OpCon Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It took us minutes to automate our first process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use OpCon for 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.

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.

I do a lot of administration of the product. I am also in development. I create jobs and maintain roles for end users, so I take care of administration and scheduling.

OpCon provides centralization like most of the schedulers. It has pretty much the same functionality from a centralization point of view.

OpCon enables us to manage complex schedules that span disparate systems. This functionality is native to OpCon.

OpCon has not freed up time for our staff to focus on higher-value projects.

I have used OpCon to manage legacy systems along with modern systems. It works fine with legacy systems and modern systems.

We have automated pretty much every manual task with OpCon. We have very few manual tasks left. The scheduler is there, so we have to do all the work using the scheduler. If we still have to do manual work, there is no point in having a scheduler. In other words, we automate every task that we can with OpCon. We have automated about 80% to 90% of tasks.

OpCon has helped to reduce errors when running complex processes. We use it for Linux, Unix, AIX, and Windows. It is used as a point of entry to every system that we use. It is the central point of automation for every system we use, such as ETL, managing databases, and patching Linux systems. Everything is under the responsibility of the scheduler. That is why it is very important for us to have a scheduler, and that is why we use OpCon as the main product in our production systems.

Coming from the Control-M world, one of the things I like about OpCon is that I can sometimes do complex tasks with simple jobs. That is native in OpCon but not in Control-M. In Broadcom Dollar Universe and BMC Control-M, to do some complex jobs, we need a lot of duplicated jobs, whereas in OpCon, it is native. Most specifically, when it comes to the frequency, in the same job, we can specify different frequencies and classifications of the job. OpCon is more helpful than other solutions.

Also, OpCon is much easier to use with Kubernetes as compared to other schedulers, such as Control-M.

I live in Paris. Here in France, OpCon is not very known for big clients. I like Solution Manager, but it is not yet as well developed as Control-M.

The GUI is very old-fashioned compared to Control-M, for example. They should prioritize the GUI. For administrators, they should provide more native commands to do some complex tasks, such as CI/CD tasks, through the command line.

With Control-M, there are also more possibilities for integration with other systems than with OpCon or Dollar Universe. There is better communication with other systems such as gateways, add-ons, cloud services, ERPs, and CRMs. They have done a lot of work on that.

I have been using OpCon for about a year and a half.

We have not seen any issues happening very frequently. It is pretty stable. It depends on what we do with our production systems, but OpCon is stable. There are no crashes every day or every week or even every month. It could only happen once in a quarter or year.

I have not had any problems with scaling using OpCon or Control-M. We do not have any issues with most of the modern systems. I did not have any problems while adding more services or more agents.

They were quick to respond.

Neutral

I have used three schedulers. Among them, Control-M is the best for me because they have done a lot of work on the GUI for using it on a daily basis. They also have the command line, which is not much developed in OpCon. In OpCon and Dollar Universe, you can use the command line, but it is not much developed. Control-M also has better integration with different kinds of systems.

I was not there for the initial deployment, but from what I heard from my colleagues, it was done with the help of SMA. It was not difficult, but it took time because not all the deployment phases were automated. With Control-M, we can do all the work from a single script. Of course, we have to customize some scripts in the beginning, but with a simple script, we can deploy whatever we want. This is not the case with OpCon.

In terms of maintenance, we have to upgrade OpCon agents, servers, databases, etcetera.

I do not have information about the pricing. I have seen some contracts, and it seems that Control-M is a lot more expensive than OpCon, but I do not know the pricing of OpCon. Control-M seems to be four or five times more expensive than OpCon.

I would recommend getting trained on OpCon first. You can go through some courses on SMA's website. You can start with the basic one and then have more training. You should be interested in learning about schedulers and how they work. Know how it works, what to expect from OpCon, and how to manage and use the functionalities of the product.

Its benefits can be realized immediately, but it also depends on the project that you are working on and the experience you have. If you are a central administrator and you do not do any development, you might pass all the benefits of OpCon because you never found out how to do some specific tasks. I am currently doing a migration from Dollar Universe to OpCon. These two schedulers are very different. It is very difficult to migrate from one scheduler to another because each scheduler level has its own functionalities and way of working and conceptualizing.

I have not used OpCon's Self Service feature. I have experience working with OpCon for two different clients in France. One is a big insurance client and one is in the luxury domain. Neither of them is using this functionality.

I have not used OpCon Cloud. Here in France, I do not know of any client who is using the cloud version.

I would rate OpCon a seven out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using OpCon for about eight years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are no additional costs.

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

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

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

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

We 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 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.

Over the course of my 15 year use, we automated dozens of processes with easily hundreds of tasks. Then, almost six years ago, we outsourced a large number of processes so we didn't do them in-house, and as a result OpCon wasn't doing very much for us for a time. About two years ago, we started automating new processes. Now, with OpCon, we have automated about half a dozen good sized processes.

I am using a very recent version.

Our most recent automation project had to do with our mortgage origination system where we automated virtually all of the steps being done by a human. This was about two hours worth of work each day, if done manually. This has to be done 365 days a year (weekends or holidays, it doesn't matter). Now, OpCon runs those steps each day. It finishes in under a half an hour and is done before people even have to come into work. This was a project that benefited us tremendously. 

With this project, we made people's time available to do more effective things. We didn't eliminate any staff, but we weren't even trying to. We were trying to make tasks able to be done more consistently and automatically, then allow the staff that used to do them to work on other things.

There used to be either one or two people who had to do this job every single day. So, the automation project affects those two people. Indirectly, it probably benefits 20 to 30 people by having work automated and time available to do more effective things for the company. 

At first, people were skeptical that the work could be done properly. They wanted a solution, but were afraid that it might not work or would not perform as well (as them). However, they are very happy now with the fact that they don't have to come in at 6:00 a.m. and work on holidays, etc. The solution streamlined our mortgage operations. 

While somewhat small, we just recently added automation to an everyday process. This is just one of those things where now nobody has to do it. There was a file that needed to be downloaded from our credit card servicer and moved to a different place on our network, then renamed. You also need to archive the file that was there from yesterday. This was a relatively straightforward set of tasks. I don't think the automation project took very long to do, probably a couple of hours, likely less; it took somebody 15 minutes a day. Now, nobody has to even think about it, as it's just there automatically. We have had two similar, recent projects where it was a question of downloading files made available on a daily basis, putting and renaming them where they need to be, and then managing archives of the files afterward. 

It can run scripted tasks automatically over and over without intervention. That is what it does and the part that I really like because repetitive tasks need to be done over and over, day after day, no matter what day of the week it is. It is difficult to have staff do these manually and accurately, especially over weekends or through the night. Instead, you can have OpCon do them.

I wouldn't call it the easiest to automate. It has to be learned, training is required, then you get better at it over time. There are right ways and wrong ways to go about it (think standards, best practices, conventions). It isn't realistic to think that OpCon is very easy and you can just start clicking around to do complex things. It's flexibility and rich feature set also make it challenging at first.

There is one thing I wish OpCon could do. I'm not sure if it should be expected to, but we have tried to get it to where it could start a process on an external database. I'm sure SMA would say that in some cases it can, but we have a specific application where it can't. Therefore, if there were some tools which allowed us to interact with this external database automatically, that would be helpful. 

I have been using the solution for about 15 years. Those 15 years that I have been using OpCon span two different employers.

It is very stable. It is rarely offline or not functioning because of some internal error. This happens once in a great while, so I would call it very stable.

It can be deployed and maintained by as little as one person or a fraction of an FTE. It's not a full-time job taking care of it, not at the scale of our company.

My impression is that it scales incredibly, because of the size of some of the institutions that it has been used in, even being used by our own banking solutions provider at their large multi-tenant level.

OpCon is capable of running automation for multiple servers and multiple businesses, e.g., many dozens of institutions like ours. There are very large scale deployments of OpCon, but I don't know how many servers, consoles, or employees that it takes to run them. 

70 percent of our manual processing has been automated. I guess we have more to do!

For our environment, OpCon has daily schedules doing jobs throughout the day and night. It is fairly extensive. I would consider it a critical piece of our operations. 

There might be as many as a dozen employees who touch it in some way, shape, or form. There are maybe two or three employees capable of working with it as administrators. Perhaps a couple are power users. The are indirect consumers or beneficiaries of the service. Also, there is a module called self-service. We have a number of users in back office type roles who use self-service buttons to accomplish some tasks by kicking off a process or task. 

I would rate the technical support very high. They know their product very well. OpCon also knows our industry and is very commonly deployed in our vertical, which is financial services, and in particular, credit unions. They implement their own best practices and can therefore easily build on work their consultants have previously accomplished.

I did use another automation tool before OpCon, but there is almost no comparison. It is certainly not apples to apples. I have used Windows Scheduler to do very simple things, but again, there is no comparison to what OpCon can do.

OpCon was implemented at my former company while I was there, and when I came to work for my current company, the solution was already in place.

I was involved in initial setup in my other job a long time ago. It was relatively complex, but SMA does it for you. From that standpoint, it made the initial setup straightforward for me.

For the two employers that I have done this solution with, the strategy was to identify the most important processes that we wished to have automated. It might be important because of the process's criticality to the company or because of how annoying it is to have to do it every day. Those are identified, then documentation is gathered together. It might also be information inside people's heads. So, you have to do some interviews or onboarding meetings where you get the information together required to make it able to be automated. You work with an SMA engineer to do the initial automation along with training, then you place it into production. My strategy from there is to use the onsite expertise to help identify the next tier of things that should be automated so we can work on them ourselves as we go forward.

SMA normally does the initial deployment. They come onsite for your first implementation and spend a week. Then, they often will come back and spend a second week as part of the deployment plan. By the time they are done, there are usually a great number of identified processes which have already been automated. From the initial deployment to getting things up and running on a server to having things automated in production, you can easily have these results inside a month.

The solution has reduced data processing times in two ways:

1. With the mortgage servicing example, that was a large project. It accomplishes the work in a much shorter amount of time. Nobody has to waste their time waiting between cycles and tasks. Essentially, it cuts down drastically on how long the process takes. 
2. In the case of one of the more recent smaller examples, it does its job in something close to minutes, even possibly under a minute. Whereas, if a person had to go to their workstation, sit down, login, and transfer the file, then rename it, it would take them perhaps five minutes or more. On a percentage basis, that is a huge time savings.

Offhand I would say it's at least a 75 percent time savings. We have not done a formal ROI. However, looking at our licensing costs on an annual basis and showing how that saves in terms of staff time/efficiency and getting tasks done after hours (365 days a year), we do see return on our investment.

There are standard licensing fees and annual maintenance. They also have a subscription model that is a hybrid managed service. We have also invested in ancillary API and connector licences specific to our environment and use cases.

At my previous company, we did evaluate other options. We evaluated another process automation commercial package, and we decided instead on OpCon.

We chose OpCon because of how feature rich it was. The other products could have done the immediate things at hand that we wanted to automate. However, we pictured OpCon as being able to do more than that down the line, so we wanted to invest in a more robust solution.

Technically, almost anything can be automated. However, there is almost an equal amount of work that has to be done to have the people part accept and trust it.

My advice to overcome the people factor would be to adopt a fairly formal project management approach and bring those people in as stakeholders. Listen to what they want, then try to ask questions for the rest, as there are things that they just won't tell you. Get as much possible information from them so they understand that you want to help them and are not trying to take their job away. That is the big thing: people shouldn't feel like their job is threatened at all. Work through a project management process showing them how progress is being made, what the results are, and help them to start trusting the solution along the way before it goes live. The big key is communication and information gathering.

The solution is very good. It's robust and scales. OpCon comes with good tech support. There is always room for a product to grow or be a little easier to use or maintain. I would give it a nine (out of 10) overall.