Automation Anywhere Reviews

When I started working with Automation Anywhere, I automated mutual fund statements. Later, I switched to a financial services company, so that involved a lot of monotonous rule-based work that we had to automate. Then, I started working for this oil and gas company. We focus on finance, procurement, IT, legal, and refining processes. 

I've seen business users doing this kind of repetitive work for 20 years, and they feel that there is a better use of their labor, so I wanted to automate things for them. For example, in the oil and gas industry, we need to extract information from purchase orders that we must pay out on invoices to various contractors. It's possible to improve efficiency by as much as 20 to 30 percent by automating those processes. We can do even better by asking the right questions to the business stakeholders. There's potential to automate and improve on things they've done manually in the past. 

We see opportunities to operationalize AI for HR use cases. For example, we need to gather documentation for work travel, including a visa if an employee plans to travel abroad. Instead of having an employee ask HR folks about the process, we can set up something with generative AI. AI would also be helpful in some finance use cases. We still need to do some PoCs for generative AI before moving forward. Our data science team is working with something similar, but I haven't used it yet, so we need to try some smaller PoCs before trying it at a larger scale. 

Automation Anywhere saves money. At my previous employer, we achieved $1.3 million in cost avoidance over two years. I expect to realize that much savings in my current role, but we are still in the enabling phase of our CoE. Next year, we'll complete large-scale automation. That's our goal.

UI and document automation are two features I like. Document automation is helpful because it simplifies extracting and putting data into different ERP systems. I have three or four use cases for document automation. I also like the recorder objects feature, which was called object learning in the previous version, and screen scraping. 

It's easier for business users to work with Automation Anywhere A360. My previous employer used Automation Anywhere version 11, which was sometimes a little difficult. A360 is much more interactive. We have several users in our organization who have a business background, so it takes some time with some of the use cases. A business user might take two months to build more challenging use cases, whereas a developer could do it in three or four weeks. Though it takes longer, we want them to learn and implement Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere is interactive, and my experience with my coworkers has been positive so far. I'm on the CoE team, and we've been working to enable various functions involving the HR, IT, finance, and refining teams. They are using it. On average, it takes a month or so to train them, build their use cases, and put them into production. 

The solution is currently integrated with PeopleSoft, ServiceNow, and SAP. The document integration gives us about 70-80 percent accuracy. We're mostly working on purchase orders, but I want to implement it for financial use cases, too. I'm trying to determine what the most efficient one is. 

When we need to upgrade the bot version for various applications like SAP, the compatibility issues could be easier to resolve. The financial team is using version 5 or 6, but the automation engineer recommends only version 6 because it is more compatible. I think Automation Anywhere could handle these compatibility issues better. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for nearly seven years now.

Automation Anywhere is scalable, but it depends on what you do during the design phase. You must consider the opportunities for scaling up while you're planning. It's easy to scale if done correctly. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. It's excellent. We have premium support. Our account manager is very nice. If we raise an issue, it will be resolved the next day. 

Positive

We also have Power Automate, but we do not use it at the enterprise level. We only use Power Automate for two use cases. A different team uses Power Automate, but they are not associated with the CoE. They are only using it for personal automation. 

Deployment is easy, but the testing takes time. It also takes some effort to migrate the bots from version to version, like v11 to the cloud version of A360.   We learned it the hard way, but once we moved to A360, that took care of many of the infrastructure issues we faced with the on-prem version. It was mostly some technical challenges, not infrastructure-related changes. The cloud version is much better than the on-prem. 

Automation Anywhere requires maintenance, but how you develop the processes also matters. We try to implement best practices, like using wildcards instead of URL names. That's why we try to find ways to make API calls instead and get the data from there. We are currently doing a PoC that involves retrieving the data from third-party websites, and they told us that they could build an API that would make it easier to maintain. The APIs work better than redirects. 

I tried UiPath, but I didn't like it as much for our current use case. Automation Anywhere is a better fit, but I have used UiPath at three organizations as a contractor, consultant, and full-time employee. 

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10. 

We deploy Automation Anywhere in both on-premise and on the cloud. In past, most customers have preferred the on-premise deployment, but the latest version, which is 2019, is becoming popular because it's on the cloud. 

The customers who are using the earlier version, they're on-premise and new customers are using the cloud version. The trend is moving onto the cloud rather than on-premise.

A few of our use cases for Automation Anywhere are for the HR departments, onboarding process, finance domain, month-end reports, ledger update, and AP automation.

The integrations with the OCR engines in Automation Anywhere are quite powerful. It has helped us in many projects.

The solution could improve the integration with some web applications. It was difficult to manage them.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for approximately three years.

Automation Anywhere is stable. We have customers that have been using it for years and they have not had any issues.

I have found Automation Anywhere to be highly scalable.

I have not personally contacted the support, but I heard from colleagues that the support is good.

The initial installation is simple.

I would recommend this solution to others, it is one of the leaders in the market at this time when it comes to RP platforms.

I rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

We serve different clients of ours helping them streamline or ease out with their day-to-day activities. There is a team who identifies which activities can be automated end-to-end. They prepare a proposal sheet, which comes to us, and we do the feasibility of it: How much of that activity can be automated. Then, we proceed from there.

Currently, in our production environment, we are using Automation Anywhere version 11.3.1. In a beta test version, we are also evaluating the latest version, which is 11.3.2.

Previously, we had to input a password to a particular tool for the user to login. The only option was through encrypted keystrokes, and if I uncheck the password, I can see it. Now, they have a credential vault, which is 256-bit encrypted. That is the highest security that can be provided when it comes to credential maintenance. That's a day and night difference. With a credential vault, other than the user who is entering the password, no one else knows what the password is. This also helps when convincing the clients. 

The most advanced feature in the current version is the security. Previously, the whole thing was like a software installation. Nowadays, it is more of a URL and credential vault. Everything is taken care of by a centralized tool, a Control Room, which is only accessible through the URL. I really like this feature. I hear that in the upcoming version that everything will be cloud-based. So, I'm really excited to see that type of an infrastructure.

As a developer or user, I feel that the performance of the overall package could be made a little better or reliable. For example, if I'm opening up a heavy Excel file, which is uploaded in some shared drive over the net, and I have my box coded to open that Excel to do some work or formatting on it, and depending on the network load and the size of the file, this client version while trying to access that file becomes unstable at times. It goes into the hang position until a human being comes in, ends the task, and restarts it. Until this happens, it does not respond. 

In version A2019, it's moving from a software installation infrastructure to a cloud-based infrastructure. I am hoping that the end-to-end deployment from conception to coding to production will be much faster than it is right now. That really excites me as this is a feature that I suggested to tech support.

I've been using this tool since 2014.

I would definitely like to see an improvement in how it handles the system resource crunch and how it takes care of the pressure. That would be really nice to see.

Over the years, I have seen the solution really change. I have seen the differences that come with the subsequent releases.

It is definitely scalable. It is very flexible when it comes to scalability. I have had projects in which the total benefit was about 12 FTEs across the globe. We would start off with 0.5 FTEs when we went into live production. Then, we started onboarding other countries or regions, and getting roles onboarded was pretty much seamless. Scaling up is a good thing that Automation Anywhere has for it.

I use Automation Anywhere's tech support every day. They are awesome. Whenever I have certain ideas, I always drop them an email. Then, six or eight months down the line, I see those releases coming in which makes me feel proud. 

The engineering team works on our suggestions and provides us with a patch or upgrade, which is nice to see.

Back in 2014 (at my previous organization), I wouldn't say the initial setup was smooth. There were a few roadblocks. Both Automation Anywhere and my previous organization worked on them. Eventually, everything got sorted out. Nowadays, everything is much better than what I saw back then.

We deployed in-house.

I have not see ROI in my current organization. However, I did see ROI in my previous organization.

In the initial year after deployment, you won't see return on investment. Eventually, when your bot is more stabilized and your processes are streamlined, in the one and half years to two years window, you will start seeing return on investment. The FTE cost is definitely higher than the license cost of each bot. If your program has been thought through, then one bot can be used to do the work of approximately two human beings worth of labor. That is where the benefit is, which will start from the second year onward. 

Approximately, for a developer, it is around $750 for a license a year. For Bot Runners, it is about $550.

Automation Anywhere is unlike any other software. Automation Anywhere provides me with my bread and butter. I just love the tool.

Understand what projects or automation projects that you have on hand. Every clients setup demands a different set of tools which can be used for automation. Automation Anywhere does try to cover all environments, though. However, there are a few other tools in the market specifically built for specific infrastructures. First, study your requirements. Then, based on those, go ahead and decide on what tool you want to use.

I primarily use Automation Anywhere A2019 to professionally develop RPA bot solutions for our clients and our own internal uses.

I personally use the free community edition for personal practice and personal projects outside of a work environment. 

Our organization has A2019 Enterprise on an on-premise server, but for my home use, I simply log in to my community edition account from my own desktop computer. 

Our clients use a variety of on-premise and cloud-deployed installations for whatever their specific use case is. 

Automation Anywhere has presented us with a platform that is easily accessible from a web interface, enabling us to write code for RPA scripts without having to download a dedicated software application.

It has provided us with a robust set of RPA actions, making it both easier and quicker to develop functional scripts. AA has continually listened to our feature requests and customer insights and maintained a positive relationship with us on that front. 

It has also presented us with an active AA developer community and bot store, allowing us to learn from the best practices of others. 

The features I most appreciate are the built-in version control system, historical log, audit trail features, and the breadth of RPA action commands included out of the box. 

I also like the credential locker functionality and think that feature was developed in a logical, clear, and helpful manner.  

It is nice being able to develop and manage/schedule scripts from the same web browser interface, but there are times I wish that the bot developer screen was made more user friendly. Some of my recommendations for solutions of that nature are listed below. 

I would like to see a button on the bot developer web page that allows you to "expand all" and "close all" actions, folding them up into their respective "Steps".  

I would like to see a comment feature that allows you to embed comments/notes into an action sidebar, without having to actually take up a line of code in order to write such a statement. 

I would like to see a dedicated XPath web interaction drag and drop action that allows you to click/interact with websites via an XPath query. This way, you are not required to use the recorder action to gain this functionality. 

I would like to see an option allowing you to change the color scheme of the bot developer page, so you can use colors that are less harsh on the eyes when developing a script. A simple dark mode skin would be nice as well. 

I have been using the A2019 Enterprise platform for several months now, but have been using the Automation Anywhere Community Edition for about one year. 

The stability of the solution is good, although as expected, there are periodic growing pains associated with the rapid development and rolling out of the A2019 platform.

In general, the platform has grown more robust with each release, and I expect its stability and functionality to only improve over time. 

I believe it is scalable and valuable to any organization looking to implement an RPA solution within their organization. 

I have only used customer support once, but the support team member I spoke with was very friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. 

I previously have used and experimented with several different RPA platforms, including but not limited to Workfusion, UiPath, Blue Prism, Microsoft Power Automate, WinAutomation, Robin, and somewhat similar to RPA - AutoHotkey. 

As an RPA developer, I do not personally have a number to share here that would reflect our organization's ROI. 

As an RPA developer, I do not personally have much to say about this topic. I find the license pricing to be competitive and reflective of the pricing models throughout the RPA space, and I believe there is a lot of value in continuing to maintain the free community edition platform. 

As I listed above, I have experimented/evaluated just about all of the market-leading options as well as the most popular options that are currently growing in recognition in the RPA space. 

I have done my best to outline my thoughts about the Automation Anywhere platform here, and do not have anything else specific to share. 

My day-to-day activity was to take data from invoices and put it into an Oracle DB. I have already automated banking uses, which deal with some of the invoices. The second case solution which I had worked with was multi-bot architecture.

We have certain kinds of applications spread across our organization and the data coming into that organization is common. We made a solution as a multiBot: one Bot is working on one application and we have hundreds of applications. So a hundred Bots work together on the same set of data to integrate it.

The applications are different. Say one is Oracle, one is SAP (System Analysis and Program Development) and one is Salesforce. In the way we implemented this, we segregated the workload into parts: part as a master Bot, part as a worker Bot and part as the closure Bot. The master Bot will work on the input part of the data set, the worker Bot will work with the individual (designated) applications, and the closure Bot will consolidate all the data and feed it back to the designated user. This was the plan for our architecture.

The Automation Anywhere product has improved our organization with the speed of processing. It is very fast in execution time, it requires less support time, and it is a good value for the money.

The most valuable features I see right now pertain to dealing with the servers. That has become a distant concern. Because data is already on the cloud, I can use a controller and my client as one unit. That is the best thing. I can use Automation Anywhere in my mobile, I can run my Bot through an Android app. This flexibility and centralization without worrying about availability is a good thing.

I think that all the expectations I had for the new release of the product are covered in the coming version A 2019. I'm very happy about what I hear about it. I think once I use this A 2019 release, I'll come to know what the things are that I'll want in the future. We have access now to a community edition version, which I have to download and will be testing out shortly.

The first of the new features that I believe will do me the best is the customization of the commands. I can build my own package as per my convenience. Let's say we have a variable command. We already have the ability to use XML commands and we have some Excel commands that are provided by Automation Anywhere. Now Automation Anywhere is allowing us the opportunity to build something of my own in their environment and deploy that in production. Before I could imagine that component and not build or deploy it. I can build it now and that an important new feature for our progress.

As far as the stability of the product, it's doing well. My experience over the two years I have worked with it as a developer, going to the cloud has been good for reliability and accessibility.

We have not experienced downtime from the Automation Anywhere setup. When our infrastructure is down it definitely impacts my accessibility to Automation Anywhere. This is not actually the fault of the product as far as I have experienced.

I feel the one thing which I can tap to enhance the scalability of the system is the AI component of Automation Anywhere — that is IQ Bot. I think this is something which can really grow into a massive Bot solution with great advantages. I heard recently that the accuracy of that data reading for invoice processing is something like 70% accurate currently. I think they are trying for 90 or 90 % plus as a goal now.

We have definitely had the opportunity to use technical support and I evaluate them as very good. If I have any data stuck somewhere, I query to the Automation Anywhere support guys. If I have some problem with the 11.x version, they'll admit that there's a bug in that version for a particular process or function and they will develop a patch for it in a new upgraded version. We definitely feel confident going accordingly with that and patch the update as a solution.

Our reason for adopting the product and why most of our clients prefer it as a solution is that we talk with them honestly about what capabilities they will need and why this product fills the purpose. Everyone can choose to do their tasks in a different way and other solutions could work to develop automation. What matters for me is the way the product allows users to easily develop the Bots. I do believe that Automation Anywhere is giving me the opportunity to quickly and easily develop stable Bots and it is better at that than other competitors you might want to compare it to.

It is definitely not a simple setup. It is at a medium-complex level. It depends on what actually gets put into the brackets.

When there is a level of complexity, it's all related to the server, where I'm hosting my applications and my client. In the 11.x version, we control one server from another server. When we have to use many servers, the complexity of the setup begins to become more involved.

We developed our architecture on our own by our own, designed to fit with our needs and purposes. We have also done the initial setup now for a number of different customers.

In some ways, we have seen a return on investment. For example, we have one customer who is aware of the FTE reduction (Full-Time Employee) on the repeated Bot creation jobs. They have scaled up by having their workers work in a different way. We are actually automating the repetitive Bot creation jobs and reducing the FTE where that human effort is not actually required. The company resources can spend more time focusing on the creative part of the work rather than creating the Bots.

I don't know exactly what the pricing schemes are for the product as this type of negotiation is not my responsibility, but I think the basic pricing comes to $15,000. We have many employees and perhaps not so many doing Bot development and deployment. The Bots can service a lot of people and I think the rest of the pricing is based on usage.

For people looking for my recommendation for an automation product, I definitely would recommend Automation Anywhere instead of going for a more orthodox or older technology. With older tools, you are just doing the same things and not improving processes. With RPA a digital transformation is actually required for an organization to adopt a better way so they scale up and create an enormous amount of new opportunities for their organization to grow. It is a step to go in the direction where AI is going in. You cannot see the destination yet, but somewhere you have to start up using an RPA that is right for you. That is what I would recommend to my colleagues.

If you start talking about innovation as streamlining day-to-day processes, that is where to start from. It is where we started. We give clients various approaches, but we recommend that RPA is one thing which has stability and which is a good, long-term return on investment.

Once you invest you don't get the returns immediately. You have to wait some time while you work at creating the solutions by scaling the number of Bots you have and the processes you simplify and improve. After a time, your efforts will improve results. That is what we communicate with our customers. When we have them interested, then we come to a conclusion as to how we will go about implementing it.

On a scale from one to ten where ten is the best. I would rate this product as a ten-out-of-ten because the company and product have done everything to meet my expectations.

We used to expect new things in the A 2019 version and the company delivered on that. So, once I use this release of the product for some time again, I will probably have some new expectations. By 2020, I think we will send them feedback again.

We are improving our monitoring service by enabling it with AA. Our monitoring team provides configuration and some accessories to our clients. One of these resources is monitoring our hosted application, check it's working state, e.g., the input and output processes health checks and resolutions. We are trying to use Automation Anywhere to monitor these aspects auto. One of our bots monitors logs and files to create an Excel report at the end of the day and mail it to clients so that they make their decisions better for their next level faster.

We are using it on-premise.

This tool really benefits our clients. If we can do something fast, then we can do it more frequently. E.g., we can send them frequent reports. While we aren't bombarding them with reports, we would want to send frequent information on failures and successes so that they can make better decisions faster.

We monitor all applications frequently. Some reports are created and sent to clients. Some of these reports are manual and would about an hour to get all the vouchers, check all the schedules, and check all the results. We created a bot which does this automatically every  four to six hours. I test for failure, then a consolidated email is sent to the client directly.

We created a bot based on the calculations received on a regular basis to be created/scheduled for every 6 hours. Every 12 hours, it reads it and sends an email to be read. It sends out some calculations, then sends out an email to retake orders.

Speed is the most valuable feature. E.g., for a human, it could take around 60 minutes to create a report with a few errors. Occasionally, a person will miss something. With this bot, we can get the work done in around five minutes with no misses. So, it takes only five minutes for a report to scan and be created with fewer errors.

As a developer, the scripting language is easy and powerful to use along with integrating all the tasks. 

I am looking forward to IQ Bot, but I expected more out of the current version. We do not deal with much scanned documents. I want to see if IQ Bot can scan client emails for us because our clients send emails with some incidents and issues. We want to see how IQ Bot can automatically do the processing and create structured data and trigger other bots to get  related tasks done.

The Control Room is demanding on resources, even when the traffic or processes are low.

We are planning to integrate with Outlook. We are plan to create a small plugin which will trigger in Outlook once an email comes in. It will monitor the mailbox and remotely trigger a bot. Very soon, we'll see how we can trigger from Excel. I am looking forward to integrating with MS Office very soon. The only challenge is we are moving from the local Office to the online Office, which will be a small challenge for me. 

There are many bots available on the Bot Store. However, my developer told me that he was unhappy with the quality of the bots available.

I would really like natural language processing and IQ Bot in version 11.

It's very stable. We are very impressed. In the past two months of runs, we have not experienced the Control Panel or a bot failing.

I personally started working with version 11.

Right now, we have one Control Room and two bots. In the next coming weeks, we'll be putting four more bots and our second Control Room into production. We plan to use the second Control Room in a development role. After the four bots are complete, we will start creating bots for the IT and finance departments.

We used the technical support once. The dashboards were not working. However, it was more due to resources on our side rather than something with Automation Anywhere. We fixed that and the dashboards came up. It took a reinstall, which was fine, since we were just starting out.

The technical support was responsive.

My lead developer has taken courses and certification on Automation Anywhere University. His experience with it was good. We are also trying to set up a couple of guys in our company. I have gone through a small training as a developer with direct experience. I am planning on taking two more certification courses.

When I saw Automation Anywhere for the first time, I have yet done any training but I could use all the tools within minutes. That's the beauty of what I'm using. I created a password without any training.

No. We went for AA to empower our current workforce.

The setup was straightforward. However, the reinstall was not straightforward, but it wasn't complicated either. There was an issue with configuring the database once.

The bot for monitoring applications did not take too long to create, about two weeks went into it. After that, there was some back and forth for changes. Then, we created another bot for scanning clients' mailbox. It creates a front office ticket, depending upon what's in the mail. 

We used a partner for the setup.

We have a core lead developer who does most of the development. Initially, we checked on what processes we could automate. We picked a couple and deprioritized a few others, which we are taking on right now. We are trying to create a light governance process to see which candidates are right for RPA, then take them forward.

We look forward to ROI in next three to six months. There is no direct cash savings.

With the scheduled mails that we send out to our clients every six to eight hours, it use to take one hour for a single person to create that report, then send that out to clients. This was done twice a day. Now, after every six hours, we send out a mail to clients so they can know the success or failure of their application or process. This is automatically done within three to five minutes. The report that we are doing is now more frequent and much faster with fewer errors. 

In terms of time, we are saving four to six hours daily. We have increased productivity to do more things and can monitor other applications much better now. Clients can get emails faster, which makes them happy. We are meeting SLAs.

We did measure couple of AA competitors. We evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath. 

I was not keen on the UiPath analysis. UiPath needs a more technical person to do the coding and bot creation.

I did not see a UI or web console for Blue Prism, where AA has a web console where we can connect to the dashboard through the Control Room.

While we are not big users of IQ Bot now, we are looking forward to using it on our mail down the line. Overall, the power and capabilities of Automation Anywhere were the best that we saw.

Automation Anywhere has the features that we wanted: Non-Technical user engagement, Easy scripting, IQ Bot, Screen Recorder, and Web Scraping. We have started to use almost all of these features already.

Evaluate your processes and determine where RPA can be done. By automating your tasks, you can speed up your work, get extra savings, and focus your attention on things that are better suited for your employees.

I am very happy with the bots that I have seen here.

We are planning to test IQ Bot. We have some planned agreements that we would like to have digitize. We also have all our scanned documents, so we will see if we can scan them and try to store the digitize version with special desk tools into some data storage.

We are creating a bot more from a business user prospect, not product development. We have help from our developer who is approaching this from a business user. He is creating a light bot for the technical area, but we don't have any direct business users, as of now. For some of the finance and IT departmental people, we will tell them how to create light bots so they can try to do Excel automation on their own.

Our clients have Citrix environments. We are looking forward to automating their environments.

We are empowering our users to do processes faster. With Automation Anywhere, our clients can get their work done fast and in an automated manner.

The primary use case is data extraction: How to extract the data and run the components alongside it.

I have been using version 11 Community Edition, which is good. After coming to Bangalore and this morning session, they showed an example of A2019, which is the latest version. That is a game changer. What we did not have in the previous version has included in this version. I had a little preview of all the changes, and I'm pretty impressed by it.

Automation Anywhere has a Bot Store. E.g., you can download the bot from the Bot Store and utilize it's data extraction capabilities. You can extract unstructured data through IQ Bot. Getting unstructured data is not difficult. I once obtained an 84 page PDF file using an IQ Bot. This was just the trial version, and it was really good. I was able to get all the circuit IDs and properties that wanted in a simple CSV format. I had not seen anything like this before. When compared to other platforms, such as UiPath, they don't have these capabilities right now. They have activities like PDF extraction, but that's not good enough. That is a reason I'm referring Automation Anywhere as a game changer.

I would like more cognitive abilities, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. E.g., if I see you, your facial recognition has to be there. If I send your picture, it should tell me your name, where you are from, and when I met you because we forget people. It should have these type of capabilities. 

Stability is a key factor. It is pretty stable. After they launch the cloud version, whether you are in my country or I'm in your country, it won't matter. You can access it anywhere. You won't need a version to download or install. 

Right now, I have it on my laptop, but when it is on the cloud, it will be more stable. Anybody will be able to access it. That's the beauty of it.

The scalability is pretty impressive. You can scale it from one computer to hundreds of computers. You don't even need Citrix. Once it is on the cloud, you can access it from anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere technical support is pretty good. I would rate them as an eight out of 10. I'm giving them an eight out of 10 because this community is still developing right now. I will not say it's fully developed. We are in a market where other contenders are also there. It is a very neck and neck competition between UiPath, Blue Prism. and Automation Anywhere. Between them, somebody is good at some things, and somebody is good at others. That is why I cannot give the support a 10 out of 10. However, because of this product's features, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a 10 out of 10.

My sales team did the decision-making. We are in negotiations for some other clients, as well.

Our previous programs have run successfully with it.

I've used UiPath as a developer. Now, I'm using Automation Anywhere as well. When I compare both, the biggest point is cognitive abilities. The IQ Bot is the best in class. You won't find that even in UiPath. 

All the available versions of competing automation tools are available, UiPath or Automation Anywhere. Download them and think about it, then decide for yourself. 

Cost cutting is the primary reason to look at getting an RPA solution. Humans are not intended to do just manual work. If I give that manual work of 14 minutes, 30 minutes. or one hour to some bot, and it can do the work without any problems. That time is now yours, and you can do something else. You can build relationships, you can have a friendship with somebody, or you can do something nice. This is what we humans were intended to do.

I'm certified in a UiPath, and now I'm going to gain my certification in Automation Anywhere.

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.