OUCU Financial

In recent years, OUCU Financial has worked hard to keep up with the industry-wide demand for a more modern banking experience, including the conveniences of virtual and mobile banking. As they adapted internally to provide these services—while preserving the exceptional member service they’re known for—the organization put greater emphasis on operational efficiency in the back office, where members of their IT department would spend inordinate amounts of time manually executing critical core processes.

To lighten the load on those employees, OUCU implemented a basic automation software solution to automate file transfers. It allowed their IT staff to perform tasks like moving a file from their LAN to an SFTP on a scheduled basis, “but that’s about as far as the solution went for us,” says Curtis Lewis, OUCU’s IT Project Manager.

In addition to finding that there were multiple core processes the software couldn’t automate, when something went wrong with an automated process, they’d receive a generalized error message. Those messages could tell them that something went wrong with a job, but it couldn’t identify what happened specifically. Trying to diagnose the issue whenever that happened ate up a lot of valuable IT staff time.

That loss of staff time became a significant issue.

As OUCU set out to find a more robust automation solution that would boost operational efficiency and eliminate time-consuming, error-prone manual processes, they stayed focused on their primary goal—to save their staff time.

While networking with other financial institutions, OUCU learned about OpCon. “When we asked our peers in the industry about the automation tools they were using, OpCon came up quite a bit. We were getting a lot of positive feedback about it,” Lewis says.

Those positive reviews of OpCon and SMA Technologies gave them the confidence to schedule demos of the solution.

During those demos, they discovered that OpCon could not only automate those processes that their previous solution couldn’t—it could also automate processes they hadn’t even considered.

“We saw that we could use OpCon to automate things we weren’t even sure were possible to automate,” says Lewis.

To confirm OpCon was the solution they’d been looking for, OUCU evaluated some of the most significant benefits of a cloud-hosted solution: disaster recovery preparedness, the ability to preserve business continuity, and the elimination of the time and effort required to manage hardware and software on-prem.

“If a branch goes down, and we have servers in house, it can take a lot longer to get them back up and running than if they’re hosted in the cloud,” Lewis explains. If a branch were to experience a disaster, OUCU could simply connect to their cloud environment and ensure no data loss or significant branch downtime.

When it comes to managing hardware and software on-prem, Lewis notes, “You have to deal with things like hardware end of life, software updates, reboots—things that can’t always take place during work hours. With an on-prem solution, we’d have to spend staff overtime in the evenings or over the weekend to take care of those things.”

With those considerations in mind—along with SMA’s outstanding reputation and completion of OUCU’s thorough due diligence process for cloud-based vendors—it became clear that a cloud-hosted solution was the right choice for them.

“Implementation of OpCon was incredibly easy. SMA built out our environment, and we worked with them to establish the VPN. Then, we jumped right into training,” Lewis recounts. “The training was exceptional, and the implementation team was very knowledgeable. When we had a question while building out our initial set of jobs, we could jump on a call with SMA and get the support we needed.”

OUCU is experiencing meaningful, tangible results following their implementation of OpCon. They’ve already automated many of their manual core processes, which has reduced overtime costs and set them up to save hundreds of staff hours per year. They anticipate a continued increase in time savings as they automate more processes, including those for departments outside of IT.

On top of significant time savings, their confidence in error alerts has greatly increased. “OpCon has made it easier to diagnose an issue with an automated job in the event that something doesn’t go as expected,” Lewis notes. “We can trust what those alerts tell us, so we know exactly what we need to go in and get done.”

Additionally, OpCon is reducing the impact of human error in their core processing. “While we always want to be 100% accurate while we’re running those processes manually, accidents happen,” Lewis explains. “You might mistype something. By having OpCon handle those processes, we can eliminate that human error from the equation.”