IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Reviews

We're working with different clients from the manufacturing environment. We have implemented end-to-end solutions. We work on web automation and automation of invoices.

The non-SAP automation is also good. The product’s integration capabilities with other software are sufficient for improving our workflow efficiency. We follow the standard procedures for setting up and deploying bots. There are no challenges. The solution’s impact on staff productivity depends on what we automate. Integrating the tool with SAP, EBS, or other ERPs is easy.

The product must be promoted more. There are no promotions.

I have been using the solution for the last six months to one year.

The tool’s stability is good. I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

The tool’s scalability is good. We can get more tools if we need them.

The technical support is pretty good. Some dedicated staff are allocated to us.

The initial setup is very simple. The learning curve is easy.

Our customers see a return on investment within six months to one year.

The pricing is reasonable. We buy it as a bundle.

I don't see much difference between IBM and other products. Whatever Automation Anywhere can do, IBM Robotic Process Automation can also do it. We have done some POC with other tools. We chose IBM because we have been partners with the vendor for many years. We are an IBM shop.

IBM’s OCR solution is pretty good. It is quite economical. OCR is good for streamlining operations. We have integrated the solution with our ERP. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The tool provides different options. It is a good tool for automation. Studio has many options. It helps us reduce development time. We do not have to code scripts.

The solution has to improve its features. The administration of the environment could be better. The users should be allowed to create folders in Control Center. Scheduling bots must be improved. The product does not provide an option to organize the scheduling bots in Control Center. It might be a little confusing if we use many bots. We don't have the option to put them in different folders. The logs in the solution could be better.

I have been using the solution for two years.

I rate the solution’s stability a six out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten.

The product was easy to deploy.

The product is reasonably priced compared to other tools. The price could be better. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

I will recommend the solution to others. It is a good tool for automation at a good price. The product has to improve the administration and Control Center. The product is less expensive compared to other tools like Automation Anywhere. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We are using IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for virtual business automation.

It may be easier to capture objects in the features, but we face more difficulty with other tasks, such as automating processes on US-based sites. Capturing GUI operations is very easy, but capturing IBM Logistics automation is hard. It does not always work with browsers or automotive applications like SAP. On the other hand, some commands help capture operations.

I have been using IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for the last three years. My company has a partnership with the solution.

I rate the solution's stability as five out of ten because the server site experiences memory overload. Similarly, the client's site encounters high memory usage when specific applications remain open for two to three days.

I rate the solution's scalability as five out of ten.

Customer support is helpful, and the community is sufficient. However, there is a need for additional educational resources. I will give the service and support a rating of six out of ten.

Neutral

We have an automation-enabled solution partner.

The initial setup is very easy. Sometimes our customers experience a high setup time during database creation. It takes only one hour to set up if you're prepared with databases, rows, and access to the database.

I rate the pricing ten out of ten. So, the pricing is very good for me.

Overall, I rate the solution six out of ten.

I have been using IBM Robotic Process Automation for approximately three months.

IBM Robotic Process Automation should be more stable.

The solution is scalability.

We approximately 100 people working on this solution.

I am satisfied with the technical support.

I have found some of the deployments of IBM Robotic Process Automation are more difficult than others. Some deployments can take a few months.

The license is paid annually.

I would advise others to find a solution that best fits their use case.

I rate  IBM Robotic Process Automation an eight out of ten.

We use IBM RPA to perform customer credit risk analogies. It analyzes all the information coming from the customer.

I like the integration with Watson and the possibility to have an intelligent reading of all the customers' documents. It analyzes the main information to provide insights about the customer to understand if the request is a risk. The ability to integrate with hybrid clouds is another advantage.

The time it takes for approvals, and risk analysis could be faster. It's probably the main benefit you can get from the whole process. If it can do the tedious work quickly, employees with specialized skills can concentrate on the things that require deep knowledge or specialization. Then all the manual, repetitive tasks can be forwarded to automation.

Integrating with artificial intelligence should be more mature and more complete. So far, it works, but there are still many more benefits that we can get with better integration with Watson. There are also some opportunities to improve the integration of documents in the workflow. 

I've been using IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for about six or seven months.

Several products are incorporated in the back for automation. Some of them are in the process of being more aligned with cloud services. Some are still not in Kubernetes or a Docker. Two of them are in the process of being incorporated into Kubernetes and Docker to be aligned with the rest of the products. All of them work in a very stable way.

IBM RPA is totally scalable. It's precisely the reason we have all of them in Kubernetes and the cloud. This makes them available for scalability, and it's very easy. In Kubernetes, you can scale up very easily, without any interruption of the service.

IBM's technical support is very good.

The initial setup is complex. You need to first find out where and how it can provide real value to the company. Without doing that first, without understanding the main objective you are pursuing, it can take a lot of time to show a company that this product delivers real value. 

Once you understand the final objective, you can design and implement it. The implementation really isn't a big problem once you have well-defined objectives that you need to achieve.

We work with an IBM partner.

Being in the cloud is key to having similar products integrated and working in the same environment with artificial intelligence. You have to be clear about the value added by such integrations to the customer, or you'll face some resistance.  

To implement these kinds of projects broadly in several areas at the same time, you won't have a very good chance to be successful quickly. It's important to start with a small project to demonstrate the benefit, and from there, you can scale very quickly. You can grow or diminish the capacity you need in a very dynamic way without very high costs.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM RPA a nine.

We use RPA to test mainframe solutions because they never change.

IBM Robotic Process Automation is very easy to use. 

Stability could be better. It also gets difficult with every new version of Java or every new version of Windows.

I have been using IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for more than 12 years.

IBM RPA is an unstable solution. This is the biggest issue we have right now.

It's very easy to scale. We have done it many times with many machines running simultaneously with integration between RSP and EDM quality management. 

Technical support is very bad. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM tech support a three.

It's a client terminal solution, so the desktop solution doesn't require much time to install and deploy.

For anyone thinking of using IBM Robotic Process Automation, I would tell them not to change anything if it's running.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM RPA a seven.

We are a solution provider and we have been working on selling the IBM RPA product during 2020. We are primarily dealing with the on-premises version because our clients are not willing to use the cloud because of issues with their data. We have a lot of banks as clients, and it is a problem for them to use cloud versions.

One of our primary use cases is creating chatbots for clients, such as financial institutions.

Other things that we can automate are tasks like dealing with incoming credit processes, and administrative processes such as invoicing. These are the processes that take a lot of time.

We have not generated any sales yet, but we have experience with the product and are working on selling it.

IBM should provide specific solutions for specific problems, like templates for invoicing processes, or general templates for creating efficient processes. Another good example would be to have a template for a credit onboarding process. This would give us something to show the client in terms of a working solution, and that we're not having to create something from scratch.

The quality is great! It's very strong and has a very strong platform. However, you need to consider the clients and have a client perspective.

From my point of view, the RPA from IBM is not yet in touch enough with the clients. They are not taking the client's perspective into consideration, and they don't guide them enough throughout their journey to RPA.

They need to provide more guidance and more coaching. At the end of the day, it's a type of culture that they are trying to build within the company.

I would like to see an interface that would help customers establish which process is suitable for RPA or not. Maybe some type of scoring process would be helpful in establishing the processing suitability for whether it is an RPA or not. That would be a great feature to consider.

We began working with IBM Robotic Process Automation one year ago.

I think that it is a stable solution but I am not yet experienced enough to answer with certainty.

If you are working on-premises then scalability could be a problem. This is certainly not a problem with cloud solutions but again, this is the same problem for us. Our clients would like to remain working on-premises. we all know that cloud-based solutions are the best, in order to have scalability and in order to grow in the number of bots or applications.

Most of our clients are mid-sized banks, and we have a lot of government entities.

I think that the pre-sales and technical support are really great. I had worked for IBM myself in 2016, and these people are really professional.

We are competing with UiPath and Blue Prism, and also, our clients have been considering minor regional RPA companies. One such example is a company from Argentina that is very popular in the region, called BI.

The main difference between IBM RPA and the other products is that the small companies have developed ready-to-use solutions.

We work with the presales teams and have not had much experience with the setup.

The length of time required for deployment will be two or three months, depending on the infrastructure. When you have an on-premises deployment, you need to prepare the infrastructure to perform the implementation. There are times where the initial setup takes longer than you first imagine when the project begins.

For example, having availability with the client's infrastructure in order to start working on an RPA project is sometimes a problem.

The cloud is the best way to deploy RPA. However, we face the dilemma that we cannot use the cloud. So, I think that the solution to this type of problem is to try and set up a private cloud for our clients. Unfortunately, I have found that it is not a simple process to set up a private cloud. The number of resources required is not necessarily reachable for many entities.

My advice for anybody who is considering an RPA product is to carefully consider where to start because not all processes are suitable for RPA. You need to carefully evaluate what you are going to do because if you are starting from scratch, you need to carefully choose which processes you are going to start with.

Don't try another RPA solution for the company from scratch. You have to create a culture of RPA inside your company. A good product comes from creating a culture.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have a client with a line of bars in the service/hospitality industry who wanted to have a system which takes a reservation for restaurants. They wanted to use IBM Robotic Process Automation software for this on the back-end. E.g., if a user wants to make a reservation, they can select a restaurant make if a table is available and at what time. On the back-end, IBM Robotic Process Automation will log all that data and create the reservation for the client.

From a business users perspective, all they care about is the dashboarding and reporting feature. It is very easy to take a dashboard or report, then use that report for their own internal purposes.

It is easy to use. We have enabled our resources who don't have a background in automation to be certified and trained, then implement this product within a very short period of time, as it is very user-friendly.

I would like more drag and drop type of features. If you look at some of the competition, they do provide that scalability feature, where a user who doesn't know anything about automation can work off of it using a bunch of drag and drop things. That is what our clients are looking for.

I would like it to do pretty much everything out-of-the-box without any need for any customization. However, that is not the case right now. We absolutely have to do some amount of customization with the solution in order to use it out-of-the-box as-is.

The technical support is great.

The client was looking at a solution. Because it was an IBM client, this solution was their top choice. When they were trying to compare IBM Robotic Process Automation against the other things which were there in the marketplace, we decided that because it was an IBM product backed by IBM support, this would be the primary driving factor for the client to pick the solution.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It took less than an hour to set up the solution. 

We were able to put up a solution, like set up a port or create an application, in such a short time from the ground up. We are able to run this and put it in production with minimal effort required, and that is a big deal for us.

We used an integrator for the deployment. 

This solution produced a good ROI.

If you compare it to other competing products, it is pretty good in this space. It provides ease of use when you perform a task. If you compare IBM against the competition, the amount of effort required to set up a part or set up a process is way less than what you get from competition.

Put IBM on top of your list because we have done the analysis. We have compared this solution with other solutions that are out there in the market. Nine times out of ten, this would be the go to solution if you are considering all of the factors. I would strongly recommend other clients to start looking here.

We have not integrated the solutions with other solutions. It is a standalone implementation.

We use it for our customers who are looking to leverage automation or artificial intelligence. We mostly use the solution where there are a lot of people in backend operations, like BPOs. We try to leverage automation by moving work, shifting left.

This product definitely helps with cost optimization and brings a lot of optimization to repetitive processes. So if today people are doing something manually which is repeated multiple times, by leveraging this solution we are bringing efficiency in expediting the process and saving the organization costs. The ballpark reduction in operating costs is 20 to 30 percent. It could be much more as we mature in this particular area.

It definitely increases productivity where there is a lot of user intervention. Some of the cases we are trying to improve revolve around optimizing sales processes. Where customers are taking about three days to process an RFP, we are trying to get the response down to one day for all RFPs.

We also see indirect benefits on decision-making and we're looking to optimize that.

It's integrated with all the other products within the Salesforce ecosystem.

We are looking to see how it can connect with various interfaces seamlessly, through APIs.

It's pretty stable.

As for scalability, we are starting with a very small footprint. We will explore and see how it performs when it is scaled.

Technical support is pretty good. We were able to get the right support for the customers, as needed.

We were using Blue Prism. That is one of the competitors that we were evaluating.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have used various versions of automation solutions in the past, so we understand the whole setup process.

We are looking at a 20 to 30 percent ROI due to automation.

We are exploring multiple options. We have done a lot of proofs of value and, through that process, we are identifying the product that should be used in the future.

We would definitely recommend the solution to colleagues and suggest that they evaluate it based on their needs. The biggest lesson we have learned in using this product is that leveraging automation has benefits for our customers in their daily processes and that it can be a stepping-stone in improving ROI for them.

In terms of usability, we are working with customers in the initial phases and the deployment is pretty good. But we need to look at the longer term for how it is being deployed in customers' businesses and we need to get their feedback. Some of our customers' business users use it and, in the initial phases, the usability looks good.

As for using it for compliance and/or governance issues, we haven't explored that part of it. It is more on the optimization, productivity, and cost-saving sides.

I would rate this solution at eight out of ten. We are still in the various stages of exploration of scalability and business-user response. We are still in the evaluation process. But it's pretty good, so that's why I am keeping it at eight.

There are a lot of legacy applications which are not modernized in terms of exposing APIs or services. Those are the places we are using Robotic Automation a lot.

Speed. That's the key. When you create a transformation-type of a program, just the discovery itself usually takes between six to eight weeks. But in six weeks you can actually take a robotic solution and move it all the way into production. So speed is definitely the key here.

Cost as well, not just from a software perspective, but cost from an enterprise perspective. Since it's not inclusive, in terms of automation, you can just do it standalone, in its own silo. It's not going to force your existing system or teams, your admin teams, to create new IDs for you or even force them to create new services or APIs for you or expose something from there. They can just keep the way they are doing it right now, but you still automate it.

So speed and agility in terms of not having inclusive automation, both really help.

The ability to do screen-level automation becomes key, and people can connect to it. Especially extracting data from a legacy application, putting information into an Excel, running some macros, etc. Those are well-defined use cases from an RPA perspective.

Extensibility is the key, especially in terms of the Recorders feature that we have. That should be browser independent. Enhance it, because some people have Chrome, some have Internet Explorer, etc. Allow it to be browser independent.

Integration with PDFs: Not just the ability to read information from PDFs but the ability to write information from PDFs, make it secure, sign it, etc.

An additional enhancement would be: How do you connect to your Microsoft Exchange Servers? Right now, the connection forces Microsoft Exchange to expose a port. Some enterprises are not allowed to expose a port, so it has to go through the firewall and security and token assessment.

And that's another thing: If they can allow a token exchange inside the tool itself, that would help.

This solution is still evolving. It is going through the rounds right now. We hope it will become more stable, but right now, since it works on the laptop, it has a lot of dependency on your browser or what type of operating system you have. Sometimes it has dependency on your credentials - are you using a network type of an ID or a local ID, etc. The use case has to be selected properly and then, accordingly, once you scale it up, it works fine. But the use-case selection becomes key here.

Just from an IT perspective, increasing the number of bots or reducing the number of bots on demand is a click of a button. It's as simple as that.

But from a business perspective, scalability takes a different meaning altogether because they want the same kind of bot to do a variety of different use cases. The key comes out in terms of design. At our company, one of the key things that we do regarding bots is to lay out the governance structure and always think from a microservices architecture perspective. Once it is from a microservice architecture perspective from the business side as well, it just looks like Lego blocks. You just combine them together and complete the use case and it becomes more scalable.

From an RPA perspective, since this tool is kind of new, there are a lot of incidences that we have discussed a lot with IT support. Right now, in version 11.2, the Control Room gets disconnected frequently, so we are working with IT support on that. Earlier, we had an issue where we wanted to put information into a PDF document and, again, we worked with IT support to get a solution and work around that. So there have been a variety of use cases where we have had to work with and rely heavily on them to give us solutions.

The setup is a little complex as compared to Blueworks Live but it is not as complex as IBM BPM or IBM ODM. From a structure perspective, you still go through creating your three layers - your Bot Creator, Bot Runner, and your Control Room - along with the database. So from a structure perspective, you're still going through the same stages, but the tool itself is so small compared to the size of IBM BPM that it's not very difficult to install. Typically, we allocate two days for installation, which is about 16 hours of effort to do the installation in a test environment.

There are a lot more options in the market. For example, Pega. If our clients already have a Pega product, especially the BPM side of Pega, they are often inclined to take Pega's RPA. Then there are the integrated products like Kapow from Kofax. If they already have a Kofax solution, Kapow comes as RPA-based so it's all integrated together and they use it. Then there are standalone products as well in the market, such as UiPath, WorkFusion, and Blue Prism. 

Out of all these, UiPath and Blue Prism are the current contenders. Kapow is up and coming and has great potential.

In terms of advice, every tool has an issue. We have evaluated multiple tools and every tool had an issue from a scalability perspective as well as from extensibility perspective. There is no reason not to go with Automation Anywhere. The use case selection is the key. If your use case is heavy on document management, I may not be inclined to suggest Automation Anywhere, but if it is more on the integration side of it, definitely go with IBM RPA.

We are solely working with an IBM product for this solution.

In terms of the important criteria when selecting a tool like this, the starting point for our customers is cost. The other thing that comes into it is the security aspect and, "What will happen to my human workforce if I put bots in there?" It depends upon what the enterprise objectives are. Operational cost saving is definitely a done deal when executing excellent RPA, but in terms of enterprise goals, the overall operational cost on the human side, it's completely based on the business case, and how they want to manage it.