Please share with the community what you think needs improvement with HelpSystems AutoMate.
What are its weaknesses? What would you like to see changed in a future version?
The OCR needs improvement. The solution needs image recognition to integrate front-end and back-end workflows. They need to offer better organization of image capturing for image recognition. The documentation is not that great. There have been times where I've had to reach out to HelpSystems to just try to accomplish what we're looking for. I've used other solutions that have much better documentation available.
The stability of the studio client could be improved upon. Currently, sometimes it slows down and occasionally it will force the program to close completely - which is unexpected. The interface could be more user-friendly and easier to navigate. It would be helpful if the solution was available in the cloud as well as opposed to just being available on-premises. On-premises infrastructure offers limited scalability.
So far, for two years, I have not found anything amiss. That said, nothing is 100%. Each RPA product is not mature enough. There are always have to find innovative ways of automating. There are always challenges for automation. It is a continuously growing process. The majority of the clients want more automation in AutoMate and they want that in the roadmap. Some companies have asked for voice integration. This is likely part of the roadmap.
The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina. The OCR (optical character recognition) capacity could be improved a bit.
It's difficult for me to answer as I'm not really an expert on HelpSystems and I don't know it well enough to really give great feedback just yet. I'm not really that comfortable critiquing the platform. I'm sure there are some of those issues there. It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help. For example, I know with Automation Anywhere or UiPath, there are strong community areas where I can ask questions and search for information. I don't know if that exists for HelpSystems. I find, for example, it's helpful, if I'm using UiPath, to go onto some of the community pages and I have found answers to my questions fairly easily. I don't know if that's something that exists with HelpSystems. The user interface could use a bit of an improvement.
In the case of health systems, particularly the OCR functionality is not available. You need to buy a separate license for OCR. Sometimes and the server loses contact with the agents installed in the equipment. That's something that I personally worry about due to the fact that, when the agent loses contact with the server, you stop receiving the locks of the receiver of the program. The solution has a very weak knowledge base. Much like Automation Anywhere, the product could offer virtual development via the web. AA has a web browser interface that allows users to deploy from the web using AWS. It's less reliant on on-premises technology. The solution should have stronger password management. This should be centralized.
There are many things that need to be improved. The security needs to be improved. They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance. They don't have an auto-recording capability, which means that you have to program everything. The impression that we had and the feedback that we received is that the interface is confusing and there are too many things that you have to do. It can be a very intimidating UI for a lot of people. They have drag-and-drop features, but they are not all that great. The interface needs to be streamlined and if they want broader adoption in a company then they need to do a better job at taking the technology out of it. Unlike many of the larger competitors, they do not have a Community Edition where you can deploy it and test it out. You might be able to run it for a month or a couple of weeks, but that is not enough. I think that this is something they could improve on.
Adaptive Growth finds that AutoMate satisfies the workflow and repetitive business processes of most any company we would address. The product's improvement will come mostly from its users which has been the case.
The OCR for Hebrew text needs to be improved. The recognition of Hebrew characters is not the strongest part of AutoMate.
While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath. Specifically, the Automate Enterprise interface needs improvement. When you are promoting packages within the environment, it is easy to extract an import, but it would be better to have it all in the same console. As it is now, you have to extract the package separately. The environments should be able to communicate; you push the button, click on deploy, and it goes straight to the production environment. Increasing the integration with other databases would be an improvement.
Is it required in your company to conduct a security review before purchasing robotic process automation software? What are the common materials you use in the review?
Do you have any tips or advice for the community?
Any pitfalls to watch out for?