Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our use case is mainly finance related. We've used Automation Anywhere to automate a couple of applications with respect to statement analysis and daily manual processes. 

We check if the process is automate-able, meaning there is no human interaction needed, no judgments to be made, etc. If the process is a candidate, we then move forward and start automating. We also look into the systems involved, because some systems have restrictions with respect to automation.

Overall, we've saved a lot of time. There's a recent process that we automated, which saves around 200 to 300 hours each month, depending on the number of accounts that come in.

Automate Anywhere can just mimic what a human does. That is the overall feature I can talk about. With respect to specific features, my main focus is with IQ bots, because they can learn by themselves, which is very helpful in a finance background where we're looking at statements and the like. There's a little bit of coding that you need to do and then you can just start teaching it.

This solution is very easy to use since it's a pseudo-code based language rather than workflows. It's very easy to analyze, especially when it comes to getting back to your code, making changes, or resolving an issue. It's not only the development that you need to look into. You also need to look into the maintenance point of view. You need a little bit of a technological background, but that's really just an add on. Even if you don't have it, you can really mimic a manual process that you're doing for simple use cases, so it really helps.

One aspect of the solution that needs improvement is with respect to its stability. There are a lot of issues in the tool. There are a lot of breakdowns. We report these issues to Automation Anywhere and they come back with a fix, but it takes some time. At least the fact that we know those errors up front really helps us to design the code. However, with respect to some features, we've finished designing and then we realize that it's not going to work, so all our effort goes wasted.

Stability has yet to get there. There are issues with the tool such as breaking down. When we have the bots run on our local system together, we might need to restart on the second or third day. There are a few limitations, which I'm sure they'll overcome with time, but until then, we have to modify our code to withstand that drawback.

If you have coding background, it's very simple. There will be no effort at all. For a non technical background person, it might seem a little complicated at the start, but with all the drop-downs and pulls for loops and ifs, it gets really easy.

The course is wonderful. The module is really amazing. I tell my peers to take the course. Certification I wouldn't emphasize as much, because the questions asked in the certification versus the module do not sync with each other very well. However, if you finish the module, when you get a use case up front, you will know what feature is best to use. After doing the course, I know all the easiest ways to do stuff. So this course will really help a person.

We are using it to automate company processes all across our firm: finance, legal, compliance, and customer client account servicing.

We have the ability now to surveil all our employees for political contributions. This would previously take 40,000 hours for a human to do. By combining Automation Anywhere and Appian together, we have been able to build a bot that works with Appian workflows to manage all our employees.

The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages. I have been able to be a developer with Automation Anywhere without knowing the technical background. I am a business user, and not needing the technical knowledge to use the system has been useful for me.

The bot creation process is straightforward in some ways and complicated in others. You can get your initial stuff laid out really quick, but then putting in your exception handling is more time consuming. It is awesome because it takes two hours to get things initially done. However, then it takes another two months to work through everything else, such as infrastructure and moving from development to QA to production. 

When I change the name of a variable in the Variable Manager, I would really like it to change in the code. We just added coding standards where I had to spend hours going through and recoding existing bots, because anything needing a change had to match our coding standards, and that now includes variable names. I just spend two days renaming variables in a bot. While it should have been superfast in the Variable Manager, I had to go through every single line of code, rename all of them, and inevitability, I will miss one. If I have already assigned a variable do something, it makes sense that if I change the name of the variable, then it should change in the code.

We have had so many stability issues.

We had quite a few issues when we upgraded from version 10.5 to 11.2. We were struggling with those issues, only to find out that version 11.2 has known problems. We should have gone straight to version 11.3. Now, we are upgrading again.

We have had so many production support issues. In version 10.5, we lost the ability to run unattended bots. Our Control Room could no longer unlock our Bot Runner machines, and Zendesk could not help us. So, we spent two month babysitting every single bot that ran. Then, when we upgraded to version 11.2, we found out schedules vanish from the Control Room, which resulted in us babysitting the bots for another two months.

The technical support is not great. We have had issues where they close our tickets when we don't respond to their email within eight hours, but they email us on a Friday night.

I had two days where I was out of the office, and they closed tickets on me. This has happened to my co-workers, as well. This has been frustrating.

I really struggle with the support team and informing them of endemic issues. They try and explain it away, but I know enough to be aware that there is a bigger issues, such as what we experienced with versions 10.5 and 11.2 causing us to babysit bots.

Not having the support has been problematic for me.

We used a third-party vendor for the deployment. With our initial vendor, we were led to believe that they were experts. We have since come to realize this was not the case. We have changed vendors and reprogrammed our bots from the initial vendor. We are much happier with our current vendor. 

We measure ROI through a combination of hours saved, errors avoided, and quality of life, which are bots based on processes which humans can do quickly but hate doing them. We have a couple bots built around quality of life.

I would encourage anyone looking for an RPA solution to look around at other solutions in the market.

The ability to integrate the solution with other applications is hit or miss. We have a lot of homegrown applications, and sometimes those don't work. Mostly, they work well with websites until they change the websites.

We have done a proof of concept of the IQ Bot. We struggled with it because we have sales spreadsheet that go across more than one page, and IQ Bot cannot follow it across more than one page. Also, the dp1 requirements were too high for most of our use cases.

We don't use Citrix automation.

We have automated some fund management and fund reconciliation processes, which has been done successfully. The tool has been performing well. 

In our fund management and fund reconciliation process, we had a lot of headcount. Automation has significantly reduced our FTE count, investing that IT personnel into other work. Also, the quality of the work has slightly improved.

Our development time has been reduced because the solution is very user-friendly. You don't have to know a lot of things. It has an IDE with drag and drops, in addition to workflow development. This gives developers an edge to write code quickly.

I am a developer with nine years of experience in full-stack development. I have found this tool strikingly different, compared to the other tools, in terms of ease to use. Anybody can be taught it, and it has a very small learning curve.

Automation Anywhere has some limitation with its integrations. You can build your logic with MetaBots and .NET components, e.g., if something is not gathered by Automation Anywhere or built into functionality, you can write a MetaBot. A MetaBot is like an external component. You can write it through C# or .NET code, and make a DLL, and import it. This is not open to all data types or EXE functionalities which can be written through C#. You have to define your variable types, matching them with Automation Anywhere existing variable types. Because of the knowledge required, I cannot let another person, who doesn't know Automation Anywhere, build my external DLL code.

They are already addressing some concerns that I have been having, like having cascaded code blocks, which is very helpful for developers to use when finding and debunking codes. Until now, we haven't had collapsible cascaded code sections in Automation Anywhere. This is not typical, as any IDE will usually have it, on any language.

The current interface for business users is not intuitive, as it is a code-based view. A business user wanting to develop a process may find the interface a bit elusive. Automation Anywhere is now working on a process flow view with a drop and drop, which should be better for business users.

There is not much guidance for implementing DevOps, like continuous development. Nowadays, the technology has come for the deployment part, it should be part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD). 

With Jenkins or TeamCity, there is a job, and I want to see them have integration with Automation Anywhere, so we can directly code check-in, run, test, and deploy. Now, we are doing this manually for deployment, but I want to see a DevOps job instead.

We had couple of Windows' tools that we automated. The stability is remarkably good. 

In some cases with RPA web development, where we had to integrate with some websites, there were some problems in terms of reliability or stability. The issue is not constant. Different browsers, like IE, work well, where others, like Chrome, don't work well. With legacy websites, based on old technology, it also does not work well. 

The scalability is fine. You can create small, repeatable tasks. You can expand through different bots. So, you don't have to recreate the same stuff. Automation Anywhere provides the facility so you can reuse components to make a scalable solution.

We are improving scalability on a daily basis, as RPA is new to us. Our code is now more scalable and reusable than we developed our basic structure. Going forward, if we have to create a new bot with any given scenario, it will take 20 to 40 percent less time to create. This is because we have already made the scalable, reusable components.

In terms of accessibility, the Automation Anywhere technical support is the best. Out of all the RPA tools that I have used, their support forum is more agile and responsive. For any issue, we just have to create a ticket and a technical person will get assigned in no time. They are the best in terms of responsiveness, but I have mixed feelings about the quality of those responses. I feel sometimes to support their fast responses that they probably compromise their quality.

We used to get a lot of emails from the original fund management users (the consumers) asking about their estimated stock prices: monthly and biweekly. This information comes through a lot of emails. We had to read those email, classify and categorize them, then go into a different portal to get some more data, and finally, send them a result in an Excel format.

We used a consultant, and the deployment was very smooth. We have been maintaining three environments: development, UAT, and production. The deployment procedure is pretty simple. We just have to export from one to another environment where the dependency is just a package file. 

We are thinking of implementing Bot Insight and the CoE dashboard to calculate our ROI, since our bots are not analytics-based. We are just using our bots as a bot. They are not integrated with any analytics. I know that they have a CoE dashboard, where you can define parameters to automatically calculate ROI. At the moment, we are manually calculating our effort savings.

I don't agree with the IQ Bot licensing costs, which depends on the consumption of the document rather than per bot or user. This is confusing for me, because most of the cases for us in a possible future scenario, there would be a lot of invalid data to be scanned to get to real data. E.g., we would have to supply approximately 100 pages of scanned data to extract two pages of original data. In these type of cases, the IQ Bot might be a costly venture.

The company also looked at UiPath. From my understanding, Automation Anywhere was chosen for ease of use and licensing.

The IQ Bot seems interesting in the terms of populating semi-structured data and gathering intelligence of its own. Though, I haven't implemented in my project yet.

I didn't know Automation Anywhere seven to eight months back. All my learning came from the Automation Anywhere University. Though, I have experience in other RPA tools, the courses are really helpful, as they helped me to gather the knowledge needed to implement and master the product. Right now, I'm applying the information to my domain and company.

I haven't used it in a Citrix environment.

I very excited to see the next version of this product.

Our primary use case is banking/financial. Processes we have automated include loans, ledgers, mortgage loans, and even some of the record management systems.

In some of our use cases, people were spending more than three hours per day just generating reports. And then we created an automation for this and it reduced the time to 30 minutes. It improves employee productivity so they can use their time in other areas.

I like the way it works with structured data in the back office and the way it does repetitive work.

In terms of ease of use for developers, we're able to create reusable components. We don't want people to have to rebuild things from scratch. In this way, developers can take the reusable components and complete their development processes more quickly.

The bot creation process is pretty straightforward. Anyone can go in and learn it easily, and then they can build a bot. I like it.

When it comes to integrating the solution with other applications, there are some challenges. For some third-party solutions, there are no direct interconnections. For example, there were no direct connections with SAP systems. So, we had to create connectivity between Automation Anywhere and some third-party solutions. They have now improved that situation a lot and we can connect SAP and other systems as well.

If they want to sustain their position in the market, they have to be flexible, working on how we can integrate with third-parties, working on a machine-learning product. People are expecting that and it would be really helpful.

From the IQ Bot perspective, frankly speaking, they still have to improve a lot. I got IQ Bot training in San Jose. My expectation from a straight, technical, architectural point of view was that I would be able to create my own algorithm and integrate it. But with IQ Bot, I am not able to integrate anything. It is already well-defined, so I have to use that particular option only. I know I can not go with any other machine-learning platform. I hope they will be coming out with version 12 where we can integrate it with Python algorithms and other stuff. It might only be in the future, it might only be on the roadmap. But as of now, it is lacking a lot in that area. We are expecting, for most of the documentation, things like tags, that there would be a checkbox option. That's lacking in IQ Bot.

The stability has increased a lot. When we started with version 10.2, there was a lot of instability. There was no way we could keep the bots active, there were scenarios where it became disconnected. There is also the code deployment perspective and a lot of other angles. People are always only thinking from the business perspective, but as a technical architect, I think about operational effectiveness and how they can improve the product's maturity.

The stability has improved a lot.

However, when upgrading, they changed their internal architecture. They moved it to a JT Java platform. When moving, some of the existing features did not work in the new version. It might be that they have to improve their regression testing to improve clients' satisfaction. It can happen that what is running in production currently, if I move to a new version, suddenly is not working tomorrow. People are not happy with that and say, "I want to roll back to the older version." They are not able to use the new features.

When moving to a new version, they have to think about what features people are using and what kind of impact there will be. Small business users will be fine, those who have ten bots or 15 bots. But there are organizations like mine that have around 700 to 1,000 bots, and that makes changes very difficult to handle. It could be that 10,000 tasks are using something and if that thing is changed it will be hard to update. I might have to spend a year on that. People will never accept that.

Scalability-wise, they have increased it a lot, based on the clustering method. As a technical architect, I'm going with always-on production and data centers. That means that if any data center goes down - there is a natural disaster or something else that happens - how do you make it such that you can bring up another data center? I'm coming up with a design for that based on the latest version, version 11.

The initial setup is very simple. It's Windows-based and it's a straightforward installation. We used to say they need to come up with a silent installation option, with the previous version. But now, with version 11, they have introduced, even at the server level, a silent installation. That means we can make it automated instead of manually installing it.

We measure the ROI of automated processes by how much of a benefit we're getting from it. We look at how much time it takes and how many robots we're using and we include the licensing and operations costs. Finally, we take into account how much faster the performance of the bot is, compared to how long it took to do the process before automation.

We have saved time and money, but when people think of going with RPA they cannot expect that they will immediately see ROI. They have to sustain and increase the RPA options. They will have to spend a minimum of one or two years increasing their use cases for automation. Then they will see a good ROI. They should not expect, within three months, to say, "Hey, I have automated, where is the ROI?"

All organizations have a certain strategy or checklist. In this case, management will think first about licensing cost, about the total cost of investment. After that, they will think about the product's features and functionality. They will also look at support. They will consider the use cases, the current processes they have identified already, and based on all that they will decide whether to go with Automation Anywhere or another product.

In terms of our bot creation process, people come to me and say, "I have a process. How do we automate it?" We need to understand if it's a cognitive use case or a straightforward use case. If it's straightforward, we tell them we'll use this product and build it for them with four to six weeks of development. Then it can go to production. If it's cognitive, then we really need to understand it better. We need to use a third-party product, like Kofax or maybe an IQ Bot if it is fit for the scenario. Based on that, it takes some time and then we'll move it to production.

We have a process architecture review committee where we review all the processes. We cannot blindly go forward with all the processes that have scope for automation because it's all licensing cost. We need to think about whether we can automate a given process with any other IT automation solution, like scripting or macros. If that is not possible then we have a fit for RPA. Then we have to go through our checklist, walk through the use cases, and look at the percentage of the automation scope: Is it a 100 percent automation scope or 80 percent or 20 percent? We need to to know if there is any manual validation or manual intervention required and how that is handled.

Initially, we failed with the Citrix automation where we have a lot of use cases. We ran into a lot of limitations with Automation Anywhere in version 10.5. But with version 11, they have AI Sense which we can use for Citrix applications. We are currently exploring this option.

I have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and I have advanced professional certification from Automation Anywhere, which I completed for version 10.5. I'm also doing it for version 11. I also have an official certificate for IQ Bots.

At the moment, for us, everything is on-premise. We're not ready to go with cloud. So we have to build our own platform. We have to build our own bots.

I would rate this solution at seven out of ten. They have to improve on the product's maturity level. When they are introducing new versions, they have to conserve the existing commands and features, so that they work when we move to the new version. And they also have to come up with more flexibility, so their solution can integrate with our scripting and our own algorithms. That will make it easy to convince our business areas to increase the adoption of RPA.

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

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

Ease of use is a valuable feature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we measure ROI, we look at four buckets:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have not taken any Automation Anywhere University courses.

I have implemented it for multiple use cases. 

One of the use cases that it was implemented for is filling out timesheets from the managers. There are certain managers who have to allocate hours to multiple employees, around 40 to 45 employees. Each month, they decided how much time that they will allocate to each of resource. Using a robot, they can automatically fill in the timesheet on Zoho, which is the timesheet system that the company uses.

Another use case was that we used to have certain lists of vendors who billed every month. They had a specific format to their invoices. Using bots to read through those invoices, we were able to pick up relevant data and enter it into the finance systems.

It has improved the efficiency and reliability of the data in the systems. A user is always going to make errors. By adopting robots, we are able to have more accurate processes, plus time is saved.

It saves time for the people who operate it. This particular bot is an attended automation bot, and before running the bot, the manager tweaks some of the values which are important. Overall, this will save the managers time during their processes and create value.

It is not always required to have a technical background. It is not necessary to know programming languages. This makes it easier for a business user to create his own bots.

It is pretty stable on a day-by-day basis. It is much better than when I started working on RPA solutions three years ago.

Manually, I have worked on adding/scaling bots, but I need to work on cloud availability, possibly discussing scaling with cloud providers, like AWS.

For different processes, the scaling time period is different. For some processes, we could develop bots in two weeks, then go to production with one or two bots. For other processes, it could take three months or more. It varies based on the process.

We did not use another solution previously.

The setup process is not easy compared to the competition, and this can be a barrier to entry.

We implemented it ourselves.

The time savings depends on the process. By using a bot, we have saved 40 to 70 percent. If the process uses unattended automation, it saves a lot of time.

Currently, I don't think that we have saved money with this solution.

When I started working on it, it was difficult to obtain a trial version (barrier to entry). Now, they have a Community Edition, which may make it easy to get started.

We looked into UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. Our client was interested in Automation Anywhere.

UiPath has an easier setup process.

I recently took a look at the Bot Store, and it's a good initiative. I haven't started using it. I downloaded a couple of the bots, and hopefully soon, I will try to use some of them in a production environment.

The real beauty of robotic automation is when it is running from the back-end (unattended).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have seen some inconsistencies with stuff, environmentally.

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

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

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

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

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

We have 10 licenses right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it enterprise-wide for HR, IT, and in the front-end of our transfer agency. The bot helps organizes certain HR classes, letting the organization know when classes have not been completed. We have uploaded certain fund model data to third-party portals. We can set up new accounts in less than a week, where it use to take months.

At a very high level, because of how we've implemented it and how we work with our business partners, they are now looking for ways to help do the automation. Additionally, we've adopted a bit of a federated model, where once we start working with business partners, we start training them on how to use the tool. Therefore, the tool has more of a widespread use around the organization, helping people rethink their jobs.

It integrates with different types of applications, so we can automate our business partners' redundant, repetitive tasks.

It is very simple to use. We have people that we trained who had absolutely no development background at all and are now using RPA. They are using it and developing their own solutions. 

We've had people who already had a development background. They self-trained and got certified in about three days, so it's pretty easy to use.

While the Automation Anywhere University is good, the estimates of the time that it takes to complete it are a little low, especially when you start watching all the videos thoroughly. One of the courses that they said would take six or eight hours was closer to 16 to 20 hours.

I noticed that from version 10.5 to 11.3 the number of clicks to start a bot through the Control Room and Schedule Manager have increased. In certain cases, I would like to see that become simpler, faster, and easier.

I would love to be able to schedule things based on business case. Right now, the Schedule Manager is either once a day or pick days of the week with times. However, in the financial industry, I sometimes need to run something on the third business day of every month. At the moment, I don't really have a way to set that up in the Schedule Manager. 

I would like to see some improvement in error handling. That would be great. Sometimes, the errors that you get back are awfully generic. It is like you have to do a lot of research to figure out what the issue is.

I would love to see a little smoother integration with some different types of platforms, technologies, and user interfaces. 

The stability is getting better. We had some issues, especially because when we went onto version 11.2, there were some scheduling issues. So, very recently, we upgraded to version 11.3.1.2, and it seems to be a lot better.

The scalability is good. It is very easy to scale. It doesn't take us hardly any time at all if we need to spin up a new Control Room or Bot Runner. The slowest part is probably on our end, getting the hardware.

It took us two years to scale from pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. I wasn't involved in the early days of the PoC. I came into the group a little later after that, but now, we use a federated model. We were sort of the center of excellence for it, working with our business partners. In a number of cases, our business partners are now developing their own bots. We have developed some, where the business partners didn't have much of an interest to doing the development. They wanted to be involved in the creation, so they understood it, but they didn't want to do any of the coding in the background, so we do it for them. We do all the production support.

I like to go by actual executions, not number of bots, because we have some bots that need to be executed multiple times during the day. Last time I looked, we were well over a 100 different executions in a week.

The technical support is great. I have worked with a couple of different people who have been absolutely phenomenal, helpful, and have solved so many of our problems.

When I have a serious production support issue, if I need to escalate it, I usually receive a lot of good help from some great people to get our problem resolved. Sometimes, it takes a while, but I get it. Everyone's environment is different, and it's hard to know everything about how everyone has their architecture setup.

They've started up a user community recently. I haven't investigated that much. I really want to do that, but I always thought that a user community where the users of the product always get together, talk, sort of brainstorm, and come up with other suggestions for the tool would be great. However, I believe that has just been started. I just haven't had a chance to go look at it yet.

We weren't using a different solution before this. Automation Anywhere was our first RPA tool. 

We wanted to remove a lot of the drudgery out of people's lives. Someone copying files from one platform to another or taking data and manually entering it from one system to another was not a good value savings. A human should be doing stuff that is more creative and requires human thought process. We wanted to enable our organization to improve overall. So, we figured an RPA solution was a good way to start on that journey.

When we went to version 11.2, which we set up brand new, if I had to do that myself, it would have been a bit complicated. I worked with an installation specialist from Automation who was awesome. He made it very simple. We had some of our own server and DBA personnel on the line, and he documented everything for us. At the end of the day, I had all of the information that I never had on our original 10.5 environment, which has made it a lot better.

Originally, we used HCL Technologies. At a high level, the original implementation went pretty well. Our problems were other things. We started having more issues around coding and our expectations on thought leadership from the vendor, because they were the ones originally doing the coding. We were the business partners to them. As we began to get certified and do some of the coding, we started to realize that there were things that we just didn't know and had a hard time getting some answers. Then, we ended up starting to work with a different vendor. As far as the systems administration work for Automation Anywhere goes, we took that over, and that's what I do.

For time savings, we do time and motion studies with our business partners, so we truly know how long it takes them to do a process and calculate that in. 

Depending on the area and department, we use different rates of pay to calculate dollar savings. We also break that down, whether it's actual realized dollar savings or just a dollar savings that's not realized to the department. 

There's also risk reduction, which is a lot harder to quantify, so we've taken that to more of a high, medium, and low type of deal, because there's a number of cases where we're eliminating manual keystroke entry. That has created huge risk reduction from our standpoint.

If we count the integrations that we have done with Appian, which is where a lot of our savings is from, we are well over a million dollars in savings. This is from only doing development for about a year and a half.

We have seen a return on investment in a lot of ways. We seen dollar and time savings. There was a department that was going to have to hire somebody to just copy files from one platform to another every day. Because of this automation solution, they didn't have to hire anyone to do that. That was a good cost avoidance there. 

One of the biggest things for us is getting the whole enterprise to start learning about RPA and about different ways to think about how they do processes, whether you can improve a process first manually, then make it automated, or if it's even ready for an automated solution. This type of thinking and mindset throughout our business partners has started to make a lot of improvements throughout the corporation, not just in RPA, but in processes.

We're just starting to renew our license, and we were quoted $115,000 without the IQ Bot. 

The IQ Bot is another $30,000. This is with very limited pages, as we go through our first projects. The majority of the cost was for ten days of onsite training.

The shortlist would have probably been Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, at the time. We went with Automation Anywhere because Blue Prism is really good on the back-end, but that's all that they specialize in. We knew that we had to do a lot of front-end type of RPA work with some third-party vendors, which we weren't going to get API calls to. We had to be able to operate with their graphical user interface. Once we made those realizations, Automation Anywhere became our choice.

Make sure you understand what your needs are:

• Whether it's front-end or back-end?
• What interfaces do you want to use?
• Do you need an IQ Bot or some type of cognitive machine learning tool?

Understand what the different tools from the different vendor do, because they are becoming more similar, but they are still designed for specific areas of a technology, whether it's the back-end, front end, or somewhere in the middle. You need to understand your own needs. Once you understand that, research the various tools thoroughly and make the best choice.

The product functions well. 

The integration with other application works really well. We have used it with Appian more than once, and that integration has been very easy to do.

The cognitive document processing is good. We have done a proof of concept. We just purchased IQ Bot, got it installed, and will be starting our first project soon. One of the things that we did learn is reading the imaging was tough because of the DPI needed for the IQ Bot. It's 300. Most imaging systems don't save them that high. They are at 200 or 250, so we ran into issues there. However, as long as we can get electronic documents, it's been awesome.

I have taken some Automation Anywhere University courses. I took the online classes and got certified in 2018, but there are some other courses that I wanted to take that I saw in there. The content is really good.

The bot creation process is easy. It does require more thought if you truly want to incorporate some good error handling in the process. With some of our bots, this is absolutely critical. We have some bots which have very strict SLAs because we are in the financial industry. It is a bit trickier and requires more thought. You can do it and do it well. It's just that it requires more forethought than a typical user would know.

We don't use Citrix.