Automation Anywhere Reviews

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. 

I am an assistant professor in a DMI institute in our country. In our institute, we have to manage a lot of invoice billing. I have been using the bots to automate and maintain invoicing in our institute.

We have also been using AI. I have created many projects, such as a virtual assistant, to automate tasks in our institute.

Automation has been playing a significant role in every aspect of our institution. In our institution, it is very difficult to manually manage more than 1,000 people's data. I like the ability to automate and the bot feature in Automation Anywhere.

Previously, we were doing everything manually. We needed a lot of people to do the work manually. We need 20 to 30 people to manage invoice billing every day. With Automation Anywhere, it has become very easy for us to do invoice billing. It has saved us about 80% of the time. We only need 10 people now. Financially, it has helped us a lot because we can manage tasks very easily with few people. The workload has been reduced by using automation.

I like to make use of Co-Pilot with every task because it is very reliable. They have improved it a lot. I like to use it every day and integrate it with my software. A task that takes months can be done in weeks with the help of Co-Pilot. It helps us save time and do other tasks. It saves a lot of time for employees to do or prioritize other tasks.

In terms of integration, some of our staff have been using the integration of Automation Anywhere with Microsoft 365, but I have not integrated it.

The interface is really nice and user-friendly. Anyone can start right away. 

I have been using IQ Bot, and its accuracy can be improved. It could be more accurate. 

Managing all the bots in the control room can be a difficult task for a large organization. The control room features could be enhanced for better performance.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for around one year in my institute.

At times, I faced some issues with Internet connectivity, even though I had a good Internet connection. This happened at the initial stage, but over the last five to six months, they have improved a lot. Other than that, everything is perfect. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

The automation is used by 60 to 100 people on a regular basis. Around 50 to 100 people use it at intervals. They are not using it regularly in our institute. Overall, there are about 200 to 250 users.

Around 30 to 40 people are involved in maintaining the bots that we have been using. We usually assign them tasks to maintain the bots weekly. It takes a few hours. It is not a big deal.

Support is really good and genuine. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have not used anything other than Automation Anywhere. We were introduced to this by an employee of one of my friends, and we have been using it. We have not used any other solution.

For a non-technical person, it can be a little bit complex, but it gets easier with time. A couple of days are enough to learn and deploy it.

We have five to six people involved in its deployment.

It has helped us save a lot of time and money. It helped us a lot financially.

It is reasonable and affordable. If you consider the tasks that we can get done using this, the pricing is reasonable and affordable.

Overall, it is not very difficult, but initially, it can be a bit difficult to understand how the bot works. Over time, even a non-technical person can manage it. A week or ten days would be enough to learn everything and start using Automation Anywhere.

I would suggest starting small for anyone new to Automation Anywhere. I would also recommend learning and gaining experience from those who are already experienced. Other than that, it is fine. I would definitely recommend Automation Anywhere to everyone.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a solid eight out of ten.

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.

Our primary functionality is built around screen scraping applications. We collect data from one application and either generate reports or use it to complete a user transaction or a customer transaction. For example, I have automation that handles bill pay. A request comes in, we verify it, and then we execute a bill payment transaction.

When we first started, the motivation was not wanting to be left behind in the latest and greatest opportunity for automating desktop applications that are boring and time-consuming but are still very important for the company's business operations.

We were able to see its benefits immediately during our proof of concept five years ago. We were able to take five users of daily work and reduce it to one user of support work. It was very significant.

Prior to implementation, these processes were done by the business units manually. Post implementation, the solutions are IT-based. As a result, IT now has additional responsibility for the business automation, just supporting the business function. It is one thing to build the software. It is another thing to maintain it and keep it running in production. There is a pretty significant lift or burden on the IT side that was not there during the manual executions.

I like the diversity. Every year, maybe even every six months, new modules are introduced to the program, and module enhancements are added to the toolbox to make automating various applications or situations easier. For example, the email module has been enhanced over the years to support all the latest authentication technologies. That is very important as we move away from username and password and embrace multi-factor authentication. Without the ability for these modules to stay in sync and up to date, we would not be able to use them. 

On the document automation side, the document learning features are not as robust as one would expect them to be. When I am doing document automation and a document fails due to low confidence in populating a field, it requires manual correction. Automation Anywhere states that if I correct enough documents, over time, the automation tools will learn where those error situations are and automatically fix them. We have not seen that feature work as advertised.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for roughly five years.

We have not had any issues. I am very impressed with its availability.

It scales quite well. I have not found an application that has exhausted the capacity of the system to execute. If we need to handle more transactions, we simply need to add additional bot runners. We currently have three bot runners in production. If we needed five or ten, I could have five or ten in a couple of days.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rank their technical support group a nine.

Positive

We have two other solutions in-house other than Automation Anywhere. They are very specific to the tasks they are handling.

It was pretty easy. I took a proof of concept that took nine months to build. Since I could not copy it from the proof of concept environment to our brand-new tenant or control room, we had to reprogram it. The reprogramming and testing took three months. Now, if you put all those numbers together, you probably could say it took us a year to build that first application.

It requires operation execution maintenance by my company and my IT group, but it does not take any Automation Anywhere resources to maintain it now. They maintain it at the cloud level and do a good job.

Two people were involved in the implementation.

The pricing is fair. My company is part of a big organization, so the pricing is very advantageous.

Five years ago, we evaluated four products, and Automation Anywhere emerged as the top choice. It offered the best cloud solution compared to the other vendors or providers. Now, if I took those same four vendors and evaluated them today, I might come up with a different answer. The industry has changed drastically just in the last three or four years, and if we did a reevaluation and could start over, chances are everyone, including Automation Anywhere, is on much better footing today than they were five years ago.

In terms of our AI approach, we are very cautious with AI. We are a Microsoft shop, so we are limiting our AI exposure to an Azure tenant-based AI resource. We are probably building our own LLMs to manage the intelligence or the exposure of intelligence to the AI engine. I do not see us ever using external AI modules.

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

As a financial services company, we have a variety of use cases for different areas of our business, as well as some of our IT partners. We have automations that help perform payment extensions on customer accounts. We have automations that track email communications on accounts that are in collections. For our IT partners, we have bots that perform password resets for applications that our IT team supports, as well as the provisioning automations that we use to grant access or change access for team members at our company.

They have been informative in terms of new features, components, and capabilities that are available to us as their customer. We have a regular cadence set up with our account manager and our support manager to ensure that we are able to leverage some of those new components. We have had the opportunity to test or play around with some of the new features being rolled out to see if it is something that we would be able to introduce into any of our use cases at GM Financial.

During the development and the discovery phase for the use cases, while walking through a use case with the process owner, we were able to identify some opportunities that could have helped them before the process was automated. By seeing where they were struggling with manually performing the process and automating the process, we have been able to give them a lot of time back with the use of some of the features.

It is fairly easy to understand. The courses that Automation Anywhere University offers, especially for citizen development, and even for those who are getting into development, have pretty simple course content. It is not overly complex or too technical where somebody could get lost in the instruction. It is fairly easy for anybody who does not have that technical background to pick up and use. If anything, it would probably give them an opportunity in terms of what background they want to understand more to supplement or complement what they learn from Automation Anywhere University.

For a first-time user of Automation Anywhere, there is not a huge learning curve. The content and the instructions through Automation Anywhere University are comprehensible. It is easy for somebody to practice, learn, and build on top of what they have learned. As different use cases come around, there are different opportunities to use some of the different features or variables in development. It will help strengthen how they learn or map out how to use the tool.

We have dependent environments that our automation will log into or interact with. There are applications that our automations interact with or are integrated with. We have automations that are using Salesforce and SharePoint. We have an FIS platform for automations servicing customer accounts. We have various applications and third-party websites that our automations interact with daily.

We have automated processes that were heavy with human interaction. Through automation, we have been able to allow those human resources to be reallocated to other areas of the company, doing different processes manually. These automations are working daily beyond normal business hours, on weekends and holidays. Business partners that are benefiting from the automations have been able to distribute those resources to other areas.

Automation Anywhere has most definitely saved us time and costs through automation. Our business partners are able to receive the benefits of automation and distribute those human resources to other areas of their business. By saving time and costs associated with those human resources, less overtime is being paid. Especially for processes that are dependent and have time-sensitive SLAs, we are not accruing any penalties or anything like that. We are able to leverage automation to avoid those costs. It is not only from a time and cost perspective but also risk avoidance. Risk avoidance is something that is not necessarily highlighted when it comes to automation, but I feel that we have also been able to avoid risk.

We are looking at the different programs that Automation Anywhere offers. We are engaged with our account manager on Pathfinder, and we are able to leverage the ability to map where our program currently is and where we want it to go. We are putting some key ideas, thoughts, and time frames around where we want to be when it comes to building our automation program at GM Financial.

Right now, when I look at the platform for Automation Anywhere, the ease of use for the control room from a production support standpoint for our L1 and L2 team members has been amazing. With our conversion from v11 to A360, there has been better ease of development of components within the control room for our development teams. Obviously, it is apples to oranges, but the experience since going to A360 has been amazing. We have been able to establish some reasonable components, which has made our delivery efforts a lot easier since we have been in A360. From a support perspective, the ease of use with the control room and being able to manage those devices in the control room has been easy for us as well. 

If I look across the use cases that we have, there is more opportunity for us to collaborate with Automation Anywhere to see or maybe explore some potential opportunities for new capabilities within the platform. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of anything that they would need to improve on, but there are probably opportunities to explore some potential use cases where maybe there is a feature that is not yet available. We can discover and pioneer something together.

At GM Financial, our journey began in January of 2020. I have been supporting the development team that has been building bots in Automation Anywhere since 2020.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate my experience with the support of Automation Anywhere a ten.

They are very responsive when our platform admins or our developers need to open up any cases. We have a weekly support cadence with them as well as an account cadence with them. In the different areas that we receive support from Automation Anywhere, they are very responsive and very attentive to our needs.

Positive

When we started our RPA journey in 2018, we had a third party. It was outsourced to a third party that had a proprietary tool. We managed to do that for a few years, but being able to host, support, and build internally was a key factor for us. When the company decided to look at possible solutions to deliver these services, Automation Anywhere was what they selected. When we moved to A360, we took those automations that were hosted externally and brought them into our portfolio as well.

Deploying Automation Anywhere was definitely a learning experience for us, especially when we stood up the platform and tried to understand the deployment flow internally for the team. Our platform admins who do the actual deployment got their system before the support team that helps with the checklist of activities before the deployment takes place. That is where we had to learn and set up our framework to get it deployed.

Prior to actual automation deployments and getting the environment set up, we had to work with our infrastructure team. We had to make sure that we had the right resources in place and that those resources were working adequately before we launched our first automation onto the platform. Internally, we learned some lessons along the way. That is a part of the course for anybody who is deploying a new solution in their infrastructure. Overall, it did help us learn the importance of having a good framework in place so that if we need to build, expand, or change anything, we would be able to accommodate that appropriately.

We have most definitely seen an ROI internally with our development and production support teams. Even our business partners are receiving that return on investment because we have been able to help them realize the benefits that they are getting by automating their business processes. That return is not only to the IT team; that return is tenfold to the business.

I am not engaged in that portion of it; my leader is, which is good because then I do not have to have many discussions.

During the exploration phase for finding the tool for GM Financial, we looked at other tools like UiPath. I believe Blue Prism was another one that was being evaluated. Automation Anywhere was also in the mix. They were also trying to determine if they wanted to continue to host externally, but all in all, Automation Anywhere was where they went.

We are starting to get into an Automation Co-Pilot use case where we can showcase or pilot that with the business. One of the things with technology is that it is a journey, especially for an older financial services company like GM Financial. It involves adapting, understanding, and educating on new technologies and features. Before we can deploy things, we have to prove them. We have to show them. We have to help them understand what the benefit of using it is going to be. We are getting ready to pilot our first co-pilot using Automation Anywhere, and that is for our customer service or customer experience department.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is the opportunity to network and also to see Automation Anywhere showcase any new capabilities and enablements that are available to Automation Anywhere customers. At the keynote session yesterday, it was really nice to see how somebody is recognizing that a lot of times, departments within IT are siloed. They are working through challenges to be more collaborative and engaging to improve the services that we deliver when it comes to automation. Learning and hearing those things and listening to different breakout sessions confirms that we are not alone on our journey when it comes to our RPA program and other things because Automation Anywhere is not just RPA. It is good to know that we are not alone, and it is good to network with people who are experiencing the same challenges or opportunities that we have. All the information and the networking are my favorite things of all the Imagine conferences.

The Imagine experience is fun. It is exciting just because of the fact that we all have these opportunities within our grasp. It is just how we choose to go after it or how we choose to engage. There is the excitement of brainstorming or sharing ideas with people across different companies or services. You feed on that energy, take it back home, and work with your teams to continue to deliver and support.

Three reasons that I would highlight for colleagues and fellow team members to come to an Imagine event are:

• The content that Automation Anywhere shares about upcoming enablement and capabilities that are going to be made available to them.
• The information shared and networking is done with people from other companies across the globe.
• The events in breakout sessions are hosted at different times during the day.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten. I have not had any negative experiences with Automation Anywhere.

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 varied use cases and have worked in different business areas. Customer service is one of our biggest business areas, along with investments and finance. We also have some risk compliance, legal, and HR use cases involving about 50 different applications.

Automation Anywhere has freed people's time and effort to do more useful things. Some smaller teams have a lot to work on during the holidays. The solution has improved error reduction and work-life balance. It was all the more useful during COVID-19 when we worked from home for four years. RPA was a godsend. People could do things more easily. We continue to grow our program through this year because of the benefits it provides.

We really like all the features of the solution. The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use. In 2018, we assessed four different products available on the market. We chose Automation Anywhere because it seemed to be the easiest and most intuitive to use for non-technical people. That has always been our model. We are a very citizen developer-focused organization in terms of RPA and intelligent automation.

The integration of Automation Anywhere with our business applications is excellent. We haven't yet encountered an application with which it doesn't integrate. That's the point of Automation Anywhere or RPA. You use the applications as is. It sits as a bridge or a layer on top of your existing application and does a fabulous job.

We have integrated very few use cases into our workflow. We hope to do that a bit more with attended automation and Copilot. We have no complaints so far regarding documents, but we hope to do a little more with that. From what I've heard, you have a lot more API integrations available now than before. We would like to assess them and use them.

Automation Anywhere has definitely improved work-life balance and error reduction. Our audit and compliance team regularly advocates for the RPA team. They reach out to different business areas when they're auditing them. They are absolutely one of our biggest advocates. We have seen an overall improvement in employee morale with the various benefits we have gotten apart from the obvious time-saving.

The biggest metric that we use is annualized automated hours. I think we have saved about 50,000 annualized hours. In addition, we have saved another 50,000 hours for automated monitoring where people aren't needed. It has saved us a lot of time.

Automation Anywhere is excellent at providing automation at scale.

Through my sessions yesterday, I'm absolutely very interested in the benchmarking process that comes as a part of the Pathfinder program. We are also hoping to use Copilot very, very soon.

We haven't used Professional Service Accelerators yet because of how our program is structured. We started five years ago. We do everything in-house, including training and development. Our citizen developer program is quite robust. We have been able to do all our migrations and development ourselves.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is connecting with many different people. I've been coming to the Imagine event since 2019. Every time I come here, listening to all the keynote speakers on the first day makes me realize that the world is moving at such a fast pace, and we are so behind.

You meet people and realize that these are all possibilities and opportunities for us to be a part of this revolution. It's amazing, and it always feels great to come to the Imagine event.

The most important part of the Imagine event is the people. We have worked with Automation Anywhere all the time. We have worked with excellent people, whether it's the customer success team, the accounts team, or all the leaders at Automation Anywhere. It is wonderful to meet all of these people and hear and see what their vision is and what their thoughts are.

The highlight of every Imagine event is all the products and services that are coming in the near future that we could use or leverage. It's really exciting. It's just me this time, but we usually have more people at Imagine. People are generally very excited to come and be part of it.

With Automation Anywhere or RPA, the way we automate things now is different from traditional automation. The focus of our organization has been to help nontechnical business people automate their own processes. It makes it so much easier for them to learn to automate their own work as opposed to traditional automation, which was mainly done by IT.

It is extremely easy for business users who do not have technical skills to use Automation Anywhere. We use the Automation Anywhere training. We train our own citizen developers within the organization, but the training program is based on what Automation Anywhere provided us at the beginning.

While we have to teach business users how to use basic technical things, we also have to teach technical people how to approach business and business processes. That's a part of our training program. Apart from that, it's very intuitive and straightforward. It's equivalent to a six-month-old who can operate an iPhone.

We take our cues for the solution's learning curve from the Automation Anywhere initial training. We think it takes about six weeks for people to learn to use Automation Anywhere effectively, and we build that into our training program. We cover the basics in week one. We take a use case and work with that in week two. People continue working on their use cases in the third, fourth, and fifth weeks.

In week six, we target to put the use cases into production and cover more advanced topics. We have continued collaboration with our developers to learn new skills. I think six weeks is the amount of time needed for people to be comfortable using the tool on their own for their own use cases.

On our platform, we have about 50 other applications integrated with Automation Anywhere. We have expanded our program from RPA to intelligent automation. Intelligent document processing, Alteryx, Power Automate, and Automation Anywhere actually work hand in hand. While Automation Anywhere is still our main automation orchestration program, we integrate these other automating applications along with it.

I could personally use automated testing, which we currently do not have in Automation Anywhere. When we looked at the document processing IQ Bot, it didn't work for our documents. Since I haven't looked at it recently, I don't know if it needs improvement now. I'm sure the current version is much better.

We started using Automation Anywhere at the end of 2018, so, it's been five years and counting.

We have no complaints about the solution's technical support. I rate the entire customer success team a solid 11 out of 10. That's my comparison scale. Over the last five years, we have had five customer success managers, and all of them have been excellent. They had different personalities and different ways of working, but all of them were excellent. The last four are personal friends now.

Positive

We started seeing a return on investment after the first year and a half of using Automation Anywhere. The growth has been a little bit slow but steady during the time we were all working from home, but I'm hoping for it to grow again over the next 12 months. We'll probably have bigger and better stories to share at the next Imagine event.

I think the solution's pricing is reasonable. Setup cost is what you expect in the industry so far, and the licensing is at par. However, I like the ease of licensing and the flexibility in scaling up or down. We have done that over the last few years. I am looking forward to moving to the cloud between now and the end of August. That will change the licensing model a little bit.

We do not have Dev Stage licenses. From what I understand, it's going to be a pool that we pull out of. It'll be different, but I think it'll give us more flexibility.

We did not use a different RPA solution before using this. We assessed four different products, starting at the end of 2017 through 2018, and realized that Automation Anywhere is the best fit for us. We still think the same because it works great, and we have no reason to complain. We haven't had the need for any other product just yet.

For our current setup, Automation Anywhere is set up on a private cloud on-premises. However, we are working to move to the Automation Anywhere cloud. We are assessing and going through the initial steps. We hope to be on the Automation Anywhere cloud by the end of this year.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

Most of our automation happens on Automation Anywhere. 

While the automation is being done, we use it as a platform. Then, depending on the number of users/ bots needed, we apply  for the corresponding licenses.

The good thing about Automation Anywhere is that any process:

1. Which is repetitive, rule-based, and only requires you to do collect/ edit information on the application frontend can be automated. 

Therefore, Automation Anywhere makes for a good use case. 

2.Wherever the process is  deterministic, with no decisions to be made, you can use it. 

It can automate any processes where 

3. Process is well established, standard, or stable, and there are not many changes in the process. For example, a simple task, such as logging into a website, launching a website and doing systematic steps on the website, can easily be captured to Automation Anywhere.  I see lot of applications, especially in finance and accounting domain.

You might have a lot of steps where you need to either extract data, repeat data, or collect data. All of those processes can be automated through RPA, and especially Automation Anywhere. You can use even automation from the server side, not just websites. The only constraint is that the process should not require human intervention and decision making.

We see the application in the 

# BPO space, 

# Finance and accounting, 

# Health care in terms of claim processing.

E.g. in F&A, if you're doing invoice processing where the entire process is manual, and the analyst has to go through the invoice to determine invoice details, discount on the payment  or a penalty should be levied. In such cases, you can scan this information through an OCR, which is an optical character recognition tool. Then, the rest of the information can be pretty much retrieved by the RPA, which means the RPA will scan the information to classify this information and fill up the  web form. This will be sent to the ERP. This is how the workflow would look like. 

Wherever you can put

# a rule-based system, you can automate all of the processes. In our company, all these processes are manual and you might have 50 to 60 people supporting this process for a mid-size company. You can automate it and reduce the manual effort by almost 40 to 50 percent, depending upon how many techs are enrolled and what is the effort being spent in order to process transaction volumes.

I have been familiar with a couple of projects where this was implemented in cash applications or invoice processing, and they could automate these steps. So, I'm familiar with some of the back-end processes and where they are getting automated.

#1.You don't have to really code anything, as it gives you a good interface (UI), because the components are already preconfigured, you  have to just a drag and drop sequence in terms of how you want to execute the steps. 

#2. There are preconfigured APIs that can be used. E.g., if you want to interact with the mailbox solution, you can have the RPA fetch attachments or email body from the mail solution. You can process attachments via test file or PDF. You can even make Automation Anywhere work around PDF, which is typically not that easy to work with in terms of extracting information.

#3. Metabots/ IQ Bots: One of the features, which we have not used too much, but available, is the MetaBot feature. These preconfigured solutions are easily downloadable, and you can just plug-and-play with a bit of customization, which also means you do not have to keep recreating and can reuse existing functionality. Some of the typical uses are that you could be regularly logging into a website. You can just download a MetaBot, as a useful webpage interface and just run it. All you have to do is maybe replace the name of the website, and in case there is a certain authentication mechanism that is being used, then provide that information.

# 4.There are multiple levels of cloning. In case screen cloning doesn't work, you can do object-based cloning or keystroke-level cloning, depending upon what parameters are available to you and what is the level of information that you capture. You can traverse between object cloning, which is the lowest, most basic form of cloning to a stroke-based cloning, which is like taking care of each keystroke-level which is made by the agent.

#1 Exception Management and Notification: When you are making a code, and there is a happy path and exception management mechanism, it would be nice if there was feedback in terms of whether this is the most appropriate way to code this. I'm not sure how this can be done, but that could be very insightful. It already gives you some screen tips, but this could be done in a better fashion, in case you are creating the workflow and then you believe a beta workflow is available or could be done. If a screen tip could be given to the coder for this sort of workflow, this would be a much better feature for Automation Anywhere. 

# 2 Type of Cloning: I've realized that sometimes when screen-level cloning is a better option, people still use object-based cloning. It would be useful if Automation Anyone could give you tips recommending fewer steps or fewer areas of exception management after you inputted your code. I'm not really sure if this is doable from a technical standpoint.

#3 Debugging: Currently, I believe the debugging of bot is a bit tricky and not very elegant, you might have to keep re-running the script to be able to identify the bug. This can be looked at, as a possible area of improvement. 

#4 Scheduling:There are two modules: the run module and the control center. In terms of scheduling and triggering, they could make it a bit more helpful and provide suggestions, e.g., if you are scheduling it, and there is a conflict, can you resolve it this way. Maybe you can get an upfront alert or something to that effect. 

#5: Stability, Workaround and fall back mechanism: When  bot breaks down, is there any of mechanisms or notifications that can be given? You can possibly choose to notify people, typically in organizations people are pretty much adverse to automation. If something breaks down, they would like to know at the earliest given opportunity that something is breaking down and piling up. They want to be able to resolve it quickly. If the resolution is going to take time, they want to be able to make some specific workaround mechanism kick in. If a bot breaks down, immediately the fallback mechanism should work too. If there could be information in terms of  when the process was out of range and somebody might need to take a look at what has happened. This is because most of these business processes that get automated are critical in nature and might have financial and operational impact. People need to know that there are working fine and not broken down. It can really have an adverse impact if they break down and nobody knows.

#6. Platform Training: My experience has been that if the person who codes the bot is not very well-trained, then they might create unstable bots. So, it's not the platform. It is just how somebody has coded the bots which can bring in lot of instability to them. I recommend that when you are using a coder that the person well-trained and have a good amount of experience already working on bots. They shouldn't be newbie or beginner who comes in to code because that will impact the quality of the code itself.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for the last three years at two different companies.

# Business process stability: Before robotic automation, the business process itself should be stable and very well-documented. Also, anytime a change is made to the process or subprocess ensure, that the RPA gets updated too. Typically, the entire process of automation might take some time, then by that time, the initial business process might have changed a bit. There could variations in terms of volume or in the process itself.

The most important thing is that before you automate something that you must make sure that it is stable, in its steady state for whatever changes might be upcoming over the next six month to year. Otherwise, you might create a bot, which will go into production,  and fail because the underlying process itself has changed.

# Monitoring and controllership: If there is no changes in the process, bots are pretty much stable and especially, if they have been well coded. In case there have been any changes anywhere in the process or subprocess, the bot can fail. This means you must have a review mechanism with monitoring in place. Once you put a bot into production, you have to monitor it and do regular sanity checks. Otherwise, you could have situations where bots have failed and you might not know, then the process comes to a standstill. In a nutshell monitoring and control is an important aspect of RPA in the run phase.

Scalability is just scaling up the number of bots, so scalability is not a problem. You can increase the number of machines and number of bots to scale up the solution, but it can be sometimes very cost prohibitive. E.g., typically, it requires a dedicated machine, and it can't be a shared environment. This can be a bit of a constraint in terms of the number of machines being used. Otherwise, the solution is completely scalable. In case the process requires more throughput, you can just increase the number of bots which are working. Also, if you are doing this properly, then you have to make sure that there are not multiple bots running at the same time which might be at cross purposes.

I don't interact with the people from Automation Anywhere.

# Procurement of the license is easy, but depending upon what you want to automate and how you automate it that might take time. Setup is not at all difficult. You just take the license and install the application, then it's ready to go. However, in terms of what you're trying to automate, how you're trying to automate it, and the complexity of the problem, the entire automation process can take time.

# Implementation timelines:The time frame to implement depends on the complexities and number of the processes and subprocesses. In a typical process, the coding, testing, and deployment could range from a week to four weeks. However, I have seen it sometimes take longer because you have to continuously keep checking and testing it. Every time the code breaks down, you have to possibly start from the beginning.

My experience has been one to four weeks as the ideal time frame. However, depending on how well the process was understood and documented, there can be certain gaps which would only become evident during the testing phase, not otherwise.

# Resources: Depending on the number of bots that you have to create and the number of the complex processes along with the given budget and timelines that you have in mind, the number of developers range from one to multiple developers. The resources that you really need are developers because they are people who will be coding. Otherwise, from an ownership standpoint, we need some subject-matter expertise for the process. The people who are subject-matter experts will be needed on a part-time basis for the developer to be able to map the process well and be able to create their technical design. Then, you will need a technical master who creates the technical documentation of how it will be coded. The number of technical masters again depends upon the processes and complexity along with the corresponding number of developers.

The deployment team may not be very big. You need just the developers and a design architect, mostly two people. All the other people come and go per the requirement stage of the deployment. There might be people who are there only for consultation. Some people might be there only to approve the solution. Whenever you bring in automation, it has to be reviewed, monitored, and assessed from the organization's standpoint. There might be people who are just doing approvals for this process deployment in case it's a very complex project, and then there is a project manager. Otherwise, sometimes the technical design person doubles up as a project manager too.

Before implementing, you do the assessment of why the organization wants to automate:

Imperatives for Robotic Automation 

• What do they want to automate? 
• What are the key objectives  the organization wants to achieve through robotic automation? 
• Is it a process optimization or is it cost cutting? 
• Who is driving the automation? Is it client-driven or is it vendor-driven? 

Then, you have to build the business case in terms of what you want to try to automate. E.g., how much can actually be automated? That assessment should be done. Even the cost and time of automation versus that benefits that you're going to get out of it needs to be done.

# Process Degeneration: When we start automating, we do a process desegregation. This means whatever processes are under scope that we try and understand the task level, activity level, and precedence details. We make activity diagrams, then try and assess out of all of these which one can be automated. So, if the automation index is pretty high, which means that most of the process can be automated, e.g., up to 80 percent, then it might make a better business case than if the automobility is only say 30 to 40 percent. Then, the cost of automation might be way higher.

# Setting the right expectations with the client: t is also important to set the right expectations with the organization. Are they new to automation or do they some prior experience with automation? Because this helps us set the right expectations in terms of the benefits which can be had. The customer might also want to understand what are the impacts if automation fails and the fallback mechanisms. For example:

• How do you mitigate or remediate the impact of automation failure? 
• What is a criticality of the process you're automating? 
• What are your points of failure and choke points? 
• What are your backup plans if things aren't going well?

The most important thing is the business case as to the cost versus the benefits of automation.

# Legal and Compliance Regulations: Also, are any legal or compliance regulations which are applicable because technically it might be feasible to automate, but legally or from a compliance point of view, it might not be good idea to automate. You might want to still have human intervention in terms of verification and validation.

# Criticality of the process: From a financial impact standpoint, things that require a bit of background investigation might be better kept as a manual process or require a human approval rather than automating it completely.

It all depends on the scale. In one project that I have worked on, we had a savings of $200,000 over a three-year period and a payback period of 6 months. The typical ratio is that one bot will replace two people.

# Licensing: One of the components of key drivers for us to renew our contract is AI or automation. As an organization, we are moving toward smarter operations.

Our pricing a year ago was $600 per license, but I am not sure of our current licensing cost.

# Set up cost: Additional costs will be for the machines and the number of machines that you are using. You can deploy virtually as well as on physical machines. In both the situations, you do need to allocate a certain budget for securing the machines and where the software will be installed and running. 

# Dedicated Machines: The machines cannot be used for anything else, because only a certain bot can run at a certain time. You need to be very particular about your scheduling of running the bots, and while the bot is running nobody can use the machine. You cannot have an agent working on a machine and the bot running in the background. The machine  has to be completely dedicated. 

# Network Bandwidth and Disk Space: Then there are the network bandwidth requirements and  disk space requirements, which are additional costs apart from the licensing and software costs. The developer is also going to charge you for their coding time too.

There are two or three more tools in the market such as Blue Prism, UI Path, but I think the preference was given to Automation Anywhere.

I have only worked with Automation Anywhere.

Understand why you are choosing Automation Anywhere, as the platforms are pretty on the same level except for certain functionalities. Also, in some scenarios, one platform could be better than another. Pick a platform and stick with it.

It is easy to use, but I realize that the effectiveness of the platform depends on the coder and how he is doing the coding. This is my experience, because I have seen that the quality of the automation is as good as the person who is using it. In Automation Anywhere, the skill set of the coder really determines how good the automation is, which is why I am making it a eight (out of 10), not 10 (out of 10). Because while the platform is feature-rich and easy to use, it is the skill of the coder that determines how well the platform is leveraged.

I' am now mainly driving AI at my company. RPA has become a bit secondary in the sense that it is a part of my solution, but most of the time, it is AI-driven. RPA sort of helps in the execution of some of the components of that overall solution. From the organization's standpoint, automation is already a part of all our solutions. E.g., our organization is moving toward automation where almost 30 percent of any deal will be allocated to automation. It will be a ratio of 70:30, where out of $100, a total of $30 dollars will be allocated toward automation and AI.

I did my certification on version 10.4.