What advice do you have for others considering Jiffy.ai Automate?

It is a reliable product. Although, it has some minor issues. But, the process for the POCs conducted by their team with a thorough understanding of our requirements was excellent.

I would advise clearly defining your ROI and your process. You should understand why your exceptions are coming and make sure that you automate the right process, rather than automating the wrong process that has a lot of exceptions. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

You have to be open to trying new things. There are certain things that if you are already used to other bigger players in the market, then there are things that you like and things that you don't like. However, even the things that you don't like, it is mostly because you are already used to the way the service player is doing it. Therefore, if someone is doing it differently, it could be actually better, though it may not feel like it. I think you will find it exceeds your expectations. Even with using humans, we have multiple redundancies to ensure there are no errors. The end results are not a lot of errors, though using the bot reduces the redundancy in having people check each other's work. We are still reducing the full-time employees doing the work, but not up to 100 percent. We still need to maintain certain people for handling tasks that can't be handled by the bot, like manual exception and manual handling. Therefore, we cannot 100 percent automate everything. There are certain scenarios that require human judgment, preventing us from using the bot to do them. I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

It is quite flexible and powerful. I would recommend this solution because of their customization option and support. This forced us to think about certain places where we automate using RPA. We went back and considered, "Why do you want to build up a system based on manual process, then go and build an RPA?" There are human interventions, which is required, and certain places you can't eliminate a third system. While RPA is in-built into those, we are using only the back-end of Jiffy.ai now where the entire user experience is built by us. So, a bit of innovation is happening. For example, we are doing eKYC approvals next, where it is mandated that everything has to go through the manual approvals. We are planning to automate this, but this time around instead of using Jiffy.ai as a standalone system, Jiffy.ai is on the back-end. Our system will be built on the front-end with Jiffy.ai as the back-end for all this automation. A task is sent to an email inbox, which reads and processes information continuously. Nobody uses the client machines. There is a dashboard that we built for users to monitor things, like the WPS. I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10) because there are still things that need to be improved.

Lean into Jiffy as a partner for their expertise and knowledge. Be respectful of the partnership and the relationships, and our experience has been that they will really jump in to help and be there for you. You have to be honest and you have to just make sure you've got good communication in place as you're working through things. We've definitely automated end-to-end business processes, but you have to find the right level of granularity where you can do it all. We haven't explored an end-to-end process for a major value stream within the company. But within large-grain, end-to-end processes, we've definitely identified many sub-processes, and their entire end-to-end workflows, that we have been able to automate. We haven't used Jiffy's Natural Language Processing yet. It is something that we would like to explore, among many of those capabilities in the next version. We've just got so much on our plate right now, trying to implement in the current version, that we're trying to figure out that time to cut over. There is definitely some human intervention, but it's really not Human In The Loop. That's another of those things that will be in our next release and that we've got planned for the future. We wanted to crawl-before-we-walk-before-we-run, so we've started with some more basic automations. I'm sure the capability is there. We just haven't taken advantage of it yet. A lot of the challenges that we uncover are really internal to our environment, as opposed to the platform. There's a little bit of both, and that's where it really comes back to the partnership with Jiffy. They are always super-responsive in addressing any challenges with the product or the platform and supporting us as we work through how to integrate or automate a certain homegrown application of ours that is probably an outdated legacy application. We've run into challenges along the way, but we partner with our internal folks and then with Jiffy to work through the challenges. In the beginning, I'll admit, I had some concern about Jiffy's stability as a company. They were working through some additional rounds of funding. They were a small startup when we first selected them, but they've gone through some additional rounds of funding. They've done some hiring. They've done some solidifying. I feel really confident about it now. They're in a good spot, and they've made a lot of good progress this year.

I haven't seen fully deployed, end-to-end processes, because I wasn't really involved in the automation of the finance processes, but from what I've heard, it can be done. The development part takes a while because of the complexity. The creation of a bot or a process is not that straightforward. The workflow setup is quite complex. The methodology, compared to the other RPAs, is more like a flow chart kind of thing. They have used a different methodology. It's not so much a question of whether Jiffy can do it, but more of a question of whether the developers can do it. In theory, because Jiffy combines RPA, machine learning, workflow, intelligent document processing, analytics, and human intervention features, you can automate without having to integrate with third-party platforms, but we still have to test that. We still need to test whether Jiffy can solidly integrate. RPA is more for front-end automation. In theory, it can work with any system, as long as the UI is clear. As long as a human can click the buttons it can be done. As an agent of change, because I'm doing digital transformation now in my role, I'm always looking for end-to-end transformation, not just some of the processes within the larger process. The Jiffy approach is good, although it's not unique to Jiffy. The system is very much capable. It's just a matter of how people design and implement it. Overall, it's a good application to start your RPA journey with. If cost is of concern, then start with Jiffy. If cost is not your main concern there are a few premium products out there, but they come with a huge price tag. They're easier to learn and to use. There are a lot of resources out there. You can easily find developers out there who have experience with UiPath or Automation Anywhere. But if you want to start small, and you have a very small budget, and you are expecting very good customer support, then Jiffy is the one. Their future is bright. They just need to improve a few things along the way.

I learned that processes can be made more efficient with automation. That is a no-brainer. However, I feel that there are still a lot of misconceptions about the role of bots and people are afraid of them. They are afraid of losing their job due to a robot. RPA is something like a sneaker that allows you to move faster and do more. It is not a replacement for a person. A person is still needed to do the work for the direction you want to go and the target that you need to reach. A bot allows you to do things faster. Give them a try, then you can compare them to the other solutions. I think you will be surprised to find that they are quite responsive and understanding of your automation needs. They grasp things quite quickly. All the software automation in the market basically does the same function. What makes the difference from them is the human factor. We have not used the advanced features. They have things like machine learning and some AI thrown in, but we have not used them. I find that Automate is basically just a descendant use of Jiffy.ai itself. Also, we are not directly programming on it. Most of the time the process is hands-off and we don't interfere with what Jiffy.ai Automate is doing. When it encounters an error, due to some human error or a system issue, then we will have to go in and perform manual intervention. We are upgrading our ERP and are unsure if Jiffy.Ai Automate is compatible. If it is compatible, then we will use their solution. We are open to new systems. So, if a better system comes along, then we might consider it. I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

The OCR aspect of it is very interesting, although we haven't fully tested it. In the testing environment, we do use some of the AI features, which are primarily being developed by the Jiffy.ai team, not internally. We see the results, which are pretty good. We provide a number of images. The Jiffy.ai team performs the training, then we use the training model to extract information. So far, the results are very promising. We get the OCR scan results with a very high accuracy. So, we are happy with the results. From my little experience with our OCR project, it requires some training. I haven't seen any natural language processing features, but I have seen some AI-related aspects that relate to how the image is structured and the location of individual images allows Jiffy.ai to classify words. So, it can define the meaning of a particular attribute and associate that attribute with a tag based on its location. We like Jiffy.ai because it is stable and easy to use. We don't have any concrete projects for the future yet. We have some ideas for exposing some web services to Jiffy.ai, but nothing concrete yet. Essentially, we want Jiffy.ai to extract information from desktop applications and provide these as web services to third-parties to consume. I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).