Automation Anywhere Reviews

Being a bank, we have a lot of processes which we have automated. I am a Project Manager for HR functions. The majority of my processes are in terms of income and skills processing. Those are all automated.

We were one of the few to start up this journey with Automation Anywhere. Interestingly, the majority of our processes were determined to be boring. People did not find them to be very interesting. Those processes have been automated. Being a bank, we have some sensitive processes which we cannot automate. Those processes have been given to human intellectuals. Otherwise, the majority of our processes are automated.

It has boosted our processing time by seven times. Typically, something that has taken eight to 10 minutes now can be done in two to three minutes. So, we have seen some value-add there. 

Resources are being processed earlier and involved in a different type of a governing kind of role. This sort of builds a layer for them to move and scale up. The solution is fast and easy to deploy. Our use cases lasts for two to three sprints and we can churn out solutions very fast.

We do not have a server type of an environment. We use a desktop version of Automation Anywhere which is easily customizable and quickly built-in. We do not have to go through major security iOS applications, etc. These are all enterprise applications that we have onboarded. Each of our functions take their responsibility of building their bot and deploying it. 

It is fast and reliable. 

Older versions of Automation Anywhere required specific skill sets to use it. It is no longer like that.

The version A2019 GUI allows you to drop and drop.

As far as version 10.1 is concerned, we have been using it for the last two years. It is okay. As an organization, we look forward to next version. However, being a bank, we have certain processes that we have to follow. We are happy with the version that we are using and haven't experience downtime.

We have been looking at processes which can easily transition into a large scale environment, where you can have cloud or hybrid model. However, being a bank, some of our processes are critical and we would like to hold those on-premise. This limits us with our usage of Automation Anywhere.

The support that we receive from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We have specific customer success managers as a platinum partner. We have support extended to us when we have any type of concerns and issues. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. It didn't really affect our processes at any levels, which really helped. The process was fast and easy.

The support team kept our team calm.

We have an in-house Automation Anywhere team who supports us.

It saves us man-hours, headcount, and processing time.

We have automated the equivalent headcount of 500 FTEs since we started. Those people haven't been laid off. They are just doing different types of work activities.

We did not evaluate other vendors beside Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere was a pioneer in the market at the time that we were evaluating vendors. It was a good match.

Explore the new version A2019 that is coming out. It is user-friendly and can be onboarded quickly.

I would love to use the next version A2019 that is coming out.

Our primary use for this solution is mainly to support our email vertical, so it helps automate the management of financial, commercial and operations between our multiple domains using logistics and libraries and data points.

We just use it to get data from different sources and massage some data with some specific protocol. After that, we simply have to put back the data. It is a system for data treatment and to notify the proper business handler.

The product has helped our organization tool-wise to expand capabilities and offerings. To keep it short and simple, I'd say there are useful features that will definitely help us as we do more development in the near future.

The most valuable feature is that we can automate data manipulations. We can save IP's, we can save time, we can use manual reports. The main benefit of this tool is that it is a robust solution.

The feature I think that helps most is the ability to integrate. There is SAP integrations, SAP application integration, web application integrations, and email integrations. We have multiple features — there are a lot of features. They are also very good features which enable us to do many things.

What may be able to be improved is that sometimes there'll be a connection that is not from our clients and servers and that's a situation they may want to address. The solution for that may need to be built differently based on the needs from organization to organization. In that case, it is not particularly or specifically about the tool. It is just something I could see they might help enable.

That the product is now available as a cloud-based solution is a good feature that they added. So with that and new features already coming out, I don't have a lot of suggestions. I will have to work on this new version, then let's see if there's something I think they need to add.

There are a number of current tools which can be improved because they have many limitations. Like some better controls in emails, and better support for features in Excel and PDF. Especially things like that which I need more than new features.

I'll be enabling the current features, but I'll have to see them and what they do before I can feedback more.

The product is not totally stable. I feel like it could be improved on in that way. It's just stable, not very stable, and that's the difference.

The problem is mainly handling enterprise data. There can be connections which are not the nature you would expect. It is not from the client or the server but something else. There can be performance issues.

Scalability is a trend we are experiencing in IT. We have to have a scope for a project and we have to create a scope again in the future millennia. So I'm waiting just to see the functionality of the additional features in this package.

We have never had to use the technical support as we were able to work with and implement the product. We act as consultants and supply technical support to clients.

I do not think it is straightforward to start working with this product. It's a little complex to start out working in the database. After this when you gain a little experience with the product, then you will understand it and be able to smooth out your processes and how you approach development and it will be easier.

We are a consulting organization, so we have experience with this product now. We have started up administration for the solution for many other clients. We did not use an external reseller or integrator and did everything in-house or ourselves. So we have worked it both ways: we did our own deployment and then we did deployments for other organizations.

Right now we are just mainly focusing on our internal development with our workforce only.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

Now they have a nice tool that is mostly stable with most of the features I could want being covered in the functionality of the product. More features are coming soon with this release so that's why I rated it an eight. The product right now will probably be better with the release.

I think it would be very difficult to consider the product a nine or a ten. To reach that level and to connect with innovations in the technology that are coming is very hard to anticipate and solve. There is always a limitation to what they can develop at once, so they will delay some work.

If I'm talking to a user who is not comfortable with automation tools, I recommend that they try the Automation Anywhere tool only. It's very easy to learn and easy to implement. It is not something you are making a sacrifice to use. It is a good tool.

We wanted to automate as many business processes as possible within the finance organization since the office that we work in today is called the finance transformation office. We transform all the business processes of finance for a better, simpler, scalable finance organization. We are constantly pursuing transformation of the finance organization as far as Cisco's changing dynamic business models. We are a predominantly product-oriented organization. We transformed our business models from products to software and subscription-based business model.

Users can develop for themselves. This is the end stage goal for our organization: To have our finance users developing automation for themselves. Automation Anywhere lets us do that, as users can develop the bots by themselves.

I have taken one of the finance processes, which is completely Excel driven, and consolidated more than 20 Excel files of large volumes of data by drawing pivot tables and all sorts of yield curves on the Excel files. I converted this structured, formulaic process to the bot. There are features within the Automation Anywhere which let you do types of keystrokes, formatting in Excel sheets, etc. The process used to take more than 30 hours for the user to complete on a quarterly basis. With the development of this bot, the bot can run the entire process within an hour and a half. It saves about more than 20 hours of time for the user. This is just one example. There are other bots saving hundreds of productivity hours per quarter. 

It lets users add value with their time other than focusing on downloading Excel files, consolidating, and drawing up formulas. Since everything is structured, these easily are incorporated into the bot's work.

Anybody can develop a bot by themselves. It's not a technical language oriented program. Specific skill sets with language learning skills are not required. Any finance person can get in and develop a bot with a little training on Automation Anywhere. They can go in and develop themselves. 

In the version that we have, there are some challenges with the browser-based applications, the cloning of the objects, and the solution's stability. 

Automation Anywhere must be able to maintain a consistent resolution. 

The latest edition, which is enterprise A2019, has better analytics and the cloud all integrated into the bot framework. 

The client version is getting challenging to use because you have to maintain a lot of infrastructure. You must have the machines to deploy the client. However, you don't need a large infrastructure, if you can do it on the cloud. 

I would like a Bot Store for MetaBots. The MetaBot feature needs to be expanded. E.g., I would like a copy/paste from the top row of Excel where I don't need to write a keystroke. Instead, I could just use MetaBot for this.

We have already launched more than 20 bots live into production. They are up and running. We are doing very well with these. We are in a convenient spot for delivering 50 to 60 more bots in the next couple of quarters.

Because it can accommodate 200 to 300 bots, the scale is not a constraint for us. It is scalable.

The technical support is good. I have contacted technical support of Automation Anywhere quite a few times during the process of developing a bot. Their responses were good and up to the mark. There were very responsive and proactive in resolving issues. They were on top in terms of supporting the features of the applications.

Our finance organization needed to transform itself to meet the changing business models. We established the finance transformation office to meet the entire organization's financing transformation needs. As part of that, we identified a couple of quarters ago that RPA was one of the software solutions which could help us automate several of our business processes. This is apart from the re-engineering and re-architecture that we do to transform our entire business process. Now, there can be some use cases within finance which can be transformed through usage of automation software, like Automation Anywhere.

We have streamlined several activities, cutting down on manual activities. This has happened over the last six to seven years.

I was not part of the setup process.

We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI.

At the end of the day, finance analysts expect faster outcomes while having their manual work taken away. There should be a more diligent way for them to add value and contributing to the organization through analytics and providing valuable insights. This removal of manual work can be done using a bot. That is the goal.

Our enterprise IT team chose Automation Anywhere as our product for doing automation. Automation Anywhere is one of the best, leading automation software tools for developing enterprise automation.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere.

I am excited about the Microsoft partnership that was announced today. Excel is a daily core tool for us. With an automation plugin, this works like a miracle for the finance team. The potential is unlimited, e.g., Office 365 and Internet Explorer will have plugins.

We have an ITMS Service Desk that has a lot of tickets coming to it. As an enterprise, there are too many applications there, which are being used by employees. This service desk enables them to address all the issues which they are facing, whether it is on the application, infrastructure, etc. There is a group who manages all these tickets coming through ServiceNow. These numbers are huge. To manage these services or change requests, we use Automation Anywhere when it is not possible to use either an API or do scripting.

My company is using the latest version.

I have one application that does not publish any APIs. However, there is one activity where every employee needs to be registered in that particular application. Now, we use Automation Anywhere for this. So, we get the data from the source data using the front-end of that application through the Automation Anywhere script. Then, we do registration of the employees into that application. Previously, this was being done by people on our service desk. Now, we are using Automation Anywhere to do this activity. This has saved a lot of time. 

Just for this use case, we had around 300 tickets coming in every month. We went live last month and the tickets went down to around 80 as of August 20th. While it might touch around 100, over a period of around six months it will become zero because we have not removed all the legacy data. We are just doing it from the go date of when we went live. The target is that it will be zero after three months. So, it's working well.

A work in progress is a request which came in from employees using ServiceNow to create a VPN account for them. Today, this is a manual process where the service desk people have to raise a ticket to another team who create the VPN account for the employees. This is why we are currently automating this process.

I like that it can login to any system as a robot and do the work that humans can.

Automation Anywhere is unable to connect to the database directly. What we are doing now is directly writing the PL/SQL scripts and trying to push the data from the database into Automation Anywhere. This feature is available in UiPath, but not in Automation Anywhere.

I am unaware if Automation Anywhere is able to read unstructured data, build some intelligence around it, and then push it into the application. We do have some requirements in our organization where invoices are scanned, and based on the data, hard copies of the data are fed into some applications. Today, we are using different tools for these features, but if it is available in the tool, then that would be good.

We are a midsize company in the Indian market running one or two bots. 

From a scalability perspective, I don't think there will be any issues. It is pretty good.

Support-wise, it is great. 

We installed this on a cloud infrastructure and had a lot of challenges. However, there was a dedicated support person who was helping us to do the installation.

The initial setup was definitely complex. Layman people cannot do it. People with a bit of knowledge need some help from Automation Anywhere.

It took a month and a half to do the basic installation of this software along with some internal processes related to our firewalls.

We had a dedicated person from Automation Anywhere who was supporting us at the time of the initial installation.

While our Automation Anywhere's implementation is in a premature stage, it has really decrease the workload on our service desk. We are looking to decrease the ticket counts too. I definitely see this solution helping us in the future.

Our tickets have decreased. We have more than 40 uses cases. We definitely see some ROI in the future from this product.

In the Indian market, I feel that for mid-size companies, such as ourselves, that having multiple bots costs a lot. If Automation Anywhere wants to expand in the Indian market, they will need to look at their pricing.

One of the major reasons that we went for Automation Anywhere was a global MSA, which our company has with Automation Anywhere. They wanted us to use this particular tool for our end customers too. 

I am part of an internal CIO team, where our customers are our employees. However, as an organization, we had a global agreement with Automation Anywhere where they wanted to deliver this tool to the end customer as part of their solutions. Because of that agreement, we went with Automation Anywhere.

My team (who uses both Automation Anywhere and UiPath) says that UiPath has better modules and functionality than Automation Anywhere.

I'm seeing some results in the use case for whatever we are trying to automate. So, it has been really helpful.

Don't use an RPA tool for any problem statement. I've seen people use any RPA tool available for their problem statement just to say that they are using some type of RPA. E.g., We had a use case where we had to read information from an Excel table and generate a report, so people started using Automation Anywhere. However, it would have been better in this scenario to use Power BI by creating scripts.

My primary use case is collecting data from the latest sources, whether it be a spreadsheet or PDF. 

I have used Automation Anywhere in my current and previous organizations.

In my current company, we have been successful with pushing the solution through and getting management buy-in. 

In my previous organization, we started with version 7.0. We saw cost savings by automating some critical processes. In addition, the manpower was able to do high level work instead of mundane work. 

In my current organization, we are seeing great results, especially with the financial and civil processes.

It extracts what the IQ Bot does, converting it and ensuring the entire process right from the input to the output and is fully automated. It is digitizing a particular process, which is really great.

if Automation Anywhere could bring in object recognition, it would be a game changer. Today, we have a lot of video analytics. People talk about video analytics since I come from the consumer background. We are looking into the latest technologies of facial recognition from an audit proxy, e.g., counting the movement of the products from the counter versus the billing application. I have brought up this inquiry at my last three Imagine sessions but I am not getting an answer. Maybe the demand in the market is less. but people now are looking for this type of solution where Automation Anywhere can bring in some cognitive inbuilt. 

It would be great if video analytics could be brought in as a third-party product integration or on the Automation Anywhere platform. I would like the video analytics to be integrated within the next two years. Right now, most people are using third-party tools. Video can be translated into an image and information can be picked up from that, then translated into meaningful insights to make decisions.

Getting buy-in was a major challenge because of the various people not aware of the technologies moving and getting buy-in from top management is a challenge. 

A major issue is getting the in-house team trained. I would like to have a better way of managing the teams. The more your in-house team is trained, you're less dependent on your partners or solution providers, thereby scaling up the confidence of doing it in-house. I just visited a booth now on the training part to see what can be achieved so I can go back and tell my team what Automation Anywhere is providing in terms of training.

There are hiccups in the production tool. I would rate the accuracy level at 95 to 97 percent. 

Compared to the earlier versions, compliance, deliverables and other tools in the market, nobody can touch Automation Anywhere.

In terms of scalability, you have to leap frog forward. Overall, you need to work at achieving a digital workforce to scale the entire landscape of the organization by having them look to the future. It is not only the RPA part, but also you have to adopt AI and ML type technologies which can holistically cover the entire aspects and take the organization to the scalable level.

The response from the technical support is really good. 

I just met the account manager and he was thrilled to see me.

We had a technical evaluation team, which I was part of since I had earlier worked with Automation Anywhere and had a sense of it. We had been evaluating its competitors, but Automation Anywhere's stability and ease of use was great. My past experience with the solution allowed me in my current organization to make the right decision.

The initial setup is not complex. It is pretty simple. We started with small processes. then we moved onto complex types of environments. The implementation in terms of technicalities, it was not complex. In terms of getting into the nitty-gritties of what, where, when, and how it would come all together, that is the challenging part. It is the understanding the entire process of transforming the requirements into something technical. 

We used Ernest & Young for the deployment. They are one of the good partners in terms of understanding the internal processes. The consultation is great. They are with us day in and day out. They are helping us to try and transform the business.

In my current organization, we have yet to see results because we are going with a small launch with two Bot Runners and one Bot Creator. We need to asses the right approach, selection processes, choosing what to automate and what not to automate, and what would be the scale of automation. That is where a lot of hard work is required going ahead to see the results coming in the next financial year.

in my previous organization, I could see a lot of cost savings and returns from automating processes. 

More than 40 to 50 percent of the IT budget will be for the cost of automation projects in the coming years since these projects enhance operations add value.

We also considered Blue Prism, but they have nowhere near Automation Anywhere's success story in the span of just eight to nine years.

In the initial days of 2012, I visited an Automation Anywhere manager in a very small office in India. There were only about ten people operating from that region. Back then, they didn't have partners like EY. Today, they have all the Fortune companies working with Automation Anywhere, even Microsoft has joined hands with them. 

It has been a good experience working with Automation Anywhere, which started small. We were directly coordinating on simple tasks, like, "Hey this is not working. Fix it now." There were no partners in-between. 

This is the right platform and choice. Today, every business needs to be at this pace and cannot ignore automation. You have to be in the race if you really want your company to get to the next level and be at par with competitors. Bring your business to the table by getting it automated by using the right tools, like Automation Anywhere, and the right partner.

The solution delivers value.

Going forward, we are looking to add more value, then plan for a better foundation using the automation platform by making a COE team and installing the newest version of Automation Anywhere.

We use it for back-office administrative business processes, within order-to-cash. We have an end-to-end process automation that supports customer billings. We also have task-based automations that process either customer credit memos, or credit and re-bills, working within SAP.

We started with the solution on-prem and we have shifted to an AWS cloud environment.

It has allowed us to establish more reliable business processes, when transacting in our enterprise systems. It has improved the reliability of our monthly billing processes that, in the past, was dependent on manual, nine-to-five types of activities. We can now schedule those activities, process 24 hours a day, and then we review exceptions. I would emphasize and underscore the reliability aspect and the ability to process 24/7.

It is highly reliable, both from an uptime perspective and regarding data-quality and input into the systems. It's doing the same thing, every time, with 100 percent accuracy.

To put it in terms of hours, we are approaching 10,000-plus hours of capacity on an annual basis.

There aren't any features that are specifically valuable. We are not using IQ Bots.

On the cognitive side, some of their competitors, when we were originally shopping, were a little more advanced in that space. Making use of probabilistic outcomes and presenting them to a business user is a feature that, at the time of our evaluation, did not feel like a strong, mature solution for Automation Anywhere. Nevertheless, they won our business. That is one feature where I feel they are trying to make investments to address those gaps.

The platform has been very stable. There have been a few Control Room issues when adding new VMs, but overall it's very reliable. I'm pleased with the performance so far.

We are pleased with Automation Anywhere's ability to scale. We are convinced that it is a platform that we can scale, and we are convinced that it can function and operate within our environment.

We have six-plus use cases in production today. But those business processes are very complex. They are touching many systems. Our definition of a bot is a business process, not a task. Some companies call a bot a task. We don't do that, we call it a business process. We have six business processes that are running, which are very complex in nature. 

Regarding the scalability of a single business process, we have found that to be very easy. We have found Automation Anywhere to be very friendly when it comes to that. We add capacity in the form a virtual machine and a license to scale and meet the needs of the business.

We have not dealt directly with Automation Anywhere's tech support. Historically, they've been pretty good. I'm relaying that from my systems integrator and my helpdesk support. I always ask if they are getting what they need when they need it and the answer is yes. I'm pleased with the feedback I'm hearing.

The original setup was easy. What was difficult was adding licenses. I went a month where I was paying for licenses that I couldn't use, for various reasons. That was painful.

I'm not familiar with how long it took to stand up the environments. It was pretty simple from a PoC point of view, with the free trial licenses that were made available to us by AA in conjunction with their preferred systems integrator. That was fairly painless. Standing up the production environment was relatively painless as well. We had no problems whatsoever there. However, as we scale and add licenses, we have challenges.

Based on our use cases, we have seen a return on our initial investment for the PoC, and we are continuing to leverage the platform as we scale.

Price is where I'm least satisfied. Other vendors are more willing to offer discounts.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and WorkFusion. Those were the vendors that were strongly considered when we were evaluating Automation Anywhere's capabilities. There was a laundry-list of others, prior to those, which we evaluated from a market-research point of view.

We valued the market presence of Automation Anywhere. We valued the ease of use, when we were thinking about scaling out to the business. The recording feature, while not a developer tool - it is a tool for a business user who may not possess the thought process of a developer - we valued that in our evaluation. Those were the two major factors. 

And at the time, the commercial terms as well, the one-year commitment, was appealing to us when we were shopping the solution. We didn't want to sign a multi-year deal on a technology platform that wasn't proven out to our business. That was another factor which gave us comfort as part of the decision-making process.

At the start, I advise picking a portfolio of use cases to start with. Some will over-perform and others will not. Think of it in terms of a portfolio approach to sell the concept to your organization. My second area of advice would be: Do not automate systems that you do not own or control, unless you are willing to accept the degree of maintenance associated with that automation.

The biggest lesson I've learned so far from using it is that it's not as easy as the salespeople say. The biggest challenge is that not all automations are created equal. To give you some context, there are automations that I still don't have in production which have taken me over half-a-year to build. You talk to a sales guy and he says, "Hey, you can build an automation and be up in two weeks." Yes, but will that automation add a drop of value to the business? Probably not. The challenges are around stabilizing our complex automations.

Anything Google-related is challenging. I didn't really receive any help from our systems integrator or from AA when it came to the Google platform. We paid, extensively, to learn the hard way.

As part of our CoE, we rely on a third-party for development and maintenance of our automations. That means we have no users of the solution in our organization. The third-party has access to Bot Creators, they have access to our development environment and Control Room. They promote code to production and maintain the automations.

We have plans to increase our usage of the solution in the future. It is our intention to build an internal capability, over time. The processes we are looking to automate are more within order-cash and back-office. We have some administrative, travel, maintenance. Our IT ticketing system spawns maintenance; there's also account-creation and maintenance. That's an area of focus for us. And we're exploring reporting capabilities which are on the simple side. That's the area where we're targeting internal development and building an internal competency. It's what we characterize as simple automation use cases.

Overall, Automation anywhere is pretty good. It's not perfect but it's up there. I don't have a point of reference, other examples, but I think it's pretty good at what it does.

The tool is used to automate any business process. Some examples are:

• If you want to download some data from a website or push some data onto a website.
• If you work with an Excel application and want to automate it, or any Windows-based application, you can automate it as long as you know what the business process is.
• If a person is doing a day-to-day activity and you want to automate that activity, you can use the Automation Anywhere tool to do it.

I have worked with the Windows, Excel, and web applications, along with some SAP automation and how to automate that SAP data. I use Automation Anywhere to determine automation for how to:

• Distribute the process. 
• Schedule the process. 
• Run the process. 
• Design the process.
• Distribute the data for 1000 to 10,000 data points (in Excel).

I have automated the invoicing in a finance department, where the finance department wanted to automate the invoicing process. They wanted to do the following:

• Invoice the data.
• Create the invoice.
• Mail the invoice.
• Download the invoice data.

If you have 10 operators currently performing these activities everyday, then you automate the process, by removing the 10 operators and having only one operator required, this will decrease costs. It will also increase the efficiency of your company.

In the automatic invoicing system, we created a file which pushes onto a shared folder. The bot will pick up the file automatically from the shared folder and process the invoice. Therefore, if tomorrow, another bot were to be created, we could just create a file and copy it to the shared folder, then it would pick up the file and process the invoice.

I utilize all the commands provided by Automation Anywhere, such as all the recorders. I use these commands to develop my processes and bots.

Automation Anywhere has a drag and drop process.

Automation Anywhere needs to improve Excel and its commands. In Excel, if you want to add a sheet, you cannot add a sheet. There is no command for adding a sheet. Also, if you want to rename something in Excel, you cannot rename it. You always must keep a list that you can rename through your keyboard, but there is no specific command in Automation Anywhere. 

The email automation command also needs to be improved. The email automation command sometimes is not working properly. When you connect the mail server, it is not being done properly.

The OCR feature is not that reliable.

With the PDF command, you can only read structured data. If your data is in an unstructured format, there is no command for it in Automation Anywhere. Then, people need to use Python coding if their data is in unstructured format. Therefore, Automation Anywhere needs to improve in the PDF area.

I have been using the product for the last two years.

I didn't have any stability issues. 

I haven't found any scalability issues with it. If the volume increases tomorrow, another bot can be added from the Control Room.

I worked with a single deployment model, which didn't have a load balancer requirement. Higher availability deployments require load balancers.

I haven't dealt with Automation Anywhere's technical support.

For the implementation, you just follow the proper process on how to deploy the proper hardware configuration on the production environment. The process does not take that much time as you push files to the Control Room, then from the Control Room, you can download the client. It does depend on how many bots you are implementing and how you are scheduling them.

Automation Anywhere is deployed from a deployment guideline in a step-by-step process. Automation Anywhere provides some deployment guidelines, which can be referred to.

Only one person is required for deployment: the Control Room administrator.

The number of people required for monitoring the solution depends on the amount of bots deployed.

It saves time and money. If a bot does the same work as nine out of 10 people, then you are saving money through wages. Also, a bot will work all hours without interruption, whereas FTEs may need time off or vacation. 

I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator. 

The Automation Anywhere automation tool is user-friendly, especially compared to UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere's deployment is also easy compared to other RPA tools.

The solution is good for people who want to do their job quickly without any delay or problems. 

The future of IT will require every organization to need automation.

The Control Room is good in version 11, as compared to the previous versions of the Control Room.

We are an IT services firm. We use it for simple processes, but also for complex. We usually take up simple processes for manual tasks, which are easy to automate.

We have mostly done financial services: finance and accounting processes. That has been for the most part. We have also used it in HR and recruitment to find resumes online, and in other processes.

Its ease of deployment is the most valuable feature. We have found with many customers that it's quite easy to deploy. The other valuable feature, which is not from a technology perspective, is how Automation Anywhere collaborates with us. So, it has made our journey much easier than with other partners that we have.

Room for improvement is more on the IQ Bot side: How quickly we can adopt and deploy it? 

Another area which I feel would help is how the business can adopt it:

• Is it easier for the business to make changes to the tool once it's deployed? 
• How can the business take up roles in the man-machine continuum? 
• How can the business and machine work together, and how does the role change for the business stakeholder. 

It's more on the change management side, but includes all of the tool enabler.

It has been quite good in terms of making changes. As we are working on the process, it's much easier to make changes.

In terms of scaling up, we have not had issues with bots which are in production. In UAT, there have been scaling issues. But in production, as long as a solution is good, then it works.

It was a strategy from our company. We were looking to reduce the cost of operations for our existing clients. We were looking at different ways in which we could reduce our business, in a way, by reducing costs and get more business from the same clients. So this is where we started, by looking at automation as a major thing for Hexaware itself. It starts from our visions, which aligns very well with what Automation Anywhere provides, as a platform. That is where we started, then we have obviously grown and been able to automate many processes, which helped us to get many deals where we are upfront and able to tell clients how much optimization is possible. This is sort of my role, to showcase to the clients how much automation is feasible, in a particular process. We are quite good at that and have been able to do multiple engagements in this space.

We have automated one process, which was running with 109 people. We reduced it down to 69 with automation.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and World Fusion, and we struggled. Initially, we worked with other firms, but we have seen a great synergy with how Automation Anywhere integrates with our team and how we are getting support from Automation Anywhere. When we are going to a client with Automation Anywhere, it's much easier. That collaboration with their support team, and their advice to us, is extremely good. That's why we end up referring Automation Anywhere.

I would like to use IQ Bot a little bit more and understand more about what is offered, as to what features are there. One of the key challenges that we have had, in implementation, is for complex processes, especially where the input is not standardized. So, IQ Bot seems to be a good tool to use there. Hopefully, it will address everything, but mostly on that.

I would rate the product around eight to eight and a half. Mainly, because there is always room for improvement, and we're happy with the tool. There are areas which we need to understand more, as well, like IQ Bot for instance. We did one engagement with IQ Bot, but we need to mature ourselves into how we can utilize it. As the product matures, I'm sure it will be easier for us.

My advice will be to get a partner who is wiling to work with you and is willing to collaborate. This will make your life easier in the automation journey. There will be initial hiccups when you are getting into this journey, and that's just part of any journey. You need to look internally as to how you can improve, and work with a strong team, to deploy the solution.