Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use Automation Anywhere in our HR department for onboarding and attendance verification. We also utilize it in our Finance department for bank transaction reconciliation, and in our assets department for multiple data entry of assets in the system.

Automation Anywhere has helped us integrate different data entry systems.

It has a low learning curve and can be utilized for traditional automation with minimal training.

Automation Anywhere has saved hundreds of working hours per year for our organization.

It is capable of providing automation on a large scale. The technology is remarkable.

In the latest release of Automation Anywhere, version 360, new features have been included to facilitate connectivity with APIs, RPA bots, business applications, and documents. Additionally, users can now leverage their own language and Python for enhanced functionality.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase the consumption of automation.

The most valuable aspect of Automation Anywhere is its ease of use.

The optical character recognition of various documents and templates, particularly when using the Arabic language, has room for improvement.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years.

With the new release, Automation Anywhere is extremely stable.

Automation Anywhere is scalable and capable of adapting to any new requirements and technologies.

The initial setup requires some expertise. We formed a team to handle the preparation, installation, and configuration of the platform internally.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The pricing for Automation Anywhere is reasonable.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten. I appreciate their solution, as they continuously improve by addressing the gaps.

In Concentrix, my role is as an asset manager. It's very much focused on the RPA practice globally, which is why we come from enablement to delivery and support. End-to-end is something that is managed by me.

One thing I really like about Automation Anywhere is the product has actually taken leaps in the last three years. We started with the conventional RPA type of use cases. But, in the last two years, with the help of IQ Bot, and what I learned today about this Attended Automation 2.0, I think they are addressing vital key challenges that we have faced so far. The description on top of the description is what their model is. They're partnering with us in this journey of transformation. The type of technology advancement that they have done will certainly help us a lot.

They are constantly being in the BPO space and BPO and RPA are something which go hand in hand in technology. It is the right space for the utilization of this technology in the industry. While our customers are also asking for us for this technology benefit for the revenue benefit, productivity benefit, efficiency, etc. In the last two years, we have leveraged it for multiple clients, whether for telecom, healthcare or other spaces, it has been a very strong partnership that has really helped us.

RPA is something which was their best product. It was easy to config, easy to record, and deploy on the floor. With their IQ Bot, I am very much convinced that was the area where we started tapping unconventional use cases, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all those things bundled together. With this cognitive capability, we went from 30 to 40 percent use cases which we are able to address and have leaped over to a wider space of 50 to 60 percent with this cognitive bot.

There are many things which I have liked in the last couple of months that I have seen in Automation Anywhere. Something that really excites me is the new release of Attended Automation 2.2. It's a very lightweight solution. When I'm talking about the automation of the size from 2,000 to 20,000, and everyone is using the attended bot with this scale and thin client model, we can easily deploy and scale it out to the larger corporate size. So, this product is very unique and I have not seen it in any of Automation Anywhere's competitors. They came out with it.

The product is quite stable. I don't know how to code the the other products which we have used. One thing with the bot that we are always with struggling is the memory management. The Automation Anywhere product is quite stable in that perspective. Security and other things are very well managed by Automation Anywhere. The third piece is the architecture is very much centrally governed. This makes this product more robust.

In the last two years, one thing which Automation Anywhere has changed and they actually worked on is the support and enablement part. That will be the key game changer for them. Because if I compare them with other competitors who are in the space of Automation Anywhere, the customer experience (where we are the customer) is there when you need them. The support is available on time. That is where I think Automation Anywhere is wonderful.

It was very straightforward. I don't know if it was because of the training which was given or if it was because of the application itself, but it was very straightforward to start the journey of RPA using Automation Anywhere. Whether it's a complex use case or low complex use case, I think Automation Anywhere does give you that flexibility that you can start your journey seamlessly.

One thing that we are just changing now: When this automation journey started, everyone was talking about ROI. E.g., I'm investing X amount into the technology, and I'm now trying to cannibalize on efficiency. We are not leveraging automation just for cost reduction. The business is now leveraging automation to get it into this space where we were not able to get so far. So, the dimensions of ROI are not only cost reduction. The dimension of all ROI have been changed to scalability, compliance, some other new business go-to market strategies, etc. Those things are very much changed from the way it was here previously.

This is tricky. We all know who is in the quadrant and the leading there. In the last five years, we actually worked closely with them. Everyone does have their own pluses and minuses. But, if I talk about Automation Anywhere, their cognitive bot is one of their unique selling points.

We are able to sell it very easily compared to its competitors. Another piece is the stability part. The third piece is something which is the customer experience: The ease to work with it. The Automation Anywhere, as a partner, is very easy to work with. They are there when you need them, whether you are in the initial journey of automation, you are figuring out what is the right opportunity, or whether you are in the journey of deploying the bot or support. They are there with you at each of those stages.

These things really make them different compared to their competitors. I'm sure if they will continue focusing on these they will be leading in this space.

So far, it's a 10 (out of 10). If there's anything which will change, I will let you know. But so far, the experience with Automation Anywhere in the last two and a half years has been wonderful. My best wishes to the team.

I use it to develop for the HR domain, where I am using Oracle PeopleSoft and Salesforce applications. Mostly, I use the object cloning command and Excel operations. 

I work in a banking company. We use Automation Anywhere for global HR payroll operations and payslip-related automation. We have also automated hedge loans and credit card approvals.

We use versions 10.3 and 11. Compared to 10.3, version 11 is good and easier to automate because they introduced more options. You can also automate complex things. They introduced the Control Room feature too. 

It is installed on-premise at our company.

We are using Automation Anywhere for our leave approval process. We used to have three FTEs on the day shift working on this process. Now, we only have one FTE working on the leave approval process. The bot supports everything else in the process. With this bot, we are saving the cost of two FTEs.

• OCR
• Object cloning
• Excel automation
• Reusable
• Scalability
• Code free

Most back-end operations start with Excel. With Automation Anywhere, we can easily automate the CSV in Excel operations. It is integrated with Microsoft Office 365.

The Control Room feature is very good.

We are using Taskbot for attended automation and unattended automation.

From the Bot Store, we can download bots. We can analyze the code. I have downloaded some bots just for coding standard purposes.

I would like more integration with Microsoft Excel. More screenshots that can be integrated with Excel would help our customers too. It is good that Automation Anywhere is now willing to partner with Microsoft.

I need to be able to work on Citrix with the solution. 

I need cloud-based applications. Now, we are manually running the application.

The stability is good.

The scalability is perfect. It is a reusable product.

We have around 200 bots in the entire company. We have allocated separate systems for these bots. We have almost 350 processors that we have automated using the bots. 

I have not used their technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

For the bot creation process, we have a solution architecture team. They will analyze the process and check for feasibility before proceeding to next level. They'll check whether the process can be automated, then prepare a document which will come to me. Then, I'll try to make the SDLC. I'll check whether the process is possible, then we'll go for development. This is the structure:

1. Analysis and feasibility study.
2. Documents preparation.
3. Development.
4. UAT.
5. Deployment.

There's a process requirement. If I get request today, it will take some two to three months to develop and close the incident.

A cost savings example is processing parental leave applications. The volume per day that one FTE can do is eight or nine applications. When using Automation Anywhere, we can do 15 applications per day. Another thing is the improvement in accuracy and reduction in errors.

I like Automation Anywhere better than UiPath because you can review the drag and drop activity. You can also review the code line by line. 

We are not using any other tools as we are partners with Automation Anywhere.

I used to work on UiPath. Automation Anywhere can easily be adopted and learnt. UiPath requires some programming skills and knowledge. Compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere is easy to learn with its drag and drop commands. In UiPath, the commands were difficult to work with and also architecture. 

Recently, Automation Anywhere introduced its cloud-based Control Room, where you can monitor the bot. Also, Automation Anywhere recently launched a mobile application, which UiPath doesn't have. 

Automation Anywhere has Credential Manager.

You can easily build and deploy the bots with it.

Train more people on a team to understand the tool to build teamwork. Share the development tasks.

Automation Anywhere has plugins for Excel, but we haven't integrated it with Oracle.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. I am certified in Automation Anywhere. I have the Advanced certification and am now doing the Masters certification. The courses were good and helpful for anyone wants to learn about Automation Anywhere. Everything is on the website, e.g., information about installation, configuration, bot development, and bot assessment. 

Automation Anywhere and RPA are not that difficult to learn. It can be learnt and be adopted easily, but you need at minimum practical knowledge. You need to take courses and scenarios. E.g., even if I know about object cloning, I still have to go and work with object cloning to understand the possibilities of object cloning.

We are not using IQ Bot.

Task schedules and runs are good candidates for bot automation.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using it to automate company processes all across our firm: finance, legal, compliance, and customer client account servicing.

We have the ability now to surveil all our employees for political contributions. This would previously take 40,000 hours for a human to do. By combining Automation Anywhere and Appian together, we have been able to build a bot that works with Appian workflows to manage all our employees.

The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages. I have been able to be a developer with Automation Anywhere without knowing the technical background. I am a business user, and not needing the technical knowledge to use the system has been useful for me.

The bot creation process is straightforward in some ways and complicated in others. You can get your initial stuff laid out really quick, but then putting in your exception handling is more time consuming. It is awesome because it takes two hours to get things initially done. However, then it takes another two months to work through everything else, such as infrastructure and moving from development to QA to production. 

When I change the name of a variable in the Variable Manager, I would really like it to change in the code. We just added coding standards where I had to spend hours going through and recoding existing bots, because anything needing a change had to match our coding standards, and that now includes variable names. I just spend two days renaming variables in a bot. While it should have been superfast in the Variable Manager, I had to go through every single line of code, rename all of them, and inevitability, I will miss one. If I have already assigned a variable do something, it makes sense that if I change the name of the variable, then it should change in the code.

We have had so many stability issues.

We had quite a few issues when we upgraded from version 10.5 to 11.2. We were struggling with those issues, only to find out that version 11.2 has known problems. We should have gone straight to version 11.3. Now, we are upgrading again.

We have had so many production support issues. In version 10.5, we lost the ability to run unattended bots. Our Control Room could no longer unlock our Bot Runner machines, and Zendesk could not help us. So, we spent two month babysitting every single bot that ran. Then, when we upgraded to version 11.2, we found out schedules vanish from the Control Room, which resulted in us babysitting the bots for another two months.

The technical support is not great. We have had issues where they close our tickets when we don't respond to their email within eight hours, but they email us on a Friday night.

I had two days where I was out of the office, and they closed tickets on me. This has happened to my co-workers, as well. This has been frustrating.

I really struggle with the support team and informing them of endemic issues. They try and explain it away, but I know enough to be aware that there is a bigger issues, such as what we experienced with versions 10.5 and 11.2 causing us to babysit bots.

Not having the support has been problematic for me.

We used a third-party vendor for the deployment. With our initial vendor, we were led to believe that they were experts. We have since come to realize this was not the case. We have changed vendors and reprogrammed our bots from the initial vendor. We are much happier with our current vendor. 

We measure ROI through a combination of hours saved, errors avoided, and quality of life, which are bots based on processes which humans can do quickly but hate doing them. We have a couple bots built around quality of life.

I would encourage anyone looking for an RPA solution to look around at other solutions in the market.

The ability to integrate the solution with other applications is hit or miss. We have a lot of homegrown applications, and sometimes those don't work. Mostly, they work well with websites until they change the websites.

We have done a proof of concept of the IQ Bot. We struggled with it because we have sales spreadsheet that go across more than one page, and IQ Bot cannot follow it across more than one page. Also, the dp1 requirements were too high for most of our use cases.

We don't use Citrix automation.

We have automated some fund management and fund reconciliation processes, which has been done successfully. The tool has been performing well. 

In our fund management and fund reconciliation process, we had a lot of headcount. Automation has significantly reduced our FTE count, investing that IT personnel into other work. Also, the quality of the work has slightly improved.

Our development time has been reduced because the solution is very user-friendly. You don't have to know a lot of things. It has an IDE with drag and drops, in addition to workflow development. This gives developers an edge to write code quickly.

I am a developer with nine years of experience in full-stack development. I have found this tool strikingly different, compared to the other tools, in terms of ease to use. Anybody can be taught it, and it has a very small learning curve.

Automation Anywhere has some limitation with its integrations. You can build your logic with MetaBots and .NET components, e.g., if something is not gathered by Automation Anywhere or built into functionality, you can write a MetaBot. A MetaBot is like an external component. You can write it through C# or .NET code, and make a DLL, and import it. This is not open to all data types or EXE functionalities which can be written through C#. You have to define your variable types, matching them with Automation Anywhere existing variable types. Because of the knowledge required, I cannot let another person, who doesn't know Automation Anywhere, build my external DLL code.

They are already addressing some concerns that I have been having, like having cascaded code blocks, which is very helpful for developers to use when finding and debunking codes. Until now, we haven't had collapsible cascaded code sections in Automation Anywhere. This is not typical, as any IDE will usually have it, on any language.

The current interface for business users is not intuitive, as it is a code-based view. A business user wanting to develop a process may find the interface a bit elusive. Automation Anywhere is now working on a process flow view with a drop and drop, which should be better for business users.

There is not much guidance for implementing DevOps, like continuous development. Nowadays, the technology has come for the deployment part, it should be part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD). 

With Jenkins or TeamCity, there is a job, and I want to see them have integration with Automation Anywhere, so we can directly code check-in, run, test, and deploy. Now, we are doing this manually for deployment, but I want to see a DevOps job instead.

We had couple of Windows' tools that we automated. The stability is remarkably good. 

In some cases with RPA web development, where we had to integrate with some websites, there were some problems in terms of reliability or stability. The issue is not constant. Different browsers, like IE, work well, where others, like Chrome, don't work well. With legacy websites, based on old technology, it also does not work well. 

The scalability is fine. You can create small, repeatable tasks. You can expand through different bots. So, you don't have to recreate the same stuff. Automation Anywhere provides the facility so you can reuse components to make a scalable solution.

We are improving scalability on a daily basis, as RPA is new to us. Our code is now more scalable and reusable than we developed our basic structure. Going forward, if we have to create a new bot with any given scenario, it will take 20 to 40 percent less time to create. This is because we have already made the scalable, reusable components.

In terms of accessibility, the Automation Anywhere technical support is the best. Out of all the RPA tools that I have used, their support forum is more agile and responsive. For any issue, we just have to create a ticket and a technical person will get assigned in no time. They are the best in terms of responsiveness, but I have mixed feelings about the quality of those responses. I feel sometimes to support their fast responses that they probably compromise their quality.

We used to get a lot of emails from the original fund management users (the consumers) asking about their estimated stock prices: monthly and biweekly. This information comes through a lot of emails. We had to read those email, classify and categorize them, then go into a different portal to get some more data, and finally, send them a result in an Excel format.

We used a consultant, and the deployment was very smooth. We have been maintaining three environments: development, UAT, and production. The deployment procedure is pretty simple. We just have to export from one to another environment where the dependency is just a package file. 

We are thinking of implementing Bot Insight and the CoE dashboard to calculate our ROI, since our bots are not analytics-based. We are just using our bots as a bot. They are not integrated with any analytics. I know that they have a CoE dashboard, where you can define parameters to automatically calculate ROI. At the moment, we are manually calculating our effort savings.

I don't agree with the IQ Bot licensing costs, which depends on the consumption of the document rather than per bot or user. This is confusing for me, because most of the cases for us in a possible future scenario, there would be a lot of invalid data to be scanned to get to real data. E.g., we would have to supply approximately 100 pages of scanned data to extract two pages of original data. In these type of cases, the IQ Bot might be a costly venture.

The company also looked at UiPath. From my understanding, Automation Anywhere was chosen for ease of use and licensing.

The IQ Bot seems interesting in the terms of populating semi-structured data and gathering intelligence of its own. Though, I haven't implemented in my project yet.

I didn't know Automation Anywhere seven to eight months back. All my learning came from the Automation Anywhere University. Though, I have experience in other RPA tools, the courses are really helpful, as they helped me to gather the knowledge needed to implement and master the product. Right now, I'm applying the information to my domain and company.

I haven't used it in a Citrix environment.

I very excited to see the next version of this product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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