HAPO Community Credit Union

With $2.3 billion in assets and 490 full-time employees, HAPO is ranked as the eighth-largest credit union in Washington State by asset size. The cooperative offers a full range of financial services for individuals and small businesses, including deposit accounts, auto and student loans, mortgages, credit and debit cards, business loans, and investment services. HAPO employees live by the organizational mission “To help empower our members to live free. Free to enjoy life without financial stress. Free to live for today while planning for tomorrow.”

Robert Carter is the Systems Engineering Manager at HAPO Community Credit Union, overseeing a team responsible for the entirety of the cooperative’s servers, computer networking, and telecommunications infrastructure.

When he first joined HAPO in 2015, the Credit Union had automated a few of its daily processes. What automation existed was “scattered across the entire server infrastructure.”

“I would describe it as the Wild West,” Carter says. “It was very difficult to identify where job tasks were being performed and where they lived in the infrastructure. They couldn’t be monitored at all as to their performance. Usually, you didn’t know if something worked or didn’t work until something didn’t show up on the back end.”

This lack of transparency meant that much of the institutional knowledge resided with just a few individual experts who had been in the organization for years or even decades. This created a situation where if those subject matter experts were to get sick, go on vacation, or leave the Credit Union, their deep understanding of HAPO’s systems and processes could potentially be lost.

“As the new guy, I was dependent on people already here to communicate that knowledge to me and show me how things were done,” Carter says. “Otherwise, it would have been very difficult for me to identify all of that information.”

HAPO Community Credit Union first discovered the enterprise power and flexibility of OpCon when it underwent a migration to the Corelation KeyStone core system. OpCon offered a full-fledged direct integration with KeyStone, making it easy to implement during the core conversion.

“At that time, nobody here knew anything about the product,” Carter says. “So, as part of the process of implementing the new core, our Software Engineering Manager and I had the opportunity to visit SMA Technologies’ Texas facility for a week-long training program to learn about OpCon. And we immediately saw the capabilities of that platform and what it could do for us.”

Since implementing the OpCon workload automation and orchestration (WLA&O) solution, HAPO has automated numerous back-office processes both within and outside the core in areas that include IT, accounting and finance, branch operations, and loan production.

For example, HAPO now uses OpCon to automate its daily ACH processing.

“It’s critical to the operation of the [Credit Union],” Carter says. “The processing is complicated and has a lot of steps. We were able to automate it in such a way that it became an event-driven process that’s continuously looking for files from the Fed.

OpCon grabs the files at five-minute intervals and drops them into a location that kicks off the process, ensuring that all importing and exporting functions within and outside the core happen. We use self-service buttons that allow our accounting team to monitor and check the process as it proceeds.”

Another example of how OpCon has helped HAPO improve its operations outside the core is in consumer lending, where HAPO uses the platform to automate various processes within its loan origination system.

“It’s a big platform,” Carter says. “It’s implemented in many servers and sometimes the team that uses it needs to get in there and do specific tasks. Through the use of OpCon’s self-service buttons, now they can just go in, hit the button, fill out the form, and get it done—with zero risk.”

After deploying the OpCon workload automation and orchestration solution throughout its operations, HAPO Community Credit Union has achieved the following results:

• Gained Time Back: OpCon gives time back to staff by automating and streamlining complex processes in tasks such as ACH processing, consumer lending, check processing, and report generation. On any given day, HAPO has roughly 3,000 separate jobs queued up for automation through OpCon with 600 schedules running at any given time. This adds up to numerous hours of staff time saved every day that can be repurposed for higher-level work that helps move the Credit Union forward.

“If I’m not performing 10 mundane tasks a day that take 10 minutes each, those are little slices that can add up to a big block of time to be used on other activities,” Carter says. “Over the course of a year, you can save many staff hours that can be dedicated to some other effort.”

• Retained Institutional Knowledge: One of the lesser-appreciated benefits of automation is that it forces the organization to have well-defined and documented processes. This, in turn, enables the institution to download expert knowledge that resides within the brains of one or a handful of individuals, ensuring it’s accessible to the entire organization.

“Organizations often rely on [institutional] knowledge over time—the passing down of information from employee to [another],” Carter adds. “When you’ve automated something within an organization like ours, you’ve documented that process for the future.”

• Enabled Better Audits and Regulatory Exams: OpCon helps to streamline a virtually unlimited range of common processes performed throughout the organization, whether routine or performed on an occasional, one-off basis. For example, workload automation helps to expedite the production of reports required for external and internal audits, as well as mandatory safety and soundness exams.

“My attitude was, if I have to do any of these jobs twice, I’m going to automate them,” Carter says. “So that led me to automate a number of jobs that produce routine reports that I or my team reference all the time. OpCon enables us to produce reports that auditors want to see, which is great because it demonstrates to them that we know the status of our systems and we can produce that information on demand.”

• Maintained Control and Reduced Risk: With OpCon’s self-service buttons, staff with limited technical knowledge throughout the organization can gain all the benefits of automation in a low-code/no-code environment. From the teller line to the accounting department and beyond, OpCon can automate virtually any multi-step or file transfer process, eliminating costly errors and improving the employee experience.

“In my experience with the self-service buttons, they’re a big deal,” says Carter. “They allow me to give very specific power and functionality to other individuals without giving them direct access to the tools that implement that functionality.

For example, I can give our tech support team access to functions in Active Directory or the domain controllers by building out that functionality in PowerShell and implementing it with self-service buttons. That allows them to perform those specific tasks with zero risk and with my team maintaining full control.”

• Generated Faster Processing: OpCon uses advanced features like frequency scheduling, master/daily scheduling, and multi-instance scheduling to automate virtually any process in the core. This has enabled HAPO to accelerate its processing time while maintaining above average reliability, with virtually no downtime.

Today, HAPO Community Credit Union benefits from a flexible, scalable workload automation and orchestration platform, without the complexity that comes with enterprise-level solutions.

After realizing the improved control, lower risk, and recovered time that automation through OpCon provides, Carter looks forward to identifying additional areas where the powerful solution can make a positive impact.“

The whole culture shift of using automation and getting the most out of it is something that I’m seeing spread [across] the Credit Union more,” Carter says. “And I think it’s just going to keep growing. As [more departments] realize that we can take a lot of the jobs they do off their hands and give them back that time, they’re going to find ways to use that time on more important projects. And I think the payoff going forward will be huge.”

Carter recommends that financial institutions of all sizes take a hard look at employing WLA&O in their operations, since “life without OpCon would be much more challenging.”

“For any organization that has a lot of human-driven business processes, automation can recover so many work hours that you can dedicate to other purposes within your institution,” Carter says. “Automation takes time, money, and resources to deploy. But you can’t afford not to automate.”