Automation Anywhere Reviews

All of our solutions are implemented mostly for banking.

We have an offline biller, which is for reconciliation & settlement of offline biller data operations. We have similar automation for online billing.

The ATM (Automated Teller Machine) monitoring is automated. This includes the monitoring of operational processes on mutual fund & bonds transactions (upload and reconciliation).

We have a process for reconciliation of the billing statement before sending data to the customer.

DRI: Reconciliation charge back & note for SICS (AS400).

We use eight Bot Creator instances, nine Bot Runners, and two Control Rooms.

To show how Automation Anywhere has improved our business, I will explain one of my solutions in the ATM Monitoring use case. Previously, humans had to monitor the ATM status for 24 hours to find out the status of the ATM in the event of fraud or theft. With the RPA, every hour it will download the ATM status data from the ESQ application and compare it with all problem tickets that are still open. Every time a status mismatch occurs, the RPA will send info to the team via email and WhatsApp.

Process Description: ATM Monitoring

• Recap machine problem data according to status and sort by each vendor automatically.
• Send notification & report via email and WhatsApp.
• Schedule adjustment in sending notifications and reports.

Process Steps:

• The Bot will automatically download problem and faults ticket data from ESQ.
• The Bot will compare problem and faults ticket data automatically and sort each vendor for terminal IDs with tickets that are still open but have no faults.
  
• The Bot will send data that has been recorded and processed automatically to each vendor via email and WhatsApp.
• The Bot has a schedule adjustment function related to sending ticket data to each vendor.

Master Data Bank: 00.00 WIB
Supervisor Mode: 00:10 to 05:00 WIB
No Transaction: 14:00 to 00:00 WIB
Outstanding Ticket: 07:00 to 19:00 WIB

The benefits we get from automation include faster and more accurate matching, running 24x7.

One Control Room, one Bot Runner, and one Bot Creator are required. 

Time saved: 45 minutes per bot, per process, and two hours for three status updates.

Applications involved: Outlook, Excel, Browser.

One very useful feature is the IQ Bot, which is helpful in the operation of the data input process to all of their applications. Initially, humans had to read one per one document, but with the IQ Bot, it is continuous until the input process is complete.

Currently, IQ Bot is implemented by a finance company that is concentrating on motorbike financing. There are many claim documents that must be processed and inputted to their internal application, and using the IQ Bot reduces both cost and time.

My suggestion for version A2019 is to enable the Metabot function because it helps us in a shortcut to the integration process with other applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Cyber​Ark.

It would be helpful if Device Credentials can sync with Active Directory so that for the IT policy case that requires periodic password resetting, there is no need for a human to input manually into each Bot Runner machine.

The quality of the IQ bot can be further refined for scanned documents.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about two years, since 2018.

After using the A2019 version, I find that it is more stable and features more actions. However, maybe because this is a new version with a change in platform, it still has some bugs.

The support from the AA team was very helpful when I encountered issues that I couldn't solve on my own. The ability of the support team is very good and helpful.

From the start, I have only used Automation Anywhere for RPA.

At the initial project commencement in 2018, it was still complex. With the experience of AA projects, it became easier for us to start them.

We implement using an internal team. To improve development skills, I always suggest taking the AA certification and participating in the training.

We did not evaluate other RPA options.

The current version has a fresher UI and more Excel processing features. That's what I admire.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stability is great. We have very few issues. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The use cases I use Automation Anywhere for are for healthcare and revenue.

From the customer's perspective, the biggest benefits are automation of the security and monitoring systems. Our automation consumption has increased considerably since we began using Automation Anywhere. Initially, we were using two or three bots. Now, we have almost 25. In terms of revenue, we can save around $10 million through automation. We still have room to expand, and we're looking to implement more bots, especially IQ bots, but we have some concerns about the accuracy level. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to learn for business users without technical knowledge. For example, I don't have much technical knowledge, but I learned how to use the solution from Automation Anywhere University. It's a user-friendly solution everyone can understand and implement in their business with the help of Automation Anywhere University. The university is more than enough to develop a small bot. It's a comfortable platform. Even the new employees who don't know about automation can gain experience. It only took me about one month to learn the solution. 

The IQ Bots have a lot of room for improvement in terms of accuracy level. We need to improvise a lot. I'm facing another big challenge with one of the use cases. We raised a ticket and did multiple follow-ups with support, but the accuracy still isn't up to the mark. 

We've been exploring FortressIQ and tools that use AI/ML in the past three or four months. We're looking at ways to implement those tools in new areas, but there is a gap because Automation Anywhere University doesn't have much information about them yet. 

We have web recording applications, so we need something like AI to be involved where we can give a verbal command, and the bot can learn to do an automated process. That's the kind of technology or innovation required from the business perspective. If a business consultant can interact with a generative AI or some other advanced AI that can act as a developer, the development cost will come down drastically. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for more than six years.

I rate Automation Anywhere support seven out of 10.

Neutral

I don't deal with purchasing, but I know that Automation Anywhere is more cost-effective than Blue Prism. I won't say the cost is low, but I can say that it's cost-effective. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of 10 overall.

Our primary use cases for Automation Anywhere (AA) are billing, email automation, and ticketing.

Most of the features of Automation Anywhere (AA) are good, but one big feature which I really like is its OCR (optical character recognition) feature.

Another important feature of this solution is how it handles variables, e.g. my engineers don't need to have complete programming expertise, and they don't need to declare variables and get variables captured on the fly.

I also find the accuracy rate of this solution valuable, and I like that it performs better after implementation. Most of the features of this solution are amazing.

Multiple things still need to be improved in Automation Anywhere (AA), and the key thing is its error handling command, though it has come a long way from the previous version. This solution still has a lot to improve on error handling, especially when compared to other platforms that are doing very well.

Another area for improvement is its file handling. Automation Anywhere (AA) now supports automating file-related operations, but that still needs to be improved. We can directly import and do the script, e.g. the script feature is new and is found in the latest version, but still needs a lot of improvement.

An additional feature I'd like to see in this solution is more scripting integration. Integration needs to be fluid, e.g. integration of different items are in the latest version, but it always comes with limitations.

If a more fluid integration can be built into Automation Anywhere (AA), I can go and unpack a project file, open it, then from there, I'll know that we need to extract the data. Currently, the native RPA takes a whole lot of time to open a particular file, then read the data. It's always easier to utilize the data frame, read and slice the data, then take what's next. In that note, we can enable the RPA within itself, e.g. in-house data solution that can be integrated, making it a better solution. There is an integration feature in Automation Anywhere (AA), but it's not that fluid, and it's not easy to integrate. We always have to build something outside and integrate the whole process, and this needs to be improved.

I have experience with Automation Anywhere (AA) within the last 12 months, and I've been leading projects in a product manager capacity. I've worked with this solution for three years, using the previous generation and the latest generation, e.g. the 2019 version. I handled the implementation of the previous version and the transition and migration to the 2019 network.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has a lot of stability issues. It needs a lot of maintenance. If it runs 24/7 in the server, it's fine, but on the development machines or the VM (virtual machines), it isn't. We really need someone to attend to it, e.g. that person has to monitor the VM, then if an issue starts from the control room, we need to identify what's going on, then we may need to do something to the machine, or to the application. This is a problem in the previous version and the current version, and this solution hangs at times, for no reason at all.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is scalable, but we have not tried to scale it to a larger instance. The implementations we currently have are on-premises, and our costs are limited. We test if this solution works fine for the demos with clients we have worked with, but on the production side, we haven't tried to scale it for more than 20 or 30, and that's the limit we have.

I've contacted and escalated to the technical support team for this solution multiple times. I would rate them 3.5 out of five. They are quick to give support, but it could vary. Their second level technical support are good, but their first level technical support require a lot more insight into the tool and how they're handling issues.

The initial setup for Automation Anywhere (AA) was straightforward, but the current deployments we are working on are a bit complicated because these are switch solutions, and they are not straightforward.

We have multiple systems communicating with each other, e.g. the SaaS systems we need to interface with, then we have other data that we need to introduce to these systems. Because Automation Anywhere (AA) is an on-premises platform, we are looking into whether implementing or deploying it will be safe, but I believe it is safe. In most cases, when it comes to switch solutions where you want to switch your RPA on top of other automation or other technologies, it can be complicated, depending on the technology you're with. It can be complicated when you want to integrate with other systems.

We're paying for a yearly package for Automation Anywhere (AA). It's not a standard license. It's a license package, e.g. it comes with the fee for automation, or the license for the product, and anything beyond that, we pay a base fee, and whether we utilize it or not, it's paid for, and it has to be allocated. That's the current deal we have. What would be better is for them to have different packages for different types of organization.

As Automation Anywhere (AA) is an RPA platform, we have development users and end users, e.g. we have 14 developers who are working on it, and they are direct developers, then we have six citizen developers from the business side, who are certified and are using this product.

Automation Anywhere (AA) always requires maintenance, so we always need maintenance engineers to monitor the application around the clock. Because of cost implications, most clients don't use cloud solution assets, e.g. they use on-premises, which means a lot of maintenance is required.

My advice for people who want to start working with Automation Anywhere (AA) is to get a certification first, and then they also need to determine their purpose, e.g. what kind of case they want to work with. When their certification is ready, they still need to keep learning, especially when they run into issues. They should always get in touch with the forum, or they should get whatever knowledge or information they can take from their certifiers, or whatever organization they got their certification from. There is a learning curve, and it can either be quick to learn, or hard to learn.

I would rate Automation Anywhere (AA) an eight out of ten.

We are in services. We are consultants and we use these automation tools to automate processes for clients. I'm not using it for my own organization, however, I'm using it for clients' organizations.

Use cases are largely cross-business process automation, back office automation. It could be used in finance or accounting. It could be in underwriting, if it's an insurance client, for claims processing.

We have done automation largely in the lending space, including wealth management and customer onboarding. 

The solution helps with reducing operational costs, which can be reduced by up to 30% to 40% in savings in terms of operational cost. That's your basic benefit, which is delivered quite well.

It's usually the RPA functionality that I prefer, which is more widely used. They also have an IQ Bot for document processing, which is a bit of advanced OCR. That's not used as frequently as their RPA tool.

The stability is good.

As it is on the cloud, it's quite scalable. 

Their OCR is a bit expensive, meaning the IQ Bot. There are a lot of customers who don't want to use it due to the price tag. Maybe if they price it more aggressively, it could be widely used as well. Otherwise, it has pretty much industry-leading functionalities, similar to any other RPA tool. 

In general, their roadmap is well defined and we are pleased with its offering. 

I've used the solution for about two years. 

The solution is pretty stable. It's good. Whenever there are issues, there are frequent platform upgrades provided by the vendors. It's very stable.

The scalability is great as it is on the cloud. It can be scaled up pretty fast.

On average, I would say, per company that we've seen, there are close to 50 to 100, users - depending on the size of the organization. If it's a small bank, they have somewhere around 20 to 30 users, however, if it's a large company, it's closer to 100 to 200 users. We work with the solution on a daily basis.

We tend to contact technical support once a month. We deal with them pretty regularly. 

I'm also familiar with UiPath. UiPath and Automation Anywhere are often used in many organizations. UiPath can be on-prem or on the cloud, however, AA is basically now on the cloud. 

What we've largely seen is clients more using VBA or .NET-based automation solutions. Before moving into these platforms, either an Automation Anywhere or UiPath was used.

The initial setup is pretty simple and if any issues are noted, the vendor can assist.

The platform can be set up in two to three months. I have not seen clients directly start on the cloud version. Usually, people have had on-prem which they have migrated to the cloud. Basically, the on-prem setup took two to three months. Maybe if there are new clients who are starting directly with cloud, it could be lesser, maybe a month or so. 

From then on, subsequent automation of processes can take anywhere between two to four months, depending on the complexity. If you have a simple business process, for example, invoice processing or claims payment, that can take one to two months. If you have something more complex, that can take anywhere between two to three months.

In terms of the amount of maintenance, it depends on how many processes have been automated. Usually for a small-scale setup, if there are 50 bots or there are 50 automation, there could be maybe 5 FTEs required to maintain it. If the operations are large, with thousands of bots, the team size can vary anywhere between 30 to 50 FTEs. The larger the operations are and the larger number of processes that have been automated, the bigger the support team requirements are. On average, 1% should be able to support 6 to maybe 10 automations.

There's support from the vendor, so I don't see a major challenge in setting this up.

While the RPA is still competitively priced, usually IQ Bot is expensive. That's what we have seen.

For the OCR, my understanding is that it's a one-time cost. I've seen instances where it's $15,000 or so and on top of that there is some cost on every document processed or maybe a bunch of documents. Per every 1,000 documents processed there is a cost that is recurring. That said, the initial one-time cost is quite high.

We are AA partners. 

I would recommend the solution based on its scalability and stability. 

Generally, people who adopt these tools do a tool assessment between multiple vendors. Usually, we have seen that it's either UiPath or Automation Anywhere that is shortlisted. These two seem to be the most preferred options.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is for our shared service center that is located in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. These are our key target areas.

For a finance process, we are able to initially do it at segment level. We handle one section, then automate that section. We will then move onto the payroll side and automate that part of it. At a higher level, we are able to merge both processes. Now, we are able to do end-to-end automation: 

1. From creating a quotation.
2. To creating a purchase order.
3. To doing a payment to the vendor.
4. To payment to our employees. 

We are able to visualize the areas of automation as well as do the automation in a fast manner. That's one of the immediate contributions that we are having.

The turnaround time of building bots is quick. We are deploying around four bots per month. The turnaround time to get a design, build, and deploy is very fast. This is very good for us. It has helped us out when scaling up in a better manner.

We want them to have a clear roadmap on what they want to do and follow it. If they are moving to version 11, we want them to stay with that version. Now, I hear that they have a new version out there. I have to plan out every upgrade or movement from one landscape to another. This is a cost for us. I have to get buy-in from my leadership. That becomes a challenge for me. I need assurances that wherever you are going, you are clear on what you want to do. You don't end up with doing multiple upgrades every now and then. It's not a sustainable solution for us.

One of the things that I see in the forums is they are planning to build an ML platform on it soon, whereby we can use RPA as a starting point and have leverage on all the machine learning services available across multiple vendors: Azure, Google, and Amazon. I'm really interested to see how that works because we are already using those entities but in a different manner. We want to see how all of them work together as a platform. That's one of the requirements we are looking for.

I would like them to have more collaboration with SAP and Oracle, as those are our key products. This would provide more value for us.

The biggest challenge that I have with Automation Anywhere is the pace of upgrades that they do. We are not an IT company, we are a mining company. We are very conservative in doing our upgrades and moving from one platform to another. Upgrades are one of the challenges we are having with Automation Anywhere.

Stop upgrading, it's a pain for me. Or, make it easy. I would like a plan for it. Every time they upgrade, I have to upgrade my systems. I have to make sure that all the test bots are working fine, and this is a cost for us.

We are now scaling it up on the operations side for people literally sitting in the mines. They want to use Automation Anywhere for their day-to-day operations. That's the next scalable area that we're looking at.

We have developed a competency within the team as well as with our partners but we are at a juncture where we want to scale up. We are figuring out how we want to do it. One of the discussions that happened in today's forum was the different operating models we can have: a COE, business unit, or federated model. Today, I'm having calls with couple of Automation Anywhere guys to understand the best fit for us. That's how we will decide how we can scale up. We have the potential but we need to do it in a manner that can be sustainable over a period of time. 

The technical support is really good. The response time is good from the support team. When we reach out to them, it is only when we have a problem. Most of our team is a bit on the aggressive side if they feel the bots are not working well, but the language and communication that the operations team uses when dealing with us is very smooth. It helps us calm down and come to realistic expectations because we can't expect every problem to be solved in the first day. Their communication and interaction are really smooth. 

Our customer success manager has been really good at her job.

This was our first RPA solution.

When we started out initially out, we were told that the infrastructure we had would be supported by RPA. We were going to use Amazon as one of our platforms, but it did not happen, so we had an initial challenge. We were behind our schedule by around seven months because of this mistake. Both of us learnt from our mistakes. We now have a sustainable RPA. But, at the start, this was one of the big challenges, selecting the right infrastructure.

We have already seen ROI. We show ROI in terms of productivity. We are already clocking in around 7000 hours of savings per month

IQ Bots are very costly. It's not a sustainable bot for us as of now. We will look for better, alternate options for that.

We had two options: UiPath and Automation Anywhere. UiPath was the cheaper option for us but the cyber security standards of Automation Anywhere were better compared to UiPath. UiPath got rejected because of that. Automation Anywhere has passed our cybersecurity standards, and that is why it was our preferred option.

SAP is also launching its own RPA tool. Therefore, it will be tough to convince my management why I should stick with Automation Anywhere until they provide the intelligence part. Though, I think they are on the right track.

Learn from our mistakes. Choose the right RPA product and partner. The initial mistake that we did was that we wanted to do it on our own. If you are not an IT company, don't get into that. Learn from partners and use them. Use the right partner and learn from Automation Anywhere too, as they have done their own mistakes. Learn from them. Instead of assuming that you know everything and getting into the RPA world. That's the wrong choice.

Automation Anywhere is doing well compared to the market.

My company' objective in using this tool is to automate every rule-based operation possible. We're looking forward to automating anything that does not need a human to make a judgment call. We have automated most operations in several applications, including mainframe, Linux, web-based URLs, Citrix automation, and in Excel extensively. We have done a variety of projects but we are looking forward to growing more into other areas that we have not yet explored.

The biggest value that I see from the product is the way it works in general. The unattended mode that Automation Anywhere promotes, works great. That is the best thing, I would say. It runs code that performs on a virtual machine unattended. No one gets involved in the triggers because the bot controls the tasks. When you use a person to manually monitor a task, such as getting a quality check done, automating the task to work unattended eliminates all the human effort. It's a solution that is quite simple and straightforward to implement and is available 24/7, 365 days. No disaster recovery is required as the server is always intact because processes run to assure uptime, security, etcetera.

We are aiming to have 100% unattended runs. We don't want attended runs because it increases bandwidth which is not great for support guys and clogs the system. Also, you can have some unattended InfoSec (Information Security) breaches and things. We constantly aim to have the best. At the moment performance is not 100% but I would say it is constantly improving.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to operate by working on AA-level development without all the trouble of having VMs set up, setting up ports for it, having the environment so that the developers can work on it, etcetera. With Automation Anywhere, I don't think we need a technical guy, an IT guy, or specifically a specialist engineer to accomplish things. Automation Anywhere is that good. A layman who has a keen interest or even a little bit of curiosity can learn the product end-to-end, sustain himself if he wants, learn how the VM is developed down by the ports. The product and support make it easy to learn. The knowledge is readily available.

The whole package that Automation Anywhere offers is really good. The variety of commands that it offers made to play well with other integrations. It could be using a C# module, code on JSM, the APIs — I want to use database XM. Ultimately, I want to use anything that makes it friendly for me to accomplish what I need to. That is a help because it often will be something I have already learned, it will be easy to access, easy to build, easy to sustain — as long as the commands work as expected.

Unattended Automation is the best feature for me. Because I use it extensively, it is also one feature I am very familiar with and so it is also one of the areas that I would like to see more improvements on. Any time I speak with people who promote automation and say that it is unattended, they may have a machine perform an operation. Very few understand that each unattended operation packet is unattended at all times. No matter what time of the day, if you just click Run once and it operates to get something done. You don't continuously relaunch it.

In my current role, the only thing that I focus on is how sustainable the code is. It has to run for a long time — years. I am expected to run extensive testing. So, in this position, I'm working on the current stability of all the commands and how that can play into the future. I'm not looking for new features. Really the opportunity for automation is already offering this opportunity to create your own features. Adding new features is almost too much. If I've got enough tools to use, I should learn to utilize them first. Use them and then maybe get something new once I have exhausted the possibilities. There are already enough options that AA provides to use. The commands that it offers out of the box are okay for people to begin to work with it. If you don't know it, all you have to do is ask. 

It is not an end-to-end solution for everything, but it is very good at what it does with allowing automation and freeing up other resources — both human and hardware. It is not an end-to-end solution for everything.

The only area for me that I would consider as an improvement is sustainability in areas I face every day. On CSM (Central Management System), for the most part, it works every time, but those areas exist where it does not perform as expected. For example, we had a problem with our ticketing system. What we do is we have a ticket open so that the issues stay open for a week even if we have it fixed. It is supposed to stay in the system continuously for a week — a hyper-care period — so that the issue stays open and we are sure the issue is fixed. That hyper-care period never seemed to end in the application. The problem was it extends a week, to two weeks, to three weeks, but we did not achieve that four-week period of no error of the full runs for the solution.

We worked at resolving the issue and thought we fixed it permanently. We locked in the solution. We were happy. We almost won. Then in a week, we had a reversion to the same problem without making a change. It was not possible to explain. It is my only concern that some things get handled erroneously or changed. 

Without question, Automation Anywhere is generally a stable product. It's not like I can bank on it always performing. I know a few bots we created are not perfect, but I also know that most of them — 60% of my bots — are good. No one calls me about them from the time they're deployed. I haven't had a single escalation or a single error reported about them. This is great.

I still have the other 40%. I think some things go wrong in situations you face unexpectedly or an error occurs. This is not the way it is supposed to be. It's supposed to be really easy: just plug it in and you have the service. But it doesn't work sometimes.

It is frustrating at times to experience this instability, but we do find a solution and we are working on it to be better. With the new version and features that AA is proposing, it looks promising that we can achieve that goal. It looks like the new version will be really stable compared to the version I am currently in, but I will never be sure until I use those new versions.

Another form of stability is in upgrades. Currently one of the pain-point areas on my to-do list is migration to 11.3.2. We have been working on it for almost a month now. We haven't reached the deployment stage. When I migrated to 10, I had some bots that no longer worked after the upgrade. It was not expected. We got on a call to support to explore the problem and had to resolve them.

Right now, I'm not really sure when to migrate. We have 50 bots and every fortnight, there's a part that goes wrong. If I have to take the action and migrate into a new platform — 11.3 2019 A — there is something of a leap of faith. I'm really not sure that I can take that leap now considering the relative stability that I'm experiencing at the moment.

Working with Automation Anywhere, I have been taking steps to use more of the functionality in the product. In a migration, I will want to use the new version as extensively as I have used the current version. At each step, the newer versions were better than what I have used in the past and I have used version 8, version 9, and now version 10. I've used these three versions and there have been improvements each time. We're seeing improvements to come, which I'm looking forward to exploring. But we have to be sure the migration point is realistic.

A lot of times that I have raised issues with support, the command in question is simply not performing. Object learning may not be working as expected, an action's not executing or it is not connecting to the database at all. The simplest solution is often to copy basic commands and replace them and it works. With the number of calls I made to Automation Anywhere, the guys know me now because I have so many issues. They work with me on it. We try to find solutions. At the end of the day, we find some way or other — a shortcut, say, or copy and paste — and get the code to work. We may not be able to figure out the root cause as an answer so that it doesn't happen again. The bottom line may be that the code might be corrupted, my part of the implementation is corrupted, the ATMX (Automation Anywhere Task Files) part is corrupted, etcetera. But the patches are not a perfect solution when I'm in charge. It's a lot to know a process well enough to fix the root cause of an issue. But these concerns remind me that Automation Anywhere as a tool is great, but there are areas to improve.

Automation Anywhere is definitely scalable in several ways. It's easy and accessible. It's designed the best — almost perfect. It has many more usable components than I was familiar with, and I had so much to learn. Now, with some experience, it is not foreign, and we just don't need to build to get what we want. But to get that you need to start at the design phase, you should not start at development at all. People try — even me — when you're starting, just to aim at building usable components. We can ask a developer to do that, but then the developer will not design to build a reusable component. It will only be specific to his assignment, the development, his process, and he will get it done to complete the job.

Scalability starts with a designer who is the one who makes the call. They need to know what to standardize or how to do things by thinking globally to make sure that a resolution is usable and adaptable if desired. That is the standard we adopted. Other big companies have more bots compared to our 50. They may think what they have is a lot more scalable than it is.

We have ongoing support from AA. I appreciate Automation Anywhere support when I talk to them. There are quite a few hiccups as we go along. At times I don't get straight to the support people when you need them as they are busy supporting other users. But the response has been great.

The setup is a bit complex but it is not so bad if you are a little interested and a little curious in learning about the product. It helps to have a little background knowledge on how it works, what are the features that you need to look for, what logs you need, etcetera.

Some basic guidelines will help you along in the initial setup — a basic brush-up on what to do and expect can suffice. Of course, there is the AA's guide that you can follow if you don't know what to do. Initially, when we didn't know the server, we didn't know what are the application calls were, the documentation did help. It was not that complex to do the installation, but the IT guys did not support it. They were surprised I wanted to learn about everything and work with another product when they had resources to accomplish what was needed.

If you choose to try it out, when you need to know more, ask for help. If you're ready to set up deployment, start from some base and set a restore point.

For those who are considering Automation Anywhere as a solution, I would ask how good their team was already. To take on a new product and take a chance that people will try to enhance their skills by learning it may not be the best course of action. Many will have to learn something new and do better than they did with previous solutions by learning and using AA. If the response is that they have hardcore developers, web designers, C# developers, etcetera. They may be looking for quick resolutions, hardcore development and coding bit. They will want any other product or UI that appears to give you far more than AA. AA does all of that — it is not that it isn't able to do it — but it's easy and it is different. With other solutions, you will need someone with that knowledge and ability to code in a particular language. But AA is a platform that can be used as an opportunity for people to up-skill themselves. That's something that is different compared to any other code.

AA commands are not the same as other languages. It has its own dictionary, its own library, its own way of working. I see that this is the same thing mentioned by others as to what they think about the product. It is possible to learn it by just using the Q&A.