OpCon Reviews

We use it predominantly, and almost exclusively, for core processing with our financial system.

OpCon makes it so we are lights-out for most of our morning and evening processes. 

It makes it super easy to notify us when something is wrong. It allows us to incorporate a wide range of custom processes or notifications. It's pretty agnostic in terms of how it does things. It doesn't matter how you've been doing things. As long as it can be called and given a command line parameter or interface parameter of some sort, it works really well. The biggest attractor is it allows us to incorporate so many different processes that wouldn't normally work together, making it a seamless schedule of events that happens and is really easy to both manage, update, change, and review. It's just a really slick piece of software that makes things super easy.

From the sixth through the 17th, that is where we have some sort of processes that have been out for the day. We have 324 schedules, 177 subschedules, and 2,996 jobs defined. Everyday, we have about 30 different processes defined. On special days, like end of month, first of the month, etc., we have a lot of stuff to find in there, which means there's no person doing it. It's all done by the system, taking that workload off of having a person. We are able to make sure that we have people concentrate on the things that really require a person and not the remedial tasks. This has been a huge advantage to having the software.

Our manual processing has been automated in the realm of 70 percent by this solution. There are only a few things that we still do which require a human touch.

The solution has streamlined operations. We have written custom jobs to do particular things, but OpCon is definitely the one that manages running them at particular times. Often times, those jobs have to run after hours. So while we still develop and spend time and man-hours writing code, once it's done, OpCon is running that in the afternoons or evenings. This is usually done during off hours when a person would normally be required to be here and do it. Instead, OpCon is available, consistent, reliable and easy to get things in and working quickly once we develop and get them working. OpCon takes care of the entire process, including notifications that we define if something were to happen so we know what to do next. Again, it's simplifies the entire process.

The solution freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. However, tasks like managing user credentials, permissions, or access takes a human eye to determine what to do next unless it's something very straightforward. I can't really have OpCon go through and determine that user X needs to be moved to group Y unless it's a scripted piece. That still takes a human eyes and is done by people. OpCon has taken away things that happen repetitively every day, regardless of what's going on. It has definitely allowed us to separate those two process.

We have three employees (four including myself) who have been doing these processes in some capacity in the system. The workload that I would normally be doing, I push a lot of those jobs over into this and define a lot of them. Probably anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of what I do, I've been able to offload in OpCon. For the other staff, the evening and morning procedures are the biggest in terms of freeing up time because these are the things that we do before we open and after we close. Of those processes, nearly 90 percent of what we would normally have done with a person have been moved over.

Our employees are happier doing things that require them to think. When you're doing the same task over and over again, it's pretty remedial. It is nice to have a system take care of that for you. People tend to want to be able to think about what they are doing and have some brain processing going on instead of doing simple data entry. Overall, I expect that they're happier about the piece that they're working on versus doing the things that OpCon never complains about, which is the same thing every day.

Our primary use case is file movement.

It cuts down on phone calls from other departments because they can monitor their own work, once we set up their projects.

I've got eight individuals who work for me and, before we had OpCon, I lost about two of them a day to processing our Check 21 files. That whole process is now completely automated. Instead of performing the work, they're just monitoring it through OpCon. I've gained back two full-time employees to use in other areas. Instead of being "button-pushers," they now monitor the processes. Five of my team members, and me, have been through the OpCon training, and they're getting more and more involved every day. They're slowly rolling out some new jobs and learning how to tweak and manage it.

With ACH, I get about a half an FTE back. I haven't had to add anybody to my department, whereas without OpCon, I would have had to add one or two bodies.

In two weeks, OpCon has done 15,677 jobs that an operator would normally have had to do. It has significantly streamlined operations, and it does things right, every time.

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.

We chose OpCon to replace a scheduling package that was controlling approximately 10,000 batch jobs every day. So the main purpose of OpCon, for us, is to replace an aging homegrown solution with a more advanced scheduling product that has more bells and whistles. We use it for job control. We have Enterprise Manager on desktops communicating to agents that are on our mainframe computer.

We haven't yet completed the conversion. We are about 30 percent converted right now. We still running 70 percent of the work through our old scheduling package. We have two main shops. One of them is an upstate shop and one is a downstate shop. I run the downstate shop. We have about 10,000 jobs, of which 5,000 to 6,000 are in that downstate system. We have deployed about 2,000 jobs out of a total of 6,000 jobs, downstate.

The part that jumps out is the notification process. The agent can now notify us, by email or text messages, when any jobs have failed or when any groups of jobs have finished successfully. Previously, it was a manual process where somebody would say, "We finished the work now," or, "A job has failed," and then they would have to start sending out emails or calling people to notify them when we received certain errors or reached certain stages in the work. That part has been automated.

We anticipate, in the future, that it will save us time mainly because, with the old scheduling package, we would have to manually identify and calculate dates for the next 12-month period. We would have to do that every single year. That's a very lengthy and accident-prone area and, by automating, we expect to see a reduction in effort from the staff.

We love OpCon. I have been working with this credit union for five years, and we had it before I started working here. It is a great product. We are not yet using it fully. We are not taking advantage of everything because it is huge. It has a lot of different things that we can do with it. I am very happy with it.

OpCon gives us a single point of control for orchestrating workflows and file movements. This single point of control is very important because we can see all the jobs we have. We have 600 jobs, and we can view all of them within this single platform or a single dashboard. We have a lot of control over them.

OpCon enables us to manage complex schedules that span disparate systems. We have jobs where at least three to four servers are involved or at least two or three parties are involved. We have jobs where different departments need notifications and we have to wait for those departments to take some actions before another action takes place. There are different subjobs or dependencies. With the last job that we automated, there were so many things that we needed to do, such as decryption, waiting for other employees to do their part, notifying them, and then taking action. There were a lot of things. I did not think it was possible, but they could automate that. The tool can do it. That is why we have SMA Technologies because they have the experience in doing it. It would have probably taken us days to figure it out ourselves, but eventually, we would have got it done.

They free us from creating jobs or even monitoring them because they monitor the jobs. This gives us time to focus on other projects and gather information from other departments on what they are doing manually. We can then bring that to SMA Technologies and ask if they can help us with this manual process to automate it. Right now, we have a number of tickets open with them that are helping us to automate different manual jobs that other departments are doing. This is not just an IT product the way I see it. It is more of a company product that helps other departments to automate their jobs as well.

We have over 600 jobs. Our core financial system is a legacy system. It is a Linux system, but the way I see it, it is a legacy system. We have the majority of the jobs touching that system. We have our card processing system as well, and we have our data content management system. Every time our front lines scan receipts, checks, or documents, they automatically get sent over to a content management system that we have. OpCon automates a lot of the jobs, puts them in the right bucket or folder, and indexes everything in there. It tells the system where everything needs to go and indexes everything. That helps us as well from the point of doing it ourselves. We do not have to manually tell the system and index all this. It notifies the employees when the documents are already indexed and ready for them to view. We have at least three to four legacy systems that OpCon helps us with. The rest of them are more modern applications.

Per week, it probably saves us 30 to 40 hours. Per month, it saves 100 to 200 hours for my employees. The time saved can vary because there are months when we have to do more. At month's end, there is a lot of stuff to do and a lot more jobs to run. These jobs are run at different hours. Usually, they are run after hours, which helps my team and the company in saving money. We are not paying anyone overtime. Jobs are running automatically.

OpCon has helped to reduce errors when running complex processes. We do have some complex jobs that require talking to different services and external vendors. OpCon does help us with all of that.

Where I see it working best is when we are trying to automate jobs. For example, about a month ago, we had been running a job manually that had six or seven different steps. The steps included gathering the file, moving the file to a different location, and decrypting the file because it was encrypted. After the file was decrypted, it was moved to another server and a notification was sent to multiple people and multiple departments when the file was ready, waiting for those employees to do what they needed to do with the file. After the file was modified, we picked up the file again and SFTP it to another third party. So, there were a lot of different steps that we were doing manually. It used to take us at least an hour and a half to do a lot of this work because we were waiting for other people. We were sending the file. We were decrypting it. Sometimes we had issues with the decryption. We created or SMA Technologies helped us to create this job that automates all of this, and we do not have to do this work anymore. It is all automated, so it is saving my team a lot of time. The problem was that this had to be done between 4:45 PM to 6:30 AM. It was after hours, so we were paying our employees overtime. OpCon helped to save us a lot of money just in this particular job.

I needed some time, and it took me probably about a year to learn everything about it. Once I learned it, it was very easy to configure it. The reason why we had SMA Technologies do it for us is because of timing. I do not have the time to do it, but it is very easy to do it ourselves. I just do not have the time or resources. They are more knowledgeable in creating the job. They have done it for other clients. It takes them minutes to create a job, whereas it would probably take me an hour or two to create a job, but it is very easy to learn it. It is user-friendly. It gives you a lot of control over different things that you are doing. I find it very easy to create jobs, but I just do not have the time for it. However, we understand how things work. When a job fails, it could be a power outage or the server could have gone offline. We understand where to go and how to resume that job. It is very easy to understand and troubleshoot as well.

We are an in-house Fiserv Premier bank. This solution allows us to automate a lot of the core processing. 

This is outside a bit of the day-to-day. We recently did a branch acquisition of another bank, though not a full bank. With that, we had to convert all of their ACH transactions. It was a very complicated product that we received from our core provider, Fiserv, for some translation programs. It was very cumbersome to run through the process, convert it out, get output files, etc. Without anyone touching it, I was able to automate the full process from pulling in the files from this other bank, converting everything needed, and posting it to our customer's account 24-hours throughout the day.

We run the ACH process around the Fed window about four times a day: 2:00 am, 10:00 am, 2:00 pm, and 7:00 pm. We are not staffed all those hours. If someone were to actually run through all those steps, it would take maybe 15 minutes per each file.  This is if someone were to manually do it. So, that adds up. The main thing is we can let it run at two in the morning without staff.  It of course ran in less than 10 minutes, since it was automated. 

The product allows our full-time employees to be repurposed, not eliminated. We turn ourselves from operators who used do everything to reacting or being proactive. 

We have a night operator whose whole evening was just initiating, running everything, and watching it. My predecessor and I have been doing a staggered approach, taking these tasks out of the night operator's hands and putting them into OpCon. This still gives her the control where she can initiate via the Self Service portal. Now, we're hitting that phase where I can start to let it run on its own. She's become more reactive with the handful of things that she's still doing.

Our night operator loves it. Granted, she is one of those people who is always up for change and improving things. The way that she used to run things in the IBM mainframe was more isolated. She would see the output as a whole: That process A and process B were running, but she didn't actually know the details. With OpCon, she likes to have it up to watch it (not that you have to have someone watch it closely). She uses OpCon because it is easier for her to troubleshoot if something were to come up by seeing where things are at, what step it is on, and observing colors change.

The team members' reaction to the change has all been positive. Everyone has a different feel for it, but everyone sees the positive. I do my best to put a positive spin on it. It's not so much taking anything away from anyone. It's just converting it into OpCon, running it, then determining, "Is intervention needed? Can it run on its own?" 

Primarily, it is used for automation of our daily processing with our core system, Symitar. There are the jobs that we run every day. We also have weekly and monthly jobs setup. These jobs have to do with different departments or reports run on specific days of the week or month. 

We process all of our ACHs and shared draft or check processing in OpCon. Also, VISA credit card processing is all done through OpCon.

We are running anywhere between 400 to 500 jobs a day, on average.

The biggest benefit, as a department, is it has allowed us to move away our focus from manually processing all daily processes with our ACH and shared drafts, reports, etc. It's allowed us the opportunity to work on different projects and upgrades within our organization. It's given us time back from needing to have someone onsite manually processing everything from 6:00 am until 10:00 pm at night.

We are about 92 percent automated right now.

It has streamlined operations, specifically with the timing of our processes. We don't have to worry about if things are going to run at a certain time. The automation allows us to say, "Okay, we want this to run at this time, and this to not run until that is done." So, it has really streamlined the accuracy and timeline of when jobs run throughout the day.

Employees have been very positive, as far as the changes in their tasks are concerned. For example, our payment services and accounting department use Self Service. This has helped them from their old manual process of taking anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes for a job started to a simple click, then the job is done. So, they have been very excited to not have to go through such a rigorous process just to run one step.

We use OpCon to automate daily operational jobs.

We implemented OpCon to remove risks associated with manual processes and improve efficiencies to reduce the time for those operational jobs to complete.

OpCon provides a single point of control which is extremely important to our organization.

The benefits of OpCon were seen immediately. It took a little bit of time to set up all of the automation, But once it was created, we began seeing benefits immediately.

OpCon enables us to manage complex schedule steps and multiple systems.

Between 25 and 40 percent of our staff's time has been saved to focus on higher-value projects.

We've rolled out self-service buttons to the business units, empowering them to handle their requests without involving our department. This has been highly beneficial.

We have used OpCon to manage legacy systems along with modern ones for file transfers.

We have approximately 300 processes that were all manual before using OpCon to automate them.

OpCon has helped save between 15 to 25 hours per week.

Errors have been reduced when running more complex processes, resulting in a positive effect on our organization.