IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Reviews

We use robotic process automation for automating financial services processes, so back office processes for accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc. We are at the PoC stage at this point. 

The performance has been good. We are still in the early stages. One of the challenges that we have solved is helping to replace individuals with robots or bots, so we can free up capacity. We have not had any attrition; we have simply taken on more work. Therefore, it has been helpful. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to automate mundane tasks. This improves efficiency, reliability, etc. You can form critical operations which can be highly automated. 

At this stage though, we are not using AI. I think that is the next step. Today, we are mostly focused on taking the human element out of processes. The next step for us before we can deploy to scale will be solving for exception handling. We think AI can help with this. 

We would like more focus on understanding AI and how it can be used to manage exception handling. 

We have not really explored it as much as we would like yet. That is something we are going to start focusing on. We wanted to try it out as a PoC to see how it worked. So far, it has been good. 

We were not using anything previously. We just tried this solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. I don't think there are any issues with the product usability.

I think it is more about the features: How we leverage them, then how we apply them at scale in our enterprise. There is a lot more focus on change management when you are bringing robots in, e.g., people start getting concerned about losing their jobs. 

We worked with a local partner.

No.

Focus more on change and make sure that there is buy in to try it out. Use a PoC model (proof of concept model), otherwise it gets really challenging to implement it at scale. 

Right now, we have more pull than push because people understand the worth of robotic process automation in financial services, and are not as threatened by it as they once were. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: There were not that many vendors in the market, at least not in the consideration set. 

For growth industries, the automation of call centers, service to the customer, these are the principal use cases.

The results in cost and time savings, the change in people, and the way they work.

Deployment is done in a small amount of time.

Better integration with artificial intelligence or with machine-learning.

It's stable.

It's scalable.

What's important for me when selecting a vendor are the price and the benefits.

I am a strategist. So, I have to define a strategy for different companies. Not for buying, I myself am not going to buy. But I am going to recommend to my clients, the companies, that they use a vetted RPA automation.

One of the things that we're doing is trying to automate a lot of processes that, today, happen in a very manual way with paper. We're trying to take advantage of our human resources and apply them in better places, in more value-added activities that truly contribute to the customer experience. 

We are trying to automate a lot of the decision-making that we have, and a lot of the old-school processes that take many, many clicks and that robots can do a lot faster and better than humans can.

So far so good. The results that we've seen have been pretty positive. We are aiming, by the end of the year, to record about $10,000,000 in savings just by automating the processes that we have identified so far.

It allows us to transform the processes that we have so that, again, the simple tasks that happen on a day to day basis, but that are very time consuming, can be done by machines. Then we can have our people focus on the things that truly do matter, where we do need human creativity to make decisions.

I think simplicity is key. One of the things that we've noticed is how our developers have been able to quickly adopt the platform; but not only the developers or the techy people, also the business.

One of the things I want to do is empower different business units to be able to do their own automations, so that I, from IT, don't become a bottleneck, but rather I empower others and I enable others to be successful.

One of the things I would definitely like to see is more of the machine-learning and cognitive capabilities. For example, now that we're starting to automate more and more tasks, there are some things that still require us to go back and modify the robots when we need to. But if we had more of the machine-learning integrated into it, I believe it would be easier to maintain, so that we wouldn't have to go back and adjust every time.

So far, no complaints. 

So far we've built 10 robots, so we haven't scaled it to the 100s, but from what I've seen on the architecture diagrams, and how we're building it, it seems like it's going to be scalable.

I have not used technical support yet.

I think it actually came out of The World of Watson last year or Interconnect. There was a lot of talk about process automation and robotics, so we had a couple of meetings with Accenture and KPMG. They were coaching us on RPA and that's where we started looking into different solutions that were available and that's how we got here.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• price
• reputation
• stability
• simplicity.

It was pretty straightforward. The packaging of the solution was pretty straightforward to just deploy. We're running it actually on Azure, on our cloud services, so we were able to get it up and running, I think literally, within less than half a day. It's also a PoC environment, but just getting that up and running was simple.

We looked at Blue Prism, which is provided by KPMG, and another one.

Overall it came down to the simplicity, the security that was behind it, and it was also pretty competitive from a price perspective.

I would rate this quality robotic process automation software a nine out of ten. I have to say I was pretty impressed with what I saw. I think now they can close the gap on bringing that climative angle into it, and that would make it a 10.

I would say start small, do a PoC, try it out. Make sure that it meets your needs and then go from there.

We have implemented this solution for our pattern rule-based high-volume finance and IT department. 

Offers an attractive package with multiple benefits, like unlimited use of some features. The solution is also very user-friendly. We ordered Studio, OCR architecture, and more features that were bundled together for the user's-benefit. 

There are certain limitations in the solution for screen reading. Certain times it cannot read a Microsoft screen, and this needs to be improved. Integration of IBM RPA with Microsoft needs to be enhanced. 

From time to time, the company has improved its features and package.

I have been using the solution for more than three years. 

The solution is quite stable. 

The solution is scalable. Around three to five people use IBM Robotic Process Automation in our company. 

The technical support team responds very fast and is easy to reach. 

The setup is generally straightforward but can become complex based on your execution plan.  

The pricing is reasonable. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten. 

The competitors of this solution, like UiPath, are more expensive. I would overall rate IBM RPA a seven out of ten. 

I use the solution to extract data from PDFs and upload it into Microsoft Excel.

The solution’s performance is good.

The product's document readers must be improved to capture the data well.

I have been using the solution for six months.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. The setup can be done in an hour.

The deployment can be done in-house. Once the development is complete, we need to download the source file and upload it to the production control room. The product does not require a technical team for maintenance.

The product has a yearly licensing fee.

I am using the latest version of the product. The product has two versions, one on cloud and the other on-premise. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.