WorkFusion Reviews

WorkFusion is an RPA solution that we use to automate things. We have multiple use cases. We use it to help prevent card fraud, as well as for fraud investigation, credit, and new-account opening. It is used across the bank for multiple purposes.

The purpose is to automate trivial and mundane tasks and make them less dependent on humans, as well as to make them much faster and more efficient than when done by humans.

The whole purpose of RPA is to minimize and automate the mundane tasks that go on in any organization. In our case let's take the example of card fraud. When someone here in South Africa suddenly gets an SMS on their phone saying that 1,000 South African rands were debited on their credit card, and they realize they didn't do the transaction, they'll report fraud to the bank. Before automation, when someone reported fraud, the case had to be logged and an investigation would take place to look into whether the customer had actually been a victim of fraud. That process included pulling SMS and ATM logs and it took seven to 10 days for a case to be finalized.

With automation, we have some pretty new solutions wherein, as soon as a card fraud is reported to the bank using any of the usual channels, whether it's through the app, an SMS, visiting a branch, or contacting a call center, a case is logged and flows into the robotic system. Then, based on the customer's card number, his details are fetched from the bank systems, including his SMS and ATM logs. When an investigator sees that the customer was a fraud victim, he puts it into the refund queue and the bot reverses the amount. If it is the first time a customer is a victim of fraud, he gets a refund within 10 to 15 minutes.

We already have a lot of compliance and governance systems in the bank, but they were all manual. If someone who was doing compliance and reporting was sick for two or three days, that job would be pending or maybe someone would need to take over. With automation, the level of reporting has increased because we are doing all the user reporting more frequently. WorkFusion has increased the level of compliance by not delaying it.

The Control Tower enables us to create and use workflows. It helps us run processes. There are a lot of small features, but the Control Tower is a very good feature, wherein we can create bots and schedule them as well as create different instances of them to run in different regions.

The "human task" feature is also important. It allows us to handle scenarios that might be causing a process to fail. We can catch a process that has not finished and take action on it.

When we develop bots, WorkFusion is heavily integrated and built on top of Selenium. We get to use the Selenium capabilities, which is also nice.

I've not worked with the OCR feature, but from what I hear, its accuracy is not that high. It depends on the type of documents you're processing, because if they are handwritten documents, it's very difficult to do optical character recognition. Maybe it is a matter of using the AI/ML features of the WorkFusion platform, which we haven't explored. But document processing with respect to OCR can be made better.

Also, WorkFusion comes packed with certain libraries and .jars. At times, you understand that you're using a system in which a library or .jar is outdated and you need to upgrade it. At that moment there is a problem because the WorkFusion guys say that you cannot tinker with their basic product, despite the fact that we have encountered an issue with an existing library or .jar being either outdated or having some serious issues. And because of that, we are failing. They need to better manage quickly making changes in WorkFusion to accommodate a situation where other technologies are not supporting the platform.

For example, WorkFusion uses a protocol for a file transfer protocol server. Now, some other systems we are using WorkFusion with have migrated to a higher protocol. WorkFusion doesn't support that higher protocol and the other technology doesn't support the lower protocol. We are in a Catch-22 situation. But if we were to go to WorkFusion, they would say we won't allow you to change our product. They can do better in managing changes customers need to make because of certain situations.

I have been using WorkFusion for about four and a half years.

I actually never worked on RPA before I started working here. I had knowledge of Java so I was hired by the organization. There was a lack of WorkFusion people available in the market five or six years back. Even now, it's not one of the most popular or prevalent technologies for RPA in the market. So there are fewer people to work on it.

The solution is pretty stable. At times we have problems wherein our platform team needs to restart their services or server. But I would assume that it is because a lot of teams deploy to that server. So if they're not managing their processes in a smarter way, at times it gives them problems. But otherwise, the platform is stable.

We haven't scaled it on a dynamic basis, in real time, as you might do with Amazon Web Services or cloud services. But if we have a bot working on four machines, and we need to handle more loads, the very simple way of doing it is to add more machines or VDIs. Another option is to make them run for more hours so that they can complete the load. We are able to manage our loads with our design and the way how we implemented the solution. We haven't had challenges.

Currently, we have version 9 which is on-prem. From version 10 it is on the cloud. It's a big move from on-prem to cloud. So a lot of people have to learn the basics of the cloud. Then the whole program can move to the cloud. There are discussions going on and the next move is to the cloud.

There are a lot of people using the solution within our company. Some are technical people who are developing and deploying solutions. Others are on the platform team and they are managing the end product. Some people are analysts who have different levels of access. And some are on the business teams in the bank, who actually run the bots. There are six or seven teams involved with a total of about 100 people using it.

Sometimes, when we report an issue such as a possible bug in the WorkFusion platform, and we need answers or a solution, we think WorkFusion can do better. Most of the time, there is a lot of back-and-forth communications and then they will say, "We will log a ticket and it will be in our queue and we will investigate it." Many times it's a burning issue for us. The support from the WorkFusion team is slower than what is expected by their customers.

There could be many reasons for it. They develop a lot of features and they have to integrate improvements into their solution, and they have to roll out patches. But, when all is said and done, it would be better if they were faster and more nimble to accommodate changes.

Positive

In our organization there is a platform team that manages all the technical aspects of installing, managing, and restarting services.

Maintenance of the product is typically handled by that team as well, which has five or six staff members. There are two senior guys and three or four very junior guys who just joined out of college. But obviously, their job is not only to maintain WorkFusion, that's one of their jobs. We don't need a team of five to maintain WorkFusion, but we have a team that does the job.

It competes with other solutions in the RPA domain, such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere.

We haven't used the AI and ML features in production that much. The OCR features are reasonably good, not very good, but reasonably good, and they get some use.

If you're an analyst or an end-user, it's not very easy, but it's worth developing some abilities based on basic certification or training. It's not that complex because there are so many facilities available, but if non-technical users are not aware, they may only be able to use it to a lesser extent. It is not really easy for non-technical users, that's what I hear, but it is worth it. It gives you results if you learn it. And for a technical person, it is Java-oriented technology, so you need to have good skills to develop bots.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

My first use case was for reconciliation purposes. In our bank, we had recon challenges with one of our tools. We built a bot that can reconcile the bank's main push-pull account. It does the reconciliations and picks out all the exceptions, things that don't match between the bank's account and the customers. For example, if there's a debit here but we don't see it corresponding there, it flags it as an exception and, at the end of the process, it triggers an email to the team that owns recons to be handled manually. But the bot does the main part of the reconciling.

We came up with bot processes that are saving the bank time. It would take days to do a reconciliation of the bank's main push-pull wallet. Because of that, sometimes when there was a mismatch, nobody picked it up on time and the bank would lose money. Now that the recons are happening on a daily basis, it's helping the bank. Now, the bank is diving deeper and wants to go more into automation.

It frees up time. The feedback we have gotten from the businesses, now that we've been able to automate their work, is that they're able to spend more time with clients that require their attention. There are some customers that would prefer you spend more time talking to them, advising them about products and services. Now, they have ample time for that. 

Somebody who previously spent about three hours out of an eight-hour day doing reconciliations was only left with four or five hours, which didn't give them ample time to spend time with customers or pick up other things that required their attention. Even if it's something that is not fully automated and requires the officer in charge to manually trigger that process for it to run, once that person has triggered it, they can go about their normal routine. It's something that some of the business team members have come to accept and they are diving into it more.

It has helped improve our accuracy because when it does the recons, it does the matching. Recently, our recons team was audited, and when the auditing was done, the process done by the reconciliation bot was the only process that was passed by the auditor. The ask now is to automate all the other processes we have yet to automate. I'm confident when it comes to accuracy because of the audit results.

The tool itself is easy. I started using it without really having any coding experience, and it was something that drew my attention toward development. I was from the business side, generally, but now I find myself in the engineering field and doing more. But it started from there, where I didn't have any knowledge. So the fact that it was just a matter of "click here, click here," allowed me to mimic exactly what I used to do for account reconciliation purposes. After just a few clicks, it was doing reconciliations for me. It is the tool that got me started on this journey because it was easy to use.

I came fully from the business. I didn't have any technical background and actually did Banking and Finance in school. I just knew how to use a laptop, but I didn't have any technical skills when I started this journey. 

For me, where it can be improved is the speed. I built two bots, one with WorkFusion and the same thing with Python. My feeling was that the speed at which Python did things, how fast it did them, was quite cool. It was faster. Sometimes, when WorkFusion is running, the way it triggers on its own, it takes time before it even launches the page. But once it launches the page, it moves. WorkFusion could improve how the tool itself triggers some of these bots on its own. I feel that it's slightly slow.

They are all fast but the other one was a bit better than it was in WorkFusion. They are doing better when compared to the old versions they used to have. When I started, the tool was way worse. The more recent one I'm using is notably better in terms of its speed.

I started using WorkFusion in 2020. I did my own personal learning around it at the start and then a certification program and became fully certified in 2021. I am now a Power User of it.

I've gone beyond just WorkFusion, and I've done a deep dive building robots in Python. I'm currently also doing that with PowerApps from Microsoft.

I feel that the slowness I mentioned is coming from it not being stable. I've had scenarios where I run a bot the first time and it gives me an error. I don't make any changes to it and run it a second time and it goes through successfully. I can't explain what causes that. Maybe it is network-related.

But in general, once we have developed the bots, they run on their own. The only time I've had a challenge where it has not been able to complete was in the event that the bot was not able to access some of the platforms we use because a platform was down. If you assign the time, "Run at 6:00 AM," by 6:00 AM you will notice that it will at least attempt to run. If there's an error, it will alert you. You can see that it couldn't log into a page because the page wasn't there, but it attempted to do it. It won't be the case that it didn't run because of something on their side.

They usually give us direct support because our bank has a direct contract with them. If we make a suggestion about what we want, they find a way to put that into the system for us. But I haven't had any reason to go to them for support. The tool hasn't given me any headaches.

Comparing WorkFusion from two years ago with WorkFusion now, there's a difference. They keep adding more. Previously, the number of pages you would get for OCR and machine learning wouldn't be that huge. You would use them up and you couldn't do anything more. And these are bot processes that need to be running on a regular basis. But now, that has been increased heavily. 

There are more additions and features being added to help make our work much easier. Before they do an update, they send emails to some of their regular users to ask, "What do you think we can bring on board in our next version that will help the tool?" They do try to release versions that can help.

Previously, in the bank, we didn't do much automation. It was a journey the bank decided to go on in 2020. The bank wanted to start automating most of its manual processes related to a type of tax. We have neighboring countries that had similar projects. The whole idea stemmed from South Africa. They were doing most of their automation in WorkFusion so we decided it was something we could also look into.

I saw WorkFusion online somewhere and somebody also mentioned it to me when we were at a session about something else. They said, "Oh, he did some automation with WorkFusion." I was a bit curious and read about it and decided to download it. Nobody guided me through it but they have online training, so that's where I went.

I went through the "How To" on their portal. They started me off by playing around on a website, capturing data, taking a few figures from online, things that had to do with rates. When I did that bit of work and I picked up the idea of how it works, I built my own quick bot. It wasn't anything huge, but it solved one of the problems I had at work. And that's what led me to further go and get certified in it.

Based on those of us who took the early lead, and our success story, the bank felt that it should invest in this channel.

You usually will use the tool itself on-prem. But to have it run fully automated, you put it on the cloud on their server, where it's able to run, connect, and then run on its own.

I followed the steps and the setup was quite okay. Even when I was about to purchase a license and switch it to their cloud site, I was able to do it on my own. It was just a matter of reinstalling and selecting the right option. Based on the videos that I was watching, it wasn't difficult at all. And that's especially true if you are a first-time user of the platform. If you watch the video, you can follow it through and then do your own setup. And you will have your own studio to do development in.

I started using the OCR after I was fully licensed. It wasn't difficult for me. You can practically show it what you want it to do on the page. You show the bot, "Go here, and whenever you see this reference, pick the next value after that." It can do it for you.

We've gone beyond just WorkFusion. We have added more tools to our development. We do Python and Microsoft Power Automate as well. We keep exploring and adding more tools that we can use internally to cover things. One thing we have noticed using some of these tools is that some things may be faster in Python than in WorkFusion. We try to compare them and see which one solves the particular problem we have and which is faster.

We attempted OCR in Python but we weren't getting the accuracy we wanted. We brought in Power Automate and noticed that there's an OCR piece in the PowerApps and we are looking at whether it can give us the accuracy we want. But for now, when we have documents and files to read, the tool we go for is WorkFusion.

If you have any technical background in Java or other development languages and you want to experience some light coding or just know a little coding, WorkFusion is good because it allows you to do a lot by clicking. It's good for somebody who wants to start this journey. There's a coding part of WorkFusion for those who want, but if you want to build your skills and start automation, it's not a bad tool to start with. In time, you're going to want more, but for a starter, WorkFusion is not a bad tool at all. You can click and it does image recognition and more. It's easy to navigate.

The document processing engine for specific types of documents, for the few docs that I have worked with it, is okay. It tries to mimic exactly what a human would do, but I wouldn't rate it at 100 percent. It does exactly what you want it to do but it might take a lot of time to get through a particular document. WorkFusion goes cell-by-cell compared to the same thing in Python where I could quickly just read it into memory and then do an entire page. With WorkFusion you can also read something into memory if you give it the right range and then you can use it in the way you want to.

As a bank, document processing is critical. You can't get it wrong. That's the reason that, for most of the bots we develop, we usually have manual intervention at the end for a human to review things. We get somebody to consent to it before it goes out because these are the kinds of things that commit the bank. We need to be extra careful with documentation.

We have started a center of excellence where we train people who want to learn how to do automation on their own. They might not necessarily be tech-minded, but we show them how to do it and then they can. We are getting a lot of people who are trying to get on board and buy into the idea.

A lot of people who are using it in our organization are using the free version. The certified version is something you pay for. We have about eight people who are using the certified version and we have two more people undergoing the certification process. The last time I checked, there were 20 users using the free version and practicing using the tool in general.

Initially, people thought it was geared toward somebody losing his job. But now they have bought into it. These bots are things that need to be handled and maintained by somebody. So it's not here to kick you out of your job but to provide you with an alternative route.

We use WF on banking use cases

It has helped us create new opportunities. 

WorkFusion has the capability to implement complex workflows, which is useful. ML capabilities are very powerfull as well

Non-code and further ML capabilities would be usefull.

Platform is very scalable with the exception of Control Tower. Some improvements could be usefull on this component.

A spanish customer service would be appreciated. I would rate the technical support as 9 out of 10.

Positive

WorkFusion's implementation is very easy. The biggest issue is analyzing the documents internally.

The implementation time depends on the project and use case.

WorkFusion is leader on IDP.

I would recommend WorkFusion as a very flexible tool.