WorkFusion Reviews

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.

We use the WorkFusion Tara Digital Worker to assist with level one screening of real-time payments.

We deployed WorkFusion in the cloud and it is integrated with our screening solution.

We use machine learning-powered AI-based digital workers, which are very important to our core business process. This allows us to work at scale without increasing headcount and to focus our existing headcount on more critical work that requires human attention.

It is important for institutions to evaluate the opportunity to implement AI in areas where experience and consistency are key, understanding that it requires a strong governance program and continuous monitoring to prevent people from treating it as a black box and ignoring its potential risks.

We have seen an increase in efficiency, which has allowed our existing resources to be more focused on mission-critical items that are more relevant to subject-matter experts, enabling them to do important work without eliminating essential tasks, given the nature of false positives associated with payment screens.

AI helps our organization scale. Based on the automation rate, I see that our institution has been performing well. I believe that the benefit of WorkFusion is their willingness to work with the customer to continuously evaluate the product and strive for higher automation rates through ongoing releases and enhancements.

We do not use WorkFusion's document processing engine very often. We are considering using them to evaluate introduction alerts and real-time payments. They would compare a paper payment to a populated alert. The documentation they have provided has been excellent. Once we had an executed agreement, they provided very good article documentation related to model validation, which has allowed us to implement a strong governance program.

WorkFusion is easy for non-technical users to start using.

It allows us to scale our real-time payment screening process so that we can handle an increase in alerts caused by changes to watchlists or the environment. Digital workers can process the equivalent of a very large number of full-time teammates, so we can treat them as the first set of eyes in a four-eye review process. A second human subject matter expert can then evaluate the digital worker's performance and give a final sign-off. This process is more efficient and has a faster turnaround time than a fully manual process.

Although we had no issues with accuracy or compliance before implementing WorkFusion, it has helped us maintain a strong level of compliance by providing consistent outcomes and notes as part of its review of payment alerts.

WorkFusion has been an excellent partner, providing clear and concise communication to understand our needs, helping us to integrate or work with our existing systems expeditiously, assisting with user acceptance testing, and providing a very strong customer support base when we have identified challenges or requested further enhancements. I appreciate WorkFusion's partnership in this regard.

We have been very pleased with the speed and decisiveness of WorkFusion, which is able to quickly provide a disposition note or escalate to a human for additional review. We are also very pleased with the quality of WorkFusion's dispositions.

I would like WorkFusion to improve the automation rate when evaluating unstructured text.

I have been using WorkFusion for just over six months.

WorkFusion has been very stable even when we've faced challenges. WorkFusion has been a great partner in identifying, fixing, and implementing solutions in a very reasonable amount of time.

Scalability has been good so far, but we haven't had a massive increase to truly test it. Based on our observations of the dynamic nature of functions, lists, enhancements, and additions or subtractions, WorkFusion has met our demands so far, which is great.

Technical support is good and responsive. They communicate the status of issues well, which I appreciate. We don't have to call them; we can simply report an issue, and they will provide regular updates. We've never had an issue linger for too long, which is great. Overall, our experience with technical support has been positive.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward and a very good experience. The WorkFusion team worked seamlessly with our sanction screening vendor to turn it around quickly and easily from our hardware end.

The implementation was completed in-house. The digital worker that we use works as though it is a human within our screen system.

Given that we do not generate income, it is difficult to quantify a return on investment. However, I would say that it has been a significant cost savings, allowing us to meet our demands without having to increase our headcount by multiple teammates.

The pricing is fair because WorkFusion's out-of-the-box solution is appealing.

We evaluated a few different automation vendors, but we felt that the WorkFusion product was more directly designed to meet our needs; it did not require a custom build by another vendor.

I would rate WorkFusion eight out of ten. The product offers opportunities for improvement, particularly in terms of customer-based comfort with the level of automation, whether to manage it, monitor it, or trust it to run fully automated.

We have a small number of endpoint users who use WorkFusion. These are our level-one analysts who interact with it. We currently use our level-one and level-two analysts to handle escalations from WorkFusion and to evaluate the false positives that WorkFusion identifies, in order to confirm that they agree with the disposition note.

No maintenance is required.

For those considering WorkFusion but already using an RPA tool, I would like to know about their RPA experience and whether they felt it was tailored to the specific needs of the financial crime compliance industry. I have personally found that WorkFusion's explicit definition of what its digital workers can and cannot do, and its application of this to the financial crimes industry, really sets it apart from other vendors. This is because other vendors require a significant amount of customer input to design a product that meets their needs, and then require further customer maintenance to ensure that those needs are still being met.

Make sure to discuss the willingness to work with other vendors to share their model documentation and provide support for model validation. Artificial intelligence-based solutions are a very hot topic, so I think people need to be cautious about how they select a vendor. Make sure that the vendor is able to provide their own model documentation and model governance so that they understand that the risk of any errors and all liability rests with the institution. AI can be a great tool, but only when it is governed and monitored appropriately.

We implement this solution for our clients according to their needs.

WorkFusion's SAP integrations are really good. 

When it comes to the artificial intelligence part, WorkFusion is demanding in terms of having extra skills. You need to be a bit of an expert. If you look at Automation Anywhere, IQ Bot is a business-friendly tool. To develop applications in WorkFusion, it's much more time consuming, and much more expensive in terms of the additional skills and resources that are needed.

WorkFusion is time-consuming in terms of development. Especially when compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere. The inspector elements have a separate window, and that's something that takes extra time, in terms of developing WorkFusion. 

The installation and the software required for WorkFusion is really massive. You need a professional IT administrator to actually do all the installations. That makes it very expensive, to get the infrastructure up and running. It involves Tableau, and other items. There are many third parties you will need to bring up the ecosystem,which further adds to the expense.

They should have a simplistic infrastructure. They are built for huge enterprise-scale companies of 1,000 or 10,000 or more. You don't see that kind of RPA implementation very often. They should have a simplistic version of implementation for smaller enterprises without all of that extra software. It would be great if they offered both a very basic installation, plus their already existing enterprise edition. They should work on stripping down the amount of software and the amount of hardware required.

The technical support can be improved. 

I've been dealing with the solution for a number of years now.

I can't comment on the stability per se. All of the bots are pretty much the same. As long as the underlying applications work well, it also works well.

I can't really comment on the scalability, except to say that large enterprises would already be best suited to this solution due to the size and cost constraints inherent in its design. 

During the current COVID situation, technical support has not been great. Typically they respond back promptly. As of now, there is absolutely no response coming from WorkFusion. While in the past we may have been satisfied with their assistance, I wouldn't be able to say that today, due to the complete drop off in responding to issues.

It is complex for enterprise implementation. The solution needs a needs minimum, of 20-22 servers. It's no small task. This is not a straightforward setup. It's a large undertaking and there are many moving parts.

Deployment takes at least a month. In terms of getting everything done, a company is looking at a deployment of 15 to 20 days minimum.

This isn't the type of solution where anyone can try their hand at implementing and deploying. An organization definitely needs an expert to assist them with the process.

This is an expensive solution. 

They have a very expensive license compared to any other automation tool. For instance, at $50,000 - $60,000, you can bring in an Automation Anywhere solution. For this solution, you need at least $250,000 to get something going. 

That's three or four times expensive. They do have a "free" version, but it's not good. They should have an intermediate version that's int he ballpark of $100,000. Mid-tier pricing is needed.

We're hoping to partner with the solution in the near future. Right now, we currently just service our customers as required.

We are IT services providers, so we work on all deployment models. We match our offerings to what the customer is currently looking for.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. While it's a good solution, there's a lot to work on.

They should work on productivity for the developers. As of now, their productivity is very bad compared to what Automation Anywhere or UiPath offers. It's why I've ranked them a bit lower. A simple business user can work with a UiPath and on Automation Anywhere. That's not true with this solution. It has an ease of use problem that needs to be tremendously improved. They have to catch up in the RPA market.

I'd recommend other companies first consider UiPath. If there are a lot of unstructured data, the first preference would be to go to Automation Anywhere. This is due to the ease of use of IQ Bot. 

We like the tool, and we want to use it. Our only request would be, they should simplify the tool as much as possible and work on the productivity of developers.

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.

We are using WorkFusion as our enterprise RPA solution at this time to help us deploy some automation. It is a hybrid-based installation. Eventually, we are going to try to move everything to the cloud. Some of our customers are dealing with transactions, trader solutions, governance compliance needs, and other special cases so it is not totally possible to go totally on the cloud at this time. There are also clients who deal with things like a KYC (Know Your Customer) type solution, and then a few operational needs like ATM reconciliation and financial revenue reconciliation. The regulations sometimes preclude certain solutions in certain configurations.  

It helps us to provide some of the bot solutions we need to work with our customers.  

I suppose that the most useful feature in WorkFusion has been the desktop solution — also known as a desktop option. It is a type of RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation) express option because it allows us to do very quick developments outside of the normal BI (Business Intelligence) process. Even though the bigger enterprise is obviously more robust, there are a lot of small solutions that can solve pain points in our business at a particular moment that do not require more rigorous development.  

Obviously, the WorkFusion Enterprise product is very technical. You have got to be Java proficient and otherwise technically oriented. I guess what could be an improvement in the product is moving towards more "codeless" coding. That would be using things like a drag-and-drop interface to build solutions with premade components. These components would have set functions to simplify using the coding portion of the product for the business user. Instead of keeping the product in use with only the more technically inclined users, they might create a way for the business user to assemble what they need and enhance development opportunities.  

I think a move towards that sort of codeless coding would be a great step in creating more utility for more end users. Maybe API calls or other creative components could be worked in. The express version does not do API calls and the Enterprise version does not do codeless coding. It would be nice to have a solution somewhere in the middle. WorkFusion has got the very easy, light version covered and the very technical, heavy one covered. There seems to me to be a gray area or gap in the middle where a whole set of potential users is not addressed.  

I think our organization has been using WorkFusion for three or maybe four years overall. With my group in the Africa regions, we have been using it for about two years.  

I do not think we have ever had issues with stability. It seems to be very good from my personal experience. It is more likely that something in the solution will be affected by the environment changing than it just breaking down. The question becomes can an RPA solution adapt to changing architecture through various upgrades and version changes and remain compatible with the environment.  

The stability of the product itself is something we have not had issues with.  

I would say there are probably just less than 100 users currently working with WorkFusion at our company. I am not sure what the total number is, but probably less than 100. Within the African group, we have probably got about 15 to 20 total users.  

Most of the people using the product are using it on a daily basis. The processes created as bots are obviously running in real-time all the time. The developers are either busy with deployments or they get involved from an analysis and design perspective. But working directly with the product consumes a high percentage of the users' time.  

Our scaling is simply replication across countries and geography. There are always new projects and configurations that need to take place to augment the system, but it is pretty easy to scale usage of completed bots.  

I do not ever have the need to contact the WorkFusion tech support directly. We have got a Center of Excellence that supports us from a group perspective. We deal with them and they deal with the vendor if anything needs to be resolved.  

This solution is actually the first RPA I have used. Maybe it is not so surprising considering the technology is not very old.  

I joined the team after all of the internal architectural decisions, choices, and implementations were completed. Because of that, I can not really comment on the evaluation process. I have just been making use of the system that was in place after its adoption, and I can not really complain.  

I was not involved in the initial installation as it happened before I arrived. I can only say that I have not heard anything about the issues that may have occurred.  

It does require maintenance and there is ongoing support from a technical training standpoint. Then the bots themselves require maintenance and updates. That is, if there is anything that changes in the environment or any process changes, the bots may need to be reconfigured — or even replaced — to work with the changes.  

WorkFusion is cheaper than quite a few of the potential solutions, but we have also heard some complaints that it is a more expensive solution than others. It is certainly not the cheapest solution. I think Help Automate came in as quite a bit less expensive. Obviously, we have to have an enterprise solution with a company of our size and there is an opportunity to negotiate to potentially work out a volume discount. That would make the cost less significant in the choice of what we continue to use.  

As far as I know, all other services are included in the license as a single point of pay without any additional fees.  

While we have got WorkFusion as a solution at the moment, we continue going through due diligence. We actively check and evaluate the alternatives that are available. We consider it an ongoing or proactive review of our current toolkit. We currently use mostly WorkFusion, but we also use Python for some of the other automation. We are looking at other important products like UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and Help Automate. Those are the tools that we are pulling in to use for our comparisons. One of them may solve potential pain points the current solutions do not.  

Overall, I would recommend this solution to other users. I have got nothing against UiPath or Blue Prism or any of those other products, and I think there are other options like Python people can make use of. But from my experience with this product, I certainly recommend it.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate WorkFusion about an eight. Between a seven and an eight but on the high end of that range.  

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.

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.

The solution is not just about playing recordings, dragging and dropping them onto the platform. It does more, it allows your business to have more use cases. When you are using the framework it allows you the ablility to customize the Java code according to business requirements. This is what makes it easier for us.

I think from a business point of view, we have accomplished what we wanted to. From a skills perspective, there is still a lot of upskilling that is required because our next step is machine learning.

The solution is customizable, you can create new APIs according to your requirements.

We have had some problems in the past with the Inspector tool that looks at the elements on the screen. Replacing it or improving it is needed.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable, we have not had any glitches or problems. I would say currently the stability is approximately 95%.

The version we are using has been able to scale fine since we have done it already. I would like to see how the scalability is of version 10, which we are waiting to do.

The customer service uses tickets for tracking support. Their turn around time is very good, we typically get a response within a day.

The setup was time-consuming but simple. We had the skills and resources to complete it without a problem.

The whole implementation took approximately two months. We had different environments and hardware which can add up to more time for the process. Typically, the more changes that are required the more time it can take.

I do not have high-level experience with platforms that offer similar robotic process automation currently. The capability is there in this solution, the platform has a lot of features and capabilities. The onus is of the user to utilize all of those capabilities that WorkFusion has. 

If you have a small business there might be a better solution out there for you but if you have a large organisation, I definitely recommend it.

I rate WorkFusion an eight out of ten.