Nintex RPA Reviews

We manage customer accounts: their orders, modifications, account cancellations, and back office stuff. For example, our clients are network marketing teams. Therefore, they will have accounts for multi-level marketing (MLM). They want their orders and accounts modified. For some of them, we want to change their subscriptions or cancel their accounts. These are all submitted as requests through online forms. Then, we will take them and do the modifications. We do this process automatically through Kryon.

All our bots are actually licensed for unintended, but we are not able to use them. So, we have currently 15 bots and all of them are attended only.

It has been helpful in reducing the manpower and error rate since we are able to run tasks 24/7 without interruptions. As humans definitely take breaks and there may be absenteeism that is unexpected, the solution provides continuous work. Humans tend to make errors once in a while, but the solution has almost zero percent errors.

We are able to cope with our clients's demands. No matter how much volume they throw at us, we are able to get it done quickly. That is where we see the biggest returns.

If a client gives us a new task, and it is a recurring volume, procedure, or SOP, then we are able to automate it within approximately a week. Then, they will be up and running with that automation. 

If it's a very simple task, we can automate it within about a week. If it's complex, then it will maybe be a couple of weeks to three weeks at most. We mostly differentiate simple and complex tasks by the number of steps involved. Sometimes, we need to cross check multiple accounts for a single request. We need to ensure all the information comes back correctly and that the logical calculations are done correctly. The more number of steps, the more complicated task that we will consider it to be.

We do code level modifications, which are already prewritten, and everything is with us. We don't use any of the advanced features of Kryon.

The simplicity of it: Kryon was very easy to learn and implement. The learning curve was very small. It didn't take a lot of time to set up or go live.

It is easy for business users to utilize. Mostly, it is a visual based tool. You don't need any expert coding knowledge. Even if you don't know anything about coding, a couple of weeks training should do the trick, as long as you are able to identify the logic behind whatever task you're going to automate.

While it does help reduce manpower, we still do require manpower because there are some processes and steps that we cannot do with automation. It may be too sensitive to be done by automated processes. In those cases, we still need manpower.

It does help to identify which tasks can be automated based on Kryon functionality, until you have close to 50 multiple tasks from one client. As soon as we automate any one of our top volume drivers, we try to understand how we can automate the next one orthe next highest volume driver. We have tried to use Kryon's functionality to the max, but still there are some limitations that don't allow us to automate all the tasks. E.g., anything that involves free form text is a major drawback. We use forms which get their data from our customers along with their account details. So, their form details are always the same. They don't change the fields, only the values are different. If it were an email, every customer would use their own words to describe the problem. It's difficult to write simple logic that is common for all types of words. I think free form text requires artificial intelligence. However, the lack of AI is not a big issues.

Another major drawback is OCR. We are not able to read scanned documents correctly in a reliable way. There is always some margin of error. Some of the processes require us to read scanned documents, and you need to ensure that it is 100 percent accurate. Without that level of assurance, you can't automate such tasks.

Our client uses Citrix NetScaler Unified Gateway. It is a virtual machine. All the tools that we use run from the client's location and through a virtual machine called Citrix. It is projecting the remote screen onto our screen. Kryon is not able to identify individual applications behind Citrix. All it makes is a screen by taking the image. So, Kryon's functionality is limited to screen reading. Because of this, we are not able to take advantage of the Windows functionality or web server functionality. like browsers. They are not able to identify whether it's a browser, etc. It can just read from the screen. Being able to identify applications inside Citrix would be a huge advantage for our processes.

Their logging features are minimal. 

Reporting-wise, there are some reporting options, but I don't think they are very practical from the point of developers.

We haven't had any instability. It is very stable.

So far, the upgrade process has been smooth, but it does take a few hours. The upgrade process could be better. Right now, it takes a few hours for them to set it up. We must wait to have a shared meeting. They have to wait for us, and we have to wait for their availability. It would be better if we don't have to wait for them, and similarly, they don't have to wait for our availability.

Everything is managed by our console and the Kryon admin. All we had to do is get a license, add the system name, and the bot is simultaneously up and running. So, stability is very simple.

We have two types of roles: developer and tester. Developer does the coding work and shows new tasks are deployed. Once they are deployed, the tester's work would be to ensure the tasks are running correctly. We have a license for an unattended bot. However, because of the Citrix issue, we still need to have at least one person on the floor to monitor the bots in case anything gets stuck, the tool is not responding correctly, or ground does not direct the total Windows, etc. 

We have seven people covering all the shifts 24/7. Apart from developers, we have four testers. One developer is enough for development and maintenance, but we still have three to ensure that all of our shifts are covered. Thus, we can work on multiple task at the same time.

The customer service is pretty good. The only problem is availability. Because of our high transaction volume, we have to give a scheduled time to them. Similarly, their experts also need to schedule among other customers. So, there is no dedicated support, but I know they are available and very helpful. It just takes a bit of time to contact them with both of us trying together. On average, it takes three or four days to schedule something with the customer services. 

If it is an emergency that makes our bots go down, they will make special arrangements with us. They make sure that they are available immediately. We haven't had downtime for more than 24 hours, so far. The customer service is great in supporting us.

This is our first RPA solution. We did try automation with Visual Studio, like encoding, but it was a failure. We thought RPA would be a better solution: easier to implement and error free. It made sense at the time, and it's still helping us out.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The deployment took a couple of days: One day to set it up and one day to review.

We just have one environment with multiple bots. We straight away went into production. We didn't have a testing environment or equivalent.

There were Kryon people who took care of everything. They just had to arrange the requirements. Once that was done, they were able to take up a remote connection and set up everything. They were helpful, ensuring everything was properly working and up and running.

At the beginning, we had fewer bots. So, we just went straight into it without a plan. We asked the Kryon team to set up a server, and they did. From there, they licensed us the bots. Once that was done, we started coding and straight away implemented them. Anytime that we have required an upgrade, we will just add additional bots.

If they need to upgrade the version, they will let us know that a version is available. We give them a suitable time and they will schedule a meeting to upgrade it remotely.

Error rate and manpower has been reduced. The error rate has been reduced almost to zero. Though, sometimes, some of the tasks are done better with humans than Kryon.

We are not exactly saving money at this stage, because we have invested a lot in Kryon. Our transaction volume and cost that we are receiving has not yet equated in a profitable way. We are moving to a more profitable way going forward, but it will take a bit more time. In maybe another year or so, we will see some improvement and ensure that this solution is profitable.

It saves our business analysts a couple hours per day.

Our workforce management (WFM) team is managing the licensing costs.

Kryon was our choice. Our project manager brought in Kryon team for a demo. Once we saw the features, we did a test with their training specialist, then we were convinced that we could utilize this for our requirements. We didn't look at any other options at that time.

It is a good solution if you're not using any virtual machines, like Citrix. 

It would be better if you get a demo or automate a simple task using Kryon. Get them to show you a proof of concept so you can understand what other challenges that you will have rather than blindly implementing it. Definitely, get a demo to see how efficient it is. Seeing it in action helps a lot.

We are not completely moving to a digital transformation. Even our management doesn't agree with 100 percent digitized solutions. They still want some level of human involvement, as well as for auditing.

The humans in our company have been concern about the robots taking over their roles. The robots take up most of the redundant tasks and focus on those. This ensures that our agents do the more complex ones or the low volume drivers. The agents do all the ones that require more logical reasoning, installation processes, or secure processes. We train our agents on these tasks and reassign their skill sets. We give them more training, giving them more complicated tasks. We aren't trying to lose our agents, even though manpower reduction is there. We just trying to retain them, but for different types of tasks, ones that require more human involvement and thinking.

We don't use Kryon Process Discovery or any of their web related services.

Automation takes up most of the walling that we get from our clients. Ground is being used extensively. However, the limitations are caused by Citrix, which is making us rethink our strategy sometimes as to whether we will be able to increase with the product. We want it to be faster and more reliable. We want to ensure that with any errors which occur, it is able to identify those errors, and it's able to rectify them or at least log of them. We want to take a look at them or notify people. Currently, only because of the Citrix issue, we are constrained. We might need to take a look at another software that supports Citrix more efficiently. Currently, there's no plan to increase usage, but it is part of our major usage as of now.

We use it for rapid process automation, but we also have Process Discovery. We use it for billing and collections, business administration, and insurance.

We have some idea of what we wanted to start with. We have been able to expand on that since embracing Kryon a bit more. We originally went into this solution knowing there were some processes which were extremely manual and wanted to take on automating. Once we got into using more of the advanced commands, we got through with some of our first, second, and third wizards, then we were able to take a step back, and say, "Here are all the functions that I've now learned to work with. I want to put them into higher level of development." We were able to expand the idea of something very simplistic, a three or four-step process, then move it over to a 50 or 60-step process. Because of those advanced commands, we could condense them down, which was something we didn't know at the time would be a reality.

Kryon has helped our existing workforce embrace the digital transformation of our organization. We now have people who are more interested than ever in moving over to digital processing. We are able to focus on key components of the business which can't be processed through automation.

We have seen some significant drops in employee errors. However, your data is only as good as what you receive. Errors have reduced by 80 percent based on the processes that we have automated by the sheer fact that we don't have people touching so many of them.

We have been able to streamline some processes just by using RPA. That has improved them.

Its ability to work with multiple platforms within the same application or "wizard". Some of the SQL functionality has also been extremely helpful. All of our platforms are homegrown. We don't use an out-of-the-box software, which makes our availability to using RPA software suites pretty limited. Then, you have a product like Kryon which is flexible. We use PowerBuilder as our application building codex. Kryon adds flexibility when we have the functionality of SQL, where we can take sets of data out of the back-end and run complex computations or do a bunch of data validations inside the wizard. It can save us sometimes dozens of steps, then if we were to try and do those same reviews using the user interface completely. The balance that we get from using Kryon RPA, alongside being able to screen scrape and frequent screen, gives us an advantage that we haven't had previously with any of our other attempts at robotic process automation.

Kryon Process Discovery is a very exciting thing. We are rolling it out to approximately 100 VM machines, but we will be using it comprehensively for the next few years, as long as we can get it rolled out here soon and start gathering more information. It's been a very exciting thing for us here at LTCG.

We haven't finished rolling out Process Discovery. We only have it on three computers right now for the test environment. However, one of the most complex tasks that we are using two full-time employees to do was have it record and monitor these employees, along with all its variations, and how they are working through a process. We then exported that from Process Discovery into Studio. Now, instead of starting from scratch on a process that a developer wouldn't know, we have a framework and outline on how to make that work from end-to-end.

The read from screen functionality needs improvement

We still do a lot of stuff in the user interface. Finding UI information and split UI need improvement.

I would like them to add more functionality from Excel, especially when you pull data from Excel.

We've had a lot of good success using this solution for the full-cycle of automation from the discovery of processes to turning on the automation and scaling it up. We would like to see having a little more specific documentation, or some of the examples be easier to find. One of the big things that we get directed to now is the Kryon Community page, but a lot of that wasn't in existence or publicized when we started doing our training and education. Now, we're stumbling through using it. For the majority of the time, we have either had to try and interpret what the instructions meant or do a service desk ticket.

I have had two people go through the online training. My feedback would be that they need to focus a bit more energy on that. I would like to see that online training be a bit more comprehensive in the projects that they create, so we can say, "Here's what we have," or, "Here's what we need." I don't know if maybe they should sit down and try to develop "training" documents as well. Or, like dummy wizards, where you have to copy and paste this wizard, start from scratch and learn these steps, then you put it together to make it work, which would be similar to what we did with the in-house training. 

They could add a bit more to the online training too, since it's still relatively new for us. We don't have a "dedicated" team of people who do this. This has been a learning experience, because we only have a limited number of people who can dedicate hours to it.

It is a very stable process. It has been a learning experience for us. We have learned to make some changes in our system to add stability that users were experiencing. They were experiencing the same instability issues that we were having. RPA shed that light. We've made some changes structurally to our IT and business processes to avoid that in the future.

We have seen bugs and had frustrations. When we've done software upgrades, or opened service desk tickets, things can get frustrating because of a slow response. There might be a system outage, where we weren't informed of it until everything at our site went dark. So, we have had growing pains.

Scalability is still a possibility for us, as we will probably need more of the solution in the future. I don't have any concerns about scalability at this time. We do have plans to increase usage. 

We have two attended machines, because we have such a low demand for it right now. However, we do have nine unattended machines that run daily. We average about 1200 to 1300 wizard runs a month.

We have five developers, all from different subsets of the business. We have some that specialize in finance, account management, or those of us who came from more of an IT background (or a more structured IT role). We have a good mix of of SMEs with some IT mixed in there.

Kryon's technical support is very good. They made some core changes that have improved the solution over the last two years.

We have used other RPA tools previous to my time at LTCG. None of them were successful after the original deployment. Therefore, we decided to wash the project. While I don't remember the name of the software, the reason they were unsuccessful is because of the language that our user interface is built in.

The initial setup was complex for us, but that was, in part, from the way we operate at LTCG. I wouldn't put that on Kryon.

From start to finish, the deployment was four months.

We did the deployment all internally.

We do upgrades three times a year for both Process Discovery and Kryon RPA. Essentially, we have a structured team set up who opens up in a project, then we start reporting against the project. We try to get all the requirements built, but it all runs through me. So, I run it as a type of the project manager. Then, we deploy the upgrade alongside the customer review team. It is not as rigid as some other projects should or could be.

We currently have four total users from IT, who assist us in maintaining the Kryon server, Process Discovery server, and upgrades for deployments, which includes security and overhead. There is also my role, which is just performed by me.

We've more than broken even over on the license. Year to date, we are at $120,000 in savings.

We have been able to alleviate two FTEs, which was a big savings for us. We were able to reuse those resources in other locations. It is over 5000 hours a year in total savings.

We were able to reduce our processing speed in time by 65 percent. That is just simply by using a robot versus a person.

Licensing costs are about $100,000 a year without any additional costs.

We had requests out to four vendors: Kryon, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. Kryon did not end up being the most financially inexpensive, but it did make the most sense based on the ability of having business users develop, not IT people. The product bridges the gap in terms of ease of use for business users with no tech background, compared to a UiPath or Blue Prism. With those solutions, you have to be a .NET developer to use them. Kryon allows people who are business-oriented people to use it.

Understand that you need to have a very well-documented framework of what you plan to automate. Not necessarily the idea of, "I want to automate this task." But, as a company, don't be narrow-minded to believe that these are the only tasks that we can automate. You'll find that there are a lot of groups which are doing things that you may not know of that you can automate very quickly. Be very open-minded when you start working with the solution, because you'll find that a lot more doors are open than you originally anticipated.

As with anything in software suites, you are always going to have challenges where people didn't know something was a function or didn't know this is how that worked. Kryon has a good start in trying to bridge that gap between the developer, who would look at something, and go, "Yup, I can pull a lot of this data from SQL, and I just need to click these buttons," versus someone who doesn't have a technical background.

There is still some growing to be done. It is necessarily the product that has been the problem. It has been necessarily some of the responses that we have gotten from Kryon itself. 

We took all kinds of mindless operational processes, things we were doing over and over again and which cost us a lot of work time every day, or week, or month, and scheduled them to be automatic, with no human hand in the process.

We have a lot of examples. We make loans, although we are not a bank, for various purposes. Sometimes, people don't pay us back and the loans go to collection. We have to start all kinds of processes via lawyers, and when we transfer a case to a lawyer we have to prepare it. All the preparation for the lawyer is automatic now. All the letters for the lawyer with all the details about the loan, about the collection - everything is automatic.

Also, for each customer whose debt we transfer to a lawyer, we have feedback to our core system to update all the data in the system again. So all the data about the customer and the debt comes from the system to the lawyer, and feedback from the lawyer comes into the system. And all of this, of course, is connected to the loan itself, to the customer. Everything is aligned.

We are a digital company. We very quickly embrace all kinds of digital transformation. Kryon was just a part of that. We have engaged in digital transformation in many ways in our company. But the adoption of Kryon was very quick, and that is its advantage. Because it is a very quickly and very intuitively customized system, it helped us to adopt it through users who are not technical users. It really helped us to put a lot of automated processes in the system and adopt them very quickly. Now, my organization wants more. They say, "How did we live without it before?" It really helps us in our day-to-day processes, the ones that are not so complicated, not so involved, that we do over and over again.

Efficiency has increased. If robots are doing stuff we used to do, this increases the efficiency of the staff.

All our users have no technical background. But Kryon is really simple and intuitive. Our business adapted very quickly and easily. This is the main thing and it's why we love the system so much. It's why we are always trying to put more processes into the system and make more use cases: because of the simplicity and the intuitive nature of the system.

Our original plan was to do something like two robots, and a few processes, but because it was such a success in the company, we expanded it. We have 11 processes. The eleventh is due to go live in about a week. Some of them are not complex, some of them are more complex. It depends on the process itself, the amount of time, the amount of integration, if there are dependencies on another system.

In terms of plans to increase usage, for now we really want to see how the day-to-day is going with all the processes. More processes mean more licenses and robots, and we have to do ROI as the next step. I would guess we'll do more, but it's already a lot to have 11 processes in a year with four robots.

We, ourselves have not used Kryon's customer support. Maybe our third-party uses it on behalf of us. I don't know.

This is our first RPA solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very quick, very understandable, very open. If we had problems, they were helpful. They assisted our third-party company. It was very easy to work with.

Deployments depend on the process. We have been working with the system for a little less than a year. After about two months, we had the first process working. It's really quick. When I say two months for the first process, that means we sat with the customers, understood what they want, how to do it. We had them test it, we launched it, we optimized it in production. The whole timeline of the process was handled in that amount of time.

We asked our organization to set the priorities. We asked for a quick win, meaning something very small and very painful, or something which was taking a lot of time. That enabled us to win their appreciation and reduce the resistance to change. Some people may look at it as a robot is replacing me. We handled this too by making them a part of the implementation process. This way, they wanted it, were engaged with it, and wanted to do more. It gave them something that they hadn't seen before. It gave them a feeling of success. It's very important, through the process, to feel like you are succeeding in doing something new in a very short amount of time. The people involved have to see we're not really replacing them, and that it actually helps them to do more, to do better, to do things that have work quality to them.

The people using Kryon are from three departments: collections, services, and operations. Not everyone is using it, because we're uploading files to the system. There a few people in each department who are doing it. Overall there are about ten people involved with it, but it services the whole department. There are the people who operate the system, and the people enjoying the fruit.

Even when I purchased the license, it wasn't via Kryon. It was through a third-party. The product is Kryon, but the customization and all the agreements and the buying process were not through Kryon. It was with a third-party.

The reseller is HMS. All our connections to Kryon are through this company. All our processes of examination and solutions were through them. We are very pleased with the job they have done, with the service. They are very good and they helped us a lot.

But these days we are transferring all the knowledge, all the data, and all the operations of the system to our people, the employees of our company, so that we will be able to do it alone. The first year was through this third-party, and we have their support. And now our main goal is to be able to do it on our own.

Kryon has saved us money. We measure in terms of people. We haven't increased our employees in those departments, and we can say that we have saved nine employees, nine people we haven't had to hire.

I would expect that in the first year there is no ROI. It has to be measured over three or five years.

I wasn't part of the process. I had a colleague who did it.

It depends if you are doing it by yourself, with your employees or, like us, through a third- party or someone who knows how to work with the system. If you're doing it through a third-party, there is no problem and they have all the knowledge, all the data, all the know-how about how to do it. If you are doing it with your own people, training is mandatory and Kryon has it. Some kind of on-the-job training, or some kind of support, is necessary to be able to implement it quickly and the right way, because there is a right way, a way to do it properly.

Kryon was not involved in helping us find and prioritize processes that are ready for automation. We did so. They were not part of this process. We came up with the processes, we talked about them, not Kryon.

I'm not the one who uses the system every day. I'm not the one who uses the customization. We go through a third-party which does all the customizations for us. I can't tell you which part of the system I enjoyed the most, or what I'm using because I have a third party for that.

The primary use case is for back office processes.

It has improved our organizational process in inbound and outbound tourism. The previous process was very complex and took at least a day for the users. Now, it is fully automated and saving a lot of hours for our back office.

The product is very useful for our organization. The process takes approximately a month.

Our organization has nothing between the digital and back office processes.

Because of this product, we started to look for more processes to deploy.

The most valuable features for our organization are the automatic processes which save main power in the back office.

From our experience, the product is not suitable for end users.

It is a very stable product.

It is a very scalable product.

The product is used very extensively. We have plans to increase usage.

All users can use the processes.

We require two staff for deployment and maintenance.

The technical support is very good.

The vendor's customer service is very good.

We didn't use a previous solution.

The initial setup was deployed by Kryon.

Our implementation strategy was evolution strategy, process after process, and be the leading business user.

We used a third-party, HMS, who has very good knowledge in the product

There is no doubt that there will be ROI. However, it is too early to provide data.

This solution has saved us time when launching new automation processes, but it is too early to give the amount of time.

There is not enough data to determine if the solution has saved us money, business analyst hours, operational efficiency, or reduced employee errors.

In addition to the standard licensing costs, there are manpower costs.

We would recommend it.

We don't use Kryon Process Discovery.

We use Kryon in a number of use cases. We have done a lot of work in the insurance industry, especially client-onboarding. We are also working on AML, anti-money laundering. Another use case is data extraction from invoices, using the Kryon platform.

To give you an example, we worked on a client-onboarding scenario. Client-onboarding, when run manually, was typically taking about 45 minutes for just one customer, because the process is so lengthy and because of the amount of information required. In addition, it was updating four systems and there was work done to match the systems, which required a migration piece. Now, with automation, we capture it once, in one system, and then onboard this information to two or three other systems. It now takes a maximum of about eight minutes, compared to the 45 minutes of work when it was done manually.

It has definitely also helped our workforce embrace digital transformation. We have implemented this with onboarding processes, email processes, and the like. It has now spread to multiple LOBs and they're talking to us, including HR, finance, and more.

The bots result in a lot of effort saved and that means we don't need to hire people to do certain jobs. It's saving money on FTEs. I estimate that when we run a business use case, the typical savings are four to five FTEs per month. In terms of business analysts' time, out of eight hours, typically four hours are saved. Operational efficiency has increased more than 50 to 60 percent. Finally, it saves us time when launching new automation processes, by about 30 percent.

The best feature is its reporting. The core features of Kryon are the best. 

In addition, the number of commands it gives us to edit and modify is really good. 

It also captures screen activities and plays them back. I'm a technical guy, so it's very easy for me to do it. If I imagine giving this to a business guy, it is really amazing, because he knows what action he is going to perform.

With respect to web-based applications that we have, Kryon may not be able to do certain things in terms of technology and support.

Also, there are limitations on integrations with other platforms like ServiceNow. There are some issues integrating. It's not a really an open system. The product, its design, etc., is really good, but they have to look at the openness, how to integrate with other products which are available in the market, as well as with our own solutions. You can do integration but it is not so easy. You have to build certain things to integrate. It's not like an open API is available. It's there but it's not really open compared to competitors.

The only challenge today is that when we migrate to a new version, there is a lot of work. We need to roll it back. Once migrated, we cannot roll it back easily. There are a lot of things that need to change. We've asked Kryon to build a complete package so that migration can easily happen from one version to another version. 

For example, 5.1 to 5.4 was really a nightmare for us. It was more to do with the number of assets we had. When they changed to 5.4, with the new enhancements, some of the scripts were failing after we migrated, and we had a whole list of issues. We had to reconfigure certain elements. It was effort. It was not an easy migration.

We are now doing close to 20 processes. It still works fine. There are no issues from the scalability point of view.

Technical support is there in some of the regions. In APAC it is good. One or two years back, it was not there. They've improved since then. They are able to support us if that is required.

The initial setup took some time because there are a number of components. There is a server, Studio, etc., so it takes some time to set up properly. But once it is set up, it's easy to work with. But the initial setup requires some time.

Setting up a server typically takes three to five days. We go through a process where we regulate things, we make sure we validate the software, and we that we have approval. 

Our implementation strategy was to first set up a pilot. After the pilot, we wanted to go full-blown. That's when we looked at infrastructure for development, testing, and production. We then started bringing a lot more LOBs in, to grow and develop.

We used Kryon consultants, and some of our team members also got trained and certified so that we could take over that piece. Initially it was a joint effort and after that we took over.

Our experience with Kryon consulting was good. They follow certain guidelines, they don't allow any unwanted consultants to implement or do anything. They make sure consultants are certified in the product and that they have experience. That was good. That's how they start with all customers.

If we look at the number of FTEs saved, there is definitely ROI from those savings. In fact, we are collecting metrics on that now, to know how much value we've had. Over the three years we have had close to $300,000.

Our licensing cost is close to $80,000 US per year and that includes the server, Studio, and both attended and unattended bots. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We evaluated a few solutions but Kryon was the platform we chose. We evaluated UiPath and Kofax. We found Kryon to be a good platform so we engaged it. It is easy to use, no integrations were required, there are no plugins to download. Our platform includes mainframe and client-server.

At the time we were evaluating, UiPath was not really working out well. If we were to compare now it's a different scenario, but two years back it was a nightmare.

My advice is to follow the right set of instructions and best practices, even before you implement automation. Look at what is available, at how you do it. If you don't follow those instructions, you may find it difficult, but once you know exactly how to use it and what to do, it works. Have training properly done and after that start looking at implementation.

It's really good for end-to-end RPA. The way we work is we do a discovery manually rather than using an automated discovery process. Once we identify a process and we run through a complete lifecycle of it. We then work on the design elements, how to run the exceptions, etc. We make sure that UAT is done, that it is tested well. We then make sure that the business users accept the process, how it's going to work. We then validate the bot, make sure we get a sign-off from them, and then we go to production. We do one week or two weeks off thorough checking on production to make sure there are no exceptions or issues. We then hand it over to the client to run it.

In terms of the ease of use of Kryon for business users with no technical background, that's a key area. What we say to them is, if you're not familiar with Kryon and you want to automate, there is a basic, fundamental, one-day workshop. It will give you at least an idea of how to record, what the options are, what you should look for - the key things to learn about some of the elements of the Kryon platform. Then they're good to go. I see that users are then happily recording things and playing them back. So Kryon provides ease of use where they are not really struggling. If somebody knows Excel, that person can easily run Kryon.

We have business users and we have some developers. It's a small team of five to eight people, including the business users. In terms of deployment and maintenance of Kryon, we currently have a very small number of processes. There is an agenda to grow big. We're looking at more than taking more 30 live so we are bringing in external consultants to help us do that job. We want to keep a lean team right now, because once we go live we will need to do more of the production support and maintenance of the bots. We will only do small-scale development in-house. If it gets to a complex level, we will get a team of consultants to help us. In terms of infrastructure, we have one guy dedicated to that right now.

I would rate Kryon at seven out of ten. There are the migration issues and they need to support web-based apps.

We have two primary use cases. One is the back office. We're a bank and we are automating some work of the bankers - mostly manual jobs like typing Excel data into our legacy systems and the like. The other thing is automating testing. We have really difficult scenarios involving both legacy and web systems. We hadn't found the right tools to take testing all the way from start to finish. But we have found Kryon very effective in that direction.

One way Kryon improves the way our company functions is in testing. Previously, we didn't have full coverage and we couldn't run a full regression day by day, or after major activities such as updates. We had to do it all manually and we didn't feel confident. Now, it's a completely different thing. We're trying to build a strong regression area where we can run a full regression of all our systems by clicking a button. We're not there yet, but we're heading that way. It's going to be a complete change in the way that IT acts because it gives us much more confidence.

One of the main features is its ability to connect into literally everything we've got here. Some of that was easier; some of it took some extra labor. But all in all, it has the capability to connect and to interact with almost every system that we have. That's the main feature. 

The next feature is the triggers. It's relatively simple to activate it. You can activate it via Control-M or via email. It has a lot of built-in triggers which enable us to easily activate the jobs.

The third is the support. We have great support from the guys here. It's not the product itself, but let's call it the "ecosystem" of the product. We have a strong product owner, and they respond very quickly to every question we have. That's a good thing.

The cognitive part, the OCR could use improvement, but I know it's on their roadmap. 

We need stronger governance to know, when a transaction is done, whether it worked or failed; strong logging. That would be helpful.

It's pretty stable. I can't think of a major crash.

We're not there yet, regarding scalability. It's fairly easy to purchase and make another robot, another machine, but we're not there yet. We're not at the limits of use of our first one.

Selenium was only good for web applications and most of our business processes involve more than just web applications. So if we wanted to run a complete test, end-to-end, Selenium didn't really help.

The initial setup took a while because we're a bank, so we have all the security requirements. It took a while but the setup was not very complex. The go-live took a couple of weeks but that was not entirely because of Kryon. It was due to the bank system itself, the firewalls and security.

Our implementation strategy was to go to the back office. We took ten nominees and we tried to pinpoint the one that would be most useful yet which was not too complicated. We gave it to Kryon as a PoC. They came and we said: "Let's take it step by step. Let's see if it works." If it did, we would try another one. We would then try to spread it among our core systems. We would connect it to each core system and have at least one active job in each of them. From there on, we made set up a center of excellence within the bank for automation, and people come to us now and ask us.

A Kryon consultant helped us with the primary deployment, but now it's our own team. Kryon guided us. We went to a three-day workshop with them where they explained it and gave us the primary technological understanding. Our experience with Kryon consulting was that they were helpful and professional. It was okay.

We're connecting with on a daily basis when there is a problem. But we have since made our own team.

We're a relatively small bank. So even if we can automate a decent scenario, we still don't have a lot of users or transactions. So the ROI is going to take a while in that area. In the testing area there is a good ROI, because we're now capable of doing things that we couldn't before. Completely. It's a game-changer.

For example, in the scenario of making a loan, part of the process was typing things into our legacy system. Selenium, the solution we had before, just couldn't do it. We had to abandon the goal of automating the scenario, and now we can. It's a game-changer in that respect.

The truth is, when we brought Kryon, we didn't think about automating testing, and they didn't recommend it. It was not meant to be a Selenium or testing tool, but we thought it could be useful, and it turned out that it was.

We did not evaluate other vendors. We quit using Selenium and, once we got Kryon, we said to ourselves, "Why not try to use it in place of Selenium?" It turned out to be much more useful and much cheaper, because we already had the license so we can use it whenever we want. Selenium was expensive and it only gave us certain aspects. So all in all, going with Kryon was a good thing to do.

There is a vast field of RPA tools. You have to know what you want to do and how to add value to your business. You need to see if what Kryon gives you is the best fit for you. For us, as beginners in the field, it was good, because of the support and the willingness to help us and to be cooperative. That was very helpful at the beginning. So you have to evaluate which step of the RPA lifecycle you are in. I can tell you more, in a year or two, if I'm satisfied when I am more advanced. But for starters, it is a good decision.

In terms of using the solution for the full cycle of automation, from the discovery of processes to turning on the automation, and scaling it up, it's a little bit early to say, because we don't have a lot of experience. And I can't compare it to any other thing that we have, because we're really at the start of it. But so far, it has met our expectations. I didn't think it would go as fast as they described it, and it didn't, but it was fairly rapid, and it has its ROI. All in all, good.

It's not for end-users, absolutely. It's not that. For developers, it is interesting. We didn't actually use developers to work with it. We had more, what I would call an "implementation guide." It takes knowledge and it takes time. There are a lot of technical issues, not only because of Kryon but because of our system and the integration between Kryon and our system. It's definitely not for end-users, regardless of what anybody says. It's not. But it's fairly decent for developers. 

We have our four developers who actually touch Kryon. We have two-and-a-half to three people who are dedicated to deploying and maintaining it, and another one comes and goes. We definitely have plans to increase usage. At the moment we do about 1,000 transactions each day, but we want to get do more.

As for helping our organization embrace digital transformation, we're heading that way. It's only the start, but we have a good vibe here. I could answer that question more comfortably in a year. But I see the way. I see the light.

We had an outside advisor, not Kryon itself, to help prioritize processes that are ripe for automation. We preferred it that way. Maybe Kryon could have given us that service, but we preferred to take an outside advisor.

I would rate Kryon at eight out of ten. It's not as rapid as they describe it and it has its limits. We have met with Kryon a couple of times. The guys were very helpful and said, "We'll bring that into the roadmap," etc. But we hit the limit of the product. For starters, we expected that to happen in year-two or year-three, not three months after trying it. But all in all, it has been a good experience.

We have legacy software in our company. Some processes in our company are being done manually. There are very routine jobs, processes where people are sitting in front of a computer and typing data. This software, Kryon, enables us to make these processes more automated.

We program the software, we run the use case with the software and now, instead of things being done manually, they're being done automatically. It's helping leave all this old legacy software which doesn't have APIs. We wouldn't be able to do it otherwise.

We cannot get into this legacy software. There are no APIs. It would cost a lot of money if we wanted to develop something like an API. This software enables us to overcome this API problem, automate things, and do it relatively quickly. It's low-cost development.

We're a bank. We get money transferred to the bank from other banks, but some of the data can be wrong. We know it's money coming to our bank, through a money transfer system in Israel of which we are a part. But if we cannot recognize which account number it belongs to, regulations require us to send the money back to the bank that transferred it to us. This happened every day. Until we had this Kryon RPA solution, there was a person sitting in front of a computer typing these transactions into the legacy system. It was all manual work and the person doing it would work, say, two hours a day doing these transactions. Now it's done automatically. 

So it's not just that we're saving the time of this person having to do this typing, but we have also improved this specific person's job satisfaction. She doesn't have to do this boring, hard work. Not only are we saving valuable time of our employees, but there is added value, like fewer typing mistakes.

The recording feature enables us to record what we're doing, like typing or clicking the mouse, and to identify objects on the screen. We basically teach the program how to type, instead of a person. That's the most powerful feature.

That's valuable for us because it's the only way we can automate this process.

I would like to see a better OCR solution. That's the main thing: identifying unstructured data, like all paper documents and data from pictures. 

Also, because we are in Israel - Hebrew is a hard language - we'd like it to better handle Hebrew.

We had some issues, but it's relatively stable. We didn't have any major issues. Their support helped us a lot. Some of the issues we had were because we didn't know how to work properly with the product. But it's working and it's doing its job. I'm relatively satisfied with the system.

We don't yet have a lot of processes in production, so I don't have experience with its scalability. I don't see any problem, why the product would not be scalable. But we don't have a mass of processes, so I can't say anything further.

So far, we have automated six processes, about one process a month. Of course, we have plans to try to put through two processes a month into production. We're planning on doing tens of processes in the next year. We want even more, but that depends mainly on us.

Technical support is very good. They answer fast and they know what they're doing. We have had a very good experience with them.

We used nothing before Kryon.

It's hard to say whether the setup was straightforward or complex. I think it's quite simple. But because of all the security requirements for data at our bank, we couldn't do it in a straight way. We had to go a very different way, so it wasn't so straightforward. I don't know if it's our fault, because of all the security issues we have, or if it's a product fault. Let's put it at 50/50.

It took about a month-and-a-half, from the beginning of the deployment with Kryon, until we solved everything, and we could run our first process in a production environment.

Our deployment strategy included internal meetings, trying to map the processes we wanted to automate. Second, we started negotiations with Kryon for buying their product. Then we started learning the tool and how to work with it. At the same time, we started installing it on our server in our company.

After we finished the basic installation of the development studio, we started developing our processes. That was the month-and-a-half. We were installing the program and dealing with all the security issues. And at the same time, we mapped our processes and development.

After we finished with them, we continued mapping and identifying the other processes in our company. Kryon has been advising us, not only about installing, but also by giving us best practices on how to map and how to identify the processes that we can automate in our company.

Kryon assisted us with the deployment. It was a very good experience. They were really committed to our success. They were very informative and helpful. They solved the problems and the issues we had to deal with. I have a very positive opinion about them.

We have definitely seen return on investment. We are checking it all the time. By the end of this year we will have returned the investment, and we will start gaining more. Most of the money goes to developers' salaries, people working at the bank, rather than the licensing. Including the salaries, we expect that by the end of this year, we'll return the investment.

For an unattended robot it's $6000 a month. Right now we have three unattended robots.

We checked out Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. Even though we have deployed Kryon, we are still checking other solutions. Maybe they will be valuable in different processes. 

We decided that Kryon would be the best, mainly because they have the most installations and production in Israel. They have quite a lot of experience.

I would highly recommend getting a commitment from the vendor - and not only from Kryon. It's hard to get the vendor's commitment and to know, when you sign the agreement, what the SLAs for dealing with your problems are, and how committed they are to you as a client.

The second thing is that more important than the source of the RPA solution is the way your company handles the automation of processes. It's a very big issue in a company. Employees are scared they will lose their jobs. It's something you have to deal with no matter what the RPA solution: how you manage these changes in your company. Kryon and others have a very methodical way to do this by creating a center of excellence, etc. It's very important to do this even before you choose your vendor.

You need to address peoples' fears, that's the main thing. A good organization will not send people away, but will find them more valuable things to do, instead of the very routine things that RPA can do instead of them. You have to address many people at many levels, that this is something that you have from now on. Every new product, everything you have, they should know that you have an automation tool that you can use. It's very powerful. It's helping make things more accurate and faster. 

It's a change, not just because people fear losing their jobs, but in many other aspects. Even management has to know about it, about the capabilities of these tools.

The users are developers. We have two developers and I am a system administrator. This program is for developers who develop the processes. Once the processes are developed, we can replace business users in certain jobs. The three of us, and perhaps two others who are administrators of our VM machines and who deal with security issues, handle deployment and maintenance.

We mainly use it for creating automated processes from previously manual processes, to make existing processes faster, better quality and more efficient. We currently have three processes implemented in production and the fourth is going live next week. It's not heavily used, so far.

The first one is small. It just enters the US dollar currency into our ERP system. It's a daily task each morning. The second one involves an external, third-party systems from which we export a report and import it into one of our systems. It used to be done on a daily basis by an employee and now it's being done automatically. The third one is an automated delivery note. One of our suppliers, provides our tobacco products with paper delivery notes. So now they send us a daily report and the robot enters the delivery notes into the operations system. The fourth one which will go live next week, will upload bank notes of returned payments into our financial system. That was another manual process that will be automated.

The currency automation saves us around five minutes per day, but it has to be done every day. For this one, the amount of time is irrelevant. It's more that there are many processes that rely on the currency. So if it hasn't been done or is done late, it can delay other processes. So the value here is more than how much time it saves us. The second one saves us approximately five to ten minutes per day. The third one, the delivery note process, is more difficult to calculate since we have approximately 200 points of sale. Each one has one to two deliveries per week and it takes five to 10 minutes for each point of sale to create these delivery notes manually. So it saves us 2,000 minutes, about 1.5 times a week. The last one, the one that is going live next week, is more significant. It will save approximately a day per week for an employee.

As for operational efficiency, the automatic delivery notes is most significant. From the 200 managers, the bit of feedback that I have gotten is very positive. From the others, I have to admit that it's more minor.

Of course it has helped to reduce employee errors, especially with the delivery notes, since the correct number is very important. If you enter "11" instead of "one," a type-o, it's very significant because it is an expensive product. Definitely, in terms of user-error, we have improved on that a lot. Before Kryon, there were one to two errors per day, or about 50 per month. We found most of them later on and then someone had to remediate them. It has saved us significant man-hours.

Once I decide a process is suitable as a Kryon solution, the cycle of automation is quite quick. I learn about the existing process and I'm one of the two guys who program the Kryon environment. It's relatively simple. There are many details, but once you understand the concept it is quite easy.

I think our version is two versions behind. I just had a talk about it last week with our account manager at Kryon and we planned together to upgrade the environment once per year. In my opinion, today, if possible, it would be better to have it done automatically, like an application on your smartphone. Or even if done manually, the upgrade should just be "next, next, next," and it's upgraded, rather than making it a project to upgrade. In the digital era, that is one of the expectations, that it would be easier.

Besides that, it's all about functionality: What you can do and what you cannot do. I'm not very familiar with the competitors' solutions, so I'm living in the world or Kryon functionality. Sometimes I'm looking to automate something and it's not there. That doesn't mean that it's not possible.

In terms of additional features, the sky is the limit. For example, we are working with Oracle ERP. It would be great if there were built-in functions or commands to integrate with the Oracle application, and not everything through capturing screens and going from there. Currently, there is only an integration with Office, mainly to Excel. I understand that Excel is much more popular than Oracle in terms of use and in terms of integration. For an organization that works with the Oracle application, I would love to have even a plugin or a tool kit for that - maybe to SAP as well.

There was one day that Kryon had a problem to do with a certificate change or something like that. The whole Kryon environment was down. Aside from that, it's been quite stable and works smoothly on a daily basis. We haven't faced any problems.

We haven't explored the scalability yet. There is room for many more implementations on the one license that we have.

I'm working with the technical support on a few issues. For the issue with the certificate, I sent them a case and they replied immediately saying that it was a global issue and that it would be fixed in the next couple of hours. And it was. Overall, on a scale of one to five, technical support is very close to five. Over the year I have had something like five or six tickets. One of them is ongoing + one bug reported.

As for customer success, we have an account manager. I think she supports all the local market accounts. She initiates meetings once per quarter. She's very approachable and cooperative. She's really great.

For the setup of the whole Kryon environment I was only involved in the framework, just to make sure that our system group prepared the server and installed the SQL server they requested, and to make sure they had all the permissions they needed, but nothing more than that. The consultants did all the rest.

Maintenance requires just my colleague and myself.

We didn't do it independently. We brought in EY (Ernst Young) consultants to do it. It went smoothly as far as I concerned. It was a one- or two-day workshop and it was done. It was really quick.

Thanks to them we have the Kryon environment. They suggested it and we brought them in to implement the first implementation, which is not being used anymore because we replaced the target system. 

They sent two consultants and one intern for the job. 

We haven't calculated ROI yet. I'm quite confident that in the long run it will demonstrate a return on investment. In the first year, at least for us, because there have only been three or four implementations, but nothing more than that, in terms of man-hours the supplier delivery notes is most significant. It's possible it has already given us a return on investment.

We have a yearly license. It's about $5,000 per year. There are no additional costs other than that a server has a license.

Initially, our CIO came up with the idea and brought Ernst Young in to implement it in our organization. In the first meeting we had with EY, they put two RPA systems on the table, Kryon and another which I don't remember. They gave the pros and cons for each solution and together we selected Kryon. One of the factors was that it's an Israeli company, so we thought it would be easier for us in terms of approachability, language and work hours. We believed it would be easier for us to use.

Take the training course. At least the person who is going to program the robots has to have some background in information systems in general and in more specific, operation systems, in programming and in Office, of course. He has to have a technical orientation, database knowledge would help him, as well as system analysis capabilities.

In terms of ease of use for business users, the only users are me and 2 other persons in the information systems department. Currently, we have only unattended implementations and no attended implementations which would require a user in the organization to operate it. As for programming it, it requires up-front training. The e-learning, at least at the time that we started working with Kryon, was not enough. Just the basics were there. When we tried to do some more complicated stuff, we had to understand it better. We took the four days of training. After that we started all of the implementations.

As for helping our workforce embrace digital transformation, I wouldn't relate Kryon to that, at least not yet. We are still not using it for digital processes or a digital environment. But we plan to do that in the upcoming weeks. There is a process to create a new customer, which today is very complicated. The last part is to just type the customer's details into the system. I'm thinking of using Kryon which would complete a fully digital process.

In terms of my rating of nine out of ten, there are many things that I'm not sure of. For example, it takes a while to launch the Studio, something like a couple of minutes. It could be that my laptop is not strong enough. It might be that our virtual server doesn't have all the necessary memory or CPU capabilities. It might be many things, so I don't want to say that it's only due to performance issues with Kryon.

We found a bug in a database trigger with Oracle Database. I know that it works mostly with the SQL server, but we are using Oracle, so that's another issue that came to mind. The fact is that we found this bug something like six months ago and it's still not in the new version. As far as it was communicated to me, it will be part of the next version. If that bug was critical for us, maybe I wouldn't have rated it a nine; maybe it would be a six or seven or eight. But, luckily for them, it's not highly critical for us. I don't know how they prioritize bug-fixing. I suppose that there are not too many Oracle Database organizations among their customers, at least not in our market. Therefore, maybe they prioritize this somewhere at the bottom. But for us it's a bug and we cannot use this functionality, which is required. That's why I took off one out of ten. Besides that, it works, it's stable, it has nice performance, and was, therefore, a good decision to go with it.

Automating a process involving SAP and Excel operations. Such operations require access to SAP TRX, export in Excel file, and running Excel macros.

Cuts time due to the building of a robot which runs during the night to perform time-consuming and tedious activities.

Recording user actions in SAP environment with field input and function activations, such as export to file, variants selections, etc.

I would improve the object recognition features, making it not linked to the screen resolution or the position.

No.

Setup is quite simple and not very expensive, but regarding licensing, I don't know.

No.

No.

We use the product to fetch particular records from Excel sheets and store them in the accounting system.

Nintex RPA is easy to use in terms of recording the steps. We can recognize and repeat the steps quickly. It has competitive pricing compared to other vendors as well.

It is complicated to detect an object using Nintex RPA. There could be some features to fix compatibility issues with firmware. The language on the product’s app could be easier to understand.

We have been using Nintex RPA for three to four months. At present, we use the latest version.

The product is stable, and it has an easy-to-understand UI.

We have less than ten Nintex RPA users in our organization.

The initial setup process is easy.

I implemented the product myself with the help of an installation guide. It took two to three days to complete the process.

The product has reasonable pricing.

We evaluated UiPath And Microsoft Power Automate. Both the solutions are expensive compared to Nintex RPA.

I recommend Nintex RPA and rate it an eight out of ten.