What needs improvement with BotFarm?

The solution can improve the accuracy of hand-written data reading. In some situations, the data needs to be hand-written by the agents, and at our organization, we face some rare challenges with such data in BotFarm.

The product must provide features related to AIOps. The tool must be able to monitor system performance based on certain activities or events. It must be able to detect certain health stats of the system. The tool must execute remedial actions to resolve problems before they cause significant incidents. It must detect system anomalies and execute remedial actions based on set rules and processes built into it. It must escalate or resolve the issues automatically.

BotFarm has room for improvement. One aspect that can be improved is the accessibility of reusable components for developers. It relates to role-based access and accessibility. Sometimes, within the same project, multiple partners are working, and one partner may not want to share their work forms with others. In such cases, the administrator has the authority to decide whether to allow the usage of certain components or not. This decision is taken by the company or the administrator. Initially, if partner A develops something, they may not share it with partner B. Unfortunately, partner B may end up developing something similar on their own. However, things are changing now, as standardized development practices are being adopted by partners. This allows partners to share and utilize each other's work even in such situations. From the customer's perspective, it will have the cost, and it will have the project's timeline. It is not just about being easy to use, but it should also be simplified and easy to integrate. It should be developed in such a way that it is easily integrable. In fact, one of my customers has dedicated a resource solely to the development of reusable components. However, they have already made improvements in that aspect.

An area for improvement in BotFarm is that the communication between the Control Room and the Bot Client Missions isn't utilized well. There's also the issue with PCI DSS compliance or certain regulations that require a set of configurations that are not fully supported by BotFarm. The product should be certified or designed according to the required regulations in the finance industry to make it better.

Normally we need to monitor the solution using an AWS console and the control room. We would like to have a standardized dashboard to see all the information in one place.

The discovery suite that they just acquired could be included. The more I think, maybe it's going to be targeted to be integrated with the process discovery piece, after the acquisition of FortressIQ.

The solution automation is incapable of interacting with our Pega software application development. It is based on the nested table concept and it is unable to read these tables. Several projects have been put on hold because of that. In the next release, the solution could be more interactive with other CRM applications, such as Pega or Salesforce functions.

The OCR command needs to improve. This feature is used to convert the extracted data from an image file. While converting this file I was facing a lot of issues with the data because it was getting lost and some of the data which was extracted was mismatched. The data loss was rated as a nine and the data accuracy was a massive decrease and was up to 20%.Data extracted from ocr some times is mismatched or in accurate.

The version that I'm using, the Excel command, is a bit limited. The OCR tool, the optical character recognition tool, could be more efficient. It should be monitored thoroughly due to the fact that the OCR tool we have we have to manually check even if there are only a few characters missing, the processing might go wrong. In general we wish that the OCR of that product would be more efficient. You do have to make sure your system will be compatible with the product.

We do have some troubles with the internal software commands, but we have been troubleshooting this bug to fix it.

Although I like the OCR technology, it could still be further improved.

The user experience could be made a little better with this solution. I find it difficult to find qualified people to be able to use the solution. In the future, I would like to see machine learning built in to support marketing use cases.

The CL command poses an issue during the process of data conversion, accuracy, data loss and the assessment of certain data as false. This said, IT has been very good in evolving the tool and it is doing so on a weekly or monthly basis.

For the intelligent bots, it is still not quite structured, as far as I can see. I checked for IQ Bot. These licenses are having certain issues. We stopped around the pricing part. It's not just the price, however. It was also not fitting the capability. Based on the on-prem model, if they can include an intelligent bot there, it will be helpful with all the security and the pricing parts involved. The dashboard needs improvement. For Bot Farm, the visualization is not that good compared to the main Automation Anywhere dashboard.

Its UI could be made better. It should also be more flexible. Currently, it is more rigid, and a little more flexibility is required. Their technical support should also be better. We are not very happy with their technical support. Its price is also quite high as of now. They should improve its price. Its setup should also be made easier. It is quite complex to set it up. Even though we were able to set it up a little fast because we had done something similar earlier, but it has a very complex setup. It is extremely resource-hungry. If they can make it a little light on resources, that would also be useful.

The deployment could be simplified. There are a lot of user settings and stuff that you need to do when you need to prepare a report. Automation Anywhere does have IQ Bot, which is a pretty good product. It needs to make sure it's competing with it in terms of feature offerings, et cetera. We've seen some scalability issues.

An additional feature that is missing from BotFarm is the ability for complete, AI-driven automation. Automation can be divided into two types, namely, full automation (does not require human intervention) and semi-automation (requires human intervention). However, most companies are not able to give all their data from their ERP system to perform full automation. There is a missing feature in the software which allows for this solution to be solved. Additionally, by using AI, I would like the bot to pull reports automatically from the ERP system, but at the moment I have to log into the system to retrieve reports. Another area that needs improvement is with regards to machine-bound licenses. When installing the solution on a clients laptop or desktop and creating a license, that license is bound to that computer. I cannot use the users ID or password on any other machine.

The only challenge that we have faced with BotFarm is that there is no continuous deployment. The whole world is moving to the DevOps model, but BotFarm is still not on the DevOps model. It should have integration with the DevOps model. The migration of the bots or bots pipeline is currently purely manual.

The pricing of this product could be better.

We've had a few issues with the APIs. We have connectivity and integration with pretty much every single tech stack across the table that we have in the world, and there are a few areas that they don't do that well yet. I'd be looking for some improvement there, in terms of their integration with certain products.

The licensing schemes could be more competitive. They need to be much more flexible in their pricing. It would be ideal if they increased their capabilities in process mining.

The solution is a bit higher on the pricing side. The prices could be more competitive or more reasonable or charge on a per-need basis. That would be more helpful instead of packaging it as a complete solution. It would be ideal if the solution offered more language options, such as Arabic.

When somebody is just learning this product it can be difficult for them to understand, so improvements to the user interface would be helpful. It would be nice if people could understand it right from the beginning. In the future, I would like to see a feature for real-time chat with the support team.

We are not permitted to use web applications, so we find ourselves using Object Cloning and web control commands instead. Sometimes I feel like it doesn't work properly and we are not able to provide the dexterity needed. Also, on multiple occasions, the service bot deactivates without reason and Automation Anywhere will not function properly until it is reactivated. In general, everything is fine but they should remove the unattended or attended bot feature. This can be confusing to customers because an unattended bot license costs around $5,000, whereas an attended bot license costs roughly $1,500, which can cause customers to think: “why should I purchase an expensive unattended bot license when I can purchase an attend bot license for much cheaper?” Also, if I want to install my runner license on another machine, for example: if you install your license on a specific machine and a second vendor (like we did), you’re now installed on machine B but you can’t log in on machine B with your credentials from machine A. This is meant to be a security feature, but it makes things very difficult for customers and clients.

The image processing capabilities definitely need to be improved. We have had trouble automating processes running on Windows Server 2016. It seems to be related to integration with the Office tools, but I cannot 100% confirm this. Technical support can be improved.

The deployment could be made a little bit easier. An automated telephone support system would be helpful.

The machine learning needs to be improved so that they perform better in terms of predictive analysis and sentiment analysis. The documentation needs to be improved because it does not shed much light on how the product can be used. In general, the support can be improved. The stability can be improved. Having the ability to control the system from the cloud would be helpful, rather than setting up the environment locally.

The new version is not very stable. Sometimes I can't use the recording sound. They should improve the community. It should have a download version instead of every time needing to deploy through the SAS system something new. It's time-consuming.

The community forums can be improved a little bit because they have mixed solutions or discussions with respect to some ideas. I would like to see more process mining features to give us insight into them before we develop automation.

I would like to be able to access BotForm using a mobile app. I think that customization can be further improved. IQ Bot, used by BotFarm, needs to be improved with respect to being able to read handwritten documents using the OCR. An example of this is reading signatures.

It should be easier to create an environment for bots to operate in. There should be more support for developing in environments such as Citrix and Linux.

The scalability of the solution needs to be improved. There's a general lack of technical support. This should be improved. It used to be better.

From a simplified perspective, in terms of improvement, we use the bot for the maker position, not for the checker. It's about how well the bot can be utilized. For now, it's not utilized 24/7 because only business clients use it. I would definitely be wanting to see OCR features for improving the solution. A human brain can easily distinguish between red and blue by looking at the screen. If there's an easy way for the bot to differentiate between the colors without being sequential that would be great. More integrations with third-party applications would be a great additional feature.

I think that the governance framework is completely missing from this solution and something needs to be done about it. Other products are ahead of BotFarm in this regard. Having the validation of the bots is something that can be improved. Pricing for this solution can be better. I would like to have access to self-service support.

The stability needs to be improved.