OpCon Reviews

We use OpCon for scheduling batch jobs on the Unisys mainframe. It controls all of the batch work. Therefore, if we want to rerun a job or add a new job in, It is used for controlling this Unisys batch work.

It allows batch work to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

If we are talking about a one-off job, it takes roughly five minutes to set that up, which is very quick.

Results are pretty much instantaneous. It depends what frequency you put on the job. It could be a job that will not run for another couple of hours. But, if you set up a job and want it to run straightaway, it will do it straightaway.

OpCon has streamlined operations. 

Going back 20 odd years ago, everything used to be controlled manually before. Now, it's just a flow of jobs. You kick one off, then there are just dependencies, one after the other. These jobs just follow those dependencies and do it all automatically, instead of somebody having to sit there and do it manually.

From when it was first deployed, the solution freed up around 100 or so employees to do more meaningful work as a result of the automation.

It reduced data processing times when it was first deployed. Back then, it probably saved a good six or seven hours on a daily basis. The amount time has shrunk since then, but that is not due to OpCon. It is more due to reduced processing times on the Unisys mainframe.

It is very simple and easy to use, but that might be because I've been using it for a long time.

The things that we use most often are:

• NIST view
• Job Master
• The quick search option.

The way to view a schedule is called perch view, and that's not always the greatest. It can be quite slow.

Any issues we did have with earlier releases have since been addressed in later releases.

We are looking at something called Solution Manager which comes with it, because we don't use that currently. This shows more performance and is an easier way to access them. You can also set trends and do more analyzing.

I have been using it for 12 to 13 years.

The company has probably had it for about 20 years.

The stability is very good. We don't ever seem to have any issues or major problems with OpCon. It's always been quite good.

We have currently been looking to upgrade to version 19. So, we are testing that.

The scalability is quite good. The amount that we have on it doesn't ever cause any issues. I am not too sure how much more it could cope with, but I imagine it's a lot more.

We have approximately 50 scheduled jobs running various different processes. It varies between 20 and 100. Because it's a big organization, these automated process are not a massive part of the organization: Approximately 15 to 20 percent. I don't see this figure going up since a lot of stuff tends to be moving into cloud-based stuff.

Our use of OpCon needs improvement because I don't think we use it to its full capabilities.

There is a team of us who do the maintenance. There are mainly three people on the team with another hundred other people using it for view only purposes, such as viewing data results and what times certain jobs finish. They don't have access to make any amendments.

The technical support is very good. I think we have a designated person who we contact if we ever have any sort of issues, etc. Their response time is fairly quick (within 24 hours).

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. They give you some good user guides and information on how to do it.

If we are upgrading, it probably takes about two to three hours. We start the automation process within this two to three hour time slot. It is pretty quick.

When deploying a new version, we have to do a lot of testing. We have DR boxes which we do our testing on first. That's what we're currently doing it at the moment. Then, we have to run it through our change management to make sure all of the various other areas in the department are happy.

SMA is pretty helpful, if we do ever have any questions. They are pretty quick to respond.

For upgrades, three or four are required. There are three of us on our side involved in upgrading it. Then, there is one person from SMA to help, if need be.

Compared to other solutions that we have in the organization, OpCon is a lot quicker to deploy. For example, Control-M takes almost double the time to deploy.

We use OpCon for Unisys and Control M for more server-based jobs.

it's definitely an application worth considering and looking into. It is a pretty good tool. I don't really have too many issues with it.

My biggest lesson since using it has been to learn how to upgrade it. This is part of the process, as I've gone from the scheduling side of it, where no one else scheduled jobs to the next step of learning how to upgrade it.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10). The product is always available and easy to use. I like the overall general feel and view of it.

We started using the OpCon product with a contract management application doing migration between Dollar Universe and the OpCon solution. The first time we used the OpCon product for scheduling programs we had around 7,000 jobs running on this application. Today, we have around 41,000 jobs per day. We have around 4,000 host computers in production and we have 618 applications running on the solution.

We have migrated about 90 percent of our information systems to OpCon. We have to finish the project and finalize the migration for the remaining 10 percent or less.

OpCon has streamlined our operations. With OpCon, we have reduced the number of jobs by about 17 percent and we have execution times running on a schedule. It's a good way for optimizing and automating the scheduling of our programs.

One of the advantages of OpCon is the ability to use the API and web services. We couldn't do that with our previous solution. We have been able to change our procedure for ticketing. When a job is down, we can immediately create a ticket from OpCon in our ticketing solution, which is ServiceNow, using the web services.

One of the valuable features is that we are able to automatically manage problems with jobs. The system automatically tries to restart jobs when things go down. That's a good way for us to quickly manage and resolve all problems automatically, without creating tickets.

It is really different than the product we used before, Dollar Universe. The interface of OpCon is really modern and fluid and simple to use. It's really a framework for the user who doesn't see all the complexity behind the product. We have a lot of functionality with the product that we didn't have before. All our users find it simple to use and, after working with it a few times, it does not take them long to know how to use it. We've had no difficulties using the product.

And the web solution, Solution Manager, enables easy access to the application to quickly see if we have problems with our programs. Immediately, with its color code, we know if all is okay or if we have a problem. The web interface is really simple to use and we can put it on a screen on our desks and look. It's really useful for us. When we click on the screen we can immediately see which job is the problem that we have to analyze or restart. It's really easy to identify that and to restart or go quickly to the problem, without having to find or analyze where the problem is. It's efficient for us.

I would like to see them improve the Solution Manager for the web application. It's the future for us. Our customers need a lot of functionality, but there isn't that functionality within Solution Manager. So they have to develop and improve it.

The visualization module needs to be more open for parameters, such as the color of the job status information. For example, when a job is canceled, the color on the visualization module appears as orange and we can't change that color with a parameter. We can't decide, for example, to display the jobs that were canceled in green. I'm expecting from SMA that they will create parameters and give us the opportunity to choose the colors we want for job statuses.

We've been using it for two years.

We didn't have any problems for the first few weeks. When we got to a big volume of jobs, we started to have some response delay. We called SMA's French support and U.S. support to analyze our problem. SMA's solution was that there was a difficulty with the large history. We hadn't deleted and had too many days in history. We had to purge some history and close some days. Today, we do that regularly and it's okay for us now. We have a good response time from the product.

Whenever we upgrade the solution we have support to help us, and we have never had great difficulty in upgrading the system. It is not a difficulty for us today. 

We have not hit the limits of the product. We have a lot of new projects starting on OpCon to develop new scheduling programs. We don't use OpCon for only part of our information system. We use OpCon for our entire information system. OpCon is used for all our scheduling jobs.

A really big change for us was that SMA has French support in Europe. That's a big advantage for us because we are not all fluent in English. And they are open night and day. Whenever we call, we always get support. Support is really good.

One of the good things we have found with SMA is that we have a partnership. They really help us and we are working with them. We really want to optimize the product and give them suggestions for new functionality that we need. We help them to develop it and to optimize the product. They work interactively with us and are quick to develop the functionality for developing our business.

We used Dollar Universe.

The initial setup is really easy. Installing the product is not really difficult.

For all our infrastructure development, integration, pre-production, production, training — for the whole environment — it took about six months, including specifying all the parameters and starting the product, doing the pilot migration, testing the application after migration, and moving it to production. The first migration started immediately after we finished configuring the product.

We had a contract with SMA for support and to help us do the first migration of the pilot application, which was contract management. After we finished configuring the product's parameters, testing the product, and doing the migration on this pilot application, we managed the migrations alone, with SMA's support if we had difficulties doing something or needed help to optimize the product.

We have seen ROI. In the first year, we paid less than the previous solution and, with OpCon, we have reduced the number of incidents and we have an improved quality of service for our customers.

There is also less cost for our teams to analyze and deal with program scheduling. We haven't needed more people to explore the solution. We can have fewer people and do other things. We can invest in projects and not just in running activities.

It costs less than our previous solution, Dollar Universe. We pay annual maintenance but we don't pay anything additional until we hit a certain number of jobs per day.

In 2016 we started to analyze different solutions in the marketplace. We had meetings with vendors of a lot of solutions, with demonstrations, and we evaluated every product. At the end of the analysis, we chose three solutions. We then met with customers using those solutions. Only then did we choose the SMA solution. It's a more complete solution for us and more open and scalable for our needs.

We evaluated the IBM solution, the Automic solution, a French product, and so on. There were other solutions too, but those were the main solutions we analyzed.

Start with a lot of training and develop a good familiarity with the functionality of the product. Do that before starting development on OpCon. Normalize the codification of the schedule of the jobs. Write that clearly and define the rules to develop the objects before starting with OpCon. That is very important because if you start to develop immediately in the product, without doing that phase of analysis and normalization of the codes, you will have difficulties.

We have a team of about 10 people whose job it is to create the scheduling programs. And we have another five external people to reinforce that team. For everyday exportation of the project and all our schedules, we have about 16 people. They schedule jobs and analyze issues or responses from our clients for building jobs.

The solution is for our core system processing, which runs our scheduled programs. We are a financial institution, so it does our postings, reporting, nightly processes, and file transfers for anything which needs to go in and out of the core going to designated places. OpCon now does any type of repetitious work that we would have an operator do.

I have it implemented in our accounting and card departments for their processes, our payment systems, and HR for the onboarding/offboarding of employees. We also have it in IT.

It improved our consistency on how batch jobs are run and their schedule. It used to be left up to me or another operator to do the postings of these jobs. They were not always done on time. If it was supposed to be done at 8:00, then it'd be done at 8:10 or 8:15. Now, 8:00 is 8:00. Jobs are more efficient, and with the schedule, there is no variation on the time. These things will be run.

The other part is some of these jobs have prompts in them. You had to answer those prompts and make sure you were consistent in your answers. If you rely on a person to do it, sometimes those answers are not done correctly. Whereas, with OpCon, it will always be a consistent response to those answers. There is no deviating whatsoever. This reduced the responsibility of another operator who can be moved over to do something else. It went from that person doing the job to monitoring what is going on in OpCon. It also has expanded their job responsibilities to other things that need to be done.

The solution has streamlined operations. E.g., we have at least 20 different jobs in our nightly process. These have been streamlined within OpCon using one master job that does each one of those different batch jobs for us.

It has freed up my time because the other operator and I use to tag team. It also helps because I don't have to come in for month-end or nighttime processing. We don't need a nighttime operator, which is nice.

You can sleep in and get notifications if something fails, which was a nice part of it. If something is processing, and you want to make sure that it processes okay, this is probably one of the best things about the scheduling and automation of the solution. It does free up your employees to do other things. You no longer have to worry about them missing a step or not posting on time.

It gives me more time to program. For others, they now work on other things that we have in our IT department. This goes to some of the networking things that we have going on, help desk situations, and looking at what is the latest and greatest in things out there that we can dive into in terms of home banking products, e.g., if we can add things to those features.

Being able to copy what we already have, then apply it to another task is one of the cool features. It saves time. When I know there is another new process coming up, I can copy an existing one and just change a couple of things in it that need to be changed for it to run the new job process. The nice part about the copy part is I don't have to go back and look at what I had to call it, put in those settings, etc. I already know what those settings are, which is great. I just need to tell it the new job has to run, then schedule a time, and if there is a different time for it.

I am getting into the self-service part of it, which means I can then assign users to kick off odd processes which are not on a true set schedule. They can pretty much initiate it themselves. That is one of the features that I really like. 

I like the notifications of when jobs have completed or failed. This is a big plus because you can either have an email or email and text sent to you. That is very helpful.

There is some difficulty with the ease of use when I don't have some of the templates that were already created. I know they have to make general templates across the board for everyone to use with different types of systems, but it is good to have the templates done. Then, the solution becomes very easy to figure out, and I know that I will always use OpCon in this way or in this different scenario, as it will work for me with these usages.

More templates would be great. Non-core featured templates are my biggest struggle. For example, the PowerShell functionality is really cool, so I dove into that a bit where I wrote scripts using PowerShell for our Active Directory.

We have been using it since 2013.

It's a stable solution.

We require one person and a backup for deploying and maintaining the solution.

It's capable of working with other system, which is very good. It is very scalable.

We have about 4,328 daily jobs with 897 daily scheduled. We probably had about a hundred jobs when we first started. We have been adding them here and there as we go along.

We have at least 15 employees using the solution, plus another employee and me.

OpCon has been implemented 100 percent for IT in what we do at our core. For the rest of the departments, this solution is around five to 10 percent of what they do.

Besides our core, we're trying to see if we can branch out to other types of things that can be automated. There is always room for growth. I think we have tapped out on what OpCon can do for our core. It is now what else can it do for us that is not core. That is why we are looking at our HR department and networking stuff, and being able to automate some of the system processes there. E.g., pinging network servers to make sure they are online, up, and available, and also scheduling any type of tasks that they might have.

They are average for technical support. I still have to do my own research on some things.

I have never used an automation system other than Windows Scheduler, which is probably the best way. You go into Windows, restart your computer every day or run updates at this time. Whereas, OpCon gives us more prompts and things to do where you can set up different PCs or servers to do certain things.

I was involved in the initial setup, but that was back in 2013. I was excited at the time, but wasn't sure what I was getting into. The initial setup was complex because it was something I knew I wanted, but didn't know what it was.

When we first set it up, we requested a book of jobs to be done for us. This was like a set standard of batch jobs that would need to be automated. I have been able to elaborate and expand on those.

It took us a week after deployment of OpCon to automate our first process.

Our implementation strategy was to first start simple, then go into our complex processes. 

Simple for us would be running a batch job that has maximum three or four prompts in it. Then, we go complex with the RACH process, where we receive files, process those files, and schedule times for them to post. Then, we run intermittent jobs in-between to produce a return file that goes back out. 

We had an onsite person come for a week from SMA. Our overall experience was great. He was a nice guy who handheld us through some of the processes, making sure that we were good and explaining everything to us. That was probably the best thing of having him here onsite, and not remotely, because he could see where our questions were stemming from and why we were asking certain things. He then helped us set up the different templates for our processes.

Manual processing has been automated 99 percent by OpCon. With new processes, we give it at least two weeks manual so we can write down the details of how to do the steps, then we automate it. Within a month, it has been automated, then it's no longer a manual process.

It has freed up my time. I don't have to stay late at night. We don't need a nighttime operator, which is one of the biggest things, at least for me. Some places I know, they need to have other employees besides the two basic ones during the day do operations. Now, we don't need an extra person for that. 

It has freed up our time for other things. We get to program a little more.

Our licensing is on a yearly basis.

We did not evaluate other vendors. 

I had seen OpCon a few years ago before at a conference for Coresystems and they were the only ones there. Jump to 2013, I find out that our executives had said, "Yes, we're going to go with them." I was very happy with this.

Have a list of items that they would like to have automated. That way they can sit there, and say, "Yes, I did accomplish what I wanted with the system." Then, what do I want to expand on afterwards? 

The work upfront is great. In the long run, it makes your life a lot easier. You will have to do some work upfront, which is knowing your manual processes, remembering them, and knowing what they are step-by-step. Once this is mapped out, it makes it easier to implement OpCon. You also have a template that tells you where you might have missed a step if something fails within OpCon.

It has made my life very easy. In a way to me, it is an AI. Though, we still have to tell it what to do, it is one step closer.

OpCon is probably about a nine (out of 10). There is always room to grow.

We use it to automate multiple platforms: our mortgage platform, our core platform, and other instances where we're working with third parties to whom we have to move data. It does about 90 percent of our automation. Very rarely do we do anything that's not automated. For example, we do not manually upload anything. It's all done through OpCon.

The biggest improvement is the batch automation. We don't do anything manually anymore; everything is automated. We did have a very highly skilled employee and the job he left for was a job with a bigger credit union to run their OpCon shop. That's how good he became at it. His skill set was at a very high level, where he automated up to 90 percent of what we do. We very rarely have to manually upload.

We've automated about 50 to 60 processes, and that number is growing. We are adding on our mortgage platform to automate that. And that number does not include the OpCon buttons they also use for on-demand stuff.

It has also helped to streamline our operations. We contract out our collection department so they are no longer housed on our system. They're housed on another platform. OpCon is able to not only pull in our data, but it also, on a daily basis, updates that third-party. In addition, if there are any updates coming back, OpCon will check on a daily basis and send it back. That's just a sample of how it automates. 

Another example is how we automate our daily FedLine. The most important job files that we run are our ACH, our Federal postings for credits and debits. We totally automated that where there is no longer any manual intervention. We upload the Fed file; it comes in and OpCon is smart enough to know where to place it and how to run the edits. It's also smart enough to know that there are delay times. Before OpCon, we were posting them the next day, manually, one after the other, because there are four to five that come in and out throughout the day. Because we were able to automate it through OpCon, we can now post them when they actually come in. They are posting throughout the day now. For example, at 12 in the morning there is our major posting, and it's posted right when it should be. Members are actually getting their paychecks or debits and credits right when they should happen. That was a big one which was very member-impactful.

OpCon has also freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. They're not having to go into Symitar and run a job. Instead, they can simply run something. They've also found innovative ways to use it as well: "Hey, I have this thing that produces an Excel file. Can OpCon just grab it and send it out to this other vendor for me?" And the answer is, "Sure, that's not a problem." Our employees are thinking outside the box, as far as utilizing it goes. Even though they don't generally know OpCon, they know what it's capable of. In some cases, they're building their own little building blocks of automation themselves.

The main employees who have been freed up are in our accounting, item-processing, and lending departments. In those three departments there are about 15 employees. All depend on OpCon to do something for them. We're not that big of a shop. We have about 100 employees in total.

Our employees expect automation now. Prior to that, it was nice to be able to run something and for them to get their data. It was awesome. Now, as they know that it's a standard process, they're not as excited. They just expect it now. If you would tell them: "Oh, no, you have to manually move this from here to there," they would probably come back and say "Wait a minute, my other thing is automated. Why can't this be?"

If we're counting all the manual intervention, as a percentage, I would say that OpCon has reduced data processing by 90 percent, through automation, the efficiency, and the eliminating of manual errors.

There are a lot of areas that are valuable. Perhaps the most valuable would be the OpCon button that users can select so that instead of having users going into Symitar, they can now just run an OpCon button that works on-demand. That's probably the one that has made the biggest impact. We no longer have users running job processes in Symitar. Everything that they need, we simply have them run on-demand, so there's no access into Symitar. That is one of the most valuable tools we have. Obviously, the batch-automation is a big one, but that button functionality would be the biggest feature.

Usage is a little complex. It's not like you can bring somebody in and they can just use it. They have to be trained. Our main OpCon person left and it's a lot harder for a lot of people. Once you have somebody leave, the next person has to step up and it is a little difficult. As far as complexity goes, it's right up there.

Once you get to know the platform, you do know how to troubleshoot. But there's just so much to learn. If you are properly trained, it is fairly easy to figure out problems and troubleshoot. SMA does offer certification and they also offer consulting hours, which we are using right now.

There is always a percentage of jobs where the batch automation doesn't work or something critical happens within the OpCon server that causes something to stall, and we have to troubleshoot.

Another area for improvement is within the notification and alerts. I'd like to see it get smarter with script-writing within OpCon to make it do more. There is some room for improvement there and that's why we got the consulting hours.

We've been using OpCon for the last five years.

The stability, on a scale of one to 10, is about a seven. We are having some issues with logs. We did reach out to OpCon, but they didn't have a solution for that, so we're having to manually handle that on a daily basis. That was a little disappointing. I'm hoping that one day they will have a list-serve where we can reach out to other OpCon shops. That way, we can reach out to other OpCon users who have a high level of OpCon skills and say, "Hey, we ran into this problem. How did you guys figure your way out of it?"

It's pretty scalable. It can go virtual. They have a lot of options. Right now we are on-prem, but we would definitely look at going off-prem and having it hosted in the future. That's what we'd like, and they do offer that capability. They also offer managed services, which is something we're going to target in the near future, simply because we're a small shop. so they do offer a variety of things that we could definitely take advantage of.

We only have one user using OpCon because the main one left. She is training our other two who are brand-new; they are literally brand-new, even to IT. We are very shorthanded right now. That is why we bought the consulting hours, so that we could get these other two up to speed.

Similarly, only one person is doing maintenance of the solution, which is why we're going to contemplate shifting over to OpCon's managed services. That kind of solution is probably a perfect remedy for a shop like ours. I wouldn't be surprised if, this time next year, we're not even managing it and that they are.

When we had the log problems they weren't very helpful on that. It felt that it wasn't a very helpful solution. From eight to five, they will help. They have some really good people. But if there are really complex problems like the logs, it feels like the front-line support doesn't know, or at least didn't on that one occasion. Thankfully, our network guys figured out the problem. Otherwise, we would have been out of luck. I'd rate technical support at six out of 10.

We didn't have a previous solution. We were doing things manually.

I didn't participate in the setup, but I believe that it was straightforward. OpCon came onsite for training and it seems that soon after my staff got the training they took the ball and ran with it. They got the building blocks in the training and, after that, they caught on fairly well and were able to start automating a lot of the manual processes, one by one.

For the implementation, we had to load the server and we had to have a backup for that OpCon server, which goes out to our Branson site. Any changes to OpCon get passed on. But when OpCon come onsite, they pretty much got everything loaded for us. We were paying them to do that, which is what I would recommend to anybody. It helped us, a company that was brand-new to it, to bring us into it. When they were onsite they handled 90 percent of it.

It wasn't long after the deployment that we automated the first process. Within a week we were already automating some things that we had been manually moving over. And then we road-mapped big ones like the ACH stuff that I mentioned elsewhere. One of our first projects was automating our ACH to the Feds. We had an idea of what we wanted to do once it was implemented.

We have definitely seen a return on investment. The big return on investment was the fact that we lost three OpCon people from our staff and nobody even knew that we had. We went on without skipping a beat. We literally had the worst-case scenario that can happen to an IT staff and we came out smelling like a rose. Everything ran and we were able to continue with a small staff and we did not have to worry about our batch automation.

Yearly, it's around $30,000.

We bought consulting hours for a year at an additional cost. We're getting 85 hours a year for consulting to help us through, for example, with a complex process that we want to get done. Some of those hours might be spent for them to actually come onsite and give one-on-one training to some new people being introduced to OpCon.

We looked at two other vendors. It's been a long time so I don't remember their names. They were enticing because they were definitely a lot lower in cost, but ultimately OpCon had more of a service to provide. OpCon offered more services and more automation. It was a no-brainer after we learned that.

Do your homework. Definitely look at other vendors and consider your staff size. In our case, because we have a small staff, we don't have a lot of programmers. We don't have the luxury of having 10 programmers who can write their own batch scripts. If you're a small shop like us, really do your homework on it because, in the end, if you rely on somebody writing batch scripts to do things and they ultimately leave, you own that. You really need to make sure about your road-mapping. Are your employees going to stay at the credit union? If they are, that that makes a big difference. 

What happened to us was that we lost two valuable OpCon employees within a span of two months who knew how to solve OpCon problems. The third person, who was average but knew it, went down with an ankle injury for a month-and-a-half. We had nobody who knew OpCon for almost two months. The only thing that saved us was that the process was so automated that we didn't have a problem, thank goodness. Everything just ran and we never had an issue.

You have to know your staff; you have to know whether they're content. Are they going to be staying? If you know they're going to leave, you better plan ahead. You don't want to get caught like we did.

But our situation tells you how well OpCon is programmed.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that we have to stay on top of the releases. Every year there are software releases that you have to get done. They are key. But there are also updates, SLAs that come out. We definitely try to keep on top of that because our batch automation is a critical platform. So it's critical that we make sure that everything is up to date. The SQL portion of that is also important. We also use third-party FTP software and that is another thing that we've got to make sure is up to date. It's a definitely a solution with moving parts.

We own the solution ourselves on-prem, but our core system is cloud-hosted.

It runs all types of jobs to make changes to our database. From our end, we primarily use it to pull and push information to our cloud-hosted system: moving files around, making changes to files, and those types of things.

People use the tool in every job role that we have. Our organization is a financial institution, so we have people in lending, people in member services, people in operations, risk, and marketing. 

Previously, we would receive a file from a vendor, then we would have to go through and make changes to individual accounts in our core system. There are probably between 10 to 20 accounts any given week. It probably took around five minutes for it to run through the report and make all the changes, and that was if there was nothing complicated with all very straightforward changes. Now, that is done in 30 seconds.

We receive a report once a month of bad email addresses. Someone would have to go through and search each one of those individually, and there was a time when there was 300 email addresses on that list as we were working through putting in tens of thousands of email addresses in our system. As we're working through those on marketing campaigns and getting bounce backs, we've been gradually removing them. That used to take an extremely long time for someone from marketing to go through, search each individual email address, and remove them from all instances and places where it resided in our system, where there could be 10 to 20 on any given account. Since implementing that process, it takes five minutes. Now, it does it all automatically. It looks at every possible location and removes it in all areas. We've been able to clear out that list and completely remove it from the vendor system, so we aren't getting charged for the bounce back.

This solution has freed up our employees to do more meaningful work. Some portion of everyone's job has been automated, and that's probably by two to three hours a week. So, that is 120 employees times two to three hours a week.

The change has all been positive. Employees don't have to do the simple busy work anymore. They are able to spend more time doing the stuff that impacts our members in a positive way.

IT is probably the biggest area of our organization that has seen incredible improvement, since we were the ones doing a lot of the batch jobs and running a lot of the group jobs that would impact multiple accounts. However, every department has had reports automated.

The most valuable feature and reason that we bought the solution is because of the RSJ connector, which we use to make changes to our database. 

After attending the pretraining as well as the advanced training that they offer, I would say that the product is very easy to use. What can get complicated is if you're doing anything more than just the built-in jobs. If you're using the more advanced features, troubleshooting becomes extremely complicated.

We converted in 2016, so we have been using it for about three years.

We have had it go down one time, which was not related to the system itself. The server went down, which was an issue on our end. That is not OpCon's fault. Now, the only issue with this, which is OpCon related, was that it didn't send any errors except for one alert, one time. Then, because the server was down, it was unable to send us anything ongoing.

If there was some way that we could set up monitoring on a separate server that would look for specifically OpCon related tasks, then that would be more helpful. But, as for the stability of the system, we have never had it go down that was its own fault.

We have automated hundreds of processes, if not thousands, since deploying this solution. We have 120 employees who are impacted by its use. They use the reports that it runs on a daily basis. 

In the terms of people administering it, I am the primary person responsible for setting up new jobs, making sure it's running, doing updates, etc. We also have five other people who may login to do basic troubleshooting on it. I am a systems developer, so I handle the development of OpCon as well as a couple of other systems. As for the other people who can login, we have four people on help desk along with our director of security.

We have not had to scale OpCon beyond the initial setup. We have the controlling server and two others that it is connected to setup. We previously had three, but we moved that third to a cloud-hosted solution. It doesn't matter how many people we have or how big our core system is, we don't need to scale it for that. 

We had some previously automated processes. In the sense, they had to be scheduled manually, but once scheduled, they would run through a list of things. So, that part was already partially automated. At this point, we probably still have 20 percent of our manual processes that cannot be automated because they require someone to go in and physically look at the information. We have maybe five to 10 percent left that can be automated or can be partially automated that haven't yet been.

If we wanted to move it to more servers, e.g. have multiple data centers, then I think it would scale excellently. However, we haven't had to deal with that yet.

The technical support is always excellent. Having a network which can help you troubleshoot and build the best possible system is probably the most valuable thing that I have learned:

• The value of a network of people working in the same system. E.g., being able to reach out to the support that they have as well as other credit unions, who use the same system.
• Being able to troubleshoot and discuss different ways to accomplish the same thing. E.g., the different options that they have for moving things around and running things in a different way with all of the different tools that they have to assist you. 
  

We used Windows Scheduler before to automate some general file movements and stuff, but we couldn't do anything within our core system with it.

We switched our core system. Originally, we were using a system provided by Pfizer. We switched to a system provided by Jack Henry & Associates, and they were not compatible with Windows Scheduler. So, we were doing everything manually for a while, until we adopted OpCon. This solution overcomes limitations from our previous automation tool.

The initial setup was straightforward. We set up the original server as well as the ones that we would need it connected to. The basic system has been in place since the initial setup.

We had folks onsite for two weeks, but we have been continuing to automate more new, existing processes over the last three years. So, we had the bulk of our official setup done within three months.

After deploying the solution, it took us 10 minutes to automate our first process. After we got it setup, creating a job is very simple.

In general, getting up and running is extremely easy. Once you get the basics installed, creating and running jobs is very easy. However, when you get into the more complicated, advanced features, then it becomes much more complicated.

We had someone from the SMA team come onsite to help us set up the server. We installed and connected it to the appropriate additional environments. Once we did that, it was completely straightforward. It did help that we had someone come onsite to help us set up some of our more complicated jobs while we were still very new with the system.

Our experience with the SMA team was excellent.

We have seen ROI. We are becoming an automation forward organization instead of just a financial institution that does everything manually. We have been able to move so much reporting from paper. We are digital because of OpCon.

We don't have people manually doing processing anymore. The fact that I can do five minutes to three hours of work in 30 seconds is a significant improvement.

OpCon was the only one that did exactly what we wanted. We needed something that integrated with Jack Henry's Symitar Episys solution. We wanted something that would be easy to set up and maintain, which offered a lot of training.

The biggest difference between OpCon and Windows Scheduler is that Windows Scheduler does not work with our core system. It didn't really work with the old one or the new one. Originally, we were only using it to move files around, so we could have continued to use it in that sense. But, when moving to a new system, we wanted to have something that would interact directly with that system.

OpCon offers a lot more complicated criteria when scheduling the types of jobs that you can run. OpCon is a complete automation solution, where Windows Scheduler is just a scheduler.

Pick the right team and send them to training. So, pick people who are going to invest in and use the system on a daily basis. They should also be curious and creative. Then, send all of them to training, both the free and advanced training. They also offer a certification now, which is also extremely useful.

I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

We use it to run all of our batch across seven Unisys mainframes.

It's installed on Windows.

OpCon has streamlined the batch. It's made it quicker. We're processing work a lot more easily now, given the dependencies and frequencies we have. We don't really have to think about checking things. It's all there in the system and done.

When we first brought it in, we saved on people's time. We freed them up to be able to look at the future. We freed up two or three people who used to have to work on it all the time. In terms of batch savings overnight, we've probably saved a good couple of hours per night on batch scheduling.

Auto-scheduling is the most valuable feature. We have the ability to schedule seven days in advance, so we know exactly how we're running every night. If we need to make any changes, we can make changes to the daily schedule and we don't have to worry about changing masters or quarterlies. Changing our master schedule causes us issues. We have another product that doesn't work quite like this and when they have to change the master schedule they have problems. Because we have the ability to auto-build seven days in advance, we only need to change the daily and not the masters.

Believe it or not, there is nothing that we require. Everything we want is there. Everything we need, we get. The support we get, and the management support we get from SMA — we have a monthly review meeting with them — are fantastic.

The stability is fantastic. It's 100 percent. We've never had a problem with the product from day one.

It's fully scalable. We're currently reviewing moving it into our Windows estate, which is huge, and we're possibly looking at moving it into other areas as well. It's fully scalable, obviously with charges. We pay for a set of licenses to run on the Unisys. If we want it to run on other machines, we would have to pay more for the licenses, which is standard for any product.

We run about 2,000 jobs a day, and we are looking at potentially expanding it to 25,000 jobs a day, if our Windows systems move across. We're just about to go into proof of concept on that.

We were using an SMA product, Scheduler, but they stopped supporting that product and then we migrated to their updated product which was OpCon.

The initial setup was easy, as are the updates. It took us about an hour to do it, given the way that it's all written down for you. You can have a resource from them onsite if you want or you just load the software and it goes off and does it all for you. We've done it numerous times and we've never had a problem.

In terms of our deployment strategy, we already had an SMA product called Scheduler. What we did was we took a copy of our database, gave it to SMA, and they migrated it through into OpCon for us. They gave it to us and let us play with it, test it, and make sure it was working okay and then we migrated straight over to it. It was as simple as that. We couldn't find any problems and we migrated straight away. We've never had any problems with it.

SMA is fantastic to work with. They're knowledgeable, they know the products, and they don't try and force anything upon us. They're happy to work with us. They understand our limitations, and they still do to this day.

We've seen a tenfold return on investment. The relationship we have with SMA now is absolutely fantastic. They don't just do batch scheduling. They've come in and offered other services.

We're processing the batch a lot quicker, so our services to members are not down. The money is available and in people's accounts a lot quicker than it used to be. It gives us 100 percent availability. It doesn't fail; we've never had a problem with it. 

It's not expensive. It's a lot cheaper than competitors. Licensing is annual.

There are only additional costs to the standard licensing fees if we go above what we've agreed to. If we were to add a new Unisys mainframe, or if we add a Unix box or a Windows box, then obviously we'd have to pay for licenses. There's nothing else.

You need to be up-front and tell what SMA what you want. There are different licensing models for different setups. There are a lot of options, so it's really a matter of working out exactly what options you require. What works for our organization, Nationwide, may not work for the next company or the company after that. But they have a lot of licensing options available. And if there isn't one that you want, you can make your own with SMA.

There isn't anybody else that does Unisys. There's no other product for running automated batch on Unisys. Obviously, there are other companies in the market that can do Windows and other systems, but no one out there can really run Unisys. And Unisys recommends OpCon anyway.

I, myself, do not use other similar products, but Nationwide does. We use a product called Control-M from BMC. We can't find any advantages of Control-M over OpCon. The drawbacks of Control-M are that it's too expensive and an upgrade takes ages, days, to do.

OpCon is cheaper and the service we get from SMA is absolutely fantastic. The product is always growing. We're seeing it grow. We're seeing the changes, and we're seeing the changes that we're asking for in the product. We don't see that from BMC. That's why we're looking to move Windows from Control-M into OpCon, possibly.

My advice would be to work with SMA. Don't try and do it yourself. Work with SMA until you're comfortable; until you've got the training and the expertise. Work with them until you're comfortable taking it on without one of them there. Do your first install, your first upgrade, with SMA. It's simple, it's as per the manual, as per the training, but you need that little bit of confidence. That's what we've found. We've got that confidence now, and we don't rely on SMA at all to come in to help us.

The biggest lesson I've learned by using the product is trust it. Trust what SMA says. Believe what they say, because what they say is right. The migration is easy and they can do most migrations. Their training is fantastic, their support people are fantastic, and the support is out of this world. We're UK-based, so we have a UK team that looks after us in our daylight hours, and then we have a US-based team, and then we have an on-call US-based team as well, if we have problems. But we've never had to call them out. We've dealt with them, we've had our little questions and niggles, but they've answered everything, every time.

The product is always improving. The new release 19 has a load of new features for us. I've not really looked at it yet, but I think it's become faster, more slick, and a bit more user-friendly. They've taken on a lot of what customers have been saying about it. They've made some behind-the-scenes changes, but they've also made some enhancements to the way information is presented. My system, the Unisys, is quite old, so there's probably not a lot to change in that arena. It's probably more on the Windows and Unix side, which we don't use currently.

We don't really have users as such, because it's a batch scheduling tool. We have about 30 users who have access to it, but only for support purposes. We've got a team called Schedule and Batch which looks after things and check it. My team has access to it, but we very rarely use it and we're not limited on the number of users. The scheduling team is responsible for making sure all the batch work that is scheduled finishes correctly. We also have an ECC team, whose members are like operators. They look after the machines that run all the batches overnight. And then my team is a support team. We support the ECC in scheduling batch, if they have any problems with the product or with any of the batch jobs overnight.

For updates and maintenance of the solution we need just one person, me. My job is platform manager, but I'm also the OpCon subject matter expert as well.

On a scale of one to ten, this product is a 12. But I'll accept making it a ten.

We are a mid-level financial institution. We specifically used OpCon to help schedule important tasks that could not be trusted to human error. We picked it up as a tool to make lives easier for all of our different departments. We began working with MAS a few months ago as our scheduled jobs became too much for a few people to handle while we were experiencing high turnover. We became bogged down with users who did not understand the system and did not have time to train them. MAS stepped in and made this transition a lot easier for us. 

OpCon has made our lives easier by taking out the guesswork and removing tedious activities from employee's workdays when their time is better spent elsewhere. OpCon also helps because it is easy to "read the job" to know what the job does, why, and how to do it manually if needed. 

Through the use of self-service buttons, we have been able to give the option to run jobs whenever the user needs without having to manually do an entire process. Many of our end users use this without any complaint. It is simple and easy to use. 

MAS is by far the best feature, although not a feature of the software specifically. MAS has more knowledge than our employees, so we have been able to develop schedules that are far beyond our own skillset. 

They have also helped with maintenance so we can be assured if something goes wrong, MAS is there to fix it. Our on-call schedules are easier and we get full nights of sleep. Our team morale has greatly increased since we began working with MAS. Another great feature is the exit codes which help us understand why things are failing so the jobs are easier to fix. 

The only downside to OpCon is that its features can be complicated and really must be taught. Most of our users don't have training beyond the free Basic Training that SMA provides, so for fresh eyes, it is kind of difficult to understand some of the language used. 

Another thing that is difficult to understand is that not all failures explain why they are failing. Some give generic exit codes. 

Otherwise, I have no complaints. Working with the MAS team has really simplified everything for us. They're easy to reach, knowledgeable, and quick.

Personally, I have been using the solution for two years, but our organization has been using it for five or more years.

The software has many features that are even beyond my knowledge, having worked with it for two years. Working with the MAS team, I have learned even more. 

You will often find that you speak to the same people over and over again so you develop a rapport. Everyone is always helpful and very nice.

We did not use a different solution. We were doing all of this manually. 

The initial setup can be complex, however, transitioning with the MAS team was very easy and straightforward. 

We used a vendor team. Our engineers developed a close relationship with them. 

It is not the cheapest solution on the market, but it is relatively easy to use. I absolutely recommend splurging to hire the MAS service to make the transition easier. They can help teach your users how to use the program and they are able to quickly build jobs so you see an immediate impact. 

I am not entirely sure if there was an evaluation as this was before my time, however, knowing management, I assume that they had many demos with other vendors as well but eventually chose SMA.

We currently use Opcon for our daily job scheduling. We also use it to transfer files after jobs have been processed. Being able to let Opcon run these jobs and file transfers have saved us time daily.

It has saved our morning and evening shift time by processing tedious jobs so they're able to get more involved in other tasks. Soon we'll be able to roll it out to other departments and handle some of their tasks.  

The workflow designer is a wonderful feature to show to users. It seems so simple - and yet there's a lot going on which can be easily explained. Having the jobs laid out while attaching dependencies is a nice addition to the program. 

The service that they offer is amazing. Ryan Compton has helped me more times than I can count. He does a great job of explaining things and it has gone a long way.

The logs are a little daunting to look at the first few times, however, as you begin to understand what you're looking at, it becomes easier. 

We've been using Opcon Since February 2021.

We switched to a different core and Opcon was definitely a better replacement for the solution that we were using. 

For anyone interested in Opcon, make sure you have a few users in your company attend the training classes.