OpCon Valuable Features

MT
Consultant and Contractor at NYSDOT

There are three features which are valuable: 

  • automated calendar functions
  • the notification process for failed jobs or unscheduled events occurring, via email and text messaging
  • the ability for the scheduling package to communicate across multiple platforms. 

We have three mainframe computers and our previous scheduling package wouldn't communicate across the mainframes. OpCon gives us that ability to schedule jobs on mainframe A and a job on mainframe B and the latter can be dependent upon a job on A. 

Those are the key components that we've found to be beneficial.

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PL
Manager Applications Operation Group at Groupama Supports et Services

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

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

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

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MF
Core Application Programming Manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
  • Being able to automate jobs and have a central location where we can see how the day is progressing.
  • Getting alerted when something fails, and be able to escalate that with our employees.

Those are the most valuable features for us.

Also, while there's a learning curve to get your mind around how their schedules, jobs, and frequencies of the jobs operate, it's a pretty fast tool to learn. There's a lot of depth to it, so you can really get down in the weeds and become an expert in it. It's a fast learning curve. It took about a month to be able to get a pulse-check and see where we were at in jobs. Being able to create and modify jobs and schedules takes about three months, tops, to be able to do them comfortably. You could probably do it from the onset, but it's always shaky learning something like that.

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Buyer's Guide
OpCon
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpCon. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
RC
Systems Engineering Manager at Hapo Community Credit Union

Among the numerous valuable features, one standout capability is the implementation of self-service buttons. This feature has proven immensely beneficial across the enterprise. 

Essentially, self-service buttons enable the integration of a website, allowing us to construct backend automation. Users throughout the credit union can then access this automation effortlessly through buttons on a web page. This functionality empowers users to initiate or kick off jobs with a simple button press, decentralizing automation control and mitigating the need for them to interact directly with our critical infrastructure. This not only enhances efficiency but also provides a powerful means of controlling user access to sensitive systems. 

The self-service feature is an incredibly powerful tool, and its significance cannot be overstated. This functionality allows us to empower various departments within the credit union by giving them control over their own tasks, schedules, and internal processes. 

With the automation seamlessly operating in the background, this feature extends OpCon's reach across the organization, providing everyone with the ability to manage their own work. It has been instrumental in minimizing errors during the execution of complex processes. The inherent strength of automation lies in delivering consistent results, ensuring that the process and its outcomes remain consistently accurate.

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NR
Senior Core Systems Specialist at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

The most valuable process that we use is just the basic automation with the use of Enterprise Manager, which is their user interface. We also use a bit of their Self Service product, but not as much as we want to. Our primary feature is just the Enterprise Manager, which is essentially their basic version. This feature allows us to create, modify, and test different automation processes. It also allows us to be notified in the case of jobs failing to finish, or if for some reason the job doesn't finish in time. It can tell us that information as well, but it gives us a good overall view of OpCon processes and where we are at for the day.

I would definitely rank basic ease of use as very high. It is very user-friendly. There are some processes and functions which are a little more advanced. Overall, it's something that is very user-friendly, as they have designed it to be that way.

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Shawn Goodrich - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at Five Points Bank

OpCon removes the human element from routine jobs, taking the potential for human error out of the equation. OpCon provides a single point of control for orchestrating workflows. There's a GUI to build and schedule jobs. You can set up your notifications, review error logs, and troubleshoot through there.

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EW
Sr. System Programmer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We particularly like the fact that it's graphical because it is Windows-based. Before, we were text-based on the mainframe. You can also produce flow charts. Because it's point-and-click, its ease of use is very nice.

The learning curve was not very steep. When we converted to it, SMA held some classes, and they even held classes that were specific to our environment and where we were coming from. People were functional in it within a week.

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NV
EMEA Datacenter & Network Operations Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • It's very scalable.
  • We have experienced very few lags or issues, so it's very stable. 
  • It's a very versatile product. You can schedule everything you want in many kinds of environments. We have never faced a limitation in this regard.
  • The support is very responsive as well. They have replied to all our questions on time.
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MT
Principal Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

The most valuable feature of OpCon is its scheduling capability, particularly for automating file transfers with vendors. Before OpCon, this process was manual, requiring someone to log in to vendor websites daily for file transfers. With OpCon, this task is automated based on specified frequencies and calendars, reducing the need for constant manual intervention. This scheduling feature has extended to other areas within the credit union, allowing staff members to trigger automated processes by submitting files or using a self-service feature. OpCon is a significant labor-saving tool by automating formerly manual functions and streamlining operations across the organization. It is a centralized control hub, managing operations and consolidating tasks across five instances, including two for production and others for documentation, service, and development. The organization plans to expand this centralization to involve additional IT areas and departments seeking to automate manual tasks. We utilize the self-service feature for specific IT tasks, and we've extended its use to several departments within the credit union. The impact of the self-service feature on our processing and business efficiency has been significant. Rather than manually scheduling or relying on complex processes tied to specific criteria, the self-service button is provided to departments. It offers the capability to support older systems if needed.

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ML
Senior Administrator OpCon at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

I find OpCon's ability to monitor files and folders, and its integration with other software to be the most valuable.

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RJ
Manager, Computer Operations at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key.

OpCon is pretty easy to use. I'm not a programmer, I had no formal training. They offer some basic training courses. They also have a lot of documentation online and their support staff is super helpful. So it's pretty easy as long as you can take the time to familiarize yourself. It's a pretty easy application.

For the Enterprise Manager, the UI is okay. It puts your processing in alphabetical order instead of the actual processing order, but they are building a new UI. They really are on track to make it even more user-friendly. It's like they're listening to some of the common complaints from their customers, or they started to build out what we need or what we are looking for.

We are setting up the Self Service feature right now. That's going to be our biggest list in our organization. We just installed it and went through our training a few weeks ago. My team is building Self Service buttons in our testing environment right now.

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EW
Sr. System Programmer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable aspects of the solution for us are:

The GUI. Our previous scheduling software had a graphical user interface but this was nothing more than an add-on. It constantly had problems and eventually was abandoned due to its unreliability. Since migrating to OpCon we are now in a purely graphical environment. This provides more information in a smaller space and makes administration a point-and-click process.

The Database. OpCon uses an SQL Server as its data repository. This has given us substantially more capability for reporting and updates.

The deployment. OpCon has a deploy concept which is a methodology to implement change management to schedules.

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DK
Services Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.

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TF
Director of IT at PACIFIC MARINE CREDIT UNION
  • Scheduling
  • Job concurrency
  • Failover
  • Failed job notifications 

The schedule processing is our biggest reason for using it.

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MA
Manager of Remote Services at DOW CHEMICAL EMPLOYEES' CREDIT UNION

The most valuable feature is its integration with our core system. There is a very limited number of vendors that integrate with our core system. OpCon allowed us to reassign three part-time people who were running jobs manually. OpCon is running those jobs automatically and those people now work in general IT support, instead of running manual jobs all day. Those people were very receptive to the changes because it was a lot of tedious and error-prone work and they were pretty happy to get it off their plates.

OpCon is also fairly easy to use, as long as you have some kind of process background for understanding workflow. If you understand workflows at a very basic level, you can use OpCon.

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KB
Director of IT at Navigator Credit Union

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.

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AR
IT Manager Business Solutions Delivery at CBC Federal Credit Union

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

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MR
OpCon/xps Support at Nationwide Building Society

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

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BS
Information Systems Architect at Cornerstone Bank

The self-service is great as it enables users to initiate processes within OpCon without giving them access to more functionality than required. It relieves stress off the technology department, as more users are able to facilitate their own processes without a call to tech.

IBM LSAM has a very robust set of tools to monitor and run the various processes on an IBM i mainframe. It has the functionality to mimic operator input and capture data off of the screen for evaluation. The two most heavily used features of the LSAM in our environment are the Message Management and Scan Spoolfile functions. These allow us to capture information from message logs as well as spool files and launch further processing through the LSAM or OpCon itself. 

The smart email allows us to retrieve emails from a specified account and triggers further processing. Again, it allows another avenue for external users to initiate processes without needing to contact us. 

The script repository enables us to hold "scripts" that can be run on various machines - Windows in our case. It supports versioning and documentation.

The end code response allows us to evaluate how a process finished, set the termination/end code appropriately, and then trigger further processing based on how it ended. 

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TG
IT Analyst I at REDWOOD CREDIT UNION

Last year, we added a second environment and the OpCon Deploy product. This has allowed us to build a testing environment. This has been a great addition for us as we can work through our workflows without disrupting our production environment. 

Our users use the self-service features. We have a number of them set up and their self-services are actually called Solution Manager. My accounting group uses it and my payments group probably uses it the heaviest. A lot of times we use it for daily postings, either GL postings or we have various different payroll postings that the payments group has to process based on some accounting groups that we work with and things like that, that have to be done a little bit separately than the regular payroll postings that we do. That's just the tip of the iceberg, I do have it set up for a few other groups just to do things like upload or actually transfer files via FTP to other vendors. It's a one-step process where they've created a file and that file needs to be consumed in some way, either via our host system or sent out to a vendor.

The self-service feature reduces the complexity of the technical aspects of workload automation. We've been using OpCon since 2012. Being able to give somebody a self-service button that they can press to consume a file to run a process within our host system was a huge advantage. Before, somebody had to go into the host system, run a particular batch job, manually type some things in that could also then be typed in incorrectly and create problems. It's taken a lot of steps away from what used to be a very manual process. People in other departments are not always technically minded like we are in IT, it helps them to focus on what their job is as opposed to having to do their job and then understand how to run this whole major IT process.

The self-service feature definitely increased our user's productivity. I can remember when we had an eight-page checklist that we had to go down each item and run each of these, "Step one, do this. Step two, do that." And when we brought OpCon and that clearly reduced all of that daily having to go through a checklist. We actually had one person in IT, and their job for the day was to run the checklist. Once we went to OpCon automation, whether self-service or just fully automating some things, it reduced that checklist to basically nothing at this point.

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RB
Systems Director at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

The overall ability to automate all our processing is the most valuable feature so we don't have one scheduler doing this, while another scheduler is doing that, and somebody doing this manually. We are able to automate our processing completely.

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TT
Computer Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

All of it is valuable. We've been very successful with it and really reduced our manual keystrokes and manual errors. The greatness of it is the flexibility of the scheduling and the integration of all platforms and processes. We have integrated it with everything from AIX to Microsoft Servers; with pretty much anything that we can.

The product is easy to use and it's simple to automate processes. It's a GUI interface. You don't require any special programming skills to use it.

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NW
Senior Applications System Analyst at Frandsen Financial

Anything that is file movement related is awesome. Whether you are outsourced or an on-prem in-house bank (like us), you're not just fully in-house anymore. There are so many different third-parties that you work with now. With the amount of files going back and forth between end users or simply from the core to different vendors, this is the best part about the solution, streamlining and letting it run. Whether that's constantly throughout the day, certain times of the day or month, or a specific 16th day of the month, that's probably the most helpful because there is no operator that you have to wait on. We can just push it through a traditional FTP or SMTP.

It's very helpful, as we can move quite a few files all at the same time from a server level instead of having someone at their workstation downloading a 100 files. E.g., I created a process with our recent branch acquisition that we did early last year, where files were moving between the acquiring bank (us) and the selling bank. I put on our Self Service portal buttons for execution, that said, "As file's become available..." Then, my conversion team could have access without waiting on me to pull in stuff. If they knew that the selling bank put out some large conversion files, they can go out and simply hit a button. It would go out, grab it, and in a matter of minutes, be available to them on our public shared drive versus trying to pull that down via a secure site. 

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MR
Operations Analyst - Primary OpCon at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

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MN
National Monitoring, Capacity and Availability at a government with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features for us are

  • job dependencies
  • auditing
  • notification
  • robustness. 

Those are things we rely on all the time.

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JL
Engineer at CONSEIL DÃPARTEMENTAL 83

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.

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JS
Former Associate Dean of Enterprise Systems at PASCO HERNANDO STATE COLLEGE FOUNDATION INC

The whole product is valuable to us because of the integrations that it has with the MCP and the Windows environments. You have to have the agent on each one of them that you want to monitor. The integrations that we have created are along the lines of extracting files and sending them through SFTP to another vendor. Those are the things that were taking a lot of time away from my staff.

Also, being able to push files through in different ways to different vendors, including FTP, is helpful.

One of the other features that we have is a smart starter so that users can start their own jobs from a little GUI pad that we developed for them.

But really, the whole product is valuable. If it lost any of the functionality we're using it for, it would be sad. Everything is beneficial to us. Everything that we need is here. There's already functionality for the things that we've wanted to do.

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JS
IT Manager at Pioneer Federal Credit Union

Self-Service Solution Manager enables automation to be triggered by a human, but still provides the benefits of reducing the workload of the user, and reducing the possibility of human error. 

Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job. 

This also helps restrict the permissions of the users that have Self-Service Solution Manager access to only areas or systems that they need. 

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ML
Data Center Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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JR
Operations Manager at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

All of its features are valuable. We use the heck out of it. I just went to a conference and there were only three of us who had our hands raised every time they asked about a different level of OpCon and how we have it deployed.

One of the things we like about it is that you can open it up to other departments so that they can see their own tasks running. We were one of three at that conference that said they had it deployed to other departments.

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RB
Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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

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PN
TitleApplication Specialist II at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Self-service is one of the features I like the most. The self-service feature allows us to give control to the users to execute the job we have set up for them. This eliminated the requests, either through a ticketing system or email, to run a specific schedule for the department. 

With a simple click of a button in self-service, the department or the user can complete his/her job. Users are loving this feature, too. They are liking the option that they have control over their process.        

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JD
System Analyst at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

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.

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SP
AVP Operations at Dickinson Financial Corp.

It allows us to organize everything into a process flow throughout the day for our different tasks that we have to run. So, it keeps everything organized. It is easy to monitor and adjust, if we need to.

Automating tasks is pretty easy for the most part, though you can get more complicated. For most of our tasks, it's relatively simple.

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reviewer1661889 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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CW
Senior Analyst at iQ Credit Union

For us, the integration with Symitar is the main reason we got it. But we're also able to automate everything. We don't have to do things manually anymore. It takes out that human error.

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ET
IT Operations Systems Analyst Lead at SAN ANTONIO FEDERAL CREDIT UNION
  • 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.
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AW
Unisys Infrastructure Support Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

The things that we use most often are:

  • NIST view
  • Job Master
  • The quick search option.
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DO
Data Management Services at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

On-Demand access allows the front office to run jobs on their own, making it unnecessary to contact IT when they need on-demand reports run.

We get email notifications for failed jobs, jobs completed, schedules past run time, etc.

File Watcher can run jobs when files are made available in a folder. 

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FL
Works at Procedata

The image scanning and anti-malware features are really valuable.

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EL
Director of Core Application Services at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

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.

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CM
Application Support Analyst II at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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CA
TitleSystem Administrator at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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

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

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LM
Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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RC
AVP of IT at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

It schedules tasks.

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AW
Core Operations Analyst at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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.

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SE
IS Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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.

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TF
VP IT at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

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.

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EJ
System Analyst at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

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

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

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

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JP
AVP IT Operations at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable features are 

  • the ability to chain jobs together 
  • the integration into Symitar. At the end of the day, that's what makes the big deal for us.

The ability to chain jobs together allows us to create complex interdependencies between our jobs, and the integration into our core system is important because it allows us, through an automated system, to do a huge number of things that used to be done manually.

It is as easy to use as it should be. There is a learning curve, but that's because it's a powerful system.

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SR
System Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

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.

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GH
Systems Developer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

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

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reviewer1242072 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the self-service because it has made it possible to provide simple and quick solutions in the handling of certain tasks. Self-service is easy to use for people who are not in the IT department and who must act at any time for and with the customers.

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BH
Sr. Systems Programmer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

For us, the most valuable feature of the solution is the file transfer piece and being able to automate the moving of files around between our various vendors. It reduces the time involved versus somebody having to individually move the files around. It has reduced what we would have done manually at one point by 98 percent. 

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MB
Senior System Automation Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The automation part of OpCon is the most valuable for us, with all the core processing. It's really mostly hands-off unless we have failures. In our old days, we'd spend a good part of the day doing processing via manual tasks. We don't have to do any of that any longer.

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reviewer1658715 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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

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

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Buyer's Guide
OpCon
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpCon. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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