Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

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.

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 financial back-office functions, things like fee information, balance information, and account aggregation information.

It has been able to save us time in our processes from hours to minutes. Something that might have taken anywhere from two to eight hours now takes 20 minutes.

The general features, that we can automate a task that takes hours into minutes, are valuable. But as far as an individual product feature goes, there isn't anything more specific.

Operationally, there's room for improvement, especially in the area of high-availability and deployment.

In high-availability, we have two Control Rooms acting as a cluster so if one fails the other one will take over. But that's not our environment operationally, and the latest information we have is that they identified another product bug.

We have come through a number of issues with them and they've been very good at fixing them, but we've gone through four different patches to get things working, and currently, we're not working in a clustered environment.

We're not really there yet, in terms of scaling, but based on the high-availability issue, right now I'm not too confident. From everything I've heard, though, it seems like people are running hundreds of processes on a Control Room, but we haven't really done enough to know about scalability.

Technical support is the one thing that has been fantastic. Initially, when we had all these issues, we had some issues trying to get to the right people. But since we escalated and got the right people involved, they've been fantastic. They've had people come out to our site. We submit tickets and let them know the error and they see and pretty much turn them around right away. Unfortunately we do have a number of issues, but support has been really great.

We haven't used any other RPA product.

In the initial setup, we had difficulty in our environment. We actually had to have them come onsite for two days to get us deployed, and even then it took another month before we were finally operational. I think our environment was a factor, but we also did find product failures.

We installed it but it was not operational. Everything from the way things were configured to our license not being set up accurately was an issue. So we had configuration setups such that we couldn't process and it took a while to get that figured out. To be honest, one of the issues was that it was around the holidays and the right people weren't available to help us out. It took us a week-and-a-half just to resolve the fact that there was a button that had to be un-clicked.

And we've been continuing to have issues along the way. They had actually settled down quite a bit until we hit this high-availability issue.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we used a development partner, professional services, that had knowledge of Automation Anywhere. This is a brand-new program for us, our first foray into RPA, so we had a professional services partner who took us all the way from business process through implementation. We don't have technical resources here who did the implementation. We totally relied on them, initially.

Our strategy was to have an experienced professional services partner help us get onboarded and develop bots for us as a PoC. Then, after the PoC and we declared complete, we would move them into production. Our longer-term strategy would be to start building some in-house talent that could do some of the bots as well.

The partner we used was independent of Automation Anywhere. They did a really good job in the upfront work, telling us what RPA can provide and about the process for determining if something should be automated or not. 

Where we struggled a bit is when it came to implementing. We implemented what the business did but we didn't implement what was needed from an operational point of view. In other words, what happens when there's an issue? What happens when there's a scenario that the bot can't handle? How will people get notified? Things like that weren't factored in initially. Some of that might have been because it was a pilot, but ultimately the vendor said, "Yeah, we're going to productionize this." But we've had delays in getting our bots into production because that aspect of usability wasn't factored in.

We're in the process of trying to get our last bot into production, and then we'll start trying, in 2019, to develop some more bots. But it has delayed our bot development. We're tracking about two months behind what we expected.

Our biggest lesson learned is that we need to factor in usability right from the beginning, not only that the business does these ten steps, but what happens if those steps fail?

It's too early for a return on investment.

On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are about $80,000. We bought a package and when we tried to get this high-availability to work we bought some extra Bot Runners. I know that if we buy IQ Bot there's an additional cost for that but we haven't gotten there yet.

We evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath. We chose Automation Anywhere - both our technology and business sides, as a partnership - because the business and technology agreed with them. They felt that it was something they could more easily understand with some of their tech-savvy people. They felt they would ultimately be able to use the product, once it got rolled out. Whereas, with some of the other products, they didn't feel they were as easy to adopt.

Make sure that you not only look at what the business needs are, but how the business will use the product when it becomes operational. It's relatively easy to get a bot developed to do what the business wants, as long as they have a good process laid out. But what is more difficult is that when you go into production you have to understand how you can schedule it if it's attended. Our three bots are unattended. You have to understand the scheduling aspect, you have to understand what happens if it's not happy path and there's an issue. Who does it go to? How is it going to get monitored? And you have to understand how your infrastructure is supported. Our infrastructure is kind of complex which is, I think, why we're running into some of the issues we are.

The users of Automation Anywhere in our company are all business users who support our clients in the back-office, whether that's trying to do fee calculations or account calculations. We only have three bots and the number of business users is probably less than 20, in total, who will be using it once we go live. It may be more as we get further along but right now it's less than 20, probably closer to 15.

We're trying to get it out to different departments, so ultimately there could be 50 users, maybe even 100, but that's more long-term. We might get up to 20, but I think that's as far as we'll get this year, unless we start having a lot better success.

Part of our problem is that for maintenance we require at least two people. Deployment is actually pretty straightforward, but we need about two people for that as well. The people involved would be CM, configuration management, our technology architect, our operations infrastructure, and our database team.

We have around 400 to 500 bots running on the production server. If any issues arise with a bot, we check and fix them on our end.

We have SOPs for manual processes. We automate based on the SOPs.

Automation Anywhere helps us perform processes much faster. We have many options in the tool to keep all details secure. Overall, it is very beneficial.

Automation Anywhere is easy to learn for someone who does not have technical skills. Other technologies require us to learn syntax and other things. Many things are there, whereas in Automation Anywhere, we can just select an action. Within one or two months, one can easily understand and work on it. With basic coding knowledge, we can easily automate. Compared to other technologies, it is very easy to learn.

Automation Anywhere is user-friendly for automating processes with accuracy and efficiency. It saves time and offers precise outputs. 

Automation Anywhere has saved about 60% to 70% of our time.

The best feature is the Capture action. If we want to capture the whole process, we can do it in a single shot. Everything is added to the code, which is a good feature. It takes us less time to automate. It allows us to achieve what we are doing manually, irrespective of how long it is.

I struggled with understanding the use of different variables during my initial time with Automation Anywhere. We have three types of variables. We have user-defined variables, system variables, and config variables. Sometimes, we get confused about the values stored in various variables. If the tool could show the current value stored in the variable, it would be much easier.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for the last two years.

Automation Anywhere is a stable product, and I would rate it as one of the best.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

In my team, we have 30 people using the solution.

Till now, I have not connected with any support member for any issues.

Neutral

Automation Anywhere is my first tool on the automation side. I do not have any experience with other tools on the automation side. Earlier, I worked with Java and C technologies. Compared to those, Automation Anywhere has more features, and it is very easy to do everything I want.

The initial setup is straightforward. If you have knowledge about it, it does not take much time. Within 15 to 20 minutes, it can be installed on a machine.

Its maintenance is easy.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere to others. 

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten. This is my first solution, and I am still learning it. I still have to learn many things about this solution.