Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are using Automation Anywhere for multiple automation processes. There are multiple clients with KPMG who have many automations going on.

In finance and accounting companies, they ask for report generations and record fetching from some data source type of tasks. They want it to be fetched and exported into forms, charts, etc. using automation. The task will happen when triggers are required based on some data sources. It is the data that will be exported and sent over mail. These tasks are mainly focused on organizations.

No other competitor has this email trigger, so it saves a lot of time if you automate the process. We don't need to fix a time for a task to run. It gives the feature of on demand execution for any task. Whenever a user wants, it can send a mail and get the task done as soon as possible. That is our main feature, I feel. 

There are multiple features, like PDF integrations, which are coming up. Task-related features to PDF integrations are coming up nowadays, so people want those executed and improved a lot in Automation Anywhere.

For improvement, I would like to see Automation Anywhere integrating with multiple other technologies. As of now, it is integrating with .NET. When it come to future technologies, I want Automation Anywhere to integrate with Python scripts, and make the execution easier. That will be very helpful, having our cognitive technologies interacting with Automation Anywhere.

On the basis of rating, I'll give a 90 percent to the process being stable. The remaining 10 percent is based on the change in the environment. If you change the environment from development to production or some other environment, then there are minor glitches which come into the process. But, that also can be handled a bit easier in Automation Anywhere.

It is very scalable. If we come to the point where we need to increase the number of bots in a process, for different countries or teams, we can add multiple bots and Bot Runners to the process, then we can execute. This gives a lot of scalability to the process.

The technical support team was very helpful on on our development. There were many cases where we needed their support and urgency. They gave a lot of support to us. They responded well quickly. That's what is required for our development or developer team, so I'm a bit happy with our technical support team from Automation Anywhere.

It's a bit straightforward. If you go through the user manual of Automation Anywhere, the stuff with automation there is quite easy. A layman or common man, who is new to the Automation Anywhere can install it quickly. So, it's easy.

There are a lot of savings in terms of effort and time as well as costs. Automation Anywhere automates a lot of processes. It allows an organization to save the efforts of a lot people. It saves a lot of time because people can't work a whole day (24/7), but Automation Anywhere bots can.

I'll rate it near an eight (out of 10) for Automation Anywhere. I'm giving this rating because the first thing which can be improved is integrating multiple technologies like Python, which can enable the developer and the process to run in a much better, faster way. The second thing is the automation that is available in Automation Anywhere can be improved. This will help other use cases to run.

The primary use case is to automate any type of process, mostly for payments, wealth management, and loans.

The bots replicate human behavior in front of a computer.

We are automating all our mundane processes, making people more creative.

• The most valuable feature is its Control Room.
• It is a user-friendly tool for developers and easy to learn.
• The product is easy to integrate.
• As a tool, IQ Bot is easy to use, powerful, and very competitive compared to others.

I would like a better code migration solution, because this is something that we do a lot.

It is a complex solution to make stable.

It is a powerful tool for scaling that sometimes makes the process seamless.

It took one year to scale to the amount of bots that we are currently using.

The technical support is very helpful. We have almost 24/7 support. We also have a representative who works closely with us to make sure everything get resolved as quickly as possible.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was complex.

The first time, we used an integrator for deployment. They were good, but we don't work with them anymore. Now, we work with Automation Anywhere.

We measure our ROI by the money that we save.

Our annual licensing costs are about $500,000.

We did not consider another vendor.

It is a great company with a great product and support. You should consider this tool if you want something powerful and user-oriented.

While I haven't taken any courses through Automation Anywhere University yet, my team has.

Our primary use for the product is to automate business processes. Mostly this means financial processing. We have a lot of use cases in finance. For finance alone, we have 30+ bots in production. Other bots are for a variety of other business uses like the supply chain, networks, and business processes. We have 400+ bots in production as of now, all together. 

We have automated business processes, like finance, supply chain, network systems, and payment systems.

We are using it on-premise and migrating it to the cloud at the end of the year.

The product has improved our organization by allowing us to better use our resources. We can have a strategy implemented using bots and make better use of our time instead of spending it on repetitive tasks or tasks the bots can do more efficiently.

The most valuable thing about using this product is that we are able to use the time that we spent doing manual processing for other progressive purposes. The bots we implement free up our time. The second best part is that we don't need to see the automated processes happening.

We have business user utilizing the bots who don't have any technical expertise. We trained them, and they're able to do a couple of minimal bots which are required for them.

For us at this point, I don't think the product needs more features. There is already a new release coming up with a bundle of new features which we will have access to and have to learn. As a user and developer, I only look at stability. That's it. I want the most stable environment — a stable version of the product — where I can close my eyes and sleep and the bots run and do their jobs.

The basic system is very ease to use, but the difficulty comes when we make changes. For example, any change in the name, even if we have wild characters in place, the bot fails to identify the filename. It identifies the same filename in non-prod, and it does not identify the file in production.

We need a more reliable tool. Sometimes, the same check (a 70 percent scan) identifies numbers, and sometimes it does not identify the numbers. We are not sure why it is behaving weird.

We don't use the Bot Store because it is not legal for us to use.

I have been using it for almost two years now.

On a scale of one to ten, I can rate the stability between seven and eight. We have found that sometimes a little change in the environment brings down an application or a bot stops working. We are working on that issue. Stability improved from three out-of-ten to between seven and eight. We hope to bring that stability up to at least a nine.

The solution is very easy, but the tool behaves weird sometimes, environment to environment. It is not as robust as it has been designed. The smallest changes will bring down the bot. It's not capable of environment to environment changes. We have to make sure that the bot is running in each environment. 

Be a little patient while developing because the tool behaves weird. Even 11.3 is not behaving well. Once it starts working, it will work.

As of now, we are migrating from a Micron database. Once we have completed that, we believe the scalability will be a cakewalk.

We have almost 500 bots spread across different portfolios. They are scheduled and running on daily basis.

We did not integrated this solution with any other applications. This is running as a standalone thing in our environment.

We are in different time zones, but we still get a response from technical support when we call. On a scale of one to ten, I can say tech support is an eight. The thing that would make support a ten is that we get a solution on the fly when we contact a person in support. Sometimes they provide us some other solution that we already know or a workaround. We don't need alternatives, we need solutions that work.

The login mechanism seems to be only understood by the AA guys. We raised a ticket since we don't understand the login mechanisms most of the time.

Initially, we did the certification program from Automation Anywhere University. It could be better than what it is. It might have been upgraded recently. We took it more than one and a half years back. The ease of doing the course could have been better. You need access to a system when going through the course and completing it. There was no simulation. We were in the initial stages of procuring the systems, so it was a little tough for us to complete the courses too.

I was not involved in the decision to move to Automation Anywhere. It was a big decision handed down from the top management.

The initial setup was complex. Because we are in the finance industry, the initial strategy had to take a lot of data into account which needs not to be secured and not exposed to the outside world. So we struggled a little with how that has to be implemented. For example, passwords are critical data. We came up with a cyber bot at that point in time to deal with the potential password issues. 

The business team has a lot of doubts about how Automation Anywhere is being implemented and the processes it affects.  Because of this, it was really a huge effort to make them understand what we are doing. Any time we would have to make changes to infrastructure, even a small change on the infrastructure side could make an application unstable or make a bot come down.

We have got to put in more hours at this point to make the implementation stable and further deployment possible.

Bot creation process:

1. We have a PDD document available once the use case is identified. 
2. Once the PDD is available, if it is a legal/security issue, then we go for the next stage: development. 
3. We develop the SDD. 
4. Based on the SDD, the bot is developed. 
5. Once it is all developed and the UAT testing is done, we'll show it again to the legal/security.
6. Then we go for the approval across the business teams. There will be lot of approvals required. 
7. Once it is approved, then it goes to production. 

We'll create a bot ID in-between once the use case is good.

Based on the complexity of the bots, it takes six to 16 weeks for us to create bots (pilot to completion).

Initially we did use a consultant to get going with the implementation. It was a small group of guys who were also in India who we had come to work with us. Our experience with them was good.

When all the big problems were solved and there was nothing immediate on the plate to resolve, we were able to make out what we needed to do and judge the steps to take ourselves. So we slowly got away from support from the implementation group. 

We are able now to rely on the support that we are getting from Automate Anywhere technical support.

We just started looking at the fruits of our labors to understand the return on investment so we do not have a clear picture of the actual value yet.

We are not converting to a dollar amount. We are saving time. Last year, we save around 50,000 hours.

For Runner we paid around five-thousand dollars and for Creator we paid around three-thousand dollars.

The cost depends on the environment of an organization. I don't have the exact figures, but these are the production figures provided to me. 

We don't have a license for cognitive document processing yet. We are identifying the use cases for it.

We also evaluated UiPath, and for the attended bots right now, we'll be using UiPath, not Automation Anywhere. When we evaluated Automation Anywhere, it did not reach the same level as UiPath for management on attended mode, e.g., a huge number of licenses on attended mode.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a seven. Because we did not explore any other RPA tool as of now, and we are exploring UI parts without knowing more, it is hard to compare. 

The only thing that keeps me from rating it higher independently is the stability. Maybe it's stable in some other companies, but somehow we don't seem to share that stability in our environment. Because we have virtual machines that have to be up and running all the time and they are mostly Windows-based, Windows may also one of the reasons why stability is not so good. I don't blame the automation tool directly, but it could be more robust.

As far as giving advice to people considering the product, I say to give it time and learn to use it because it is the best. If the process is clean, we can automate to any extent.

The primary use case for this solution ranges from the web scraping to working on more complicated applications, which are built in-house. For example, in the case where we would have to get into an application that is not automation-friendly, we would use the OCRs to recognize the fields, insert information into the application then extract some of the information. We also do a little on the database front.

We are a solution provider for a back-end team who works on a different manual task.

We tried the same type of flow automation using a Python and VB application, but we don't have the leverage of OCR which is available from Automation Anywhere. 

Most of the automation that we currently handle is that which has already failed when using the previous versions with the VBAs and Python.

We are using this product on-premise, so we still haven't upgrade to the cloud.

In our organization, we track the number of hours we saved, not work for the customers, but work for ourselves. 

Those numbers were tracked in a tracker called Smartsheet. We saved approximately 10,000 hours of work for ourselves. The numbers are staggering, considering we have only been using Automation Anywhere for a short period of time.

I have not worked with all of the commands offered in this solution, but some of the helpful features are OCR and web scraping. 

The OCR application is excellent and has helped resolve many issues that I had been facing. Also, to some extent, the web scraping is more effective, and the delays are really good.

I am also a programmer with VBA, but I found that I am more comfortable with Automation Anywhere, because it is faster and you get more results within a short period of time. we use the Excel VBA.

Most of the times you find the solution that you are looking for in the Bot Store. You might have to customize here and there. It is a good place to get into because somebody might have the same type of scenario. However, I have not used it extensively.

This solution should be more user-friendly so that our clients can take a bot that we have developed for them, and then run it by themselves. As it is now, we write the VBA code and give it to the user, our client, and then they run the code. However, they do not like this. Having this is the next release would be helpful.

Automation Anywhere is intuitive. Initially, you may struggle a little, but once you get used to it, then it's intuitive and you don't really have to know all the commands beforehand. There is scope for improvement here.

The feature often asked about by the users, the product owners, is that they want to learn more about the bots themselves.

We have not used anything attended. As far as we are aware that feature not available, but it is to be released soon.

Version A2019 is something that could be beneficial to new users. At the same time, I cannot rule out completely that you need to have a very good programming skills. It will be easier if you have some knowledge on the programming front because you might be using a command which is already built-in. Therefore, you should know how the loops works and how the conditions work in order to implement them. If you want to do a bit of deep-diving into automation but you will need a little technical knowledge at this point of time.

We haven't had any issues with stability. The ecosystem provided is great, because we have bot stores that can be downloaded, so we don't have to start from scratch.

Before creating a bot, I can go directly to the bot store to see if the bot is already available. That way, I don't have to waste any time.

Most of the time we built the bots for ourselves. When we purchased the licenses from Automation Anywhere we had them provide us with training. It was approximately a week for the training.

Also, there was another training session for photo documentation purposes.

Automation Anywhere is an excellent example of a solution that scales up. 

When we develop a task we modularise it and upload it into the repository. If another team member is working on another project and they require a section of my bot then it then gets downloaded and modified. Somebody else plugs in the variables, etc. In this way, the scalability is great.

At the moment, there is no setup in place.

We don't have a Citrix environment. It's mostly web-based. We also have in-house built applications that we use for our day in and out operations.

The technical support team has been with me from the beginning of my journey with Automation Anywhere. I was not a good developer initially, so I give them all of the credit.

They have a very good support team. I would advise my colleagues to use the IT help desk as much as they can.

As developers, we have evolved. Initially, at the start of using automation Anywhere we had many struggles. We contacted support for some help and suggestions, and with the help they provided, we are now more comfortable with Automation Anywhere.

There were instances where they couldn't help me, but it was because of the task not being suitable for automation. I understand that there are hindrances in the evolution of a solution, but they helped wherever they could. I would say that in 80% of the cases, they were able to help me.

They need a better community support with online resources. Though, there are good resources in regards to other programming languages, such as Python, VBA, and .NET.

Previously, we had been using VBAs and Python, albeit our use in Python was not extensive.

We chose Automation Anywhere because we heard that you don't need to have expertise in a particular area, and anyone can develop a simple bot in a short time.

We still do not have a setup in place. We do have licenses, but we are trying to have more bot programmer licenses in place. As such, the deployment is still in progress, but from what I understand it is simple and straightforward. I expect that it will be completed within the next week or two.

Most of the team who were working on Automation Anywhere had a little programming background, such as VBA or Java. Initially, we struggled a bit to use the rich commands but Automation Anywhere provided initial training when we got our licenses. Somebody came and gave us training for three to four days. Then, it took about three to four months to transition from the PoC to using the bots.

We handled the implementation ourselves, and have not sought out help from anyone.

When we initially bought the licenses, we had the Automation Anywhere team come down to train us. This lasted for approximately a week. They also visited on another occasion for documentation, but otherwise, we work on our own.

We do a cost-benefit analysis along with a feasibility study. We do this initially when there is a project that is lined up. We look at how many hours the project will take. We also delivery time and its urgency. Even if the project may not save a huge number of hours, we still might pick it up because of the urgency. Sometimes, we also look at it from an error reduction standpoint. There could be a lot of errors coming out because it was manually processed and this may cause the company issues. With Automation Anywhere, we reduce these errors.

I was not involved in the cost or purchasing, but as far as I know, the return is great. There are a couple of projects that we have worked on where we could have saved approximately 4000 hours on just one project that we built in two to three weeks. This is the type of impact this solution has.

We have purchased licenses, but are trying to obtain more bot programmer licenses. That should be happening in the next week.

UiPath was the closest competitor that we were considering. We provided pros and cons for both UiPath and Automation Anywhere. There may have been a cost-benefit analysis done from management, but I was not involved in that area.

We just did a PoC with UiPath. We did not work extensively with it. The product was based more on a workflow model. Automation Anywhere will also have a workflow model with its A2019 version.

We were not compromising on quality for dollar value. If you are looking at it from all aspects then Automation Anywhere is the clear winner.

We can automate anything with Automation Anywhere. Initially, we were skeptical about whether this small project would be automated or not because we were not well acquainted with the Automation Anywhere capabilities. After using the product for a while, we understood its potential, such as the OCR capabilities.

My experience with Automation Anywhere to date has been great, however, there are areas that I have not explored which could be features that should be added or improved upon, such as APIs. I have yet to explore this area of the solution and there may or may not be room for improvement.

We used to use Excel VBAs. However, if you want to manipulate stuff in Excel files, you have to write the back-end code in VBA. This is more effective than writing your code in Automation Anywhere. There are no hiccups in integrating with VBA.

We have completed the 11.2 expert certification in Automation Anywhere University and are in the process of completing 11.3. The University has a lot of stuff in their repository. As a programmer, you might not use all those commands extensively in your development. It's a good place to learn, but I didn't see everything being learned in the University being implemented.

For anybody who is considering this solution, I would start by suggesting that they look at their business requirements. We looked at it from a business standpoint because in our day to day operations, we needed automation. This is how we realized we needed a solution. If you are doing web scraping or another type of mundane task every day then you need Automation Anywhere.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is to use bots to automate our accounting reconciliations. So whatever reconciliation does not involve judgment or review and can be done by the bot using a series of steps. For those situations where it is possible, we are now using bots we created. This helps minimize a lot of the time as well as simplifying the reconciliation process.

We have a dedicated system for Automation Anywhere. We deploy it on-premise.

The way Automation Anywhere has helped our organization is that we've been able to evaluate our process of transaction reviews and identify tasks that subtract value from our efforts and automate them. We added automation to a lot of situations where human judgment and interpretation are not required. Our organization does not use as many resources in manual evaluation.

One of the best features of the product is that it eliminates a lot of unnecessary access to transactions. Secondly, it brings in a higher level of security. When the process is totally manual, there is more of a chance of inviting an element of human error. So using bots helps to eliminate these issues.

There are areas where the product can be improved and ways we can get Automation Anywhere to help us in other fields. For example, there are situations where legal interpretations are involved which have the potential for automation. We are not currently using the bots for these situations. So that's definitely one area where I would say there is room for growth for the product. 

Mostly, for my purposes, I'm looking for more support on reporting.

There is too much use of attended automation. I would like to move more toward unattended automation, where bots are capable to handle exceptions and give proper feedback to the users, e.g., how many exceptions we have that we can fix it, so we can make it more aligned.

I have not yet encountered any operating instability. The stability is good. It runs smoothly.

The product is scalable. Obviously, scaling the solution requires some time for development. Whenever you identify something that can be automated or want to work on something that already exists which is similar but slightly different than what you need, it requires time. So there is time expenditure involved in scaling, but the solution is definitely scalable.

We have about 11 accountants working on it.

We are fairly pleased in our experience with customer service. They are pretty good.

For the kind of company that we have, which predominantly relies on processing our revenue streams, it was a no brainer to move more and more towards AI and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) processing.

Genpact proposed Automation Anywhere and we found it to be suitable.

Initially, the implementation was tough. When we started, we were trying to do too much at one time. When we started just playing with small, bite-size pieces, rather than working with big chunks, we started to make more progress. That change in scope kind of helped us to scale things up faster.

We worked with Genpact predominantly to help us implement bots and automation. Our relationship with them has worked pretty well.

We implemented the solution for Genpact but are not users. We have seen the demo and how easy it works, but don't know what happens in the background.

We have definitely experienced an ROI in terms of saving. For example, the costs of service delivery contracts have come down because of our use of automation. 

ROI is determined by how much the account saves versus the cost of licensing that I have to pay to manage the bots. It saves me around $100,000 a year.

The extent of our usage is still quite limited. I think we can do a lot more. We had other priorities that took over and couldn't focus on getting the tool more widely used. In the coming year, we are focusing more on increasing the use of bots.

We are currently negotiating a contract. Depending upon that, we will definitely look at increasing usage.

Our goal in choosing a product was primarily due to an interest in advancing automation to speed processing of transactions. While the company probably evaluated other solutions, that decision did not involve me and was made at a higher level than mine.

My advice to those considering Automation Anywhere would be to be bold and try it out. There is no point in remaining in the dinosaur age and not taking advantage of the possibilities of automation.

Ensure your processes are standardized and exceptions are kept to a minimum. The more standardized processes are, the easier it is to implement bots, then your ROI will go up. You can extend automation to a much larger scale, but the more exceptions in the process, the more changes and tweaks in the process that brings. That makes it more complicated to invest in the bot and you will have to keep checking the deliver of the results being produced.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a seven or eight. In our case, it is closer to an eight. 

We use attended automation. There is some amount of human involvement in running the bots, but it's minimal just to ensure that exceptions are correctly captured, etc. The process works well.

The biggest lesson is to ensure that your processes are standardized, so you can increase the usage of bots. The more your processes aren't standardized, the more complicated it becomes to implement bots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Automation Anywhere as nine out of ten.

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

The primary use cases are for card and HR automation.

For our interorganizational processes, it has automated some of those processes.

The Bot Store has helped tremendously with accelerating integration from other applications. Especially with Workday, which is one of the main applications that we look to integrate.

It automates forms for our customers and our analysts.

They could improve around continuous integration, e.g., Jenkins and GitHub, stating how you could use those products and integrating them into Automation Anywhere. This is one area that we need to see more improvement on. We had to learn a lot of this on our own, as it is unavailable and not documented. I would like for them to be more verbose in putting this in the documentation.

In the next release, we would like to see more error handling functions for the bots, the ability to kill an errant bot, and have more visibility into a lot of the process flows going on in a more automated fashion.

There is a lot guesswork in areas.

The initial pilot was for two processes, which took us about four months. Then, the other processes were more extensive, so that took longer, only because we needed to do more with the process documentation, not so much in the bot creation. It just depends upon the complexity of the process, but also how well-documented your processes are.

The technical support is good, but I would like to see improvement with the documentation. 

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was complex, only because of the process that was selected. That took us longer than usual, because it had a lot of cognitive decisions in it. Part of our new process is to evaluate if a process should be automated or not, and does it have more repetitive tasks than a lot of decision making. This has greatly increased how we are able to put a process into play for bot creation.

We leveraged a third-party, as far as our bot creation, initially. That is how we did it. We have worked with partners to create bots.

Before the automation, it used to take about two to three hours. Now, with automation, it takes about 40 minutes. We measure ROI with time.

We also evaluated UiPath.

Take into account your processes. As part of the automation journey, don't look at just the technology part. This is where a lot of people make a mistake. They focus so much on the technology that they forget about "process" of RPA. They need to take a longer look at this and break down the process at its task level to see if it is worth going the RPA route. Once you do this, look at the vendors to see which one provides more in the way of bot creation and scalability, especially if you are in a cloud environment. Then, with the continuous integration, you will need to have a lot of this as you are putting things into production from development.

For ease of use, version 11.3 was an improvement compared to version 10.5. I am looking forward to seeing what 2019 provides for developers.

I would rate version 10.5 as a six out of ten and version 11.3 as an eight out of ten. I would rate version 11.3 higher because there have been changes made to how the bot creation is now done, the interfaces, the ability to utilize the VDI environment, and multitenancy.

The primary intention is to automate business processes where manual work is heavily involved, wherever it is feasible. That is our core objective. We want to free up our time and concentrate on what is very important for the business by moving processes to automation.

We have automated pretty much everything: premium registration, claims processing, underwriting. We have touched upon many processes.

Recently we have implemented one particular RPA function which helped the business to complete a particular renewal within a day, a process which took a month to complete before. They were able to reach out to the customer ahead of time. The customer was surprised to see a quicker response. The automation improved business value.

We use the solution for Citrix automation and the AISense is pretty good. It is very nice to use. It has helped us to resolve many security issues, whatever we have encountered so far. They were nullified when we moved into the Citrix AISense automation. We don't need to worry about any sorts of security vulnerabilities or security access issues. We can do everything in Citrix automation with the use of AISense. Previously it was not possible to do object cloning with Automation Anywhere. When this feature came out it was so nice to be able to use it.

It is very easy to use, very easy to learn. That is the main advantage of this tool. You don't need to have very specialized skills to learn it. It's very easy to use and user-friendly.

It gels with any other application we have. We can take everything from legacy technologies to advanced technologies. You don't feel any difference when using it with any of the applications.

It would be nice to have the IQ Bots integrated with the Enterprise Edition without requiring extra licenses. That would be great.

It is quite stable. Over the last two years we've had around 50 bots and there have not been many issues with Automation Anywhere. We do have problems, but they have been logged with the portal and should be resolved in the next releases. Overall, it is quite stable.

The scalability is good. We started with very few bots and it was quite scalable. We now have about ten Bot Runners.

Technical support has been very good. That is a major advantage of using Automation Anywhere. When you log your particular issue, within the next two to three hours a technical person will be available to walk through the problem, identify and troubleshoot it.

We would like to use the IQ Bot only, for PDF extraction. Currently, we are using PDF data extraction and finding whether the data is present. If we go with the IQ Bots, the main reason will be the capability. At the moment we are having some sort of problem with reading the images. We are using OCR and Python for that right now.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

Currently, we are using it for the labor savings, we are not very particular about what the cost savings are. We look at how much time we are spending on manual efforts and where we can reduce them.

So far we have saved about 15 FTEs in the last one-and-a-half years.

I'm not sure what the monthly licensing cost is, as that is taken care of by another team, but I would say it's around $100,000.

Our shortlist consisted of two products. When we started the journey we evaluated three or four products. We chose Automation Anywhere for two reasons:

• It's easy to learn and
• it's business-user friendly.

Without thinking twice, I would recommend going for Automation Anywhere.

We have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and that was good. It is a good learning platform. We touched almost all the courses. It also has the certification course. It was very good learning there. We even have our business associates logging in to the Automation Anywhere University and learning for themselves, learning about the platform and playing around.

The process to get to our first bot took about one year. 

For our bot creation process, we first have a business meeting to understand what the business processes are doing and we look at the process metrics. We have a spreadsheet to capture the processes for which it's feasible to do automation. Then we look at the suitability of automating a given process and what would be the return on investment if we did the implementation. Once everything has been finalized, we contemplate the development time, do the development, the testing, and then put it into production.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten. Its usability is very good. The problem is that the IQ Bots' capabilities are coming out slowly.