Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are a biotech company. We make medicines to cure cancers. 

We use Automation Anywhere for intelligence automation or robotic process automation. So, we use it finance, accounting, and supply chain. We are actual using it across multiple functions in the company.

We have automated a number of processes in accounting and finance: month-end close, eliminating profits, reconciliation, some in HR, some in operations, inventory to sell, and various other finance and account processes.

The most valuable feature for Automation Anywhere is that it enables developers to build bots and feel like they can contribute.

I love the Bot Store. I encourage a lot of my staff to use it, because it changes the game and the time that it takes to build automation. It has a lot of reusable things that you can use off the bat.

My impressions of the front office attended automation are that it really changes the game from automation which doesn't have high value. It can actually help people organically build automation. It helps change the game for more wide spread use.

I would like to see a lot around API integration going forward, like the ability for other systems to talk to the AI better by opening it up. I would like to see more chatbots or anything in the journey of making it truly immersive for human workers working with these bots.

There are a couple things that have room for improvement: Its openness and more APIs should be exposed to allow people to integrate. How do you make it easier to integrate back with this technology?

I would like it to do more predict, which means if I have a thousand bots in product, how do I check which of the bots may be at risk of failing? This would really help in supporting the bots when scaling the programs.

The more later versions that you implement, the better that they get. Any enterprise software has its gaps, but it is how quickly it is being addressed. In the latest versions, it has become much better compared to what was there in the past. 

We have them implemented in a cloud-based environment. Cloud by itself allows you to scale. As long as the software works there, it allows you to really scale.

To scale from pilots to the current number of bots that we are using, it took three to six months. That was the time frame. We started pilots on some functions, and learning from our pilots was key.

There is definitely some room for improvement there. It is sort of a hit and miss with their support engineers, you have some really good ones and some that aren't. Consistency is the key. There is room to get consistent. I am giving them the feedback, because as you get more customers, support becomes the linchpin where you can either drive a customer away or get them to use the product more.

For the last year, we were really focused around using it for the right purposes and processes. We have had fragmented solutions, then we decided to pick one player. We already had the tool (Automation Anywhere). It was more about doubling down on our investment on one product, then really getting good at using it. 

We have had the solution for a long time. As you go to cloud-based solutions, there are some nuances, which is less about the initial setup and more about when you have a version that you need to migrate or update. This is an area where we have faced some hiccups, but we were able to get around them.

We used a combination of an integrator and consultant for the deployment. We have used many different companies who are premium partners with Automation Anywhere, and we are also focused on building a COE internally, so we can do some of it ourselves. 

We measure ROI by a number of factors: 

• Hard savings from cost dollars
• Looking at the NPV over number of years.
• Labor
• What control or compliance things that we could be saving.
• Productivity
• Employee satisfaction. 

Roughly, as of today, it is around $250,000 annually.

We had literally everything under the sun, like WorkFusion and UiPath. It was more about focusing on Automation Anywhere, and only if we hit a roadblock that the solution could not solve, then we should look at the other tools.

I would say that they are a nine out of ten. Because if they are a ten, then they sit back and relax. To get a ten, there are some small tweaks to be done. I think the company is going in the right direction. It just needs more focused attention in certain small gaps, then they will get there.

The ease of use is its key novel feature. It is much better than earlier versions. I have actually trained people in finance who have not written a piece of code in their lives. They are able to pick it up. There is a learning curve, some it takes them some time, but it is definitely easy for them to use. I have a couple of folks who have not done automation before, and now they are able to go back to their jobs where we used to build automation for functions. They can now understand what we built for them and actually contribute to a certain extent for it.

Get started with the tool. Think of the structure because using the technology is not the problem, it is more on the governance and how to use it. How can you maximize your benefits that you are receiving? It is about getting your hands dirty and trying it on small PoCs. That is how we started; we started on small PoCs. That's the key.

Cost savings.

Cost savings to the client and business transformation makes life easy. 

We have the Bot Store, and also we have contributed a lot of things into Bot Store. We have about 40 different bots in your Bot Store.

I think that one of the coolest features that what Automation Anywhere has come up with is AI Sense. I see an immense potential there. Using AI Sense, we can automate outside Citrix. That's going to remove the client dependency or overall automation journey, and that can give lot of optimization, cost saving, and the time to market.

Improvement areas will be there for everybody. I think one area which I would like to see improvement is in IQ Bot. Maybe it has improved a lot in version 11 X but I think that that's one area which definitely scope to improve.

Thumbs up both sides. Stability and scalability. I think these are the least spoken things with Automation Anywhere. It's been in the market for long and they have been proving this right from the start.

It's straightforward, easy going. Anybody can start that. Only thing is that the people should have common sense.

The first one is the FT savings. That's directly proportional to the cost, what client is going to spend. The second thing is, once again, time to market or the optimization and process delivery.

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.

People are now trying to automate many different kinds of technology. They have use cases related to ARP, invoicing, and three-way matching, for example.

We are seeing an incremental need for legacy systems which do not have an architecture in place or API integrations. Our customers are doing things like simple website scraping, bringing the data into Excel, taking that data and then putting it into their legacy systems. We are seeing customers that read a lot of invoices.

Our customers have been using Automation Anywhere for a lot of integration purposes. They've been using it not only for process integration but for application integration as well.

Using Automation Anywhere, we are able to reduce human functions. We aren't exactly replacing the human, but efficiently increasing the productivity of that particular human by collecting and entering the data into a CCD system like contract systems.

I think there are quite a few new features which have been introduced, but right now we've been using a lot of object cloning and screen scraping. Those are some of the primary features, but we've been able to use other features very wisely as well. These include inbuilt email functionality, some integrations to incorporate heterogeneous systems like Python scripting, and also other things.

Compared to the rest of the industry, this product is easy to use, not only from the technology perspective but from the business user side as well. We have been very successful, in that we haven't seen a situation where we trained a particular set of users or customers, and they complained that they are not able to use it.

Some of the other products in this industry have not been able to succeed because of this issue. Although they are really great, they are too focused on technology and IT, rather than business focused.

Cloud was one of the features we wanted to see because it makes it much easier. The second feature is ease of use in terms of agnostic, which was released in the next few quarters. A lot of customers had been asking about the operating system agnostic, so today it runs mostly on Windows and I believe agnostic is also coming.

There are a few features that we would love to have: running on the cloud, running on Linux, out of the box integration availability with larger ecosystems like Salesforce, Workday, or Microsoft. If somebody is using an AWS shop it should be much easier for them to use this. So there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of infrastructure, provisioning, cloud usability, and ease of use.

This product has pretty scalable so far. The number of customers is growing year over year. People are deploying hundreds of thousands of bots. We haven't hit any scalability issue at this point in time.

I come from an investment background, so when we were doing a SWOT analysis of which product to go with we looked at a couple of free products. We looked at UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. We found that Automation Anywhere was the easiest to use. Their offer was much more appealing compared to the other products, so that's why we ended up choosing them.

We analyze ROI with what we call 3D or 3V. We look at the value proposition in three ways. First is, of course, the direct cost savings in terms of how many manual labor hours we are saving. The second thing is indirect, such as productive improvisation of the bot, and the third thing is the overall efficiency of the system. Today, when people do the ROI calculation, they just focus on a particular process. In the case of a supplier, if the requisition creation was taking a week, the rest of the processes were getting delayed.

The ecosystem processes what automatically improvises well even though RP did not even touch it. So those are some of the things what we try to bring into the picture when we do the ROI calculation other than the direct cost.

One way to measure ROI is based on how much customers are spending. Most of the customers start with the smaller licensing pack and they are increasing their investment in terms of the licensing and services every year. Some customers start with about $10,000 and end up spending about $300,000 just on the licensing over a two years period. That speaks for itself.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as seven and a half or eight out of ten. It's not because the product doesn't serve the purpose, but every product has a lot of room for improvement. Hopefully, we'll get it to a nine out of ten by next year.

We are usually asked by clients to introduce the topic of RPA and bring it to life for them. We explore what the value proposition of adopting a new technology is for them. We typically enter the discussion with an agnostic view of tools, help them understand what the differences are between tools and capabilities, and then synthesize a business case for adoption of those tools.

The perfect example that I have is where we're able to address an audit finding for a client. They had a situation where they had to show a tangible and very scalable solution to an internal audit as part of a finding that they had in the payroll area. In that situation, we created a database for them that worked alongside Automation Anywhere to conduct the validation and checks that were required to appease and provide comfort to the internal audit, while accomplishing savings in the form of error omissions.

We automated processes within: finance, accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoicing, validation, HR, payroll, onboarding, candidate screening, and IT from a provisioning perspective.

The value of RPA in general is the ability to actually emulate human behavior and transactions. The value of Automation Anywhere, specifically, lies in the ease of use that it has as a platform and the ability of individuals to learn relatively fast. There is a very accelerated learning curve on the platform.

The IQ Bot is a tremendous product. The more we can make the IQ Bot intuitive, as an application, and start connecting it to real-life examples, the more value it's going to bring to clients.

The human training area is still something that needs to be improved. It's not so much the actual technology learning, but rather how you bring this to life with all the peripheral competencies that are needed for it. Incorporating some of the Lean Six Sigma type of principles into the process optimization, as well as the change management, would make it a much more comprehensive solution than what it is today.

I think the tool has come a long way. We've had situations where it wasn't working well with Java in the past, then Citrix environments, etc. Every new release is better than the last one. They are listening to the customers and they definitely integrate the solutions to their product very fast.

I think it's a very scalable application as well, but I think the scalability is not just tied to the technology itself, it's also the organizational appetite to go fast and go the right way forward. The huge component of that is talent, and I think Automation Anywhere, with the internal consultants that they make available to clients on occasion, does accelerate the adoption.

From a pilot to scale, I would say the couple of clients that I've actually worked with took about six months to one year to get to what we would consider a repurchase point, but I wouldn't necessarily call that scale. The model that we bring forward to clients, at least in the past, was one where we actually teach them how to fish versus fishing for them, so we're not necessarily there to see them all the way through scale. We're there to see them through stability.

I think the technical support team is very responsive. This is probably one of the differentiators that Automation Anywhere has in comparison to some of their peers.

I had other platforms that we did the proof of concepts for, but they didn't go anywhere. I think part of the reason why they didn't go anywhere is because they were not scalable.

The initial setup, at times, has been a little undefined, in terms of requirements, just because people don't know the process, nor what they're going to need, as a result of putting something into production. On the other hand, I think those were growing pains that we experienced probably two or three years ago less than we experience today.

ROI is often associated with FTE, or full-time employees, but we are now increasingly finding that we could acheive ROI in different ways, not just as cost elimination. It could be cost avoidance or revenue acceleration. The ROI actually differs by use case, but in most situations, we're able to accomplish sufficient ROI to justify scaling the solution.

On average, the return that I've seen is about three dollars for every dollar spent on RPA.

Time-wise, I would say you're still bound to the pace of the systems that you are applying RPA to, so you're not getting an acceleration to the systems themselves, but you do get the ability to process transactions in those systems faster, because a bot tends to transact things a little faster than we do.

I've seen the price vary by opportunity cost, in essence, for Automation Anywhere. If they think that the client is going to scale and adopt a tool, the price could change. There is variability based on how quickly and how substantially you want to invest in it.

I think the Bot Store is actually growing. It's still in development. It's an idea in development in my mind. I think there is definitely repurpose-ability of bots that are being made available in the store, but it's not by any means, in my mind at least, something that you would actually take and put into production without making it specific to your organization and use case.

Regarding front office automation, I haven't actually been part of those discussions, but I know, as an organization, we definitely assist with front office automation. I would say the principles that dictate what you do in front office govern the ideas and how we bring this to life in the middle as well as the back office for us.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as nine out of ten.

My advice is not to lead with the tool selection. Lead with the process optimization and then understand fully what the tools actually have as an offering, and make sure that the way that the tool is deploying its learning is aligned to your organizational capabilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our journey starts from discovering and understanding what process to automate. That's where our deep domain and process expertise come into the picture. We leverage process mining technologies over there, partnerships with Celonis and TimelinePI. We take advantage of that. The journey continues from there to designing and developing automations. Automation Anywhere is the RPA platform we use for creating the bots in automation and along with that we also use many of the technologies including AI and ML. 

Toward this life cycle, we have a very structured approach of governing, monitoring, and tracking. Insights we gain from this governance, we apply towards automation strategy and implementations. We've done this for many clients across the globe. We are happy to share those experiences with some of you as well.

The focus on usability and user experience is bang on. Addressing several personas and making it easy for every persona to adopt and embrace is the spot on focus. That's an area that has a lot more room to improve. In the absence of that, the skills and expertise in the industry are going to struggle and if you need broader adoption, which has maximum potential, the persona-based user experience is a focus and I'd say Automation Anywhere is already working on.

In terms of onboarding, we step back and think about how to leverage this technology. We have created some IP around this and leverage our deep learnings from several implementations. We apply the process and domain expertise and determine which process needs to be automated by leveraging what technology and what ROI will you get out of it.

We leverage the process insights technology, we bring that to the table, we understand what processes need to be automated and we apply the relevant technologies. Automation Anywhere is one of the many we apply in transforming across automating the entire process end to end.

Number one thing when you're trying to automate, you need to start thinking beyond productivity gains and think about other value drivers such as improved business outcomes and superior customer experiences. The creation of a bot is only one half of the journey. The other half of the journey is understanding what to automate, what technologies to use and having a digital workforce and a governance platform around it is the other half of the journey. That's the one big learning for all of us from the many implementations we have done.

I would rate it around eight to nine. We have personally seen the platform really mature from several implementations, from scalability to availability, to API programmability. The vision and the journey Automation Anywhere is on is phenomenal.

Our primary use cases are mainly around finance and accounting, so invoice processing, AP processing, those sorts of use cases. It's a quite wide use case but that's where we focus.

We work in the business process outsourcing arena, it has improved our organization mainly around freeing up people to do other things and that can be quite large numbers. It can be in the high tens, even hundreds of people that can be freed up to do other work.

The main processes that we have automated with this solution are order to cash, procure to pay and record to report. 

For us, it's about replacing repetitive dull tasks with technology, allowing users to be able to do more interesting aspects of their work that hold the most value. 

We work both attended and unattended bots amongst other automation so we very much look at the use case and see what's the best approach. Most of our solutions are a combination of the two.

We're in a digital world where everything's evolving. AI is coming out, so just looking at keeping moving, introducing new innovations into the product, nothing specific. The Automation Anywhere teams seem to know what the customers want.

Stability is good. I liken it to driving a Ferrari. If you drive a Ferrari down the freeway in second gear, it won't be very smooth and reliable, but if you know how to drive it properly, then you'll have a nice comfortable ride.

Scalability is about the right approach. It's not just about the technology, it's about the people, understanding the processes, putting everything in place to make sure you monitor and govern your bots. Scalability is not a problem as long as you're approaching it correctly.

We can scale from the bots to the pilot to the bots we're using very quickly. It can be a handful of weeks. Depends on the complexity of the process. We like to get things out there quickly because if it's going to take six months, then the business is going to go off and do other things. Our target is to get it done in a number of weeks.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a great environment to use.

Our ROI is around productivity savings, agile headcount savings, but we also look at things like improvement in net promoter scores. Customer satisfaction is very important as well. There's no point necessarily just saving money if your customers aren't going to be any happier.

We have saved both time and money.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10.

You can automate the wrong process and you won't get any value. Make sure it's the right process and make sure it's a good process. Re-engineer, if you need to first.