What is our primary use case?
We're automating a lot of shared services tasks within our homegrown system: payroll, billing, and things like that.
How has it helped my organization?
As a company that places temporary employees, we have talent globally. In the UK there are GDPR requirements. Before Kryon, when one of our field employees reached out to us saying that we needed to remove their records, that was all done manually. Now, that’s something done by the robot, giving people time back and reducing possible entry mistakes. It’s the same thing with fee entries within our system. That is something that might take somebody ten hours, whereas a robot will be able to take that off somebody’s hands and ideally reduce the time to complete.
In terms of embracing the digital transformation, there is the question of whether people are going to be accepting of tasks being taken away from them and what they're going to do with that time. But a lot of people have really embraced it, especially people who were taking ten hours to put fees into our system and who will be able to use that time for more productive and less mindless tasks.
What is most valuable?
The advanced Excel functionalities are really convenient because we work a lot with spreadsheets. It’s also easy to use the HTML selectors on most major sites. It’s just a click and it picks it up. There’s not a lot of no hard-coding with it.
While I have some technical background, everything is self-taught. I'm not necessarily a developer myself, but picking up the tool, with the training they provided, has been pretty easy. I’m currently the only person using the tool in our company.
What needs improvement?
We use Google Drive a lot. If somebody sends us a spreadsheet or a document, it's going to be in Google’s format. It's not going to be in Microsoft Office format. But currently, there's no integration with Google’s documents. That would be a huge plus to have.
The same goes for, using Chrome natively. There's an extension but it doesn't necessarily always work. We have to close Chrome and reopen it to get it to pick things up sometimes, depending on the page and the IFrames and things like that.
For how long have I used the solution?
We’ve been using it since the beginning of this year; about seven months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I’m not sure yet what I think about the stability of Kryon because we haven't been able to get things constantly running and working. We initially had the server issue. And then, there have been issues with Chrome crashing and the extension.
Right now our usage of Kryon is limited to our shared services team. We're taking care of those processes first. But we have plans to automate as many processes as we can get on our plate and get through.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have room to grow. We just have to figure out where we need to go from where we're at now. Right now it's a waiting game to get things fixed and running.
How are customer service and support?
Customer service gets a rating of 100 percent. They’re fantastic. They're always really quick to respond. If we have a problem or if we put in a ticket that is more high-priority, our rep will jump on it and get things escalated. They’re happy to work through issues and take as much time as needed to resolve everything.
The Kryon team has definitely helped prioritize processes that are ripe for automation. It's an ongoing process, but they give us a good understanding of what to expect and how to figure those processes out; what can and can't be automated. It was mostly through the training. Going through that with them gave us a better understanding of what sorts of processes make sense.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We didn’t have a previous solution. We went with Kryon because of
- the ease of use
- the user interface seemed a lot better, more usable
- some advanced features that others didn't have
- the price - can't beat the price.
How was the initial setup?
We had somebody within our department doing the initial setup, although I was on the calls. It was a little bit complex, because there were some issues we ran into with Server 2016. When we tried to run an unattended bot on there it wasn't working so we had to switch operating systems. We've had to go back and forth to get things truly set up and ready to go. We're still working on the deployment, but that's not necessarily because of Kryon issues. It took some time to figure out the issue with the server, going back and forth with screen-sharing, etc.
And it seems that the size of the virtual machine that they provided with us might not be enough. We're trying to figure that out. Chrome keeps crashing on us. Once that is resolved, we have three or four processes that are pretty much ready to go. I just have to get through the actual testing of the running the unattended bots on the virtual machines.
In terms of an implementation strategy, we are working with our shared services teams to identify the processes. We have a daily “stand-up” and a weekly planning session to figure out and prioritize our processes. Then it's just a matter of building and testing and getting them out.
What was our ROI?
I expect that Kryon will save us money. It's too early to tell, but I would say that once it starts running there are going to be cost savings.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There are different pricing levels for every bot or unattended bot. You can buy however many you want. You'll need an additional virtual machine for it to work on. You can get multiple attended bots if you have users who have Windows machines. You can run those locally on their machines.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Automation Anywhere was one of the solutions we looked at. There were others but it’s been a while since we went through all of them.
What other advice do I have?
Make sure that you have your processes in a good place and that you have them written out. Make sure that you have your stakeholders onboard. And make sure that your bot works on the right server.
We don't use the process-discovery functionality of the tool. We're identifying our own processes by polling various stakeholders to see which processes make sense to automate. But it seems like it's pretty easy. We've hit a couple of snags with our virtual machines and the OS they are running and with the Chrome Extension. We're doing everything with unattended bots since we're primarily a Mac-based company. We're not able to run them on people's local machines other than the machine I use to create the Wizards.
In terms of operational efficiency, it might be a little too early to tell because we're stuck right now. But in the big picture, not only are we identifying processes, but we're also figuring out how to improve the processes, whether somebody is currently still manually doing them or a bot is doing the improved process.
*Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
