Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

We embarked on our journey eight months ago.

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 have had it in production since January of 2019, five months ago. We had it in beta for two months before that. We actually onboarded the product in September of 2018. That was when we started with the product but it was all PoC.

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.

Public Cloud

Other

I have primarily worked in the presales as well as in the sales cycle. I do not have hands-on experience with the tool. I have a team of people who are the continuous improvement folks who work in a particular area. We have developers or continuous improvement people who leverage the tool and go ahead and help to get them deployed. For example, if it is UiPath's process mining capabilities, they basically plug the data and do other things. They do the work, and we ensure that we drive the transformation and build the business connects for the customer. So, my role is very different. I am a management consultant. My core hands-on experience is not with digital tools in itself, but I leverage digital tools to drive transformation for a customer. As part of my role, I understand the features and the value add that it brings to the table. I do quality assurance of the outputs that are generated. I also ensure that teams are able to work in a client environment because they need to be able to access the client environment. I also need to drive transformation because there is a lot of stakeholder management. There is a lot of project management that is needed. I work in that area and that sphere. I am not a technical person as such, but when a tool is deployed, I understand how to execute the implementation, how to drive the discussions, and with automation, how to drive value for my customers. That is my area of expertise.

People primarily use it to fast-track and automate transactional, repeatable tasks. By using Automation Anywhere, people want the execution of transactional activities. It could be the back office. It could be the middle office. I have not seen front office use cases, but I am sure there are use cases for that. I have only seen a lot of middle office and back office activities. For example, in the Procurement area, a typical transactional activity would be PR to PO, where information is readily available. That is the use case where it can be easily applicable. Likewise, in the Accounts Payable area, you can use Automation Anywhere to execute automation for payment processing activities. The finance area has got a lot of use cases. They could be reconciliation-related activities, data-gathering activities from different documents, etc. In some areas of Audit to Cash, it could be even looking up invoices and answering customer queries that are pretty straightforward. These are the high-level use cases that I have seen.

Typically, when you are able to execute any repeatable task in an organizational environment, you enhance organizational AI capability. The reason is that your increased accuracy will improve the predictability of the AI algorithm for getting the job transactional activities completed. For example, if somebody is going to create a purchase requisition and the average turnaround time is five days, with a bot, I can get the purchase requisition created in one day. The organization can check and see what is the rate of improvement or what is the predictability of getting the orders received for producing the finished goods. When you look at the end-to-end view, you get predictability to say when will my goods reach the customer. You get to know that by improving one area with automation and ensuring that the work is done in a repeatable manner, you can improve your predictability by a certain percentage, so any automation of a particular process will improve an organization's AI capability. 

The biggest integration is how it integrates with the system of record. When you automate a process per se, you are extracting information or reading information out of a system of record. It could be SAP. It could be Oracle. It could be Microsoft Dynamics, but Microsoft has its tool called Power Automate. That is one level of system integration. The other level of system integration is where you have a front-facing bot. For example, anything to do with query management or queries that keep coming via mail or shared service portals. These integrations are a little different from the ones that you have with a system of record. Automation Anywhere integrates pretty seamlessly for both types of automation. The system of record integration can be a little bit of a challenge as compared to the regular mail servers or shared service portals because of the permissions and the security checks that are needed. Getting VDI access becomes a little bit challenging because customers sometimes are not comfortable giving full-fledged access during the UAT. It becomes a little bit challenging, but it also depends upon the maturity of the customer and the nature of the business. They are not comfortable giving full-fledged access because it will create problems for them, but after that, when it gets into the live environment, things are a lot easier and streamlined. It has nothing to do with Automation Anywhere. It is just about the maturity and the protocols that a customer has in place. These aspects make it easier to integrate with Automation Anywhere or any other service provider. Based on what my peers have mentioned to me, it is not challenging to integrate with APIs, etc. It is pretty seamless. There are not too many issues. There might have been a challenge in a specific situation, but by and large, in general, the capability it offers is pretty standard for a typical automation tool.

There have been a lot of use cases where we have used Automation Anywhere to save time and costs. Typically, any automation gives you 20% to 30% efficiency. That is what I have seen. That is an average. In some cases, it could be high, and in some cases, it could be low depending on the task and the domain, but 20% to 30% efficiency is typically possible.

Since implementing the solution, the tasks are taking place in a seamless manner. As long as the process is not changed, there is the ease of replicability. Repeatable tasks constantly get done without any challenges. 

There is also an increase in the efficiency of the people. There is reduced turnaround time for responses or getting the activities done.

We work with lots of digital tools, and I have been engaged with teams for the last seven years or so.

They are one of the top service providers for automation. They are definitely stable.

Automations are also pretty stable. Automation works on the fact that you are not changing your process. As long as things are repeatable, every automation software does the same thing. Challenges come when you do upgrades to your ERP, or for that matter, you make one simple change in the process. That is when you have any stability-related challenges.

I believe they can do automation at scale.

It has been a long time since I reached out to them for support. As a service provider, they are always there to provide support. The challenges happen in terms of how the deal was constructed, what was agreed, and where were the gaps in understanding. That is where the issues happen. There are usually many unknowns. I would rate them an eight out of ten based on my experience a while ago.

We work with lots of digital tools. We have leveraged UiPath in the past. We are platinum partners with some of the service providers.

 I know that Automation Anywhere, UiPath, or any other solution has its own specific nuances, but the gap between them is closing up technically. In terms of value, I do see that Automation Anywhere offers value.

The tool selection depends on the partnership deal. It depends on who an organization is considering and the approach for partnership deals. In my organization, we have different partners with whom we work. How you partner with an organization and approach that organization is one of the big differentiators. I know there are not too many players out there in the market. You only have big fours. The key thing is how you are partnering with them and how you are going into the market and taking their support. The second thing is how you are promoting the key capability that you are bringing to the table and how you are comparing it with other people. For example, I know that UiPath has process mining capability, but Automation Anywhere is offering AI capabilities. If I go to a customer and immediately start talking about AI via automation, it is a little drawn-out process for me, whereas with process mining, I can immediately plug and play the data and tell them what are the challenges and for those long run activities, what are my automation possibilities. The positioning is important, but I am not undermining the AI capabilities that Automation Anywhere brings. 

I was not involved in the deployment of Automation Anywhere. I work with the RPA team.

The deployment environment varies. It is dependent on the client's environment. It depends on where your data is and where you are doing the automation. If you are doing automation on the data fabric for reporting purposes and you are deploying a bot to gather the data from specific tables, you might put it onto a data fabric or a data lake. If you are working on PR to PO, that information is going to be on a system of record. It might be on the server itself. It is truly use-case-dependent in my view.

In terms of maintenance, customers typically buy the licenses, but these days, I see that customers prefer to use one main partner for all their licenses because it is easy to manage that one main partner. It could be the largest partner they have in their set of vendors who are supporting them for all IT-related activities. If they buy it from them, they do not need to do maintenance, but if they buy the licenses themselves, they may need maintenance. It depends on whom they are engaging with and what is the purchasing model of licenses.

They all are very competitive today. At the end of the day, it boils down to the negotiations that happen and what type of partner you are. Are you a premium partner or are you a preferred partner or a gold partner? Prices are very standardized. There could be a little bit of deviation, but they are comparable. It is a pretty saturated market because everybody has been doing our RPA for the last decade, so they are pretty competitive in pricing.

Every customer is at a different maturity level. Customers at a high level of maturity of process standardization definitely are looking at the next wave of evolution with generative AI. To do some things in generative AI, there have to be some elements of automation. Companies that are not so mature or the small and medium are not yet there. They are trying to digitize the ways of working. They want to ensure that they have the right framework structure within the organization. They are experimenting with automation, but it is more like a basic level of automation. Mature companies with billions of dollars in revenue have already been doing it for the past many years. They are taking up more of the generative AI opportunity to enhance and go deep into those areas.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

We have automated some data entry scenarios. We also have automation for system monitoring. It is being used for data entry, system monitoring, and data exchange with other systems.

We found a lot of processes to automate. We currently have about 80 processes that we have automated. 

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption, but we are a little short of RPA developers. We are acquiring new talent and new resources for that group, and we are on the right path. We have a lot of work. 

Workbench, which is a development tool, is very friendly. It is complete. Compared to Power Automate, Automation Anywhere is much more comprehensive and easy to understand.

We use APIs for some bots. It is not too common, but we use APIs in some processes. The integration at the moment is easy.

We work with version 11, and we have some problems with some applications. Automation Anywhere's software does not recognize them properly. The recognition of web applications is not good. The software does not consistently recognize all the controls and objects. We are in the process of migrating to a new version. We are migrating to Automation Anywhere 360, and I hope that in the latest version, the recognition model can be better. On the Internet and various forums, many people say that Automation Anywhere 360 appears to be much better, but we have not implemented it yet. I hope it is better and consistent. The main problem is consistency. If I make a bot today and tomorrow if the application changes, the bot stops working.

Similarly, in terms of the ability to provide automation at scale, the new version is more focused on that. The version that we have is not that capable. The development is not too easy. We need to put in too much effort, but Automation 360 appears to be easier. Development takes less time.

Automation Anywhere is a technical application. It is not so easy for a regular user. It requires technical knowledge. The new version is more user-friendly from an ease-of-use perspective. 

I have been using this solution for three to four years.

I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We are still using Power Automate, but we are not using their RPA model. We only use Power Automate for other automations. When we chose our RPA tool, Microsoft had not released the RPA tool for Power Automate. Microsoft released it a year or two years later.

We have some processes to analyze the ROI, but right now, we are not focusing on knowing that information. Our main need is automation. ROI is important, but it is not critical at the moment. We are still automating projects in the company.

It is expensive. I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten in terms of pricing. 

They bill for every IQ bot that you have. We do not use IQ Bot, but we have a license, and they bill for every thousand pages. 

We evaluated one or two other options, but I was not a part of the evaluation.

We did a little bit of research, and we found that Automation Anywhere was recommended at that time. It had better reviews on the Gartner website, so we decided to go with it.

It takes about three to four months to learn it. Some of the things are easy, but because we are trying to do automations, we need to make sure that we understand the application properly. We need to know how it works internally in the structure of the code because sometimes, we make a programming change that works today but stops working tomorrow. That is because the application can change, so we need to understand how the controls work between the changes and have the logic that allows a bot to run smoothly irrespective of the application changes. It is challenging to analyze the changes in the application and find a way to program the bot to recognize the changes.

To someone who wants to use API integration instead of an RPA solution, I would say that API integration is more recommended, but sometimes there are issues with this type of integration, so we have to finish the project in Automation Anywhere. The first option that we always try is to create our own integration between the systems with APIs. The RPA tool is the last option for integration.

In terms of maintenance, we need to install the updates or patches. Our infrastructure team is in charge of that. We have technicians to install patches. We have people with different roles. They are technical leaders or system administrators. We also have an information security team, and we have a network team, as well as an operating system team. Every department makes a little contribution to the whole environment.

For managing the bots, we have only three people. Maintenance of bots is different because we have bots scheduled all day, so we still need to monitor them on a daily basis, but the update process is monthly. We verify what is pending. Overall, the maintenance takes about eight hours a month.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven out of ten.

I am a Digital Transformation Consultant & my role revolves around suggesting, recommending & implementing the best automation solution across to my clients. Some of them also include:

a) Lower operating costs

b) Faster ROI

c) Ability to be more competitive

Giving the right automation solutions can reap major benefits. Understanding these benefits—and some obstacles—will help us develop support for an operations automation project. The primary benefits of operations automation cited most often were cost reduction, productivity, availability, reliability, and performance.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has helped me in suggesting, recommending & implementing the best automation solution across to my client

AA is a better and more intelligent approach to cost containment and reduction. The greatest opportunity is to increase service to the customer (end-user) while systematically reducing costs. Management often overlooks this potential for savings. Most modern servers have a low operating cost and the total cost of ownership has been declining. AA solution has helped to streamline operations in businesses of all sizes.

The benchmarking scores, the latest technology improvements & the use cases are the most valuable aspects. 

• Intelligent automation for business and IT tasks.
• Uses SMART Automation Technology.
• Rapidly Automates complex and complicated tasks.
• Create automation tasks like recording keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.
• Distribute tasks to multiple computers

AA allows you to create processes using 3 types of robots: Task Bot, Meta Bot, and IQ Bot. Instead of rewriting redundant code for processes, a meta bot can be used instead. This type of robot is best used for complex scalable processes. IQ Bot: The most powerful of the 3 types of robots is the IQ Bot.

With more demo recordings and positive real-time reviews from the clients. AA should provide a free evaluation period so it is easy to attract new customers. It is not able to use OCR effectively and has limited usability. Handwritten documents are still a drawback. 

It is also difficult in terms of control room management. The debugger is also a weakness of the tool, forcing the developer to use error handling or message box to map errors. Few applications take more time for loading when integrated.

I have been using AA since 2017.

• It is highly accurate and gets up and running in a very short period of time.
• You can keep the BOT learning by feeding more and more data sets, which makes the whole process highly efficient.
• It is very cost-effective when deployed and when scaling out to the limit.

• Using Automation Anywhere's tool we can automate window and Web-based processes. It is very easy to use.
• It can automate rule-based and repetitive processes.
• It can work 24*7 without taking a rest.
• Time-saving. It is very fast in comparison to doing something manually.
• Cost-saving.

They are always up to mark and ready to help out when in need.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team, they were great !

It has been fair to be honest.

The setup cost, pricing and/or licensing of AA sounds reasonable considering its capability.

Keep up the good work & keep improving as you grow.

On-premises

Microsoft Azure

We have ITMS (IT Service Management) and there are a lot of support tickets which are coming into that service site. As an enterprise application, there are too many tickets to handle live. This system is being used by service desk employees to enable them to address all the issues that customers are facing which they are tasked to resolve. 

Because the number of tickets is huge, managing those services and change requests is complicated to handle manually. We use Automation Anywhere now to process these tasks wherever it is not necessary to use the API to process the handling of requests.

If, for example, I have an application which does not have an API, but there is one activity where a user may need to be registered in that particular application for it to function, we use Automation Anywhere for that to supply the access. We get the data from the source data and use an Automation Anywhere bot to do the registration of the user into that application. This was being done by the service desk manually in previous instances, now it is automated using Automation Anywhere.

We have had about 300+ live tickets at the end of every month before using Automation Anywhere. We just went live last month using Automation Anywhere bots to take care of processing some issues. The total number of tickets that remain live has come down to around 80 as of the end of this month. It might touch around a hundred at peak times right now. But over a short period of time, maybe around six months, these unresolved issues could become zero at the end of the month. We are just evaluating the numbers from the date when we went live, so it is not so accurate. Definitely, the goal is that the count will become zero, and that is the target. It seems to be working well so far.

The other use cases that we have are open-ended right now. There are a lot of potential uses. For example, if a request comes into the service now to create a VPN account, we can automate that using Automation Anywhere. That work is in progress. Today that is a manual task where the service desk people raise another ticket to another team who will go there and create the VPN accounts. 

We are in the process of identifying certain processes that can be automated through a bot, as there are other services for internal support functions, like HR or IT. We are trying to take some of those services to automate them. In terms of the extensiveness, we have just started with that. We have around 10 new sketches that we have automated right now but we have around 13 to 14 sketches that we wanted to automate through this process.

We are using the on-premise deployment model.

As far as how the product has helped us improve our organization, we may be a bit premature to just to say that it has already decreased the workload. But looking into the decrease in the ticket counts, it suggests that it is helping process customer service requests and that it definitely is going to help us more in the future as we utilize the solution better.

There is one user registration process in one application where there is no API which has been published by that framework. This is a very proprietary in one application by a third-party. So, there was a help desk, and whenever a call went to the help desk, they had a front-end where they created these user registrations. Now, this is completely automated for all employees who are onboarded. We receive the data, it is put it into Excel, and from Excel, it will update it into the particular tool where the registration happens.

On the service desk, they are using ServiceNow with a VPN connection. Now, they are logging using Automation Anywhere as a bot, which logs into a ServiceNow. It will then take that VPN request and create it on the server.

To be very honest, I've not had the opportunity to go through all the features of Automation Anywhere. This feature where it can use a bot to go between a user and into other systems as a robot and do that work is very valuable. It can do whatever humans can do and still provide a level of security. That model is a good one. 

Developers don't have any challenges using it. We are still in the early stages of use, but it is working well. It is very easy to use for our developers.

One of the challenges that I think should be resolved — from what my team was telling me — is that Automation Anywhere is not able to connect to a database directly. I have not evaluated this myself. There may be good security reasons for this, but it should be possible.

For example, generally what we do now is to write scripts to push the data from the database and into the automation event. The direct access feature — which is not available according to my team — could solve the issue with the scripts. There's room for improvement in making more flexible solutions.

As of now, because I have not used the new version very extensively, I don't have any reference to say what features should be added to the next release of the product. My one thought is that I don't know about the possibility of reading from unstructured data and if Automation Anywhere has any features to access unstructured data sources. It would be good if it can read the data and build some intelligence over that to push data to the right application. We do have some requirements from clients in other organizations where invoices will come in to be scanned. Based on the analysis of the data, copies of the data can be sent to different, appropriate applications. We are using different tools to do this now. If this kind of feature for reading unstructured data is there, then it will be easier to incorporate in processes. That is good to add if it is not there already. 

There can be some options to connect to the database directly where we should be able to add some data. 

There was a limitation where we were supposed to login remotely to one server and carry out some actions. That integration was not possible.

I have been using the product for about six months.

In the Indian market, there are a lot of other service companies like us. In the market, there are other products competing with Automation Anywhere like UiPath. My team has technical experts in their technology and these experts also work with Automation Anywhere. When they are comparing the products, they say that the modules or the functionality in UiPath can do a better job overall compared to Automation Anywhere.

From a stability perspective, we run into an interesting issue. Somewhere in the licensing — especially for the Indian market — there should be some different pricing packages. For mid-size companies like us in our market situation, having multiple bots really costs a lot as a percentage of revenue. Instead of adding costs, we are trying to run with one or two bots which run about seven processes in all. It may not be the most efficient or optimal way to get the most from the product. From the cost perspective in the Indian market, if you want to grab the majority of the potential users, you will want to be considerate on the pricing side. A lower price may bring greater market share, user familiarity, and recognition.

Otherwise, stability seems to be good.

From the scalability standpoint, I don't think there will be any issues except for the increased costs which could prohibit some companies on a limited budget from scaling. So technically it is pretty good, but there may be some restrictions or interference in budget or integrations.

We are using one or two bots that are running continuously.

Support wise, I think the company is doing great. When we hired support staff to help us with the installation the support was very good.

Right now, we are just at the beginning of our implementation as far as what we envision it will be in the future. So far the support that we are getting is normal support. It is just okay. When we place a ticket, there is nothing bad, but also there is nothing extraordinary about the support like we were getting during implementation. What we receive now is just a normal support experience compared to the specialist who was very good.

We have not taken Automation Anywhere University courses.

One of the major reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere is that our company could have a global MSA (Master Service Agreement), where we could use this particular tool for our end customers also. As an organization, we had a global implementation with Automation Anywhere where the clients wanted to deliver this solution to the end customer also as part of their solutions. That's why — because that option was there — we just went with Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup for the program was not straightforward. It was definitely complex. As a layman who is unfamiliar with the product, I do not think people can implement it easily. Even people with a little bit of knowledge about the type of robotic engineering and applications are going to go through some challenges where they need help from Automation Anywhere.

So far in this installation, we have had to integrate with some internal processes. Also, we needed to incorporate solutions for the respective firewall openings to the internet. It has taken almost one-and-a-half months to do the basic installation of the software. It is not like pushing a button.

We initially deployed everything on server. However, the permission required Excel to also be a part of our process to be automated. So, we received some complaints on it this. This particular thing cannot be deployed on the server because of the license that we were holding. What I came to know is this feature is not available.

We hired a dedicated person from Automation Anywhere who supported us at the time of the initial installation. Because we were installing this on the cloud infrastructure, we had to go through a lot of challenges. Because we had a dedicated person helping us to do this insulation, it saved us a lot of trouble, experimentation, and effort.

We are still in the process of deploying and evaluating both the solutions and the benefits. However, I definitely think we will see a return on investment. Looking into the number of tickets and seeing that they have decreased now because of some implementation of the solutions we intend to deploy is a good sign. We have around 40+ such use cases that we still need to deploy. Definitely, we are going to see some ROI using this product. It will develop more over time.

In one of the use cases, we use to have around 300 tickets per month which has been reduced to almost zero now.

We evaluated Softomotive and UiPath. 

With Softmotive, the performance was a concerned. It was breaking in many places. That is what we observed. 

With UiPath, it was good. It has got a lot of integrations and can directly talk to the database as well. All those details are there. 

The major reason that we selected Automation Anywhere was the licensing model.

The primary advice which I would give to someone considering automation tools, in general, is don't just go for any RPA tool (Robotic Process Automation). You want to be sure that the tool you choose will solve some issues and resolve your problems. I've seen people just take any RPA tool just to say that they are using some RPA. It is not a status symbol, it is a tool for business. You need to define the problem and that RPA is the way to go to resolve the issue and improve business function.

If there is a process which cannot be completely automated using any scripts, and human intervention is very much required, consider going for this solution.

I will give an example. There was one use case where we had to read information from an Excel table and generate a report out of that. People might decide they need to start using Automation Anywhere or some RPA tool for this solution. But reading an Excel file is not really a commonly necessary use case for any of the RPA tools. Basically it can be taken care of in programming scripts or some small database script application. An easy solution would have given the proper output with less effort and they would still get what they were expecting as users. The point is to evaluate the problem and how complex it is before going to purchase any RPA tool which may be unnecessary. If it can be done through something else, it may be a more efficient process. 

Business users are not using the tool. They are just using the direct outcome.

We have not used IQ Bots, but might in the future.

We have not used the Bot Store. I would like to explore that in the future.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight. It is an eight because I'm seeing some results in the use case even early on whatever we are trying to automate. It has really helped our process so far and we will expand on that.