but they were with us every step of the way and they answered all our questions. From an implementation standpoint, I don't think it could have gone better. They also had staff present from Symitar, our core, so it was like a hand-in-hand operation.

The implementation took about a month.

At first, there were a lot of meetings over the phone to go over how our infrastructure was set up and to outline all the different jobs and processes we were doing. They had different experts that we talked with to set up each part of OpCon. It was many meetings and then, onsite, it was a full week to get us ready to go.

We consulted with OpCon's staff onsite. 

Our experience with them during the deployment process was great. They were very helpful, very friendly. There wasn't a stupid question that we could ask. They were quick to answer and provide us reference material. 

And over the years, they've been that way. We occasionally contract hours with them if we want to do something that's a little bit more complex than our staff can handle. They're very patient over the phone. They always offer onsite consultants as well, for a fee, but their remote consultants are great. We always buy contract hours, dedicated support, when we want to add something new. That's not to fix something that's busted.

On a yearly basis our cost is between $25,000 and $30,000. I don't know if our contract is different from what a new client would get, but we have unlimited users with our Self Service. That gives us a lot more scalability. We can spin up different machines and different servers all over our network.

I wasn't involved in the discussions, but I don't know of too many solutions that would have the same level of features. OpCon is the only one that I know of that has a connector to the EASE environment.

My advice is to set aside as many resources as you can — personnel and time — to make sure that your implementation goes smoothly. Involve everybody in your organization who might find a use for it. Also, have a good communication plan for when you implement it so that people know that things are changing and, if there are issues, who to contact. And make sure you have staff trained and ready to put out any fires. If you don't have the staff, then make sure to set aside budget items to have OpCon Professional Services ready to go, after the fact.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is what's possible. It's still a learning curve even after 10 years. You hear what people are doing, at conferences, and you didn't even think that that was something that could be done. Recently I heard about a situation where a credit union wanted to monitor social media. They had a use case where they could set up an Azure listener that would go out there and aggregate anytime somebody mentioned that credit union, and then it would pull in the comments. Then, it would build a report that would go off to the credit union's marketing department. That way it could escalate. If someone said something negative, they could respond quickly.

Automation is a work-in-progress. There's always room to automate. You get a lot of people who are a little nervous when we approach their department and ask for automation ideas because they don't want to be automated out of a job. But every year we tackle new processes. There are some things that are still done on paper, here at the credit union, things that are hard to give up.

OpCon has features that we haven't had time to even use, so I'd say we're happy with where they're at when it comes to the feature set.

In IT, there are three programmers and I who use it at a high level. There are another 15 to 20 people who use it with the Self Service portal, where they can fire off a job manually that we set up. We have 350 employees and most of the stuff is behind the scenes for the departments. It's like the plumbing in the wall. They don't really see it, but they know they can turn the faucet on and get water.

I would rate OpCon a 10 out of 10. I'm very pleased with the product.

We have it running batch processing across our mainframe and Windows Server environments. OpCon also integrates with a third-party SFTP tool and through that we have OpCon driving all of our file transfers as well.

We've automated hundreds of processes with OpCon, representing a good 80 percent of our processing.

One thing that we had to introduce about three years ago in our bank was exchanging high volume monetary files with other banks on a mission critical hourly basis. We would start doing the exchange at about 9.30 a.m. every day and it would go through until 2 a.m. the following morning. It was very time-driven. Our customers were heavily reliant on it because it was money that was coming to fund their accounts. OpCon allowed us to fully automate the process, right down to when it went wrong for any reason, it would alert us. Rather than having to employ three staff members to manage the process over the period, it just runs. It tells us what has gone wrong.  Every day, every hour, we do two full exchanges and they just happen.

Another thing we've been able to do with OpCon is to give our business users a level of self-service and automation for themselves. We don't have to be here to do things for them. OpCon will just do them for them. OpCon has absolutely streamlined our operations. We went from getting requests to do something and the end-user waiting for however long it took us to get around to doing it, to their being able to do it for themselves.

We actually got rid of our third shift with one of the operators going off to work in another part of our IT division. Now, the third shift effectively goes on unmanned. We allow OpCon to run things for us.

In addition, with the automation, the solution has definitely sped things up enormously. There's less human interaction that has to go on now.

We just wouldn't be without OpCon.

The most valuable features are the 

• automation 
• repeatability.

Since we got it configured, it has just done the job day in, day out. Being able to rely on it and know that it's going to happen, whether there's a person over it or not, is really good.

The ease of use and simplicity in automating processes are good. They get better every time they put out a new release. When we first got it, a long time ago, it wasn't as intuitive as it is now. That also comes, a little bit, with our having used it for so many years, so we're more used to it. But I have a guy who started working with me about three years ago, for example. He had never touched anything like this but he was able to pick it up and run with it. And he absolutely raves about it. He thinks it's the best product he's ever worked on - this from a person with many years of IT experience.

I might like to see a little bit more of a seamless user interface. That would be good. They're moving towards a browser-type interface, rather than the Java application that we currently use. Also, a little bit more built-in self-service would be good, rather than a standalone product.

We've been using OpCon for around 15 years.

The stability gets better all the time. Where we've had problems with stability, it's been partly our fault. We run it on a VMware server but we haven't recognized that the workload has increased and haven't increased the capacity of the server it's running on. It's because of things like that that OpCon has had the odd issue. But in general, the product in and of itself is pretty reliable.

It's absolutely scalable. It will just take whatever you throw at it. As long as you make sure that the hardware it's running it on will cope, it seems like it has endless possibilities.

It does all of our batch processing. Absolutely everything is run under OpCon. As we add more processes, it's a no-brainer; we put them into OpCon. We only use it for our ClearPath mainframes and Windows Servers. If we were to move to another operating system, we would definitely take OpCon with us. It has that flexibility to run on different platforms as well.

Technical support is really good.

I brought OpCon into the company. Prior to that everything was done manually by people.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were a very small IT shop when I first came here and OpCon was one of the first SQL databases that we had that had any great importance in our world. We had local New Zealand support to help us. They were really good. We were a little bit wary of jumping in and using it, and they really helped us to step into the product with small steps to start off with. That allowed us to gain a comfort level. It was a good implementation.

We were a little bit shy and timid about automating things. We started out playing with it quite a bit. It took us a while from the time we deployed it until we automated our first process, and that was because I decided to approach it by rewriting a lot of the code that we ran, to make the best use of OpCon. We used to have one great big job that ran everything, and I really wanted to break it down and use OpCon to bring everything to the surface, rather than it being all hidden in one big job. My wanting to do that made it take longer; it was a few months to really get something going "in anger."

The game plan was to try and take away as much of the manual processing as we could. There was a lot of checking that was done every single day.

The fact that we were able to eliminate a staff member entirely from the area and move him to another area has definitely paid dividends in terms of what we pay for OpCon today.

I have worked in an IBM environment, so I've worked with Control-M and the old CA 7. OpCon was the only option that was available, at the time, for a ClearPath mainframe. But it's been a good option.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is: Don't try to do things manually. It's a really good automation tool. Really, really good.

Go for it. If your aim is to gain reliability and automation, and making sure that when you want things done they'll get done, then OpCon is a really good tool.

One of the very good things about SMA as a company is that they actively seek input from us as customers. Where it makes sense, they take our suggestions and they develop them and they implement them. There are a couple of features in OpCon I'm aware of which have come from a number of customers here in New Zealand, including myself. They listen and they improve where it's appropriate. There's nothing significant in the product that needs improvement. It's a really good product.

There are four of us who look after the production environment, and we have about 10 or 11 people who are using it in development work, running their processing. There are two of us who do maintenance of the solution. The only reason there are two of us is that people go on holiday. It really is easy to maintain.