WorkFusion Reviews

We use WorkFusion for SPA, Smart Process Automation. SPA combines robotic process automation and machine learning. The heart of it is machine learning. The RPA processes are a few steps that a robot does instead of outsourcing to a human in India. It makes the process more efficient to execute any exceptions on the WorkFusion cloud.

It's a SaaS solution, so everything goes over the cloud. Only the results are delivered locally on-premises. We're using it for machine learning purposes to extract data. However, the process is not entirely straightforward and sometimes we need manual intervention by our third-party ops provider in India and Poland.

We have between 20 to 40 bots that work in our production environment. They do the work in the background, so we don't see what they do, but they handle the workload. We also have approximately 20 employees in India that for whenever a bot has a question or has an issue. Then a human being needs to look after that. This gets done by our colleagues in India based on training. We define the gold data to be specified in each document we want to have extracted. We also have very detailed instructions on what has to be done if something happens that is not as expected.

We work directly with WorkFusion. We also work with a back-office services provider and they do the manual exception handling. Whenever something isn't automatically extracted, it appears in the cloud. An employee of our service provider in India or Poland handles the manual extraction based on the detailed instructions. We get the results and import them into our target systems.

WorkFusion has doubled our efficiency. We replace manual processes with automated ones. We need half as many people to process the same amount of work, or we can process double the amount of work with the same people. It's a mix of both because the volume has increased a lot. 

We would have some issues meeting our obligations to our clients without WorkFusion. We expected the volumes to increase, but they coincidentally spiked as we introduced WorkFusion. That was an immense help because we would've had trouble serving our clients if we didn't have this capacity gain.

The document processing engine is essential because that's where we gain speed. We're processing a massive volume of documents with the document processing engine and automatically extracting around 80 percent of the information, enabling us to honor our clients' SLAs. We can distribute the information 24 hours after having received it. This is an SLA that we have with the clients, and that document processing engine helps us keep those timelines because it's a lot faster than if someone had to look it over manually.

Adopting WorkFusion has improved our accuracy, but not significantly. We have fewer mistakes overall compared to parallel processes that don't go over WorkFusion. It's around 5 percent better. Compliance isn't an issue because we process publicly available information. It depends on how compliance is interpreted. We would also have more security tasks to go over internally before working with an external provider.

When we implemented WorkFusion, it was quite popular within our company. I got to do a lot of demos for different companies. It was good because it showed people what was possible and inspired ideas about new use cases. I'm currently also working with all kinds of different use cases. In terms of creativity and generating ideas, WorkFusion was good. 

We're also able to automate internal processes because WorkFusion also can deliver different outputs that are more flexible for us to work with internally. So we're also able to have more efficient internal processes thanks to WorkFusion.

The document processing engine is good. We're extracting around 70 data points from a given document, and we have an automated extraction rate of 80 percent for those fields. For some fields, the rate is 100 percent because they're clear. They're always in the same spot and are very defined. Other information is only found in a few documents, and the automated extraction rate for those cases is a lot lower. Overall, we're quite happy with the 80 percent.

The interface is user-friendly and accessible for people without a technical background. It's straightforward to design and set up the business process ourselves. I think the UI was designed for business users rather than IT or technical users. I was able to set up a business process with a half-day of self-guided online training. That's pretty intuitive, and I would rate the UI 8.5 out of 10.

I would even give WorkFusion a nine for overall ease of use. The workspace is well designed. You can navigate everything using the keyboard, and it has good functionalities. WorkFusion is ready if you have specific improvements to your business processes. 

The most common issue we have is with the OCR, but that also depends on the quality of the documents your scanning. Still, I would say the OCR is comparable to other solutions. I wouldn't say it's better or worse than other OCR engines.

WorkFusion entered the market early, and we see some newer providers that run on different technology in the background, so I'm not sure if WorkFusion's platform is always the most advanced. At the same time, I'm confident that WorkFusion is also working on releasing a new generation platform when they see fit. WorkFusion is constantly developing. 

However, we've had use cases where we decided not to employ WorkFusion because it lacked capabilities that were important for the business processes in our company. We discussed this with WorkFusion, and they were open about these functions not being one of their primary capabilities. In these cases, we chose another provider. 

WorkFusion is willing to listen to new requirements and look for solutions. They're also forthright enough to say when a specific capability may not be the best fit, and they're able to admit that. This is also something I appreciate because other providers claim to do everything, but when we do the POC, we find out the solution falls short of our expectations.

It's very possible that WorkFusion can address the internal RPA tool issues. But in terms of RPA, it depends. If you identify the need for an external solution, then you can do an RFI with WorkFusion. WorkFusion will give you a truthful reply to your requirements about whether they can help you out or not. We have RPA internally, and we do most of it internally. When we don't need WorkFusion, we prefer to do things in-house. We can solve most of the processes we have with our internal capabilities.

We started working with WorkFusion about five years ago. I switched departments around two years ago and since then, I have not been responsible for the original process that we had in production for WorkFusion. Fairly recently, I did a proof of concept for another project with WorkFusion.

WorkFusion's stability is fairly good. We have to open support tickets every now and then because something breaks down or isn't working. When we started working with WorkFusion, they advised us that they hadn't worked with this much volume in the past. We were processing more documents than their system had ever handled. We pushed their boundaries a little.

We weren't expecting the volume, either. When we went live with WorkFusion, the volume started spiking simultaneously. We had even more volume than we originally anticipated, and that caused some stability issues. 

Fortunately, that never caused a long interruption in production. We have an agreement with WorkFusion, so they would always address any ticket in a timely manner. We're not seeing 100% stability in uptime, but we always get support when it goes down. They have improved a lot over time.

They addressed any scalability issues we had at the time. It wasn't perfect from the beginning, but WorkFusion always showed us support and commitment to helping us succeed. I would rate them an eight of 10 for scalability. If it's not ready to scale, they will find a solution for you. They scaled it for us in the end.

We process an average of 1,000 documents a day. These documents are about 30 pages on average, and there are about 50 to 70 data points per document that can be extracted.

WorkFusion's service is what sets the company apart from competitors, which are all similar in terms of features. They're set up fairly well to respond quickly if there are errors or you need to make some adjustments. 

They also understand our use cases well. That helped us a lot because we're a financial company, and we appreciate their expertise. They understand the issues we're trying to solve. We appreciate that. I would rate their customer service nine out of 10. 

Positive

WorkFusion was the first process automation provider we implemented. 

The initial setup was complex for me because I didn't have much knowledge. I don't have a computer science degree. I had half a day of online training and did weekly calls with WorkFusion where they answered my questions and offered solutions to problems I had. 

It all goes back to customer service. It took about three to four weeks that WorkFusion.

Setting up business processes on the WorkFusion platform was painless because they provided good support. I didn't configure the machine learning models myself. We gave our business process requirements to data scientists at WorkFusion, and they implemented the background ML models. We specified how a certain data point would be recognized and interpreted in a document.

WorkFusion's automation is excellent from a cost-benefit point of view. It's not for free, but we doubled efficiency. You can look at it in terms of opportunity costs because if we didn't have WorkFusion, our costs would increase by around 30 percent.

The price for WorkFusion is quite fair. It isn't the cheapest solution in the market, but it's very close. We had a bad experience when we chose a cheaper provider for a different POC who failed to meet our expectations. That could also be our fault. Other providers will charge you more for the same amount of work.

We evaluated some solutions, but it ultimately came down to price. WorkFusion was fairly early in the market. I am not sure if their technology is as sophisticated as some of the new players on the market, but the new players on the market are also a lot more expensive.

WorkFusion has standardized processes, but they've also developed new templates and machine learning models for us. Overall, I would say they're fairly standardized. Another provider develops machine learning models on the go based on a template, but a different business model enables them to do that.

I rate WorkFusion nine out of 10. WorkFusion's customer service is the most important aspect for me. They have people in Minsk and London, so they also cover different time zones and can help our colleagues in India when they need help. One of the reasons we chose WorkFusion is because they had full-service coverage of our different time zones.

I started with invoice processing. That uses a lot of different parts of the WorkFusion solution. It uses their built-in OCR package, built-in S3 instance, and built-in databases. Invoice processing is the big use case. 

We use their AutoML tagging machine learning use cases. Then, at the end, we use their true robotic process automation, using the SeleniumLibrary, to enter things into our ERP system.

I have used it for a couple of other projects. I have done this mostly because WorkFusion makes it easy to code out a straightforward business process, put it on a schedule, and hook it up to a database without needing to requisition all new things and servers to launch it. I can host it in one central spot.

Our particular instance is on-prem. It has five or six different Linux servers that all talk to each other as well as a handful of Windows machines that end up talking to the central Linux boxes. In my time here, we have had two different major versions of WorkFusion: 8.5 and 9.2. We are currently on version 9.2.

The workflow automation has definitely been helpful. It gives us an interface to launch code on one site, then have it run in parallel one to ten times on ten different robots. They can do the same process ten times in parallel on a website. 

We have entire workflows predicated off of the document processing engine. Our whole invoice ingestion process runs 50,000 documents a year, give or take, completely predicated on WorkFusion's document workflows.

We receive invoices from 50 to 100 different vendors. They all have different formats. The document processing engine (coupled with their AutoML services, data extraction, and human tagging) is able to translate these 50 different formats into a single output that we can then pass downstream into whatever process needs to receive it. So, this has been a helpful integration.

We have automated a lot of finance workflows using WorkFusion. This definitely helps both our accounts payable and accounts receivable teams.

I really like the machine learning and tagging. They give a decent UI to allow even non-technical users to gather or tag the data, then that goes into the back-end so we can use it to train the models. This is something I have not seen in another solution or environment, and having that built-in, straight into the package, has definitely been a big help.

Out-of-the-box, the machine learning in the document processing engine needed some tweaking. A couple years ago, another engineer at the company and I met with one of the WorkFusion ML engineers and built out a custom model on their AutoML platform, then deployed it in January or February of 2019. It has been running pretty well since then. So, one of my huge selling points on WorkFusion is the AutoML.

We only have our engineering team writing code and developing business processes since it is very technical. In terms of data extraction and training the ML models, we deployed that to our accounts payable department, which has fewer technical users than our engineering team. After a handful of training sessions, they were able to get in there and use it with decent accuracy. It could be better, but it is definitely better than nothing.

One of the big upgrades that I know is happening in version 10 is an improvement to their tagging interface. That is definitely something that I am excited about to sort of reinvigorate our more non-technical users in information extraction from our documents.

There could be better version control through their web platform. That is something that could be improved on. Integration from the IDE, e.g., from WorkFusion Studio directly into Control Tower, would be nice to have too.

I have been using WorkFusion since my first day at the organization. The organization obtained WorkFusion sometime in Spring of 2018. I joined the organization in Summer of 2018. Therefore, I have been using it for about three and a half years.

The vast majority of the time, there are no issues. Most of the issues that we have run into have been more around certificate upgrades and stuff like that. That is probably not WorkFusion-centric and could be mitigated more on our side by using a cloud solution instead of on-prem.

The ML server specifically likes to lose connection with our network drive once a month or so. However, I don't know if that is actually a WorkFusion issue or if that is our network team doing a server reboot which just doesn't reconnect automatically. Nine times out of 10, WorkFusion has been up and running exactly when I need it.

In terms of web automation and desktop automation, it is mostly a server provisioning thing. That is mostly on our side. Once we have the servers provisioned and imaged, we can deploy one to 10 processes that follow the same code with relative ease. I have never really tried to scale beyond 10 or so.

The technical support is super responsive. Whenever we open a ticket in their Jira, they get back to us in short order. They are always knowledgeable about what they need to do when helping us fix our issues.

I would advise using WorkFusion's support whenever questions come up. They know what they are doing and read the documentation thoroughly.

I would rate the technical support as 10 out of 10.

Positive

Three years ago, you could upgrade from version 8 to version 9 to get X, Y, and Z improvements. Now, we are at a point where we can upgrade from version 9 to version 10 to get A, B, and C additional improvements, and it is good that WorkFusion is iterating and developing their solutions.

I was fairly heavily involved in the version 8 to version 9 transition a couple of years ago, and it was a big undertaking. That is something that they could do a little better. I would recommend having them assist in transitioning their platforms through the major version upgrades. A lot of things had to be rewritten in the new version as opposed to having some sort of import tool to move them over automatically.

Going to version 9.2 was not a direct upgrade. We actually provisioned new servers and did a brand new install onto them. It definitely leaned more towards the complex side than the straightforward side.

I remember our manager at the time spent a lot of late nights back and forth in the WorkFusion documentation. They have six or eight different servers that all have to talk to each other under the hood. They have to share secrets between each other to manage it. They have to manage certificates against each other. It is just the tech stack complexity that influenced it a lot.

The OCR implementation was straight out-of-the-box. 

There was one instance where I connected with WorkFusion over the development of our custom model.

Leveraging the more AutoML and custom models has been a lot of tweaking over the years. The initial model probably took about a month, once we went live with version 9.2, and that was working heavily with the WorkFusion AutoML engineer who is associated with its deployment.

The 9.2 implementation was mostly done by our technical manager. There were also about three engineers tangentially involved, mostly as a part of learning more about the solution and the inner workings of it.

Their robots have increased the rate of efficiency by two to five times in our organization. There is still a human element to code out the package running the robots. You can't just click something and have it run. However, once that has been done, you can parallelize it 10 or 100 times in a fairly straightforward manner. 

When we are automating things, we are just completely eliminating the chance of human error happening. The computer does it, and the computer will do it the same way every time. We don't have the element of humans in there. It has improved our accuracy and compliance since we are eliminating the human error element.

It has provided time savings and let employees be allocated to other job tasks.

Their OCR package has been alright. I have played with the Microsoft Computer Vision packages, and this tends to do better on certain things, like handwriting analysis. In terms of ease of deployment and integration into the rest of the platform, it definitely provides advantages with ABBYY, which is what we use in WorkFusion under the hood.

We have explored some Microsoft solutions, but they aren't exactly complete parallels to WorkFusion. They just allow similar things. Where they often fall short is ease of deployment and integrating separate parts. For example, in Azure, I can set up a database and a process that will read from the database trying to link that into a machine learning algorithm. Linking that again to a document tagging type of setup would be tricky to do. WorkFusion allows for relative ease when linking all those separate portions.

I have been fairly happy with it. It gives me straightforward deployments of stuff. It lets me build out schedules and set up database tables natively from their web interface.

I led our internal 'tagging' training sessions, not WorkFusion. It was mostly just walking through what the environment is and what they have to do in the solution to process documents.

If someone was looking into WorkFusion, but already has an RPA tool in place, I would probably want to learn more about what they are not getting from their current RPA tool. Then, I would figure out if that is something that WorkFusion would be able to provide or if it is something that would be a shortcoming in WorkFusion too. Generally, I would lean towards the side of momentum, where if they already have a good thing going with one tool, unless there is a real need to transfer over, then I would recommend staying with that tool.

I would rate the product as seven out of 10. It is definitely not a nine or 10 because there are certain shortcomings in it. However, I don't pull out my hair every day trying to make general things work the way that they should work.

Within my company, I am responsible for a line of business where we roll out automations for various internal stakeholders, and WorkFusion is the platform of choice within my organization.

Approximately 90% of our use cases are RPA-governed use cases. We have one use case now that is a machine learning (ML) based use case. While we are not adverse to using ML within WorkFusion, we are still in the process of identifying or exploring the right use cases within the organization that are the best fit for ML.

A helpful feature is the analytics capability within WorkFusion. The analytics dashboards, i.e., their Tableau dashboards, are really helpful for building a business activity monitoring layer. These are very visible to senior management and stakeholders, who can see and know what is happening within processes. They can see what benefits are getting delivered as processes, either ;daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. It is easy for stakeholders or senior management to understand the value for the money that they are spending.

The solution has ELK Stack with Kibana, which is useful and helpful for monitoring all of WorkFusion's infrastructures. This has been really helpful, even though we have just started using it very recently. Previously, if there was an issue, we would log into each of the servers separately and try to fix it. We were introduced to ELK stack two weeks ago, though it has always existed in the product. It has been really amazing. If there are failures, we immediately get notifications. We have been able to integrate it with our enterprise alerting system that creates tickets automatically, which is amazing. We don't have to spend and dedicate hours just to look into the infrastructure to see if there has been a failure or not. We can be reactive instead. 

WorkFusion definitely has a very strong capability to process any document using OCR and machine learning frameworks, particularly from an extraction perspective. We have just used this, deploying one use case using these capabilities. We have been happy with the results. We are getting almost an 80% automation rate. Based on this success, we have started exploring other opportunities within my organization to see if there are other use cases that best fits this AI paradigm.

It is difficult for non-technical users to use WorkFusion. If we really want to build automation, we definitely need Java developers. Their RPA is not for non-technical people. If I look at competing products, like Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism, or even Power Automate, a non-technical person can build basic automations and deploy them. Since non-technical people can easily build basic automations, they can be deployed in no time. With WorkFusion, there isn't a similar feature that works well. One needs to write code from scratch to build automation. That is definitely a deterrent if we really want to do quick, dirty automation. I would not rate WorkFusion very high on their no-code, low-code paradigm. In this area, I would definitely expect them to improve.

From an AI engine perspective, they are currently focused on document processing. They should provide the capabilities to integrate ML models. which are just outside document processing. In the world of machine learning, there are several such models available. They should give that capability or provide those capabilities within the platform. That would go a long way.

I have been using WorkFusion for more than six years in various capacities. 

Since we are working primarily on RPA, I find their RPA nodes to be not very stable at times. The nodes may crash at times, and it doesn't send any notification that the nodes have crashed. Maybe the configuration at our end is not right, but this is what we see. From that perspective, we need to continuously monitor those nodes. If we had a better way of monitoring all those available nodes, it would be much better. That is the most fragile part of WorkFusion's infrastructure. Every other component within WorkFusion is very stable.

RPA, as a whole, is an amazing product within WorkFusion, when it comes to deploying at scale.

WorkFusion is the platform of choice for scalability. This is one reason that we are using WorkFusion compared to other competitive products, where the ease of building RPA is much better. If I look at the competitive products from a scalability standpoint, WorkFusion is the platform of choice for us. It is amazing.

We have already 50-plus processes deployed in production. We have around 50 to 70 more processes in our pipeline, and the pipeline is growing.

We have a 20-member team at the company working on WorkFusion.

From a customer support perspective, we expect timeliness of response. If we are raising a ticket, we expect that whoever picked up the ticket will respond in no time. At least, the first response should come in no time. After the initial response, if they require certain logs, then they should take them from us and come back to us within a stipulated time frame. It should have the right recommendation and a solution that should solve the problem.

Their response time is sharp. If we raise a ticket, which is a production-critical ticket, their initial response comes in less than 20 minutes. I haven't seen any tickets open for more than 48 hours before they are getting closed, however complex it may be. Their support team is doing a wonderful job. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

Positive

The initial setup wasn't complex. They definitely expected us to provision several infrastructure components, like servers. However, once the servers were available from the organization, all the ports were open, and the DNS names were set up, then the installation of WorkFusion was smooth. It takes anywhere between a day to two days at max.

It took us almost a month to implement their machine learning models for OCR and Intelligent Document Processing. This wasn't WorkFusion's problem. It was more on the data collection side. Their model requires us to bring in a lot of documents to train the model. It took time from our side to provision those documents with the needed quality. The model doesn't work if you give it 10 documents. The model won't suddenly launch. It doesn't work that way. Once we had given it the right set of data, then the initial out-of-the-box model was done in a month's time.

When we were building our first ML model, we obviously weren't able to achieve the success rate that we were aiming to achieve. We engaged WorkFusion who spent almost a month with us unconditionally, helping us with our complex document structures. The results have been amazing. 

From an engagement standpoint, we are happy with WorkFusion. Their customer success team, delivery team, and sales team are amazing to work with.

We have not yet seen ROI. We have been using this product for two years. We realized that we need to deliver more automation on this platform to get the benefit. That is a function of the use cases that we are picking up. Our success criteria for automation is a reduction in FTEs, which is because we are measuring a break-even from a FTE reduction rate. This is also a function of how we are internally finding out use cases within our organization.

The pricing is high. They should have a better pricing structure. It was not easy for me to try out WorkFusion initially. For example, if I am working on SAP, the licensing may be very expensive. Though, it is fine to use it at scale and pay for the license. We have an enterprise license now, so we are not worried anymore. We are fine with it. 

As a first-time customer who wants to engage with WorkFusion, not working for my company, then I would want to do a PoC. The cost is prohibitive because they will ask me to get infrastructure with six or seven servers. Then, you must buy a WorkFusion license to do a PoC, which is expensive. I would then have to set up a team to build the PoC and see the benefits. That is very prohibitive.

We explored other solutions, like UiPath and Automation Anywhere. We even tried Power Automate. We evaluated them almost two and a half years ago, then we settled with WorkFusion as our platform of choice due to its scaling capabilities.

When it comes to building automation using RPA, it is not very intuitive or user-friendly. We definitely require developers to build automations. Compared to using alternative products to build automations, such as Automation Anywhere or Power Automate, WorkFusion is not easier for building quick and dirty automations. However, if you want to build automation that can be deployed at scale for several transactions within a day, WorkFusion's RPA is amazing. This is one product feature that we found rather interesting.

If you are looking for building small-size, quick and dirty automation and something that you can build from scratch within two to three days to run on each of your user's desktop, then WorkFusion is not the platform of choice. However, if you are looking for building automation which can run at scale, e.g., if you are doing suspect transaction processing in a bank and processing approximately 50,000 transactions in a day, then you want to really ramp that up at scale. In that case, WorkFusion is the platform of choice.

There is room for improvement. I would rate them as six out of 10.

We have been in two proofs of concept with the solution. We're wrapping up two use cases with it right now.

The first one is for what we call "adverse media." We're required to do adverse media searches on potential new clients, as well during periodic reviews of existing clients.

For example, if we're onboarding a major retailer as a client, that retailer will have numerous negative news items, or adverse media. There might be employment abuse claims, civil lawsuits, and criminal investigations. For a large retailer, we would expect that kind of media. Currently, our adverse media process is performed by human beings, my analysts. They have to make a determination about the news items, based on rules set forth about negative news. If an analyst determines a match between an article and a rule, we would then escalate it to the business. The business would then make a determination as to whether the negative news is of enough concern that we would not onboard the client. Or, if the retailer was already a client, the business would determine how we should proceed.

With WorkFusion, their model will now use the criteria my human analysts follow, data elements to focus on first to validate whether the news is associated directly with our client. We first have to determine if an article is a true match. There are thresholds within the rules, severity levels. There's a difference between someone accusing the client of money laundering and whether they've been found guilty. Other severity levels are things like has someone been arrested, indicted, convicted, gone to jail, or served jail time. The Workfusion model is applying all those steps and thresholds that my analysts use, and should come to the same conclusion. The goal is that my analysts will be able to focus on the true matches and work on those. The point is to use our limited resources to focus on the high-value targets.

In our other use case, clients bring us documentation that we require to onboard them, such as articles of incorporation and ownership documents. Currently, what happens is that a banker would transcribe the key information from those documents into our onboarding system to start onboarding the client. After the customer has been onboarded, our review team will conduct a quality check against that profile to make sure the documentation is fully aligned with what was entered into the onboarding application.

We're using Workfusion's OCR model to read the documents that are collected and check the information in them against the profile that was created by the banker to determine if everything is correct. If it's not correct, it will then alert my analyst and tell them: "You now need to do a review and identify areas where there is a discrepancy to be corrected."

Once we close out our PoCs we will move the solution to Azure.

Before WorkFusion, my processes were all manual. Now, the Workfusion model reduces the amount of time my analysts have to spend reviewing client profiles that have been created against the documentation from the client.

We're in the process of assessing the results of the document processing engine. We have gotten very good quality or success ratios. They are in line with our expectations. The document processing engine is very important for our organization because, from our perspective as a bank providing financial services, documentation is the first step for onboarding any client. It touches everything we do, from lending to opening bank accounts to doing other transactions. Unfortunately, we're still in a paper-driven environment. It's critical that this be successful to reduce our handling time. It will bring greater efficiency and reduced costs. It should reduce our processing time by about 25 percent.

We have seen Workfusion improve on accuracy and compliance. As with any manual or human-driven process, you have to build a QC process. The QC process I have is manned by humans, my analysts. That's a cost, a redundancy we have to build. And it creates a "four-eye" approach to make sure that the person checking the work is meeting the procedure standards. Are they making errors that would cause us not to be in line with regulatory standards or expectations? With the Workfusion model, we reduce human error and the need for further QC. We switch more to a QA process where we're testing whether the model is effective.

The benefit to our organization will really be the overall efficiency. It's reducing the human processing time, which reduces costs and increases our speed to market. The sooner we can complete a review of a customer, the sooner the customer can start transacting and being fully engaged with our institution. Although I'm the head of our call center, anything I do to improve the revenue-generating opportunity of the business is a success factor I'm measured by.

I'm a non-technical person. I'm the business head. From what I've seen and been exposed to, Workfusion is very simple to use.

And in terms of the solution's flexibility towards evolving goals, it's highly flexible. During our PoC engagement, I have proposed functionality or enhancements and they've been open to them. They see value in the things that I have been proposing and that they would apply to their other clients as well. They have taken my suggestions for further development as future enhancements.

Where I think there is room for improvement is in the areas where I have suggested enhancements. There is enhanced functionality I would like to see, things that would further enhance the user experience, deliver greater efficiencies, and further mitigate risk.

We engaged WorkFusion in October of last year, so we've been using it for about five months.

My IT partners have raised no concerns about the stability of the product at all. There haven't been any hiccups in performance or any downtime during our engagement.

My impression is that Workfusion is very scalable. The purpose of my using it first in our organization was to test it out before using it enterprise-wide. I have sufficient volume and activity to prove out their model. And so far, the results are very promising. We're in the next phase of exploring enterprise-wide deployment.

My organization has about 72 people, a combination of offshore and onshore, and they are currently the users of the WorkFusion product. 

My partners in IT have had no issues with the support provided by WorkFusion.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. Any hurdles that we encountered were the result of internal issues in our firm, and not because of Workfusion's requirements. With the way our IT infrastructure is built, it was a little bit more of a challenge for us. We're a smaller firm and we tend not to have the sophistication or the resources of larger clients.

We started the deployment in October and we started running in January. It took about 11 weeks to implement it, but that was more due to our internal structure.

Everything was done with the vendor.

We're going through the ROI analysis at the moment, but I can tell you that it's favorable. So far, they have hit all the success metrics.

The solution was not the cheapest, but it was also not the most expensive. Workfusion was very open to negotiating pricing and to working within the objectives of our firm.

We evaluated about four other vendors over a year ago through an RFP process that was managed by our procurement team. It took us about 12 months to settle on WorkFusion.

The reasons for not choosing the others included price or the viability of their products.

For someone who is looking into WorkFusion but already has an RPA tool in place, I would say that WorkFusion is a bit different. Workfusion's structure and strategy are not simply to be a single solution provider, but a fully integrated solution provider. They bring a whole suite of services to you. Others, like UiPath or Foxtrot Robotic Process Automation, just do one thing, RPA. But Workfusion brings all the services together, making it a one-stop-shop experience. Instead of your having to subcontract things out, WorkFusion's solution is all-encompassing. 

That was one of the key factors in our going with them because, in our next phase of development, they are going to be able to deliver that part, rather than our having to go to another vendor to complete things.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that when you're picking a firm, it's truly vital to assess how well they're going to work with you and how flexible they are. My past experience with other firms is that they're too rigid. They work within the confines of the terms and agreement and there's no room for flexibility unless we negotiate a change request or new terms.

With WorkFusion, what I have found is that there are firms out there that are willing to work with you, versus always sticking to the black and white of the contract you signed.

Most of our use cases are for internal operations. We have automated use cases related to 10-plus departments. Most of our use cases are using the robotic process automation capabilities of WorkFusion. Only one use case is through the machine learning capability. Then, there are a lot of use cases that have optical character recognition (OCR) in them.

WorkFusion helps us in automating our business processes, so it helps in many ways, including lowering the cost of delivery. It helps us by either avoiding external costs or by reducing the cost of operations by employing fewer people. Secondly, WorkFusion helps by speeding up processes. The process takes time. It has business costs associated because there are people waiting to take the next steps in the process. The end result of waiting, whether it is an internal or external team, is that they are delayed. Therefore, it helps us in speeding up business processes and improving employee morale, as people don't have to do repetitive work anymore. 

Because WorkFusion is consistent, it creates repeatability in our processes. My team is the automation team so we are the ones who assess the processes and deliver them. For our partner teams, whose processes are automated, it helps by giving them back the capacity and a little more peace of mind that things are working.

We rely on all the core features of the product. 

Our team is satisfied with the overall capabilities of the document processing engine. We process a lot of documents. In fact, much of our business is based on processing data. Generally, that data is found in a lot of software documents. Therefore, the document processing engine is very important in terms of having the capability to automate processes. In general, the product works as advertised. It meets our needs.

We are using the document processing engine mostly for structure documents. We are not using it for a whole lot of unstructured data.

So far, we have developed only one automation using machine learning. The results were less than optimal. Part of this could be because of the use case that was selected. Overall, our experience was suboptimal. WorkFusion was an outstanding partner in terms of providing their experts for free to help us on that particular use case, but we still have a lot of things to figure out in terms of how to use its machine learning capability.

I have been using this solution since 2019.

Overall, the platform is very good. It is a rock-solid platform. The results in machine learning depend a lot on your model, what the data is being used for its training, and what kind of preprocessing you have done for the data. So, it depends on a lot of things. 

It is a highly scalable solution. It has limits at some point, e.g., like 300-hour servers in one deployment. However, for most organizations, when you get to that limit, that is already a humongous configuration. Then, you had better go and create another installation instead of having a huge cloud farm or something. We set up another one, and that is probably the best thing.

All our automations are unattended automations, so users are not directly using them. In terms of the business impact, we have 500-plus users whose lives are impacted by these automations.

Right now, we are rapidly expanding. In January last year, we had 10 automations in production. Then, by the end of the year, we had 50 in production. Obviously, when you have 10 in production, you don't need a lot of maintenance on those. However, when you have 50, you expect that some kind of effort will be needed. We haven't seen the full brunt of that yet. In general, my expectations are that roughly 20% to 30% of the development team will be needed per year on the automations. This is because of multiple factors, including the changing requirements from the business side, other process changes or updates, or changing requirements from the WorkFusion platform. 

The technical support is excellent. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

The company did not previously use another solution.

I have been in this industry for a long time. I have virtually used every single solution, especially the top ones.

The initial setup has gotten simpler. It used to be a very complex setup, but WorkFusion has made a conscious effort in terms of simplifying the installation processes. The newer versions are a lot simpler compared to the previous ones.

It took too long to implement their machine learning models for OCR and Intelligent Document Processing. For our business process, it took little over two months to implement. However, we were not getting the desired level of accuracy. So, WorkFusion provided its own experts, then the team worked together for roughly six months.

We have had WorkFusion for a little over two years. We are still in the process of rolling out. We haven't been dynamically updating our existing business processes because of a change or something, but our team has been flexible and nimble to respond to the changed business environment requirements. That helps provide the capacity, but it is still a development cycle that takes a couple of months from conceptualization to deployment. That is where we are. It is definitely good to have the extra capacity where you can go and deploy it. Overall, conceptually, it is good to have capacity if an organization is facing a scenario where goals are changing frequently. Bots could definitely help. We haven't faced the situation where our goals change that frequently.

We implemented mostly in-house. Senior developers and team leaders from the company were involved in the implementation of the models. From WorkFusion's side, their top talent was involved.

After putting 50-odd bots in production, we have now started to see a positive return on our investments. We are seeing 30%-plus for ROI.

We have a good deal from WorkFusion. We have an unlimited global licensing deal with WorkFusion. For us, it is a no-worry solution. We can go ahead and use it as much as possible anywhere we need it. If WorkFusion has a different kind of a deal for licensing with others, then their business decisions need to be evaluated based on that.

Assess your business needs, look at the product fit, do a PoC, and then move forward.

RPA is the strongest capability of WorkFusion, but virtually all the competitive products offer all the feature sets. There isn't a product without OCR combined with RPA or machine learning capabilities. They are all coming bundled and packaged together from all the competitors.

Benchmarked with the marketplace, the core functionality where WorkFusion shines is relatively difficult. WorkFusion provides screen recording, drag and drop, etc., but those are not considered the mainstay of WorkFusion's features. Overall, my impression is that WorkFusion is a developer's automation platform, where some development experience is needed, versus competitors' products where there is more drag and drop and less development experience is needed.

There are many new features that competitors are bringing to market. Some of these features are related to dashboards or application monitoring capabilities. There are certain capabilities related to the development lifecycle, such as capturing processes and then having autogeneration of the code. That is a big capability that many competitors are introducing. Many competitors are providing lifecycle tools, which is something WorkFusion could include and enhance in its overall feature set.

One of the key differences is WorkFusion is evolving as an automation solution for the back office. It is evolving as a tool where a lot of processes are there. You need efficient, stable business processes in production. That is the kind of solution you have versus some of its competitors who are pitching their tools as everybody's automation tool, where everybody will participate and double up on the automations. Those solutions have made it relatively easier, so the learning curve is a bit easier and the development lifecycle is smaller. However, the execution speed is not that efficient. Other competitors are also integrating end-to-end lifecycle tools. They are also bringing out capabilities, like task mining and process mining, and trying to integrate those with their tools so the whole delivery lifecycle can be shortened. These are some of the key areas from the top competitors where WorkFusion differs.

We are in the process of expanding WorkFusion users at the company. Right now, we have 50-odd process automations at the company. We are on track to put roughly 100 into production by end of the year. We are also trying to expand into other geographical areas, including the UK, Latin America, etc.

If someone already has an RPA tool in place, I would ask them, "What are you paying for? Why are you looking for a new solution?" WorkFusion is great in terms of running tons of processing capabilities at a faster speed with a more reliable execution. That is where WorkFusion shines. If an organization has a lot of automation processes with their back-end operations, WorkFusion will probably work better than most other products.

We have done a number of different workflow automations and process automations, spanning a large number of different business units. We have created bots with RPA. 

We have done a little machine learning and AI work with the solution, but not a ton. I haven't found a lot of use cases for this. 

It has delivered pretty good value for RPA and workflow automation, but we haven't gotten as much out of the machine learning, data extraction, and classification stuff.

The automations that we built are massively important to us. We have seen significant improvements. 

Over the past few years since we have built this out, it has permeated the organization. As we go and meet more people, they see what we have done or what we are doing and it has changed the way people think. For example, I have a number of business areas where they will tap us almost constantly, saying, "Hey. I have another good idea for automation." We have business leaders, and even people on the floor who are hands-on, throwing ideas out there and trying to make things even more efficient.

It has definitely helped us improve our accuracy and compliance. We don't use it a ton in the highest risk areas, but we are using it in a financial area and a number of different solutions. 

We have some time-sensitive transactions that are very difficult. You either have to hire an army or automate. So, we have automated some of that stuff. For example, if you need a PO change made, then you might not be able to get it all done in a day. If you are doing it manually, then some stuff might get recorded the next day. Whereas, with automation, you don't have that problem anymore. Things are more accurate partly because we don't get errors. We can build validation into our solutions and part of it is more accurate simply because it is more timely.

The ability to stitch together distinct pieces of a process into a larger workflow is the most valuable feature. I could emulate grabbing input from a screen, from an application, database, or Excel or a CSV file, then take that information and do a ton of different manipulations to it using rules and code, as necessary. Then, I can touch multiple other systems and grab more data or enter data into them, whether it be databases or front-end applications. That flexibility is huge in enabling us to really make a good impact with our automation.

The document processing engine is capable. We have a small number of invoices. For the most part, it works pretty well to process a document, extract the information, and then make updates in our accounting software. Invoices by their nature are structured documents. We only use it for certain vendors, so we are not just throwing everything at it.

It is not bad for structured documents. We just don't use it enough to be able to cheerlead for it. However, where we have used the document processing engine for structured documents, it seems to do a good job. 

WorkFusion does a lot of different things. In terms of workspace and document tagging, it is not bad and pretty intuitive. With a little bit of training, people generally pick it up and are off to the races. Other than that, we don't generally let non-technical users touch it.

We had an issue where they had a subproduct called RPA Express. We rolled it out and called it a power user program, which is basically your citizen developers, business people, and people who build smaller bots for their areas. We chose the RPA Express version of WorkFusion as the platform for which these guys would build their bots. We built up a program and got a bunch of people trained, then WorkFusion discontinued the product. I am not so sure that they always give our goals consideration, even though we are supposed to be one of their better customers.

I would like it if they provided a more detailed roadmap in terms of where they are going with the product. As we are trying to make decisions about the things that we are going to do to try to augment our capabilities, we could know whether they are thinking about the same things or not.

I have been using it just shy of five years.

It is moderately scalable. The scalability in version 9.0 is both a benefit and a drawback. 

The big problem with version 9.0 is if it is not specifically RPA, then everything that is not RPA (in terms of processing) happens on the application server, which is also where the orchestration happens. So, if you have data-intensive processes that aren't being distributed, since RPA and machine learning are the only distributed processes, then you have a major single point of failure. We have had some significant issues with this piece of it.

The newest version solves these drawbacks. In version 10.0, those tasks and the orchestration, which is the application server and the processing of non-RPA tasks, will be separated. The non-RPA tasks will have their own distributed clusters that you can scale, which is a huge difference.

We are looking to upgrade this year. The newest version (10.0) has more scalability for back-end processing.

They upgrade their product very often, but they don't offer enough time when supporting their existing product. I installed a new version of WorkFusion less than two years ago. They are now telling me it will be end-of-life this year. When you deal with most other enterprise software, the support period is like five to 10 years long. It puts a lot of strain on my entire group. We need to build up different environments and get all the infrastructure. The upgrade process is a nightmare.

The overall support could be much better. For example, when they say, "We are only going to support it for three years before you have to upgrade again," that is insane.

If I have something wrong with my environment and we create a ticket for WorkFusion, they get back to us pretty quick and are pretty helpful. They have certainly stepped up this piece lately. I would rate the technical support as eight out of 10.

Positive

The setup is extremely complex. Each time that we have upgraded, it has been extremely complex. This is part of my gripe. I am now doing my third upgrade in five years.

I came in during the initial deployment. That took a few months.

One upgrade took a year to do, from the first server being built to the last bot being migrated. This was because we had to migrate all our existing bots. This is the same process and time frame that we are expecting towards the upcoming upgrade. I will end up spending half a million dollars to do an upgrade.

We have seen ROI from using this solution. We saw value out of the solution very quickly. We saw it within a year. 

It really does help by either freeing up people's time to focus on more value-added tasks or reducing headcount. We generally have other things that we can get people to do, helping make the employees' work more meaningful since they are not having to do the mundane stuff.

The document processing engine is decent, and certainly not bad when we have used it. We find it to be capable. The biggest issue is just finding the use cases. I don't know if that is the vendor, us, or a combination thereof. I know when they have brought ideas forward to us, we are like, "We already have solutions." So, we have solved some of those problems already in other ways.

If the document processing engine broke tomorrow, we would not lose a ton of sleep over it. It might upset a handful of people, but they will live.

The digital worker is like a prebuilt solution that will replicate the steps or some piece of what a person may do today. We don't use any of that stuff out-of-the-box. Now, it is early days for them to be pushing their digital workers solution, but I have seen some stuff in their newer versions that might be of use. Part of it is the software capability, but the bigger part of it is we just don't need a lot of that stuff. 

One of the big ones that they always push is invoice processing, "We can scan your invoices and obtain the information off of them, then automate." It is like, "Okay, cool, but we get almost all our invoices through EDI, so we don't need that. It doesn't do anything for us." 

I would rate this solution as seven out of 10.

It is related to order entry and customs processing. At a high level, it is automatically reading from emails, processing attachments, OCR, and machine learning.

We use it for our important use cases. We are a transportation company. We take orders, then we fulfill those orders. So, if we do not take the orders, then we have nothing to work on.

We also do cross-border freight. We move freight from the US to Canada and Canada to the US. We need government clearance before we can move the freight. For that, WorkFusion is also important.

It is on the cloud utilizing AWS. We are working on changing it to the SaaS model from this year onwards.

It takes care of simple tasks so users can focus more on exceptions than on regular use cases. They only focus on orders where they need to handle an exception, some information was not given, or there is an issue that they had to focus on. The rest of it goes straight through without human touch. We want to see our employees as engineers, wherein they think and solve problems, not necessarily have to do repetitive tasks. I think WorkFusion helps with avoiding repetitive tasks.

We have a retry queue. Therefore, if some information is not correct the first time, then you put it in the retry queue, the users can correct any mistakes. So, it has certainly helped with accuracy. From a capacity and scaling perspective, it has also helped by taking away our repetitive tasks. It is helpful in that sense.

It is flexible in handling different types of use cases. It allows users to customize the solution, if they know how to code. 

It has the ability to handle big use cases because it is scalable. So, it can handle complicated use cases.

We have had no issues with the document processing engine. It has been good. There are some documents that it edits out, but for the most part, they go through. We use it for mostly unstructured documents. Its machine learning is good when the amount of data to be extracted is within reason. However, if there are too many data points, then we have to get creative and maybe focus on the top 10 customers or top 80% of the volume. We might have to focus on that. But, if it is within a certain number of fields, then it is okay.

Its ability to read handwriting has room for improvement. 

I have been working with WorkFusion since 2016.

If WorkFusion goes down, it is a big problem. If it is not accurate, then we will have issues as well. We need to get the right freight and clear the right freight. The robots have helped increase the rate of efficiency by 75% to 80% from a customer perspective and 30% from an order entry perspective.

We had some issues in the past, but it is fairly stable now. From what I hear, it is more stable in the later versions. With version 10.1.4, there were some issues relating to load distribution. However, it is good now. Their support and infrastructure teams have been able to help fix those issues. We have had some downtimes in the past, but their support team has been fast to help out with them.

The solution requires a DBA to clean up the database, reindex, and update the statistics in the database. It requires maintenance there. There is also the monitoring of the AWS service in general.

It is used extensively as a big part of our organization. We use it for our two main use cases: order audit entry and customs. We are using it heavily and rely on it. If it goes down, it is a big problem.

From time to time, I have posted in their community. Nowadays, I primarily work with their support team who is excellent. They are very fast to respond and knowledgeable. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

Before WorkFusion, we used Kofax RPA. When our use cases got complex, we felt doing that with Kofax RPA was not a good option at that time and wanted to use WorkFusion instead.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did not have too many issues, just with the number of servers and the cost of hosting it full-time. 

It took about three to four weeks to implement their machine learning models for OCR and Intelligent Document Processing. The main timeframe was with document tagging and the training data. Our SMEs, data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts were involved in implementing this functionality.

We engaged their engineers to do the setup. We didn't do it on our own. That made a difference.

Similar to their support, their infrastructure engineers are also very good and knowledgeable. It was a very good experience.

For somebody new trying to figure it out on their own, it could take time. However, if you are going through WorkFusion, then the setup is not bad.

We have certainly seen ROI, especially with our custom's process. We are able to achieve a lot of straight-through processing. In fact, if it goes down, it takes our users at least five times more time to finish what they need to finish. So, we have certainly seen ROI there. We have able to repurpose employees to do different things. The ROI could always be better. It is a work progress.

The overall cost could come down a bit in terms of maintaining the servers. Because it can handle complicated things in big use cases, the infrastructure is also correspondingly big. It would be nice to bring that cost down. 

We would like it to be cheaper. The licensing that we got was unlimited, insofar as we are on-prem. We are not SaaS-based. In that sense, it is good. At the same time, it would be nice if the pricing comes down a little bit.

We checked a few things, then we went with WorkFusion. We liked the flexibility with WorkFusion to handle complex use cases. That was the main reason why we went with WorkFusion. I was also going to say their AutoML seemed advanced compared to other tools.

If it is used for simple things, it is definitely easy. If you want to get complicated and do your coding, then you need some technical knowledge. It depends on the use case.

To someone who is looking into WorkFusion but already has an RPA tool in place, I would say, "Take an evaluation of your current RPA in terms of your ML statistics, extraction rate, or KPIs from the current RPA environment. Then, possibly do a PoC with WorkFusion in terms of how WorkFusion can match those KPIs or make them better, and slowly transition from the other RPA to WorkFusion if the results are better."

Version 10.1.4 might not be the best option since there are some known bugs that can cause load distribution issues. Maybe go with a later version. A PoC would be good. In general, do a good evaluation, then pick the right version and move forward with that.

We have evaluated WorkFusion Network's library of prebuilt components, but we have not used them so far.

I would rate this solution as seven out of 10.

I am a solution provider and I implement RPA products and automate processes for my clients.

In my recent deployment of this product, it is primarily used for financial processes, such as reconciliation in Excel. There are different Excel sheets that I reconcile using automation.

This product helps us by automating functions in finance. Users are able to have attended bots but can save time by handing processes to the bots to run.

The bots are deployed on our on-premises server, and users are able to assign work to them to run while they continue their own work. The processes that the bots are running do not interfere with the day-to-day business. The server simply gives them time for the processes that they are performing.

When a process is running in the background, it is consistent. In situations where processes are running and controlling the user interface, once in a while they might miss what's being clicked.

The most valuable features are the Excel activities. It has a number of Excel activities that are quite reliable.

The Studio is used for development and the Control Tower is used for management.

This is a Java-based application that takes up a lot of space and when it runs, consumes a lot of memory. This affects the reliability because it gets to a point where it hangs.

There are some basic features missing in the Excel activities. For example, you cannot delete a row or a column, which are some of the things that I would like to be able to do.

An example of something that is difficult to do is get yesterday's date. There is a lot of scripting that has to be done. It's not direct because you can't simply use a date variable and then subtract one day. Instead, you have to do some coding to get it. That was a problem for our deployment because reconciliations are done for the previous day, and when you're naming files with yesterday's date or creating folders according to date, you have to do a lot of manipulation in the code.

I worked with WorkFusion for approximately eight months between November 2020 and August 2021.

In terms of consistency, it's good. However, in terms of reliability, because it consumes a lot of memory, it gets to a point where it starts hanging. The fact that it needs a lot of memory is the only problem.

I would not recommend this product for large automation projects because it gave us problems in terms of space and the speed at which it was executing. Once it starts running a large process with loops, it hangs. So, the process takes longer to complete.

When I deployed this solution, it was for a financial institution that had a six-person team. We automated three processes that have to do with reconciliation and they run them every week or two. The six people share roles and the bots assist them.

The reason that we deployed bots for them is that they are limited in number and needed assistance. At this point, the usage is not expected to grow.

I asked some questions on the forum and I tried to contact the support in South Africa, but I couldn't get the assistance I required. These people were not coming through, so I just had to do my own research.

Ultimately, technical support never got back to me on any of the queries that I raised. As such, I cannot give them any plusses. In fact, I still have pending questions in the forum.

I also work with UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate.

Setting up the server and the desktop versions are quite straightforward, both for the studio and for the control tower. As long as you have the required access, the setup process is straightforward. You just have to press the Next button on a series of screens.

We had a deployment on IIS and I built a web application on top of the bot. In total, the deployment took about a week because there were some functionalities that were not being picked up properly. Once those were completed, everything worked properly.

Post-setup, the deployment was a little bit difficult.

In terms of maintenance, one or two people are sufficient. You need a developer, and then somebody to support the infrastructure.

I implemented this product alone. It was a bit difficult so I used the online forum and also tried to contact technical support in South Africa.

My client is using RPA Express, which is available for them to use free of charge. Their parent company is in another country, so they're not paying for anything locally.

The Studio comes standard and is available at no charge but the Control Tower requires a license. The orchestration platform, where you manage your bots and users, is also available with a separate license.

As a developer, you cannot download the developer studio for free unless you are working for your clients. 

My client had chosen and acquired WorkFusion in advance of hiring me. They were looking for a consultant to assist them with development and deployment.

My advice for anybody who is implementing WorkFusion is to use it for small desktop processes, such as sending out a report via email, or small amounts of Excel reconciliation. However, once you have more than 1,000 or 2,000 data rows, it's going to be a bit hectic to consume that much data. That said, for small desktop applications, it's going to work.

When it comes to deploying to the server, it's going to be a bit complicated for enterprise solutions, especially because of the space. When they want to deploy it, they should have at least 16 GB of RAM and at least four CPU cores. Otherwise, anything below that will be too slow.

In summary, this is a good product for small desktop-level automation, but I do not recommend it for large-scale automation because it consumes too much memory and the processes run slowly or hang as a result. There is a lot of work to be done and considering the support does not get back to you, you might struggle with an issue for a long time. Also, there is very little content available online.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.