Automation Anywhere Reviews

As a partner, we've been serving a lot of customers with primary use cases in BFSI, healthcare, and oil and gas. 

We have automated some 30 or 40 processes including ERP, Financials, manual data scraping from various websites, offloading data from Excel into an application, etc. We've done quite a few.

It improves productivity, it improves efficiency. But most of our customers are automating processes which were taking way too long for them to execute. In some of these cases, as a result of what we have done, they are saving more than 40 hours per person, for multiple people. That's been great.

Among the most valuable features that we've been able to utilize are the screen scraping and object cloning. These are two features we have used so far. We are also utilizing the API integrations.

We are excited about the solution's cognitive document processing, IQ Bot. That's an interesting one and we have at least a couple of customers who are looking for those features.

There have been a lot of nuances in the technologies that are missing. Being a tech company, where the technology is moving forward, I'm excited to see what is coming in the near future.

At this point in time, the installation is one of the biggest challenges in terms of being on a particular instance.

Also, we've been working very closely with Automation Anywhere on some of the integrations. There are some workarounds we have had to do, but I think in the newest features of version 11.3 there are things like callback, especially for the API integrations. We are looking forward to that.

There is room for improvement in that it is still on Windows and there is no self-service. Even though the product is easy to use, there are some challenges when we move across different environments; there's a lot of setup needed.

There is room for improvement in the stability of this product.

In terms of scalability, we haven't been in a situation where it has been a challenge for us. We've been able to scale to what we need. Having said that, we haven't deployed thousands of bots yet, but for the bots we have done we've been doing great.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we're currently using, took us between eight and 12 weeks.

Technical support is pretty good. They are reachable and they've been able to solve the problems.

We work exclusively with Automation Anywhere.

The setup has been okay. We haven't seen many challenges.

We do automation ROI using three dimensions:

• absolute time-savings
• efficiency improvement 
• reduction in manual labor.

In some cases, we see savings on the order of $100,000 and, in the newer processes that we are trying to do, it may be up to $1,000,000.

The cost is anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000.

I invested a lot of time in evaluating the different vendors but because of our relationship with Automation Anywhere, it was a clear winner.

My advice is to go for Automation Anywhere.

In terms of the bot creation process, it depends on what you're trying to do. The simple bots are easy, the complex bots have their challenges. The biggest challenge is when the settings change between environments. That's when we have faced a lot of challenges with things as simple as screen resolution.

I've taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and they have been pretty good. It's been really impressive.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at about seven out of ten.

We only use Automation Anywhere on the RPA site because our internal Automation Anywhere customers are varied. Since Automation Anywhere doesn't have an office in Turkey, our customers there work on UiPath. We are automating some business processes based on a checklist. Automation Anywhere is also used for a few OCR projects that involve scanning documents or images and extracting the information. We can automate those jobs with RPA technology. 

Automation Anywhere is user-friendly. Business users can easily use the solution to automate tasks like sending emails without any technical skills. Of course, you need some analytical thinking skills but don't need to know how to code. All the activities are in the tool if you want to replace or manipulate the text. While UiPath requires some development skills, any business user can use Automation Anywhere. It takes about 10 to 15 days to complete one process. If it is more complex, it might take around 20 days, but it's usually around 10 days. 

You can automate any system within your environment. There are various systems that Automation Anywhere can integrate. You can use it for web, desktop, or cloud automation. There are no restrictions on what it can automate.

The training Automation Anywhere provides is excellent. Anyone can easily learn about the solution. They also have a free trial version that you can use online. If you practice daily, learning the solution takes about two or three months. 

Automation Anywhere should make it easier for developers to manage queues and exception handling.  The OCR component could also be better. We have had to use other OCR tools to get information from the account documents. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere is a professional enterprise tool that can scale to meet all our business requirements. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of ten. We have used support a few times for one of our customers, and they respond quickly. If the issue involves a critical production system, they respond to the request on the same day. We can schedule a meeting to solve the problem together.

Positive

We also use UiPath. Implementing projects in Automation Anywhere is easier, but UiPath is more useful for DevOps. On the technical side, the two solutions are similar, but there are differences in the front end. UiPath is faster. Automation Anywhere runs a process in two seconds, but UiPath takes milliseconds. 

You can develop any process with these tools, but our Turkish customers prefer UiPath because it has an office in Turkey so that we can take support in our mother language. Both of them meet our requirements.

Deploying Automation Anywhere is straightforward. It doesn't take much time. All of the processes need some maintenance because the processes running in the system sometimes don't work. We need to rerun the processes or change the elements. We have a 17-person team, and three of us are responsible for maintaining. The time spent maintaining bots varies. Sometimes, the issue is easy to fix, but if you need to change the flows or do some development, it may take two or three days. 

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten. It depends on your skill. I would rate it higher for non-technical users. 

Automation Anywhere is similar to Blue Prism. We do a lot of process mining and RPA tasks. We've used it in some very large companies. It's for automating activities in large service centers like home loan originations, insurance claims, or for service desks for utilities for telephone companies.

Companies were trying to eliminate a lot of manual processes that were being handled by people at keyboards and some of the repetitive nature. A lot of it is the front-end handling of incoming phone calls or incoming service requests that might be sent via email or text. Rather than having people look at the request on a green screen or on a website, the robots would actually handle some of the routing of the requests or the routing of the documents. For example, for a home loan application or some kind of claim. A lot of the time, most of the companies have people sitting in a service center, receiving those requests and reviewing them. However, now, a lot of the inputting of the data can be handled by the robot.

The solution is easy to deploy. It scales. It's easy to configure. They are pretty generic. There's not a lot of difference between any of the three big RPAs. 

Automation Anywhere is very focused on the Microsoft world. They don't do anything other than Windows and Microsoft, whereas Blue Prism and UiPath compete with other platforms.

The learning curve is low. It's faster to learn than the others.

Some people in my company have used the Co-Pilot functionality. Right now, they use Salesforce, although they have their own RPA now and they are going to replace it with MuleSoft's automation.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide automation at scale for Microsoft is excellent. 

The integration of RPA bots, APIs, or business applications and documents is pretty robust.

They should consider being more multi-platform.

I've used the solution since 2018. I've used it for about five years. 

I've never used technical support.

I've also used Blue Prism in the past.

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The project would dictate how long it would take to deploy. It could take a couple of days to a couple of months. There's a question of governance proliferation and compliance that needs to be considered in RPA. The internal policies would affect the overall setup. 

There is maintenance in the form of updates. It doesn't take much maintenance. We don't use bots and therefore do not need to maintain them.

I don't have any thoughts on pricing or licensing. 

For someone who wants to use an API integration instead of a robust process automation solution, I'd advise it depends on the culture of the company, and the complexity of the integration that one wants to do. Depending on the culture, on average, it's a 50/50 split. There are some environments where RPA is the right thing to do since it's quicker. It's faster. It's easier to manage them from the perspective of just configuring the conformance and compliance with internal policy. However, in other parts of the same organization, you might need API integration depending on what you're integrating.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Nobody gets a ten. Nobody's perfect.

We use it for processes related to IT operations in the manufacturing industry.

There are hectic IT processes, jobs that run overnight, weekly, and monthly. We can optimize, rewrite, and automate them. They represent the most important use cases that I have been involved with: IT operations and software for manufacturing.

It has helped our organization increase automation consumption by 20 to 30 percent.

The most valuable feature is the Control Room.

Also, the integration of RPA bots with other processes and documents is good. We don't have any issues there. We could have more connectors, but it's fine. I have used it for SAP and for direct API-to-API, and that went well.

It is good for standard procedures with an SOP. For those, it works well. But there are processes that are tricky and need human intervention and intelligence. In those cases, the process gets stuck. Something that is a straight-ahead process—you do A, B, C, and D—is fine. But when you do A and then have to decide whether to do B or C, where there is a need for logical thinking and human intervention, we find it difficult to automate those cases. We have to break down those processes and do that tweaking.

We would like to see a more seamless UI, and we would like AI help. Wherever we are stuck or there is a logical error, AI help, with prompting and suggestions on what to do, would be good. If I have dragged and dropped something in the wrong logical sequence and it fails during execution, there should be automated AI help.

We use NetBeans IDE where we get something like automated help, but that's a platform for doing standard Java and PHP development. Automated help is coming up more and more in many tools. For example, Microsoft is providing it. We would like to have something like that in Automation Anywhere, with automated debugging and self-help.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Overall, the product is stable for SOP-based use cases. It is not very stable for complex use cases.

It is not very scalable for complex use cases.

Their technical support is good overall, not excellent. They can improve the response time and on-call support. We have SLAs, so we need support to be immediate.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

Recently, automation has gone to the cloud, and that has been most beneficial because installation was quite hectic before. On-prem was quite difficult, but the moment they launched the cloud version, it became easy.

With on-prem, there were issues with installation over production as well as the setup of the Control Room. Often, the Control Room would go down or hang, and we would have to do restarts. It was not seamless.

The licensing cost could be improved. It costs a lot. At the very least, the developer licenses and the control panels should be made free to enterprises, and the production environment licensed. Production should bear the cost; we would be okay with that, but not the development side.

Business users didn't find it that easy to use, but for developers who are building the use cases, it's quite easy. For the business users, the issues were standard ones, such as navigation, user friendliness, and the terminologies that they needed to understand. They often require training before using it, and not just one training session, but training and retraining. On a scale where 10 represents a low learning curve and one is a large learning curve, Automation Anywhere is a seven. For non-technical people, it's difficult. For them, the learning curve is a four or five. It usually takes four to five months for them to be able to really use it on their own.

We have developed solutions for IT back-end processes, so there are no end-users. These jobs run weekly, fortnightly, and monthly. There are two or three people involved with it, but it's the jobs that we have automated.

We need three to four people to maintain the solutions, but that doesn't take a lot of time—about four hours a week. It's not something that needs to be done every day. Before the jobs run, they check to make sure everything is okay, that no errors or notifications are coming up. The maintenance is very low.

Automation Anywhere is good but not exceptional. It's good because, for simple use cases, we use it with different technologies. For complex processes, automations should perform better.

Our case was downloading the invoices from an Oracle Application.

It involved web and desktop applications and the setup was done in a Citrix, where the AA tool and required applications were installed in a secure environment.

Using Object Cloning for a web application, we extract a record of a company code for which all the invoices need to be extracted, based on month and year. When the company codes are available then all the invoices were extracted, applying the proper logic in the Oracle environment (Similar to SAP).

Proper logging and exceptional handling were supported.

Testing was done in the Dev and Test Environment and finally deployed to PROD.

The Bot was scheduled as per the customer requirements in the Control Room, to be executed as per the demand.

It has improved a lot by automating repetitive steps and hence saving a lot of quality time. 

It's very easy to use and all of the employees can easily get involved in the process, whether they are a developer, support, or have an HR background.

Almost all the easy and complex processes can be automated.

For each employee, the tool is useful if they have some redundant or repetitive tasks to perform on a daily or weekly basis, such as timesheet submission or shift allowance extra. It's a BOT BUDDY, as it is called in our organization.

It's very fast and takes no time to execute a lengthy process.

It's secure; all of the passwords and UN are secured.

The tool is simple and easy to debug and run.

The Automation Anywhere University is vast and we can easily get support from other community members.

Free certification and tutorial videos are readily available and are free of cost.

The Control room is valuable, as we can schedule the bot at any time and give access to anyone from anywhere.

The Recorder feature helps to automate without any effort and is very robust and precise.

The automation is very fast and in no time, it executes the process and hence increases the SLA by a vast margin as compared to other RPA tools.

IQ Bot is a very high niche tool and reads any kind of scanned copy and gives the output with more than 95% precision. It's very simple and supports Python and NLP for adding extra features.

Metabot helps to make reusable components and can be used as a function wherever needed.

It supports Dlls, VBScript, Python script, and macros.

Bot Insight helps to get the analytics in a more enhanced and visually attractive way.

The simplicity of the tool is a plus point, as it does not require one to be from coding background to work on it.

I would like the AA tool to be more proficient and a single entity tool that does not require DLLs or some script to be written separately where it is not capable. It should have more commands, which should remove the dependency on MetaBots or other scripts so that everything is available in the tool itself. This would save time.

All the time working on the tool requires internet connectivity, and it will be great if we can work offline. Offline development would be helpful.

More features like AI and ML should be included, as well as additional features to automate Citrix applications and mainframe applications.

I would like to see more Excel commands available.

Introduction to dictionaries and other data types should be included.

I would like to have a ready-made framework available so that less time is spent to develop the whole framework for the processes.

In terms of robustness, the bot should be efficient enough to deal with the code breakdowns. This could be done with more exception handling features and a ready-made framework.

More tutorials with complex scenarios and ILT training would be an improvement.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The product is very stable and runs without delay, failures, or system hangs.

Logs are maintained both locally and at the server level.

The client and server connection is smooth.

Scalability is wonderful for AA, we can easily add the extra robots as per the transaction load without impacting the process.

The customer support and technical support are very helpful and service is available 24/7,  around the clock.

Communication is very good and their knowledge of the tool is in-depth.

Support teams are pro-active and they have a vast network of partners.

We did not use a different RPA solution before this one.

The initial setup was easy, as per the guidelines shared by AA, including the minimum system requirements such as OS level, RAM requirement, SQL Server, and .NET requirement. This information was shared via the documentation.

When finding any problem, their support team is very fast and cooperative in helping to resolve the issue ASAP.

Our company directly consulted with the Automation Product teams for RPA implementation and COE implementation in our organization.

ROI is high; usually, one process automation is equivalent to three FTEs in our organization.

It's cheapest among the competition, although bargaining is a must.

Different licenses are for Bot Runner and Bot Creator, which saves on the cost.

We evaluated UiPath and Automation Edge.

We found AA to be the best among the others in terms of pricing, licensing, support, and tool capability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will be talking about some of the leading products from Automation Anywhere, which is their RPA Taskbot and IQ bot. Being a consultant and partner, we have implemented successfully some solutions for Automation Anywhere using IQ bot and Taskbot.

We have found that finance as a function has always been a very strong use case when it comes to a product like Automation Anywhere. The reason is very strong compliance, quality, error controls, and the speed and efficiency with which Automation Anywhere can deliver projects. Because of this, finance as a function has always been a great user for this type of solution. However, we have also tried implementing Automation Anywhere around some very different use cases in HR.

We have implemented Automation Anywhere solutions for HR recruitment and onboarding, which has helped save a lot of time to go through some of the very detailed resumes with multiple pages of a candidates' profiles, their skill sets, their academics, and their years of experience. When there are hundreds and thousands of such resumes which are applied online through multiple channels, like LinkedIn, Monster, email, or any campaigns, it really becomes very painful for HR organizations to go and scan so many CVs and process, then mine, the best candidates for a particular job request.

So, we use successfully Automation Anywhere product to automate the complete recruitment process, along with our onboarding process as well. It has really worked wonders for the organization and departments.

Finance as a function is driven by cost and the money involved in it. So, if I'm processing an invoice, doing procurement, or expense processing, there is money involved. From a compliance perspective, the value of the bot should be accurate to the second or third decimal. The accuracy of the job being done has a very high sensitivity in finance compared to other functions because there is money involved on the receivable side or payable side. So, either I am to collect money from my customers or I am to pay money to my suppliers or vendors. Everywhere, there is money involved, and you can't execute an incorrect job. You can't execute a wrong document and end up paying less or end up paying more to your suppliers or customers. When it comes to financials, Automation Anywhere has done amazing work in ensuring not only the speed and accuracy of the bot, but also the compliance and error controls through which the bot executes the job at very high satisfaction and tolerance levels. So, I have seen various use cases and success stories where Automation Anywhere is used in finance.

So far, we have seen that a valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the ease of integrating it with multiple systems. It can very easily integrate with an environment of an organization. It helps in a quick go to access and implementation. You don't have to spend days implementing Automation Anywhere software. You can quickly go drag and drop and do an ease of configuration. You can actually get your bot up and running very fast, which is one important advantage.

For a business user, it is not very technical or complex software. Before this, they need to have a lot of training. So, that is the ease and simplicity with which Automation Anywhere can be deployed, not only by a technical team, but also by the business owners. I found this to be a very unique, competitive advantage.

The industry is moving towards strong AI and ML-based algorithms. They have already started their journey. Earlier, Automation Anywhere added Taskbot, then they added IQ Bot. I would say bring the AI component into the Automation Anywhere product line, then a user will be able to make a lot of decision-making processes digitally instead of with human intervention. The more that they bring and make their cognitive engine stronger, along with the Taskbot or digital worker, that's where I feel they will have a wonderful contribution to an organization who is looking at a truly digital workforce environment.

They should do more on the cognitive side. If they can keep adding more features, that would be their greatest advantage.

A good thing about Automation Anywhere are three important things: scalability, durability, and the entire stability of the environment. So, I can start the journey with one, two, five, or 10 bots, then just look at the very comparable enterprise organization where I could apply hundreds of the bots.

Now, in any other situation, when I deploy the bot from our development to UAT to a production environment, and bots are running in a production environment, what I should not be worried about is: Are those bots running? Are the tasks getting completed on time? All that stuff. 

Stability of Automation Anywhere bots is very high. So, a one side deploys these bots successfully. I don't have to worry much whether the bot is stable. Is the bot performing? Even after deploying the bot, do I have to go back and check ii the bot is having some problems? Or, are there some errors being induced?

In the Control Room, I am able to see the complete dashboard of all the bots: 

• Which bots I have deployed (hundreds of them)?
• How many bots are in progress? 
• How many bots are running? 
• How many bots have thrown some error because of incorrect jobs or processes?

That gives me very quick access to the entire deployment of my bots. I can access that dashboard, even from my mobile. Even if I'm not in office and I'm head of the enterprise or a COE architecture, I can just log into my mobile and see how many bots are performing well, how many bots have done the job in time, etc.

The stability of the whole architecture is the essence of Automation Anywhere, if you ask me.

Scalability is huge. I have seen organizations who don't want to invest big during the initial phase, even if they have a big appetite to deploy hundreds of bots. They normally start with five or 10 bots. The best part about Automation Anywhere is you can start with five, 10, 50, 100, 200, or 300 bots. Today, the Control Room can manage 300 to 400 Bot Runners in a single architecture.

So, organizations don't have to worry that after a 100 bots they won't have to do another architecture change or shift the entire environment here or there. They can keep on adding bots and keep scaling their organization to hundreds of bots.

You can configure bots to do multiple tasks in a series or in batch mode, depending upon the type of task. Ideally, when you assign a job to the bot, it will try to finish it. But, if there is some parallel processing required for some business requirement, I can make a few bots do the job parallel, then I can take over from where the other guys left off. That is another ease of Automation Anywhere. Bots can be configured the way you want to perform your operations.

I have worked with their technical support. I would rate them quite well. It is improving day by day. From the initial days, when we used to approach the technical support, we definitely used to get a lot of technical insight from them related to Automation Anywhere. Today, when we talked to them for environments outside Automation Anywhere which are a customer environment, they are able to assist us. They are able to guide us on something, even as a part of the enterprise architecture. 

The best part I have seen is the technical capabilities and support metrics to help the customers and partners (like us) are improving day by day. That is the biggest advantage of why they are able to reach this scale of enterprise penetration today.

In this forum, we have come to know that they're also coming out with a browser version. Today, we have to install the software on a PC, desktop, or server. What they are coming out with now is like a browser version, which quickly can be applied instead of an installation. That is amazing. That will be disruptive. You can now deploy hundreds of bots at a very fast pace, and that's an amazing thing to look forward to.

We have seen environments where customers do have multiple product lines for doing different functionalities or process automations. While comparing various competitors, we have found that if a customer is at the SMB or medium scale of deployment, say two, five, or 10 bots, there are competitive products available . But, any organization who has gone enterprise scale of hundreds of bot has chosen Automation Anywhere because the way they have created their entire governments and architecture. Customers are more comfortable with Automation Anywhere when it comes to scalability.

Two or three bots, we have seen competitors here and there. But, the moment you move into large scale bot deployments, we have seen comfort more with Automation Anywhere compared to other competitors.

Last year, I would have rate them an eight (out of 10). This year, I would rate them a nine (out of 10) because I'm seeing a lot of improvements coming. As an observer in the industry, a consultant, and a partner, this is what look upon to any giant like Automation Anywhere to bring a lot of exciting new features every year. This is required by everybody in the organization and globally. That's why I would say nine out of 10. I would have said 10 out of 10, but I want them to bring more such features, and maybe next year I'll be saying 10 out of 10.

There is not one specific use case in the sense of what we use the product for. In the broader scope, it would be automation. But right now we have several applications. We started our journey with the tool in 2017, and we have automated several processes in finance, IT, and engineering. 

In finance, for example, we have automated cash application, billing processes, reporting, payment processing, and we are using IQ Bots to automate our invoice processing. We completed the pilot, which provided us with phenomenal results. So we tested with a small entity with 30000 invoices and around 300 suppliers with a high level of success.

The character extraction capability of IQ Bot is much, much better than the other OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engines that you have in the market today. So we are completely pleased with that, and we are planning to upscale our invoice automation processing.

Today while we look at the opportunities in front of us, our customers are expecting us to be more productive and execute with greater speed to be relevant and competitive in the market. The expectation as far as the accuracy is really very high, and we need to be compliant. We have experienced that the more manual and hands-on that we are that there is a higher risk of being non-compliant.

There are skilled companies who are spending more time on transactional activities. For example in the engineering field, there are engineers who are spending time on transactional activities and there are finance guys who are spending time on transactional activities that could be automated. 

We can use intelligent automation with great value in helping these people upskill themselves into newer areas of analytics, new roles in reporting, and project accounting in finance. We're trying to eliminate these transactional activities, be faster over time. We started by looking at specific activities and we looked at the processes. Now, we are looking at a complete value chain. When you look at the complete value chain, that's when you actually begin driving positive change in business results. That is our projected approach for the next couple of years. We'll be looking at the complete value chain and see how bots can help us make our process more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the IQ Bot's ability to extract information accurately. It can do things like process table-level information, line-item level information, etcetera, and the accuracy is really very high. All of our users are accountants rather than programmers or anybody with an IT background. The accounting people can easily learn Automation Anywhere. We tried a few other tools but our folks were more comfortable using Automation Anywhere. They felt that it is easy to learn, and it was easy to train them as to how to use it.

In the next release, I think it has to be more compatible when deployed with the Citrix environment. That's one bottleneck that we have seen. Technically when we used the IQ Bots, we couldn't work directly through the Citrix environment. With our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) setup, we needed to access it through the Citrix environment. Because we were not able to do that, we had to have a workaround. We are currently working with Automation Anywhere to have that fixed. They have given us confidence that it can be done.

When looking at stability, we have to remain ready for any surprise even if we have not experienced any stability issues. We don't know what that kind of surprise will be, but we have backup plans in place.

In case the tool fails, we may not be as fast as the bots, but we have a BCP (Business Continuity Plan) but we know we can't be specific on what challenges will come, because we don't know.

In two years, I think once in one process where a bank changed its user interface on the bank website, a bot failed. We had to go and correct it. It was a fairly quick fix because to create it doesn't take much time. Changes like this are not predictable.

If you look at our shared services, we are growing and we need to keep our costs flat. This means I cannot hire more people. This need for greater efficiency is made up by what I have been able to gain out of the automation. We are actually using automation to move more processes into our shared services. Ours is a private business and we create big cement plants. One project could last for five years. When we land a big deal our volume spikes. It's a very cyclical business. It has been very easy for us to deploy scalable solutions now.

The company is very service friendly and willing to work with us when we need it. I would give them high marks for attention to customer service.

Our decision to go with an RPA solution was one that I made. One of the reasons I was hired into this organization was to drive automation. There was a specific goal for that which I was tasked with.

When looking at other options in the market Automation Anywhere seemed to be the company for us for a couple of reasons. One is that when we had our first engagement with Automation Anywhere we felt that they were very customer-focused. We did not see that with the other service providers. They really came prepared when they first met with us. They had all their books, IT, operations, delivery plans and such, so they were able to answer all our questions. They were very flexible in meeting our requirements and needs.

They were willing to go out of their way to support us and to ensure that we would succeed in the journey. Some of the service providers even refused to create POC's for us. But Automation Anywhere said they would and they went ahead and created them.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward and easy.

We did not use any consultants for our deployment. We worked directly with Automation Anywhere. Our belief is that we know our business better than anybody so we opted for maximum direct involvement.

Before deciding to go with Automation Anywhere we looked at other products for comparison like UiPath. We looked at the desktop automation tool, I currently don't even remember their name. The choice seemed obvious from the first impressions.

If I have any advice to give to people who are considering this product as a solution to their automation needs, I would say don't waste time thinking too much about adopting it and just go ahead and start.

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

If you look at the first year we had the product, we had a 6% efficiency gain. This year we are looking at 10% in finance and 12% in IT. The more we discover ways to use it, the more efficient we will become.