Automation Anywhere Reviews

We work in a very complex type of environment. We do a lot of data analytics and strategy consulting work. The work that we have automated so far is our legacy suite of applications, doing all the reporting, data extraction from different web sources, and collating the information, then publishing to websites.

We use RPA or the Automation Anywhere tool to orchestrate the whole process. We combine it and integrate it with other API and Python solutions to help get the data from a particular source, whether it be an FTP source or AWS environment. Then, we make those validations using Excel. After that, we do our QCs and validations, then publish or submit the reports.

We partner with a few other vendors as well for different use cases based on the type of clients that we are working with.

We feel our team is more involved in the whole process to give better ideas and give new use cases to help automate things. Things that were very repetitive and manual, such as creating daily checklists and reports, those have been reduced considerably. Our team is very happy about that.

Automation Anywhere has a very rich and easy to use interface. This makes it very intuitive. As an organization, we give training to business users to help them automate themselves. It is an easy to go, create your own scripts, and logic. The typical commands which they have in the workbench are very helpful for us.

New versions keep coming up. The challenge for us is to have the downtime to do the migrations. This could be improved upon. We would like fewer version changes and upgrades happening to the application. While the downtime is not that much, depending on the business processes, there are times few critical processes are running on a daily or hourly basis. We would expect the downtime to be even less for them.

There are a few internal applications that we have where Automation Anywhere needs to be added. We need to get those applications embedded so the integration process between those applications is smooth. E.g., With a Citrix type of environment or VDI environment, we have not been able to get the right information. We have to use the coordinates. Recently. we attended a session and realized that they have come up with an IQ Bot and computer vision technology. Therefore, we have some use cases which we want to leverage.

Our focus would be for them to keep innovating for more intelligent solutions which can merge your text to speech. These types of solutions, along with other ML and AI capabilities, can solve for the larger objective and typically RPA platforms are not able to do. The type of applications that we use are very large and different. They are not the typical ERP systems or systems which normal organizations would have. If they could bring AI and ML capabilities onboard, this would help me rate them even higher.

The stability is great. We have very few issues. 

We just migrated to version 11. Though, I don't know the exact version. It was a seamless experience. The whole integration and migration has been very smooth for us.

Scalability is an important aspect of it. We believe they have been doing it pretty well. Earlier, we were doing everything as an on-premise implementation. Later, we moved to an AWS environment, hosting everything on our cloud machine. This helped us scale the whole solution and reach our multiple clients in projects that we were engaged in very quickly.

We believe the A2019 version is meant to scale the tool to a larger audience.

If we have issues, the Automation Anywhere team is always available to support us, as there are account managers and customer support managers.

We use the technical support a lot. We have our own dedicated tech support. Whenever an issue arises, we raise a ticket and it gets resolved based on criticality - within a few hours to 24 hours is usually the turnaround time. They are very helpful in terms of setting up conversations and meetings to understand an issue, then take it forward for resolution.

We already had a process excellence transformation team doing the typical operation excellence type of work process improvement and process re-engineering. We decided that it would be better to help us take the leap of automation and go from the third or fourt-generation improvements we were doing since those were long-time deployments and bring a change. We were looking for faster adoption, an easy to deploy solution, and achieve a quick ROI. This is also sellable to our leadership and makes sense to take to a larger scale. That was the whole idea.

We first thought of implementing internal system automations, legacy application automations, and Excels automations. However, when we realized the potential of this technology, and how it integrates along with its seamless environment setup. That was the go ahead for us, and we started our journey.

Initially, because we started everything in-house (did not partner with a consulting firm or the typical technology integrators), it was difficult. Then, we started learning the architecture and environment. Automation Anywhere gave us a dedicated support to set up the whole journey for us in the initial few years. It went from strength to strength after that.

We built up the whole capability in-house. Automation Anywhere helped us with the setup.

From the second year onward, ROI is achieved, which is a great thing because year-over-year you are accruing those benefits.

We have deployed it across multiple processes: reporting, data management, or sales strategy work. We have achieved a scale where we are in a position to close $1M of benefits.

The number of licenses that required when evaluating a solution was not a hundred bot licenses or Bot Runner machines. At that time, we were not looking at scale and that is where Automation Anywhere helped us.

Including the AWS setup and everything per license, it costs us around $10,000 on an annual basis. I believe that is pretty reasonable considering the teams that we have. 

We evaluated the top four vendors: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath, or Kryon. But, we realized the type of use cases that we had and wanted to try first to deploy them. Those vendors had enterprise large-scale license models in place, but we wanted a use-per-license type of system and support structure with its communities. Automation Anywhere reached out to us, and said, “We will do a free PoC and pilots for you. If you feel the solution is suiting your set of use cases, then go ahead and purchase.”

We set up the whole team and evaluated a few vendors. What prompted us to go with Automation Anywhere was our typical use case that we cater to. They were not run-of-the-mill, large volume, highly repeatable work. We have processes where only two to three people are doing the work and not many volumes coming in that.

We wanted our vendor to understand our challenges. We had multiple meetings before Automation Anywhere could understand what work we do. Then, it was like, "Aha." So, it took us time to reach where we are, but we have now partnered with them, and it's going great for us.

1. See how your use case fits with the solution. A few uses cases may be good for you.
2. Take a look at the cost model. Do you want to go for a big bang approach or large-scale implementation?
3. Customer support: Organizations fail to understand when you have deployed bots in the production systems, and they are up and running, that you need a very robust, strong support system. This way if any issues come up regarding the application/solution, teams are there to support you.

Primary use case of Automation Anywhere is financial accounting reporting use cases.

We use unattended bots for all the financial reporting. We have also done some use cases in master data management (MDM). These are the things that we did early last year.

For the next year, we will be primarily focused on cognitive automation. We've already started with IQ Bot exploration. We will be looking into the new version of IQ Bot.

We released ERP, improving our workload balancing. For example, for each of our employees, we have release almost 400 hours of critical repeated efforts.

Automation Anywhere is very good for rapid development. It has all the capabilities in terms of giving a stable automation framework. It has very cool technical capabilities, like MetaBots, dev controls, and object cloning. 

We encountered issues during the upgrade of the framework. We were using the older framework of version 10.3.5. When we were upgrading, we were having a few issues in terms of getting the proper hardware and software prerequisites. For some things, like getting the controls of some of the application's tools, we were getting Automation Anywhere's help.

The operation happened both in hardware and software. There was some amount of friction in terms of technical and hardware operations. In terms handling capturing the controls, that's where we used the help of tech support.

We are looking forward to the release of cloud/web automation, which has yet to be released.

We having most of the use cases rely on Automation Anywhere. However, we face some challenges in terms of RPA implementation with Citrix.

Whatever use case we have deployed in production, we have found nil in terms of stability issues. 

For scalability, we are still working on the bot utilization framework and have created additional frameworks apart from the existing automation framework.

Tech support is one of its primary features, far better than the other RPA tools. We have been able to fix some big technical issues that we came across.

Initially, we were having a few challenges in terms of getting the approval from InfoSec since we wanted some Veracode reportt from our CSM. That took some time. Initially, we were having open issues with the older version, in terms of the Veracode code report. These were high-end critical. Eventually, we were able to get the final report after the approval from Infosec. Then, we were able to install all of the software to our Olam framework.

We started with an integrator, then went directly with Automation Anywhere. Our experience was good. They started by helping us work with the software and understand Automation Anywhere's capabilities.

We have released at least $400 to $500 a month during our peak period, so we have really seen ROI with the product.

I think it's $5,500 per license.

We had some RPA tool implementation strategies. We looked at all the tools and their features. We did a brainstorm session with all the tools and found out the nuances between them. We identified Automation Anywhere as the tool that we should implement in Olam.

We compared Automation Anywhere with UiPath, Blue Prism, OpenSpan, and WorkFushion.

Automation Anywhere is one of the easiest tools that developers can use for development. It takes them only a small amount of time. It has good stability in terms of implementing the automation use cases. We also found Automation Anywhere as a pioneer in terms of RPA implementation.

Automation Anywhere is a pioneer in RPA tools. I would recommend Automation Anywhere. Automation use cases will be rapidly implemented through it. It has a good amount of stability and cool features that can be robustly developed with the help of developers as well as business people.

We are looking forward to using IQ Bot as well as attended automation in the coming year. These are features that are available, but have not used yet. We are trying to do a PoC to start and implement them into our daily use cases.

Currently, we are focusing more on finance, shared services, and interpretive related ideas. For accounting and finance statistic, we have reconciliation specific processes, such as rates uploads into systems. The majority of our development is on SAP and Excel. We are focusing on the financial services area, so our use cases are more related to finance and accounting. These are the use cases developed by the development team.

We are using an on-premise deployment model.

The main agenda for using the RPA is to see how we can get the benefit from reducing human capacity as well as quality output. These two are the major focus for us and what we are achieving.

Timeline-wise, it normally takes a long time to develop. With the AA and RPA concepts and their ready-to-use components, we can deliver a bot within couple of days or within a week time frame based on the use case.

It is easy to use and developer-friendly. The development time is very short. If any system needs to be changed or any functionality needs to be incorporated to any of the technology, it usually will be a long process, like months. With this innovative tool's automation, it is very dynamic, easy to develop, and deliver results quickly. With some of our use cases, we were able to deliver within the time frame of two to three weeks, which is the biggest plus with this tool.

There are good MetaBots available in the Bot Store. We were able to leverage them, as well as established our own reusable components. Considering that, it is easy to add on any software or applications that sits in the system.

We would like to have the Excel plug-in. We have a challenge with unattended bots in development which will be deployed on virtual machines. End users ask, "Why can't we run the bots whenever we need?" The new concept for getting attended bots as well as the Excel plug-in will solve this problem, but we'll wait for 2019 version, which may be a better solution for the business.

More structured and unstructured data collection will be a challenge. While we have the IQ  Bot tool, the success rate at the beginning will be lower. It will be around 20 to 30 percent at the start because you need to train the bot at regular intervals. Of course, this depends on the data. This area could use be improvement.

The marketing strategy is directed toward end users. These leads to confusion in the organization regarding, "Who needs to develop?" Is it IT or the business? This causes friction within the business. Whatever the approach, it is important to show how to get the most benefit out of the tool. There should be a clear roles for IT and the business when using the tool. This way teams and structure can be better established in a business.

For attended automation, there are still questions to be answered: How it is going to maintain the queue? E.g., there are 20 users who want to process their own processes, and when they trigger things, how will the Control Room react? How will bot work distribution happen? These things still need to be looked into, but conceptual-wise, attended automation is really good.

It is confusing: Who needs to develop the bot? The business or IT. At the basic level, the bots can be created. However, once they are moved into production, you have to make sure that the bot is stable and running 24/7 without any issues. Therefore, a lot of care is required due to the amount of controlling mechanisms required.

There are a few problems with deployment and maintenance. When it moves to other systems, the consistency will be somewhat lost.

RPA is decently established and stable as the market is coming up with new features. However, the unstable area is more the IT part of it where a lot of research still needs to be done, especially in the case of artificial intelligence. 

When we run bots, sometimes the systems will go down. Maybe it is because the same functionality worked once or even regularly, but then all of a sudden there will be an issue. It might be a network, latency, or some other issues. Still bot stability needs improvement. These are very rare situations. It works most the time, but one time it will fail and we don't know why.

When I talk about RPAs, it is to say, "Can this problem be solved with RPA?" Scalability-wise, we are in good shape. 

In terms of AI incorporation, this type of scalable incorporation would be benefit everyone. The trend looks like we are going to reach to this point in a good manner.

We were able to put more than 40 bots into production. There are around 20 more in progress. On average, we were able to save around 25,000 hours of manual efforts.

The technical support's response is very good. They gave back solutions quickly. We haven't face many challenges when using the tool. So, we haven't interacted much with the technical team, maybe two or three instances. 

We looked into moving into RPA because it was the trend in the industry.

We do regular acquisitions which leads to a lot of duplicate roles and resources along with similar activities. With this approach, we can streamline our processes and bring uniform processes across the organization. We have been able to establish this. If we use the bots on a lot of manual efforts, it will reduces effort. Going forward, we can use the bots in a better manner by using them for the strategy of delivery and appointments.

We started this journey with a PoC. For three months, we tried understanding the tool and its capabilities. 

The initial setup is not complex for the tool setup. The struggle points are establishing the right mechanisms to identify the candidates and prioritizing things. 

In April, we started the pilot. By July, we had the software as well as the use cases that we needed. We got the licenses in July or August. It took us at least a quarter to establish systems and resources. Then, we started delivering the bots from December 2018. It took six to eight months' time frame from PoC to first bot deployment.

For our bot creation process:

A business user, whoever is doing the manual process currently, will send their request with the details of the use case. Those details will be assessed by IT and the business functional groups to measure what will be the man-hour savings. Also, is it a possible candidate for RPA?Based on those measurements, we identify candidates for RPA, then we determine if they meet the current threshold of 500 hours. If it is more than 500 hours, we consider that a candidate for RPA. Based on that criteria, we identify and prioritize it. Afterward, it comes to the development team for development.

If we had been alone during the initial setup, might not have been that successful. However, when we partnered with the other groups, like consulting firms, then we were able to get the right mechanisms in place within a short time.

We did the deployment in-house.

We have a good dashboard to measure ROI. Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent.

To measure ROI, whenever we get a use case from the business when we do an assessment, one of the factor that we capture is the time saving. We try to measure and apply the country rates for the locations where they are doing manual efforts. We measure the time savings by applying the country rates and deriving the hours and value.

The time that it takes to develop and deliver is within two to three weeks.

It has good licensing costs which are average for the market.

We did try out UiPath, which is a good solution. 

We also look at Blue Prism.

We like Automation Anywhere's end user experience. We thought Automation Anywhere was the better solution for developing bots in the long run. It is a centralized tool because of its Control Room. It makes sense to have a solution where everything is in a centralized repository. AA has a more future-looking perspective which will help them in the long run.

We currently are not evaluating any other vendors.

When we saw the tool capabilities, we were so excited. We tried to start using them but we needed to have the right structure and mechanisms in place from the beginning to identify the use case for prioritizing. This plays a major role. 

If you are a big organization with a center of excellence, you need to bring all the people together. The establishment will play a bigger role than just developing and delivering bots. Developing and delivering bots is a very small portion, which is doable by any individual who has a basic technical background. To be successful in your journey, having the right structure upfront will help.

We experimented a little bit with IQ Bots, but we didn't see much use cases in this line currently.

A lot of people interact with RPA and the industry is really excited about it. However, you need to pick the right candidate to be successful in your journey, along with the right framework for the development. This will give you a good output. This is what the business needs to test. Pick a solution based on the organization's needs as well as the right approach. Have an assessment with an approach framework will help.

We're using it across a number of departments. So far we have implementations for finance and cost-control, as well as operational and logistics uses.

Our deployment is a hybrid solution. We have an on-premise component and some portions are in Azure.

We've implemented a few solutions that are helping us out in a couple of different dimensions. One of the big ones for us is cost-control. We've been able to identify certain billing errors and to dispute them or avoid overpaying in certain instances. It's helping us to improve both the visibility of the accuracy of the invoices we're receiving, as well as any instances where there might be disputed amounts. It's also allowed us, for certain tasks that have previously been repetitive or manual-data-entry heavy, to centralize and then automate them and reduce the number of actual employees we need on those mundane tasks. It's been very helpful for that.

The core functionality, the ability to automate these tasks and to interact, both with our own in-house software solutions as well as with our customers' and vendors' solutions and portals, has been incredibly valuable for us.

We're also beginning to dip our toes in the water with the IQ Bots, to do some OCR and some machine-learning. So far that is looking like it will be very valuable to us as well.

One thing about it that we have not found to be exceptionally useful are the built-in bot analytics, the Bot Insights. From our own extensive experimentation, as well as from what we've understood from other people using this solution, we've been able to come up with better solutions using our own in-house analytics and our own systems than through theirs.

Also, we're seemingly plagued with certain technological issues or bugs. In particular, at the moment, we're in the middle of a pretty serious issue that's blocking our further development. We have been working with the Automation Anywhere support team on it, but it's been dragging on for a while now and we still haven't received a solution from them yet. We're hoping to get that resolved and move forward. 

There's definitely some funkiness or some jankiness, sometimes, with working with them.

The stability has been mixed. In fairness, it's hard to say how much of that is issues with the solution itself, versus any issues that we may have had in the setup and integrating it into our own systems. It's definitely taken us a while to get to a point where we're comfortable with it being able to run consistently and smoothly. We've made a lot of progress in that regard and we're seeing a lot of improvements as well.

Our issues tend to be more on the development side. We've had pretty decent success once the solutions are fully developed and deployed, as far as stability is concerned. But, we have definitely encountered a lot of issues and hiccups along the road, while developing.

It seems pretty scalable. We're looking into scaling up in the near term. The pool seems pretty scalable and good to us from what we've seen so far.

We currently have six or seven processes that we've automated using Automation Anywhere and we're looking to increase that number quite a lot here in the U.S. We have a prioritized list of another 50 or so tasks that we'd like to try to automate with the solution. In addition, we're working to generate interest among some of our other agencies and countries worldwide, in using it.

Their technical support is good. Any issues that we've raised, they've gotten right back to us and helped come up with solutions. It has taken longer than we would have liked for some of our thornier problems to reach a resolution. At the moment we're a little stuck, based on a problem that we're having, although tech support has been responsive and has worked closely with us to try to come up with a solution.

This is the first RPA solution that we have used.

The initial setup was definitely complex. It took us and our IT teams quite some time to get everything set up the way we needed it, with our three environments. Part of that was getting the Control Room installed and set up, as well as making sure that the client was running properly on all of our machines. It definitely took us some time to get that all running smoothly, a few months to get everything deployed.

We're a global company and our U.S. offices have been running this as a pilot for global. We've been sitting with different departments and stakeholders to try and understand what processes might be right for automation and for this kind of solution. We've been compiling that list, prioritizing, and trying to get the buy-in of the people who will be most impacted by it. We've also been trying to get some early, big wins as far as ROI is concerned, and as far as demonstrating the value of the technology, so that we can continue to roll out more, here in the U.S. and, hopefully, more broadly later on.

It has all been done in-house.

We are definitely seeing positive ROI on this, between some cost reductions as well as some FTE replacement for the more repetitive or mundane tasks.

Licensing is done on a yearly basis. There are some additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. There are a couple of add-ons we've looked at: The IQ Bot for OCR and machine-learning were add-ons, as well as the Bot Insights - the analytics.

We got The Bot Insights rolled in immediately, on a trial basis. The Meta Bots, if not immediately, we had added on very early on. The IQ Bot is something that we've been looking into recently. We have not yet purchased that license. We have run a PoC with it and are looking into adding that on.

We did evaluate other options but I wasn't directly involved in the initial screening process. I do know that we examined three or four other solutions before settling on Automation Anywhere.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that nothing is as easy as it seems it should be.

One of the things a number of people are looking for out of an automation solution is a reduction in FTEs. I know Automation Anywhere would prefer we not describe its usefulness in those terms, but I know that's something that a lot of people are into. While it certainly can achieve that, the estimates going in tend to be very high and the reality is that you're not really hitting those numbers. So be very conservative when you evaluate it. It has absolutely been worth it for us and has provided us with good value. But the optimism going in - and I've heard this from other people we've met at the Imagine events, etc. - is over-optimistic and the actual numbers are less than what is estimated. Being realistic about that is very important.

Also, if you're using any kind of custom, in-house software, seeing how it interacts with that is important. It can be a little persnickety about interacting correctly, especially if it's an older, legacy system. It runs very smoothly across many different types of software and modern interfaces. But it can be a little challenging working with something that's a little older or more specialized and customized.

Currently, we have five to ten users, ranging from very much involved to just being onboard or peripherally involved. We have a number of developers directly using the technology, as well as project managers. Those are the people who are directly involved. The number is much larger if you include the business users who are impacted by the solution, impacted by the bots that we've created and their results. I would estimate, roughly, 50 users are benefiting from it right now.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, we're getting back to that five to ten people. We have four or five developers who are developing new bots. We have three IT people who are involved very directly in maintaining our servers and the virtual machines that we're running these on, as well as providing technical support for the overall infrastructure and setup. Those are the people who are directly involved at the nuts-and-bolts level.

It's been very helpful. In many ways it's doing what it says it can do. It's automating processes, it's got some good settings for controlling, running, monitoring, and maintaining that. On the other hand, our experience in actually developing with it and making the bots has been rockier than we would like. Also, the setup - getting the infrastructure and the installs set up properly - and updating, when updates roll out, are a bit complex.

We use it for back-office administrative business processes, within order-to-cash. We have an end-to-end process automation that supports customer billings. We also have task-based automations that process either customer credit memos, or credit and re-bills, working within SAP.

We started with the solution on-prem and we have shifted to an AWS cloud environment.

It has allowed us to establish more reliable business processes, when transacting in our enterprise systems. It has improved the reliability of our monthly billing processes that, in the past, was dependent on manual, nine-to-five types of activities. We can now schedule those activities, process 24 hours a day, and then we review exceptions. I would emphasize and underscore the reliability aspect and the ability to process 24/7.

It is highly reliable, both from an uptime perspective and regarding data-quality and input into the systems. It's doing the same thing, every time, with 100 percent accuracy.

To put it in terms of hours, we are approaching 10,000-plus hours of capacity on an annual basis.

There aren't any features that are specifically valuable. We are not using IQ Bots.

On the cognitive side, some of their competitors, when we were originally shopping, were a little more advanced in that space. Making use of probabilistic outcomes and presenting them to a business user is a feature that, at the time of our evaluation, did not feel like a strong, mature solution for Automation Anywhere. Nevertheless, they won our business. That is one feature where I feel they are trying to make investments to address those gaps.

The platform has been very stable. There have been a few Control Room issues when adding new VMs, but overall it's very reliable. I'm pleased with the performance so far.

We are pleased with Automation Anywhere's ability to scale. We are convinced that it is a platform that we can scale, and we are convinced that it can function and operate within our environment.

We have six-plus use cases in production today. But those business processes are very complex. They are touching many systems. Our definition of a bot is a business process, not a task. Some companies call a bot a task. We don't do that, we call it a business process. We have six business processes that are running, which are very complex in nature. 

Regarding the scalability of a single business process, we have found that to be very easy. We have found Automation Anywhere to be very friendly when it comes to that. We add capacity in the form a virtual machine and a license to scale and meet the needs of the business.

We have not dealt directly with Automation Anywhere's tech support. Historically, they've been pretty good. I'm relaying that from my systems integrator and my helpdesk support. I always ask if they are getting what they need when they need it and the answer is yes. I'm pleased with the feedback I'm hearing.

The original setup was easy. What was difficult was adding licenses. I went a month where I was paying for licenses that I couldn't use, for various reasons. That was painful.

I'm not familiar with how long it took to stand up the environments. It was pretty simple from a PoC point of view, with the free trial licenses that were made available to us by AA in conjunction with their preferred systems integrator. That was fairly painless. Standing up the production environment was relatively painless as well. We had no problems whatsoever there. However, as we scale and add licenses, we have challenges.

Based on our use cases, we have seen a return on our initial investment for the PoC, and we are continuing to leverage the platform as we scale.

Price is where I'm least satisfied. Other vendors are more willing to offer discounts.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and WorkFusion. Those were the vendors that were strongly considered when we were evaluating Automation Anywhere's capabilities. There was a laundry-list of others, prior to those, which we evaluated from a market-research point of view.

We valued the market presence of Automation Anywhere. We valued the ease of use, when we were thinking about scaling out to the business. The recording feature, while not a developer tool - it is a tool for a business user who may not possess the thought process of a developer - we valued that in our evaluation. Those were the two major factors. 

And at the time, the commercial terms as well, the one-year commitment, was appealing to us when we were shopping the solution. We didn't want to sign a multi-year deal on a technology platform that wasn't proven out to our business. That was another factor which gave us comfort as part of the decision-making process.

At the start, I advise picking a portfolio of use cases to start with. Some will over-perform and others will not. Think of it in terms of a portfolio approach to sell the concept to your organization. My second area of advice would be: Do not automate systems that you do not own or control, unless you are willing to accept the degree of maintenance associated with that automation.

The biggest lesson I've learned so far from using it is that it's not as easy as the salespeople say. The biggest challenge is that not all automations are created equal. To give you some context, there are automations that I still don't have in production which have taken me over half-a-year to build. You talk to a sales guy and he says, "Hey, you can build an automation and be up in two weeks." Yes, but will that automation add a drop of value to the business? Probably not. The challenges are around stabilizing our complex automations.

Anything Google-related is challenging. I didn't really receive any help from our systems integrator or from AA when it came to the Google platform. We paid, extensively, to learn the hard way.

As part of our CoE, we rely on a third-party for development and maintenance of our automations. That means we have no users of the solution in our organization. The third-party has access to Bot Creators, they have access to our development environment and Control Room. They promote code to production and maintain the automations.

We have plans to increase our usage of the solution in the future. It is our intention to build an internal capability, over time. The processes we are looking to automate are more within order-cash and back-office. We have some administrative, travel, maintenance. Our IT ticketing system spawns maintenance; there's also account-creation and maintenance. That's an area of focus for us. And we're exploring reporting capabilities which are on the simple side. That's the area where we're targeting internal development and building an internal competency. It's what we characterize as simple automation use cases.

Overall, Automation anywhere is pretty good. It's not perfect but it's up there. I don't have a point of reference, other examples, but I think it's pretty good at what it does.

Automation Anywhere is removing the boring, repetitive tasks from the workforce.

I've worked on different models over different frameworks. 

I do the coding as well as the deployment side. I prepare documents and the user ID. Sometimes, if the user ID is not prepared, then I jump into the process to get it done. With the technical feasibility of the document, I take the technical feasibility and do an estimation to code the bot. I configure the bot, then code it according to the entity and get it reviewed from the client. Then, I run the bot through the Hapi port, as well as different scenarios which might come up.

Once the client is happy, we have a couple of rounds of testing. We have a "You Ready" phase where we code for a few days and the client provides data. We run through the data and this give them the technical results. When they're happy, then we finally move the code over.

One of the clients that I worked with to automate their process received invoices from 12 different companies and different regions. These are the process steps that we automated:

1. We could get the data from PDFs (the invoices were in a PDF format).
2. We accepted the data, uploaded it, and filtered out some of the data. 
3. Once we extracted the data, we use it to search data on particular websites for a particular invoice number to be processed. 
   
4. We used the invoice number to process the invoice.
5. We got approval for the invoice. 

I worked on another process where it generated offer letters for different people with templates. We would get the data in a dump. We would take that data put it into a template, and then into a Word file.

With another client, we used to receive around a million files. Per day, we would have to process around 70,000 to 80,000 records, uploading data where the volume was huge. We deployed the process in multiple bots, using about 20 bots to get the process done. For this client, every second used mattered. We had to code the bot in such a way that we could save every second for them. We had to figure out how much time the bot took and the cost savings for any particular data. We used the workload feature of Automation Anywhere get it done. The manual process took around 30 to 40 people around five to six hours a day, where the bot finishes between one to one a half hours. This was a huge time savings for the client.

For the client with 70,000 to 80,000, we created an SQL database to maintain all their records using bots. E.g., if a bot failed, then another bot would retry using the same information. In the "You Ready" phase, this process was 95 to 98 percent successful. When we finally moved it to production, we had between 99 to 100 percent accuracy. This took us around one and a half months to set up. Two development levels were involved along with an architect who was guiding us.

The most valuable feature is the object cloning. If you compare it to the other RPA tools, object cloning in Automation Anywhere is the most valuable. Mainly for web application, object cloning comes in very handy. Most processes are built as either a website or as a desktop application. Out of 800 commands, around 150 to 200 will be cloned through object cloning. In Automation Anywhere object cloning, there is a special feature called DOMXPATH, where we can customize it to any level. If IDs getting changed, which happens in some cases, then we find out the pattern. Based on the pattern, we come to the particular text box and button. Then, we can use bots along with parent-sibling relationships to get things done. 

I like that it has PGP Command and it is able to connect to a Citrix environment. 

We have the MetaBot feature, which is valuable because we can read reusable components in the MetaBot, then use them as a framework.

The training and resources for this tool are very good. They are so simple that anyone can easily learn it. One of the tool values is its ease of use.

The Excel part needs improvement because we use it as a database. Right now, we are using UiPath for this feature, as that RPA tool allows us to sort, search, and filter in Excel databases. 

The IQ Bot is pretty immature, in regards to AI and machine learning. I would like them to add additional logic.

I have been using it for almost two years now.

Automation Anywhere is quite reliable and stable, especially compared to the other RPA tools. E.g., with UiPath, code that was working yesterday might not work today.

We have experience minor issues with Automation Anywhere, such as with the object cloning, where it required us to restart the machine. Once the machine was rebooted, the solution worked fine.

It takes one or two people to handle the daily maintenance of this solution.

We code our bots with tasks and subtasks in such a way that we can easily combine them when new features come up.

The initial setup is pretty simple and fast. It can be done from the web Control Room, which can be done easily.

For coding, we are keeping the information in XLS or XML files. We use MetaBot to retrieve the data. We keep our URLs in an Excel file, so when we go to our production environment that it will automatically take the URLs and implement them.

One or two people can deploy the solution easily if they understand the requirements.

In most of the cases, the product value is very good. If the infrastructure, implementation, and framework are good, then generally, the client can get a good return on investment. However, getting good resources is tough since most people have limited experience in RPA products who struggle a lot to use these tools.

The coding for Automation Anywhere is a lot easier than for UiPath and Blue Prism. I have about a year and half of experience with UiPath. Compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere is easy to use and bot development is faster. If you try to develop the same bots in UiPath, development of the same bots in Automation Anywhere will be faster. If the client wants the bots to be developed very quickly, we will do it Automation Anywhere. However, if they give us time, then we will us UiPath. If the process is huge and complex, then we go with Blue Prism.

Another key advantage of Automation Anywhere is the object drawing feature. This comes in very handy. Whereas, if we use UiPath, we have to use the .NET code and commands versus Automation Anywhere where can use scripts or create MetaBots. 

Companies need to do feasibility testing to avoid trying to automate processes which are not right for automation. Then, they should examine which vendor is the right one for the automation process, e.g., Automation Anywhere or UiPath. They need to establish the proper infrastructure for the RPA product, like licenses and an RPA team. The RPA can be a mixture of trained professionals and people who are learning as they go from the training provided by the tool.

Version 11.3 updated a lot of features that were previously not there, like workload automation and analytics dashboards.

I am always learning new things with this tool.

The tool is used to automate any business process. Some examples are:

• If you want to download some data from a website or push some data onto a website.
• If you work with an Excel application and want to automate it, or any Windows-based application, you can automate it as long as you know what the business process is.
• If a person is doing a day-to-day activity and you want to automate that activity, you can use the Automation Anywhere tool to do it.

I have worked with the Windows, Excel, and web applications, along with some SAP automation and how to automate that SAP data. I use Automation Anywhere to determine automation for how to:

• Distribute the process. 
• Schedule the process. 
• Run the process. 
• Design the process.
• Distribute the data for 1000 to 10,000 data points (in Excel).

I have automated the invoicing in a finance department, where the finance department wanted to automate the invoicing process. They wanted to do the following:

• Invoice the data.
• Create the invoice.
• Mail the invoice.
• Download the invoice data.

If you have 10 operators currently performing these activities everyday, then you automate the process, by removing the 10 operators and having only one operator required, this will decrease costs. It will also increase the efficiency of your company.

In the automatic invoicing system, we created a file which pushes onto a shared folder. The bot will pick up the file automatically from the shared folder and process the invoice. Therefore, if tomorrow, another bot were to be created, we could just create a file and copy it to the shared folder, then it would pick up the file and process the invoice.

I utilize all the commands provided by Automation Anywhere, such as all the recorders. I use these commands to develop my processes and bots.

Automation Anywhere has a drag and drop process.

Automation Anywhere needs to improve Excel and its commands. In Excel, if you want to add a sheet, you cannot add a sheet. There is no command for adding a sheet. Also, if you want to rename something in Excel, you cannot rename it. You always must keep a list that you can rename through your keyboard, but there is no specific command in Automation Anywhere. 

The email automation command also needs to be improved. The email automation command sometimes is not working properly. When you connect the mail server, it is not being done properly.

The OCR feature is not that reliable.

With the PDF command, you can only read structured data. If your data is in an unstructured format, there is no command for it in Automation Anywhere. Then, people need to use Python coding if their data is in unstructured format. Therefore, Automation Anywhere needs to improve in the PDF area.

I have been using the product for the last two years.

I didn't have any stability issues. 

I haven't found any scalability issues with it. If the volume increases tomorrow, another bot can be added from the Control Room.

I worked with a single deployment model, which didn't have a load balancer requirement. Higher availability deployments require load balancers.

I haven't dealt with Automation Anywhere's technical support.

For the implementation, you just follow the proper process on how to deploy the proper hardware configuration on the production environment. The process does not take that much time as you push files to the Control Room, then from the Control Room, you can download the client. It does depend on how many bots you are implementing and how you are scheduling them.

Automation Anywhere is deployed from a deployment guideline in a step-by-step process. Automation Anywhere provides some deployment guidelines, which can be referred to.

Only one person is required for deployment: the Control Room administrator.

The number of people required for monitoring the solution depends on the amount of bots deployed.

It saves time and money. If a bot does the same work as nine out of 10 people, then you are saving money through wages. Also, a bot will work all hours without interruption, whereas FTEs may need time off or vacation. 

I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator. 

The Automation Anywhere automation tool is user-friendly, especially compared to UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere's deployment is also easy compared to other RPA tools.

The solution is good for people who want to do their job quickly without any delay or problems. 

The future of IT will require every organization to need automation.

The Control Room is good in version 11, as compared to the previous versions of the Control Room.

Our company is an implementation partner for Automation Anywhere, and XLNC Technologies is a consulting organization for whom I work. I am the head of delivery operations.

We are working with around 14 clients who are on Automation Anywhere. We have been able to recommend and further resell starter and enterprise packs. Implementations performed by us scale up from one bot to 10 bot runners

My primary use case for Automation Anywhere would be the one which yields higher ROI , has repetitive tasks to be performed and doesnt involve fuzzy logic for sure . Cases that we have achieved success are extraction of data from PDF's , SAP automation, AD Integration, Integration with CRM and Payment links, KYC documents and web scrapping. Listed are low hanging fruits and will boost confidence of the stakeholders in the RPA deployment , recommend to look at such use cases when looking at Automation Anywhere and its implementation.

I have worked in Dubai, and we implemented RPA for one of the major retail giants. We started out with one process (bank reconciliation) and scaled up to almost 200 bots in six months. Sales was improved by at least by 80 percent. 

During the Dubai shopping festival, there were big launches that happened on the sales/retail domains. Bots compared products with other competitors, looking at the pricing ranges then locating the price for your own product, then bringing them to the home page for easy access. All these sort of changes were managed by bots. It had a direct impact on the customer lifecycle. 

In my current implementation, which is happening in India, with the poker companies, if you played poker, then you would have observed when you are trying to make out a cash-out if you don't get your cash-out in four to eight hours that you tend to get worried about the poker game in which you were playing. One of the use case that we received was to go ahead and make cash-outs almost on a real-time basis along with the tax deduction. Because in India, there are tax deductions which happen. Before, it used to take almost a day to go ahead and get the tax deducted. Then, the cash-outs were being made in eight hours. Now, it is happening in one to two hours. This boosts the customer confidence and experience. When the customer experience increases, obviously sales will increase. 

Automation Anywhere has multiple features in it. If you could look at the agnostic tools that are available on the market, almost everybody has a similar features, but Automation Anywhere has quite a secure platform. It is highly encrypted.

It is highly scalable on cloud and virtual machines. 

Automation Anywhere is a tool. It is not able to go ahead and extract the hand-written documents. Most of the automation tools that we have in the market are not able to get an accuracy of close to 80 to 90 percent on hand-written documents. So, I'm eagerly looking at a release from Automation Anywhere, wherein they could plug in an LP or look at some sort of a platform which could convert hand-written documents into a readable format. If they could bring in they own platform, this would make a big in-roads for the entire automation industry.

If it is able to integrate with any plug-ins available on the market which could read hand-written documents, that would be good. IQ BOT is one cognitive bot that they have launched, and if they could extend this particular cognitive bot to hand-written documents, then they would have an edge over other automation giants already in existence.

Recently, they launched the business analytical dashboard, which is cutting-edge. We can see in real-time the business dynamics and the way the metrics are behaving when the bots are being run. If we could have a ready-made application allowing for input processes and metrics into it. Then, it provides the approach that you should take to start the automation and when the process should expect to be completed. 

Automation Anywhere already has bots stores and digital workers being enabled on the website. Instead of putting it on the website, if a couple of digital workers could be made inherent in the tool itself, then the customer who is buying the package gets an edge over other partners or other vendors. E.g., if Automation Anywhere could package a digital worker along with my existing tool, as sort of an add-on, then that would add value to my package. Similarly, if I am from SCN, maybe an SAT module digital worker could add value.

There are hundreds of codes or utilities available. 60 percent just go down the drain and are never used, because there is no utility towards them. If they did something like Amazon, a pay-as-you-go, to get a digital worker, it would be cutting-edge technology. This would save costs for me and would optimize my implementations. The same benefits could then be shared with my customers. 

Stability is an important part of the product. It has accolades across the globe. If it did not, stable companies in the tech and finance industries wouldn't have gone for it. It's stable because it's highly scalable on cloud and virtual machines. The codes developed in Automation Anywhere don't tend to go back, skip, or miss out. 

The current version launched is 11.3. We are more comfortable with 11.3 now. However, the earlier version, 10.7 was good to work with, but since there even newer version coming, we work with 11.3 for now. Version 11.3 does have some bugs, but they are manageable because there is a good technical support team provided by the Automation Anywhere. We haven't had any major hiccups.

The moment that you start having access levels missing or security is being quite stringent about not opening a couple of bots, they are not providing admin access rights nor providing accesses to VPNs, that's when the stability issues come in. Then, we start blaming that the application stability, which in fact is wrong, because you are not meeting the prerequisites.

Other tools tend to give me exceptions when I am scaling them on the cloud. While the infrastructure might be available, systems won't be able to talk to each other. The codes tend to miss paths, and sometimes codes are not getting applied in the application. However, with Automation Anywhere, we haven't seen any such issues until now, wherein large scale developments are being found to be unstable. 

The good thing about Automation Anywhere is the website has a detailed architecture which talks about having a load balancer and how you can scale up. 

Currently, I have been working with clients in the US and Dubai through remote support. I have been developing bots remotely where I have been able to access their virtual machines. The virtual machines are separate for creators and runners. I have around six creators on virtual machines, which is good enough to start off. There are around 25 runners which are deployed on 25 VMs. This is in US. That's how we are operating them, and it's the largest setup that we work on.

In India, clients start small. They start with a starter pack, which is only allowed to be issued by an implementation partner. If you go onto the Automation Anywhere website, there is nothing called a starter pack. So, organizations will tend to start small with a starter pack, which may come in a bundle of two or three creators, one runner, and one controller. They want to test how it is functions in their organization. If they can pick up low hanging fruit, which means if they're picking processes which are smaller but high in volume, then they will have higher ROI. Then, these organizations tend to jump onto an enterprise level deployment in a maximum of six months. That is the trend that we have seen. 

However, the moment the client starts going big and is not able to get the right ROI in place, that's where they tend to start dropping the ball. Then, they start looking for another RPA software or decide RPA is not for them.

I have been receiving good technical support them, and hence I'm sitting on the sidelines. This is because if I didn't get the right support along with the right documentation and KMS, then I would not be able to fix issues first on my own. If I'm not able to do this, then relying on the technical support would be the last thing that I would do. The technical support that Automation Anywhere provides is fantastic, especially their acknowledgment and response times. Their knowledge base articles are quite descriptive. You will be able to fix issues on your own if you are quite tech savvy. Even if you are not, then they're quite detailed enough to follow.

If you don't get the right support, then there is an escalation channel available which you can reach out to. There is a community, where get solutions. There doesn't seem to be any issues with the support currently being provided by Automation Anywhere. I find them quite responsible and available whenever I have issues.

It is quite straightforward doing an initial setup of Automation Anywhere. This is because it has a well-defined installation guide which talks about how to install Automation Anywhere software. However, automation only works when IT support is quite adequate. So, if the IT and infrastructure teams at the client site are not supportive, for example, then I'm not able to provide admin rights or open security ports. That is when the entire installation moves into a messy state. There is a way to cater to such issues. Because this is a new technology coming, if you meet with the IT support team along with the CISO of that particular organization and set the right context and objective that company wants to achieve with automation, this roadblock can be fixed.

Otherwise, I haven't faced any issues with the setup.

We start off with the planning phase. Then, we go into the asset process gathering phase. We map it along with data gathering, wherein we gather data about the collaterals, the documents which are required in the process, standard operating procedures (SOPs), user login credentials, access rights, and business logics. Once that is done, we recommend a target operating model. Once approved by the business, that's when we start development. We start doing regression testing when post development is over. Finally, we do the handover the new app to the customer operations and can deploy the bot.

If I have to do a process discovery, which includes understanding the data gathering and creating an address process map, it takes a maximum five to ten business days (simple process). It takes this amount of time because the SME has to give me their time, and I never get all the information that I need in one shot since there are a lot of business and technical exceptions that I have to cater to. I have to be quite inquisitive in asking in the process, then the process gaps and the exceptions. I have to make a map, follow up with a sign off, then get it close.

A medium level complexity project can take 25 man days and a complex process could take a least a month and a half.

If I am deploying eight to ten processes in a span of six months, I need maximum three developers. If I'm developing out 50 bots in six months, then I need 20 developers.

Once the bots are deployed, I need a support team which works in three shifts. My support team would consist of a solution architect and three developers spread across three shifts. The monitoring team would consist of a solution architect and one or two IT support people. This is for a large scale bot development. If it is a smaller scale deployment, a smaller support team is needed for monitoring.

We have saved customers 400% in terms of time saved by implementing this product.

We implemented automation in an HR domain. We had 60 percent reduced error rates, 25 percent freed working hours, and the response time from the HR department was faster than before. We automated candidate screening, payroll automation and expense management. In finance and accounting, they had a reduction in 70 percent error rates, 35 percent working hours were freed, and there was improved satisfaction for the internal customers after the automation implementation. Finally, in IT, there was 90 percent is the reduced error rate, because in IT everything is binary.

The pricing and licensing of Automation Anywhere plays an important rule in the Indian market because in the Indian market $10,000 USD is too much. Hence, the pricing tends to go down depending on the customer relationship with the partner: A starter pack is $10,000 and an enterprise pack is $100,000. If you go through an implementation partner, you can get good deals. They can save some money. 

An annual contract is really beneficial for support.

I have been working in RPA for almost two to three years now. We started off with Softomotive. Then, we began working with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

We have (or are currently working on) PoCs with WinAutomation, WorkFusion and Blue Prism.

The biggest difference between Automation Anywhere and their competitors are the spread that they have. You don't need to look out for testimonials on why to use Automation Anywhere. There are big giants who are already using it. The feature list that they carry with them makes them stand out. Their industry first bot, IQ Bot (a cognitive bot), has already won an award for the best technology deployed in 2018. It goes in and extracts data from invoices and applies machine learning if the data is not set to the right columns, putting it back to the right columns, then goes ahead and extracts data from purchase invoices. 

It's the best product that we have at this moment.

Start small. Don't take big steps if you are automating.