Automation Anywhere Reviews

We were in finance before, so all of our use cases have been in finance. Recently, we have grown out to IT. Our use cases now encompass HR, IT, legal, and everything that we can.

There have been numerous improvements in the organization. We have saved hours and time and hard dollars. In the first year, we saved over half a million dollars. That was about six months of time. After that, we have done at least three million year over year, and we have increased that very much. As far as time saved, it is well over 10,000 hours in the first year alone, and we continue to grow. This year, we are projecting 30,000 manual hours saved.

Prior to the implementation of Automation Anywhere, we had lots and lots of manual work. People would go into Excel and copy data from one master sheet to many sheets. They would compile data. They would take lots of time to do these things. Today, they can go in, press a button, and launch it. They can download hundreds and thousands of invoices, whereas previously, they used to do it manually. One of our use cases saved two people four days a week of time, which is 32 hours each. We now do that automatically in six hours.

The learning curve is initially a little daunting, but after you are in there and you understand how it works, it is very seamless. It is very easy to pick up and very intuitive, and then from there, it is pretty much you go and get your hands dirty.

The tools that we integrate with Automation Anywhere so far have been Python scripts and PowerShell. We have got Power Automate and Power Flows from Microsoft. We are starting to do some cognitive RPA. We are implementing OpenAI through Azure. We have got a lot of that going right now.

The integration with all of the documents and APIs is very seamless. There are packages available in the store if you do not have the integration built-in out of the box. They are available to everyone. Everything that we have been able to use has been just drag and drop. We can just pop in our credentials and be done.

Automation Anywhere has affected us in a positive way in terms of employee capacity and compliance. We have not had to backfill roles. We have not necessarily replaced people, and that is by intent. We did not want to replace people, but we also did not want to have to backfill people. We wanted people to focus on things that they value and be more productive instead of doing mind-numbing things that get no value, but they just have to do it.

Our time and cost savings have been immense since the beginning. In our first year, after we started launching the bots in June or July of 2019, we saved half a million dollars and 10,000 man-hours. Since then, we have grown more than 70% year over year. This year, we are on track to go up to about 40,000 man-hours saved and more than three million hard dollars saved.

They have been able to provide automation at scale pretty well. We fired up and started off with only three production machines. We are now up at five. Officially, we were going up to seven as of next week. We have heard about people here at the Imagine conference who, for example, have hundreds, so the point is proven, and the facts are there. They can scale up very quickly.

The main Automation Anywhere Program offering we use is Pathfinder. We have not utilized our partner services or anything like that, but Pathfinder has been great. Their user groups have been great. To be able to focus and see the product launches beforehand has always been advantageous. The ability to see that has been good.

The features that we found most valuable have been just automating manual processes. We are able to integrate and work with applications that users typically work with. That has been the best feature for us right now. 

Some of the biggest improvements they can make are with the interface. It can be improved in terms of usability or searching for something. For example, icons are hard to find. Typically, you jump into the search box, but being able to go in and find things quickly with the eye could be very valuable.

We have been using Automation Anywhere since 2019. It has been five years.

The stability of the solution has been great so far. It has been very resilient. Obviously, it depends on how you build it. You can obviously make a bad solution and it is going to be bad, but the uptime has been amazing. We have not had any issues with the cloud service since we moved to A360. It has been great since then.

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. There is some room for improvement. A lot of that depends on who you talk to. You have a great person and you have a not-so-great person. 

On the client support, so far, their service has been a ten out of ten. We have had amazing reps who I have worked with, and I have nothing bad to say about them.

I did not use a similar solution previously.

We use a mix of on-prem and cloud devices. We are exploring Microsoft Azure to go to it soon, but we are not using it today.

The deployment experience was a little bit frustrating at first, but I was not the one involved. Our architects were having issues, but we engaged with the Automation Anywhere solutions engineers. We were on the phone for maybe an hour or two hours and they fixed it. The deployment was great.

Our ROI is time saved and money saved. This has just been massive, and we continue to grow. We will be growing in the future, especially after this year.

There has been a half-million-dollar return on investment in the first six months alone. We will be up to three million this year. That is our projection, and I think we are going to exceed that.

The evaluation was done before I got here, but I know the company did evaluate UiPath, Blue Prism, Kofax, and a few others. They evaluated the top Gartner Quadrant applications.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is being able to see what other customers are doing, not just networking but seeing the presentations, the breakout sessions, and seeing how other companies are doing the same challenges and maybe way better. It is a good time to go and reach out and ask them how they are doing something or how they are scaling up. For example, one company here has managed to scale up to more than 800 bots. They do something with Azure where they turn on a machine, and it is very cost-effective. That is solving some of the problems that we have.

The Imagine experience has been great. This is my second year here. It has been fun. It is helpful to learn. We have done a lot, so I really enjoyed the entire experience.

I got one of my direct reports here for the first time this year. Some of the things or the reasons I did tell him to come were:

• Being able to network
• Being able to learn from others and see how they do things
• Being able to talk to people who have the same challenges that we have and being able to figure out how to do it better

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for more than a year in my college laboratory. I utilize it for editing, collecting student assignments, data entry, report generation, grading multiple-choice questions, managing lab equipment, student communication, and automatic software installation or updating. The primary functions include handling repeated administrative tasks, data entry, feedback generation, grading processes, maintaining lab equipment processes, taking attendance, and communicating with students. If any software installation or update in the lab is required, I manage it with the help of labs.

The task bot is the most valuable feature, which I use primarily to automate repetitive and rule-based tasks like attendance tracking, grading, and report generation. I also utilize IQ Bots for more complex tasks involving unstructured data, and email automation for sending bulk reminders to students. It reduces my work time significantly, giving me the ability to focus on other manual tasks. Without Automation Anywhere, my tasks would take much more time, as these repetitive human tasks need daily attention.

Overall improvement is needed for non-technical users who face challenges with how to use it and how to perform more tasks. It should be more user interface friendly for non-technical users and enhance its ease of integration with third-party applications.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for more than a year in my college laboratory.

When we discuss its scalability, it is available across various departments and adapts well.

There are many FAQs, personal calls, and community forums available. Technical support can be easily obtained through official channels, although sometimes the community forum is not accessible to many users.

I used UiPath before starting Automation Anywhere. I also used Blue Prism, which was difficult due to its need for coding.

Initially, we found it a bit complex, but after learning about it, it served us well. For complex tasks, deployment takes about two to three days.

We can achieve nearly eight lakhs per annum in total savings by using Automation Anywhere.

I recommend Automation Anywhere to other users because it minimizes repetitive human tasks, saves time, and helps reduce costs. I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

I have many use cases for Automation Anywhere, including multiple use cases. We are automating SAP finance processes, commercial processes, and distribution processes. So many processes are there.

Automation Anywhere is very easy to use. It's a low-code platform that a person who doesn't have any technical knowledge can use. Automation Anywhere has a single control room where everything exists in a single platform.

In other tools such as Power Automate and UI Path, Power Automate has two components: desktop flow and cloud flow. To do end-to-end automation, including cloud applications and desktop applications, we have to use two things: Power Desktop Flow and Cloud Flow. Similarly, in UI Path, we have three interfaces: Orchestrator, Desktop Flow, and Cloud Flow. However, in Automation Anywhere, there is a single control room where we can do everything: cloud automation, desktop automation, everything.

It would be good if they could make a direct connector with Microsoft applications, such as Teams and SharePoint.

I have been using Automation Anywhere in my career for three years. I am using this for four projects.

I have not seen any problems regarding stability and performance. However, the community control room, which they provide free of cost, sometimes causes problems. When we purchase it, it doesn't create any problems.

The scalability depends on our project and how long it is. We have a project that started in July 2022, and we have many use cases in there. We can say that we can still run. We are still developing some automations there. The scalability depends on the project.

The technical support is structured based on the sensitivity of the ticket. I have created many tickets on the support portal since we have a purchased support portal. We get responses according to the business impact. For example, if we mark it as one, they call us within two hours. If we mark it as three, they just mail us and give the solution. Most of the time, I find that our internal team finds the solution; the support team isn't able to provide a perfect solution.

I have used UI Path, but I don't work on UI Path. My team members are working on it. As a manager, I used to use UiPath before, but now I am managing everything at the admin level.

The installation is easy. It's not too difficult. There is a provisioning of the control room where we have a customer portal. We can go there, put our licenses, provision our control room, and they can provision within fifteen minutes. After that, we can use the automation engine. The installation part is just installing a small EXE, and we can start the automation.

To deploy a solution from end to end, there is the discovery phase where we identify the use cases. Then we have some documentation phases, such as the design documents. After that, we can start the development. It depends on the use case and its complexity. On average, it takes four to five weeks to complete automation end to end.

If a person has knowledge of everything, they can do everything from development, requirement gathering, to production deployment. But according to our role-based access control, we need at least three people to do these tasks. One can do development, another can do QA testing, and the last one can do deployment.

For pricing, I don't have any idea about the pricing of Power Automate. Power Automate costs fifteen dollars per month for a single creator license. Whereas Automation Anywhere provides a package where we are getting one attended license, creator license, and one control room. It costs seven hundred fifty dollars per month. We can say Automation Anywhere is more expensive than Power Automate.

Automation Anywhere has their own university, which is on an online platform, and all the courses are free. Anyone can make their account on the Automation Anywhere University, get registered in the courses, and take all the training sessions.

It is easy to use for business users who don't have technical skills. There is a license called Citizen Developer. I have a scenario where, six months ago, our client's manager wanted to do some automation, and he didn't want to disclose these things with anyone. He asked me to give him a Citizen Developer license, where he can do his automations. He automates things such as Outlook and some Excels.

I used the Copilot. It allows the user to interact with the live running boards. Before the Copilot, unattended boards were there. When we trigger the board, we cannot give any input at runtime. But with the help of Copilot, we can give input at runtime whenever we want to change the value of any variable.

I would rate the solution overall as nine out of ten.

Our company uses Automation Anywhere for enterprise automation of various finance tasks, focusing on accounting. This includes processing accounts payable invoices, managing oil and gas revenue, extracting data from text, and downloading files from our ERP system. These automated processes, some of which are business-critical and complex, enhance efficiency and accuracy within our finance operations.

Automation Anywhere has helped to address process bottlenecks and departmental inefficiency. It is used as an attempt to streamline operations.

It simplifies the management of complex workloads.

Automation Anywhere has a significant learning curve, but it is understandable and reasonable. Having a support team makes the process easier compared to learning it independently.

The training for non-technical users takes one to two months.

We've integrated numerous tools with Automation Anywhere, most notably our accounting system, which is interfaced via SQL and terminal. Additionally, we utilize RPA to interact with various systems employed by other departments.

One of the strengths of Automation Anywhere is its user-friendly interface, which makes it accessible even to those without a development background. As someone who began with no coding knowledge, I found it a great entry point into the world of automation. This accessibility, compared to tools like UiPath, stems from its intuitive design. Furthermore, the capacity to deploy RPA solutions across various virtual devices, a common feature in RPA, is invaluable for streamlining and scaling automation efforts.

Automation Anywhere's API feature is a fantastic offering, providing the valuable ability to call or execute tasks.

As a developer, I find Automation Anywhere's bot editor riddled with minor workflow issues that hinder productivity. For instance, the broken bot package versioning system prevents copying and pasting code between bots with different package versions, a stark contrast to the flexibility of Python. This inconvenience arises even when transferring code between bots within the same process, significantly disrupting workflow. While there are other minor improvements I could suggest, Automation Anywhere has been, albeit slowly, addressing our concerns.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for five years.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is quite good, with few outages from the platform itself.

Automation Anywhere is a very scalable product capable of handling large-scale automation operations.

In my experience, Automation Anywhere's technical support has been lacking. Many of their representatives don't understand the product enough to offer effective assistance. As a developer, it's frustrating to encounter issues and try to communicate them to support staff who seem unfamiliar with the underlying technology. This lack of product knowledge hinders effective troubleshooting and resolution.

Our current support plan is the most basic, so I don't anticipate a quick resolution. However, they generally respond within the expected timeframe for this level of support.

Neutral

Although I wasn't involved in deploying Automation Anywhere, I recall the process being straightforward and immediately successful for the company.

The implementation included a team of four to five individuals supported by a contractor.

We evaluated UiPath and another product that I cannot recall.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

My experience upgrading Automation Anywhere from an on-premise solution to the cloud was challenging despite some helpful features. While a tool was provided to convert version 11 tasks to 360, it introduced unnecessary code during migration. This inefficiency may be specific to Automation Anywhere or a common issue with automation upgrades. Regardless, the process was lengthy and tedious.

Automation Anywhere requires considerable maintenance due to a combination of factors. Our automation of an older Java-based accounting solution causes some challenges. Additionally, automating browser-based tasks in large oil and gas SaaS companies leads to frequent breakage of bots when the underlying HTML or code changes. Consequently, ongoing maintenance is necessary and will be a permanent responsibility for our maintenance team, which includes our project leader and a group of developers.

Establish consistent policies and procedures before doing anything. This aligns with the Center of Excellence framework. Having clear, consistent policies is important before building bots and implementing solutions.

We obtain use cases from the business and optimize their solutions by implementing Lean Six Sigma methodologies to eliminate process waste. We then follow this with end-to-end automation that requires no manual intervention. Automation Anywhere is the tool we employ to achieve this.

Our goal is not to solve problems but to automate manual tasks previously performed by humans. Rule-based processes require minimal human decision-making and are ideal candidates for automation. By using Automation Anywhere, we aim to replace repetitive human labour with machine efficiency.

For example, a business user performs the same routine daily: logging in, analyzing Excel data, and responding to customer emails. This repetitive manual work is ideal for automation. We use the Automation Anywhere tool to build a bot that mimics these human actions. The bot logs in, processes emails, responds to customers, and completes the entire process autonomously, from start to finish.

We use generative AI to process emails by determining customer sentiment and intent: happy, inquiring, dissatisfied, or angry. The AI makes decisions based on email content and automatically generates requests or tickets in ServiceNow, assigning them to appropriate users. This automation replaces the manual task of sifting through thousands of daily customer emails, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. The combination of generative AI and Automation Anywhere automates this process efficiently.

Automation Anywhere increased productivity by 30 percent.

Automation Anywhere has significantly re-emerged in the industry over the past few years. The platform has introduced numerous features and a robust cloud deployment pipeline. The initial focus is on a cloud-based architecture and a new structure supporting third-party coding languages like Python, VBScript, and VBA. Document Automation, formerly IQ Bot, simplifies document automation development. Additionally, Automation Anywhere acquired Shibumi, rebranded as CWE Manager, to provide a pipeline for automation and offer detailed performance metrics, including ROI, savings, and bot health for business users.

AI is the future, and automation is a crucial component. Our healthcare organization, which manufactures products like gloves and masks and provides in-house hospitality to patients across the US, has significant opportunities for automation and AI implementation. With six data centres globally and a new CIO focused on cost reduction, we're aggressively pursuing cloud migration to Azure and have partnered with Google for AI integration over the next five years. These initiatives aim to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance patient care.

Throughout my experience, I have integrated nearly 600 applications with Automation Anywhere, encompassing a diverse range of software, including desktop-based, standalone, and web-based applications.

Automation Anywhere has significantly reduced costs in my organization. For example, a team of 20 employees previously spent six minutes manually entering 20,000 Excel records into an Oracle application daily. This process consumed valuable time and resources, including Oracle licenses and employee wages. Automating this task eliminated the need for one Oracle license by accessing the database directly. Our automation solution processes 10,000 records in just 15 minutes, drastically improving efficiency and accuracy.

Integrating workflows requires careful consideration of automation complexity, determined by the number and type of applications involved and the number of interactions within each application. We assess applications based on web-based vs. standalone, legacy vs. automation-friendly, and the number of fields requiring input. A complexity score is assigned. Zero to ten is low, 11 to 20 is medium, and 21 to 30 is high, and corresponding timelines for development, testing, QA, pilot, and handover are established. Once timelines are set, we focus on securing application access for developers, providing necessary test data, and coordinating with business stakeholders for UAT testing. After successful UAT, the bot is deployed to production for a monitored pilot phase before full-scale implementation. This approach is standard workflow management practice in our organization.

The savings from automation depend on the specific automation implemented. Some automation may provide minimal benefits to the business. For example, if a new automation is introduced and the business user spends only two percent of their time per day on the related task, the savings may be insignificant. To evaluate the ROI, we calculate the costs over five years, including development, support, licensing, and infrastructure setup. In the first year, the focus is on investment and implementation. While savings may not be fully realized in the second year, from the third to fifth year, the business can expect significant returns due to reduced human labor. The automated process can be continuously enhanced to adapt to changing business requirements. My organization has achieved savings of approximately one point five billion over the past year and a half through automation.

Automation Anywhere's most valuable features include generative AI, similar to Copilot, which will significantly benefit developers; low-code or no-code technology; and document automation capable of extracting data from structured and unstructured PDF formats, presenting it clearly and easy to follow. An upcoming feature will also provide graphical representations or dashboards to illustrate cost savings, ROI, and FTE benefits achieved through process automation.

The Copilot recently integrated into Automation Anywhere requires significant refinement and additional features. Essentially, it still necessitates manual review, which is inefficient. For example, instructing Copilot to write code for opening and reading an Excel file generates necessary commands but still requires developer input to specify target data, column numbers, and desired data. This indicates a need for further training to enhance the bot's capabilities.

Integrating Automation Anywhere with existing systems often proves challenging due to the prevalence of legacy applications that are not automation-friendly. Unlike modern applications with easily identifiable elements, these older systems require creative problem-solving to develop reliable and error-resistant automation. This challenge is common across the RPA industry, necessitating innovative approaches to data extraction. For instance, utilizing software development kits, XML files, or APIs can be more efficient than navigating through multiple application pages. Additionally, implementing fuzzy logic scripts is crucial for handling data entry errors, such as name variations, to ensure accurate matching and process success.

The learning landscape for Automation Anywhere offers various certifications and training materials. While the community provides a platform for interaction and resource sharing, not all training content aligns with the specific needs of developers. Additionally, the community forum, though helpful, doesn't always provide timely or comprehensive solutions to user inquiries. The company's internal structure, with multiple product teams, can also complicate the process of obtaining support and resolving issues.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

I would rate the stability of Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

Automation Anywhere is a highly scalable tool, particularly evident in its ability to handle user concurrency, as demonstrated in document automation. Its scalability is supported by robust hardware and software requirements, high-performance document and file processing benchmarks, and the capacity to increase or decrease resources to match fluctuating demands flexibly. Essentially, Automation Anywhere empowers businesses to adapt efficiently to changing needs.

Automation Anywhere offers tiered support levels based on partnership status. Gold, silver, and platinum partners receive varying degrees of assistance, including dedicated support teams and prioritized ticket resolution. While their services come at a premium, the benefits include timely responses and efficient problem-solving.

Neutral

I have worked in various industries and have experience automating processes using different automation tools available on the market, including VBA, VBScript, and Python.

Automation Anywhere, while a formidable RPA tool, currently ranks second behind UiPath. Both companies are industry leaders, continually innovating to enhance scalability and reliability. While Automation Anywhere has made significant strides in recent years, UiPath maintains a slight edge in overall market performance. Compared to other available options, Automation Anywhere remains a top choice due to its robust features and reliability.

The deployment process in Automation Anywhere is relatively straightforward. We export the package from one environment and import it into another. However, each organization has its own unique deployment standards, often involving processes like change advisory board approvals. Therefore, the actual deployment method will vary depending on the specific organization's guidelines and procedures.

The overall deployment time for a robot is five minutes. A team was involved in this process. As the developer, I was responsible for obtaining the necessary approvals and moving the robot code from enrolment to deployment. Other organizations may have specific teams dedicated to these tasks. For example, they might have their own Centre of Excellence team that handles all deployments. Therefore, the deployment process can vary depending on the automation and the specific organization. In my current organization, we handle deployments ourselves, while in my previous organization, there was a separate team dedicated to this task. Prior to that, a support engineer typically performed these duties.

Automation Anywhere's pricing is significantly higher than other RPA solutions. We recently conducted a small proof of concept with their generative AI integration and received a quote of $75,000 for one year. In comparison, Microsoft offered a similar solution for only $20,000. This substantial price difference makes Automation Anywhere one of the most expensive RPA options on the market, second only to UiPath.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten.

I would rate the ease of use of Automation Anywhere as a six out of ten for someone without any technical expertise.

The learning curve for non-technical people is two months.

There are several areas for improvement in the implementation of Automation Anywhere. Many employees are reluctant to entrust their tasks to automation due to concerns about job displacement. While this is a common misconception, automation is designed to streamline processes and free up employees to focus on more complex and strategic tasks. From a development perspective, Automation Anywhere continually introduces new features, but there is often a lack of effective communication and training. To maximize the benefits of automation, developers should adopt a proactive approach, seeking creative solutions and considering the user-friendliness of automated processes.

My entire organization has close to 27,000 employees worldwide. Our enterprise team, consisting of 15 members including me, handles automation work for the entire organization. My team consists of six members dedicated to support activities, monitoring and assisting the robots. The remaining members are part of the development team, solely focused on development tasks.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is a moderately complex task due to the numerous dependencies that must be carefully considered and planned for during any migration or upgrade. Yesterday, we successfully migrated our Automation Anywhere Control Room from version 32 to version 33. Prior to the upgrade, we underwent extensive preparation, including reviewing Change Advisor Reports, obtaining necessary approvals, and coordinating with the database team to create a backup of the Automation Anywhere database. Once these prerequisites were fulfilled, we proceeded to the server, uninstalled version 32, and installed version 33. The previously created backup was then integrated to ensure accurate data reflection in the latest version. While proper planning is essential, the upgrade process is neither overly complex nor excessively straightforward, making it a medium-level task.

We have a team of six dedicated to support and maintenance activities, managing approximately 250 automations across our organization. The level of maintenance required varies depending on the developer's experience and the complexity of the automation. Junior developers may create bots that are more prone to errors, leading to increased maintenance. However, senior developers or well-designed automations typically require less maintenance. In addition to support and maintenance, our team is also responsible for minor enhancements, bug fixes, and upgrades or downgrades of our automation systems.

We don't need to constantly monitor the bot as it runs according to its schedule. It performs its tasks autonomously, but manual intervention is necessary in certain situations. For example, if an expected input file fails to arrive at the scheduled time, the automation process will stop. In such cases, a support engineer must contact the business to address the missing file. Additionally, manual intervention might be required for downstream automation tasks, such as when a front-end UI changes on an application. These situations depend on the specific downstream application, business needs, and other factors.

I would highly recommend Automation Anywhere as a technology solution. I've been involved with it for nearly twelve years and have witnessed its remarkable evolution. From its early stages to its current state, I'm impressed by its potential for future innovation and problem-solving. Moreover, I've seen first-hand how Automation Anywhere has significantly benefited businesses by reducing costs and saving on full-time equivalent labour. In one instance, I observed how a single automation process could accomplish the work of ten people in just one hour.

I was working for an airline client that had their processes in the mainframe. The application Sabre that they had was all terminal-based. It was very difficult to navigate and capture everything. We automated a lot of tasks related to validation. For example, when someone booked a flight ticket and tried to cancel it, they needed to give some reason. We had rule-based validation, so we had to validate the reasons and assess them. Previously, it was all manual and terminal-based, and then we used Automation Anywhere to automate.

We also used Automation Anywhere to do a lot of PO manipulation. It was done in an application called Coupa. We used to do that automation with APIs. API automation was very easy with Automation Anywhere. We used it to automate such tasks.

Automation Anywhere was introduced as an RPA tool to facilitate the digital transformation journey of the client organization. They wanted to eliminate a lot of manual tasks and provide quality work for their employees rather than them doing manual activities. They also wanted to make sure that a process was in place. They wanted a very low code or no code automation so that even business people could upscale themselves and automate. They wanted to free up their employees from such manual tasks and have a lot of bandwidth to do some other research.

In the use case related to the cancellation of a ticket, a lot of things have to be handled. When you cancel a ticket, the airline has to make an update at a lot of places. Only then you would get the refund. It involves a lot of processes. They could be related to the meal or something else. Even if you have not subscribed to any add-ons, all the checkboxes have to be ticked, and only after everything is cleared, you get your refund. Before automation, the refund process was very tedious. When they were doing it manually, any mistake could lead to incorrect transactions. For example, they might end up transferring a different amount. It was a very tedious process, and it was handled with the Sabre application, which was not very user-friendly. It was mostly a terminal-based mainframe application. It had a user interface, but a person with good experience was required for it. A fresher or somebody less experienced could not do it. You needed to know where exactly to go, and there were a lot of things that you had to learn to do this process. It was always done by an experienced engineer, and it was very manual involving navigating different screens. During COVID-19 times, there was a shortage of employees, and the airline was handling a lot of regulations, so this manual process became more problematic. At that time, we introduced Automation Anywhere. We were targeting only 50% automation, but we were able to automate 80% to 90%. It significantly improved the time to process a request and reduced the dependency on a senior engineer for the process. The robot could handle the process. We had programmed the robot. It was a very good experience. It helped the client navigate through tough times.

When you decide to automate a process, you try to understand the process in and out. You try to understand the exception scenarios and how to solve them. You prepare a process discovery document. While doing this documentation, you try to streamline the process because Automation Anywhere, as a tool, needs to be configured to automate that process. It forces us to ask a lot of questions, such as what if the file to be downloaded is not there. You come across all such things at the initial phase. That helps a person to restructure the process and fine-tune it more strategically. It saves a lot of time. It has plenty of features to do Excel operations. It has a lot of capability for querying. You can read data from Excel and process it using a query. You do not have to do Excel operations one by one. It is very quick. If a person is taking 30 minutes to do the operation, it takes only seconds or minutes to finish it. It provides a lot of efficiency.

You also have a lot of traceability. You have a lot of logs. You can see what happened after a process. When you have an audit, you have some traceability. A person doing a task does not always document each and every step. He or she would just do the task and finish it off. When you automate the process with Automation Anywhere, because the robot is doing the tasks, you get a lot of logs and a lot of traceability for auditing.

At the initial stages of automation, you also redefine and optimize a process. Instead of downloading 4 Excel files at different places, you try to standardize it. You give a standard name and a standard path. Everything is standardized, and a lot of focus is put on security and data privacy. We are very conscious of not saving it at any location that is accessible to anybody else. Subconsciously, we do all these checks. It improves the security and data privacy aspects. It also leads to process optimization. Like any RPA tool, it saves a lot of time, and it is efficient, and then logs are there as a good source of tracking.

Automation Anywhere is easy. It takes one to two weeks to introduce a non-technical person to this solution. They already have good domain knowledge, and they just need to know how to work with the tool. In about a week, we will be able to train them in basics. We can show them the interface. We can show them what goes where, but they will not be able to develop full automation or know about full RPA coding. They can get the basic knowledge in one to two weeks. Full training will require building a use case. It could be a small use case. If a developer would take four weeks, which includes development, testing, and other things, a non-technical person would require eight weeks. Only then a person will be able to learn completely and become a very good developer.

In terms of integration, there was SAP integration and Sabre integration. There was one more application. I worked only with these applications. If there is a component available, the integration goes smoothly. When you want to go for something customized and you try to build an integration, it is very challenging, but that is common with all the tools. When you try an out-of-the-box integration, it is very easy because they would have already tested that it is working. When you try to build something or customize it, that is when the challenges come. I have seen plenty of challenges with Automation Anywhere when you go for something that is not there in the package. You need a lot of support from the team and a lot of effort. The security restrictions from the organization were also stopping the integration. It was not happening. A lot of errors came, and we had to reach out to the network team and the security team. There were networking and security issues that had to be resolved.

Automation Anywhere has saved time and costs, but I do not have the metrics.

I have not used the recent versions, but it provides a great way to automate. Excel automation is quite valuable. Initially, it was only there in Automation Anywhere. It was not very popular with other automation tools. Excel automation is a very good feature. A lot of back-office activities happen in Excel. It is a very needed feature that Automation Anywhere provides.

In 2021, Automation Anywhere switched from on-premises to cloud. They renamed it as A360. They brought the required changes with this version. Before that, they used to have a line-by-line code view. They did not have a flowchart diagram, but it was very much needed. Because it was low code, a pictorial representation of the code was something that was missing in Automation Anywhere. It was there in UiPath and Power Automate at the time. Automation Anywhere then introduced two views. That gave people the option to use the view that they were comfortable with. That was a very brilliant move. Having two options made it very accessible.

It is very user-friendly. The AI capability that nowadays I am seeing in Automation Anywhere is very good. They have plug-and-play AI solutions. You do not need to know a lot about coding or AI to implement AI in your automation. You can just use their plug-and-play solutions. That is where its real strength is.

Automation Anywhere is easy, but the Automation Anywhere courses are not so easy. All RPA tools have their own academy where business users can go and learn the solution and do things themselves. Automation Anywhere courses are a little bit complex to understand. You need a little bit more time, and accessibility is also a little bit of an issue. They should focus a bit more on the academy and learning materials on their portal. The content should be easy to understand. It is not easy to grasp for a non-technical person. It should be easy for citizen developers. Also, their certification is very costly.

There should be more visibility as an RPA product. Every organization is trying to stick with certain tools. I like Automation Anywhere, and I would like to work with it, but I am not getting an opportunity. Automation Anywhere is not promoting itself to other organizations. Organizations are moving towards Power Automate and UiPath. It could be because Automation Anywhere is not reaching out to companies.

Their community events are also less. There are not many developer events in the cities where IT is there. In Bangalore, India, most of the IT companies are there, so we get to go to a lot of conferences. We get to hear a lot from other vendors, but Automation Anywhere's events are very limited. They should take care of their presence in the community and companies.

They should introduce videos for the new features. They should promote new features. They should be known to people. They should be accessible to people. Only then developers or companies will know about it. Only then, it will get used. There are probably plenty of good features, but they are not known or explored.

I worked with Automation Anywhere for 2 years.

It is a stable product. I would rate it a 7 out of 10 for stability. It is not a perfect product, but it is improving every day.

It is not very scalable. I would rate it a 6 out of 10. After you have built your robot, if you want to make some changes, you can do that, but if you built a robot and you want to make it an AI-enabled robot, it is quite a challenging task.

There were many users of this solution. I was a part of the Center of Excellence. The finance team and HR team were also trying to use it. There were more than 50 people for this solution.

I was getting good support from them. I would rate them a 9 out of 10. They were always very helpful to me. My colleagues have had a bit of a bad experience, but I did not. I have raised a few tickets, and every time, the person was attentive and helped me out. They were very patient. They were straight to the point. They knew the technology.

Positive

I am working with UiPath and Power Automate. Automation Anywhere has got its own benefits and its own strong points, and the same is applicable to other vendors. It is just about which one your organization is aligned with and which one your organization has chosen to go forward with. However, other vendors are better in terms of reach. Even if I am not working on Power Automate for six to seven months, I get to learn about it. I see a lot of things on LinkedIn. There are communities where I can go to learn and keep myself updated, whereas, about Automation Anywhere, I do not see much information. I have to exclusively go and spend a lot of time to find the information. That is where I see the difference.

It was on-prem before, and then we migrated to A360. It was already deployed when I joined, so I do not know about it, but migration took 4 to 5 months.

There were 4 people mainly focusing on migration. It was a bit complex because it was new, and there was not a lot of material available online. It was a little complex, but later, it became smooth. We reported a lot of bugs, and other people also reported them. It was very smooth.

It is cost-efficient in terms of licensing. I found their support good when I was working for the airline client. However, I hear from my managers here that the support price for Tier 3 or premium is a little higher. That is why we are not going for Automation Anywhere. Its price was okay for our client, but for us, it seems expensive.

Automation Anywhere was a tool that was decided by our client. They were very much satisfied with how work was progressing. It gave them faster results, and it helped them navigate through the Covid-19 situation.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere. It is a very solid product. I have always vouched for it. I see a lot of potential because it is very easy and it was a stable product when I was working with it. They were very careful about their releases. They were not releasing a lot of things, which is something I see in other products. With Automation Anywhere, each release is very carefully tested.

They introduce new features, but I have noticed that in India, the market for Automation Anywhere is not very big. I am not getting to work on Automation Anywhere because companies are moving to Power Automate and UiPath, so I am not able to learn it more. It is difficult to get hold of this solution.

In terms of our organization’s perspective when it comes to automation and AI, specifically Generative AI (GenAI), we want about 50% of the income coming from IT and services. Automation and AI are placed at the top of the strategy. We are moving towards RPA plus AI and ML. It is almost like hyperautomation or intelligent automation. This is one focus area, and another one is Pure Generative AI and data. The data part is handled by a different organization. We are looking into how to drive insights from data analytics and how to leverage the GenAI technology outside and derive value from it. These are highly focused areas.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an 8 out of 10. I liked working with it.

I am the manager of our intelligent automation COE within HR. We operate in a federated model. I lead the HR team, and there are similar teams that exist across the company in five or six other areas.

We have plenty of use cases within HR specifically. We have automation for candidate-facing opportunities before people join the company. We especially have a lot of automation opportunities for our recruiting. The human capital management platform that we use is an SAP product. We use SAP SuccessFactors, so naturally, a lot of our automation opportunities come through that platform. There are a lot of emails and notifications to managers for talent management, talent acquisition, and all the way through to payroll, or anything that falls underneath the HR function. Nothing is off limits, and we have pretty much touched most of the functional areas within the department.

In terms of comparing the processes and tasks automated using Automation Anywhere versus how they were done prior to implementation, a lot of the processes had remained the same, especially in the early years. A lot of people were leveraging RPA platforms to recreate processes the way a human was doing them, so the look and feel were very similar to how a human was doing a process, going across applications over the UI, whereas now, there is a heavy focus on process improvement. A lot of people are leaning into process improvement or re-engineering a process before it is automated and making sure that we are automating the right thing. 

It allows for more reliable dynamic automations if you can leverage something out of the UI. You can leverage a database or an API versus automating something similar to how a human would click through a screen. There is definitely a heavy emphasis on design requirements or completely changing a process from a functional perspective, which takes a lot of work, but your automation is easier to create and maintain in the long run.

Before Automation Anywhere, I have used other RPA platforms. From comparing it to others, it is very intuitive. I do not have a development background, but I lead a team of developers. I am trying to manage and teach them how to use the tool as well. I find that it comes across as very easy to use. I have seen a handful of new developers pick it up within a couple of days. They are able to understand the UI and create their first couple of automations within a few weeks and then they get running with very complex things within the first year. It is very intuitive to use. There are definitely a lot more capabilities coming out, but it is all within the same platform. If you know how to go through the platform, they make it very easy to deploy technical solutions.

Automation Anywhere is one of the easier platforms to learn. There are a lot of online resources, and they also have a community forum. If there is not a video on how to do something explicitly and you have a question, in their developer community, people are quick to respond. You can also simply Google something or look at their website, and you will be able to find an answer for it. Especially after you go through the first couple of days of their university's online training through the community version or get your hands on automation, it clicks pretty quickly. When you see it once and learn everything that is in the platform, everything comes pretty quickly after that, so the learning curve is pretty shallow. 

In terms of the tools that are integrated with Automation Anywhere, we are doing a lot of work within ServiceNow. I just became aware they have a thing called Connector Builder, which basically allows us to build connections right there within Automation Anywhere with ServiceNow. There are other integrations with SAP or Active Directory right there in the developer's toolkit so that they can build automations with it. This makes integrating with your system of records or whatever systems you are automating a lot easier.

We have not done any integrations with document automation. That is a big use case that we are looking at. I know intelligent document processing has come a long way, so I am very interested to see how seamless that integration works out. In terms of being able to integrate and leverage any of our SaaS platforms or on-prem applications that we are automating, we have not seen any limitations to it. We have been able to automate everything. Being able to use API task paths or just expose more endpoints from an API perspective makes the developers' lives a lot easier. It is technically a little bit harder, but if you are able to use APIs, then integrating that way will alleviate future maintenance for automation. It is definitely useful to have that in the platform.

Automation Anywhere has had a big impact on the business. I can speak mostly from an HR perspective. All of our automations that are currently running in production save about 2 million dollars annually, both from a cost savings and cost avoidance perspective. Certain things have a dollar amount. There is a dollar amount associated with a transaction that we can automate, and then we can also inject that time back into our employees' days. Freeing up that capacity allows them to go use their human decision-making skills on more advanced and complex projects and allows automations to do that manual, repetitive, and mundane work. Hours-wise, I do not have a metric, but we are able to save 2 million dollars with our portfolio. We are continuing to add new automations, which makes that number go up and up. 

In terms of time savings, it has been super helpful. We are able to give employees their time back.

We have not had any issues with scalability. Everything from our licensing structure and being able to deploy bots across the enterprise is pretty efficient. Being able to get the most out of our bot runners and start looking at bot performance and utilization across those machines has enabled us to get the most out of it. We are able to deploy everything that at least HR needs right now. I know some of the other companies or departments might need more bot runners to keep up with that scalability. When it comes to end-to-end automation and working across COEs in a federated model, that is a different story. We have not tackled that yet, but in terms of being able to deliver work for HR at our company, Automation Anywhere has been a huge help, and there were no issues in terms of getting the job done.

Automation Anywhere offers a lot of programs to get involved. I recently became involved in their MVP, the Most Valuable Pathfinder program. That is a smaller group in the Pathfinder community that allows us to see early access to what is coming and things that will be showcased at Imagine or the products clubs. We sometimes will be able to get early access to dev environments to go poke around and see what is coming. That helps leadership also see what is coming and be able to make a decision on whether or not to buy new features or capabilities. It gives us a little bit more time to go out to our business stakeholders and the people we are automating processes for and say that there is a use case here. Could we apply some new technologies? 

Four or five years ago, we looked at everything in terms of whether we could automate a functional process, but now, there is a lot more coming with Generative AI and intelligent document processing. There are product clubs and community forums to see how others are leveraging the same tools. It is super helpful to see how other people are applying the same technology. It may spark some interest throughout our company.

The most valuable feature of the platform right now for us is just getting the most out of the tool. When I first joined the company, we were on version 11, which is the on-premise version of Automation Anywhere. Getting over to the new cloud platform A360 has enabled us to get the most out of general RPA or robotic process automation. There are plenty more tools that we are looking at, but just being able to automate functional processes, whether through the UI or APIs, to alleviate that manual work from the department has been really our bread and butter. That is where we see a lot of the value for the company right now.

From a platform perspective, our model has been getting operational data back out to our automation owners. We are a pretty small team. We have about 70 automations in production. Everything that we automate, we naturally own a fraction of that just from a technical perspective. Having a team of developers, you want them focused on building new things. We are at an inflection point where we have automated so much that just keeping the lights on certainly takes 20% to 50% of the time, depending on the time of year. Being able to enable the stakeholders is one of my main focuses. If we are automating their process, I want them to continue owning that as much as possible. We are just expanding on the bot insights. From a security perspective, there have been some challenges for us getting our customers in there from a role-level security perspective and making sure that they have full access to the control room and their automation after it is automated. Being able to manage a digital worker has been a big focus. That is what I am looking to get the most out of the tool right now.

I have been in automation for about seven years now. This is my second or third year with Automation Anywhere, specifically. I just went over my two-year mark. This is the beginning of the third year using the platform.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is fantastic. The platform itself is very reliable. Automation, in general, can be finicky sometimes, and it will break. That is business as usual, but in terms of the platform, reliability, and uptime, it is good. If there are patches, by being on the cloud, we get them faster. Fixes and new features are constantly available to us. We have no complaints there. It has been a great journey.

I have not had any issues being able to deploy solutions for all of HR. The platform has everything to offer that we would need to automate for our company.

Their customer support is very good. There are very few times when we have to go out and open up a ticket, but every time we do, we get very timely support. We seem to be getting connected to the same reps, which is super helpful to build that relationship. If we cannot find a knowledge article or something online, they point us in the right direction or let us know if there is a patch or something else coming that will fix it for us.

I have used a competitor. I worked with UiPath for about four years before Automation Anywhere. There are a lot of similarities in terms of conceptual robotic process automation and similar trends in terms of intelligent document processing, process mining, and task mining. I am sure they all have features around Generative AI.

It was deployed before I joined. In terms of the deployment model, it is probably fully on the cloud, but I am not too sure. When I joined two years ago, we were on version 11 on-prem. One of the biggest things I had to do was migrate us from version 11 to the cloud version.

Even if we do not automate anything and just keep the automations that we have running, that is going to save around 2 million dollars year over year for our HR group. Continuing to expand into new automations will drive higher ROI. So, year over year, even if we do not continue to automate anything, those savings and those hours continually go back into the business.

I do not have any experience with pricing and licensing. We have an admin team and IT team that handles a lot of the infrastructure and technology, so I would not be able to speak too much about that.

Automation Anywhere was evaluated before I joined my current company, so I cannot speak much about that. I know they worked with an implementation partner, and that Automation Anywhere was obviously the chosen one.

We do not use Automation Co-Pilot. It is definitely one of the items or features that I am very interested in. I was excited to get my hands on it during the bot games today at the Imagine event and see how it works. You can give it a string of text, and it will generate code for you right there in the control room. That is super helpful. I am looking to see how my developers react to that as well. I am sure that would save some time from the developer aspect. There is another aspect for business users. I certainly think there are some use cases there that they would be interested in looking at.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event has been connecting with everyone in person. I work remotely, so it is nice to see people in person. We get to sit in a room and do the bot games again. We get to see some cool new features and everything around Generative AI. I do not hear the term RPA so much. The big focus in the world is Generative AI. There are a lot of keynotes, and we are able to see how people are starting to apply it early. There is a lot of excitement. It is an exciting time, and I am very interested to see how we will be able to leverage Automation Anywhere with the new technologies.

The Imagine experience is energetic. The world of Gen AI feels like a bit of a playground. It is generating a lot of buzz all the way up at our executive level, and I am sure it is the same for a lot of people. I see the wheels spinning for everyone. There are ideas, and it is good to see everyone saying to start small. It felt a little bit daunting how we are going to apply this, but it is nice to see everyone reiterating the same thing, "It is coming, and you have to be careful. Start small, and it is a journey." It is nice. It is a good pivot.

If I were to invite people to the Imagine event, I would say that it feels like a tight-knit community. There are probably a couple of thousand people here. Seeing familiar faces and being able to meet everyone and talk about some of the same struggles that we might be seeing is good. We get to know how others are thinking through it. Being able to see the new technologies is awesome. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to come. It forces you to take a look at what is coming next and how others are applying it and start thinking so that you can make a decision on where you can help your customers with it.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a solid eight out of ten. It is not perfect. There are probably a couple of little things, but being with the tool for two years, I have seen so much being changed. It is a playground. There are plenty of features and capabilities. We are just scratching the surface, so I am excited to see what is next. It is very good.

We have a pretty big shop nowadays. We have 324 automations in production. Our use cases were concentrated on loan services. Most recently, our initiatives have been targeted in the control space - automating the things that make the bank go around and seeing that the bank is in a good position every day. 

We have a backlog in the hundreds, automation is not something that we'll finish anytime soon. It's definitely a marathon to finish all the things that we need to do.

In 2017, there was a lot of hype around RPA. They paved the way for us to see those benefits, and we continue to grow every year. 

In those early days, we had 28 automations in our first year. We thought we were pretty proud of that number. In 2023, we created over 100 automations in a single year and moved those to production. The volume and the increased capacity for our businesses improved. The employee engagement, when we talk about bots now, is much better. It's "how can we help?" There are no real concerns of "They're going to replace our jobs." Over seven years, our automations have grown, and we've matured with them. 

There are several aspects that we value. The control rooms, monitoring the performance, and making sure everything is up and running has been a great feature. From the design and capacity of the developers' perspective, the intuitive interface is excellent. It's a workflow-driven design session. Following the flow of the users alongside the code makes for an easy automation that everyone can understand.

Automation Anywhere brings in and changes the way we do process automation. Everything was very manual beforehand. We'd have to do batch processes where integrations of systems were pretty costly and took a lot of time. Mapping database fields from screens down to the next system was more difficult versus with Automation Anywhere, you get the visual input of the screens. You can click on those fields and not have to do the data mapping or extract them. You can correlate them to other systems almost instantly individually. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to pick up for business users. Initially, we trained 45 people. Whoever raised their hands, we said, "We'll train you." About 65% of those initial trainees were from the business side. A couple of years later, we noticed that the people who created the automation did really well. They were receiving promotions. Then, all of a sudden, we didn't have the people to support our automation needs since those original trainees moved up. We made a shift and said, "Hey, business users, you want to come to technology? We're going to centralize development." 13 said yes, and we kept building out. Now we're a team that's 40-strong.

The learning curve is pretty quick. Automation Anywhere provides a lot of training courses to support you and there are individuals assigned to your account. The learning curve is short from our standpoint. We spend two weeks with anyone who comes in, whether they're a previous developer or a business person. We find that simple automations can be completed within that training period. Within six months, some of the most complex items people are able to handle.

Right now, our 324 automations touch around 120 different systems. Our core platforms are integrated. APIs are being used for SharePoint or imaging systems so  thatwe don't really have a reliance on the UI. With the integrations, we just continue to grow. 

The integration of Automation Anywhere into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents is great. There are several phases to this one. Automation Anywhere, just the design, the tool, allows you to jump in with workflows initially and lay out the complete automation, and then you can get into the details. For us, it's particularly powerful as it aligns with the different systems that we work with, as well as providing connectivity to the underlying systems, seeing the screens to get into the details of that workflow, making for a great design process for our automation.

Our automation program has positively affected our business in terms of employee capacity and compliance. It's affected all areas. When we think of the capacity, I can go back to 2020 in the early days of COVID and with a payment protection program specifically. We had 9,000 tellers who no longer were going into the bank. We pivoted to an SBA program and had those 9,000 tellers calling a variety of small businesses. We still needed 1,000 more people to do the due diligence. That's where RPA shined. We were able to fill that capacity gap and immediately become one of the top three players in the space. 

When I think of just day-to-day employee engagement, we're focused on the controls of the bank. Those happen maybe once a month, once a quarter, once a year. So those are activities that you really have to prep for and document really well. RPA does the same thing over and over really well, and those controls are assured to be done and executed in the same fashion over and over.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save on both time and cost. When we think of we run around 750,000 hours of runtime on bots per year. That would be a significant amount of employees. That's about 450 to 500 employees' worth of work done every day. Just the overall capacity provided by automation would be hard to replace.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide Automation at scale is impressive. We've obviously pushed that limit. We're at 324 automations. That's over 4200 tasks executed every day. From a scale and monitoring perspective, we know which bots are running, which ones may be going slow, and which didn't run. The ability of the control with room to monitor allows us to jump in and help out when necessary. That is paramount to our success. 

Automation Anywhere helps us find value. We do use professional services from time to time to augment both our capacity and capabilities while finding new ways of doing things. This is a very fast-moving environment. The things that we did five years ago are gone. We threw them away. We upgraded to new versions and have new capabilities. Keeping up with the latest and greatest is always a challenge. There are also new ways of development and sharing those findings, whether it's a webcast or part of the Pathfinder program; we're always curious about what's next with the product.

The tools are fundamentally solid. However, when I think of self-healing, such as automation with a new prompt or a new Windows patch occurring, being able to handle those kinds of things on top of what Automation Anywhere already does and that automatically click through and do the reboots that are necessary to just have a clean run would be ideal. That way, no one has to wake up in the middle of the night and adjust something. That would be amazing. 

Our company has been using Automation Anywhere for seven years. I've been using Automation Anywhere since 2017.

From a stability perspective, whether it's servers or virtual desktops with agents, we have very few issues. We have multiple servers and have never experienced downtime. We have had one or two nodes go down based on hardware issues, however, it's resilient. 

We're now at 324 automations, and it definitely scales. The screens prioritize things, and you have dashboards that say what's working and what isn't. Those types of activities help drive us to where the problems are and show us what we need to resolve them.

Technical support is solid. We pick up the phone and call and create tickets. We get responses almost instantly. We've had many nights trying to figure out how things work on our network or looking at logs. They've been great about jumping in any time we've asked for help. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Throughout the history of development, people have tried to automate things. We've never used a tool that had the control room and the features, the scheduling, and the complexity that it could handle. When Automation Anywhere packaged the whole bundle together, that was the differentiator that really drove us to it.

When we think of ETL, all the standard tools, whether it's SQL or Oracle, we still have all those. However, for speed and simplicity and getting things to production fast, we'll leverage Automation Anywhere.

Many other options often require a data expert. You have to go to database tables to do automation or ETL-type activities, and you have to schedule that and know if there are conflicts within other systems. Plus, if there's downtime, you may not be able to run pieces. It's true coding. There is testing that's also required and the delivery time is not measured in weeks. It's measured in months. We'd all like everything to integrate seamlessly. That said, the real world comes into play, and I'm glad we have Automation Anywhere to fill everything out. 

Setup for us was probably the longest lead time. We're a bank, so we always have to scan the code base. We want to jump in, understand the connectivity, and understand how things are going to happen. There are a lot of planning-type activities before the install. We started in 2017 with version seven of Automation Anywhere. We went through version ten, then moved on to the A360. Each experience became better and better.

We have a PCI-compliant installation as well as our normal normal network.

Our experience deploying Automation Anywhere was seamless. From a server perspective, we run about a dozen servers in four dev IT QB production environments. We'll continue to do the first servers in dev and move to migrate them all the way through production. For any issues that we have along the way, customer service is right there with us to troubleshoot.

We've seen an ROI via hard saves. We define a hard save as someone having to leave the bank or a contract has to leave. We are net positive in our spend. We've managed to prioritize the highest use cases from a cost-saving perspective.

We find it comparable to other products out there. I wouldn't say huge differentiators from that perspective. 

We looked at autoIT to look at for specialty use cases. 

The very first bot that was rolled out was on my team. I've been able to see the control room and the code in progress and evolve over the years has been a pleasure. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

From an RPA perspective, it has all the core functionality. We can automate the bank's systems. The reliability, performance monitoring, and development time are excellent. In 2017, it used to take us six to nine months to develop. That was slow. Fast-forward to 2024, and it takes six weeks, plus or minus two weeks depending on complexity, to deliver an automation.