Automation Anywhere Reviews

Accounts payable is our primary focuses for automation, and we are looking forward to this report. Thanks.

We are in the early stages and need to see how it goes for future bot building especially Bot Store today.

• Very comprehensive with different platforms especially SAP and Oracle EBS. 
• The digital worker is interesting.

I am interested in discovery, and what this means for companies like mine. I think the pricing model should be more flexible.

This solution was originally introduced to help operations reduce manual tasks. After seeing positive results, we have now implemented this RPA solution in IT.

We have been able to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks completed by operations, allowing individuals to move onto tasks which cannot yet be automated.

Currently, under Automation Anywhere, we only use the Bot Runners and Bot Creators. This ensures we can automate processes without the need for manual interaction.

I would like to see more stability around scheduling a bot to run headless. I believe version 11 may be more stable and have less issues when trying to run headless.

It is more stable now than it was three years ago. So far, I have no major concerns and am looking forward to upgrading to version 11 in Q3.

As we have a small number of bits in production on version 10.5.4, we found it easy to scale. Version 11 will provide a load balancer, making it easier for us to run a pool of VMs to complete a task.

We mostly use it for operations right now. We are looking at possible IT RPA use cases.

The tech support has improved over the years. I believe the tech support to be sufficient right now.

I wasn't part of the original PoC team who completed the initial setup. 

After joining the team, we engaged in two upgrades to deal with stability issues. We found this a painful process as we were early adopters. This meant that the install wasn't stable. To resolve this, we decided on an approach where we would only upgrade to a major release six months after its release.

The deployment is quick. You could complete this in a weekend. Realistically, you need a week to prep and another week to triage unexpected issues.

Our implementation strategy has been to upgrade development, confirm everything functions as expected, and only then upgrade production.

We have a team of six, which consists of developers, a tech lead, and manager. We have set up a run support team to handle maintenance and bot stability issues. Their role is to get the bots back up and running in the event of an issue.

It is expensive. Automation Anywhere has reduced the price slightly, as we have grown. However, the price is still excessive enough that we are engaged in PoCs on other tools.

I wasn't part of the initial conversations, though I believe we proceeded with the number product in the market.

As a total package, this is probably the easiest solution to start with. Even if you add something that you will not need, e.g., Bot Insight won't be required until you have more than 50 bots in production. Even then, see if you can develop this through in-house metrics.

Generally, it is used in the banking and financial domains for Oracle and Java-based systems. We also use Automation Anywhere for integration where a third-party tool has to be triggered.

The are many features and we can do many things with it. They've now included the code so we can add some additional code. That's good.

I'd like to see the OCR feature be perfected. Today we get an accuracy ratio from OCR of around 40 percent to 50 percent only. Better OCR would be very useful in the industry because most of the documents in the banking sector are scanned and hand-written and they want to compare them with other documents.

I would also like to see them provide more support: profile documents and guidance. It would also help to have use-case demos available publicly, not on the Automation Anywhere website. Overall, better promotion of the solution would be good for Automation Anywhere.

Stability depends on the local system. It is good. But when we switch the system, when we go to Citrix or we jump to RDP, the modern stuff, it breaks sometimes.

Comparing Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I would go for Blue Prism's stability. It is very stable. Once the coding is done, meaning all the flowcharts are designed, it will work, it will not break. But sometimes, Automation Anywhere fails. It doesn't take the values from the input at times.

The scalability is good.

Automation Anywhere's technical support is good. They provide it via email. There are no issues with it. They have opened their offices for technical support in India. Usually, within 24 hours, we get a resolution via a reply to our email: "This is the issue, and this is the solution," or, "This is the way to do it." It usually doesn't take longer than that.

The setup is usually straightforward, not complex. If you're doing a basic installation, it takes around one hour. If you're installing MetaBots or any plugins, it will take some more time.

The team we work on develops on the weekend. We have Control Room access so we deploy from there. It doesn't require a team though, an individual person who is working on a given project can also install it.

We don't see ROI immediately. It takes from six or seven months to one year to get the ROI from what we develop. The client needs to trust the RPA solution. Once they trust it, the process, etc., they have more confidence and say, "Okay, you can do automate these other things as well." Build a client's confidence takes time.

But at the end of the day or, really, the end of the year, we can see that the ROI is there. There are benefits and they can see the benefits.

Licensing is not done by us but by the server team. They provide the infra and they manage the installation and licensing because licensing is very costly. It's a very confidential thing. They cannot share the license with everyone.

If I compare it with Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is cheaper. Blue Prism is very costly. Automation Anywhere's pricing follows the market, not less and not more.

It's important that all processes are documented properly.

In terms of maintenance, our policy is that we do two weeks of hyper-care. After two weeks it's over to the client and they maintain it from there on. But for those two weeks initially, if there are any errors we will change the code and deliver it. But the maintenance is good. We don't need to modify many things.

Since we are an insurance company, there are many administrative tasks, such as, the enrollment agreement process, address change after enrollment, issuing of various certificates, making payments, etc. We wanted to automate these administrative or back office operations, so this is where we first started. After we verified that the products by Automation Anywhere can work with our organization, we decided to expand their use to the making of sales materials and business performance documents for our sales division, as well as administrative processes for our operations division. Other uses include compliance related matters and checking of anti-social forces. We are taking the initiative to automate all sorts of administrative tasks of the company with the help of robots and RPA. 

The solution has been implemented into 27 divisions.

The immediate impact is administrative tasks which were traditionally done manually are now being done by robots. This reduces the workload for people. This not only improves efficiency, but also expands the type of work which can be done by people. 

When I spoke to people who have used the solution, they mentioned that they have much less stress. As we are an insurance company, a finance company, where avoiding administrative errors is critical. We need to check things over constantly, but with the use of these robots, there is no need for it any longer. In addition, robots take care of pre-process tasks and notify us in advance, so we don’t forget what we need to do. In these ways, it reduces stress.

This solution is valuable because it can automate tasks which would otherwise be left for us to process manually without us incurring an enormous investment for the cost of the system.

Since we are a life insurance company, our contract terms are very long. They could last for 50 years, or even a lifetime, which means we have many old contracts. If we make an investment into a system, this is an enormous cost for us. If we automate with a system, there would be a wasted cost. So, we had almost given up on automation, thinking the future of our company would have to rely on manual processes. That is when we found out about this solution. By implementing it, we were able to solve the issue of automation, which we had almost gave up on.

The fact that its robots can touch on various systems, like humans, this is what is ground- breaking. It means it can handle various systems.

It’s not about the solution itself, but our administrative work is mostly done in the morning. This is something I have been speaking to Automation Anywhere about. If they could offer licenses only for use in the morning, we’d have a bigger savings cost-wise. Currently, the license is good for 24 hours, but there is not much to do at night and plenty to do in the morning. So, if we could use more in the morning, that would be a great, as we also have a bot farm. This is also when we increase the number of tasks to be stabilized. If they are managed within the client or server, there will be a risk of losing the service in case of emergencies, such as power outage. Therefore, we are working to manage them virtually on servers. With Deloitte’s help, we have been setting up a structure where we can get the robots to work without having the client. That would hopefully ensure stability and viability in case of emergencies.

If we could hire part-time workers on shift-based employment, that would be ideal.

As far as stability is concerned, there have been some challenges. Sometimes, we experience our computers freezing up for no apparent reason or the network being inaccessible. So, when the robots stop working, the cause may be the RPA or it could be some other culprit. 

While there is room for improvement, I do think that we need to take into consideration that the robots may stop working at any given moment. That’s why we need a tool that supervises the robots. The Automation Anywhere products already include such tools within them. We need to be able to monitor them. We need to be able to find out as soon as the robots stop and where the processing has ended. These functions are included, so we just need to quickly jump on the recovery process. That is what I think is important.

It is highly scalable. At the time of implementing this solution, we thought that the scaling might be challenging if the setup process took a lot of time. However, it turned out to be very scalable because, by segmenting, it can also be applied to other new business processes. In addition, it can be done without engineers or system engineers. It does not need to be developed, but we do need to set it up based on rules. 

The cost for scalability is much cheaper than developing a new system.

We are using Automation Anywhere products, but we are getting technical support from Deloitte, from whom we purchased a license. They get back to us swiftly. When they can’t handle an issue, they elevate it to Automation Anywhere, who tackle issues daily. My impression is that we don’t really have technical issues. In general, we follow the manuals that we created, and this solves the issues. There has not been a situation where we have had to contact the technical support everyday for some technical issue. We don’t need to use them that much. That differentiates this from our more comprehensive IT systems.

The reason why we thought that we needed a solution is the management of our contracts last for long periods of time, which includes the maintenance of old products as well. It’s almost impossible to systemize everything from the cost standpoint, as well as the time standpoint, but it can be done if we use a robot. However, it can’t be solved unless we use this RPA. The fact that we can tackle this is huge. We thought that we could improve the productivity if we use it. This is what triggered us to implement it. It was shocking for us when we first saw a software that can handle tasks like a human. 

When we decided to implement an RPA solution, it was our goal to be able to set it up ourselves from the beginning. As we had no knowledge on this product, we asked Deloitte to help us create a manual which suited our needs. The systems being used are different from company to company, so we needed to make it so it work for our company. Generally, product manuals are written in a way that says this command does something. While ours does say this, e.g., to activate this system, use this command. We worked closely with Deloitte to standardize our manual. Deloitte also taught us how to build it as we attempted the skill transfer. 

We had some challenges in the beginning. However, if you have experience with Excel macros with End User Computing (EUC) or have used Access, it’s an easy transition. If you have not done any EUC, you will have to learn from scratch. So, it may take some time. In general, it is much easier than programming.

Automation Anywhere has different types of solutions. When you have a large-scale operation, you need something that is scalable, which can monitor server sinking and operations, and is suitable for the large-scale business development. In addition, it is highly adaptable with the existing systems. So far, except for the few systems, it can recognize all the systems currently used by us.

I would to give the solution a ten, but considering the stability issue and its readiness, I would say that it is between an eight to a nine. 

Foreign Language: (Japanese)

この製品を主にどのように使用していますか?また、パフォーマンスはどうですか?

まず我々が取り組んだところは、第一生命は保険会社ですので、保険にはもの凄く加入の時の 契約の手続きであったりだとか、加入されてからの色々な住所変更だったりだとか、色んな証 明書の発行だったりとかですね、で最終的には保険金をお支払いする、そういった事務がかな りの量であります。で、まずはそういう事務のオペレーション、バックオフィスですね、そう いった所を自動化していこうという所で、そこからまず始めて行きました。で、ある程度そこ で、Automation Anywhere の製品が機能するんではないかと言うことが確認できましたので、 それをもっと広げていこうっていうことで、今は営業部門の色んな資料作りであったりだと か、業績の管理の資料作りだったりだとか、あとはそれ以外の運用部門、資産運用部門の 色々、バックオフィスの事務であったりとかですね。あとは例えばコンプライアンス関係です ね、いわゆる反社会的勢力のチェックであったりだとかですね、そういったまさに第一生命の 中にある色んな事務をロボット、RPA を導入してオートメーション化していこう、そういった 取り組みを進めています。 

当ソリューションはどんな点において最も役に立ちますか?

そうですね、やっぱり機能と言いますか、なかなかシステム投資をすると膨大なコストがかか ってしまうとかですね、そういったいわゆる手作業で残っているところをこのソリューション を使うとやはり自動化できるということですね。我々は保険会社ですので、契約の機関と言う のがもの凄く長いんです。50 年であったりだとか終身保険であったりだとか、そうすると、古 い契約っていうのがもの凄く一杯あってですね、これはシステム投資をすると莫大なコストが かかってしまうと。これをシステムで自動化すると無駄な費用が掛かる。そういった所で諦め

ていて、これはもう第一生命は未来を手で処理をしていくしかないなと思っていたところに、 こういったソリューションがあるということで導入して、少し諦めていたようなところも RPA を導入することによって解決することができたということかなと思います。

やっぱりあれですね、ロボットは色んなシステムを触ることが出来る、人のようにね。そうい った所が画期的なところです。

色んなシステムを動かすことができるということです。

当ソリューションを使用するとどのようなメリットがありますか?御社が機能する上でどのよ うな改善をもたらしましたか?

やっぱり直接的な効果というのはこれまで人がやっていた事務の作業をロボットがやってくれ ることになったので、その分、業務の量が削減できるということです。で、それは単に効率化 っていうだけではなくて人がやるべき仕事をもっと拡大することができる、ということかなと 思います。もう一つがやってみてやはりユーザーの実際にこれを導入している人と話をする と、もの凄くストレスが無くなる、と。我々は保険会社、金融機関ですので事務のミスとかっ ていうのはもの凄くナーバスで、何重にもチェックしないといけないとか、そういった所がこ のロボットでなくなる、とかですね。後は前処理みたいなことはロボットがやってくれてお知 らせしてくれるので、やらないといけないことを忘れない、とかですね。そういったストレス がなくなるということがそういった効果もあるのかなと思っています。

当ソリューションの安定性に関して、どのような印象をお持ちですか?

安定性っていう意味では、やはり色々課題があって、それは通常、普通に事務作業で我々パソ コンを触っていると、たまに原因が分からないけどフリーズしたりとか、ネットワークがたま たま繋がらないとか、そういった、この RPA が原因のものとかですね、RPA が原因じゃなく てロボットが止まるということはよくあります。だから、それは色々改善していくところもあ るんですけど、ある一定程度、そういうロボットが停止するっていうこととかは織り込んでお かないといけないことなのかなと思っています。そのためにも、やはりロボットを監視できる ツールであったり、そういったものは Automation Anywhere さんの製品にはすべて入っていま すが、そう監視できるようにしておく。止まったらすぐ分かるようにしていく。どこで作業が 終わったら、止まってしまったのがすぐ分かるようにする。そういった機能も完備されている ので、それを速やかにリカバリーする態勢を取っていく。そういうことが重要なのかなと思っ ています。

当ソリューションの拡張性に関して、どのような印象をお持ちですか?

まず、拡張性についてはですね、極めて高いんではないかなと思っています。我々もこれを導 入する当初から、あまりにもセットアップしていくのに時間がかかるっていうものだとなかな か拡大できないと思っていましたが、それを部品化することによって、要は、一度作ったもの をどんどん新しい別の業務にも適用することができるというところで、その拡張性って言うの は高い。しかもあまりエンジニア、システムエンジニアがなしでできるというところですね。 開発ではなく、そのあるルールに基づいてセットアップして行けばいい、という形になってい ますので、そういったところでは拡張性と拡張するためのコストがシステム開発するよりかな り安い、ローコストでできるんじゃないかと思っています。

このソリューションにテクニカルサポートを利用したことはありますか?ある場合は、サポー トをどのように評価しますか?

我々、Automation Anywhere さんの製品を導入しているんですけど、テクニカルサポート関係 は保守っていう面ではライセンスを Deloitte さんから経由で買ってますので、Deloitte さんに一 時的なサポートをしてもらっています。あそこにはもの凄く迅速に対応していただいています し、また Deloitte さんでは解決できないところは Automation Anywhere さんが日々、解決に当 たってくれているということです。ただ、あまりテクニカルな問題で問題になるようなことは そこまで多くないというのが印象ですね。大体、自分たちが作ったマニュアルだとかそういっ たことを読み込むと、大体解決できるということで、そこまでテクニカルな問題が発生して、 日々問い合わせをしないといけないとかですね、そういったことはあまりないです。なので、 あまり、そういった意味ではあまり活用しなくても大丈夫というようなですね。そこが IT と は、完全なシステムとは違うっていうところなのかなと思います。

初期セットアップには関与されましたか?セットアップは簡単、それとも複雑でしたか?どう いった意味で簡単、あるいは複雑でしたか?

RPA のソリューションを導入するにあたっては、目標としては自分たちでできるようになるっ て言うのが最初から目標にしていました。ただ、もちろん我々もこのソリューションには何の 知識もない状態でしたので、最初は Deloitte さんに来て頂いて、我々の第一生命に合うマニュ アル作りというのを一緒に取り組んできた。例えば、会社によっては色んな使っているシステ ムも違いますので、そういったものが第一生命で合うようにしていく、と。具体的には通常用 意されている製品のマニュアルっていうのは、このコマンドは何をするコマンドというような 書き方になっているのですけど、逆に第一生命のこのシステムを起動させるためにはこのコマ ンドを使う、とかですね。そういったマニュアルで標準化をしていくということを Deloitte さ んと一緒にやってきました。で、その作り方も Deloitte さんに教えてもらいながら、スキルト ランスファーを図っていくということです。もちろん最初は少し苦労した面もありましたが、

ただある意味 EUC でエクセルのマクロを作ったことがあるとかですね、アクセスを触ったこ とがあるとかですね、そういったことにある程度知識がある人だと、すんなりとというか、ス ムーズに入っていける。まったく EUC もやったことない人だと、やっぱり一から覚えて行か ないといけないので、少し時間がかかるかなと思います。ただ、一般的にはですね、プログラ ミングをするとかよりはずっと容易にできるのかなと思います。

当ソリューションの次のリリースに含まれていたらいいなと思うのはどのような機能ですか? また、それはなぜですか?

ソリューション自体ではないんですけど、どうしてもわれわれの事務の仕事っていうのは、朝 やりたい仕事が多くてですね。なので、これは Automation Anywhere さんともお話ししている んですけど、午前中だけ使えるライセンスとかですね。そういうのがあると、コスト的にもも っとメリットが出てくるのでは。今、24 時間動かすと、なかなか夜中にやらせる仕事があんま り少なくてですね、朝一でやりたい仕事が多くてですね。それをもっと沢山稼働できるように なれば。ボットファームなんかもあるんですけど、そういった所をもっと充実して頂ければい いかな、と思います。ここもやはり製品というよりも、安定化していく業務数が多くなってく ると何か、サーバーとかクライアントとかに、例えば停電が起こったりした時にクライアント で管理していると、全部止まってしまうとかですね、そういったリスクもありますのでロボッ トについてはバーチャルで、サーバーで管理できるようなですね、そういったことを今取り組 みを進めています。Deloitte さんに手伝っていただいたりしながらですね、クライアントを持 たずにロボットを動かすような仕掛けづくりを今、検討を進めていると言うところです。それ によって安定性もありますし、何かトラブルがあった時の堅牢性が確保できるという風に思っ ています。

パートの人を雇ってシフト勤務とかですね、そういったことが出来るといいなと思っていま す。

新しいソリューションに投資をする必要があると思ったのはどうしてですか?

まずソリューションが必要だと思ったところはやはり、我々は...さっきの話と繰り返し になりますが、契約の管理と言うのはもの凄く長期間に渡っていかないといけない、 と。そうすると、古い商品の管理って言うのも沢山あります。それを全部システム化し ていくっていうのはコスト面、その時間の面でも不可能な話なので、そういったところ をこのロボットが解決できる。逆にこの RPA でないと解決しようがないというところ ですね。そういったところが取り組めるというところがもの凄く大きい。これであれば そういったことも解決できるんではないかと思ったところです。それが、導入のきっか けです。人と同じように作業ができるというソフトウェアと言うのは、見た時はかなり 衝撃的なもので、これであればもっと生産性を高めることができるんではないかと言う 風に考えたものです。

最終的に当ソリューションを選択した理由は何ですか?

Automation Anywhere さんの製品は色々なソリューションがあると思いますが、やはり 大規模で展開している上で、さきほど質問があった拡張性ですね、サーバー撃沈を監視 できる、運用を監視できる、それか大規模に展開することに適したものかなと思ってい ます。あとは既存のシステムとの認識度合いも極めて高いということですね。今まで、

一部の例外を除いて第一生命が使っているシステムをすべて認識して触ることができる という風になっています。

このソリューションに 1 から 10 の評価(10=最高)を付けるとしたら、どのように評 価しますか?そしてその理由は何ですか?

10、と言いたいところですが、さっきの安定性の所とかでまだまだ工夫していかないといけな い所があるので、でもそれは製品だけじゃなくて我々の態勢を含めてですね、そういった意味 では 8 点。8 点から 9 点くらいです。

I deployed this solution mostly in the finance and accounting space. We had two primary use cases. One was automating the procured invoice to pay process and the other was automating the order to cash cycle, OTC process.

It increased productivity. It raised the productivity percentage of individuals 20 to 35%. We also saw cost reduction.

Automation Anywhere was easier to learn for the developers. It has a lot of out of box features when it comes to SAP, Excel, and others. However, on the other hand, I did not like one feature which is a built-in linear code that is a straight line and it does not have the modular functionality of UiPath so the code becomes one long code and if you need to make changes you need to look through the entire code and make changes. After the code is returned, even if there are some changes in the process, the support cycle is really difficult because, with UiPath, it's modular in structure. For example, one variable changes so it's declared as a variable and you can just change it and the code automatically reflects the change. It creates a nightmare to maintain. That was the one key drawback from Automation Anywhere. The good thing about Automation Anywhere was learning the best practices of it and using the development framework was easier so getting developers who knew AA was relatively easier than getting developers who knew UiPath or Blue Prism.

We faced a big challenge when moving from AA9 to 10. That was a nightmare. The whole process took six months to one year because we had to do it for 12 to 15 clients in my organization and I was leading the Automation Anywhere deployment for 25 clients.

The biggest issue was that the new license required upgraded hardware infrastructure so we were getting all new tech stuff procured which meant that we were getting updated RAMs and things like that. Getting the licenses was easier but building the infrastructure which was required to support the new version was difficult.

Automation Anywhere is one of the least stable RPA tools out of the top five RPA solutions. A lot of times you need to rely on certain features that are really unstable. Three years back 90% of our projects were on AA. Two years back it became 70% with 20% being on Blue Prism and 10% UiPath. This year onwards it's around 50% on UiPath and 50% on Automation Anywhere. The reason why we have 50% on AA is because we have a developer strain on AA. The code is not stable. You have to recode again and again. Then when you do recode, changing the code is really tough.

Scalability is good. It's one of the better ones.

We didn't face any issues from their technical support. They were responsive and helpful.

The initial setup is more straightforward compared to other solutions like UiPath. Initially, it is relatively difficult. If you have a very simple straight linear process then Automation Anywhere is easy to implement and to deploy but as soon as you get into complexities or where you have more rules like finance or accounting where I deployed specifically at times, there are a lot of variances in the process. That's where Automation Anywhere actually becomes a headache to manage.

If you implement it right way the ROI can start within one year. It delivers quick benefits in terms of ROI.

It's cheaper than other similar solutions.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. 

I would advise two things to someone considering this solution. Go for it if you are positive it is very simple and you understand your processing end to end. It is a cheaper tool compared to others and the initial implementation is relatively easier. You will get results faster. Second, if your process has many variations, is complex, and you do not know a lot about your process, do not use Automation Anywhere, otherwise, you will run into trouble while going live and after support.

My primary use cases are where I'm dealing with a lot of raw data extraction and transformation so that the data can be used by other systems.

An example would be getting the data out of PDF files, transforming it from semi-structured to structured and putting it into an extra-stable system like Excel or a CSV so that it can be used by other systems.

A lot of clients I work with have legacy systems and a lot of API access is not available. Some of the systems might be running off a server located somewhere else, while some would be running on a mainframe and I'm actually restricted to working with the screen. So these clients have a very good use case. If I'm working with the screens, Automation Anywhere really does help me because it gives me the control over the screens. If you are not looking at integrating legacy software, Automation Anywhere gets the job done. But if you need integration then you start looking for other RPA tools.

It definitely saves time and effort. Improving the workflow, that's not something Automation Anywhere provides. That's a different challenge altogether - to do a business process improvement so that automation gives you even more value. That type of process works in combination with Automation Anywhere, but it's not a part of Automation Anywhere. So the process improvement is separate. We optimize the process and then we run it through Automation Anywhere.

You can probably use any similar tools. But Automation Anywhere is one tool that actually gives me automation capability right at the start, without worrying about process improvement in the first place. I can just act like how another person would. Whereas if I do a little bit of process optimization, I can use another tool also. If I get access to APIs, I might use Blue Prism. If I get access to web elements, I go the way of UiPath. If it is a human-mimicking behavior, that's where I use Automation Anywhere.

What I like about Automation Anywhere is the object cloning and the way you can move the mouse and either go to a particular point or go to an element. That's very easy and intuitive in Automation Anywhere.

It gets the job done in terms of getting the data out of the pages. Although I have other tools, I still have this habit of going through the clicks. If you're going through the clicks, Automation Anywhere is the best.

Let's say you are on a website. You move the mouse around. You click on certain places. Automation Anywhere is better at that because you can adjust the screen directly or you can adjust the element. Whereas in, let's say, UiPath, it's a little bit complicated on the inside because there isn't a direct command for that. I have to go to a web scraper. In Automation Anywhere, I have the direct command to move my mouse. If I need to mimic a human behavior, I will use Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is troublesome for some people because of the way it is organized. It's organized as an encrypted script, which gets run via a domain-specific language which the user sees. 

There's a loss of overhead on the computing resources in Automation Anywhere. If you have an encrypted bot, the Automation Anywhere software has to read it first, decrypt it, and run it. So there is a potential that, if the logic of the bot isn't good enough, a lot of CPU and memory overload will happen. This is something that Automation Anywhere should look at because it takes a lot of computing resources. I have seen CPUs running at 100 percent.

In terms of additional features, if I am dealing with a dynamic workflow where the workflow might change based on the input parameters, then Automation Anywhere doesn't help me because the code is pretty much fixed. When I need those types of workflows I go to UiPath.

It's highly stable. I'm pretty happy with Automation Anywhere. I'm pretty happy with the security of the bot. Once you make a bot, if you don't have access to Automation Anywhere, you really can't mess with the bot. I'm pretty happy with the stability. 

The only problem I have is that it takes a lot of memory and CPU usage for Automation Anywhere to do its internal encrypting and decrypting.

I'm not yet happy with the scalability of Automation Anywhere. Scalability is good up to about 100 bots. Beyond that, I need to spread it into multiple sites, which means there is additional licensing cost.

I would give Automation Anywhere's technical support about three-and-a-half out of five. They do have a lot of information published, but the response times aren't great within India, where we are located. I can't say anything about support in other markets.

One thing they need to improve on is the way they have been putting out so many terminologies in the market: IQ Bots, MetaBots. They need to define them properly, in simple terms. If I go to my client and say "IQ Bot" or "MetaBot," they don't understand anything. It falls back on us to figure out whether these types of things will be useful for our process or not.

Regarding their support, when they bring in these features, like IQ Bot and MetaBot, there isn't a lot of documentation that comes with them, which can cause confusion in the client's mind as well as the developer's mind. Even Automation Anywhere's guys aren't really clear on IQ Bots, MetaBots, and things within Automation Anywhere because, when we ask, they just give us the definition. That's not very helpful.

It's pretty straightforward in terms of setting it up. It's not a lot of work, as compared to what you would do in Blue Prism, or even in or WorkFusion. I would say UiPath is the easiest to install and configure, while Automation Anywhere would be number two. Blue Prism would be way down because it's difficult installing and configuring it.

It doesn't take much time to deploy Automation Anywhere. We have built a script. We just run the script and within three or four minutes we are done. We don't really install Automation Anywhere by running it and then monitoring it, rather the script automatically installs it. That script lightens our load; we automate our own jobs as well.

In terms of implementation strategy, we have a set of requirements for the client's environment and hardware. For the environment, we need to look at the .NET framework, which version, the directory structure, folder structure, paths. And there are multiple items to be checked out regarding the hardware: We need to look at the RAM, the hard disk space, the connectivity. There's a lot of checking which must be done, but we do that through the script itself.

We have all the environments set up in one local place and once the script runs it goes and installs all the required software components. The .NET framework will be installed, the run-time engine will be installed, Automation Anywhere will be installed, and the policies will be set automatically for at least the end user, so that we can go and create more users.

Once we have the hardware, and once we are ready to install the environment, it takes us about 15 to 20 minutes.

For deployment of Automation Anywhere, we don't need a lot of staff. But when we are deploying the bots, we generally have an experienced guy who will look at the deployment of the bots within the Control Room. That's a different scenario altogether.

We don't require a lot of people for maintenance. What we do is, we transfer some of the load to the client's staff, in terms of monitoring and scheduling. Of course, we have one person keeping an eye on the entire thing. We have one person on a chargeable basis per client location. And this person also doesn't have a lot of work, so sometimes this person moves among the sites if there is no problem at all with the installation.

Companies now are not willing to put a large investment up front into these tools, unless the service provider that is developing the bots can assure that the bot will be successful and there will be certain savings. Clients are actually talking to the service providers first, rather than the RPA Software Vendors. It used to be that Automation Anywhere would go to the customer, convince them and sell them five licenses, and then the client would go out and start hunting for Automation Anywhere service providers or resources. The whole model has now changed 180 degrees. Now the clients are more interested in talking to consultants and trying to figure out which tool would be good, how many licenses they would need, what the scalability roadmap is, what will they be doing again in six months, 12 months, two years, etc.

It's hard to get a clear picture of the financial value that it can bring. For example, when we go in, we look at a process and we look at the value that automating the process can bring in, but there are other aspects which we look at, which are a kind of "chain effect." If I automate this, what else will break in the whole chain of processes? When there are processes A, B, and C, if I automate B, either A or C or both will feel the heat from this automation effort. If A and C are not conducive to screen-based automation, then I am in a fix because I can automate B using Automation Anywhere, but for A and C, I might need to use something else.

That type of analysis is now coming into the picture. Earlier, it was: Pick a process, automate it, feel the benefit, and then go for another. That is one reason why now we can also recommend hybrid models where multiple tools could be used via a single interface. We have to build the interface to Automation Anywhere and UiPath, or Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism to get the job done. That becomes an additional cost to the client.

If you look at the capital expenditure, Automation Anywhere is number two to UiPath. But if you take a long-term view, on a scalable model of a large number of bots coming out, it slowly goes on to become the costliest tool. There is something they can do about that.

I did a cost comparison on short-term basis, long-term basis, CapEx versus OpEx, and Automation Anywhere is the costliest. Surprisingly, Blue Prism becomes the cheapest, if you look at the long-term view.

That's because of the licensing terms, the pricing policy, and the engagement models. Blue Prism doesn't want you to buy just one license. They want you to sign up for the long-term, for at least a minimum block of ten licenses. Automation Anywhere can give you a single license, so the capital expenditure is low. But as you go on, the OpEx, the regular increase in the number of licenses and the price per, starts to add up.

The capital expenditure goes out right at the point of buying the tool. For Automation Anywhere, I would need to spend $20,000. UiPath can give me something for $6,000, while Blue Prism will come in at $300,000. If I'm just experimenting, or I don't have a need for a large number of bots, or I can optimize my design to run bots sequentially on the same machine, Automation Anywhere vs UiPath is quite comparable.

Every tool has its own drawbacks. Blue Prism would probably be an eight out of ten, but the nearest comparable tool to Automation Anywhere would be Softomotive WinAutomation. They both work on the same principles, although the internal storage is different. WinAutomation also works on a domain-specific language system, and I would rate it a little notch higher than Automation Anywhere and give it a seven-and-a-half out of ten, but they are all in the same category. I don't really see any of them getting a ten, on my scale, right now.

UiPath can do wonders, but the technology is old. If I want to do machine-learning, I can't do it with UiPath. I would have to create another "open UiPath" for myself to be able to use machine-learning and artificial intelligence libraries which are there in the market, because I can't use them with UiPath. That's where UiPath also loses a couple of points.

It's a very dynamic market and everyday new tricks are being discovered. My advice would be: Look at your process. If your process is screen-based, doesn't have a lot of things to do with APIs, go for Automation Anywhere. If somebody's looking specifically to implement Automation Anywhere, irrespective of what process they're automating, I would probably call it a bad move.

Role-wise, we follow our own system. We have a solution designer and we have an architect. These two guys work hand-in-hand, from solution design to a technical architecture of the Automation Anywhere bot. Then we have developers who develop the system. And we have the leads, of course, who are managers. They are senior staff who understand how the bot code is to be published and released into the Control Room. Most of the time, it's the solution designer and the architects who are critical for us, rather than the developers. The development part is easier than the design part. Designing automation takes a lot out of us.

In our organization we have 42 people, and most of these are multi-skilled on multiple tools. We do only specialized stuff, so some 20 of them would have been working on Automation Anywhere at some point. We use multiple tools. We are tool agnostic. We figure out which tool to use and go with that tool.

We don't have plans to push future usage of Automation Anywhere, most importantly because of extensibility of the tool: I can't extend it. So we created a workflow tool for ourselves similar to UiPath, but it's open to extensions. I don't see a lot of projects happening on Automation Anywhere for us unless the customer asks for it. In the Asia-Pacific market, it's either UiPath or Automation Anywhere. If they don't have a tool then, of course, we'll have to look at the type of project and recommend a tool.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at seven out of ten. The architecture is great. It's only the way they have tried to protect their own bots that is causing them to cannibalize themselves. Otherwise, it is great software. It works on a domain-specific language. You really don't need to understand .NET or Visual Basic or C# to work with it. The domain-specific language is more like English. They have done a great job making something, but there is a big scope for improvement if they want to really unsettle the other guys.

In my opinion, instead of sitting in their offices and not conversing with people out there, there are a lot of things Automation Anywhere can do if it listens to the people who are actually evaluating it, using it, and are happy or unhappy with it. I don't really see a mechanism where Automation Anywhere can be seen listening to this feedback. Secondly, they should be more open about their roadmap and where they are going with Automation Anywhere. What I want them to do is to make some more noise about their plans, rather than their current situation, because customers are not looking to buy Automation Anywhere for the next three years. They're looking to buy it so that if their processes change or if Automation Anywhere changes, it can still be usable for their organizations.

I can't keep on changing tools. Let's say I use Automation Anywhere where it's obvious and then it becomes unsuitable, so I have to change to another tool. That rarely happens because the users are familiar with it and change is the biggest barrier. People don't want to change. And the cost of training is actually more than the cost of the Automation Anywhere tool itself. You need to train different people with different skills, not only in Automation Anywhere but for every tool. You need different skills and different people to actually make the whole thing work.

We have so many use cases. One of them is in finance and accounts. We have customer billing portals where there are invoices and purchase orders. The bot goes through these and gives a roll-up of the billing numbers. It goes through each customer portal. One example of a customer is IBM. It goes to the IBM portal, it logs in with bot credentials to SAP Ariba, opens an invoice and matches the purchase order items with that invoice, line by line. It then posts that invoice for billing purposes in that customer billing portal.

With the above bot in place, the cash-collection process will actually improve.

One of our other use cases is that in our general ledger process, our accountant was actually doing cash-to-bank reconciliations. He was going into SAP, downloading the open items, and then going into the bank statements and comparing the balances. By using Automation Anywhere, we were able to automate this process and now a bot is actually working as a bookkeeper and it's trying to close all the open items of the previous month and the current month. It ensures that the unidentified balance between the bank and the SAP balances is zero.

That cash and bank reconciliation is part of our book-closing process. It used to take 20 days for books to be closed. It now takes between ten and 12 days to close the books. That's an eight-days reduction and that's because of only one activity we have automated. 

As we speak, we have automated general entries and the AR reconciliation process as well. The time needed for our month-end close has been reduced.

MetaBot is the most valuable feature. Other products have robotic functionality but MetaBot is a kind of functionality by which code is created. For example, if you log in to the SAP Ariba portal and the MetaBot functionality is used, then whenever anyone within our company has to use the SAP Ariba portal, they will not need to code the process again. It will become a drag-and-drop functionality so business users who do not have coding knowledge can drag and drop. Out of ten steps, that user is able to drag and drop six of them to MetaBot. He is left with only four steps that need coding. It saves a lot of time, but these functionalities cannot be achieved overnight. You have to invest time and energy, create a set of libraries.

There is room for improvement when this application is used in a Citrix-based environment.

Another thing I have noticed is that the previous version does not have log functionality. If an external audit is happening, those logs are not available to show what changes have happened in the application. But in the new version they improved it and now those logs are available. So when our external audit came, we were able to demonstrate that whatever changes are happening in the application are getting logged somewhere and saved for future reference. In the future, if any fraud happens, we'll be able to backtrack that fraud into that application.

Stability is good, but it totally depends on the kind of infrastructure the organization is using. If the organization using Automation Anywhere has a sound infrastructure, the stability is good. But if the infrastructure keeps changing, then the application becomes a little erratic.

Scaling is very easy. We were able to scale it up very easily.

For 2018, we thought of doing eight projects, but we completed 25. We're definitely planning to scale up, but scaling up does not depend on Automation Anywhere. It actually depends on our organization's strategic plan, and how fast we want to do it. As an organization, we want to be a tortoise in the journey, rather than being a hare. We want to have a consistent pace of implementation. Initially, we were like the hare and did some extra implementations, but now we are trying to match it up with the pace of the organization. Sometimes, too big a change can rock the boat, which we don't want to do.

But equally, we were able to demonstrate that this application can do wonders for the organization, help us to digitally transform the way we're working, and introduce a new way of working to any organization. Now, humans have started adopting bots as their new team members.

Automation Anywhere has a very nice support team, and it's just a call away. You don't have to log tickets, although that functionality is also available. I have a dedicated person at Automation Anywhere. I can call her at 12 am and she will pick up and ensure that the issue is prioritized and solved the next day for me. I like the way that is done. It doesn't cause me sleepless nights.

The initial setup is straightforward. They have a guidebook to help our IT infrastructure team to set it up. It was very easy. Anybody who does not come from a software background could read it and would be able to install the application and start using it. I have done it myself and I don't have a technical background. It's like downloading Microsoft Word and using it. It's very simple.

Our deployment took three months.

Our implementation strategy is PDCA: Plan, Do, Check, Act. We planned this implementation, and then did it. We then checked whatever was not done correctly in the first instance and acted on it to complete the implementation. We believe in having a very simple approach. We planned to do automation using Automation Anywhere and then we acted on it. Then we checked that out of, say, ten milestones, we were able to close seven of them. We acted on completing the other three milestones.

They're very flexible around pricing and licensing.

We evaluated:

• Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism
• Automation Anywhere vs UiPath
• Automation Anywhere vs NICE 
• Automation Anywhere vs WorkFusion

However, the Automation Anywhere payment plan, the flexibility they have shown, and the customer service support were fantastic. At a customer service level, we don't want to buy a product and then struggle with the support they're providing.

Go slow. Don't rush into things. Try to adopt this implementation around the business strategy your organization has. Don't follow other organizations blindly. Have a digital policy around adopting this technology. Have a Chief Digital Officer, who is able to understand this and then internally sell it.

Don't go with a "big bang" approach, but rather, go with the right test use cases, and then try to actually solve a complex business challenge through this implementation. Don't implement it just for the sake of it. For example, when we implemented it our focus was not to implement robotics. Our focus was to use this technology to solve a complex business problem so that it makes a meaningful difference in the lives of people who are doing that process daily.

For example, now a bot is able to do customer billing for us and we are able to collect fast. It directly impacts the revenue. On the other hand, if the cycle closing month-end is fast, my CFO has more time for his final quarter closing. He has more time to go through what didn't go well, rather than struggling to close the books and not having time to do an analysis and get insights into what actually works. So we are trying to solve complex business challenges. We're not here to implement robotics.

We could use any technology but, up until now, this technology has helped us.

We have ten-plus users of this solution in the roles of bot manager and bot runner. There are eight people responsible for implementation and deployment and they are solution architects.

The primary use case is within anti-money-laundering: To take alerted cases and gather artifacts on multiple websites or applications, and then to consolidate those into a single file, in this case in OneNote, and provide that to the investigation team.

Primarily, this was all being outsourced because it's a lot of very tedious researching and collecting of the artifacts and consolidating them. Once that consolidation is done, those artifacts can be handed off in a structured format to another team which actually looks at the alerted information, at the details, to see whether it justifies the alert. They can make a decision based on the artifacts at that point.

In addition, with the solution going out there and being visible, we've had interest from the insurance side that wants to jump in. They've got several use cases that they would like to do. The capital markets group has use cases they would like to get involved, and the bank itself has use cases that it is just beginning now. It has ramped up a team already and they're going to start wanting to jump in too. Even groups like DevOps and some other groups that are more cost centers are wanting to jump in. Anything they can do to lower their costs helps out the bottom-line dollar for the whole company.

Looking at a company like ours, with so many different departments and processes and policies, and so many manual tasks, the use cases that we can have for both attended and unattended bots are pretty much countless.

There was a large number of individuals who were doing the data collection and artifacts collection, and they were actually a third-party. The solution improves our situation in terms of time, money, and resources. Plus, when you're dealing with a bank's information, there are additional complications of privacy concerns. If we can keep that in-house and have a bot or automated code take care of it, then there are fewer human eyes on the private information as well. It's a resource saver, it's a money saver, and it helps us with security, keeping more human eyes away from private or touchy information.

Its integration with source control is very refreshing. There could be a little bit more maturity around how to do some of the features, but not having to go outside the app, not having a separate set of procedures, allows you to check in and check out right from within the app. You can make edits and uploads and undo your checkouts. That integration is very nice.

It really does have a great dashboard. It has Bot Insight, it has MetaBots, and IQ Bots. It has so many features where it can read a file and loop.

Regarding the integration with source control, when there's a large number of operations the bulk operations need a little bit more maturity.

Also, regarding the UI, once you're in some of the screens there are fixed dialogues. They are a set size, so there's a lot of horizontal scrolls and vertical scrolls. Those are things that can be addressed in the future. The integration and having it inside the applications are far more important than these pesky complaints. But I get to a lot of scrollbars when I'm reading code. Sometimes I have to keep scrolling and moving up and down and it's a bit of a nuisance because I'm focusing more on navigating than on the actual logic that I'm trying to read through. A little bit more friendliness in the UI would help.

I came from OpenSpan and Pega and it's a different approach as far as the coding goes. One thing I feel limited in, in Automation Anywhere, is that sometimes they give these wonderful screens where you can do conditional loops or branching with the "If" statements and they'll have these built-in features for if a window exists or if a folder exists or if a process is running. But if I want to do something that is more purely business-related and is somewhat complex to write or is nuanced, I sometimes have trouble implementing that inside of the Automation Anywhere script. I feel limited at times with some of the looping and some of the branching and some of the ways to make procedure calls when I have a complex business issue. 

Where it's really great, where it's very simple, is for me to see if a window exists, to see if a process is running or if I'm waiting for a window to close. On the flip side, let's say we're in capital markets and they have a complex business rule for some of the analysis. I don't know how well the product would handle that case. I can't say that it can, I can't say that it can't, I just have concerns of how that would be done, at this point.

Coming from a couple of years of using a competitor, I do know exactly how I would do that in the other code and I do know it can handle it. One thing I can say is, even with that concern, I do know we can add scripts for JavaScript and Visual Basic scripts, so if we need to extend the product, we do have that option. I would like to see some other languages like Java or C# added to that as well, but I have questions about that. I may be able to do that through a MetaBot so that's a question I would have to ask support about, but I'm not there yet. Whatever limitations are there, I think we can still extend outside of the product.

If we're talking about the Control Room, those services stay up. We have them on a Windows Server, and I haven't seen it have an issue standing up, other than when we have some code that has gone rogue. When doing development and there has been a mistake in the code, we've had to redo the server a couple of times. Given that, I would say the stability is an eight out of ten.

We've had to change our configuration a couple of times. I'm only saying eight because I know there are scenarios that we haven't come up against and when we write code there are going to be times where Windows or the server has to be rebooted.

We did have one issue where it kept disconnecting in development but that appeared to be a VPN issue and we got help from Automation Anywhere on that.

Overall, it's very solid. I don't know that I could give a perfect score to any software out there.

The scalability is limited more by our money and our hardware than anything. The scalability really depends on how much RAM and how much network bandwidth we can do, how many servers we can apply. I know we can just keep adding to the cluster and I know clients could keep popping up. Since we're at the forefront of this, it has not been an issue. 

However, I do know that, within a year, when we start having multiple clients running and we have multiple developers in there, I may have a different response. But, again, I think we would just have to add more Control Room servers and more resources to the servers. We haven't hit a scalability limit issue yet.

The technical support has been very prompt. They've been very willing to help out and, in almost all cases, they've been able to provide an answer or solution relatively quickly. If anything, we have been the bottleneck because they have been more responsive and quicker than we were able to implement. They may want us to make a change or tweak, give us an answer within an hour, and we have to get permission or approvals to make that change in the environment it's in.

I think that's another huge plus for Automation Anywhere: their customer service and their customer relationship.

Our company didn't have any RPA enterprise-capable tools. I don't know what motivated them to learn about it. It may have come down from the executive level saying, "We want RPA, go figure out what it is." That's when they went and looked it up and started researching. They did like their competitive analysis of all the RPA software tools and platforms that were out there. They narrowed that down to ten, then to 5, and then there were three that they ended up with and did a matrix comparison. The matrix included risk, ROI, and cost and they came up with a weighted system. Automation Anywhere came out on top.

The initial setup is a complex process that they make very straightforward. Their installation is very quick. It was relatively painless. Any pain that we experienced was on our side because we had to make sure we had the right permissions or direct privileges, or that we had a firewall that was configured properly. We had a relatively complex site where we had clustered Control Rooms and we're using load-balancing. Within a day or so, we definitely have it standing up and, typically, within the same day, we have it configured. That's assuming we don't come into any complications on our side where we have to go ask for permission to get access to something or for a new certification. Overall, their installation is fantastic.

It took about two days to stand it up, to configure it, and then to smoke-test it, and make it productive.

The setup was prior to my coming aboard, by a couple of months. Our company had talked with IBM and Automation Anywhere, so the strategy was definitely to go through the documentation and to have an Automation Anywhere expert help with the development environment. After having meetings and reading the documentation, they had a hand-holding approach in development. Then they documented the steps. They went into the next environment, ran through their documentation, updating it because there were some changes in the clustering as well and the load balancing. They got that standing up and documented that. By that time, they felt comfortable in production. They were able to go through and repeat the steps without having to go back to Automation Anywhere or IBM for support.

We had to repeat the process here about two months ago and set up a new model and set up a new production environment and some more servers. That's where I get the couple-of-days timeline from. I was following their documentation with our internal guy who did it. Obviously, we had some guys that do database, some guys that do the Windows Servers, and then, myself; I was doing the actual client side. We're all on the phone at the same time taking care of it and it's less than a day.

In terms of the very initial setup, starting from the planning stage, I wasn't here at that time. I would say that it was about four to six weeks, but that's mainly because they had other stuff that was going on, so they were just having the weekly meetings until they got ready to try it. I do know they started talking in May and by the end of July, they had it done, but there were gaps where they weren't working on it in there.

The actual length of time may be about a week because we have to do a change request. We have to go through a procedure where we get approval from the business managers and the lines of business saying, "Okay, we're ready to go live. We're going to go ahead and push this into production," and we need to do backups and have a contingency plan. We then have a meeting and make sure everybody is okay with the current test results. Once all that's done, we can deploy in one night, have it smoke-tested, and have it running the next day.

For the actual deployment steps, you really only need one person but, typically, we will have the developer, a business person to do a smoke test, a Windows person and a database person; four people, only because we have separate roles here. Technically, it only takes one person, but developers don't have any permissions. But we need a developer in case something goes awry to help out the build person who's pushing it. If there's something they can't do, then they need the Windows person to handle any kind of Windows services. And if there's a database issue, you need a database person to run a script. Four would be max, but that's actually very typical in a lot of corporate deployments.

We're just getting into production right now and we're handling the first wave of production issues for getting it into production. Unfortunately, we got our code from a vendor that was helping out initially. Even though I've been here six months, I just got my hands on that code a couple of months ago, so we're having to do some cleanup.

We're really hoping by the end of next month or the month after to get a good idea of metrics on what our performance is, how fast we can work, the ROI, and the offset. We're almost there, but it's a little premature to determine ROI.

Regarding areas for ROI with this solution, the first one is that we will be able to terminate a contract for doing all this work that is going to be replaced with the bots. That immediately means lower legal costs, less overhead, less money that needs to be paid out. It's two or three bots that will be replacing multiple people. That's the initial type of ROI we can see.

It's a scale game, as well. The same code that we're doing is very applicable to a couple of other groups within compliance, within audits, which will be collecting very similar type of information from a couple of different apps. The ROI there is going to only increase because we'll have this reusable code that we can extend to other groups very quickly. I think that's why they chose this particular path. So hopefully, we'll be able to scale this ROI tremendously in the next 12 months.

Policies and procedures always change. The question is, can we be nimble enough? Can we build a platform that is solid enough, and have a pool that is talented enough to be able to produce bots in a cheap enough fashion to realize that ROI? So far, I don't see anything that would restrict that or cause that not to happen.

Automation Anywhere's pricing is competitive. That's obviously something that attracted our company to it. They're very well priced. I can't speak to let's say UiPath or Blue Prism. I do know Pega vs Automation Anywhere is somewhat comparable, but Pega also requires a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience to get up and running. There's a bigger upfront cost to get Pega and they also want to push their case management, so even if you go RPA, they're going to want to get you to do the case management side of things as well.

The shortlist was Pega's RPA and UiPath. Blue Prism was in the top-ten but they were not in the shortlist because they never responded to calls. It was felt that if they couldn't respond to the sales calls how could they go forward?

Do your homework, talk with the team, get your questions, read through the documentation, and then decide on your platforms and make sure you really focus in on whether you need clustering and the load-balancing because those are going to make a big difference in your costs, your platform, and scalability. Get that worked out first.

Then pick a use case that is very quick and simple where you don't care about the ROI but what you want to do is make sure that you're testing your environment, that all your environments work, that you can do source control, that you can promote, that you can unit-test, that you can do regular tests, that you can do deployments. You can solve all those problems without the headaches of trying to figure out how to keep the business happy, how to keep the cost down, and just focus on making your environment solid.

Hopefully, that use case is something small enough that you can do within a month or two. Once it's deployed you can see how to support it, how you test it. Then you have time to focus on your standards. What are your programming standards? What are your deployment standards? What are your guidelines for coming up with change requests? Those things, ultimately, regardless of the code, are always going to be your success and failure points.

Bottom line, when you get down to it: The coding is not going to be the bottleneck anymore, it's going to be your procedures and policies around it, your project management. Focus on that.

Automation Anywhere has made it very easy for you to install, they've got the tools to make it very simple for you to create a quick, small application and to get out there. Again, forget the ROI the first time. Get it working, get everything panned out, and then, once you feel comfortable, pick a medium case or even an easy case but one that has a high ROI. Pick something that is very repeatable but that, if you can get a bot to do it, it saves you a lot of money. That would be your next use case. And that could even be your first one if you can't find something small and simple. Once you get the experience, you get it under your belt, move on to your more mature use cases.

The tool is flexible. The tool is very easy to pick up. I am concerned with some later cases though. When we get into some complex business logic or processes, I'm not sure how it's going to handle heavier business rules, so we'll have to wait till we get to that point and we'll have to hope that our customer relationship with Automation Anywhere will help us with more complex or tricky resources.

In our organization there are 16 of us using Automation Anywhere, and we'll be at 20 by the end of January. We'll see where that number goes. And that's only been the last six months. That's a big number to put on there, where we have a bunch of stuff going on and are trying to keep it in control and figure out our center of excellence and our standards and our practices. I know the other companies may go in and throw big numbers at it but we're at 20 and that number is only expected to keep growing. That's going to be limited by how many projects can be done, how much money there is for those projects, and how many people as resources we can find. Right now, our users are developers, testers, administrators, and we have a couple of project managers who have a limited administration view into it.

Maintenance depends on the bot itself. Initially, whenever we start with a bot, we always have one person dedicated to it. Depending on the what was found, one person for maintenance is usually fine and that usually dwindles. You'll typically end up with one person who has multiple bots or automations that they are maintaining, as time goes on. If anything, it's less than one person needed for maintenance.

Overall, I would rate it at eight out of ten. It's a very simple interface. It's a very straightforward approach. You can very quickly get in and get some proofs of concept going. It has logging and some reporting. Some of the things against it are when I compare it to where I came from before and some of the features that OpenSpan had. For a developer doing coding and debugging - developing the code for reusability and debugging the code - OpenSpan had some advantages that you can't easily overcome in Automation Anywhere. That would be the two points off in my rating of Automation Anywhere, not that I would give OpenSpan a ten either. I would probably give that an eight as well, for different reasons.