WorkFusion Reviews

We use WF on banking use cases

It has helped us create new opportunities. 

WorkFusion has the capability to implement complex workflows, which is useful. ML capabilities are very powerfull as well

Non-code and further ML capabilities would be usefull.

Platform is very scalable with the exception of Control Tower. Some improvements could be usefull on this component.

A spanish customer service would be appreciated. I would rate the technical support as 9 out of 10.

Positive

WorkFusion's implementation is very easy. The biggest issue is analyzing the documents internally.

The implementation time depends on the project and use case.

WorkFusion is leader on IDP.

I would recommend WorkFusion as a very flexible tool.

We use this solution for automating processes, including reading data from documents.

This solution has great document recognition capabilities. It uses OCR and Machine Learning and works with digitized documents. It collects the fields inside the documents, based on the models that we trained with. 

A better graphical user interface that allows business users to perform automation would make this solution number one in the market. 

I would like to see improvements made with regard to tagging documents in the machine learning stage. They have an overlay document, which is great, but it would be helpful to be able to re-tag a document in a superior way. 

I have been using this solution for one year.

The technical support for this solution is really fast and the people are really helpful. They provide the necessary information in a timely fashion and can connect remotely to solve issues. Overall, the support is great.

Speaking about implementing the entire business process, for a medium-sized implementation that includes document recognition and the RPA platform, it took three people about a month and a half. That started with collecting the requirements and ended with the final demo and acceptance.

I have evaluated other solutions on the market and have found that the document recognition experience with this solution is better. Some use OCR and others use machine learning, but there is no solution on the market with the capability where you can apply machine learning for a different type of document, and you can extract fields of your interest from it. This is a core feature of this solution.

Automation Anywhere and UiPath have better user interfaces, where it is quite obvious for anyone who is new to the programming world. It allows you to make business processes, some getting quite complex. WorkFusion has this as well, but it is quite limited. At the same time, complex business processes in production will always need some coding.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My first use case was for reconciliation purposes. In our bank, we had recon challenges with one of our tools. We built a bot that can reconcile the bank's main push-pull account. It does the reconciliations and picks out all the exceptions, things that don't match between the bank's account and the customers. For example, if there's a debit here but we don't see it corresponding there, it flags it as an exception and, at the end of the process, it triggers an email to the team that owns recons to be handled manually. But the bot does the main part of the reconciling.

We came up with bot processes that are saving the bank time. It would take days to do a reconciliation of the bank's main push-pull wallet. Because of that, sometimes when there was a mismatch, nobody picked it up on time and the bank would lose money. Now that the recons are happening on a daily basis, it's helping the bank. Now, the bank is diving deeper and wants to go more into automation.

It frees up time. The feedback we have gotten from the businesses, now that we've been able to automate their work, is that they're able to spend more time with clients that require their attention. There are some customers that would prefer you spend more time talking to them, advising them about products and services. Now, they have ample time for that. 

Somebody who previously spent about three hours out of an eight-hour day doing reconciliations was only left with four or five hours, which didn't give them ample time to spend time with customers or pick up other things that required their attention. Even if it's something that is not fully automated and requires the officer in charge to manually trigger that process for it to run, once that person has triggered it, they can go about their normal routine. It's something that some of the business team members have come to accept and they are diving into it more.

It has helped improve our accuracy because when it does the recons, it does the matching. Recently, our recons team was audited, and when the auditing was done, the process done by the reconciliation bot was the only process that was passed by the auditor. The ask now is to automate all the other processes we have yet to automate. I'm confident when it comes to accuracy because of the audit results.

The tool itself is easy. I started using it without really having any coding experience, and it was something that drew my attention toward development. I was from the business side, generally, but now I find myself in the engineering field and doing more. But it started from there, where I didn't have any knowledge. So the fact that it was just a matter of "click here, click here," allowed me to mimic exactly what I used to do for account reconciliation purposes. After just a few clicks, it was doing reconciliations for me. It is the tool that got me started on this journey because it was easy to use.

I came fully from the business. I didn't have any technical background and actually did Banking and Finance in school. I just knew how to use a laptop, but I didn't have any technical skills when I started this journey. 

For me, where it can be improved is the speed. I built two bots, one with WorkFusion and the same thing with Python. My feeling was that the speed at which Python did things, how fast it did them, was quite cool. It was faster. Sometimes, when WorkFusion is running, the way it triggers on its own, it takes time before it even launches the page. But once it launches the page, it moves. WorkFusion could improve how the tool itself triggers some of these bots on its own. I feel that it's slightly slow.

They are all fast but the other one was a bit better than it was in WorkFusion. They are doing better when compared to the old versions they used to have. When I started, the tool was way worse. The more recent one I'm using is notably better in terms of its speed.

I started using WorkFusion in 2020. I did my own personal learning around it at the start and then a certification program and became fully certified in 2021. I am now a Power User of it.

I've gone beyond just WorkFusion, and I've done a deep dive building robots in Python. I'm currently also doing that with PowerApps from Microsoft.

I feel that the slowness I mentioned is coming from it not being stable. I've had scenarios where I run a bot the first time and it gives me an error. I don't make any changes to it and run it a second time and it goes through successfully. I can't explain what causes that. Maybe it is network-related.

But in general, once we have developed the bots, they run on their own. The only time I've had a challenge where it has not been able to complete was in the event that the bot was not able to access some of the platforms we use because a platform was down. If you assign the time, "Run at 6:00 AM," by 6:00 AM you will notice that it will at least attempt to run. If there's an error, it will alert you. You can see that it couldn't log into a page because the page wasn't there, but it attempted to do it. It won't be the case that it didn't run because of something on their side.

They usually give us direct support because our bank has a direct contract with them. If we make a suggestion about what we want, they find a way to put that into the system for us. But I haven't had any reason to go to them for support. The tool hasn't given me any headaches.

Comparing WorkFusion from two years ago with WorkFusion now, there's a difference. They keep adding more. Previously, the number of pages you would get for OCR and machine learning wouldn't be that huge. You would use them up and you couldn't do anything more. And these are bot processes that need to be running on a regular basis. But now, that has been increased heavily. 

There are more additions and features being added to help make our work much easier. Before they do an update, they send emails to some of their regular users to ask, "What do you think we can bring on board in our next version that will help the tool?" They do try to release versions that can help.

Previously, in the bank, we didn't do much automation. It was a journey the bank decided to go on in 2020. The bank wanted to start automating most of its manual processes related to a type of tax. We have neighboring countries that had similar projects. The whole idea stemmed from South Africa. They were doing most of their automation in WorkFusion so we decided it was something we could also look into.

I saw WorkFusion online somewhere and somebody also mentioned it to me when we were at a session about something else. They said, "Oh, he did some automation with WorkFusion." I was a bit curious and read about it and decided to download it. Nobody guided me through it but they have online training, so that's where I went.

I went through the "How To" on their portal. They started me off by playing around on a website, capturing data, taking a few figures from online, things that had to do with rates. When I did that bit of work and I picked up the idea of how it works, I built my own quick bot. It wasn't anything huge, but it solved one of the problems I had at work. And that's what led me to further go and get certified in it.

Based on those of us who took the early lead, and our success story, the bank felt that it should invest in this channel.

You usually will use the tool itself on-prem. But to have it run fully automated, you put it on the cloud on their server, where it's able to run, connect, and then run on its own.

I followed the steps and the setup was quite okay. Even when I was about to purchase a license and switch it to their cloud site, I was able to do it on my own. It was just a matter of reinstalling and selecting the right option. Based on the videos that I was watching, it wasn't difficult at all. And that's especially true if you are a first-time user of the platform. If you watch the video, you can follow it through and then do your own setup. And you will have your own studio to do development in.

I started using the OCR after I was fully licensed. It wasn't difficult for me. You can practically show it what you want it to do on the page. You show the bot, "Go here, and whenever you see this reference, pick the next value after that." It can do it for you.

We've gone beyond just WorkFusion. We have added more tools to our development. We do Python and Microsoft Power Automate as well. We keep exploring and adding more tools that we can use internally to cover things. One thing we have noticed using some of these tools is that some things may be faster in Python than in WorkFusion. We try to compare them and see which one solves the particular problem we have and which is faster.

We attempted OCR in Python but we weren't getting the accuracy we wanted. We brought in Power Automate and noticed that there's an OCR piece in the PowerApps and we are looking at whether it can give us the accuracy we want. But for now, when we have documents and files to read, the tool we go for is WorkFusion.

If you have any technical background in Java or other development languages and you want to experience some light coding or just know a little coding, WorkFusion is good because it allows you to do a lot by clicking. It's good for somebody who wants to start this journey. There's a coding part of WorkFusion for those who want, but if you want to build your skills and start automation, it's not a bad tool to start with. In time, you're going to want more, but for a starter, WorkFusion is not a bad tool at all. You can click and it does image recognition and more. It's easy to navigate.

The document processing engine for specific types of documents, for the few docs that I have worked with it, is okay. It tries to mimic exactly what a human would do, but I wouldn't rate it at 100 percent. It does exactly what you want it to do but it might take a lot of time to get through a particular document. WorkFusion goes cell-by-cell compared to the same thing in Python where I could quickly just read it into memory and then do an entire page. With WorkFusion you can also read something into memory if you give it the right range and then you can use it in the way you want to.

As a bank, document processing is critical. You can't get it wrong. That's the reason that, for most of the bots we develop, we usually have manual intervention at the end for a human to review things. We get somebody to consent to it before it goes out because these are the kinds of things that commit the bank. We need to be extra careful with documentation.

We have started a center of excellence where we train people who want to learn how to do automation on their own. They might not necessarily be tech-minded, but we show them how to do it and then they can. We are getting a lot of people who are trying to get on board and buy into the idea.

A lot of people who are using it in our organization are using the free version. The certified version is something you pay for. We have about eight people who are using the certified version and we have two more people undergoing the certification process. The last time I checked, there were 20 users using the free version and practicing using the tool in general.

Initially, people thought it was geared toward somebody losing his job. But now they have bought into it. These bots are things that need to be handled and maintained by somebody. So it's not here to kick you out of your job but to provide you with an alternative route.

One thing we didn't like was their OCR solution. We felt it's somewhat inefficient. And on the cloud setup, I would like to see more OCR-related features because other solutions integrate various tools into their services. For example, a few RPA solution providers have dynamic services for Workfront and some other services. They can dynamically pick services from NLP or various other areas on a case-to-case basis. So depending on the scenario, the product itself will pick those services to create consistent efficiency. It's similar to the service AWS or Azure uses. All these individual services are efficient in specific scenarios, so these bot platforms can identify which one to use and dynamically switch among them. It has produced exceptional results. So that is one recommendation I would make to WorkFusion. This one feature could significantly simplify things. However, it might be already available on CloudFront. I'm not sure.

We've been using WorkFusion for almost a year now.

WorkFusion's price could stand to be a little lower.

We recommend different solutions based on our customers' needs, and WorkFusion is what we offer for those who need a premium solution. But when cost-conscious customers ask us for a robust solution, we recommend LokiBots because its capabilities are pretty good. And if a customer is open to using a cloud-native product, we generally go ahead and suggest LokiBots because it is very competitive and robust. Also, LokiBots uses some of Google's advanced technology stacks.

I rate WorkFusion eight out of 10. WorkFusion will begin training our team in a month or two. So after that, my rating might change. But currently, I would rate it around eight. For people thinking about switching to WorkFusion, I would suggest considering if this is the approach you want or if you would rather go with the on-premise solution. If there are conservative customers, we recommend they go ahead with that because it may limit the major vendors available, but at the same time, they will not be disappointed. But on the other hand, if somebody wants to go through a complete detailed evaluation, then we have other recommendations also.

Banking, FX Trading, Collateral, Allocations (FI, EQ)
Process inbound emails (with & without attachments) from external clients for above lines of business.

Workfusion uses Machine Learning to process inbound data.

Automated manual tasks

It's a pretty robust product.

It comes packaged with ELK Stack, Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash.

It has a lot of monitoring capabilities that we're taking advantage of.

Throughput monitoring and database bottlenecks are areas that we are working on that need some improvement.

I have been using WorkFusion for 9 months.

We are having some database issues, but we are addressing them.

It's a scalable solution that integrates well with other solutions.

Technical support is very robust. When we have production issues, SLA is 30 minutes. 

They are responsive and helpful.

We are using other RPA  and RDA software solutions in addition to Workfusion, such as UiPath and Pega

I was hired specifically to support this environment.

When I came on board, it was already implemented, rolled out, and already in production.

I've been involved with implementing software upgrades for the product with vendor assistance.

Vendor support has been excellent

I can't speak to pricing. It's a contract signed by upper management.

We use Control Tower (UI) to control the Business Processes.  I support the production environment and respective monitoring across multiple Linux and Windows servers.

 I am part of the team that supports Robotics within our organization including bots running under Workfusion, UIPath, Pega, etc.

I would rate WorkFusion an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case was very simple. It read information from a spreadsheet and captured that into a core processing system. The benefit was that this process was carried out hundreds of times every day, and took up to an hour each time, so the capacity saving was massive. 

The most valuable feature is having the technology to interface into systems where we didn't otherwise have an API or some other kind of service or access. The benefit is in creating solutions where we don't have a backend API to call.

Everything has room for improvement, and the product continues to evolve. One area of improvement would be the ability to run headless on their Express product. This would allow one to run the automation on their local machine, but still be able to work in other applications using mouse and keyboard while the automation runs headless in a minimized window in the background.

A single-server version of the product that will work for a mid-range mid-size company would also be good to see.

Finally, working in partnership with software companies like SAP to improve their interface interactions would be a good advantage.

I've been familiar with WorkFusion since 2015, so I have worked with it for almost five years.

The stability has been good. If there were problems, I'm not aware of them. We did have a team of guys looking after the servers and if they picked up any issues they would have dealt with them on-the-fly. I'm not aware of any issues at all.

We are quite happy with the scalability. To scale, it just requires more nodes to make for more bots. We have probably about 100 or 200 robots running. So there are over a hundred instances of automations running and they execute many thousands of times each. I'm sure we plan to increase usage even more and we are confident that we can.

The technical support was very good upfront and we have a good working relationship with the vendor.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. That may have been because we had the guys who built the system from Minsk come and do it for us. The initial installation took six months and that included doing a proof of concept.

WorkFusion worked with us directly on the implementation.

Pricing models are available online. Some vendors provide a free entry level solution to get you started.

Yes, we carried out a high-level RFI (Request for Information) / RFP (Request for Proposal) process with a number of the big vendors. After deliberation and measurement against our expectations, we picked WorkFusion.

My advice for those thinking of implementing an RPA is that they start small and simple if they want to see if it works for their company. If it doesn't work as a small scale, investment in the long-term solution doesn't make sense.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate WorkFusion as a seven out of ten. It is not higher because they have got some work to do now. Other companies have caught up. They were the first ones to offer a free desktop automation product and the others will now need to follow suit. To stay ahead it is time for them to come up with the next innovation.

I am a solution provider and I implement RPA products and automate processes for my clients.

In my recent deployment of this product, it is primarily used for financial processes, such as reconciliation in Excel. There are different Excel sheets that I reconcile using automation.

This product helps us by automating functions in finance. Users are able to have attended bots but can save time by handing processes to the bots to run.

The bots are deployed on our on-premises server, and users are able to assign work to them to run while they continue their own work. The processes that the bots are running do not interfere with the day-to-day business. The server simply gives them time for the processes that they are performing.

When a process is running in the background, it is consistent. In situations where processes are running and controlling the user interface, once in a while they might miss what's being clicked.

The most valuable features are the Excel activities. It has a number of Excel activities that are quite reliable.

The Studio is used for development and the Control Tower is used for management.

This is a Java-based application that takes up a lot of space and when it runs, consumes a lot of memory. This affects the reliability because it gets to a point where it hangs.

There are some basic features missing in the Excel activities. For example, you cannot delete a row or a column, which are some of the things that I would like to be able to do.

An example of something that is difficult to do is get yesterday's date. There is a lot of scripting that has to be done. It's not direct because you can't simply use a date variable and then subtract one day. Instead, you have to do some coding to get it. That was a problem for our deployment because reconciliations are done for the previous day, and when you're naming files with yesterday's date or creating folders according to date, you have to do a lot of manipulation in the code.

I worked with WorkFusion for approximately eight months between November 2020 and August 2021.

In terms of consistency, it's good. However, in terms of reliability, because it consumes a lot of memory, it gets to a point where it starts hanging. The fact that it needs a lot of memory is the only problem.

I would not recommend this product for large automation projects because it gave us problems in terms of space and the speed at which it was executing. Once it starts running a large process with loops, it hangs. So, the process takes longer to complete.

When I deployed this solution, it was for a financial institution that had a six-person team. We automated three processes that have to do with reconciliation and they run them every week or two. The six people share roles and the bots assist them.

The reason that we deployed bots for them is that they are limited in number and needed assistance. At this point, the usage is not expected to grow.

I asked some questions on the forum and I tried to contact the support in South Africa, but I couldn't get the assistance I required. These people were not coming through, so I just had to do my own research.

Ultimately, technical support never got back to me on any of the queries that I raised. As such, I cannot give them any plusses. In fact, I still have pending questions in the forum.

I also work with UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate.

Setting up the server and the desktop versions are quite straightforward, both for the studio and for the control tower. As long as you have the required access, the setup process is straightforward. You just have to press the Next button on a series of screens.

We had a deployment on IIS and I built a web application on top of the bot. In total, the deployment took about a week because there were some functionalities that were not being picked up properly. Once those were completed, everything worked properly.

Post-setup, the deployment was a little bit difficult.

In terms of maintenance, one or two people are sufficient. You need a developer, and then somebody to support the infrastructure.

I implemented this product alone. It was a bit difficult so I used the online forum and also tried to contact technical support in South Africa.

My client is using RPA Express, which is available for them to use free of charge. Their parent company is in another country, so they're not paying for anything locally.

The Studio comes standard and is available at no charge but the Control Tower requires a license. The orchestration platform, where you manage your bots and users, is also available with a separate license.

As a developer, you cannot download the developer studio for free unless you are working for your clients. 

My client had chosen and acquired WorkFusion in advance of hiring me. They were looking for a consultant to assist them with development and deployment.

My advice for anybody who is implementing WorkFusion is to use it for small desktop processes, such as sending out a report via email, or small amounts of Excel reconciliation. However, once you have more than 1,000 or 2,000 data rows, it's going to be a bit hectic to consume that much data. That said, for small desktop applications, it's going to work.

When it comes to deploying to the server, it's going to be a bit complicated for enterprise solutions, especially because of the space. When they want to deploy it, they should have at least 16 GB of RAM and at least four CPU cores. Otherwise, anything below that will be too slow.

In summary, this is a good product for small desktop-level automation, but I do not recommend it for large-scale automation because it consumes too much memory and the processes run slowly or hang as a result. There is a lot of work to be done and considering the support does not get back to you, you might struggle with an issue for a long time. Also, there is very little content available online.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use.

One of the issues that we are facing here in China, is that we cannot access the material for training because it is on YouTube. In China, we do not have access to YouTube. Some websites are blocked by China. It is difficult to access, which is one of the biggest concerns.

In the next release, I would like to see more documentation and videos available and accessible in China and Regional.

I have been using WorkFusion for six months.

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable and it's easy to expand.

I am currently the only user because we have to do the setup learning from the website.

I have not contacted technical support yet. I have not had any issues.

Previously, I was working with Blue Prism. Blue Prism is highly architectural. It is deployed through a complex architecture. The server control and development and vendor support are very expensive here in China.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Before using this solution I would recommend a POC first.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.