Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case for bringing in Automation Anywhere was to make sure that we take away the work which our resources don't want to do, they don't like to do, or they find that there is something more meaningful and useful they can use their time for. That was our primary factor. 

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode bots, because we don't need to go and look at what they're doing. They just go by themselves. That's the state we need to get to, but we are currently attended. Based on the projects or PoCs that we have done, we've got a last transmission program coming in, which is exciting.

The bot insides should come in the same package versus having it as a different bundle by itself. If we could have this product come with all the inside solutions altogether, that would help.

I was talking the other day in a session that when we go into this, how do we ensure that the right security policies are in place? Because now, we are talking about people accessing these bots from anywhere outside of the restricted access zone. So, that is where we should put focus on, because it takes only somebody to snatch the phone and start breaching. Therefore, that is where we should put the focus on.

We started off with the 10.5 version, where we didn't find any major hiccups. Then, we upgraded to version 11.3, which we find more useful. I think version 11.3 is the way to go.

As with every solution or a product, it goes through that journey. I think the RPA for Automation Anywhere is going through that journey. I can see the stability improvements from 10.3 to 10.5 to 11.3. From this conference, I could see the end-to-end governance coming into play. So, stability-wise, they are getting there. I'm not saying that it's fully stabilized. But, it's working for us, and the path is on the right track.

We started off with this showcase piece. Now, we are going into details regarding how we can scale. Can we scale it horizontally? Can we just start putting VMs on it? So, these are the factors that we are assessing right now, but we feel that it is scalable.

We wanted to be able to kick-start this journey, so we brought in an automation team, as this is where the whole industry is moving with our clients. From here, we will have success stories year after year.

We did not use a previous solution. We were trying to shop around and see what was best for us. Automation Anywhere was always promising and the use cases that we saw were interesting. So, we said, "We'll start with that." It works well so far.

The initial setup wasn't complex, but it wasn't straightforward. It was somewhere in the middle.

We didn't go Big Bang on thinking how much money that we were going to save. I wanted to make sure that could we show improvements in the efficiency, in terms of headcount. Ultimately, it comes boiled down to cost, but then if I can get one headcount reduced from the team, and be able to utilize that to somebody else, that would be a winning situation for my client and me.

We measure the ROI through FTE. Of course, there is a dollar value associated with it.

We have started to see the ROI. We are starting to see the following:

• Activities in which resources in my team would have taken four to five hours are now done in 30 minutes. 
• Some of the weekend monitoring
• Some of the weekend missing report generations
• Monday monitoring of a heavy load system. 

These are things that we are already starting to see where the time taken to do a task has been drastically reduced. So, we are seeing the performance improvement as a result.

I have nothing specific regarding the Automation Anywhere University. But, we have taken some of the online courses available and done a few sessions, which has been a wonderful deal.

I am putting it somewhere between a seven and eight (out of ten). That is what I'll rate it, because as I said, the stability and governance are on that path. As we get there, I'm sure it'll make it to a ten. So far. the journey is on the right track.

For somebody searching for a solution, it primarily concerns the use case. But if this is what they are looking for, I will definitely advise.

We are an IT services firm. We use it for simple processes, but also for complex. We usually take up simple processes for manual tasks, which are easy to automate.

We have mostly done financial services: finance and accounting processes. That has been for the most part. We have also used it in HR and recruitment to find resumes online, and in other processes.

Its ease of deployment is the most valuable feature. We have found with many customers that it's quite easy to deploy. The other valuable feature, which is not from a technology perspective, is how Automation Anywhere collaborates with us. So, it has made our journey much easier than with other partners that we have.

Room for improvement is more on the IQ Bot side: How quickly we can adopt and deploy it? 

Another area which I feel would help is how the business can adopt it:

• Is it easier for the business to make changes to the tool once it's deployed? 
• How can the business take up roles in the man-machine continuum? 
• How can the business and machine work together, and how does the role change for the business stakeholder. 

It's more on the change management side, but includes all of the tool enabler.

It has been quite good in terms of making changes. As we are working on the process, it's much easier to make changes.

In terms of scaling up, we have not had issues with bots which are in production. In UAT, there have been scaling issues. But in production, as long as a solution is good, then it works.

It was a strategy from our company. We were looking to reduce the cost of operations for our existing clients. We were looking at different ways in which we could reduce our business, in a way, by reducing costs and get more business from the same clients. So this is where we started, by looking at automation as a major thing for Hexaware itself. It starts from our visions, which aligns very well with what Automation Anywhere provides, as a platform. That is where we started, then we have obviously grown and been able to automate many processes, which helped us to get many deals where we are upfront and able to tell clients how much optimization is possible. This is sort of my role, to showcase to the clients how much automation is feasible, in a particular process. We are quite good at that and have been able to do multiple engagements in this space.

We have automated one process, which was running with 109 people. We reduced it down to 69 with automation.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and World Fusion, and we struggled. Initially, we worked with other firms, but we have seen a great synergy with how Automation Anywhere integrates with our team and how we are getting support from Automation Anywhere. When we are going to a client with Automation Anywhere, it's much easier. That collaboration with their support team, and their advice to us, is extremely good. That's why we end up referring Automation Anywhere.

I would like to use IQ Bot a little bit more and understand more about what is offered, as to what features are there. One of the key challenges that we have had, in implementation, is for complex processes, especially where the input is not standardized. So, IQ Bot seems to be a good tool to use there. Hopefully, it will address everything, but mostly on that.

I would rate the product around eight to eight and a half. Mainly, because there is always room for improvement, and we're happy with the tool. There are areas which we need to understand more, as well, like IQ Bot for instance. We did one engagement with IQ Bot, but we need to mature ourselves into how we can utilize it. As the product matures, I'm sure it will be easier for us.

My advice will be to get a partner who is wiling to work with you and is willing to collaborate. This will make your life easier in the automation journey. There will be initial hiccups when you are getting into this journey, and that's just part of any journey. You need to look internally as to how you can improve, and work with a strong team, to deploy the solution.

The primary use case is hard to say. We have used it in a number of different areas in our company. We've used it for HR, IT, and our business partners on the front lines using the application. Therefore, our primary use case is hard to say, but basically what we try to do is automate the drudgery out of our business partners' lives.

We have automated some of our HR applications, where there are certain courses. Because we're in a financial industry, we have to maintain certain certifications, etc. Some of that is automated where we help generate reports back to HR. In some cases, there are some very front-end, which are CSRs. We have processes automated for them so they have a less manual work effort. 

We have worked with our compliance area. Some of the things that we have automated there, because we are a financial industry, are political contributions where we have to be very careful. There are a pay-to-play laws in the US, so we've actually automated, which were very difficult because you had to go to all 50 states to download all the information. Trying to do it manually was probably over 8000 hours a year, and now, we're doing it with automation.

What is important to us is continues improvement and learning. We want everyone to be able to look at what they do with a critical eye towards how can improve and get things better? By introducing the solution and working closely with our business partners every time, we create a bot, then their mindset shifts. 

Now, they are looking at everything else they do, and saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe I can do this in a different way." Whether it's using a bot, some other solution, or sometimes even just improving the process as it is without automation, the company in different parts of organization is really starting to adopt the idea of continuous learning.

Probably ease of use has been its most valuable feature. It's been very easy for us to use. We like to operate in a sort of a federated model. So, when we originally started, it was just our vendor partners who were doing the development. Now, we have our own set of core developers at my company. Since 2017, we now have about 23 different people, most of whom are certified developers, a lot of them didn't have a developer background when we started.

With the user interface, a lot of the parts of it I really like, but there are some things that could be made a little simpler. A little less clicking around here and dragging over there to use.

My impressions of the Bot Store are I really love the idea of it. We've actually downloaded a couple of them and used them. One of the more recent ones was interesting. It required a license key, which kind of confused us. If it's freeware, why do you need a license key? But we got around it.

What has also been nice, with the most recent bot from the Bot Store that we downloaded, it was developed by a vendor partner who we are partners with as well. So, when we had some issues with it, we were just put in contact with the developer at that same firm, then we were able to work through any issues. Subsequently, they have made updates to it and uploaded it back to the Bot Store, so it's actually great.

The stability is pretty good. In all fairness, I know we went from version 10.5, where we thought we were fairly stable, and we did have some issues. Then, we migrated to version 11.2 and encountered some other stability issues around scheduling things. But, after talking with some Automation Anywhere techs who were extremely helpful, we have recently, as of last week, upgraded to version 11.3.2.1, and that seems to have solved some of our problems.

We are still testing it. I still need to do some checkups. Obviously, I'm here this week, so I'm not doing it right now. Generally speaking, it is stable. Knowing what it's trying to do, I think 100 percent stability with everybody will be different. Architecture and environment are going to be pretty difficult, but they do a good job.

The scalability is easy. Installing license keys, bringing up new Bot Runners, and all that stuff from the Automation Anywhere side of it are easy. It's very easy. I've had little-to-no difficulty doing any of that. I have to go through the paperwork of hardware, VDIs, etc, and that's all on our side. But, from an Automation Anywhere standpoint, it's been very quick and easy to scale.

The technical support, from my experience, has been very good. Granted, sometimes there has been a little slowness, but if I deemed it critical, or whatever, then I've had conversations with our customer service manager, or anyone, and they've been able to get me with somebody in architect, which has been phenomenal.

When we did the upgrade to version 11.2, it was sort of complicated, because we had to start all over. We had to bring in new hardware and a new set of new databases, but the gentleman who helped me out was great. He fully documented the process for us, which was awesome, because I didn't have that from the original installs of version 10.5. Because he documented it, I was able to go through the upgrade from versions 11.2 to 11.3 very simply and fast. I would say the technical support is very good.

Why did we want to invest in an RPA solution? This was our first solution, so we weren't with someone else first. We did do some evaluation, looking at how and what we wanted to do with bots. Did we want to just use it purely on the back-end? Did we want to use it on the front-end? 

Some of the leaders at the time in the strategy and innovation team at our company just saw the need for it. We knew there was a lot of manual redundant processes that were just right for automation, so we said, "Hey, let's bring it on." The PoC sort of proved the concept, then we just brought it in-house and kept going from there.

The initial setup was somewhere right in the middle. It wasn't super simple. We could've probably done things a little better than we did, but it also wasn't horribly complex.

We used an integrator and reseller for the deployment, originally. We worked with HCL Technologies, but we found some gaps in our knowledge because of this. We didn't fully understand the architecture and how it was built. 

During all the process of the installs, we didn't get all the documentation. This made some things a little difficult for us, especially when we ended up parting ways with HCL. 

Then, we signed with a different vendor for both development and reselling, OPTIMIX. So, going through with the Automation Anywhere architects and getting it installed was great.

One of the first steps that we do before automating anything is we determine if it is a process where there is enough ROI involved to dedicate development resources or a bot to? Sometimes, in all honesty, the use case is we want to learn something, so we do it anyway. But, generally, we do a time and motion study, so we understand how much time we are saving somebody. We measure that. Additionally, we measure cost. That varies depending on the department that we're doing the automation for. But, we can measure that, and usually that is a straight hourly rate times the time saved.

Cost avoidance is something that we do, too. In other words, there was a process that we automated where a department was considering hiring someone just to do some file transfers and copies, etc. We automated that process, and they just didn't have to hire somebody.

It definitely saves us a lot of time and money.

It looks like it will be right around $115,000, not counting IQ Bot, which we won't renew until later.

We looked at Blue Prism and UiPath, but we felt that Automation Anywhere was a good mix of both the front-end and back-end, whereas UiPath seems very front-end only and Blue Prism is very back end only. We needed a mix for what we wanted to do.

We don't use it as attended as much. We have had a few cases where we were going to use attended, then just decided that for the rarity of those types of uses that we didn't want to have a Bot Runner just sitting and waiting for someone to chime in five times a day. Instead, we've created more scheduled. Right now, all of our bots are running unattended.

It's really easy to use. Again, going back to something that I mentioned earlier, we have a number of people at our firm who are now certified RPA developers that had no development background. They did that just by the online training in some cases. In some cases, it was the online training, as well as a three day class that we brought in-house and had taught. However, the only part where you want to get experience and learning are around error handling.

I've been in software for a long time. I've never seen a perfect piece of software, yet. I've seen some that are very good. With everything this is trying to do and the complexities of the environment, I'm going to give it an eight (out of ten) because it's very good. I think me giving something an eight is pretty high in this space.

Our primary use case is anything that is structured data and highly repetitive. We also see a lot of gain right now in paperwork, so AR, AP, and record to report. The cognitive product seems to be doing a really good job, and the pace of that going fantastic.

We have done a little bit of everything: 

• Oracle
• Salesforce.com
• Using Citrix, we did an order to cash.
• In the IQ Bot world, we seem to be doing a lot of AR and invoice-to-pay (those are the two that we see the most). 

We will be moving into medical billing next. Since we have done some really good prototypes with medical records, I think we are ready to go there next. 

One of the largest use cases that we have about a $10 billion company which does something like 20 thousand AR invoices a month. They had a solution in place. We actual replaced that IQ Bot, and we are hosting it out of San Jose right now. We are getting some phenomenal straight through processing. So, we took what would have taken 30 to 35 people and are able to do that little bit more accurately with about six.

Believe it or not, the first client that we ever did was a Citrix client. We cut our teeth on Citrix around the RPA product. It has some quirks to it, but it is becoming much better. So, we have quite a few instances of that Citrix machine in production at the client. 

The most valuable feature of our solution is the cognitive computing because that is coming onto stream a lot faster than you would think. What used to be in the middle of, "Can this be done or not?", is becoming, "It can be done." We are getting some incredible straight through processing rates with AR around healthcare and financial services. 

Integrating RPA and cognitive with other solutions is relatively straightforward. Originally, it came out that Automation Anywhere did screen scraping, but the technology is way beyond that now, where you can do object cloning, even moving into API. We have even coded a couple of APIs into the applications that most people will use. We actually do that now instead of going through a screen. 

Our impressions of IQ Bot are that it goes relatively fast at the pace that it is being advanced every six months, which is good. I believe that we have a couple of the largest installations of it in the U.S. right now. So, we are processing somewhere in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of AP and AR invoices. We actually have robotic operation centers on the West Coast and the East Coast. 

The IQ Bot has room for improvement. It is not that it doesn't do a lot of things today, it is just that it can do so much more. I think that that product is going to go crazy.

The next big thing that you are going to see is the analytics engine. I think people finally realize that you can do analytics on what the bots are doing. I think that you will see that come alive in the next six to nine months.

If you write them correctly and have good architectures internally, then scalability is relatively straightforward. This also applies to reliability. However, you sort of need to write a few before you get to this point. As more of these go to production, these are going to be the two big drivers.

Probably one of the faster scales that we have done is we did a prototype with IQ Bot that had about 500 invoices and a 1000 vendors. In about two and a half to three months time, start to finish, we went from the original amount to 15,000 invoices and 2500 vendors. I would suggest in that 90 to 120 day time frame, if you have done things properly and your architecture is good, that you should be able to scale at any pace that you care to.

We have seen both straightforward and complex initial setups. If you are behind a firewall, it is relatively easy to setup. When you are hosting the application, that is when it is a little more complicated (we actually host applications for people). You need to talk to the IT department, as you are actually outside of their firewall, then you are coming back inside their cloud. 

Depending on the architecture, it can be relatively straightforward, and it can be put up in just a day or two. Whereas, if you are hosting it and coming back in, it is a little more complicated.

What we did was we took the Automation Anywhere ROI calculations and added quite a few things to it. We actually ask 15 to 18 questions around process time, number of systems used, how people, and how many hours. Ultimately, we can stack rank those ROIs on a process, then we typically try to start with the largest ROIs first. So far, with what we have done, we have seen has been relatively close (as it is almost impossible to hit the ROI exactly), but the ROI on the product is good.   

No one is balking at the cost. They are market rates and will change, but no one is saying, "That is ridiculous or impossible." They are saying, "Show me the ROI and prove that the cost is accurate."

One of the things that will be good for the community will be to get the free version to download, which came out just a month ago called Community Edition. So, you can actually download it and try it for yourself. 

Ease of use is something that you need to get trained on. Once you have gone through the proper training, it is relatively straightforward to use. There is quite a bit of online training on their website, as well as in the Community Edition. After 30 to 40 hours with it, you should be pretty good with it.

One of the promises that we made to Automation Anywhere when we started was that everyone in our company would be trained and certified. Even as a Board Member, I am certified. 

Bot creation is relatively straightforward. Probably within 20 hours, you should be pretty good at it. There are some nuances around it though that I think separate first time developers versus seasoned developers. What you will see in the marketplace is how easy it is to develop one compared to how easy it is to develop one that runs in production 99.9 percent of the time.

Across the board, I would give it a nine out of ten. There are some areas that they can move up into, but they are working on it right now. I am assuming that everybody is working on it, so we will stay in that nine range.

Go do your homework. Call some of the larger clients because they seem to face the largest problems. Automation Anywhere has five to ten gigantic accounts that you can just talk to. Ultimately, I would just be careful in the way that you implement it. It is like any tool, if you know what you are doing, "Great," and if not, then you can make a mess. Therefore, be careful and know what you are doing.

We use it for backoffice processes. We are part of a shared service, so we do billing, credit, collections, and those types of processes.

We have done close to 50 projects in the last three years. AA improves our speed as far as moving files goes. It also helps in getting people prepared to work on a daily basis. We have a lot of jobs that run at night so that when people come in in the morning, everything's ready to go for them.

For example, we have two very separate systems which need to talk to each other. It sounds very simple, but we have a job that takes a file from one system and loads it into another. But it has to do that close to 1,500 times in the middle of the night. It's a job that used to be done manually by 150 people in 150 different markets. Now, it's something that's done during the night, and when they come in it's all completed. So it was a very simple task, but there was a lot of volume. It has saved everybody a lot of time and it has saved a huge amount of manpower. It saves us thousands of hours a month.

It's also very useful as far as interacting with employees. Employees can kick off jobs on an as-needed basis rather than scheduling them. It's always very helpful to have a tool that's interactive with the employees.

One of the most valuable features is object cloning, the ability to get into websites and do things faster.

I also like its usability. It's pretty easy to learn, pretty quick to get things taken care of with it. Our average developer is up within 30 days. We have our own training program. We don't use anything from AA for training. We've been doing it long enough that we created our own.

In addition, the user interface is easy to use. It's fairly user-friendly when you don't know anything about it and open it up for the first time.

The scheduling is a little difficult at times. Rather than setting up individual instances, it would be really nice if we had the ability to set repetitive jobs easily. Right now, if you want a job to run every 15 minutes, you have to schedule it a lot of times. I'd rather have the ability to just say 'run every 15 minutes.'

There could be some improvements made in the Control Room. I really like the concept of the application that they've got, so you can now access the Control Room from a mobile device, but there's only a lot of potential, there's not a lot of functionality there yet. That would be a great place for it to be able to expand, so you could have full functionality of the Control Room through a mobile device.

And in general, I would like to the solution to get into more machine-learning/AI. I know that the IQ Bots are looking to go there, but there's definitely a lot more potential there as well.

We haven't had any problems with the actual application going down. We really haven't had any issues. We have issues with third-party products going up and down, but we've never had AA just stop.

We're a small user, so we haven't had any problem with scalability. We've talked to a lot of people who have used it on a much larger scale. For us, it's very easy to add TaskBots. We're more than satisfied with the scalability.

We're always looking for expansion of the solution within our company. We use most of the commands available. There are very few that aren't applicable to what we're doing. We're always trying to get the solution into other departments within the organization itself. We use it a lot within the shared services, the area which we own. But outside of the company, we have several projects that are not within the shared service and we're always looking to talk to the other departments and get them involved.

We have 25 bots, meaning 25 licenses. Our core team that does development has four people plus a project manager.

Tech support has greatly improved. Three years ago we didn't necessarily have the best experience, but over the years they've gotten better.

As a side note, we go through a third-party first, through ISG. That's through how our service model works. Then ISG gets AA involved if they can't answer the question. We don't necessarily directly contact AA. Most of it's through the third-party provider, and then AA eventually.

ISG is great. We really haven't had a lot of problems. When we implemented version 11.3, we went so quickly - we went with it right when it came out - that there were a few questions that ISG wasn't aware of yet because it was so new. We went to AA through ISG and they were able to answer the questions right away. But for the most part, ISG is very on top of it, and we don't need to engage AA.

This is our first go in the RPA world. We had an internal resource, somebody within the company who had seen Automation Anywhere used in other companies. That person introduced us to the concept and, from there, we did some research and saw that that's where the market was going.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I did it myself and I'm not an IT guy, so it wasn't super-difficult. It took me a couple of hours, including configuration. Our IT team set up the actual virtual machines themselves, but the installation was done completely by me.

Our implementation strategy was that we started super-small. At that time, we started with five bots and the Control Room. It wasn't overly difficult. I just followed the documentation provided to install the service and configure everything.

Our initial project had to have an ROI, and that's why we started small. We have never not had a yearly ROI. We've always greatly exceeded the cost of, or the investment in, the tool. In terms of how much it's saving us, I don't want to be quoted on the exact amount, but it's more than millions of dollars a year.

We purchased AA through ISG and have done both annual renewals and a multi-year renewal, the latter recently. It has been very easy to add bots on an as-needed basis.

There are no additional costs from Automation Anywhere, but there is obviously the infrastructure costs for the VMs.

We definitely evaluated lots of different options at the time. Of course, it came down to Blue Prism or to AA. We went with AA because of the feature set, the way that the development was laid out. And support was also a factor. We were much more interested in States-side support.

Any company in today's environment would be foolish not to implement RPA. There are definitely different types of use cases where you could spread it out amongst the organizations and let them do their own thing. We have chosen to keep it centralized and have been pretty successful in doing it. But everybody should be using an RPA in some capacity.

I would absolutely recommend specifically Automation Anywhere.

Our experience with the solution has been a ten out of ten. I can't speak to the other tools because we haven't used them, but we're very satisfied with what we have.

We mainly use the bot to make our operation more efficient, save the effort of human beings, and reduce the overall cost to the organization.

Automation Anywhere has improved our organization by allowing us to reduce the number of new hires, enable us to keep the same workforce, and increase productivity.

The product is very precise, and very efficient. We run bots almost five days a week. We just tell the bot what they have to do and it is always accurate and precise, no issues.

I believe version 11 is much better than the previous version we were using.

They should make the product smarter. The bot we use right now is kind of fundamentally basic loop-based. We really want to see a little bit more advanced capability, that way we can undertake more comprehensive tasks.

The scalability, I think will be feasible, but so far we don't have any plans to increase the bots to the large scale of the operation.

So far, the bots run very stable and have little problems, we see the bots becoming more stable every day.

We can define certain procedure we already know, but we continue develop more user cases, which bring from the other end users.

I cannot say how much exactly we have made regarding ROI, but we can see the saving down the road.

We have a few licenses. They cost roughly $10,000 each.

I think understanding the product is very important. People have to understand what the bot can do before they implement one in their environment. That is very important.

We have Automation Anywhere version 11. We put all the bots on the virtual machine. We run continuously every week.

When it comes to attended automation, we try to introduce more use cases and let more people understand what the bot can do, and expand the capacity of the bot, so it can serve our organization.

We have many solutions, like Data Rebate, for example. We need to compare this information, regardless of the information that we save in the Experian databases, against information in government websites, in order to ensure that everything is up to date. The information of the company address, for example, took around 47 minutes to compare, while using RPA it now takes around 10 minutes for each one.

Automation Anywhere has improved our company a lot, because we are currently trying to leverage automation in different departments to allow employees to work where more human intervention is needed. The SLA of some tasks that we need to deliver to some clients has improved greatly. The productivity has increased a lot in my organization.

Interaction with websites is the feature most valuable to us. Most of the systems are web-based, so using a very accurate web-based identification like objects, extracting information from tables inside websites, and checking websites differences using MetaBots is very helpful with Internet Explorer. This allows us to separate the functionality by using an object where we store all the assets, or screenshots of the webpages, instead of changing the logic of a website. It's very useful.

Ease of use of this solution depends on how complete you want to go. From my perspective as a system engineer, the curve was very, very low because you have a lot of understanding about technology. On the other hand, we have examples of people that the curve was a little bit high, but coaching them to improve their knowledge about Automation Anywhere and how friendly the interface is right now is very useful.

MetaBots and Control Room may have some room for improvement.

The bot store has a large amount of pre-designed bots. I made some tests related to language, browser scene, and image recognition. It was very nice.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as seven out of ten. There are a lot of things that need to be improved, especially related to the Control Room, but you can develop and scale with this tool very, very fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stability has improved a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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