OpCon Reviews

We host OpCon on a virtual server onsite. We do not replicate to a backup database. There are some other redundancies built-in, but we just have a single production server.

Working at a credit union, it does all of our back-office processing. We have a smallish IT staff and we wanted to relieve the IT staff from having to do the daily manual processes that were in place at the time.

OpCon handles all of our automated loads, uploads, and integration with our core financial application. We have expanded it to use their self-service options so that users may generate reports on the fly, or they might have manual steps along the way in their process. It allows them to check the results, review, work any exceptions and then continue the process just by clicking a button. They really like that part. It also has given us the opportunity to allow users that don't have access to the core to generate reports from the core and have it usually placed in a network share for them or emailed to them.

The biggest example in which OpCon has improved my organization is that we have to download and process files from the federal reserve several times a day. If we don't do it in a certain timeframe, we can be penalized. It's the fact that we can download these files, process them, get our accounting teams the information they need to work the exceptions that is one of the most important roles.

It's also nightly processing. When we do our overnight processing, if there is a delay to a job, we can set up alerts to let us know that a particular job is running longer and the person on-call can log in, take a look at it, and see if everything is progressing normally or if there's a problem before it becomes a big issue the next day.

Having the ability to monitor the process along the way with checks on a job when it's too long, it didn't finish on time, or a dependency is missing has been very helpful.

OpCon saves our IT time. We eliminated our backroom processing, which would be all of the IT-related functions. So most definitely it saves IT time. Conservatively, it has saved two and a half hours daily just because of some of the things that we were doing for other departments and now the other departments can do that themselves. 

Since we implemented it in 2016, a lot of other tasks have been incorporated into it. So if those other areas would have wanted us to do those tasks, it would have added to our burden. If we have free time, they're going to find a way to fill it. It does free our time to do other things, to concentrate on things that require brain power rather than just entry.

Our overall productivity has also increased.

At its core, OpCon is a scheduler, but it can do so much more than that. The fact that it integrates with the core was the primary motivator in choosing this product. I was recruited for the position I'm at because of my experience with OpCon and my current company wanted to implement it.

Its flexibility would be the greatest benefit to it. You can really come up with some creative scheduling solutions. You're only limited by your imagination with some of the stuff. There are some limitations to it, of course, but I would say the biggest plus is the flexibility that it offers and its integration to the core. 

We use the self-service feature. We use it in our IT department, our mortgage department uses it, and our accounting department uses it. We're slowly introducing the features to other areas. As more users see it, I'm hoping more users will embrace it so that we can expand it even further.

Our mortgage servicing users use it to run their daily processes. We have an integration with FICS, which is the product we use for our mortgage servicing. So they're able to utilize it to generate reports and do their daily postings.

Our accounting department uses it for ACH and even to set the prompts to close the general monthly general ledger. Our lending department also uses it for some of their jobs to process uploads that go to other vendors.

It's very helpful for reducing the complexity of the technical aspects of workload automation. It can be used as a simple checklist where you click the button. There are some things about it that might be improved upon as far as adding some features. That would be some nice things. SMA has always been very responsive to those types of input.

The self-service feature increases users' productivity because some of the tasks that they still have to do manually are automated, but those manual checks give them a place to stop the process rather than having to do each step along the way annually. They still have those manual interventions that they have to do, but the self-service button allows them to put that check-in there so that they can do what they need to do and then begin a certain process rather than having to do the whole thing.

It has also reduced calls to our IT department with the way we're using it. Previously a process might require the user to email IT staff to have us do the next step, to upload a file, something like that. Now we're removed from that situation and they just do it themselves.

The same goes for the closing of the general ledger. It used to require notifying IT and then we'd have to set the job accordingly. Now IT is taken out of the mix. So the end-user department has control over that process.

The automation of manual tasks has without a doubt reduced human error. Whenever you can automate something, as long as you have it set up correctly, to begin with, you totally reduce the chances of transposing a number or something like that.

At my previous employment, once we implemented OpCon we pretty much eliminated one FTE position. The person didn't lose their job, but he had other tasks that he took on. They reduced the amount of workload by one person. That was a much larger credit union.

If we had to do all of this manually, it would add up because we've added more tasks than what we originally had.

I have been using OpCon at my current employer for about five years and at my previous company for another four or five years as well.

We're on version 18.3 and we're looking to upgrade to the 20.0 version in the next month or so.

In the time that I've worked on it, I've had one problem where the transaction log locked up. That was seven years ago. It was a while ago. It's solid. You have to do your due diligence with your typical maintenance and paying attention to things, but it's a solid product.

It seems to scale well, but then again we're limited. We only have one server.

We have people in our indirect lending who use OpCon. They deal with our auto loans. We have our mortgage department servicing mortgages. We have our accounting people that manage the ACH and they rely on it also for downloading reports from various vendors that we use. Our contact center uses it to run reports and retrieve reports from the core.

IT, of course, uses it. We manage everything for it. I use it for a variety of things from downloading reports to emailing to notifications. Most of our stuff is centered around the core. Most of our usage is centered on the core, but we're slowly branching out.

We have plans to deploy a failover server, and we also anticipate doing more with our order servicing software, automating more processes for that.

Technical support has been great. They've come up with solutions and they're very timely. They seem to be good people too.

The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already. 

It integrates fairly well with things like basic scripting programs which is good. 

OpCon is very powerful. That means it tends to be very complex. It doesn't always translate to usability. You can do anything in any way if you have the time and the knowledge, but it can be tricky figuring out how it's done. I haven't used much of the APIs other than some of the connectors, but I hear they've got some good support that way. I don't have any one thing that I'd say would be an improvement upon it except for perhaps making the calendar, the scheduling functionality a bit more intuitive. Some of the ways that they implement the calendar functions aren't as intuitive as they could be.

For some jobs, the setup is very straightforward. For others, they required more complexity. I have some that when we first set it up, the complex ones were downloading our federal reserve files and processing those, but the technical account manager that assisted was great with working with us on that. 

Having them there with implementing it certainly is required. But beyond that, the people that I've encountered, even when I was at a previous employer, were always very good at helping us get through what we needed to do.

There have been times that I've sent in a question to their support and I'll get a couple of different people emailing me back saying, "Oh yeah, I heard about this. Have you tried this?" Everyone's very active in trying to assist clients if they have some expertise there.

We worked with both our SMA technical account managers and then we were assigned someone through Jack Henry Symitar Episys, through their automation group. 

Once we got everything implemented, I had time with my technical account manager to set things up, but prior, I had time with our core provider and their implementation specialist to go through our nightly processing the critical stuff and making sure we had everything set up. That was the baseline process to get us started. After that, it was up to us what we wanted it to automate.

They took care of our nightly processing and then our account manager helped me do some of the daily processes. Since I already had previous experience, there were a lot of things I felt that I could do. He'd come up with solutions for the things I didn't feel that way for.

The deployment took a week.

It was through our core provider that we got the product. Since we went through them, that was the primary thing to get automated and they provided it in collaboration with SMA.

The people at SMA have been great as far as working with them. They're responsive. When I've interacted with them, they've always been great. The company has been very good.

ROI has been great. It does keep me busy because I'm the one who manages it, but it eliminates work for a lot of others. And my goal is to automate a lot of stuff so people can spend their time thinking about how to fix the complex stuff, not remembering that they have to do the little stuff.

The licensing has just changed recently. They just moved over to a new tiered pricing model and so I'm waiting to see what shakes out with that.

When we got ours, we had bought add-ons at the time, but with the tiered pricing, a lot of those add-ons are included. I'm not aware of any additional costs at this time.

The company had been recently sold and there were some hiccups with their new pricing, their tier pricing, but our salesman worked with us. Our account rep worked with us and got us something that both sides are agreeable to. OpCon does very well trying to do right by its client base. I can't fault that.

Advice that I would give to people considering OpCon would be to really understand what your needs are, understand how OpCon can fit into your environment, and realize that it can be very complex and can become very cumbersome if you're not careful. You can automate a lot of things and have a lot of different processes automated, but you still need to document and have a clear goal as to what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Take the free training that they have. Go to the biannual conference they have. You can pick up a lot of information that way. Immerse yourself in the product, in the documentation, and understand what's going on with it.

Have a clear plan before you start doing anything on how you want to handle it if a job fails. Do you want to have it restarted? Do you want to have it notify someone? You have to have a clear plan on what you hope to accomplish with an automated task before you put it into production.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that error checking is important. When you have a failure, you need to know. You should have a plan on how to handle job failures so that, if the primary person is available, the backup can either take care of it or the process will automatically self-recover.

I would rate OpCon a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

We use it to run our core system, Corelation KeyStone, as well as all of our batch processing and file movement, automation, and extract processing. We also use it to automate custom Keystone updates with Infuzion, a third party tool which streamlines input to the Keystone API. 

It's important to keep in mind that OpCon and KeyStone, together, are a completely different animal than Spectrum and UC4. They are separate systems. They work differently. What we gained with OpCon was the ability to continue to automate everything. That was the real key for us. It's not that we got better at it. We were just able to continue that level of service, which was our goal. I can't tell you what it would be like if we switched from another automation tool to OpCon for the same core system. That's not what we did. It's just that OpCon happens to work so well with KeyStone. I don't think there's another automation tool out there that's going to be able to touch it, although other vendors have since entered this space. Automic now has connectors to KeyStone and offers a viable alternative.

Total automation is our key and Corelation, which delivers the KeyStone product, is not looking at automation. I think they know they have a good partner with SMA, so they don't think about it too much. Their point of view is that they want you to do the batch processing from within the core. SMA's perspective is, "No, you want to automate all of that." Of course, that's what we wanted as well. SMA's vision was the same as ours. What OpCon really gains for you is the ability to have total, lights-out processing in a way that the core vendor doesn't quite understand or have experience around. And it's okay the core vendor doesn't have that experience because SMA does, and that's where its real value is. It will get you to the place where you can have complete, lights-out automation.

We've automated everything that runs in the batch or customization-batch updates for KeyStone. A typical day for us has 70 schedules and 496 jobs. At our credit union, we haven't had an operator since 2003. An operator is in the role where, when someone at a certain time of a day is running a batch job through the system, they're watching to see what happens with it. They're making sure the files are in the right place and the output goes where it's supposed to. We replaced that in 2003 when UC4 it started doing all that for us. OpCon has just picked up where we left off. It handles everything. And whenever it comes time to implement something new at the credit union, we're going to make sure that OpCon's driving the batch-automation on the backend.

If we're running 70 schedules and almost 500 jobs every day, we can't watch all that. There's no way. And we shouldn't have to. Automation tools are so robust, and they have been for 15 or 20 years now, that automation is a given. Any credit union is going to be automating as much as they can.

In terms of freeing up employees through automation, we've also been automating processes for other departments, not entirely with OpCon but with other solutions as well. We haven't eliminated positions as a result, but we've helped free people up to do other work by taking away repetitive tasks. OpCon allowed us to do that. They have been freed to do more challenging tasks. We would never get rid of a position because their stuff has been automated. We would just free them to do other more valuable tasks. By using Solution Manager in OpCon, we've been able to automate tasks for seven departments. Each one of those represents a task that was repetitive that we were able to automate, at least somewhat. We don't look at it as individuals or FTEs, but rather as departments that have we helped become more efficient by our automation process.

It's the entire automation landscape that OpCon provides which is valuable. The way it works with Corelation KeyStone is probably unmatched for that core system in the credit union industry. SMA has created four connectors that work with KeyStone in a way that allows us to automate basically every batch-processing or back-office task. That's the true value.

In addition to that, there's also a self-service solution manager, I believe it's called Solution Manager, that allows us to enable staff to run complex automation tasks by clicking a button and entering some information. They don't have to have access to the OpCon environment to kick off those kinds of events.

It would be great if you could create physically separate "clients," as I call them. I wish I could have a production client and a testing client and that they would be separate. We have since upgraded our license model with SMA which allows us to license a test server, which will give us better flexibility for separating prod from dev.

I know that SMA is making a push to move everything into Solution Manager, a web-based interface with OpCon. Frankly, I will be sad to see the Enterprise Manager go away. Enterprise Manager is difficult to learn at first, but once you learn it, it's very powerful and very quick to get solutions in place, to troubleshoot, and to observe your production. I really like it.

In a production environment, at our credit union, we've been using it since October 2017.

OpCon has been rock-solid. It works day in and day out and is very robust. It runs on Windows Servers, but it is a very high-availability, robust scheduler automation engine.

In two years, we've had one OpCon database issue that woke people up overnight. It halted production and SMA had a fix for it pretty quickly. That's one time in two years.

I haven't seen any concerns about scaling OpCon to automate what we need. It's been very robust and it can handle whatever we throw at it. I'm confident that as we continue to add processes into our core system, OpCon will be available to drive whatever automation we need.

We don't really plan to increase usage, but as we add new products to our core system, by default, we'll use OpCon to automate whatever we can. For example, we added mobile check deposit last summer as a product for our consumers. I realize that most financial institutions have had that for a long time. On KeyStone, our new core system, that became possible. OpCon has automated quite a few pieces of that for us, such as eligibility and sending restriction lists to the different vendors, picking up posting files, etc. We never thought otherwise, that we were going to use something else. We just said, "Okay, how are we going to get this into OpCon?" 

That's how we approach every new product that we add to our KeyStone system for our members. How are we going to automate it? Anything we can put into the automation tool, we're going to.

Their support is excellent. It's one of the best I've worked with, for an automation tool, in my career. They'll pick up the phone when you call them. If you've got a simple question they'll answer it. If it's more complex, they pass it along to the right people. If you have a technical production issue, they jump on that really quickly. They do have after-hours support that we've taken advantage of. All of those things have been very valuable for us.

With UC4, our prior core system, we had to go through a core vendor and, if there was a software issue, it would take a little while for UC4 to have a fix. I don't know if that's changed with Automic, but support definitely felt once or twice removed, whereas with SMA it's very immediate.

In addition to that, SMA's development is also aggressive. They're very good. If you've got something that you want to automate, they will help you get there. They'll make a connector for it. They will enhance the connectors they do have. They will come up with a solution. That's where I think they are definitely best-in-class: their support and their development.

I wanted to see if Automic was going to work with KeyStone, our core system that we were converting to. Automic pledged to help us support that and come up with a connector for it. But in doing my due diligence, I read over what OpCon provided for KeyStone and, just by reading the documentation, I realized that we probably should go with OpCon, even though it wasn't something that I knew and it wasn't a bench strength for our organization. I realized that we weren't going to find a better partner, with robust features for KeyStone, and that we should switch.

If I had been coming into automation cold, and OpCon was the first thing I had seen, I think I would have found it a little complex to understand. But since this is the third automation tool in my career, it was a matter of just applying what I already knew, as fundamentals, to how OpCon does things.

One thing that really helps is that SMA sends a technical account manager onsite to help you do the installation and do your configuration. They give you a block of days and you can split that up so that they will come back. Our technical account manager came out three times and, each time, we did something a little more complex with OpCon. By the time he left, the third time he was here, we had not only the basic stuff installed and ready to go, but the more sophisticated stuff, like LDAP integration, the Solution Manager, Self Service, Resource Manager — the different pieces of OpCon that were more complex or more subtle. The value is that SMA guides you through that. They provide that kind of onsite assistance.

Our deployment started in February of 2017 and we went live in October of 2017. After the initial deployment, it took us just a couple of minutes to automate our first process.

We've definitely seen return on our investment by going with SMA. When we went live with KeyStone back in October of 2017, all of our batch production was automated. In fact, we had to convince Corelation, our core vendor, to let us turn it on. They wanted us to run things manually and I said, "No. We're ready. Let's turn this on and let it do what it's supposed to do."

These are ballpark figures and the ones for Automic are pretty old. Back in UC4, we converted to version 8 in 2012, and that cost us on the order of $50,000 to upgrade. 

OpCon cost us $80,000 in 2017 money, and that included everything: support, installation, onsite assistance during the conversion, etc. It's been a worthwhile investment by far. I don't recall how much our yearly maintenance is, but it is worth the money because, when it comes time to do an upgrade, we can do it ourselves and they'll support it. We don't have to pay anything extra for it. And training is included. If I want to send some of my team members to go to training, I just have to pay for travel and expenses. So the cost of ownership has been very worthwhile.

The only additional cost with SMA would be if we need additional licenses for agents. They provide 10 licenses with the standard installation. We're using seven of them. We have three left to use. After that, we'll need to buy additional licenses for agents. We haven't gotten there yet.

In my career I've used three automation tools, going back to something called Maestro made by a company called Tivoli, and then UC4, which is now called Automic, and now OpCon. Of the three of those, UC4 was probably the most intuitive and easy to use. OpCon, once you learn it, is easy to use, but it's a little bit of a harder interface at first. If you've come from an environment like UC4 or Automic, you don't quite have that ease of adoption that you might have had with that tool.

Once you get to know OpCon, you realize that it does all the fundamental things an automation tool should do. It does all the things that UC4 does. The fundamentals are there, and it's the same thing with Maestro.

Something that UC4 does better is something I've told our technical account manager at SMA when he came up to visit. During our implementation, our technical account manager asked, "What does UC4 do that OpCon doesn't?" One of those things is that it offers logically separate clients for doing production. UC4 allows you to set up a production client and a test client and a training client and a development client. These are all physically separate logins with separate containers. What that means is you can point your production environment to entirely production agents, and you can point your testing client to entirely testing agents. And then you can make a logon such that you can't ever cross over between areas. So there's greater safety when it comes to non-live environments.

OpCon is one database. Everything exists in one bucket, so testing schedules are there alongside development and production. So we have to be much more careful about where a given schedule is running. SMA's solution to that is that you buy a separate server and separate licensing and do that same thing. Why? I could do that with UC4 by spinning up a separate client. That's one area that UC4 has a better design than SMA, in its architecture for the system. This isn't going to change anytime soon, so we have since upgraded our license model with SMA which allows us to license a test server. This will give us better flexibility for separating prod from dev, and is something we'll work towards this year. 

Another area is running processes in an ad hoc fashion. UC4 was better at that. I could execute a job plan or a job any time I wanted to, outside of regular production and it was not a big deal. I could execute it and say, "Don't run until two days in the future at 1:30 p.m.," and it would sit out there and wait and then run. UC4 did that better.

On OpCon's side, it does all the same things that UC4 will do but its connectors to KeyStone are the real keys for us in our environment. That's what makes it so valuable for us. The best differentiator is SMA's support. Their support is unlike any support I've had with an automation tool in my career, so that is the real advantage.

It's been a while since I've used UC4/Automic. That was the last automation system we used with our prior core system. It matched our core system, at the time, very well. It was all script-based, script-driven, so if you are comfortable writing scripts that drive programs, UC4 was the solution for you. We were very adept at writing script-based solutions with it. That's definitely one of is pros. I have no idea about its support. We didn't really have to contact them very much, but then, of course, we were using a static version of UC4 for five or six years. Whereas with OpCon, we can take advantage of what they're developing every year if we choose to. Some of those advantages would be such things as connectors directly into the SQL database. That's something that's new that SMA is working on. It's a pretty valuable connector.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is that it is perfectly suited to Corelation KeyStone. Automic entered the KeyStone arena in 2020 with their product, which has the same connectors now that OpCon has. Although I haven't seen it in action I know of one credit union who coordinated the integration and uses it in production. I'm sure for 
CUs converting to KeyStone who already are enterprise with Automic, this will be welcome news. For us, though, we decided to go all in with OpCon for KeyStone and do not regret the choice.

On my team, we have seven people and all seven are at least familiar with logging in and observing production with OpCon. Three of them are tasked with implementing new solutions into OpCon and supporting configuration and troubleshooting of existing solutions. We've also got seven departments using it through Self Service, with multiple people in each department using OpCon. One department has almost everyone in there. That's a lot.

SMA has a real vision and they support it. They've got the development team and the support team behind it.

I give it a nine out of 10. That one issue about a blurry line between production and development and test is the one thing that might slow us down a little bit when we are testing. We have to be very careful. Otherwise, the product itself is rock-solid. It's got everything in there that you need. Their support is excellent. Their development is aggressive. There's really nothing more that you could want from this vendor. It really is one of the best out there that I've seen in my career. It's perfectly suited for KeyStone. Now, if I looked at Automic for DNA, I might have a different opinion, but those are completely different systems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using OpCon for three years.

The stability is really good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've used the solution for about 5 years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It always works and we rarely need support.

We're using it to automate our nightly processing work, such as transfers and the actual integrations into our core banking system. We do a lot of file transfers and complicated job processing. We have a lot of processes that have two jobs that have to run before other jobs can run, and based on the output of one job it may need to do one thing or another. OpCon allows us to build complicated workflows that handle all of that.

It performs flawlessly. We were able to go live the first night with zero problems.

We're able to complete our nightly processing about 10 percent faster. We've also been able to eliminate manual touches on our systems and we're down to five actual touches to make nightly processing go. The ideal is for us to become a "lights-out" organization at nighttime. We're really close to that. Before OpCon, there was a team of five that was doing nightly processing, almost through the night. It's always difficult when you're changing people's processes and you're changing their work, but they've been able to handle the differences in their jobs. Overall, the reception has been positive.

We've automated hundreds of processes since deploying OpCon. We're up to 78 percent automation of nightly processing. Being able to automate the nightly processing is super-useful. It has been streamlined through the process of automation, which is great. The nightly processing is easier.

For daily processing, we haven't seen results yet when it comes to freeing up employees to do more meaningful work, but eventually we will. It's just a matter of getting through the process. Once we get this down we'll be able to free up more people to do more work in different places.

OpCon has also reduced daily processing times; not as much as I would have expected, but that's because we haven't really optimized anything.

The core system is the most valuable part: being able to view the processes that we've never really been able to view as a whole before. That is super-helpful, as is being alerted when issues arise.

For example, we've had problems with a vendor that has not been providing files in a timely fashion. OpCon actually alerts our teams that this file has not arrived yet and that allows us to get on the phone with the vendor, make sure we get the file, and get all of that working so that we have accurate records to start with the next morning.

We use SMA as a managed-service provider to actually build automated processes. It makes it easy for us to build work orders for them to execute. That is useful.

The process of getting automations done and the process of testing them is a little complicated. Anything with daily processing and nightly processing, which is something that's very critical for our organization, is always going to be tough. The testing of it can be really difficult.

The navigation could use some work to be able to get to the flow charts. Coming from the high level, all I want to see are the flow charts and where we are at with the workflow. Whenever I go in there, I have to remember how to do it again. It's not intuitive, at least for me.

Also, we could not use the FTP agent it has. Their protocol and that piece has been difficult to work with. It has definitely been a little bit weird. They did figure out a way to get to ServiceNow, but having some plug-and-play integrations to different ticketing systems would be good. They've been responsive. They did put together that ServiceNow integration, but they had to build it.

We started the OpCon project in January and it went live about five months ago in June.

OpCon has been incredibly stable. We haven't had any issues with the core OpCon system. It has not died.

We haven't dealt with scalability yet, but I think it would scale relatively well, beyond what we have.

We're continuing our automation process. Any sort of data processing will go through this system. Once we're done with that, then we get to look at anything else that could work with it. That's our plan.

Tech support is amazingly responsive. We've had multiple times where they've responded within 20 minutes when we've had an issue with a workflow at night. I've been happy with that.

I've used many automation tools in my career and the time to implement OpCon, compared to some of those other tools, is about the same. This is a specialized job-automation tool, instead of a generic automation tool. The way it works is a little bit more job-like than some of the other automation tools. That's really the difference between OpCon and a full-blown orchestrator-type of tool, like Automation Anywhere. It's important to keep those separate and use OpCon for what it's good for and other tools when you need things to be a little bit more diverse.

Other job-automation tools are not specific to credit unions and financials. There are some hooks that OpCon has that other tools don't, which is why credit unions go to them.

Tidal Workload Automation sits in between OpCon and full orchestrator tools. It's not as fully functional as some of those big automation toolsets, but it does some things very well.

The total cost of ownership of OpCon is quite comparable to other automation tools I've used. For a financial institution, in particular, OpCon makes a lot of sense. We're replacing another tool, Automic, that would have been comparable. There are certain things you can't do in Automic, or it's costly to do.

The initial setup is complex. The first pieces of it, while they weren't really easy, went off well. When we got into the FTP processing, it got a little bit more bumpy. The deployment, overall, was an iterative process. We started in January and went live with the first step in June.

It was pretty easy to put our first processes together. It was just a matter of making sure they were fully tested and that we had the right test environment to make it work.

We have about five people who are working on it right now, since our deployment is ongoing.

I would like to have seen a little bit more of a plan at the beginning. SMA should have been guiding us through the process of automating these things in the most efficient way possible.

It's going to reduce the time that data processing takes, certainly. We're also going to see a quality improvement, meaning fewer human errors. I expect we'll see a meaningful difference in another year or so.

It's not cheap. It's a licensing system. It costs money to put it in and it's a subscription-based system. The managed service costs money on top.

We looked into a tool called Jantz, which is a competitor. They're great as well. But this made the most sense financially, considering our size.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using it is plan really well. Line up your resources and don't be afraid to do a big cut-over to it. It's a stable system. But definitely be cognizant of the fact that there are agents involved, and whenever you have agents involved you need to make sure that the agents continue to be stable.

Consider how well you understand the processes that you're looking to automate. This is going to work the best if you have more traditional types of automations that you need to do, like batches. Make sure that you've already detailed what those processes do, because the more detail you have, the quicker you can actually get to automating the work. And make sure you have complete buy-in by everybody in the organization.

When people are working with the SMA product teams it's really important for both sides to be really clear on what the testing scenarios are like. You need to make sure you're really good at writing your work orders in an accurate fashion and recognize that, as a credit union, or any sort of enterprise, you've got things that you need to do as well to make it work. Any time you deal with agents that are sitting on multiple systems it's going to be problematic because you're always going to have agents that fall apart or something happens to them. Keeping on top of that type of thing is important in order to be successful.

It's not easy to do. I've never seen these types of things be easy. You need to put a lot of effort into it. It requires working a lot with the teams who have some of these processes, who need these types of files, to make sure that everything you automate works and that the output works for them. It definitely isn't simple to implement.

In our organization, there are about 200 people who specifically work with these types of things.

I would rate OpCon at seven out of 10. It's taken a little bit longer than we thought to get it done, but the team on their side has been great.

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

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

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

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

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

It schedules tasks.

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using OpCon since 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is very stable. They have a great foundation. 

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

OpCon takes six individuals to operate and maintain it.

The sky's the limit.

We have six users who are developers in our organization.

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

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

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

I'm not sure if anything was used before.

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

The implementation was internal.

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

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

The solution has reduced data processing times.

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

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

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

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

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

They are here to stay as a vendor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We just wouldn't be without OpCon.

The most valuable features are the 

• automation 
• repeatability.

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

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

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

We've been using OpCon for around 15 years.

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

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

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

Technical support is really good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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