Pega Robotic Process Automation Reviews

The tool is for OGC processes. 

We have asked our team to identify manual areas and automate them. 

I am impressed with the tool's recording feature.

I would like to improve the tool's integration features and stability. 

I have been using the product for the past two and a half years. 

I would rate the tool's stability a seven out of ten.

I would rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. My organization has around 350 users for the product. 

My organization used UiPath earlier. 

The tool's setup is easy and gets completed in minutes. I would rate it an eight out of ten. We have a platform team who can take care of the deployment process. 

I would rate the product's pricing a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. Pega has RPA and DPA. Pega is fantastic when it comes to DPA. The same is not the case with RPA. Pega's RPA is not on par with other tools and needs a lot of improvement. 

We use it mostly in banking, telecom, and also in government. It will be useful for intelligent workflow management. It can be helpful for you to make adaptive decisions. So, it has got some kind of feature called adaptive buttons. Wherein it will understand the user's persona and recommend the next best action and the next desktop.

In Pega, the UI has to be improved because that is the most challenging area that most of our customers ask for because we have to depend on some other React JS or some other tool to bring that kind of UI experience. So, there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of UI and UX.

I have been using this solution for five years. I'm using Pega as a tool for our organization.

It is a scalable solution. We work for different customers, in my particular area there are around 200 customer. It is a B2B solution.  

The deployment process depends on which project we are working on and what kind of delivery we are doing. Also, it depends from customer to customer. 

So, maybe if it is a decisioning framework as it is in telecom, maybe it will take at least six months because it has to self-learn the models, and there is a continuous interaction between artificial intelligence and machine learning teams. But if it is a typical workflow, maybe it is easier, but it depends on how quality engineers are working on that particular workflow. It changes from customer to customer.

I am a system integrator. A solution architect or enterprise architect can help with the deployment. So, the work is shared between the deployment. So, there will be a technical team from the system integrator side, there will be a team who works on the support side, and there will be different team members on the customer side. So, typically, there are ten people involved in the process.

The licensing cost is too high. And the amount which the customers are spending; I don't know if they are getting that kind of value at this particular time when they are setting it up.

The solution has a pay-as-you-go type. So, the pricing depends on the customer and how Pega is dealing with them. 

It is a good start, but as long as you're learning the framework that has been developed by Pega, that will take them far. But in the next five years or ten years, I don't see much visibility because there is a lot of competition across the local vendors, as there are many new local vendors entering the marketplace. Microsoft is giving tough competition to many low-code vendors.

Overall, I would rate the solution a six out of ten.

I have used Pega Robotics (OpenSpan) to automate many (~50) business processes in the banking domain. Both RPA and RDA solutions have been implemented using different types of target applications - Web, Mainframe, Windows. 

This tool is very apt in Desktop Automations for creating user interfaces to display consolidated data, summary results, controls(elements) to trigger any automation. I have designed typical automation for Customer care agents that will automatically have a transition from IVR to a human agent, search for current customer records in different applications and display a 360-degree view of the customer in the context window. 

If the underlying applications are stable, then we can expect a consistent outcome from the automation. The FTE benefit mainly depends on the process complexity and volume. I can say 70% success rate in the automation solution because of various dependency factors.

Automations built on legacy age-old applications always have issues because on inconsistent application behavior. Data loading issues, response time, concurrency issues are some of the very common challenges.

Mainframe and windows applications give very good automation outcome. Same with any other data files, web service calls, etc. Should be careful when automating web applications, if you design and develop according to the suggested best practices then probably less to worry.

Pega Robotics offers all the required features to build end-to-end process automation like any other similar tools. It's unique development style using data line and control flow line makes it easy to debug through the flow. Separating fine-grained processes into Activities make it design reusable components and easily do plug and play. Another useful feature in the suite is Workforce Intelligence for CRM. This is using Robotic automation and AI to understand how sales and services agents work so that you can identify top performers and plan optimization.

I have faced many scenarios in the business workflow, where a few applications run on the Citrix environment. That could be a critical part of the process without which business won't be able to accept the automation solution. Because of one small bottleneck, you will lose a very good candidate for process automation. Pega Robotics needs to improve in this area by any means. Other tools are using OCR technology and sending keystrokes to the Citrix window. To automate a critical business process I used Pega Robotics and another automation tool just for the Citrix part. Even though both they had enough licenses for both tools the customer wants to build it in Pega Robotics.

I have been working on this for more than six years.

Automation stability mostly depends on the performance of the target applications. As an automation tool, Pega Robotics is matured and stable now.

Scalability depends on deploying additional robots to perform the operations. There could be tight coupling with an underlying application you need to consider when planning scalability.

We get very good technical and customer support for registered users.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

An in-house team did the implementation.

Our ROI is an average of 2FTE benefits for each robot deployed in the organization. You can't count on this, it may vary considerably depends on your domain, process, application usage. There are a lot of parameters impacting ROI calculation.

Here at the bank, there's a fraud investigation unit team. If they discover fraud on an account, they have to put restrictions on the banking account and/or credit cards, depending on what type of fraud it is. They also alert the end-user (or our associates) that there's a fraud on the account. After that, transfer calls are made to FIU. From our end, alerts would be sent out to different systems including the banking deposit and the credit card system as well as our main CRM. Restrictions and alerts would be set up on the accounts to make sure everyone knows there was fraud detected. 

The most valuable aspect for myself was access to the .net framework. If I couldn't figure something out using the objects that they had provided, I could bring in the .net objects and do so using similar logic that I would in a .net or C sharp coding language. Having that familiarity was helpful.

Pega's main drawback was that you have to go and install their platform and their platform is meant to be their main selling point with robotics just a small part of what they do. It's the platform and the overhead that requires so much extra training and costs. In contrast, Automation Anywhere is just simple to control and all about the bots. 

Pega has a no-code low-code environment. We do everything based on established rules. You kind-of have to learn how all their rules work and how it works for robotics before you can use the solution effectively.

If Pega built out the robot manager side a little bit more (so you didn't have to learn the ins and outs of their Pega rules) that would be ideal. They have this robot manager application that sits on top of the Pega platform and it does most of what you need it to do. However, there are some initial steps that do need to be set up inside of the solution, or even inside workflow items. That way, I'm just learning how to use the space.

We started the contract with Pega in March of 2019.

The solution is rather stable. I didn't run into any issues where I couldn't automate anything. In terms of automating the solution, I think they do a great job. Once we got the platform up and running, we didn't have any issues. There were no bugs and glitches. There were no crashes. It was reliable. 

The ability to scale really depends on how you build it. It's my understanding that you can build them in a scalable way. You can do that for most of these RPA technologies, however, how you build it depends on how scalable they are.

We had the most issues with the platform side of the solution. If it was regarding a technical issue or if I had issues related to automating something, technical support was pretty good, but on the platform side, I would say they were not the best.

Technically, we are using both Pega and Automation Anywhere as we work through company mergers.

Pega never made it through to production. We're trying to get everything regarding AA set up, which has been a little bit tricky at the moment because we're trying to use the other company's control room. Due to this, we're on a different domain since we're technically two different companies and they don't necessarily set up with two different companies. We're working on getting access to everything on the other company's side, and getting through the firewall and tasks of that nature. We're chipping away at a bunch of different issues.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

The deployment took a while to execute. It wasn't as simple as some of the other options that we had been looking at.

We handled the implementation ourselves, although we did originally was to have someone assist. Our funding was cut, and we didn't get outside assistance, which hurt us during implementation.

In the past, we had an RPA solution set up with Pega. Then our company got bought out. The other company was using Automation Anywhere, so we are in the midst of transitioning Automation Anywhere.  We have platforms paid for by the different entities right now. Before we could get Pega really started, the company that bought us kind of squashed it. We got it up and running and installed. However, I haven't developed an entire solution on it yet due to the changes in our organization.

With Pega, there are two different parts: the platform and the actual automation software. In terms of the versions we're using, I believe the automation software is called OpenSpan and is 19.1 and the platform is 8.1.

In terms of advice, I would give to users considering using Pega, I'd caution to make sure you get an outside contractor that knows what they're doing. We had something on the books for that. Then, due to budget cuts, there was a hiring freeze, so that never got implemented. That definitely hurt the implementation of the project.

I would give the solution a seven out of ten. It wasn't bad at automating. It was just a little complicated to implement.

This is a client solution that assists operational teams on a daily basis. If a client wants to automate tasks, they provide their requirements to us and we build a solution for them using Pega to deploy onto their infrastructure. 

We have a very large operational team and we are able to avoid mistakes and ensure accuracy and speed using Pega.

There have been some scenarios where the bot was not able to replace some of the controls and could not recognize and personalize the task we wanted to automate.

This is a stable solution. The stability is dependant on the solution that an architect provides for their particular bot. It also depends on the design and the development that was done.

We have also use UiPath which is also a good tool. UiPath has a couple of new features which give it the edge over other solutions. 

The complexity of the initial setup depends on if the customer is new and if they have an existing enterprise structure environment. This determines the kind of installation that is needed.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We provide services to our clients. We have a website with monthly and daily runs in which we extract the information. Depending on the account types from the different screens on the website, we add it to an Excel spreadsheet. There is a comparison between the months to see how many are added and how many have removed the products. Once the comparison has been completed we create a comparative report and publish it to the respective stakeholders. 

The most valuable features are the loops to lookup tables to read the data.

As it is a Java-based website, there have been several trial and error runs to get the exact match rules.

We develop a normal web adaptor, not an unusual web adaptor.

Another feature that we like is the configuration tables.

There is no two-dimensional lookup table implemented. There is one dimension then to a single dimension. You cannot use a two-dimensional array to read the data. 

First, you have to read the rows, then go to the columns, then repeat the rows from the columns. You have to write a simple C# script for this to work.

In the next release, I would like to see a better UI with the latest features to design and develop faster.

I have been familiar with this solution for two years.

There has been integration with a robotic manager and when patches are created and released, they can easily be deployed to new machines. This is a very good feature compared to other tools, where they have to be done on the spectrum machines immediately. With this solution, we have the choice to delay the deployment of patches to particular machines.

I have contacted technical support several times. The delay in response time is within eight hours, but that could be because of the regional differences. Also, it may be that there are a lot of tickets being raised.

Overall, we are satisfied with the technical support.  

Previously, I worked with Blue Prism. Blue Prism and Pega Robotics are at the same level when it comes to implementation and development. 

With Blue Prism the consistency of the reports outputs the UI failed most of the time. We had to go through to ensure that everything was correct. With Pega Robotics, once we integrated it will work with any machines after deployment until there is a change. It is more consistent than Blue Prism.

Initially, the setup is straightforward. With the upgrade to the new version 19.1, there were some challenges with the configuration files, the common config, the studio config, and the runtime configs.

When we work on a project we go on the config and look at the 19.1 version, but normally it was a simple set up.

I took one hour to set up the Pega Robotics.

It comes as a package, not an individual license. Other solutions have better licensing terminology.

Pega Robotics mostly work with Fortune 500 companies. 

Individualized licenses are available, but most, are as an integrated package. There are supported add-ons for legacy application integration that are used with Pega Robotics.

I think that they are improving the IDE with the new and latest features that will help to do things in a faster way.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for any process automation. However, it is also is great for any DevOps deployment. It's a zero-code, no-code kind of development as well. 

The low-code/no-code development aspect of the solution is great. 

It's a pretty good, robust application. 

The product has been very scalable.

The stability is good. 

Technical support is great. They know what they are talking about. 

The development experience needs to be improved. It could be better.

The initial setup could be a bit easier. 

I've been using the solution for four years or more. 

The stability of the product is very good. It's robust and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability of the product is great. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. it's not a problem. 

We have ten customers on Pega right now. 

Technical support is pretty decent. We're very satisfied with the level of attention we get when we need assistance. They are pretty knowledgeable. We have no complaints. 

We would like to see the initial setup be a bit easier. Right now, it's a complex process. 

The initial setup only took about six to eight hours or so. 

We have a big team that can handle deployment or maintenance. We have about 30 or 40 people who can handle any related tasks. We have mostly engineers and then a few team leads. If you include the team leads, we're looking at about 50 or so people that can cover this area. 

There are different licensing models for the product on offer. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. 

I'd advise potential new users to do process evaluation with respect to Pega before you jump in. It's a complete end-to-end product suite. You have to know which product suite is applicable to your environment.

I used the product for around 2 years at a major customer in the European region.

1. DCO methodology helped reduce the development time. We could discuss the UI layout with the business users during requirement phases.
2. It helped cut short the release cycle by almost 40% compared to the previous solution.

The case management and UI capabilities were the most valuable, though the integration capabilities were also quite useful. We also liked the DCO methodology as it reduced the build effort because some of the development (flow) was created during req and design phases.

1. The way integration classes are created could be improved. 
2. At the time when I worked, XML anyType was not supported.
3. Rule versioning and deployment to enable parallel development could still be improved

We did not encounter any issues, but it is because Pega helped in defining the capacity sizing upfront. Also, the phases in which the program was executed meant that the load on Pega PRPC was slowly increased instead of a big bang. Continuous monitoring and capacity planning further helped.

We, along with the Pega support team, carefully planned the rollout. Once fully functional, we did not face any issues.

Initially, there were some issues, but it was resolved in time to help the client reap the benefits. Pega did provide good resources, timely resolution, and guidance in development (after initial teething problem).

The client used WebMethods OMS, but it was at distinct version which was fully customised. There was no support as well, and it did not fulfill the required needs of the client, hence the change. After evaluating a few options, Pega was selected.

The setup was straightforward as the team working with Pega support was quite competitive.

I was not involved in licensing and pricing, but it is worth the cost.

We evaluated a couple of options.

It is a good, mature robotic process automation solution. Pega is also broadening its landscape by building on top of PRPC (CRM, EPC, etc.), and with a cloud offering available, it is a genuine contender to compete with Salesforce. 

There is one downside though. It is still a niche skill and resources are scarce in the market unless big IT companies are involved. On the other side, involving trusted partners helps get the required talent pool as well as accelerators.