POWELL RIVER, British Columbia — Though many IT investments can run into the high six figures or more, sometimes minor allotments yield the most return.
For First Credit Union, an initial $1,500 investment in software has resulted in more than 50 tasks being automated at an average savings of 80 employee hours per week.
"Automate has played a key role in keeping our technology department small," said First CU's Vice President of Technology Frank Oldale.
He is referring to Network Automation's Automate software, a relationship that began in 2002.
Over the last 13 years, the credit union has steadily grown and in doing so continually upgraded the application. "We currently have 9,173 members and in 2002 we had 4,157 members," said "We have maintained our annual maintenance fees at roughly $500 per year and are currently on Automate 9 Professional."
How the Past Informs the Future
Back in 2002, the "drag and drop" business process automation platform was purchased to replace a single purpose job scheduler that triggered alert e-mails when overnight job processing failed.Today, First CU uses Automate, in conjunction with in-house developed software, to handle more than 50 tasks ranging from downloading clearing files to streamlining month-end processing reports.
Oldale recalled that the leading reason the credit union originally looked for options was due to a significant price increase related to an existing alert system that operated in line with Fincentric Ovation Banking System and Vinzant Software Global ECS job scheduler. The license fee had exceeded $10,000 per year, which was deemed prohibitive.
While there was some talk of building a program in-house, the undertaking was thought to be too cumbersome for the small staff. "We had only two people in the department at the time, and we would have not only needed to write code but manage it," noted Oldale. "It made more sense to find a less expensive third-party alert system or automation software that would eliminate most or all of the programming work."
Today, First CU's technology department has four full-time and three part-time staff. Collectively these employees support and run a data center for both the CU's banking system and its broker management (insurance system). Additionally, data services are provided to the organization's nine locations.
"This group also provides data auditing and administration for both our credit union and insurance operations," said Oldale. "We integrate many command line applications into Automate such as PGP, text to PDF. We have also built a number of in-house applications and integrated pieces with Automate, which is very easy to do."
Examples of integrated in-house developed applications include the downloading of clearing files for batch processing from Central1 into the credit union's banking system; checking VPN tunnels to ensure they are operational; uploading of check orders, statement files, tax files, among others; PDF files for all banking system reports, which are posted on the credit union's intranet daily; and the monitoring and notification of overnight "completion and fails" on the credit union's banking system.
"We have built applications for tracking sales, calculating relationship pricing and products per member extracts; however, Automate gave us the ability to automate the tasks we wanted plus many more," said Oldale.
Intuitive Automation
Referring to it as an intuitive platform, First CU runs Automate on the vendor's virtual server. "No training was required and the interface is very simple and easy to use. Testing was minimal. When creating new tasks or processes the testing is more in depth," noted Oldale. "Automate does as advertised, but you need to ensure your steps work correctly."
Along with the aforementioned automated tasks, others include monthly backup preparation, which includes compressing and moving log files and databases to a secondary storage location. Prior to automation this data consolidation process took the department at least one hour to complete.
"The software has a huge library of steps that can be utilized and if those don't meet your needs you can build scripts and create your own steps. The software is extremely scalable," said Oldale.
Prior to automation, the credit union's electronic distribution of daily and monthly reports would require up to 90 minutes a day in manual conversion, printing and delivery. Today, at designated times, AutoMate retrieves 20 daily and 35 monthly Ovation reports and converts them from Ovation's hard-to-decipher format to PDF files, and posts them on the company intranet for easy password-protected access.
When all 50-plus automated tasks are tallied, the credit union is saving upwards of 80 hours per week. This resulted in changing two employees' hours from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And while certain employees are working fewer hours, the credit union is running more efficiently and enhancing the member experience.
"The saving has come from being able to automate many of the day-to-day functions that were once done manually," said Oldale. "This has freed up employees time to focus on projects and member/client products and service."
