Automation Anywhere Reviews

I work in the logistics industry.

Right now, we have different processes and use cases that we are using it for. 

1. It is extracting information, partial information, and real information. This is one type of use case. 
2. We also use it for the company accounting related information that we are doing. 
3. We get different types of rates from different windows. We are using it for that process. 

These are the high-level three use cases that we are currently working on.

The valuable features that I see for automation with enterprise RPA are IQ Bot and Bot Insights. If you do anything, Bot Insight will provide the dashboard. It starts from the developer with artificial intelligence and the dashboard, which will provide the visibility of business-level metrics as well as operational-level metrics. Those are the good things I see in automation.

Whatever I was thinking for version 11.3, it's being implemented in the A2019. For example, it is great that the product will be:

• Integrating with cognitive analytics.
• Integrating with Azure.
• I can write scripts. 

In version 11.3, if I want to write a Python script, then I write an ESX file. This is gone in version A2019.

It is a stable product. We do experience some technical issues. However, since they are in our environment, any downtime which occurs will be with our environment, not with Automation Anywhere.

All the RPA solutions should be scalable, but I do see version 11.3 as a scalable solution that was provided. Most on the developer side don't have the knowledge on how to do the queue, as that is case management. Or, the scalability without touching the core. I do see that- So, I am expecting Automation Anywhere to share this type of knowledge with the people, then it will be a real, scalable solution.

I feel great about this conference and the way that people connected each other, from the developer to top management. Within three months, since I started my experience with Automation Anywhere, it has been nice and good.

The installation piece was sort of complicated because we are new to the business. We are new to installing Automation Anywhere services and the services that they are providing. So, we are sort of expected some kind of installation engineer to come onto our premises and provide the support, rather than remotely.

We have IT people. So, if people are coming, IT and the installation engineers sit together and install everything. People are supportive, but IT is in a different location from the installation engineers. Connecting everyone together is sort of hard. However, the installation piece is very straightforward. Though, at the enterprise level, making it work takes a long time.

We have seen ROI on one of the process, but not on the other processes yet.

My experience based on version 11.3, I would rate the product as a six (out of 10). It will go up with A2019.

I will be talking about some of the leading products from Automation Anywhere, which is their RPA Taskbot and IQ bot. Being a consultant and partner, we have implemented successfully some solutions for Automation Anywhere using IQ bot and Taskbot.

We have found that finance as a function has always been a very strong use case when it comes to a product like Automation Anywhere. The reason is very strong compliance, quality, error controls, and the speed and efficiency with which Automation Anywhere can deliver projects. Because of this, finance as a function has always been a great user for this type of solution. However, we have also tried implementing Automation Anywhere around some very different use cases in HR.

We have implemented Automation Anywhere solutions for HR recruitment and onboarding, which has helped save a lot of time to go through some of the very detailed resumes with multiple pages of a candidates' profiles, their skill sets, their academics, and their years of experience. When there are hundreds and thousands of such resumes which are applied online through multiple channels, like LinkedIn, Monster, email, or any campaigns, it really becomes very painful for HR organizations to go and scan so many CVs and process, then mine, the best candidates for a particular job request.

So, we use successfully Automation Anywhere product to automate the complete recruitment process, along with our onboarding process as well. It has really worked wonders for the organization and departments.

Finance as a function is driven by cost and the money involved in it. So, if I'm processing an invoice, doing procurement, or expense processing, there is money involved. From a compliance perspective, the value of the bot should be accurate to the second or third decimal. The accuracy of the job being done has a very high sensitivity in finance compared to other functions because there is money involved on the receivable side or payable side. So, either I am to collect money from my customers or I am to pay money to my suppliers or vendors. Everywhere, there is money involved, and you can't execute an incorrect job. You can't execute a wrong document and end up paying less or end up paying more to your suppliers or customers. When it comes to financials, Automation Anywhere has done amazing work in ensuring not only the speed and accuracy of the bot, but also the compliance and error controls through which the bot executes the job at very high satisfaction and tolerance levels. So, I have seen various use cases and success stories where Automation Anywhere is used in finance.

So far, we have seen that a valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the ease of integrating it with multiple systems. It can very easily integrate with an environment of an organization. It helps in a quick go to access and implementation. You don't have to spend days implementing Automation Anywhere software. You can quickly go drag and drop and do an ease of configuration. You can actually get your bot up and running very fast, which is one important advantage.

For a business user, it is not very technical or complex software. Before this, they need to have a lot of training. So, that is the ease and simplicity with which Automation Anywhere can be deployed, not only by a technical team, but also by the business owners. I found this to be a very unique, competitive advantage.

The industry is moving towards strong AI and ML-based algorithms. They have already started their journey. Earlier, Automation Anywhere added Taskbot, then they added IQ Bot. I would say bring the AI component into the Automation Anywhere product line, then a user will be able to make a lot of decision-making processes digitally instead of with human intervention. The more that they bring and make their cognitive engine stronger, along with the Taskbot or digital worker, that's where I feel they will have a wonderful contribution to an organization who is looking at a truly digital workforce environment.

They should do more on the cognitive side. If they can keep adding more features, that would be their greatest advantage.

A good thing about Automation Anywhere are three important things: scalability, durability, and the entire stability of the environment. So, I can start the journey with one, two, five, or 10 bots, then just look at the very comparable enterprise organization where I could apply hundreds of the bots.

Now, in any other situation, when I deploy the bot from our development to UAT to a production environment, and bots are running in a production environment, what I should not be worried about is: Are those bots running? Are the tasks getting completed on time? All that stuff. 

Stability of Automation Anywhere bots is very high. So, a one side deploys these bots successfully. I don't have to worry much whether the bot is stable. Is the bot performing? Even after deploying the bot, do I have to go back and check ii the bot is having some problems? Or, are there some errors being induced?

In the Control Room, I am able to see the complete dashboard of all the bots: 

• Which bots I have deployed (hundreds of them)?
• How many bots are in progress? 
• How many bots are running? 
• How many bots have thrown some error because of incorrect jobs or processes?

That gives me very quick access to the entire deployment of my bots. I can access that dashboard, even from my mobile. Even if I'm not in office and I'm head of the enterprise or a COE architecture, I can just log into my mobile and see how many bots are performing well, how many bots have done the job in time, etc.

The stability of the whole architecture is the essence of Automation Anywhere, if you ask me.

Scalability is huge. I have seen organizations who don't want to invest big during the initial phase, even if they have a big appetite to deploy hundreds of bots. They normally start with five or 10 bots. The best part about Automation Anywhere is you can start with five, 10, 50, 100, 200, or 300 bots. Today, the Control Room can manage 300 to 400 Bot Runners in a single architecture.

So, organizations don't have to worry that after a 100 bots they won't have to do another architecture change or shift the entire environment here or there. They can keep on adding bots and keep scaling their organization to hundreds of bots.

You can configure bots to do multiple tasks in a series or in batch mode, depending upon the type of task. Ideally, when you assign a job to the bot, it will try to finish it. But, if there is some parallel processing required for some business requirement, I can make a few bots do the job parallel, then I can take over from where the other guys left off. That is another ease of Automation Anywhere. Bots can be configured the way you want to perform your operations.

I have worked with their technical support. I would rate them quite well. It is improving day by day. From the initial days, when we used to approach the technical support, we definitely used to get a lot of technical insight from them related to Automation Anywhere. Today, when we talked to them for environments outside Automation Anywhere which are a customer environment, they are able to assist us. They are able to guide us on something, even as a part of the enterprise architecture. 

The best part I have seen is the technical capabilities and support metrics to help the customers and partners (like us) are improving day by day. That is the biggest advantage of why they are able to reach this scale of enterprise penetration today.

In this forum, we have come to know that they're also coming out with a browser version. Today, we have to install the software on a PC, desktop, or server. What they are coming out with now is like a browser version, which quickly can be applied instead of an installation. That is amazing. That will be disruptive. You can now deploy hundreds of bots at a very fast pace, and that's an amazing thing to look forward to.

We have seen environments where customers do have multiple product lines for doing different functionalities or process automations. While comparing various competitors, we have found that if a customer is at the SMB or medium scale of deployment, say two, five, or 10 bots, there are competitive products available . But, any organization who has gone enterprise scale of hundreds of bot has chosen Automation Anywhere because the way they have created their entire governments and architecture. Customers are more comfortable with Automation Anywhere when it comes to scalability.

Two or three bots, we have seen competitors here and there. But, the moment you move into large scale bot deployments, we have seen comfort more with Automation Anywhere compared to other competitors.

Last year, I would have rate them an eight (out of 10). This year, I would rate them a nine (out of 10) because I'm seeing a lot of improvements coming. As an observer in the industry, a consultant, and a partner, this is what look upon to any giant like Automation Anywhere to bring a lot of exciting new features every year. This is required by everybody in the organization and globally. That's why I would say nine out of 10. I would have said 10 out of 10, but I want them to bring more such features, and maybe next year I'll be saying 10 out of 10.

We are discussed specifically the IQ Bot from Automation Anywhere which has excited me a lot because of the functions that it brings. They are really commendable because I have seen a lot of other software and solutions which are not giving that much accuracy in terms of the output. But, IQ Bot has been one of the top-notch solutions that I have seen in the OCR field, which covers a lot of the areas where we can transition unstructured data into structured data. This can be utilized in many use cases, like accounts payable, T&E processes, and so on and so forth. That's why I'm very excited to talk about IQ Bot.

One of the use cases of IQ Bot that I've seen is the claim processing in the insurance industry. There are tons of manual forms coming into the input files. Everyone has to work on those files manually to create a structured database out of them. It takes lot of time for them to really do it. Whereas in IQ Bot, if you run the engine, and have the scanned copies of these claims processing forms, they just get converted into very good structured data in a few seconds. Later on, you can utilize that database the way you want it. You can do a lot of analytics out of this, which would not only save time and create efficiencies, but it also brings in a lot of value for the organization whose data is being analyzed and structured.

The most valuable part is that it have the integrated OCR solution within it. All the other solutions do not have the right integration of the OCR solutions. You need to go to two different places to get one solution. Whereas, in IQ Bot, there is one area where you get all these solutions together in one area. That is the most important and beautiful point that I like about IQ Bot.

I didn't have anything as such in mind. After listening to the CEO of Automation Anywhere, he has given some very exciting features which are up and coming in the next few weeks or so. One of them is the integration with Microsoft. This will be a game changer forever. Because Microsoft Office 365 or Outlook, these are being used by every individual.

Integrating Automation Anywhere bots with these type of Microsoft solutions will give us so much flexibility. We can utilize so much reach or access to these bots in every type of work that we are doing. They will become like our personal assistants. That is where it's very exciting. I'm looking forward to look it. I believe that it will be a killer in this area.

It may sound a little funny or weird, but one thing that we are thinking is we have to go to various websites and pick up relevant data from various websites using the bot. That is something we have seen that none of the bots have been able to really do it because the back-end of those websites do not allow bots to scrap through all these websites and get the relevant data in one place. We would like to see how the bot companies would crack this idea. But, that's why I said, this look weird because of the legal reasons why this cannot be done. This is something that I am looking forward to.

As far as stability is concerned, it is pretty stable. We have seen how it is used in various use cases in the scenarios. It has very good stability. Because in the case of any claims processing, it creates a very defined database. In case it finds any anomalies, which it does not really solve, it red lines all those areas so someone can manually go and correct those. Then, later on, it learns from its own mistakes. Wherein, next time, you don't have to really fix those issues, which it has found in the first place. This means, as the IQ Bot gets more experience, it will learn on its own, and become a better, more stable product over a period of time.

We have seen results, and the results are good. But, it will take me another couple of quarters to answer on the overall scalability and consistency of this bot.

We did use technical support for troubleshooting and maintenance as well.

Our internal technical support team is not that very big. It's pretty small. One person does it on a very ad hoc basis, whenever it is required.

Wherever we find that our team does not have the right subject matter expertise, that is when we call our customer success manager. They are able to help us out with various automative solutions that bring the solution back in place from that angle.

My boss and I were both involved in bringing the RPA into our organization. We had been researching RPA for the last six to eight months to see what various functions RPA can work on, how to identify the better candidate in terms of processes, and how we can get the ROI out of the RPA.

We did all types research, reading articles, and talking to Automation Anywhere guys. These guys have been very helpful and flexible in talking to us. Anytime we have asked them for any sort of information. they were forthcoming. Giving the information on their own. They have explained their use cases. That intrigued us to go into this area and try more on the RPA side.

This was the first RPA project that we did.

When you are not aware of RPA solutions, it definitely looks more complex. But once you are done with your first implementation, then it becomes very straightforward. Going forward, this will be even more straight forward, because I learned from the Automation Anywhere guys that going forward all these bots or engines can be created with very user-friendly drag and drop functions. This would become more of a plug and play solution for everyone, maybe for the people who are non-technical as well. So, to begin with, it is really complex because of the knowledge that people do not have. But, later on, after the first implementation, it becomes very straightforward.

We did consider other RPA products as well. So, all the competitors of Automation Anywhere, we went through them. I personally looked into UiPath, Blue Prism, NICE, and AutomationEdge. These were a few which we've gone through.

There are lot of reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere, but I will tell you the more practical reasons on the basis of which we recommended and said, "Okay, Automation Anywhere would be the good choice for us." 

1. One of them was obviously IQ Bot, which I spoke about in the beginning. IQ Bot is one of the unique ideas of Automation Anywhere. When we want to use OCR, because we are a research company, we see that OCR will be the key for us. That is the reason. In all the others, they have outside integration of the AB and other tools. There is only one product with this. 
2. While working on these products, simultaneously, we have seen that in few cases, there was a duplication of inputs in some of the other ones. Whereas, in the Automation Anywhere, when we were putting inputs in one place, it will just getting replicated in the second place. This was saving a lot of time for us. That was from a modus operandi standpoint. It was much better than the others. 
3. We have talked to the teams of Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism, etc. We found the team for Automation Anywhere was very flexible and forthcoming. They were forward looking and bringing more ideas. They are bringing more alternatives to us. They are actually standing right behind us, in case of any sort of inquiries or questions. Those things, we like a lot. That's the reason we chose Automation Anywhere. 

I can write a five-page differentiator on Automation Anywhere, but I think these are the most important ones.

To begin with, since my experience has been excellent with Automation Anywhere so far, I would not shy away from giving them a rating of eight (out of 10).

I'm responsible for the digital practice within the tax business. We are building a lot of our solutions using the Automation Anywhere platforms, both with IQ Bot as well as the regular RPA, in which we offer it to our clients.

I belong to the tax practice. My role is to see how we deploy technology to increase the efficiency of tax departments and help build new revenue streams from technology in the process . We work with our clients offering digital solutions in the tax space. That's really what I do for a living. We have had a lot of success using Automation Anywhere products. We've actually built a few solutions that were done on the EY cloud, which are offered to clients as a managed service.

I'll just talk about one use case using IQ Bot. Interestingly, every time an employee travels in India, the tax that you pay on each invoice, that is an amount that you can claim from the government as a tax credit. To be able to extract that information and put it together into a return can be massive. Because there are large companies where thousands of employees traveling every month and so on, what IQ Bot does using Automation Anywhere, is it reads through multiple sets of invoices, which can be in any format, extract the tax amounts, then it creates the return which is then used to file with the tax authorities. We don't even stop at that. We also compare this data with what is the actual travel that any company has. In many cases, what we've seen, there is a lot of tax where invoices have not been received. We also plug those gaps. There is a lot of value that clients derive using that aspect as well. It's not just about getting your tax right. You need to find where the leakage is and get that back to the company.

 I can tell you what our clients are always looking for. The big challenge with our clients is that while ERPs are only handling 20 to 25 percent of the requirements. There is a lot of unstructured and semi-structured data that exists in the ecosystem which they can't leverage. That's really what they want the bots to do. How can they complement the current IT infrastructure in a good way to be able to get that outcome?

IQ Bots are extremely powerful. We are using them increasingly more where we're about to look through a lot unstructured sources, like PDF documents, scanned images, contracts, etc. We are able to take the data out, then use that toward processing structured data and creating insights for our clients. 

They have done a fairly good job on the RPA space, but more and more, the whole cognitive AI space and machine learning are where I see the industry actually going. I'm sure Automation Anywhere is also focused on that topic, but we would like to see more coming down the pipe, as early as possible.

So far, we haven't had any issues that I want to highlight, so I'm assuming that it's quite stable. It is working as we desire it to work. 

I think we have more than 50 clients who use our solution at this point. So, the scalability of the platform is well proven.

Every client is looking at scalability because they don't want to do just one or two processes. But, you will not be able to realize the value if you just limit yourself to a limited set of processes. So, the scalability is a very important task for clients. But there are certain challenges in scaling up. To be able to identify the right use cases that bring value is huge and very important.

Secondly, the technology infrastructure can be challenging if you scale up because you always have to add new servers to scale. That has always been a challenge. Having said that, I think what we heard today from Neil, there's a cloud version available that will be easily scalable. That is extremely exciting as a developer. That will be able to address a lot of the scalability issues that we've come across from our clients.

We have two models: 

1. With many clients, we actually go and have them implement Automation Anywhere in their own premises.
2. The second model has actually proven more beneficial to lot of our clients. It is where we have set up the bots in our own EY private cloud on Microsoft Azure where we have implemented certain standard tax processes. So, we only get clients to migrate their processes onto our platform. There, we just take out the pain around the whole implementation, because it is not really relevant to our clients. They just start to get outcomes, and don't have to worry about it.

We have developed a very strong capability internally that is proving to be strong differentiator for EY in the market.

the ROI of the automation investment for tax processes is very strong as apart from the process efficiency, there is also a financial aspect of lost tax credit that our solutions help to capture.

 A lot of the clients have some footprint of the other competing RPA vendors who they want to leverage. We often come across those type of situations.

There are some inherent advantages that Automation Anywhere offers. Both in terms of the commercial structure, as well as from a platform perspective, that makes it very compelling for clients to actually look at using Automation Anywhere for tax processes. in our case, in India especially, some of our clients really want to start small. So, they don't want to start with a big bang, like 20 to 25 bots. It is always easiest for them to start with one process and one bot, go with a proof of concept, and gradually scale up. We have a very good arrangement with Automation Anywhere, where we can offer that as a partner pack, where we bundle services and the license for small processes. This makes it quite compelling for clients. 

The way the platform is evolving, we also see some technology advantages using Automation Anywhere, especially if you combine RPA plus IQ Bot along with the Bot Insights platform. That gives it a different shade compared to some of the other existing platform vendors.

I would rate it a six and a half (out of 10).

We started off with accounts payable type of processes. That was our proof of concept. We built that within two or three months. It was highly successful, then we got a high level of endorsement from the wider organization. From there, we moved into academic processing where there's a lot of opportunity around the processing of student results, assessing students for admission into the university and handing out offers to students. There are a lot of things in that academic space which are highly manual. Often, these take quite a long time to process, so there's a clear benefit to the student by reducing the cycle time, which has led to great benefits for the organization.

In my case in particular, I come from a business background, not an IT background. So, it sort of speaks for itself that I was able to pickup its functionality and how it works. In the space of two years time, I've gone from a junior developer to a senior specialist. So, it really speaks for itself in terms of being user-friendly.

There are often a lot of functions within the software that will do the same thing, but it's up to the developer to decide which is the most appropriate. If there were a way of the product sort of indicating or automating which function is most applicable for that field for that particular purpose, that would be great. I think that might be a ways away. But, I think a lot of the improvements that we're looking to find are going to be in the new cloud release. So, we are really looking forward to getting on that.

Every piece of software has its downfalls. The great thing about AA, particularly in Melbourne, is we have local support. So, if we do raise a ticket, it's addressed by our local team down there. If they can't handle it, it'll be expedited abroad. So, we're always very comfortable that we're going to get a prompt reply and support, if for whatever reason, we have an issue with the software. We've sort of developed coding standards which has helped us to avoid any downfalls or pitfalls. Throughout our journey, we've learned how the software really works. We're developing it in a more mature way now, which has reduced the number of errors and breakages of the code.

it's just a learning process. As long as you're willing to learn and engage with the software, it can be quite stable.

With Automation Anywhere, there are multiple ways to achieve the same outcome; many different ways to design a bot and execute a bot. But, there's definitely a best practice out there. For those with little experience, they might be inclined to follow the quickest or the easiest way to develop a bot, but that's not necessarily the most sustainable solution. So, we sat down as a team at the university and agreed upon a certain set of standards that we will always follow. We initiated a code review process, so every code that goes into production, or every bot that goes into production will go through multiple rounds of code review. If it doesn't meet our standards, it'll be pulled back out of production, reiterated, and eventually then it'll go live.

We've gone down the Reagan approach, which was referred to in the session earlier today, where we essentially started out with that low hanging fruit. We built confidence within the business and from there, it was quite an easy sell because it was quite obvious to the business that we could deliver and could deliver fairly quickly. 

In terms of scalability, we've had to grow the team slightly. It's really important to have the right team. You need someone with a lot of experience around the tool. From there, you can bring in a range of skill sets, including SMEs. We have SMEs on the team now that don't come from an IT background or development background. By having that range of skills, we've been able to sort of up the velocity of releasing bots.

We could always do better though, and we're still learning.

The technical support in Melbourne, it's great. We have a strong relationship with Andrew Rowlands, who's our customer relationship manager down in Melbourne. We really enjoy working with him. If we do have any issues with tickets that have been unanswered, he will address them for us. I think one of Automation Anywhere's strong points is really its focus on the customer. Because naturally issues do arise with the software here and there, some of which have been addressed in later releases of the product.

We haven't yet updated to the latest release. The company is well and truly able to support all versions and is always really responsive. We typically will receive a solution within 24 to 48 hours.

The initial setup actually came before my time at the organization. I think it is a little bit of an ongoing struggle, because we don't deal with the infrastructure. We have a separate infrastructure team that sorts all that out. So, sometimes there are communication issues just trying to get our internal IT team onboard to run through the installs and that sort of thing. But, definitely with the new cloud version coming onboard, we'll be looking toward going to that. Hopefully it'll resolve some of that friction that comes about through the install process and complexity.

Obviously, the easiest way to create a bot would be using things like keystrokes. It's very intuitive, simply entering the database and what you would see on a keyboard. However, it doesn't really relate to what you're seeing on the screen. So, quite often, you'll be entering data in the wrong field if there's a performance issue with the system. While if you use object cloning, which is another function within the software, it's more dynamic. It'll wait for certain fields to appear, then you will lower the risk of breakages of code.

Just an example, in a period of two to three years, we have a positive ROI. We have a positive return. We've delivered 25 to 30 bots, which equates to over 1000 atmx files. So, for a relatively small team, we've been able to scale up quite effectively.

In regards to how AA works, UiPath has more of a design flow view, where you'll be creating process maps and executing bots face on the process flow. While Automation Anywhere has this task view, or line by line view, that I find it very easy to use and intuitive. It's just really a great piece of software.

It's a solid eight out of 10. We've delivered tremendous value in a really short amount of time. We've gotten a lot of support from our organization. Of course, there are always improvements which could make it even more powerful. But I know the company is well and truly across those. I'm sure it's going to go from strength to strength.

From the business side, we're not an organization that has tremendous volumes, like a big global bank, perhaps that sort of comes into play a bit. But again, it comes back to coding standards. We have a lot of confidence in those standards. We just really ensure that new members of the team are strictly following those for sustainable bots.

For us, it was about driving process efficiencies. 

We have an awful lot of processes that need to be completed when we are placing candidates in roles to ensure that the engagement for both the candidate and the client is successful. So, that might include compliance activities, ensuring candidates get paid, and ensuring that work places are safe for people to turn up to so they can go home to their families safe at the end of the day.

There are instances where use cases and opportunities have arisen as a result of having Automation Anywhere and RPA in place that have come about through very casual conversations and have actually resulted in increased revenue opportunities that we didn't realize. Though, those have now proven to be very worthwhile and are something that we hadn't realized could contribute to us, which is making us very happy, obviously.

The ability for it to be able to be scaled rapidly. For us, it has certainly provided a range of flexibility that we hadn't appreciated before we started. This means that in times of high demand for processes to be completed, we're able to quickly scale up on demand. That gives us that additional flexibility without the need to potentially consider contingent labor increases. So, it's sort of a head count avoidance increase. So, that's proved very useful for us.

I sound like a promoter A2019 with the attended bots and some of the new features coming in with the partnership of Microsoft will be a game changer. We work predominantly within an Office 365 environment. I think there are some real opportunities there for us to do things differently.

One area where I think there's an opportunity to do things a lot better is in the analytics function. They do have a concept or product called Bot Insights. It hasn't worked for us. It isn't as plug and play as we were led to believe, which is unfortunate. I can absolutely understand the value, and the demonstrations that I've seen of Bot Insights are sensational. But, we just haven't been able to make it work. We've invested a lot of time and effort trying to make it work to no avail. So, for us, that's one side of it that has been a bit of a disappointment, but not enough to detract from the overall success story of using Automation Anywhere.

This is one of the challenges with the platform. At the moment, we're going through a number of changes with their network and some of our infrastructure. That is impacting the way our platform is running and the stability of it. In the early days, we certainly had some difficulty making sure it was stable and that was impacting the productivity of the automation of the robot.

What makes me very happy is the announcement today of A2019, which is the web-based cloud offering, or basically RPA as a service. This will overcome a lot of the infrastructure challenges that we've been encountering. I am very excited about that because it'll enable us to really drive the benefits that we know RPA can provide.

Technically, we may not get answers the first time but we do get answers eventually. The customer success managers, without them, I do wonder how quickly we might get some of the responses from the technical help desk. I can appreciate the reasons why it takes long. Everyone doesn't know everything, but the fact that we have a customer success manager who has been really critical, a key to our success, has been, and an invaluable resource in helping us drive and get those answers through the help desks.

Could it be improved? Always, yes. But with the customer success manager supporting us, it has been invaluable and certainly something that we can live with.

It's certainly straightforward. For us, it was a bit of a test and learn approach. There are certainly guidelines published by Automation Anywhere for the recommended infrastructure. We found that they weren't completely applicable for us, and we've had to tinker with the infrastructures as we've got along. Without getting into the technicalities of it, the out-of-the-box approach that was suggested to us didn't suit our environment. So, we did need to be a bit more creative about how we did the deploy.

Again, this is why I'm excited for A2019 because I think that we will just overcome all those problems and it will allow us to really drive through and scale a lot quicker. Infrastructure is probably our biggest challenge at the moment.

We have seen ROI factors. I'm not able to quantify them right now. With the number of our bots, we have been able to let go contingent workforce that has been brought into the organization to cover certain operational processing, simply because we needed to supplement that permanent workforce to do those roles.

We've now gotton to the point where we don't need to hire those people or employ those people anymore, so there's cost-saving driven there. Our bots are helping with some increased revenue opportunities by acting on signals from the market for both our clients and candidates. Cumulatively, I think within the first year, I'd be very surprised if we weren't closed to ROI, which is a great story to be able to tell.

There were a number of key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere.

1. I think when we started on Automation, and looking at RPA, we recognized that we didn't know anything. Like the first time, we saw a robot in action was when we had a demo from their sales director. So, in recognition of that, we wanted to make sure that we were going to be working with someone who was able to nurture the relationship, provide deep support to us, be highly flexible, and was patient.
2. We were considering a direct engagement model versus a partner model. We wanted a direct engagement model. This was one of the key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere because they offered that.
3. The concept of the customer success manager was very appealing for reasons that I've mentioned earlier, but they would also support us in nurturing that relationship and helping us drive through our RPA journey.
4. The Bot Store. I love that concept. We've used the Bot Store. It's helped us expedite delivery and achieve benefits. 
5. The plugger, the drag and drop, and the scripting meant we could resource internally a lot quicker because you didn't need that deep level of coding understanding in order for our dev team to be productive as fast as possible. 

Those were some of the key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere.

I don't want to fan girl it too much, or even fan boy it. But, I'm a massive fan of AA. I've been in technical delivery for about 15 years. There are probably one of the best vendors I've worked with. I'm not giving them a 10 (out of 10) because then they have nowhere to go for improvement, but I certainly would put them as a seven and a half or eight (out of 10). I think the new evolution of the platform with things that I've already talked about will start to nudge it towards that nine (out of 10). They will still not get to a 10 because you know they need opportunities to improve. But, for me, they are a very good partner and a very good vendor to work with.

We have many use cases for this solution. These include use cases from our life science, procurement, and HR departments. More generally, it is used for our regulatory and life science tasks, and some finance as well.

We have a huge roadmap that includes a lot of processes that need to be automated.

For example, some of our processes are related to clinical trials and the drug development process. They include verifying documents and entering a lot of data that has to be processed. The automation reduces the effort and time it takes to complete these processes.

We have a mix of technology in our environment, including legacy systems and new technology.

This solution saves time when completing our pharmaceutical processes, which allows things to progress faster to the FDA.

The IQ Bot is a very good feature.

For our legacy systems, we are finding it very difficult to use the automation. Sometimes, forty percent of our work cannot be processed in an automated fashion. We need to acquire additional automation tools in order to reach one hundred percent automation.

Automation Anywhere says that you can use this tool for any type of application, but there are some for which it is not compatible. In cases where automation is not supported, there should be alternative tools that are inbuilt where they can be used to support or guide the automation forward, giving us one hundred percent automation.

The licensing model has to be changed to perpetual because even when we are not using a license, we are charged for it.

For simple processes, everything works. However, for a complex process with a lot of rules and mappings then we are finding it really difficult.

We are in touch with Automation Anywhere and the partners who can develop the system and increase the speed, or deal with other limitations that we have.

We have more than two hundred and fifty licenses, although they are not all currently in use by the bots.

We have a direct point of contact for technical support, although there are limitations.

In some instances, the technical support is on time, but in other cases it takes longer. When we commit to the customers we cannot give the time, for example, as a two or three-day turnaround.

When the Automation Anywhere team works with our technical team, they don't understand what kind of tools we have within the system in our company, and how that data is going to be interlinked with the other machines. This converting of data on the functionality side is where some of the limitations are.

The initial setup of this solution is easy, although sometimes you have service problems.

For example, we have a server set up as a load balancer, and sometimes these two systems have a problem where the nodes are not synching. I think that it is an issue with Automation Anywhere having a bug in the system. This is a problem when you are selling it to the customer because you have to make sure that it is reliable, and will stay that way for some time. You cannot expect companies to change their products every now and then, or continually upgrade versions. We need things to be stable for at least one or two years at a time.

Automation Anywhere helped us to set up our Center of Excellence (COA), and their partners assisted us with other aspects of the setup.

We have seen ROI but we are not up to the mark.

From the setup, we have spent somewhere between one and two million dollars over the past two years. I would say that our ROI is less than one million dollars. I don't want to say that it is a failure, but I would like to see a better ROI.

Had things gone the way we expected then we would have seen ROI by this time.

The licensing cost is approximately $4,000 USD, which is a seed license. You can have as many licenses as you want but the moment you start using them, they charge for them. For example, if you have purchased two hundred and fifty licenses to use over one thousand machines then at any point, only two hundred and fifty users can log in. 

In 2017 when we decided that we needed RPA, we evaluated several products. We tried Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere, in addition to other automation tools that were on the market. At that time, we found that Automation Anywhere was doing better, and had more features, than all of the others, which is why we chose the product.

An example of the additional features was the support for PDF conversion, Excel data transfer, and the IQ Bot.

We have purchased more licenses than we are currently using, which is why we need to enhance automation.

These days, I think that UiPath is picking up faster and with more relevant features. If they are able to overcome the limitations we have, for example in legacy systems, then it may be a better choice of a system that you can sustain for a long time.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

In Concentrix, my role is as an asset manager. It's very much focused on the RPA practice globally, which is why we come from enablement to delivery and support. End-to-end is something that is managed by me.

One thing I really like about Automation Anywhere is the product has actually taken leaps in the last three years. We started with the conventional RPA type of use cases. But, in the last two years, with the help of IQ Bot, and what I learned today about this Attended Automation 2.0, I think they are addressing vital key challenges that we have faced so far. The description on top of the description is what their model is. They're partnering with us in this journey of transformation. The type of technology advancement that they have done will certainly help us a lot.

They are constantly being in the BPO space and BPO and RPA are something which go hand in hand in technology. It is the right space for the utilization of this technology in the industry. While our customers are also asking for us for this technology benefit for the revenue benefit, productivity benefit, efficiency, etc. In the last two years, we have leveraged it for multiple clients, whether for telecom, healthcare or other spaces, it has been a very strong partnership that has really helped us.

RPA is something which was their best product. It was easy to config, easy to record, and deploy on the floor. With their IQ Bot, I am very much convinced that was the area where we started tapping unconventional use cases, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all those things bundled together. With this cognitive capability, we went from 30 to 40 percent use cases which we are able to address and have leaped over to a wider space of 50 to 60 percent with this cognitive bot.

There are many things which I have liked in the last couple of months that I have seen in Automation Anywhere. Something that really excites me is the new release of Attended Automation 2.2. It's a very lightweight solution. When I'm talking about the automation of the size from 2,000 to 20,000, and everyone is using the attended bot with this scale and thin client model, we can easily deploy and scale it out to the larger corporate size. So, this product is very unique and I have not seen it in any of Automation Anywhere's competitors. They came out with it.

The product is quite stable. I don't know how to code the the other products which we have used. One thing with the bot that we are always with struggling is the memory management. The Automation Anywhere product is quite stable in that perspective. Security and other things are very well managed by Automation Anywhere. The third piece is the architecture is very much centrally governed. This makes this product more robust.

In the last two years, one thing which Automation Anywhere has changed and they actually worked on is the support and enablement part. That will be the key game changer for them. Because if I compare them with other competitors who are in the space of Automation Anywhere, the customer experience (where we are the customer) is there when you need them. The support is available on time. That is where I think Automation Anywhere is wonderful.

It was very straightforward. I don't know if it was because of the training which was given or if it was because of the application itself, but it was very straightforward to start the journey of RPA using Automation Anywhere. Whether it's a complex use case or low complex use case, I think Automation Anywhere does give you that flexibility that you can start your journey seamlessly.

One thing that we are just changing now: When this automation journey started, everyone was talking about ROI. E.g., I'm investing X amount into the technology, and I'm now trying to cannibalize on efficiency. We are not leveraging automation just for cost reduction. The business is now leveraging automation to get it into this space where we were not able to get so far. So, the dimensions of ROI are not only cost reduction. The dimension of all ROI have been changed to scalability, compliance, some other new business go-to market strategies, etc. Those things are very much changed from the way it was here previously.

This is tricky. We all know who is in the quadrant and the leading there. In the last five years, we actually worked closely with them. Everyone does have their own pluses and minuses. But, if I talk about Automation Anywhere, their cognitive bot is one of their unique selling points.

We are able to sell it very easily compared to its competitors. Another piece is the stability part. The third piece is something which is the customer experience: The ease to work with it. The Automation Anywhere, as a partner, is very easy to work with. They are there when you need them, whether you are in the initial journey of automation, you are figuring out what is the right opportunity, or whether you are in the journey of deploying the bot or support. They are there with you at each of those stages.

These things really make them different compared to their competitors. I'm sure if they will continue focusing on these they will be leading in this space.

So far, it's a 10 (out of 10). If there's anything which will change, I will let you know. But so far, the experience with Automation Anywhere in the last two and a half years has been wonderful. My best wishes to the team.