Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

When we started Automation Anywhere, it was a rule-based automation. All the rule-based used cases we could automate. Now, with the upcoming version, it includes AI and Python, so we can go ahead in our roadmap and start automating dynamic used cases too.

We started on the 10.5 version of Automation Anywhere. The Control Room had some limitations. With version 11, they removed all those limitations. In version 11, we do not have the Python support or AI machine learning support. But, with the A2019 version, we will have the AI machine learning libraries in the support. So, we can easily use those libraries now.

The main thing is the simple UI, easy to use commands, and it's very easy to learn compared to other tools in the market.

With the upcoming version, they have addressed all the issues of the clients. They have AI and ML. The GUI is good. The cloud has been included. So, it's promising that they have now included these. We have to see how much we can get used to it.

Version 10.5 has been the most stable version that we have used. With version 11, we are still getting some updates, so it will take some time for version 11 to get stable.

It is scalable. In version 11, scalability has a limit, but with the upcoming version, it will be scalable because it is on the cloud now.

AA has good support. Suppose we have any queries, they are there to help us. They have a support portal where we can raise a request and they will immediately reply on the basis of the priority level that they have set. So, it's very good.

If we go through the client setup, its very easy. But, if we are going through the high availability in the IQ Bot setup, it's a bit complex.

We have more than 50 bots in the company. The FTE and ROI are very good. In the future, we have many projects in pipeline that we are about to implement. So, definitely there is a good ROI and FTE savings for us.

I will rate version 10.5 as a nine (out of 10) and version 11 as an eight (out of 10). Let us wait and see about the upcoming version.

Processes which have a decision making and do not have any required rule-based are considered for automation.

All the features that we have different from each other. Most of the time, we go for object cloning and IQ Bot, which will be used in the coming years. That feature, people are looking forward to, as it will help us read and extract data from unstructured formats.

Although, IQ Bot has data being extracted from it. It can improve with more features, like handwritten copies that are readable. Anyway, the IQ Bot is coming out in a bit, and I'm sure we will go with it.

For most of the cases that we have worked on, the application has been stable. Automating applications has brought a huge change to the automations which we have carried forward.

It depends on the developer and how they have coded it with respect to scalability. However, it has the ability to be scalable.

The main point to go for Automation Anywhere is because we have worked with other tools than Automation Anywhere and the support team which Automation Anywhere has takes time to try understanding the issue, then give the feedback. That is something we learn along with the Automation Anywhere guys. I would go for Automation Anywhere because of the support team.

Version 10 that we had was a little complex to set up. However, version 11 is pretty easy.

We use multiple tools, but most of the time, it is Automation Anywhere which we go for because of our clients who are looking forward to working with Automation Anywhere. It's sort of easy to use. Also with respect to the client as well as the developers, it gives quick results. With other tools, we need to perform a lot of tasks. This tool is a bit quicker. The ROI also comes into picture.

I have in fact told all my friends and colleagues who are in the RPA domain to work with Automation Anywhere because it's easier to run as well as to implement. Overall, the deployment is easier. I mostly prefer Automation Anywhere over the other RPA tools.

I would rate the product a nine to nine point five (out of ten).

We'll be discussing our implementations for Salesforce and using Automation Anywhere to automate sales for processes within the organization. We focus mainly on sales and BFSI.

A very important piece within sales is that we've noticed most of the salespeople hesitate from updating their Salesforce at a frequent interval. You jump on a call, you have multiple calls with your customer, and you hesitate to keep dealing these updates within Salesforce. The idea behind this implementation, or this specific solution, is that we take care of all the updating of Salesforce processes. We take care of all lead conversions, lead updates, lead generations, etc. through our RPA. All you need to do is have a conversation with your bot, and say, "Hey, I just had a conversation with Nick. He seems good with all the implementations. We should convert him from Level 1 to Level 2." These basic implementations have been taken care of.

We're also looking at mobile transcription. So, if you are on a call with XYZ, you say, "Hey, I'm jumping on a call with XYZ, just transcribe what I'm talking about." So, you transcribe those calls and update them in your total documentation. That's the idea.

Automation Anywhere has been an integral part of this product's evolution in general. A hindrance that we were faced with was companies who did not have API integrations for Salesforce. This is where RPA and Automation Anywhere came in and helped us with integrating solutions which did not have API integrations within themselves. That's how we've evolved in the past two to three months.

IQ Bot seems to be a good solution that Automation Anywhere has come up with. It sets them apart from the other solutions. I want Automation Anywhere to work on IQ Bot further to help evolve the tool more and create a certain set of solutions using IQ Bot. They can maybe use better machine learning algorithms to come up with better accuracy for OCR extractions. This is an area that I want them to work on.

It is absolutely robust. Automation Anywhere as a solution, as well as our implementation, have been robust in nature with thorough testing and UAT processes being involved. Automation Anywhere can be considered as one of the most stable RPA tools in the industry, according to the perspective of the limited amount of tools that I've used. But, Automation Anywhere seems to be the most stable one.

We initially started off with a customer who had just three bots. We've now scaled them to 15 bots. It didn't take us more than an hour to scale. Automation Anywhere helped us scale from one bot to 100 bots within a period of hours, if not minutes. Unless you're scaling from 10s to 1000s, I think Automation Anywhere has it covered.

Support is five (out of five). The technical support is better than any other automation tool that I've seen. The ticketing resolution that they provide not only for paid customers, but for PoCs that we conduct, IQ Bot, and other scenarios wherein the product might not be functioning properly. The support is top-notch. There are scenarios wherein we need to be able to identify the best possible solution, and there is support for that as well.

We started off about one and a half years back initially. In those days, Automation Anywhere hadn't picked up so much. The initial setup was difficult, but as they have moved from on-premise to cloud, the setup has become much easier. Now, we are hands-on with the setup and can do it within hours.

With another client, we are saving about 20 hours. However, we are not able to justify that return on investment by just saving time. There are other parameters that we would have to look at for justifying the ROI.

The return on investment for most of our clients depends from scenario to scenario. Some of them look at it on a long-term basis and some of them look at it from the amount of time saved. For example, we are currently working on a solution for a CIO. We are saving about four hours of his time during a particular week. The return on investment for that particular person is humongous.

We evaluated all the solutions. We had different RPA tools. Looking at the feedback from the market and the type of technical support that we had received, we went ahead with Automation Anywhere. The major reason for going with Automation Anywhere was the technical support that developers have.

I'd rate it an eight point five to nine because there's still always room for improvement.

We mostly use it on engineering processes. We also use it for finances in SAP — uploading, invoice creation, etc. But we have mostly focused on our engineering processes.

An example from the finance area is when we need to invoice a customer. We open our SAP account and upload all the data into SAP, create an invoice, and send a notice to the finance team that the process has been completed. They then move the process further along. It's a daily type of operation, whenever such requests come.

We are using the on-premise version because the cloud version (A2019) is not out yet.

One of the ways it has improved our organization is regarding working on Saturdays and Sundays. Obviously, employees don't like to come in on those days. When a user is not there and we want certain processes to be done, we don't expect the engineers to sit there and do them. We can schedule things via email so a bot runs on Saturdays and Sundays. That results in a reduction of man-hours. 

It automates all the processes which do not require human intervention, things which are very repetitive. That means we can give more important work to the engineers now, rather than asking them to do repetitive tasks.

We have these invoices which gets generated every month. We have to enter these invoice details into the stacks. It is a tedious task that is done by our finance team. We have automated the process of entering the details into the stack, and t reduces a lot of manual work.

The best feature of AA is the scheduling and the triggering part of it. Whenever an email comes in we can just use Automation Anywhere. We don't have to sit there. The unattended bots of Automation Anywhere are something which we find very useful.

It does not require much onboarding skills. It's easy to train anyone. We just ask them to apply logic.

One very important thing would be more support for Citrix automation. We want something to support Cisco. Citrix automation is not a very good tool. We are not able to use it properly. Even if we go through a remote desktop connection, it goes along only with the keystrokes and image recognition.

Also, when we are moving from one version to another version, it's very difficult because most of the features stop working. They should first test everything and then release the new version. For example, there's a system variable known as the Excel Cell Row. It gives you the current row of the inner loop. When going from version 11.1 to 11.3, this variable was suddenly not supported, and most of our bots were dependent on that. Everything went down and we had to start from scratch. If you do not have a developer who has done this, it's going to be a big problem in terms of the time it will take.

We need the migration from version 11 to A2019 to go smoothly. Our developers cannot be expected to enter the code again.

I'm not sure about the stability because there are a lot of upgrades all the time. Whenever we move from version to version, like 11.1 to 11.3, if we have ten bots we have to go around and test all ten bots. And in case something is not working, we have to make changes. If they support a migration utility properly, I think it's a great tool.

The scalability is great. Nearly a 100 bots have been deployed in finance, HR, and mostly engineering. We will be implementing bots going forward in procurement.

It has taken us two years to scale to our current number of bots because we spent a lot of time on training at first.

Technical support from Automation Anywhere is great. I have written to Automation Anywhere support many times and there is a great response from them. Even if they do not have the exact answer, they always say, "You can try this option or you can try this option."

We started with Automation Anywhere. The biggest reason our company chose Automation Anywhere was because we found it more reliable for our operations than any other. Also, the response from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We started with version 10.7. When we started, initially downloading the Control Room and those types of things was a bit complex. We had the user manual, but I don't think it's very good. It misses many points. When we missed something, we needed to contact Automation Anywhere support, so there were some delays in the process. 

Then we moved to version 11.1, which was more complex and requires more of your system space.

Overall, the other process is a bit complex. They have said they're coming out with the cloud version. I think that will be a bit easier. 

The development process took us about six months.

We have a team in our company which is responsible for RPA. It's something which we do internally for our company.

There has been a great return on investment. We are interested in saving manual engineer man-hours. So far, we have saved $100,000.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. We chose Automation Anywhere because of how well it suited it our office.

Automation Anywhere is easier to use. With drag and drop, we don't need the uploading skills, etc. Everything is just there. You can just drag and drop, then just go ahead and do it. With UiPath, it was a little difficult to understand the process. Also Automation Anywhere has email automation.

I would rate the solution at seven out of ten. One main drawback is that migration issue. Another thing I would like to see is support for all the other scripting languages, like Python, JavaScript and all.

Go through the Automation Anywhere courses properly to be aware of all the system variables and all the features it has. Then proceed with the development phase. Until you're clear on the basic things you cannot do anything in the tool. You need to know those things.

I have done the Masters course on Automation Anywhere University. I have a Masters Certification from them. Their courses are pretty interesting. At the end of the Masters course, we had an interview on the course itself. There were a lot of informative things and it was a great experience.

Next year, we should be moving into cognitive document processing.

We are currently using it for a lot of projects, like repetitive or manual tasks. We are building bots to free human beings from boring jobs/tasks. We are working daily on Automation Anywhere to automate our processes.

We are using it on-premise. We are not using cloud for deployment. As of now, we are running it on our client machines. We develop automation on our desktops, then deploy our automation on our physical desktop using Automation Anywhere.

We have automated web scripting, downloading documents from particular websites, scraping data from websites, and extracting the data from PDF files. We are also updating the application with some user inputs. E.g., if you have an Excel sheet to update into a particular application, we can use Automation Anywhere tool and automate the process.

We have built some Java applications in Automation Anywhere. I have also coded macros and Python scripts to include in our Automation Anywhere tool.

The Automation Anywhere tool is very handy to use since I have some programming background, like I previously worked on Java. It's very easy to use Automation Anywhere because there is not much of coding involved. We just need to drag and drop the commands, then we can do the job.

Automation Anywhere is good for integrating other programming languages and other tools. The ease of use is very good, as we can directly code other programming languages, like Java or JavaScript, into our application and get output.

I have done work using a VPN, connecting via a remote desktop. The good thing about Automation Anywhere is if a client works without Internet, e.g., if we deploy on a client mission and the network is off, then a bot will still run offline.

If we want to read a scanned PDF, we use IQ Bot. Using the cognitive detail of IQ Bot and some machine learning abilities, we can train the IQ Bot to process all scanned PDF documents and give the results in an Excel file. This is a very good feature introduced by Automation Anywhere. IQ Bot is doing well.

The Bot Store is like a marketplace for bot developers. We already have some utility bots that are simple bots from there. We can download the bots from the Bot Store and use them in our current process. That's very helpful for the bot developers, especially for beginners who have just started with Automation Anywhere developing bots. There are a lot of bots deployed in the Bot Store. If you find any interesting bots, we can also upload bots to the Bot Store, making them available for everyone to download and use.

With attended automation, we need human intervention to provide input for bots. We make sure files are presented in a particular folder to pick up those files and feed it to the bot. Attended automation sometimes might go into exceptions, thus we need to monitor it in-between, then check whether it is working properly. This way, we ensure the bot is working properly.

Currently, I have developed between 20 to 25 bots. From when I started, we have deployed as a team between 30 to 40 bots. Their status is as fully running on our client machines.

We collaborate as a team if any face roadblocks or issues, discussing among our colleagues. Then, we involve the Automation Anywhere support team. They are very good. We can raise a ticket and get knowledge from their team. They help us resolve any issues.

The bot creation workflow is pretty simple. We check for feasibility, and if it is feasible, then we go about creating bots for the task. We have some measurements for ROI. We check the return on Investment to determine if it's feasible or not. We check the typical measurements, then go for Bot creation. After creating the bot, we don't have a production environment after creating the bot. We just deploy and run that bot.

If the process is huge and involves 10 to 20 steps, then it might take from creation to production three to four weeks of time. If it is a simple bot, it involves just launching a website and scraping data from the PDF, then putting it in Excel. For that type of bot, we can build it in one week and deploy it in seven to 10 days.

The return of investment on Automation Anywhere very good because I have automated some processes, like scraping the data from websites and updating some applications, and if we deployed full-time employees on these tasks, it would take more than a year and a half. However, if we automate the process and deploy a bot, it can be completed in just a month of time. The ROI is very good because the output is very accurate and the speed is very fast.

Our company is investing a lot of money in Automation Anywhere. They have saved money wherever humans are working. They invest a lot of money in FTEs and other logistics, so the money saving is very pretty good with Automation Anywhere. While I don't know the exact figure, the tool is saving us millions of dollars as well as saving about 40,000 hours in the last year. 

Currently, we are using attended automation. We do have unattended bots but are in the process of procuring some other licenses. In future, we will make a few bots unattended as well.

I did the Advanced Certification on Automation Anywhere University. I have also done IQ Bot learning. I am currently doing a Masters Certification. The courses are very clear. Any user can understand the content. If you are a beginner, go with Automation Anywhere. If you have some basic programming knowledge, that is enough. You can easily learn Automation Anywhere. It is not a big deal, and you can learn with the certification.

If a person doesn't have a programming background or skills, they can use Automation Anywhere and build bots. It's not a big deal. It's easy for business users to use. You just need some basic programming skills, like Ethernet and loops. 

I heard from Automation Anywhere that version A2019 will be released in either November or December. It is completely cloud-based and contains two IDs. One ID is a flowchart diagram and another ID has some commands. Therefore, any business user who has some basic knowledge can develop bots as well.

Version A2019 will be adding a lot of new features.

I haven't had a chance to work on Citrix automation.