Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

There is not one specific use case in the sense of what we use the product for. In the broader scope, it would be automation. But right now we have several applications. We started our journey with the tool in 2017, and we have automated several processes in finance, IT, and engineering. 

In finance, for example, we have automated cash application, billing processes, reporting, payment processing, and we are using IQ Bots to automate our invoice processing. We completed the pilot, which provided us with phenomenal results. So we tested with a small entity with 30000 invoices and around 300 suppliers with a high level of success.

The character extraction capability of IQ Bot is much, much better than the other OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engines that you have in the market today. So we are completely pleased with that, and we are planning to upscale our invoice automation processing.

Today while we look at the opportunities in front of us, our customers are expecting us to be more productive and execute with greater speed to be relevant and competitive in the market. The expectation as far as the accuracy is really very high, and we need to be compliant. We have experienced that the more manual and hands-on that we are that there is a higher risk of being non-compliant.

There are skilled companies who are spending more time on transactional activities. For example in the engineering field, there are engineers who are spending time on transactional activities and there are finance guys who are spending time on transactional activities that could be automated. 

We can use intelligent automation with great value in helping these people upskill themselves into newer areas of analytics, new roles in reporting, and project accounting in finance. We're trying to eliminate these transactional activities, be faster over time. We started by looking at specific activities and we looked at the processes. Now, we are looking at a complete value chain. When you look at the complete value chain, that's when you actually begin driving positive change in business results. That is our projected approach for the next couple of years. We'll be looking at the complete value chain and see how bots can help us make our process more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the IQ Bot's ability to extract information accurately. It can do things like process table-level information, line-item level information, etcetera, and the accuracy is really very high. All of our users are accountants rather than programmers or anybody with an IT background. The accounting people can easily learn Automation Anywhere. We tried a few other tools but our folks were more comfortable using Automation Anywhere. They felt that it is easy to learn, and it was easy to train them as to how to use it.

In the next release, I think it has to be more compatible when deployed with the Citrix environment. That's one bottleneck that we have seen. Technically when we used the IQ Bots, we couldn't work directly through the Citrix environment. With our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) setup, we needed to access it through the Citrix environment. Because we were not able to do that, we had to have a workaround. We are currently working with Automation Anywhere to have that fixed. They have given us confidence that it can be done.

When looking at stability, we have to remain ready for any surprise even if we have not experienced any stability issues. We don't know what that kind of surprise will be, but we have backup plans in place.

In case the tool fails, we may not be as fast as the bots, but we have a BCP (Business Continuity Plan) but we know we can't be specific on what challenges will come, because we don't know.

In two years, I think once in one process where a bank changed its user interface on the bank website, a bot failed. We had to go and correct it. It was a fairly quick fix because to create it doesn't take much time. Changes like this are not predictable.

If you look at our shared services, we are growing and we need to keep our costs flat. This means I cannot hire more people. This need for greater efficiency is made up by what I have been able to gain out of the automation. We are actually using automation to move more processes into our shared services. Ours is a private business and we create big cement plants. One project could last for five years. When we land a big deal our volume spikes. It's a very cyclical business. It has been very easy for us to deploy scalable solutions now.

The company is very service friendly and willing to work with us when we need it. I would give them high marks for attention to customer service.

Our decision to go with an RPA solution was one that I made. One of the reasons I was hired into this organization was to drive automation. There was a specific goal for that which I was tasked with.

When looking at other options in the market Automation Anywhere seemed to be the company for us for a couple of reasons. One is that when we had our first engagement with Automation Anywhere we felt that they were very customer-focused. We did not see that with the other service providers. They really came prepared when they first met with us. They had all their books, IT, operations, delivery plans and such, so they were able to answer all our questions. They were very flexible in meeting our requirements and needs.

They were willing to go out of their way to support us and to ensure that we would succeed in the journey. Some of the service providers even refused to create POC's for us. But Automation Anywhere said they would and they went ahead and created them.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward and easy.

We did not use any consultants for our deployment. We worked directly with Automation Anywhere. Our belief is that we know our business better than anybody so we opted for maximum direct involvement.

Before deciding to go with Automation Anywhere we looked at other products for comparison like UiPath. We looked at the desktop automation tool, I currently don't even remember their name. The choice seemed obvious from the first impressions.

If I have any advice to give to people who are considering this product as a solution to their automation needs, I would say don't waste time thinking too much about adopting it and just go ahead and start.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

If you look at the first year we had the product, we had a 6% efficiency gain. This year we are looking at 10% in finance and 12% in IT. The more we discover ways to use it, the more efficient we will become.

My company' objective in using this tool is to automate every rule-based operation possible. We're looking forward to automating anything that does not need a human to make a judgment call. We have automated most operations in several applications, including mainframe, Linux, web-based URLs, Citrix automation, and in Excel extensively. We have done a variety of projects but we are looking forward to growing more into other areas that we have not yet explored.

The biggest value that I see from the product is the way it works in general. The unattended mode that Automation Anywhere promotes, works great. That is the best thing, I would say. It runs code that performs on a virtual machine unattended. No one gets involved in the triggers because the bot controls the tasks. When you use a person to manually monitor a task, such as getting a quality check done, automating the task to work unattended eliminates all the human effort. It's a solution that is quite simple and straightforward to implement and is available 24/7, 365 days. No disaster recovery is required as the server is always intact because processes run to assure uptime, security, etcetera.

We are aiming to have 100% unattended runs. We don't want attended runs because it increases bandwidth which is not great for support guys and clogs the system. Also, you can have some unattended InfoSec (Information Security) breaches and things. We constantly aim to have the best. At the moment performance is not 100% but I would say it is constantly improving.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to operate by working on AA-level development without all the trouble of having VMs set up, setting up ports for it, having the environment so that the developers can work on it, etcetera. With Automation Anywhere, I don't think we need a technical guy, an IT guy, or specifically a specialist engineer to accomplish things. Automation Anywhere is that good. A layman who has a keen interest or even a little bit of curiosity can learn the product end-to-end, sustain himself if he wants, learn how the VM is developed down by the ports. The product and support make it easy to learn. The knowledge is readily available.

The whole package that Automation Anywhere offers is really good. The variety of commands that it offers made to play well with other integrations. It could be using a C# module, code on JSM, the APIs — I want to use database XM. Ultimately, I want to use anything that makes it friendly for me to accomplish what I need to. That is a help because it often will be something I have already learned, it will be easy to access, easy to build, easy to sustain — as long as the commands work as expected.

Unattended Automation is the best feature for me. Because I use it extensively, it is also one feature I am very familiar with and so it is also one of the areas that I would like to see more improvements on. Any time I speak with people who promote automation and say that it is unattended, they may have a machine perform an operation. Very few understand that each unattended operation packet is unattended at all times. No matter what time of the day, if you just click Run once and it operates to get something done. You don't continuously relaunch it.

In my current role, the only thing that I focus on is how sustainable the code is. It has to run for a long time — years. I am expected to run extensive testing. So, in this position, I'm working on the current stability of all the commands and how that can play into the future. I'm not looking for new features. Really the opportunity for automation is already offering this opportunity to create your own features. Adding new features is almost too much. If I've got enough tools to use, I should learn to utilize them first. Use them and then maybe get something new once I have exhausted the possibilities. There are already enough options that AA provides to use. The commands that it offers out of the box are okay for people to begin to work with it. If you don't know it, all you have to do is ask. 

It is not an end-to-end solution for everything, but it is very good at what it does with allowing automation and freeing up other resources — both human and hardware. It is not an end-to-end solution for everything.

The only area for me that I would consider as an improvement is sustainability in areas I face every day. On CSM (Central Management System), for the most part, it works every time, but those areas exist where it does not perform as expected. For example, we had a problem with our ticketing system. What we do is we have a ticket open so that the issues stay open for a week even if we have it fixed. It is supposed to stay in the system continuously for a week — a hyper-care period — so that the issue stays open and we are sure the issue is fixed. That hyper-care period never seemed to end in the application. The problem was it extends a week, to two weeks, to three weeks, but we did not achieve that four-week period of no error of the full runs for the solution.

We worked at resolving the issue and thought we fixed it permanently. We locked in the solution. We were happy. We almost won. Then in a week, we had a reversion to the same problem without making a change. It was not possible to explain. It is my only concern that some things get handled erroneously or changed. 

Without question, Automation Anywhere is generally a stable product. It's not like I can bank on it always performing. I know a few bots we created are not perfect, but I also know that most of them — 60% of my bots — are good. No one calls me about them from the time they're deployed. I haven't had a single escalation or a single error reported about them. This is great.

I still have the other 40%. I think some things go wrong in situations you face unexpectedly or an error occurs. This is not the way it is supposed to be. It's supposed to be really easy: just plug it in and you have the service. But it doesn't work sometimes.

It is frustrating at times to experience this instability, but we do find a solution and we are working on it to be better. With the new version and features that AA is proposing, it looks promising that we can achieve that goal. It looks like the new version will be really stable compared to the version I am currently in, but I will never be sure until I use those new versions.

Another form of stability is in upgrades. Currently one of the pain-point areas on my to-do list is migration to 11.3.2. We have been working on it for almost a month now. We haven't reached the deployment stage. When I migrated to 10, I had some bots that no longer worked after the upgrade. It was not expected. We got on a call to support to explore the problem and had to resolve them.

Right now, I'm not really sure when to migrate. We have 50 bots and every fortnight, there's a part that goes wrong. If I have to take the action and migrate into a new platform — 11.3 2019 A — there is something of a leap of faith. I'm really not sure that I can take that leap now considering the relative stability that I'm experiencing at the moment.

Working with Automation Anywhere, I have been taking steps to use more of the functionality in the product. In a migration, I will want to use the new version as extensively as I have used the current version. At each step, the newer versions were better than what I have used in the past and I have used version 8, version 9, and now version 10. I've used these three versions and there have been improvements each time. We're seeing improvements to come, which I'm looking forward to exploring. But we have to be sure the migration point is realistic.

A lot of times that I have raised issues with support, the command in question is simply not performing. Object learning may not be working as expected, an action's not executing or it is not connecting to the database at all. The simplest solution is often to copy basic commands and replace them and it works. With the number of calls I made to Automation Anywhere, the guys know me now because I have so many issues. They work with me on it. We try to find solutions. At the end of the day, we find some way or other — a shortcut, say, or copy and paste — and get the code to work. We may not be able to figure out the root cause as an answer so that it doesn't happen again. The bottom line may be that the code might be corrupted, my part of the implementation is corrupted, the ATMX (Automation Anywhere Task Files) part is corrupted, etcetera. But the patches are not a perfect solution when I'm in charge. It's a lot to know a process well enough to fix the root cause of an issue. But these concerns remind me that Automation Anywhere as a tool is great, but there are areas to improve.

Automation Anywhere is definitely scalable in several ways. It's easy and accessible. It's designed the best — almost perfect. It has many more usable components than I was familiar with, and I had so much to learn. Now, with some experience, it is not foreign, and we just don't need to build to get what we want. But to get that you need to start at the design phase, you should not start at development at all. People try — even me — when you're starting, just to aim at building usable components. We can ask a developer to do that, but then the developer will not design to build a reusable component. It will only be specific to his assignment, the development, his process, and he will get it done to complete the job.

Scalability starts with a designer who is the one who makes the call. They need to know what to standardize or how to do things by thinking globally to make sure that a resolution is usable and adaptable if desired. That is the standard we adopted. Other big companies have more bots compared to our 50. They may think what they have is a lot more scalable than it is.

We have ongoing support from AA. I appreciate Automation Anywhere support when I talk to them. There are quite a few hiccups as we go along. At times I don't get straight to the support people when you need them as they are busy supporting other users. But the response has been great.

The setup is a bit complex but it is not so bad if you are a little interested and a little curious in learning about the product. It helps to have a little background knowledge on how it works, what are the features that you need to look for, what logs you need, etcetera.

Some basic guidelines will help you along in the initial setup — a basic brush-up on what to do and expect can suffice. Of course, there is the AA's guide that you can follow if you don't know what to do. Initially, when we didn't know the server, we didn't know what are the application calls were, the documentation did help. It was not that complex to do the installation, but the IT guys did not support it. They were surprised I wanted to learn about everything and work with another product when they had resources to accomplish what was needed.

If you choose to try it out, when you need to know more, ask for help. If you're ready to set up deployment, start from some base and set a restore point.

For those who are considering Automation Anywhere as a solution, I would ask how good their team was already. To take on a new product and take a chance that people will try to enhance their skills by learning it may not be the best course of action. Many will have to learn something new and do better than they did with previous solutions by learning and using AA. If the response is that they have hardcore developers, web designers, C# developers, etcetera. They may be looking for quick resolutions, hardcore development and coding bit. They will want any other product or UI that appears to give you far more than AA. AA does all of that — it is not that it isn't able to do it — but it's easy and it is different. With other solutions, you will need someone with that knowledge and ability to code in a particular language. But AA is a platform that can be used as an opportunity for people to up-skill themselves. That's something that is different compared to any other code.

AA commands are not the same as other languages. It has its own dictionary, its own library, its own way of working. I see that this is the same thing mentioned by others as to what they think about the product. It is possible to learn it by just using the Q&A.

We are using it in all departments: management, sales, human resources, IT, and customer service.

These are some of the benefits that we have seen using RPA:

• We saw a 70 percent decrease in manual steps. If something took 10 steps to do, we are doing it in three steps today. 
• We see 100 percent accuracy in whatever we do, which wasn't something we could expect from a human worker. 
• We see a reduction in turnaround times. Something that used to take two hours to do, today takes 20 minutes to do. There is a 40 to 50 percent reduction in whatever is being automated in comparison with a human doing it. 
  

Three features that came up when we chose the product:

1. The user interface.
2. The Bot Store.
3. IQ Bot, which other RPA don't have.

We would like a better coding interface for developers. We would also like to have a user interface which reduces the time to learn the product so more people in the organization can use software, like Automation Anywhere, quickly automating processes.

As an organization, we feel the exception and error handling could be way better.

We would like the software not to change as often. Architectures were radically reinvented without informing the customer. This wasn't something we appreciated. 

Some of the stuff being used internally in the product, like Elasticsearch or open source, did not pass vulnerability ability assessment. This is another issue. 

We hope Automation Anywhere takes internal component security seriously as we are looking forward to the Automation Anyway A2019 launch. We hope it addresses some of these issues with error handling as well as component security.

Scalability works fine. 

One of the key features that we chose, the bot as a service or the BotFarm, when they launched version 11.3, they decided not to have the BotFarm anymore. This put us in a situation because we expected to have bots on demand, just like our cloud software. This would have been cost efficient for us to use. We hope to see this again being realized with A2019. I hope the scalability from an on demand basis improves.

A lot of the technical support is done by my teams. I do not have great visibility. As far as what my team has told me, it was a tedious process before. They have relaunched the entire support portal. It seems to be a lot more user-friendly to log tickets and reach out to people there.

Their customer success team are a great bunch of folks who try to support and get things done for you.

I have personally used RPA before. It is just the buzzword now. 

At the time, we were looking at or looking at replacing our complex, legacy platform which had a lot of steps. Our multiple, previous software tools that had a lot of Python, Perl-based scripting, and Perl website scrapping plugins.

The initial setup was extremely complex. Version 11.3 came with multi-forest Active Directory support and version 11.10 did not have that support. We had multi-forest Active Directory and it took us one month to resolve when we started implementing it. Again, this information wasn't communicated to us.

I hope going forward I see Automation Anywhere being faster, more transparent, and communicating more in advance than right now.

We had a terrible experience with a local integrator. I don't think that they were ready for the integration/deployment process. We spoke to Automation Anywhere who has implemented more stringent partner qualification schemes to take care of this issues.

We have not seen ROI at the present moment.

Our costs are approximately between $5,000 to $10,000 per license.

They have a ridiculously expensive bot licensing structure, especially for the Asian region.

Currently, we use Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath in my organization.

Start small. Conduct proof of concepts, then choose a process with a quick return on investment.

There are product issues. They have a reckless product roadmap. 

We use this solution for quality and GXP.

We are a pharmaceutical company and have marketed products that are about to be shipped into the market. Part of our process is a compliance check of those products. We have specifications ready, and we have the parameters with which it has been manufactured, and we have to compare those to ensure that they match. This compliance check is what we have automated using this solution.

The operational side of our business has become more civilized since we implemented this solution.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that the code can be made as complex as necessary because our processes are not simple.

This solution can be moved easily between platforms. We work on SAP as well as many other internal platforms, and this solution can very easily be moved between them.

There should be a meeting between the Automation Anywhere team and the end-users to understand whether the process can be made to work on the first attempt. This would save a lot of time, especially in cases where it doesn't work in the end. This introductory meeting would include what the processes are and what platforms are compatible with Automation Anywhere. 

I would say the product is stable, although sometimes we have connection issues and control room issues. Some of these issues are internal. Overall, the product is fine.

We had had issues with scalability. Recently, we had a use case which we were working on, but we could not do it because Automation Anywhere could not connect to the system. It was an older system, and perhaps the newer systems are more compatible with this solution. We have seen a few companies that use downgraded systems, and that is where we see that Automation Anywhere does not work. 

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten.

Usually, we have a very good response from technical support. However, we did have a case that we wanted to be resolved as soon as possible, and it took a very, very long time. Probably more than a month. They gave us a lot of solutions but nothing worked. Ultimately, it was our team who actually found a resolution for it. 

I think that the initial setup of this solution is good. Because we are a pharmaceutical company, it is a lengthy process because we have a lot of GXP, compliance issues, and quality issues. That considered, it did not take a very long time for deployment.

We have just deployed and are still in the validation process, so we have not seen a return on investment yet. It will take a little more time to see ROI. 

This solution costs approximately $3,500 USD per license. For a large company, this cost would not matter, although if I had a very small organization and I wanted to automate a small process then this would be a bit costly.

We looked into UiPath, but we felt that Automation Anywhere was the choice for us.

Initially, we actually wanted to use both. We looked into both but there are a lot of systems and a lot of complex steps to follow. The developers suggested that Automation Anywhere was a better processor to develop the code because when we wanted to look into the errors or when we have any issues it is easier to look into the Automation Anywhere line than UiPath.

This is definitely a solution that I recommend, but there are a few things that you need to look into. We actually started with a process and ended up thinking that it would not work. You have to ensure that the proper groundwork is done in order to understand whether the process can actually work. It will be possible to find solutions in any case, but it may take a very long time. The longer it takes to automate, the longer ROI will take.

I have been using this solution for a while now, and I think that it is a very good platform. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is hard to say. We have used it in a number of different areas in our company. We've used it for HR, IT, and our business partners on the front lines using the application. Therefore, our primary use case is hard to say, but basically what we try to do is automate the drudgery out of our business partners' lives.

We have automated some of our HR applications, where there are certain courses. Because we're in a financial industry, we have to maintain certain certifications, etc. Some of that is automated where we help generate reports back to HR. In some cases, there are some very front-end, which are CSRs. We have processes automated for them so they have a less manual work effort. 

We have worked with our compliance area. Some of the things that we have automated there, because we are a financial industry, are political contributions where we have to be very careful. There are a pay-to-play laws in the US, so we've actually automated, which were very difficult because you had to go to all 50 states to download all the information. Trying to do it manually was probably over 8000 hours a year, and now, we're doing it with automation.

What is important to us is continues improvement and learning. We want everyone to be able to look at what they do with a critical eye towards how can improve and get things better? By introducing the solution and working closely with our business partners every time, we create a bot, then their mindset shifts. 

Now, they are looking at everything else they do, and saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe I can do this in a different way." Whether it's using a bot, some other solution, or sometimes even just improving the process as it is without automation, the company in different parts of organization is really starting to adopt the idea of continuous learning.

Probably ease of use has been its most valuable feature. It's been very easy for us to use. We like to operate in a sort of a federated model. So, when we originally started, it was just our vendor partners who were doing the development. Now, we have our own set of core developers at my company. Since 2017, we now have about 23 different people, most of whom are certified developers, a lot of them didn't have a developer background when we started.

With the user interface, a lot of the parts of it I really like, but there are some things that could be made a little simpler. A little less clicking around here and dragging over there to use.

My impressions of the Bot Store are I really love the idea of it. We've actually downloaded a couple of them and used them. One of the more recent ones was interesting. It required a license key, which kind of confused us. If it's freeware, why do you need a license key? But we got around it.

What has also been nice, with the most recent bot from the Bot Store that we downloaded, it was developed by a vendor partner who we are partners with as well. So, when we had some issues with it, we were just put in contact with the developer at that same firm, then we were able to work through any issues. Subsequently, they have made updates to it and uploaded it back to the Bot Store, so it's actually great.

The stability is pretty good. In all fairness, I know we went from version 10.5, where we thought we were fairly stable, and we did have some issues. Then, we migrated to version 11.2 and encountered some other stability issues around scheduling things. But, after talking with some Automation Anywhere techs who were extremely helpful, we have recently, as of last week, upgraded to version 11.3.2.1, and that seems to have solved some of our problems.

We are still testing it. I still need to do some checkups. Obviously, I'm here this week, so I'm not doing it right now. Generally speaking, it is stable. Knowing what it's trying to do, I think 100 percent stability with everybody will be different. Architecture and environment are going to be pretty difficult, but they do a good job.

The scalability is easy. Installing license keys, bringing up new Bot Runners, and all that stuff from the Automation Anywhere side of it are easy. It's very easy. I've had little-to-no difficulty doing any of that. I have to go through the paperwork of hardware, VDIs, etc, and that's all on our side. But, from an Automation Anywhere standpoint, it's been very quick and easy to scale.

The technical support, from my experience, has been very good. Granted, sometimes there has been a little slowness, but if I deemed it critical, or whatever, then I've had conversations with our customer service manager, or anyone, and they've been able to get me with somebody in architect, which has been phenomenal.

When we did the upgrade to version 11.2, it was sort of complicated, because we had to start all over. We had to bring in new hardware and a new set of new databases, but the gentleman who helped me out was great. He fully documented the process for us, which was awesome, because I didn't have that from the original installs of version 10.5. Because he documented it, I was able to go through the upgrade from versions 11.2 to 11.3 very simply and fast. I would say the technical support is very good.

Why did we want to invest in an RPA solution? This was our first solution, so we weren't with someone else first. We did do some evaluation, looking at how and what we wanted to do with bots. Did we want to just use it purely on the back-end? Did we want to use it on the front-end? 

Some of the leaders at the time in the strategy and innovation team at our company just saw the need for it. We knew there was a lot of manual redundant processes that were just right for automation, so we said, "Hey, let's bring it on." The PoC sort of proved the concept, then we just brought it in-house and kept going from there.

The initial setup was somewhere right in the middle. It wasn't super simple. We could've probably done things a little better than we did, but it also wasn't horribly complex.

We used an integrator and reseller for the deployment, originally. We worked with HCL Technologies, but we found some gaps in our knowledge because of this. We didn't fully understand the architecture and how it was built. 

During all the process of the installs, we didn't get all the documentation. This made some things a little difficult for us, especially when we ended up parting ways with HCL. 

Then, we signed with a different vendor for both development and reselling, OPTIMIX. So, going through with the Automation Anywhere architects and getting it installed was great.

One of the first steps that we do before automating anything is we determine if it is a process where there is enough ROI involved to dedicate development resources or a bot to? Sometimes, in all honesty, the use case is we want to learn something, so we do it anyway. But, generally, we do a time and motion study, so we understand how much time we are saving somebody. We measure that. Additionally, we measure cost. That varies depending on the department that we're doing the automation for. But, we can measure that, and usually that is a straight hourly rate times the time saved.

Cost avoidance is something that we do, too. In other words, there was a process that we automated where a department was considering hiring someone just to do some file transfers and copies, etc. We automated that process, and they just didn't have to hire somebody.

It definitely saves us a lot of time and money.

It looks like it will be right around $115,000, not counting IQ Bot, which we won't renew until later.

We looked at Blue Prism and UiPath, but we felt that Automation Anywhere was a good mix of both the front-end and back-end, whereas UiPath seems very front-end only and Blue Prism is very back end only. We needed a mix for what we wanted to do.

We don't use it as attended as much. We have had a few cases where we were going to use attended, then just decided that for the rarity of those types of uses that we didn't want to have a Bot Runner just sitting and waiting for someone to chime in five times a day. Instead, we've created more scheduled. Right now, all of our bots are running unattended.

It's really easy to use. Again, going back to something that I mentioned earlier, we have a number of people at our firm who are now certified RPA developers that had no development background. They did that just by the online training in some cases. In some cases, it was the online training, as well as a three day class that we brought in-house and had taught. However, the only part where you want to get experience and learning are around error handling.

I've been in software for a long time. I've never seen a perfect piece of software, yet. I've seen some that are very good. With everything this is trying to do and the complexities of the environment, I'm going to give it an eight (out of ten) because it's very good. I think me giving something an eight is pretty high in this space.

Our primary use case is to improve cost savings or FTE usage through automation.

The product is still new for us, but we are already starting to think about different ways to deploy things to development.

The product is easy to use. It is a good tool for developers and business users.

Getting the bot design into the developer's hands is taking longer than we initially anticipated.

I like the ability to grant specific permissions to specific users and want to see this rolled out in future versions.

We have three bots in production. We are currently working on scaling up to 30 bots.

The technical support could be better, especially with their responds. They always caring through with their timing though.

We started looking at solutions that would make the process faster without redesigning it.

The initial setup was not complex, but we did need assistance to get it up and running.

To deploy our initial three bots, we used a partner (Accenture). Now, we are doing our own development.

We measure ROI by evaluating the entire process: 

• How long does it take to run everything? 
• How many FTEs are running the process? 
• What are the savings from a quality standpoint?
• What processes are now able to be run over the weekend without someone monitoring them over the weekend?
• What are the penalty if something is not automated?

We also looked at Blue Prism.

Start with a good integrator. That is what we did.

It is a good tool for RPA focused development.

We have been able to integrate the tool with other software. So far, we had no issues.

I have taken one course through Automation Anywhere University. It was not a bad experience. I am planning to take more courses in the future. However, the courses are very long.

Today, we use Automation Anywhere to build out the capacity within our organization. We use it to help us figure out opportunities, then remove some of the busy/transactional work, which employees don't want to be doing.

From an organizational perspective, it has improved how we work and determine, "Is there a better way to do things?" and, "How can we challenge the status quo?" This builds a continuous improvement mindset throughout our organization. This is in addition to some of the tangible benefits of taking monotonous work off people's plates, creating capacity, and cost reductions.

Ease of use is a valuable feature.

The ability to scale is probably the number one reason that we chose Automation Anywhere. We are able to build automation fairly quickly, and they are fairly scalable. 

We can rinse and repeat a lots of swap-out pieces, as necessary.

Once we got the tool going and were fairly familiar with it, we were able to scale the solution. Our developers love it. It is fairly simple to use. Sometimes, we are able to even bring people on fairly quickly, like interns, and have them use the software. Then, we are able to see some real benefit out of it fairly quickly.

At pilot, we had around four bots. Today, we have 85 bots, and that is over 12 to 13 months.

Every tool has challenges. With Automation Anywhere, it took us a bit of time to stand it up initially. We tried to do it in a virtual environment, which caused us a bit of headache. It could have been smoother in this aspect.

Originally, when we started our process of standing up our center of excellence (CoE), we used ISG to help build the scale, increase the number of bots, and help deliver use cases for our work.

When we measure ROI, we look at four buckets:

1. Capacity creation
2. Cost avoidance
3. Cost reduction
4. Increased accuracy and reduction of errors. 

We have a calculator that we created. We have some inputs, then based on what we realize, we receive an output or number stating, "This is the benefit that the automation gave us."

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. The reason that we chose Automation Anywhere was its ease-of-use and some of its market capabilities. We were also familiar with the tool from an outsource service provider.

Give the tool a try. Get the business onboard. Build some quick, easy bots at first. Then, you will be able to see the capabilities of the tool quickly.

Our bot creation process is fairly robust. We have a centralized model with a good process from beginning to end, which involves engaging our business partners, documenting the as-is, looking at the future state, then coding the automation. We leverage Automation Anywhere, as a tool in our tool belt, and one that we've enjoyed adding because it increases our capability to change processes going forward.

Automation Anywhere integrates pretty well with the other applications that we use. We like to go the API route through Automation Anywhere, but we are always looking at customer web portals or the portals of our suppliers, as we have pretty good integration capabilities.

We are looking forward to using the bot monitoring capabilities in version 11.

We haven't used the cognitive document processing capabilities of Automation Anywhere.

I have not taken any Automation Anywhere University courses.

The primary use case is to free up people to do more cognitive tasks, taking those repetitive tasks and doing those for them.

We have quite a few good use cases going on, such as:

• We have a credit card deactivation process, where we determine someone is leaving the company, then we run different reports. Then, it deactivates their credit card, so they are unable to use it anymore. This saves us in extra expenses, e.g., if they were to make charges after they left the company. 
• We have saved a lot of money on taxes based on the stuff that we run. 

We have a plethora of good use cases saving good, hard dollars.

The client and the way the code is laid out are very nice for developers. 

The interface is a lot better than a lot of other tools which are out there.

It is pretty easy for developers to use. I have trained quite a few people, and everyone seems to pick it up pretty well.

In the debugging mode, it writes all the logs to text files, but it doesn't ever clean them up. We had one that got to 200K, and it bogged our whole machine down. We couldn't figure out what was going on until we found out that we had a 200K file sitting out there. We would like some sort of maintenance on the log files going forward. 

We have seen some inconsistencies with stuff, environmentally.

The company started the pilot a year and a half ago. That phase was probably six or seven months. Then, it took a little over a year to get it up and running. We also did an upgrade to the newest version, and that took some time. Overall, it took about a year to scale up our bots.

This solution was brand-new. This was our first run on RPA.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was just a normal on-premise setup for three environments.

We used a consulting firm for the deployment. They were good. 

Currently, we are not looking to eliminate people. We are looking to save time or generate revenue. Cost avoidance is pretty big for us.

We have 10 licenses right now.

It is pretty easy to use. Personally, I do a lot of development, so I like the line-by-line code versus some of the other solutions, like Blue Prism or UiPath, which have a more drag and drop workflow. 

Give it a try. It lives up to what it says it can do, for the most part. It really does help free up stuff. Just make sure you pick the right processes. A lot of the issues that people have with it are with not selecting the right processes for what the tool can do.

We have had some success integrating this solution with other applications. We have also had some failures. We had some issues integrating it with SAP, but we started using MetaBots to do that, which seems to work really well. It does seem to work pretty well with most applications that we have integrated it with.

The bot creation process is good. It is pretty simple to understand. If anything, the Control Room is the most confusing part, but it is still pretty simple. 

I have not taken courses on the Automation Anywhere University, but I have been using this solution for a long time. So, I would be the right clientele for the University.

We haven't really done anything with the cognitive document processing nor Citrix.