Nintex RPA Reviews

We took all kinds of mindless operational processes, things we were doing over and over again and which cost us a lot of work time every day, or week, or month, and scheduled them to be automatic, with no human hand in the process.

We have a lot of examples. We make loans, although we are not a bank, for various purposes. Sometimes, people don't pay us back and the loans go to collection. We have to start all kinds of processes via lawyers, and when we transfer a case to a lawyer we have to prepare it. All the preparation for the lawyer is automatic now. All the letters for the lawyer with all the details about the loan, about the collection - everything is automatic.

Also, for each customer whose debt we transfer to a lawyer, we have feedback to our core system to update all the data in the system again. So all the data about the customer and the debt comes from the system to the lawyer, and feedback from the lawyer comes into the system. And all of this, of course, is connected to the loan itself, to the customer. Everything is aligned.

We are a digital company. We very quickly embrace all kinds of digital transformation. Kryon was just a part of that. We have engaged in digital transformation in many ways in our company. But the adoption of Kryon was very quick, and that is its advantage. Because it is a very quickly and very intuitively customized system, it helped us to adopt it through users who are not technical users. It really helped us to put a lot of automated processes in the system and adopt them very quickly. Now, my organization wants more. They say, "How did we live without it before?" It really helps us in our day-to-day processes, the ones that are not so complicated, not so involved, that we do over and over again.

Efficiency has increased. If robots are doing stuff we used to do, this increases the efficiency of the staff.

All our users have no technical background. But Kryon is really simple and intuitive. Our business adapted very quickly and easily. This is the main thing and it's why we love the system so much. It's why we are always trying to put more processes into the system and make more use cases: because of the simplicity and the intuitive nature of the system.

Our original plan was to do something like two robots, and a few processes, but because it was such a success in the company, we expanded it. We have 11 processes. The eleventh is due to go live in about a week. Some of them are not complex, some of them are more complex. It depends on the process itself, the amount of time, the amount of integration, if there are dependencies on another system.

In terms of plans to increase usage, for now we really want to see how the day-to-day is going with all the processes. More processes mean more licenses and robots, and we have to do ROI as the next step. I would guess we'll do more, but it's already a lot to have 11 processes in a year with four robots.

We, ourselves have not used Kryon's customer support. Maybe our third-party uses it on behalf of us. I don't know.

This is our first RPA solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very quick, very understandable, very open. If we had problems, they were helpful. They assisted our third-party company. It was very easy to work with.

Deployments depend on the process. We have been working with the system for a little less than a year. After about two months, we had the first process working. It's really quick. When I say two months for the first process, that means we sat with the customers, understood what they want, how to do it. We had them test it, we launched it, we optimized it in production. The whole timeline of the process was handled in that amount of time.

We asked our organization to set the priorities. We asked for a quick win, meaning something very small and very painful, or something which was taking a lot of time. That enabled us to win their appreciation and reduce the resistance to change. Some people may look at it as a robot is replacing me. We handled this too by making them a part of the implementation process. This way, they wanted it, were engaged with it, and wanted to do more. It gave them something that they hadn't seen before. It gave them a feeling of success. It's very important, through the process, to feel like you are succeeding in doing something new in a very short amount of time. The people involved have to see we're not really replacing them, and that it actually helps them to do more, to do better, to do things that have work quality to them.

The people using Kryon are from three departments: collections, services, and operations. Not everyone is using it, because we're uploading files to the system. There a few people in each department who are doing it. Overall there are about ten people involved with it, but it services the whole department. There are the people who operate the system, and the people enjoying the fruit.

Even when I purchased the license, it wasn't via Kryon. It was through a third-party. The product is Kryon, but the customization and all the agreements and the buying process were not through Kryon. It was with a third-party.

The reseller is HMS. All our connections to Kryon are through this company. All our processes of examination and solutions were through them. We are very pleased with the job they have done, with the service. They are very good and they helped us a lot.

But these days we are transferring all the knowledge, all the data, and all the operations of the system to our people, the employees of our company, so that we will be able to do it alone. The first year was through this third-party, and we have their support. And now our main goal is to be able to do it on our own.

Kryon has saved us money. We measure in terms of people. We haven't increased our employees in those departments, and we can say that we have saved nine employees, nine people we haven't had to hire.

I would expect that in the first year there is no ROI. It has to be measured over three or five years.

I wasn't part of the process. I had a colleague who did it.

It depends if you are doing it by yourself, with your employees or, like us, through a third- party or someone who knows how to work with the system. If you're doing it through a third-party, there is no problem and they have all the knowledge, all the data, all the know-how about how to do it. If you are doing it with your own people, training is mandatory and Kryon has it. Some kind of on-the-job training, or some kind of support, is necessary to be able to implement it quickly and the right way, because there is a right way, a way to do it properly.

Kryon was not involved in helping us find and prioritize processes that are ready for automation. We did so. They were not part of this process. We came up with the processes, we talked about them, not Kryon.

I'm not the one who uses the system every day. I'm not the one who uses the customization. We go through a third-party which does all the customizations for us. I can't tell you which part of the system I enjoyed the most, or what I'm using because I have a third party for that.

The primary use case is for back office processes.

It has improved our organizational process in inbound and outbound tourism. The previous process was very complex and took at least a day for the users. Now, it is fully automated and saving a lot of hours for our back office.

The product is very useful for our organization. The process takes approximately a month.

Our organization has nothing between the digital and back office processes.

Because of this product, we started to look for more processes to deploy.

The most valuable features for our organization are the automatic processes which save main power in the back office.

From our experience, the product is not suitable for end users.

It is a very stable product.

It is a very scalable product.

The product is used very extensively. We have plans to increase usage.

All users can use the processes.

We require two staff for deployment and maintenance.

The technical support is very good.

The vendor's customer service is very good.

We didn't use a previous solution.

The initial setup was deployed by Kryon.

Our implementation strategy was evolution strategy, process after process, and be the leading business user.

We used a third-party, HMS, who has very good knowledge in the product

There is no doubt that there will be ROI. However, it is too early to provide data.

This solution has saved us time when launching new automation processes, but it is too early to give the amount of time.

There is not enough data to determine if the solution has saved us money, business analyst hours, operational efficiency, or reduced employee errors.

In addition to the standard licensing costs, there are manpower costs.

We would recommend it.

We don't use Kryon Process Discovery.

We use Kryon in a number of use cases. We have done a lot of work in the insurance industry, especially client-onboarding. We are also working on AML, anti-money laundering. Another use case is data extraction from invoices, using the Kryon platform.

To give you an example, we worked on a client-onboarding scenario. Client-onboarding, when run manually, was typically taking about 45 minutes for just one customer, because the process is so lengthy and because of the amount of information required. In addition, it was updating four systems and there was work done to match the systems, which required a migration piece. Now, with automation, we capture it once, in one system, and then onboard this information to two or three other systems. It now takes a maximum of about eight minutes, compared to the 45 minutes of work when it was done manually.

It has definitely also helped our workforce embrace digital transformation. We have implemented this with onboarding processes, email processes, and the like. It has now spread to multiple LOBs and they're talking to us, including HR, finance, and more.

The bots result in a lot of effort saved and that means we don't need to hire people to do certain jobs. It's saving money on FTEs. I estimate that when we run a business use case, the typical savings are four to five FTEs per month. In terms of business analysts' time, out of eight hours, typically four hours are saved. Operational efficiency has increased more than 50 to 60 percent. Finally, it saves us time when launching new automation processes, by about 30 percent.

The best feature is its reporting. The core features of Kryon are the best. 

In addition, the number of commands it gives us to edit and modify is really good. 

It also captures screen activities and plays them back. I'm a technical guy, so it's very easy for me to do it. If I imagine giving this to a business guy, it is really amazing, because he knows what action he is going to perform.

With respect to web-based applications that we have, Kryon may not be able to do certain things in terms of technology and support.

Also, there are limitations on integrations with other platforms like ServiceNow. There are some issues integrating. It's not a really an open system. The product, its design, etc., is really good, but they have to look at the openness, how to integrate with other products which are available in the market, as well as with our own solutions. You can do integration but it is not so easy. You have to build certain things to integrate. It's not like an open API is available. It's there but it's not really open compared to competitors.

The only challenge today is that when we migrate to a new version, there is a lot of work. We need to roll it back. Once migrated, we cannot roll it back easily. There are a lot of things that need to change. We've asked Kryon to build a complete package so that migration can easily happen from one version to another version. 

For example, 5.1 to 5.4 was really a nightmare for us. It was more to do with the number of assets we had. When they changed to 5.4, with the new enhancements, some of the scripts were failing after we migrated, and we had a whole list of issues. We had to reconfigure certain elements. It was effort. It was not an easy migration.

We are now doing close to 20 processes. It still works fine. There are no issues from the scalability point of view.

Technical support is there in some of the regions. In APAC it is good. One or two years back, it was not there. They've improved since then. They are able to support us if that is required.

The initial setup took some time because there are a number of components. There is a server, Studio, etc., so it takes some time to set up properly. But once it is set up, it's easy to work with. But the initial setup requires some time.

Setting up a server typically takes three to five days. We go through a process where we regulate things, we make sure we validate the software, and we that we have approval. 

Our implementation strategy was to first set up a pilot. After the pilot, we wanted to go full-blown. That's when we looked at infrastructure for development, testing, and production. We then started bringing a lot more LOBs in, to grow and develop.

We used Kryon consultants, and some of our team members also got trained and certified so that we could take over that piece. Initially it was a joint effort and after that we took over.

Our experience with Kryon consulting was good. They follow certain guidelines, they don't allow any unwanted consultants to implement or do anything. They make sure consultants are certified in the product and that they have experience. That was good. That's how they start with all customers.

If we look at the number of FTEs saved, there is definitely ROI from those savings. In fact, we are collecting metrics on that now, to know how much value we've had. Over the three years we have had close to $300,000.

Our licensing cost is close to $80,000 US per year and that includes the server, Studio, and both attended and unattended bots. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We evaluated a few solutions but Kryon was the platform we chose. We evaluated UiPath and Kofax. We found Kryon to be a good platform so we engaged it. It is easy to use, no integrations were required, there are no plugins to download. Our platform includes mainframe and client-server.

At the time we were evaluating, UiPath was not really working out well. If we were to compare now it's a different scenario, but two years back it was a nightmare.

My advice is to follow the right set of instructions and best practices, even before you implement automation. Look at what is available, at how you do it. If you don't follow those instructions, you may find it difficult, but once you know exactly how to use it and what to do, it works. Have training properly done and after that start looking at implementation.

It's really good for end-to-end RPA. The way we work is we do a discovery manually rather than using an automated discovery process. Once we identify a process and we run through a complete lifecycle of it. We then work on the design elements, how to run the exceptions, etc. We make sure that UAT is done, that it is tested well. We then make sure that the business users accept the process, how it's going to work. We then validate the bot, make sure we get a sign-off from them, and then we go to production. We do one week or two weeks off thorough checking on production to make sure there are no exceptions or issues. We then hand it over to the client to run it.

In terms of the ease of use of Kryon for business users with no technical background, that's a key area. What we say to them is, if you're not familiar with Kryon and you want to automate, there is a basic, fundamental, one-day workshop. It will give you at least an idea of how to record, what the options are, what you should look for - the key things to learn about some of the elements of the Kryon platform. Then they're good to go. I see that users are then happily recording things and playing them back. So Kryon provides ease of use where they are not really struggling. If somebody knows Excel, that person can easily run Kryon.

We have business users and we have some developers. It's a small team of five to eight people, including the business users. In terms of deployment and maintenance of Kryon, we currently have a very small number of processes. There is an agenda to grow big. We're looking at more than taking more 30 live so we are bringing in external consultants to help us do that job. We want to keep a lean team right now, because once we go live we will need to do more of the production support and maintenance of the bots. We will only do small-scale development in-house. If it gets to a complex level, we will get a team of consultants to help us. In terms of infrastructure, we have one guy dedicated to that right now.

I would rate Kryon at seven out of ten. There are the migration issues and they need to support web-based apps.

We mainly use it for creating automated processes from previously manual processes, to make existing processes faster, better quality and more efficient. We currently have three processes implemented in production and the fourth is going live next week. It's not heavily used, so far.

The first one is small. It just enters the US dollar currency into our ERP system. It's a daily task each morning. The second one involves an external, third-party systems from which we export a report and import it into one of our systems. It used to be done on a daily basis by an employee and now it's being done automatically. The third one is an automated delivery note. One of our suppliers, provides our tobacco products with paper delivery notes. So now they send us a daily report and the robot enters the delivery notes into the operations system. The fourth one which will go live next week, will upload bank notes of returned payments into our financial system. That was another manual process that will be automated.

The currency automation saves us around five minutes per day, but it has to be done every day. For this one, the amount of time is irrelevant. It's more that there are many processes that rely on the currency. So if it hasn't been done or is done late, it can delay other processes. So the value here is more than how much time it saves us. The second one saves us approximately five to ten minutes per day. The third one, the delivery note process, is more difficult to calculate since we have approximately 200 points of sale. Each one has one to two deliveries per week and it takes five to 10 minutes for each point of sale to create these delivery notes manually. So it saves us 2,000 minutes, about 1.5 times a week. The last one, the one that is going live next week, is more significant. It will save approximately a day per week for an employee.

As for operational efficiency, the automatic delivery notes is most significant. From the 200 managers, the bit of feedback that I have gotten is very positive. From the others, I have to admit that it's more minor.

Of course it has helped to reduce employee errors, especially with the delivery notes, since the correct number is very important. If you enter "11" instead of "one," a type-o, it's very significant because it is an expensive product. Definitely, in terms of user-error, we have improved on that a lot. Before Kryon, there were one to two errors per day, or about 50 per month. We found most of them later on and then someone had to remediate them. It has saved us significant man-hours.

Once I decide a process is suitable as a Kryon solution, the cycle of automation is quite quick. I learn about the existing process and I'm one of the two guys who program the Kryon environment. It's relatively simple. There are many details, but once you understand the concept it is quite easy.

I think our version is two versions behind. I just had a talk about it last week with our account manager at Kryon and we planned together to upgrade the environment once per year. In my opinion, today, if possible, it would be better to have it done automatically, like an application on your smartphone. Or even if done manually, the upgrade should just be "next, next, next," and it's upgraded, rather than making it a project to upgrade. In the digital era, that is one of the expectations, that it would be easier.

Besides that, it's all about functionality: What you can do and what you cannot do. I'm not very familiar with the competitors' solutions, so I'm living in the world or Kryon functionality. Sometimes I'm looking to automate something and it's not there. That doesn't mean that it's not possible.

In terms of additional features, the sky is the limit. For example, we are working with Oracle ERP. It would be great if there were built-in functions or commands to integrate with the Oracle application, and not everything through capturing screens and going from there. Currently, there is only an integration with Office, mainly to Excel. I understand that Excel is much more popular than Oracle in terms of use and in terms of integration. For an organization that works with the Oracle application, I would love to have even a plugin or a tool kit for that - maybe to SAP as well.

There was one day that Kryon had a problem to do with a certificate change or something like that. The whole Kryon environment was down. Aside from that, it's been quite stable and works smoothly on a daily basis. We haven't faced any problems.

We haven't explored the scalability yet. There is room for many more implementations on the one license that we have.

I'm working with the technical support on a few issues. For the issue with the certificate, I sent them a case and they replied immediately saying that it was a global issue and that it would be fixed in the next couple of hours. And it was. Overall, on a scale of one to five, technical support is very close to five. Over the year I have had something like five or six tickets. One of them is ongoing + one bug reported.

As for customer success, we have an account manager. I think she supports all the local market accounts. She initiates meetings once per quarter. She's very approachable and cooperative. She's really great.

For the setup of the whole Kryon environment I was only involved in the framework, just to make sure that our system group prepared the server and installed the SQL server they requested, and to make sure they had all the permissions they needed, but nothing more than that. The consultants did all the rest.

Maintenance requires just my colleague and myself.

We didn't do it independently. We brought in EY (Ernst Young) consultants to do it. It went smoothly as far as I concerned. It was a one- or two-day workshop and it was done. It was really quick.

Thanks to them we have the Kryon environment. They suggested it and we brought them in to implement the first implementation, which is not being used anymore because we replaced the target system. 

They sent two consultants and one intern for the job. 

We haven't calculated ROI yet. I'm quite confident that in the long run it will demonstrate a return on investment. In the first year, at least for us, because there have only been three or four implementations, but nothing more than that, in terms of man-hours the supplier delivery notes is most significant. It's possible it has already given us a return on investment.

We have a yearly license. It's about $5,000 per year. There are no additional costs other than that a server has a license.

Initially, our CIO came up with the idea and brought Ernst Young in to implement it in our organization. In the first meeting we had with EY, they put two RPA systems on the table, Kryon and another which I don't remember. They gave the pros and cons for each solution and together we selected Kryon. One of the factors was that it's an Israeli company, so we thought it would be easier for us in terms of approachability, language and work hours. We believed it would be easier for us to use.

Take the training course. At least the person who is going to program the robots has to have some background in information systems in general and in more specific, operation systems, in programming and in Office, of course. He has to have a technical orientation, database knowledge would help him, as well as system analysis capabilities.

In terms of ease of use for business users, the only users are me and 2 other persons in the information systems department. Currently, we have only unattended implementations and no attended implementations which would require a user in the organization to operate it. As for programming it, it requires up-front training. The e-learning, at least at the time that we started working with Kryon, was not enough. Just the basics were there. When we tried to do some more complicated stuff, we had to understand it better. We took the four days of training. After that we started all of the implementations.

As for helping our workforce embrace digital transformation, I wouldn't relate Kryon to that, at least not yet. We are still not using it for digital processes or a digital environment. But we plan to do that in the upcoming weeks. There is a process to create a new customer, which today is very complicated. The last part is to just type the customer's details into the system. I'm thinking of using Kryon which would complete a fully digital process.

In terms of my rating of nine out of ten, there are many things that I'm not sure of. For example, it takes a while to launch the Studio, something like a couple of minutes. It could be that my laptop is not strong enough. It might be that our virtual server doesn't have all the necessary memory or CPU capabilities. It might be many things, so I don't want to say that it's only due to performance issues with Kryon.

We found a bug in a database trigger with Oracle Database. I know that it works mostly with the SQL server, but we are using Oracle, so that's another issue that came to mind. The fact is that we found this bug something like six months ago and it's still not in the new version. As far as it was communicated to me, it will be part of the next version. If that bug was critical for us, maybe I wouldn't have rated it a nine; maybe it would be a six or seven or eight. But, luckily for them, it's not highly critical for us. I don't know how they prioritize bug-fixing. I suppose that there are not too many Oracle Database organizations among their customers, at least not in our market. Therefore, maybe they prioritize this somewhere at the bottom. But for us it's a bug and we cannot use this functionality, which is required. That's why I took off one out of ten. Besides that, it works, it's stable, it has nice performance, and was, therefore, a good decision to go with it.

The primary use case is process automation. We are a financial institution, a bank. We use it to automate routine processes which don't require any cognitive participation.

One way the solution has improved the way our organization functions is that we have used RPA to align addresses between systems. We have a few central systems which hold the customer addresses. Sometimes the addresses are different in different systems. We find it very convenient to align the addresses by extracting the address from one system and using Kryon RPA to simulate the process of updating the address in the other system. It simulates the work of a clerk who used to regularly do so. We automated it and now the systems are aligned. The alternative was to develop interfaces, in the backend, between the systems, but that would have been very expensive.

RPA is part of the digital transformation. What we are doing is actually advancing the digital automation, and Kryon is a major part of it. When we automate processes, that's part of the digital transformation, making the organization more digital and more automated. The experience of our customers is very influenced by it. For example, we had a process for when a customer needed to deposit money when paying back a loan. If he didn't do it, he was late in his payments, we moved the process to the collection unit. Now, the collection unit uses RPA. The process is more efficient and the customer experience is better.

Because the processes we have automated mostly involve routine work, the solution hasn't saved business analysts' time, since they don't do routine work. But it has resulted in operational efficiencies. For the processes that we have automated, the efficiency has increased by 100 percent. We take processes that require human resources and we make them fully automatic.

We use Kryon Studio to develop new wizards and we use the features to capture elements from the screen and automate processes. We use the product thoroughly. The screen capture allows us to interface with systems which don't have an API, or where the API is very expensive, and it allows us to do on-screen integration.

The automation process is very user-friendly and the usability is very good. Developers are very satisfied with the system.

We have found some difficulties regarding the integration with legacy systems where the screen has elements in the Hebrew language. The connection to Hebrew, right-to-left systems, is more challenging.

We are discussing development of the product with Kryon.

We have been using it for 2.5 years.

We have tens processes in production. As of now, we haven't had any stability issues. It's working great.

As for increasing our usage, we develop two processes per month per developer. That is currently on schedule. We've developed tens processes but we have created interfaces to different platforms in the backend. Now, with the interfaces developed, we expect the next automation to be developed faster. The goal of two processes per month per developer is realistic.

I would rate Kryon's technical support very highly. They are very professional and the service quality is good. They try to solve the issues promptly. We are very satisfied. And that evaluation is relevant regarding their customer service. Their Customer Success provides the technical service.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was a little bit complex because Kryon needed to obey bank regulations. We have very high security requirements. They were very devoted to solving the issues and it was great.

The deployment took a total of about three weeks. 

Our implementation strategy was done in a spiral way. We started with a single process. It took us two months to install the system, get the knowledge we needed about it, and to analyze and develop the first process. This onboarding process was accompanied by Kryon Customer Success. In the beginning, we had a kickoff meeting and we decided on a day, two months down the road, on which we would have the first process in production. We worked together to make it happen. And we succeeded in achieving this goal. Then we started to analyze two or three processes in parallel, and we continue to develop and analyze the next processes.

We were accompanied by Kryon's Professional Services and we are very satisfied with them. They helped us, first, in teaching our personnel how to work with Kryon, and then they installed the system on our premises. They were very helpful in solving problems. We have a very good relationship with them.

There are other advantages from automating processes, other than saving money. We consider the cost efficiency and other advantages, such as the quality of the process being highly improved. It's very hard to estimate the cost of errors that are eliminated. But we expect that automating processes does eliminate errors.

We have a yearly subscription.

We checked several alternatives but decided to go with Kryon due to their product capabilities and the local support.

We haven't used the Process Discovery from Kryon yet. We started with processes that we analyzed and found to be suitable for automation. We find that the product, the Kryon Studio, to be very good at doing task automation. We are now scaling out and going to new processes.

The decision we made to develop the processes by ourselves with our team was a very good decision. The onboarding process along with Kryon's Customer Success - if you work together with them and consider them as partners - will work very well.

Regarding the solution's ease-of-use for business users, we use unattended automation so business users are not part of the process. For us, businesses users do not interface with the system.

In terms of finding and prioritizing processes that are ripe for automation, Kryon offered its service in analyzing processes and finding the right candidates for automation. But we were working with a consultant from Strauss Strategy. We are working with them in finding the processes.

We have a center of excellence team which contains two developers and there is a team leader who is responsible RPA. So we have three persons working with Kryon.

I primarily use this solution to substitute processes where humans perform checks that do not need human judgment. These include onboarding, offboarding, and changing a contract. 

Kryon will allow you to automate processes fast and easy and you do not need to be a developer to automate processes. The advanced command will let you integrate with other systems quite easy.

Apart from the usual advantages (recording etc), I think the process that is presented as  'Powerpoint' slides makes it really easy to close the gap between the subject matter expert and the person configuring the robot.

It could be more reliable in spying HTML. I did expect this to be better in the 19.4 version.

I have been using Kryon RPA for almost one year.

Our primary use case is two back-office processes from a specific area, an area which was very complicated. In the credit card world, there is a process called a chargeback, when the customer says he didn't do a specific transaction, or it's not the right amount. This process has a very long, complicated and regulated process behind the scenes, after the conversation with the customer. We used a robot to automate a lot of the process, to make it shorter, easier, and to save a lot of agents working on the process.

Every week or two weeks we are bringing on a new process with the robot. We are still in the middle of the automation move; we have a very big roadmap for what comes next. We are still on this trail.

The process I noted above is a main business area with a lot of very specific processes inside - we have now more than 15 specific processes in this business area. All of them, as of now, have saved us almost six FTEs. That's a lot of money. The savings are great and they will increase every month.

In the last month, we achieved 11,000 activities done by robot. Before Kryon, we did 500 each month. When we started with automation ten months ago we did a few hundred. Each month we have added more and more processes and more and more activities. It's quite dramatic, because we took a very complex business area, and every activity in it which can be done automatically is being replaced by the robot instead of people working on them.

In terms of Kryon helping us embrace digital transformation, we are very advanced in this area. More than 70 percent of our interactions with customers are digital. But Kryon helped us with some of the processes which are more complicated, where we had people doing things in the back-office after the digital process. Now we can do more of them automatically. It's another step in the same direction for us.

What we are lacking is OCR, the ability to read text. We would like it to have the ability to take a page which is free text and analyze it, and then for the robot to know what to do next. This ability does not exist in Kryon products, so our company is now trying another tool which has this specific feature - an IBM tool which combines RPA and OCR together.

Also, when the robot stops working for any reason - it doesn't matter if it's something in our systems or our infrastructure - it does not know to go back to the same point it was at when it stopped. We have to start from the beginning or to delete the report. It cannot continue from the same point. We would like the robot to know how to continue.

It's quite stable. Most of the difficulties are coming from the changes on our side.

The scalability has been good enough for our needs.

Prior to Kryon, we didn't work with another solution. But we are now starting to work with another solution because of OCR.

On the technical side, the setup was done mostly by HMS. The issues we dealt with were mostly to do with the connection to our organization's system. The authorization issue was difficult for the system and many other aspects, but I know part of it was from our side. We also had some information-security issues. I don't think it was too complicated, but it took us about a month-and-a-half, to do the first at set up, and then it was much easier.

We learned a lot. We learned what we need to prepare for each process so the process will be the most effective and quick. We learned about the abilities of the tool and that helped us in thinking about the next processes and how to do things more efficiently.

We are also using BI to help us with more complex business logic. Instead of doing it in the robot, we are doing it in BI and giving the robot more direct reports to work on. It makes our process much smarter and efficient.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, we have one full-time employee working on it, and one of our business persons, a project manager, is working on it half-time. He's involved in building the business process, deciding what will be the next step, and helping close all the details on our side.

The maintenance is not high. It's just that each time the system is changing, we need to teach the robot the process from the beginning. This is the only maintenance we have. The other work is really to in developing the next process each time.

We have a supplier doing the implementations for us, HMS. They are more involved in the technical details and issues. But next month, we are planning to do Kryon's course. We are bringing it here, and then eight people, both business and tech people from our organization, will learn the tool and then we will be able to use it by ourselves.

Our experience with HMS has been very good. We like working with them. We are continuing with them but from a budget point of view we would also want to learn to be more independent. But we'll definitely continue working with them.

Now that the process is cheaper for us, we have been able to change our business rules a little bit and save more money by automating. To give a simple example, if it was worthwhile for us to do a specific activity only if it was more than 50 shekels, now, when the robot is doing it and it's cheaper for us, we're doing it from the first shekel. We are saving more money by changing the business rules because the process is costing us less money.

It has also helped to reduce employee errors. This is also very important. And it has helped us in terms of monitoring because we need to do less monitoring of the employees. That's another area of savings, another improvement. In the beginning, we did need to monitor the automated process, but after seeing it and becoming comfortable with it, we were able to reduce our monitoring of employees.

The first robot was very expensive.

For us, there are the additional implementation costs that we paying to HMS.

We have a lot of people coming to us to learn from our process, so we've been providing advice already. First of all, it's important to do a very smart business analysis, from the business side, and not automate exactly the way it was done before. Really think about ways you can improve and make the business logic, the business rules behind the scenes, more effective. This is very important.

It's also important to look at becoming independent with the solution from the beginning. We have only started to plan for that now.

The authorization issues within our company also took a lot of time, so I would suggest getting those dealt with in advance.

Part of the difficulty in embracing the tool is on our side, due to bureaucratic issues that we have in our organization. Every change we make which results in a new version of the system the robot is working on means we need to teach the robot from the beginning to do the process.

For example, when we would have a new version of the system, we would ask our people, "Has anything changed?" They would say, "No. Nothing is new." Only after would we find out that something moved from the right to the left. Just one button. For the employees, it didn't matter. For the robot, of course, it does. And then we needed to teach the robot to do it again. So we have learned to prepare ourselves better before a new version is released. We receive all the screens. We teach the robot to do everything again. We're checking ourselves. We test more. These are things we learned along the way, "on-the-job learning." We wasted a lot of time on this because we did not prepare for it properly.

In terms of the prioritization process, we are working with a business analyst to decide exactly what the next process should be, what has the biggest number of activities per month and that the business case is important. We also look, from an implementation point of view, at whether we can do it. Is it accessible for us and not something very complicated which will not be possible? We take all of this into account and we decide which process to put in next. We already did the main business area and now we're continuing to another business area and doing the same process. One of the things on our roadmap is to optimize part of our monitoring processes.

From a business-analyst point of view, we are using a lot of analytics to make it very smart and efficient. So it's not saving us money in business analytics, it's the opposite. But it's worthwhile for us. The discovery process in our methodology is very important because each case is a little bit different, so we need to find the right rules, the logic.

The first process was the most difficult. We needed to learn how to work with it. But by using it more and more, we have achieved a very easy and quick process. The delivery time, now, is very good for us. We are adding a new process every two weeks. Now it's good, but the first time was more difficult.

We're automating a lot of shared services tasks within our homegrown system: payroll, billing, and things like that.

As a company that places temporary employees, we have talent globally. In the UK there are GDPR requirements. Before Kryon, when one of our field employees reached out to us saying that we needed to remove their records, that was all done manually. Now, that’s something done by the robot, giving people time back and reducing possible entry mistakes. It’s the same thing with fee entries within our system. That is something that might take somebody ten hours, whereas a robot will be able to take that off somebody’s hands and ideally reduce the time to complete.

In terms of embracing the digital transformation, there is the question of whether people are going to be accepting of tasks being taken away from them and what they're going to do with that time. But a lot of people have really embraced it, especially people who were taking ten hours to put fees into our system and who will be able to use that time for more productive and less mindless tasks.

The advanced Excel functionalities are really convenient because we work a lot with spreadsheets. It’s also easy to use the HTML selectors on most major sites. It’s just a click and it picks it up. There’s not a lot of no hard-coding with it.

While I have some technical background, everything is self-taught. I'm not necessarily a developer myself, but picking up the tool, with the training they provided, has been pretty easy. I’m currently the only person using the tool in our company.

We use Google Drive a lot. If somebody sends us a spreadsheet or a document, it's going to be in Google’s format. It's not going to be in Microsoft Office format. But currently, there's no integration with Google’s documents. That would be a huge plus to have.

The same goes for, using Chrome natively. There's an extension but it doesn't necessarily always work. We have to close Chrome and reopen it to get it to pick things up sometimes, depending on the page and the IFrames and things like that.

I’m not sure yet what I think about the stability of Kryon because we haven't been able to get things constantly running and working. We initially had the server issue. And then, there have been issues with Chrome crashing and the extension.

Right now our usage of Kryon is limited to our shared services team. We're taking care of those processes first. But we have plans to automate as many processes as we can get on our plate and get through.

We have room to grow. We just have to figure out where we need to go from where we're at now. Right now it's a waiting game to get things fixed and running.

Customer service gets a rating of 100 percent. They’re fantastic. They're always really quick to respond. If we have a problem or if we put in a ticket that is more high-priority, our rep will jump on it and get things escalated. They’re happy to work through issues and take as much time as needed to resolve everything.

The Kryon team has definitely helped prioritize processes that are ripe for automation. It's an ongoing process, but they give us a good understanding of what to expect and how to figure those processes out; what can and can't be automated. It was mostly through the training. Going through that with them gave us a better understanding of what sorts of processes make sense.

We didn’t have a previous solution. We went with Kryon because of

• the ease of use
• the user interface seemed a lot better, more usable
• some advanced features that others didn't have
• the price - can't beat the price.

We had somebody within our department doing the initial setup, although I was on the calls. It was a little bit complex, because there were some issues we ran into with Server 2016. When we tried to run an unattended bot on there it wasn't working so we had to switch operating systems. We've had to go back and forth to get things truly set up and ready to go. We're still working on the deployment, but that's not necessarily because of Kryon issues. It took some time to figure out the issue with the server, going back and forth with screen-sharing, etc.

And it seems that the size of the virtual machine that they provided with us might not be enough. We're trying to figure that out. Chrome keeps crashing on us. Once that is resolved, we have three or four processes that are pretty much ready to go. I just have to get through the actual testing of the running the unattended bots on the virtual machines.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we are working with our shared services teams to identify the processes. We have a daily “stand-up” and a weekly planning session to figure out and prioritize our processes. Then it's just a matter of building and testing and getting them out.

I expect that Kryon will save us money. It's too early to tell, but I would say that once it starts running there are going to be cost savings.

There are different pricing levels for every bot or unattended bot. You can buy however many you want. You'll need an additional virtual machine for it to work on. You can get multiple attended bots if you have users who have Windows machines. You can run those locally on their machines.

Automation Anywhere was one of the solutions we looked at. There were others but it’s been a while since we went through all of them.

Make sure that you have your processes in a good place and that you have them written out. Make sure that you have your stakeholders onboard. And make sure that your bot works on the right server.

We don't use the process-discovery functionality of the tool. We're identifying our own processes by polling various stakeholders to see which processes make sense to automate. But it seems like it's pretty easy. We've hit a couple of snags with our virtual machines and the OS they are running and with the Chrome Extension. We're doing everything with unattended bots since we're primarily a Mac-based company. We're not able to run them on people's local machines other than the machine I use to create the Wizards.

In terms of operational efficiency, it might be a little too early to tell because we're stuck right now. But in the big picture, not only are we identifying processes, but we're also figuring out how to improve the processes, whether somebody is currently still manually doing them or a bot is doing the improved process.