OpCon Reviews

We use it throughout the enterprise, company-wide.

Utilizing OpCon has enabled us to achieve almost 98 percent automation throughout the enterprise. We have over 15,000 jobs in OpCon.

The solution has also streamlined operations. We were utilizing six people to do our processing and sustain our environment prior to using OpCon, and now we are only utilizing one person for that. And that person, who is currently working primarily on OpCon, has been freed up to do other work, other scripting. He's also able to do additional admin work within the IT environment.

OpCon has taken employees out of day-to-day, manual operations and given them an opportunity to grow in other areas of IT. They have been dispersed throughout our IT department in various other functions and roles where we needed additional staff, including our client services PC area, our server support area, and some of the other admin work areas. They no longer have to do repeatable, menial tasks just running batch operations.

In addition, nightly processing would take about 10 hours prior to OpCon. Now that we're running on OpCon, it takes two.

• The most valuable features are its integration into Windows, into VM, and into AIX, as well as SQL.
• The job automation and ability to run scripting are also important for us.
• It's relatively easy to use and utilize. If you have knowledge and understanding of network technologies, it makes it much simpler.

We have not explored the possibility, but one of the areas for improvement would be more integration into Active Directory, to where it could do the creation of user accounts and the additional work to integrate third-party systems into payroll systems.

We've been using OpCon for almost eight years.

It is a very stable product.

So far it's been scalable in our environment. We haven't had any issues with the scalability of the product.

We have plans to increase the Self Service capability and to integrate it into additional business units. As far as some of the other environments go within our infrastructure, we do have plans to add automation to our document imaging system and any other new or auxiliary products that we purchase.

The technical support staff is knowledgeable about their product. We have had a turnaround time of less than four hours in most instances where we've had to call in for support. But the product in and of itself is very stable so we have not had a lot of technical support calls. Contacting them has been more for when we've had to implement new products or new services and we were making modifications.

We did utilize another job scheduler prior to OpCon called JFS, which was not robust enough to do everything that we needed done. That's why we opted to look at the OpCon solution as a replacement. JFS was more tedious in terms of implementation. It was not robust enough to do individual calendar scheduling, nor did it have the ability to do a lot of these single transfers or to initiate any scripting for SQL or AIX. It was very limited.

With JFS it did not take long to implement automations; a couple of hours to automate a process and to be able to add jobs to it. It's just that it was very tedious and we had to consistently manipulate the schedules to fit our needs because it did not have a calendar system like OpCon does to be able to manipulate jobs and do schedules by date.

Overall, JFS was not scalable. It didn't meet our needs. It required a lot of manual intervention. We had outgrown that product very quickly. We had been on that product less than four years before we decided that it just was not good enough to sustain our environment. Currently, our environment has over 240 servers and there was no way we could have managed that with the old schedule.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The SMA group came out onsite to assist with the implementation. It was done in two phases, upon our request, because we didn't have the man-hours to be able to do it all in one shot. They came out and did some initial training with us and then we asked them to come back four weeks later. Upon their return, because of the training we received, we were able to tackle a lot of the automated processes and they helped us with the more complex schedules.

The deployment itself took a couple of hours.

The implementation strategy for us was to tackle the nightly process first, and the second item was to tackle all FTPs. The third was to tackle the complex scripting for all other SQL or AIX. The last step was to do Self Service.

We reached our return on investment from the first year that we purchased the initial product, simply because of the number of man-hours saved. We were paying $200,000 in personnel costs to sustain our operations environment. We removed that from our budget as far as salary is concerned, from the operations area, because we didn't need as many personnel to run operations on once we implemented the product. We ended up adding new roles to take on new initiatives and we were able to expand our IT area into other things.

Our annual maintenance costs are $45,000. The initial cost is separate.

Initially, we purchased just the standard OpCon solution. We upgraded to the OpCon elite solution, the enterprise edition. That did include some Self Service licensing. But if we want to expand to more Self Service licenses, we will have to purchase them. We may look at that in the near future.

I don't recall which other options we looked at. We did attend an educational conference where this product was offered and we decided to explore its capabilities. Because we had a job scheduler in place prior to purchasing OpCon, we didn't weigh it against many other products. We looked at some of the features that it had and the robustness of the product and we liked the presentation that we were given, as well as the possibility for expansion. That's why we took it on as a job scheduler.

Step back and look at your enterprise and purchase enough licensing to cover all of your servers. When we first went into the product, we only purchased the minimal, standard licensing. It was just the 10 licenses. Fewer than six months after the purchase of the product, we had already used up all the licensing that we had purchased. If we had really taken a look at our overall infrastructure and seen the number of servers that we had, and taken into account the utilization of this product — because it's so robust it can be used for many things — we could have made a better decision on the purchase and gotten an enterprise version of it instead of just the standard.

I have about 15 users of the product. Three of them are operators, about five of them are in the development realm, and the rest are batch users who initiate schedules using the Self Service feature. For deployment and maintenance of OpCon we require two people. They do monthly security patching, which is normal maintenance, as well as yearly upgrades.

The biggest lesson I've learned in using OpCon is that you get your money's worth. The robustness, scalability, and expandability of the product are things that every company should invest in. OpCon is a very good product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stability has been very good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it for automation of our nightly workflows as well as automation of our internal processes that are happening all day, including moving files, and running jobs on our core system. We also interface it with a lot of the database servers. We use it for a lot. 

We automated our nightly update process and, in doing that, we freed up employees to be able to do something else and not have to worry about that. In my area, we have six or seven who have been freed up, and I've also expanded it out to more of our operations. For example, before, people would tell us that something was ready to be run and we would ask somebody to actually run that job on our core. By using the Solution Manager that OpCon provides, employees can kick that job off themselves. So it has freed up even more people. The employees involved have embraced the changes. They are happy to be able to focus their time on more meaningful tasks. Giving them that button via Solution Manager, they are happy to hit that button and that they don't have to wait on anybody else. It has saved us time. It's more efficient.

It's just streamlined our entire IT operations. Before, we had batch files running on certain servers and they were all over the place; this server did this, another server did that. But now, everything is streamlined into one. All the automation, processes and moving, is happening straight through OpCon. The run of a day is all happening through this one server. In the past, when an issue would arise, we'd have to troubleshoot and figure out where it was running, what's happening, why it was not working. Now we have a central point to focus on to be able to know what's happened and move forward.

We are running 13,935 daily jobs through OpCon, which represent approximately 1,200 daily schedules that we're running over the course of a month. We have automated about 75 to 80 percent of our manual processing. And we're still building and adding things to it every day.

In addition, if a process used to take 20 minutes to do, it may only take 10 minutes now because somebody has the whole process in their control. The nightly update process, that used to take at least a few hours, now that it runs automated, runs in an hour-and-a-half or so. So there are some significant gains. If I had to estimate, I'd say our data processing has improved by 70 percent.

The automation of processes is the most valuable feature. One of the major hurdles for us over the last few years, before we found OpCon, was to make our nightly process happen automatically. Being a bank, we have nightly update processes that have to happen for posting transactions, for example, and it was a huge load off our department to have that automated.

It's pretty easy to use. They have help information built right into the program so anytime you're trying to build something and you need help, you just hit F1 and there's documentation on what you're trying to do. OpCon does offer training, and I did attend both the basic and the advanced training, which were very helpful. But if you understand PowerShell and things like that, you could, potentially, build OpCon without going to formal training. I do think it is easy to use.

I think that they're working on this, but I wish that there was a more centralized area to be able to see what other people are doing and use the OpCon community, per se. I went to their annual conference and I gained a lot of contacts from that. I keep in touch with them and we talk, but it'd be nice to have more of that be more readily available. They have a community platform for OpCon users, but I want to see more of where somebody is doing this process in that way. They have a great community platform right now, but I feel that it could be developed.

We've been using OpCon for almost three years.

The solution is very stable. I haven't seen any stability issues with the product to date. They tell you what exactly what is to be expected. They provide documentation of updates and what you should do and what you shouldn't do. I feel that as long as I follow the guidance from them, I won't have any stability issues.

We started using it as well for running our database maintenance at night. We have multiple database servers running in-house and we were able to start doing that with OpCon. There are many solutions that it interfaces with and, while we're not leveraging all of them, we're using a good number of them.

Their technical support is very good. I called them more in the beginning when we were doing the implementation, but I'll call them anytime. For any of the processes that I'm trying to work with, they always have somebody who will help. It's been a very good experience using their support.

They have very knowledgeable resources. Everybody that I talk to over there has always been a big help. I went out to the conference and met a lot of people that I hadn't necessarily talked to on the phone and they all were very knowledgeable and helpful.

We did not previously use an automation solution. We had done things like using PowerShell and doing scripting on the servers, but we had not used those things exclusively as an automation platform.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We knew what we were getting. When we finally made the decision to purchase it, our rep reached out to us and told us exactly what was going to be happening with the implementation and when he was going to show up. We got that all scheduled, he showed up, and everything took off from there.

Our experience with the SMA tech during implementation was awesome. He was very knowledgeable. He had years of experience in the field that we are in. The gentleman who came out to us had worked in IBM for many years as a programmer, so he knew what we were doing and how we were trying to do it. He was able to take the processes that we were already doing and develop them after we got OpCon in place. He came out for one week of just implementation of OpCon, and then he came out for a second week to develop these things. He was very resourceful and knowledgeable, and if he didn't know the answer, he found it within a reasonable amount time.

Technically, OpCon was up and running on the first day, but we were still moving things into it during that first week. Within a week we had processes that were being automated. It wasn't long at all. We already had a good understanding of what was happening. We just took what was happening and moved it into OpCon. As long as we had file permissions, it wasn't an issue.

Our major focus was on our core processing. Our core has numerous file moves and transfers and hundreds of jobs that run every day. We wanted to automate the nightly process and include the jobs that were running on the core all day. We took those processes and migrated them over from the IBM Advanced Job Scheduler into OpCon. That was our immediate focus. From there, we branched out and started doing the stuff that was happening on the Window Servers. We moved all of that over into OpCon, including FTP from our core vendor, as well as the moving and posting of files.

We have absolutely seen ROI in terms of having our update process automated. That was costing our IT department quite a bit of overtime, because employees were working their normal schedules and then they would have to be responsible for the nightly update process. They would be on a rotation of course, but overall, the overtime expenses have gone down as a result of installing OpCon. And the processes that we no longer have to focus on, on a daily basis, allow our employees to be more efficient in doing other things.

We looked at a couple of solutions a little bit before we found OpCon. We found OpCon at a user group meeting for our core provider. We had looked at others and we hadn't found one that was suitable for all the uses that we'd need it for.

One solution we looked at was iRobot, but that was strictly IBM-driven. It was just running on the core but it didn't have any logic within it. OpCon has the agent on the IBM that can look at like dates and interpret them and give it an answer based on whether things line up or not. And the iRobot program had the ability to kick off jobs, but it didn't have any logic built into it.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that anything is possible. There is literally nothing that I have found yet that it can't do. I've called support and shared with them what I think is a crazy idea, and they'll say, "Oh no, we can do that." We talk about it and figure out a solution and go from there.

When you first look at it and look at everything that has to be done, you need somebody who is going to be dedicated to the product. It looks like there is a lot to do, but the reward far outweighs what it looks like upfront.

There are about 10 users of OpCon in our company. Half of them are in IT and the other half are in operations. In terms of our frontline retail staff, only one person there is using it. The rest are the operations area. They're the ones who kick off the processes through Solution Manager. In terms of maintenance of OpCon, there are three of us who work together exclusively on OpCon.

I have to give it 10 out of 10. It's done great things for us and it continues to so every day.

We use it for batch processing and online processing.

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

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

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

The most valuable features for us are

• job dependencies
• auditing
• notification
• robustness. 

Those are things we rely on all the time.

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

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

It's extremely stable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have seen a return on investment from OpCon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I love the product and I love the company.

We automate everything we can with our core banking software, including daily and nightly processing and any other recurring IT jobs that can be automated. A lot of our employees access OpCon via its self-service feature. We're a financial institution, so various business units use it, including some people in our mortgage or insurance department. It's mostly used to start processes or run reports on demand and that sort of thing. It's a set-it-and-forget-it solution. 

The most significant benefit is time savings, which translates into money savings. It's hard to quantify how much time we've saved. When we first installed it, we could maybe calculate that, but at this point, we rely on it so much that I have no idea how many person-hours it would take somebody to do these tasks anymore. 

With the processing time freed up, we could focus more on the other business units to implement what they need and work on other special projects. In general, it made us more productive while reducing calls to our IT help desk. The users can do what they need to do without opening a ticket with our IT department or waiting on IT resources to be available. They know they will use the same criteria, so there will be consistency in what they do.

The most valuable feature is the automation in general. We don't have to rely on somebody to manually do the same process over and over again, risking human error. We like the consistency. It's the same way every time. Moreover, it integrates well with our core software.

I'm sure there's plenty that could be improved, but some of the biggest pain points aren't necessarily a fault of OpCon itself. For example, the FICS integration is a little bit clunky. We've had some tickets with their support team, and sometimes they couldn't figure it out, but that probably has more to do with FICS than with OpCon. If there were room for improvement on the SMA side, it would probably be cross-training. They have a person, maybe two, who deals with FICS. Nobody else knows it.

I've been using OpCon for probably four or five years.

OpCon is stable. We've only had issues with problems we probably should've known how to prevent, so the solution itself is stable.

OpCon is highly scalable. We don't necessarily have a need to scale it beyond what we have now, but it's easy to see it scaling up. However, we don't have any plans to scale up significantly. We'll scale but not a massive amount.

I'd rate SMA support an eight out of 10. We haven't had to contact them much aside from FICS integration and support. If it's a simple issue, they can knock it out without any problem. However, when we've called with more complex problems, we haven't gotten those fully resolved. 

Positive

I think our previous solution was called AutoMate. It wasn't nearly as robust as this, and it relied on on-screen scrapes, etc. It was pretty dissimilar to this, and we retired it as soon as we had this in place. 

The setup was relatively straightforward, but we had someone from SMA on-site, so they walked us through it and showed us how to automate some of our more complex processes. I think the whole setup took two weeks. 

For maintenance, it only takes two or three people in IT. Everybody else has access to it, but we have a core group that maintains it, and then there are around half a dozen to a dozen self-service business users. But from a day-to-day perspective, it's low maintenance. If you're not changing anything, you don't have to do anything. If you're setting up new processes, that takes a little work, but you don't have to babysit the solution.

I'm certain we've seen an ROI. I haven't run the numbers myself, but I'm sure it's probably reduced the number of full-time employees we need by at least one person.

The licensing and pricing model changed this last year, so we're getting used to that. I think it's ultimately going to end up being more expensive. It depends on the scale of the business. It used to be per machine, so we had X number of devices licensed. Now it's not. If we had a lot of machines, the new license might have decreased the cost. Unfortunately, we didn't see the same gains. There wasn't any consolidation of licensing with the shift.

I rate OpCon eight out 10. If you're considering it, I don't think you'll regret it.

We use it as an automation tool to send and receive files and process batch jobs on our core banking system. It can also archive files for us. We use OpCon to automate anything that we can automate.

If I did not have OpCon, I would have to hire full-time employee to do all of the work that OpCon does. We probably save about $40,000 to $50,000 a year by being able to schedule everything. Plus it's reliable. If an employee doesn't show up for work, someone else has to fill in, and things might be late. OpCon works. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I check is my text messages. I see a text message from OpCon that End-of-Day was successful the previous evening. That way I know people can come to work and everything is on schedule.

Another benefit is that, in the past, employees would have to call the IT department to run certain batch jobs in our core banking system. We don't want to give the privilege of running a batch job to an accounting clerk because they could accidentally run a batch job that they shouldn't and cause serious problems. We were able, with an additional piece that we purchased from OpCon called Self Service — a web-based platform — to create a button for the accounting department to click. 

As an example, we have to process ACH and when an ACH file comes in, the accounting department needs to look at it for certain exceptions. And then our support services department needs to look at it for certain exceptions. When each person is done with their job, they go to their Self Service page and push a button. When OpCon sees that two buttons have been pushed, it knows it can continue with the job. So the employees don't need to call IT. We've programmed OpCon to take over the job when it knows the employees have done their jobs.

We have about 40 schedules on an average day and, within some of those schedules, multiple jobs are done. When we moved to our new core banking system, we had to do everything manually. Once we put OpCon in place, it took over doing close to all of that; about 99 percent.

We continue to look for things that OpCon can do. There might be a scenario where an accounting clerk has to download a file and open it up and put files in certain places. When we find something like that, we see if we can work through the process and let OpCon do it for them, or do part of the job for them. I know there are still things out there that can be automated.

OpCon has definitely freed up some employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. During our first month on our core banking system, because I was responsible for that system, I or my systems administrator pretty much spent all day manually downloading files, running batch jobs, uploading files, processing things, and moving them to archives. That was good because it was a new system. Neither of us had done those kinds of tasks. So we now understand what's involved. When it came time to program OpCon, we knew exactly what we wanted done. It was very nice to move those jobs to OpCon, one-by-one, and free up our time to go back to our regular work.

We're a small organization, there are only 35 of us. OpCon freed up three people in IT and probably the equivalent of another FTE. Someone else had to deal with getting files from the Federal Reserve and sending files and they don't have to do that anymore. OpCon does it. We're now free to work on other projects or other problems. The things that OpCon does, they're routine; it's the same thing day in and out. Go to this credit card processor and get a file, bring it over here, upload it here, run a batch job, and send out an email. It gets very boring doing that every day. There's more interesting work we can do.

We also have some jobs that take a lot of network bandwidth and we use OpCon to schedule them to run at two in the morning and they're done by four. That way, people aren't affected during the day, so we've made better use of our bandwidth.

Finally, we're in Oregon, so about once a year we might have snow to the point that they shut the city down. My SA or I can remote into the credit union and check on OpCon and make sure that all the jobs are running. We have a couple of managers who can remote in and do their pieces and push the OpCon buttons to tell OpCon to finish up the job. In the past, we had to have at least two people come into the organization to process ACH or payrolls, etc. Now, we have the ability to work remotely if necessary.

The most valuable feature is being able to schedule tasks so that they reliably occur each day, each week, each month, or sometimes several times a day. We are a financial institution so we need to have our core banking system up to date. We also want to make sure that the work gets done. For example, we use it for ACH deposits and payments. So if you are depending on your paycheck to be there on a certain day of the month, OpCon makes sure it's done. The scheduler works as it should.

It is a complex product to use. Programming the schedules is complex. It does require training from OpCon. As an example, I went away for a week of training. The week after I came back from that, OpCon was onsite to set up our initial schedules. At that point, my systems administrator really took over. I should have sent him to the class, but it was good for me to learn the basics. A year later, my SA ended up going to an advanced class.

I haven't been on their website in a while, but I would like to see some online training, some videos. When I bring in a new employee — as an example, my helpdesk person is going to be moving into some network tasks, and she'll be working within OpCon down the road — it would be nice if there was some basic information for her to look at to understand this program. Even for my systems administrator, it would be helpful if there were tips and tricks available. We're always looking for more learning and more education on how we make the most out of this product. Whether it's online videos or periodic webinars that are accessible online at a later time if necessary, that would be great.

The only thing that OpCon cannot do is the following. OpCon runs a batch job on our core system that creates a file. That file needs to go to a third-party vendor. The only way to get it to that vendor is through their website which has a secure login. OpCon cannot log into a website. It only uses secure FTP. So every Wednesday morning, one of my employees has to take that file and manually log in to the website and upload it. We're waiting for that third-party company to come up with an SFTP solution. Once they do that, then things will be completely automated. I don't know how complex it would be for OpCon to log into a website, but pretty much everyone uses SFTP for file transfers these days.

We have been using OpCon for a little over three years.

It's a very stable product.

The only time we have to be careful of is if we have an extended power outage. We've learned that we have to bring our SQL database server up before we bring OpCon online. That's true for several other systems that we run. But otherwise, OpCon tends to work as expected.

I'm sure there's a lot of scalability, but as a small organization, we're using it as much as we can. We've not experienced any problems. 

Our company has about $130 million in assets. I know credit unions that are billion-dollar companies and they use OpCon. So I have no concerns, as we grow, that it will continue to meet our needs.

The support is good. When we run into issues, we can rely on SMA to walk us through how to correct any problems or do something in a more efficient way.

We did not have a previous solution. One of my requirements, when we decided to go with our new core banking system, was that I did not want to spend my time doing these routine jobs and tasks every day. So I went out to my colleagues at other credit unions and asked them how they were managing these things. Everyone said, "You must have OpCon." I researched a little on OpCon. Our core banking platform, Corelation Keystone, put me in touch with the OpCon salesperson. They did a demo for me and I was immediately sold.

Because we had an expert here from SMA, it was somewhat straightforward. He knew what he was doing and we had confidence in him. We didn't have any problems that I recall.

We started automating our first process on the second day of the deployment. We created some schedules and jobs that ran so that we could make sure that they worked.

An example is End-of-Day. That is a program that's done on the core banking system at the end of the day and it closes out a lot of information for accounting purposes and so forth, and then sets the date to the next day. For example, certain accounts might need dividends applied to them or loan interest charged on loans. Late notices and certificate notices need to be prepared. If it's the end of the month, there may be a statement file that goes to another vendor. We need to make sure that End-of-Day is successful. We could see the next day that yes, it was. We immediately kicked in and started getting things done.

After the OpCon person left, my systems administrator started to create new job schedules for some of the other processes that we did. One-by-one, we started moving our manual processes over to Keystone until they were all done.

OpCon assisted us in our initial setup. They were here for three for four days. That's how long it took us to deploy the solution.

OpCon is expensive for us as a small organization, but on the other hand, it's a lot less expensive than hiring another full-time employee.

We pay for licensing annually, including the Self Service module, a connector license to our Corelation Keystone banking platform, and for a license for each server that it's on. A lot of these are rolled up into one, but the initial implementation was a chunk of money. Now, we just pay annual maintenance.

I did not look into other products. The recommendation for OpCon came from most of my colleagues in my industry working at other credit unions. I did not find another solution. Everyone used OpCon, and everyone really liked it and highly recommended it. So it was an easy decision. 

And SMA has a good working relationship with Corelation. They worked with Corelation to write unique jobs that run in OpCon for credit unions. That was also a very good selling point.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that you really need an individual like my systems administrator who understands how a program like this works. Creating these schedules and working with the language that's required to get things done is very specialized. You have to have someone like that. Could I do it? I could, but it would take me 10 times the amount of time that it takes Sean. You do need someone on staff who understands systems, system deployment, systems operations. That's how you're able to make the most of it. The programming side of it is very basic. It's not that complex. But you have to understand how to tell it what you want to do.

Our primary user is our systems administrator; he programs everything in OpCon. I can access it when he goes on vacation and make sure that all of the jobs are working fine. At times there might be a job that failed. For example, a person is supposed to prepare a file from a third-party vendor but if they don't rename it appropriately, OpCon doesn't know what to do with it. Another example is that one of our third-party vendors will send us a file that is incorrectly prepared. OpCon won't process it. It will catch the problem and then we have to reach out to the vendor and ask for a new file. OpCon allows me to catch any mistakes that a human being makes.

We have two people using OpCon. Sean programs it and has overall responsibility for it, including deployment and maintenance. I fill in when he's not here. Luckily there aren't too many issues. I'm going to get my third IT employee involved with it more next year, to do what I do. And 10 or 12 other employees each have access to their department's site in the Self Service program. So if they're responsible for looking at the bounced-check file or ACH exceptions or paper payroll that we receive from small companies, they can do their work and push their button and that allows OpCon to finish the job.

We've been very happy with it. We're always looking for ways to use it more. We ask, "Could OpCon do that?"

I am always careful about giving someone a 10, because there's always room for improvement. But I hate to give OpCon a nine. I give them a 10.

It is designed to schedule jobs everyday. We now have 750 automated processes.

Primarily, we use it for everyday jobs spread out among all our IT. Apart from all the benefits that we have from OpCon, the biggest advantage is having a centralized point to check everything happening under IT. Mostly, it is for scheduled tasks, not manual tasks.

A year ago, we had an issue with our financial software and another software. While the two tools were still working together, we were not able to find a solution to manage night jobs without OpCon. We found a definitive solution because we have jobs running during the night. Without OpCon, we would have not been able to make all our jobs work. After five years, it's hard to remember what OpCon wrote because it has changed our everyday jobs. 

The solution has streamlined a lot of our operations. Seven years ago, our everyday tasks were manual with their scripts. After four or five years, this was not so really reliable. The way OpCon is built, it has helped us to improve our scripts, making them more reliable and precise. It was easier for us to assure our colleagues that everything is working. Our everyday view is more precise now. We know precisely what is running and what will be running for our IT. OpCon helps for when we have to manage a shutdown for our systems, which happens once a year, by improving the way we prepare for our shutdowns.

When we have a problem with a job or something else, I always tell my colleagues, "It's not OpCon, it has to be something else." All the time, it is something else. So, we are very pleased with OpCon and how it works. It is really reliable. For us, that is a major point: reliability. 

We are also very pleased with its reports for jobs every day. We don't use monthly or weekly reports. Though there are some requests in the tool for these, we don't use them a lot. To follow our everyday jobs, it's perfect.

The web version has room for improvement. I am still waiting for full web administration in OpCon. While the web part is not the tool that I use every day. My colleagues use the web version, which is great because it is much easier to give them access to OpCon. They can check their jobs way more easily. Overall, the administration of the website could be better, but for everyday life, it's great.

It was hard to automate in the beginning because there were a lot of concepts. I had to learn a lot of things, as I never used such a software before.I learned a lot of the concepts and ideas behind it in the beginning. Now, I find it much easier to create jobs and schedules. I can manage it. I helped other people internally to get access to OpCon after five years of not really having problems with the tool.

We started using it five years ago.

OpCon is really reliable. We take a lot of value from OpCon. It has improved our everyday jobs by a lot.

There are two people needed for OpCon's maintenance because we want a full backup when one of us is not in the office.

We don't scale because we have just one server. We use it with virtual servers, so we have full backup of our database. Because we can miss jobs and it is not a big problem for us, we don't really need a backup server for OpCon.

There are two people working right now on everyday jobs with OpCon. Five of our colleagues use OpCon to check all the jobs being worked on. They check the logs to see if there is something wrong. We have two people assigned for the scheduler, five for everyday operations, and around 20 people who check the jobs to ensure that they work during the night. They are just looking for reason codes or through the logs. They don't do anything apart from making warnings around possible problems. If it's a big problem, it come backs to my colleague or me to correct.

All the people using the solution are part of the IT team.

I have been pleased with the support that we can get from the European partners. I think they are very good. All the time, when we have a question, they have an answer. It is very reassuring to have that support every day. Then, you can concentrate on your job and OpCon is just there to work. For us, it's perfect. 

It was used to replace chrome.tabs or Windows Task Scheduler.

The initial setup was a bit complex, but we had great support which helped a lot. I made a lost of mistakes in the beginning, so I learned the hard way. But now, I think I manage OpCon quite well. We aren't make beginner's mistakes now. OpCon used to be quite difficult but there was a lot to learn.

All the ideas and concepts behind the solution can be difficult to understand. E.g., I hadn't used a scheduler before. This was the first time. But, we had a lot of help, so it was okay. I tried to learn it myself using trial and error. This was quite a good way to learn and understand how it works.

The full deployment was around one year because I didn't want to move everything since nothing would have worked afterward. So, we took our time and did our mistakes, which was really important. After one year, we were fully operational. Our IT moved during that time, so some jobs needed to be canceled or removed and new software needed to be included in OpCon. By the time we had OpCon, all the new jobs were included. We talked with software editors and told them we had a scheduler to run jobs daily.

Every new software is included in OpCon, so it just works. All my colleagues know it's there and rely on it.

Our initial implementation strategy was to start big, but we went slowly. We took the biggest server that includes our biggest data and started to process those jobs. We took time to look at whether the solution was working and to correct our mistakes. After one month, the server was fully integrated with OpCon. We had monthly schedules, so we had to wait for one month to have everything run. So, it took one month for our first big steps.

After that, it was easy to incorporate all other tasks and jobs. Most of the time, it just took time because we had to rewrite the scripts behind the jobs. In the beginning, OpCon worked, but the scripts had to be improved. Therefore, we took time to rewrite them, making them more reliable and able to work with OpCon's written codes. We made great efforts to use the same way to write our scripts. Thus, it took time, not only for the jobs, but for the scripts behind it.

The first day that OpCon was working we had our first job working on it.

I'm very pleased with the people who came onsite to install the product the first and second times. We waited almost five years to move to the version that we have now. The people who came to help us with the installation were very helpful and precise. They added a huge value.

As a regional organization, we don't keep track of ROI.

Our license is for 1000 jobs. Including support, the license and upgrades are 2000 euros a month.

I think we had contact with Parallel Universe and two other products. This was six years ago. We took around six or seven months to make our choice. What was important in our choice was being able to have a contact with people who are working in the exact area as us. So, we were able to go and watch what OpCon did for them, which was very good and important for our choice.

We were convinced by the product to choose it, but we were able to go and see what a client was doing. They confirmed what people from OpCon told us, which was great. Every company can say, "Our support is great. Our product is great." Everybody will say that. However, when a customer says it, then it's way more important.

Our original requirements were what OpCon can do. We don't have big systems. We have only Windows, Microsoft software, and a couple of Linux systems at the time. Now, we have more Linux. We wanted a scheduler that could be moved to a platform, and OpCon was able to do that. We wanted something that was reliable with good support, and I think we found it.

If you are looking into implementing OpCon, go for it.

Scheduling is a proper job. You have to learn a lot.

I would rate OpCon as a nine (out of 10). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is very stable. They have a great foundation. 

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

OpCon takes six individuals to operate and maintain it.

The sky's the limit.

We have six users who are developers in our organization.

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

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

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

I'm not sure if anything was used before.

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

The implementation was internal.

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

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

The solution has reduced data processing times.

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

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

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

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

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

They are here to stay as a vendor.