I worked for a call center company and most of the use cases were related to developing automation for our clients. We also created some automation for internal processes.
The integrations of Automation Anywhere with the mainframe application for banking companies are among the most valuable features. Banking companies have a black screen (a text-based user interface) used in some banking core systems. In our case, we were able to create very good solutions integrated with that kind of platform using Automation Anywhere.
Also, if you need to use OCR automation to process standard invoices and send the information to another platform, that is also a very good feature.
The goal of any automation is to provide efficiencies. I would like a way, within the platform, to track the benefits. If you are the center of excellence manager, you need to show to the C level the value that you are adding to the company. The unique way to show that to the C level is how much money you are bringing into the company or how much money you are saving the company in costs. I would like a default feature where each bot gives us data on all the benefits it provides from its process.
They also need to improve and work very hard on the user experience to democratize automation.
I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.
It's a very good platform in terms of stability.
Automation Anywhere has very good scalability when you want to scale an existing bot.
It is very easy to contact them and receive support from them.
We were working with a local system.
The initial setup is very easy. If you are not setting it up in a virtual environment, it takes between half an hour and one hour, maximum.
We have deployed it on the cloud, using AWS.
There is no maintenance of the solution on our side.
These types of companies, in automation, need to evaluate their business models. They sell it by license, but if they could charge by case or by interaction, that might be better. Right now, it's expensive when you want to scale or use them for simple processes.
I know my Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism and, now, Microsoft Power Automate. If you want to automate a simple process, these solutions are very good. But if you need to integrate different platforms or systems using an API, or if you want to widen the scope of automation to create an automated process, end to end, that is going to be difficult for any user. You need to be a developer with very good programming skills. If you are going to automate, for example, downloading emails, Automation Anywhere is okay for non-technical users. But the license is very expensive, so you have to weigh the benefit that you are going to receive.
For me and my team of around 150 developers who are engineers, the learning curve was very easy. For them, it took two or three months because they were already familiar with the logic. Automation Anywhere has good information on the web where the guys can access material and forums to learn about creating different types of automation.
The benefits, for us, from Automation Anywhere are more related to the business case than the tool. You need to have a very good approach from the business analyst's perspective to understand the added value that an automated process can bring to the company.
The most important thing is to train the business analysts in your company to identify what the best processes are to automate, to get the most benefit from the tool.
Overall, this is a very good tool if you have all the permissions and accesses, and you can work without any virtual environment, like VDI or Citrix.