Automation Anywhere Reviews

We obtain use cases from the business and optimize their solutions by implementing Lean Six Sigma methodologies to eliminate process waste. We then follow this with end-to-end automation that requires no manual intervention. Automation Anywhere is the tool we employ to achieve this.

Our goal is not to solve problems but to automate manual tasks previously performed by humans. Rule-based processes require minimal human decision-making and are ideal candidates for automation. By using Automation Anywhere, we aim to replace repetitive human labour with machine efficiency.

For example, a business user performs the same routine daily: logging in, analyzing Excel data, and responding to customer emails. This repetitive manual work is ideal for automation. We use the Automation Anywhere tool to build a bot that mimics these human actions. The bot logs in, processes emails, responds to customers, and completes the entire process autonomously, from start to finish.

We use generative AI to process emails by determining customer sentiment and intent: happy, inquiring, dissatisfied, or angry. The AI makes decisions based on email content and automatically generates requests or tickets in ServiceNow, assigning them to appropriate users. This automation replaces the manual task of sifting through thousands of daily customer emails, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. The combination of generative AI and Automation Anywhere automates this process efficiently.

Automation Anywhere increased productivity by 30 percent.

Automation Anywhere has significantly re-emerged in the industry over the past few years. The platform has introduced numerous features and a robust cloud deployment pipeline. The initial focus is on a cloud-based architecture and a new structure supporting third-party coding languages like Python, VBScript, and VBA. Document Automation, formerly IQ Bot, simplifies document automation development. Additionally, Automation Anywhere acquired Shibumi, rebranded as CWE Manager, to provide a pipeline for automation and offer detailed performance metrics, including ROI, savings, and bot health for business users.

AI is the future, and automation is a crucial component. Our healthcare organization, which manufactures products like gloves and masks and provides in-house hospitality to patients across the US, has significant opportunities for automation and AI implementation. With six data centres globally and a new CIO focused on cost reduction, we're aggressively pursuing cloud migration to Azure and have partnered with Google for AI integration over the next five years. These initiatives aim to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance patient care.

Throughout my experience, I have integrated nearly 600 applications with Automation Anywhere, encompassing a diverse range of software, including desktop-based, standalone, and web-based applications.

Automation Anywhere has significantly reduced costs in my organization. For example, a team of 20 employees previously spent six minutes manually entering 20,000 Excel records into an Oracle application daily. This process consumed valuable time and resources, including Oracle licenses and employee wages. Automating this task eliminated the need for one Oracle license by accessing the database directly. Our automation solution processes 10,000 records in just 15 minutes, drastically improving efficiency and accuracy.

Integrating workflows requires careful consideration of automation complexity, determined by the number and type of applications involved and the number of interactions within each application. We assess applications based on web-based vs. standalone, legacy vs. automation-friendly, and the number of fields requiring input. A complexity score is assigned. Zero to ten is low, 11 to 20 is medium, and 21 to 30 is high, and corresponding timelines for development, testing, QA, pilot, and handover are established. Once timelines are set, we focus on securing application access for developers, providing necessary test data, and coordinating with business stakeholders for UAT testing. After successful UAT, the bot is deployed to production for a monitored pilot phase before full-scale implementation. This approach is standard workflow management practice in our organization.

The savings from automation depend on the specific automation implemented. Some automation may provide minimal benefits to the business. For example, if a new automation is introduced and the business user spends only two percent of their time per day on the related task, the savings may be insignificant. To evaluate the ROI, we calculate the costs over five years, including development, support, licensing, and infrastructure setup. In the first year, the focus is on investment and implementation. While savings may not be fully realized in the second year, from the third to fifth year, the business can expect significant returns due to reduced human labor. The automated process can be continuously enhanced to adapt to changing business requirements. My organization has achieved savings of approximately one point five billion over the past year and a half through automation.

Automation Anywhere's most valuable features include generative AI, similar to Copilot, which will significantly benefit developers; low-code or no-code technology; and document automation capable of extracting data from structured and unstructured PDF formats, presenting it clearly and easy to follow. An upcoming feature will also provide graphical representations or dashboards to illustrate cost savings, ROI, and FTE benefits achieved through process automation.

The Copilot recently integrated into Automation Anywhere requires significant refinement and additional features. Essentially, it still necessitates manual review, which is inefficient. For example, instructing Copilot to write code for opening and reading an Excel file generates necessary commands but still requires developer input to specify target data, column numbers, and desired data. This indicates a need for further training to enhance the bot's capabilities.

Integrating Automation Anywhere with existing systems often proves challenging due to the prevalence of legacy applications that are not automation-friendly. Unlike modern applications with easily identifiable elements, these older systems require creative problem-solving to develop reliable and error-resistant automation. This challenge is common across the RPA industry, necessitating innovative approaches to data extraction. For instance, utilizing software development kits, XML files, or APIs can be more efficient than navigating through multiple application pages. Additionally, implementing fuzzy logic scripts is crucial for handling data entry errors, such as name variations, to ensure accurate matching and process success.

The learning landscape for Automation Anywhere offers various certifications and training materials. While the community provides a platform for interaction and resource sharing, not all training content aligns with the specific needs of developers. Additionally, the community forum, though helpful, doesn't always provide timely or comprehensive solutions to user inquiries. The company's internal structure, with multiple product teams, can also complicate the process of obtaining support and resolving issues.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

I would rate the stability of Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

Automation Anywhere is a highly scalable tool, particularly evident in its ability to handle user concurrency, as demonstrated in document automation. Its scalability is supported by robust hardware and software requirements, high-performance document and file processing benchmarks, and the capacity to increase or decrease resources to match fluctuating demands flexibly. Essentially, Automation Anywhere empowers businesses to adapt efficiently to changing needs.

Automation Anywhere offers tiered support levels based on partnership status. Gold, silver, and platinum partners receive varying degrees of assistance, including dedicated support teams and prioritized ticket resolution. While their services come at a premium, the benefits include timely responses and efficient problem-solving.

Neutral

I have worked in various industries and have experience automating processes using different automation tools available on the market, including VBA, VBScript, and Python.

Automation Anywhere, while a formidable RPA tool, currently ranks second behind UiPath. Both companies are industry leaders, continually innovating to enhance scalability and reliability. While Automation Anywhere has made significant strides in recent years, UiPath maintains a slight edge in overall market performance. Compared to other available options, Automation Anywhere remains a top choice due to its robust features and reliability.

The deployment process in Automation Anywhere is relatively straightforward. We export the package from one environment and import it into another. However, each organization has its own unique deployment standards, often involving processes like change advisory board approvals. Therefore, the actual deployment method will vary depending on the specific organization's guidelines and procedures.

The overall deployment time for a robot is five minutes. A team was involved in this process. As the developer, I was responsible for obtaining the necessary approvals and moving the robot code from enrolment to deployment. Other organizations may have specific teams dedicated to these tasks. For example, they might have their own Centre of Excellence team that handles all deployments. Therefore, the deployment process can vary depending on the automation and the specific organization. In my current organization, we handle deployments ourselves, while in my previous organization, there was a separate team dedicated to this task. Prior to that, a support engineer typically performed these duties.

Automation Anywhere's pricing is significantly higher than other RPA solutions. We recently conducted a small proof of concept with their generative AI integration and received a quote of $75,000 for one year. In comparison, Microsoft offered a similar solution for only $20,000. This substantial price difference makes Automation Anywhere one of the most expensive RPA options on the market, second only to UiPath.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten.

I would rate the ease of use of Automation Anywhere as a six out of ten for someone without any technical expertise.

The learning curve for non-technical people is two months.

There are several areas for improvement in the implementation of Automation Anywhere. Many employees are reluctant to entrust their tasks to automation due to concerns about job displacement. While this is a common misconception, automation is designed to streamline processes and free up employees to focus on more complex and strategic tasks. From a development perspective, Automation Anywhere continually introduces new features, but there is often a lack of effective communication and training. To maximize the benefits of automation, developers should adopt a proactive approach, seeking creative solutions and considering the user-friendliness of automated processes.

My entire organization has close to 27,000 employees worldwide. Our enterprise team, consisting of 15 members including me, handles automation work for the entire organization. My team consists of six members dedicated to support activities, monitoring and assisting the robots. The remaining members are part of the development team, solely focused on development tasks.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is a moderately complex task due to the numerous dependencies that must be carefully considered and planned for during any migration or upgrade. Yesterday, we successfully migrated our Automation Anywhere Control Room from version 32 to version 33. Prior to the upgrade, we underwent extensive preparation, including reviewing Change Advisor Reports, obtaining necessary approvals, and coordinating with the database team to create a backup of the Automation Anywhere database. Once these prerequisites were fulfilled, we proceeded to the server, uninstalled version 32, and installed version 33. The previously created backup was then integrated to ensure accurate data reflection in the latest version. While proper planning is essential, the upgrade process is neither overly complex nor excessively straightforward, making it a medium-level task.

We have a team of six dedicated to support and maintenance activities, managing approximately 250 automations across our organization. The level of maintenance required varies depending on the developer's experience and the complexity of the automation. Junior developers may create bots that are more prone to errors, leading to increased maintenance. However, senior developers or well-designed automations typically require less maintenance. In addition to support and maintenance, our team is also responsible for minor enhancements, bug fixes, and upgrades or downgrades of our automation systems.

We don't need to constantly monitor the bot as it runs according to its schedule. It performs its tasks autonomously, but manual intervention is necessary in certain situations. For example, if an expected input file fails to arrive at the scheduled time, the automation process will stop. In such cases, a support engineer must contact the business to address the missing file. Additionally, manual intervention might be required for downstream automation tasks, such as when a front-end UI changes on an application. These situations depend on the specific downstream application, business needs, and other factors.

I would highly recommend Automation Anywhere as a technology solution. I've been involved with it for nearly twelve years and have witnessed its remarkable evolution. From its early stages to its current state, I'm impressed by its potential for future innovation and problem-solving. Moreover, I've seen first-hand how Automation Anywhere has significantly benefited businesses by reducing costs and saving on full-time equivalent labour. In one instance, I observed how a single automation process could accomplish the work of ten people in just one hour.

We have varied use cases and have worked in different business areas. Customer service is one of our biggest business areas, along with investments and finance. We also have some risk compliance, legal, and HR use cases involving about 50 different applications.

Automation Anywhere has freed people's time and effort to do more useful things. Some smaller teams have a lot to work on during the holidays. The solution has improved error reduction and work-life balance. It was all the more useful during COVID-19 when we worked from home for four years. RPA was a godsend. People could do things more easily. We continue to grow our program through this year because of the benefits it provides.

We really like all the features of the solution. The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use. In 2018, we assessed four different products available on the market. We chose Automation Anywhere because it seemed to be the easiest and most intuitive to use for non-technical people. That has always been our model. We are a very citizen developer-focused organization in terms of RPA and intelligent automation.

The integration of Automation Anywhere with our business applications is excellent. We haven't yet encountered an application with which it doesn't integrate. That's the point of Automation Anywhere or RPA. You use the applications as is. It sits as a bridge or a layer on top of your existing application and does a fabulous job.

We have integrated very few use cases into our workflow. We hope to do that a bit more with attended automation and Copilot. We have no complaints so far regarding documents, but we hope to do a little more with that. From what I've heard, you have a lot more API integrations available now than before. We would like to assess them and use them.

Automation Anywhere has definitely improved work-life balance and error reduction. Our audit and compliance team regularly advocates for the RPA team. They reach out to different business areas when they're auditing them. They are absolutely one of our biggest advocates. We have seen an overall improvement in employee morale with the various benefits we have gotten apart from the obvious time-saving.

The biggest metric that we use is annualized automated hours. I think we have saved about 50,000 annualized hours. In addition, we have saved another 50,000 hours for automated monitoring where people aren't needed. It has saved us a lot of time.

Automation Anywhere is excellent at providing automation at scale.

Through my sessions yesterday, I'm absolutely very interested in the benchmarking process that comes as a part of the Pathfinder program. We are also hoping to use Copilot very, very soon.

We haven't used Professional Service Accelerators yet because of how our program is structured. We started five years ago. We do everything in-house, including training and development. Our citizen developer program is quite robust. We have been able to do all our migrations and development ourselves.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is connecting with many different people. I've been coming to the Imagine event since 2019. Every time I come here, listening to all the keynote speakers on the first day makes me realize that the world is moving at such a fast pace, and we are so behind.

You meet people and realize that these are all possibilities and opportunities for us to be a part of this revolution. It's amazing, and it always feels great to come to the Imagine event.

The most important part of the Imagine event is the people. We have worked with Automation Anywhere all the time. We have worked with excellent people, whether it's the customer success team, the accounts team, or all the leaders at Automation Anywhere. It is wonderful to meet all of these people and hear and see what their vision is and what their thoughts are.

The highlight of every Imagine event is all the products and services that are coming in the near future that we could use or leverage. It's really exciting. It's just me this time, but we usually have more people at Imagine. People are generally very excited to come and be part of it.

With Automation Anywhere or RPA, the way we automate things now is different from traditional automation. The focus of our organization has been to help nontechnical business people automate their own processes. It makes it so much easier for them to learn to automate their own work as opposed to traditional automation, which was mainly done by IT.

It is extremely easy for business users who do not have technical skills to use Automation Anywhere. We use the Automation Anywhere training. We train our own citizen developers within the organization, but the training program is based on what Automation Anywhere provided us at the beginning.

While we have to teach business users how to use basic technical things, we also have to teach technical people how to approach business and business processes. That's a part of our training program. Apart from that, it's very intuitive and straightforward. It's equivalent to a six-month-old who can operate an iPhone.

We take our cues for the solution's learning curve from the Automation Anywhere initial training. We think it takes about six weeks for people to learn to use Automation Anywhere effectively, and we build that into our training program. We cover the basics in week one. We take a use case and work with that in week two. People continue working on their use cases in the third, fourth, and fifth weeks.

In week six, we target to put the use cases into production and cover more advanced topics. We have continued collaboration with our developers to learn new skills. I think six weeks is the amount of time needed for people to be comfortable using the tool on their own for their own use cases.

On our platform, we have about 50 other applications integrated with Automation Anywhere. We have expanded our program from RPA to intelligent automation. Intelligent document processing, Alteryx, Power Automate, and Automation Anywhere actually work hand in hand. While Automation Anywhere is still our main automation orchestration program, we integrate these other automating applications along with it.

I could personally use automated testing, which we currently do not have in Automation Anywhere. When we looked at the document processing IQ Bot, it didn't work for our documents. Since I haven't looked at it recently, I don't know if it needs improvement now. I'm sure the current version is much better.

We started using Automation Anywhere at the end of 2018, so, it's been five years and counting.

We have no complaints about the solution's technical support. I rate the entire customer success team a solid 11 out of 10. That's my comparison scale. Over the last five years, we have had five customer success managers, and all of them have been excellent. They had different personalities and different ways of working, but all of them were excellent. The last four are personal friends now.

Positive

We started seeing a return on investment after the first year and a half of using Automation Anywhere. The growth has been a little bit slow but steady during the time we were all working from home, but I'm hoping for it to grow again over the next 12 months. We'll probably have bigger and better stories to share at the next Imagine event.

I think the solution's pricing is reasonable. Setup cost is what you expect in the industry so far, and the licensing is at par. However, I like the ease of licensing and the flexibility in scaling up or down. We have done that over the last few years. I am looking forward to moving to the cloud between now and the end of August. That will change the licensing model a little bit.

We do not have Dev Stage licenses. From what I understand, it's going to be a pool that we pull out of. It'll be different, but I think it'll give us more flexibility.

We did not use a different RPA solution before using this. We assessed four different products, starting at the end of 2017 through 2018, and realized that Automation Anywhere is the best fit for us. We still think the same because it works great, and we have no reason to complain. We haven't had the need for any other product just yet.

For our current setup, Automation Anywhere is set up on a private cloud on-premises. However, we are working to move to the Automation Anywhere cloud. We are assessing and going through the initial steps. We hope to be on the Automation Anywhere cloud by the end of this year.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We set up a bot that works on the billing system. It uses RPA and general AI to analyze contracts of our B2B customers and check information in the IT systems, CRM, billing, etc. We compare and correct an invoice before it's automated to avoid wrong entries for our customers.

We run 14 projects in parallel, generating revenue efficiency, improving customer experience, and saving millions of dollars. Automation Anywhere affects the center of the business. 

In one case, we reduced the time spent on a task from 30 minutes to one minute. Before Automation Anywhere, we used to perform the tasks manually. These tasks account for 20 to 30 percent of the total. We can perform all these tasks in Automation Anywhere much faster than the old process. The tasks are fully automated. It's critical. We don't have more customer complaints about the wrong invoice in the B2B market.

Automation Anywhere's Pathfinder program has supported us to evaluate the maturity of our Center of Excellence.

It was easy to use Automation Anywhere's RPA through API connections, and it works well. It's easy for non-technical users to learn to use Automation Anywhere. We just finished teaching our telecom company last week with Automation Anywhere to democratize the solution. We made a bot for the company to give them the power of RPA and artificial intelligence. They love the tool. It's easy and low-code. I think it will be easy to do citizen development.

Our developers find Automation Anywhere's learning curve to be extremely short. We have good developers who can learn automation anywhere quickly. We have integrated AA with CRM, billing systems, external databases, and websites. It's easy to integrate because there are so many ready-made automations that you don't need to build. It's easy and fast.

Automation Anywhere could improve its integration with Python and other programming languages.

We started using Automation Anywhere last year and, from August to September, created a center of excellence in automation and AI. 

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10 for stability. It's highly stable compared to other automation platforms. 

I work for a global enterprise, so they innovate fast. Automation and generative AI scales up incredibly quickly.

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. They respond quickly and know what they're doing. We have a close relationship with our account manager and technical support. This relationship makes the difference.

Positive

We tried UiPath and Blue Prism before deciding on Automation Anywhere. We chose Automation Aware because of its support, which was better than that of other enterprises.

It's easy to deploy, install, and learn Automation Anywhere. We deployed it ourselves without the help of any integrators.

The pricing is comparable to other enterprise solutions in Brazil, such as UiPath and Blue Prism. The setup cost is nothing because we deploy it in the cloud. The licensing model isn't too difficult to understand like other solutions. 

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10. My favorite part of the Imagine Conference is the hands-on labs. They were impressive. Using generative AI and automation, I made a bot in three minutes. It's my first time here at Imagine, and it's a well-organized event with good information for automation customers. 

I would encourage people to come to the conference to build good relationships and network with peers. The technology you acquire here is crucial. 

We have a pretty big shop nowadays. We have 324 automations in production. Our use cases were concentrated on loan services. Most recently, our initiatives have been targeted in the control space - automating the things that make the bank go around and seeing that the bank is in a good position every day. 

We have a backlog in the hundreds, automation is not something that we'll finish anytime soon. It's definitely a marathon to finish all the things that we need to do.

In 2017, there was a lot of hype around RPA. They paved the way for us to see those benefits, and we continue to grow every year. 

In those early days, we had 28 automations in our first year. We thought we were pretty proud of that number. In 2023, we created over 100 automations in a single year and moved those to production. The volume and the increased capacity for our businesses improved. The employee engagement, when we talk about bots now, is much better. It's "how can we help?" There are no real concerns of "They're going to replace our jobs." Over seven years, our automations have grown, and we've matured with them. 

There are several aspects that we value. The control rooms, monitoring the performance, and making sure everything is up and running has been a great feature. From the design and capacity of the developers' perspective, the intuitive interface is excellent. It's a workflow-driven design session. Following the flow of the users alongside the code makes for an easy automation that everyone can understand.

Automation Anywhere brings in and changes the way we do process automation. Everything was very manual beforehand. We'd have to do batch processes where integrations of systems were pretty costly and took a lot of time. Mapping database fields from screens down to the next system was more difficult versus with Automation Anywhere, you get the visual input of the screens. You can click on those fields and not have to do the data mapping or extract them. You can correlate them to other systems almost instantly individually. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to pick up for business users. Initially, we trained 45 people. Whoever raised their hands, we said, "We'll train you." About 65% of those initial trainees were from the business side. A couple of years later, we noticed that the people who created the automation did really well. They were receiving promotions. Then, all of a sudden, we didn't have the people to support our automation needs since those original trainees moved up. We made a shift and said, "Hey, business users, you want to come to technology? We're going to centralize development." 13 said yes, and we kept building out. Now we're a team that's 40-strong.

The learning curve is pretty quick. Automation Anywhere provides a lot of training courses to support you and there are individuals assigned to your account. The learning curve is short from our standpoint. We spend two weeks with anyone who comes in, whether they're a previous developer or a business person. We find that simple automations can be completed within that training period. Within six months, some of the most complex items people are able to handle.

Right now, our 324 automations touch around 120 different systems. Our core platforms are integrated. APIs are being used for SharePoint or imaging systems so  thatwe don't really have a reliance on the UI. With the integrations, we just continue to grow. 

The integration of Automation Anywhere into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents is great. There are several phases to this one. Automation Anywhere, just the design, the tool, allows you to jump in with workflows initially and lay out the complete automation, and then you can get into the details. For us, it's particularly powerful as it aligns with the different systems that we work with, as well as providing connectivity to the underlying systems, seeing the screens to get into the details of that workflow, making for a great design process for our automation.

Our automation program has positively affected our business in terms of employee capacity and compliance. It's affected all areas. When we think of the capacity, I can go back to 2020 in the early days of COVID and with a payment protection program specifically. We had 9,000 tellers who no longer were going into the bank. We pivoted to an SBA program and had those 9,000 tellers calling a variety of small businesses. We still needed 1,000 more people to do the due diligence. That's where RPA shined. We were able to fill that capacity gap and immediately become one of the top three players in the space. 

When I think of just day-to-day employee engagement, we're focused on the controls of the bank. Those happen maybe once a month, once a quarter, once a year. So those are activities that you really have to prep for and document really well. RPA does the same thing over and over really well, and those controls are assured to be done and executed in the same fashion over and over.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save on both time and cost. When we think of we run around 750,000 hours of runtime on bots per year. That would be a significant amount of employees. That's about 450 to 500 employees' worth of work done every day. Just the overall capacity provided by automation would be hard to replace.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide Automation at scale is impressive. We've obviously pushed that limit. We're at 324 automations. That's over 4200 tasks executed every day. From a scale and monitoring perspective, we know which bots are running, which ones may be going slow, and which didn't run. The ability of the control with room to monitor allows us to jump in and help out when necessary. That is paramount to our success. 

Automation Anywhere helps us find value. We do use professional services from time to time to augment both our capacity and capabilities while finding new ways of doing things. This is a very fast-moving environment. The things that we did five years ago are gone. We threw them away. We upgraded to new versions and have new capabilities. Keeping up with the latest and greatest is always a challenge. There are also new ways of development and sharing those findings, whether it's a webcast or part of the Pathfinder program; we're always curious about what's next with the product.

The tools are fundamentally solid. However, when I think of self-healing, such as automation with a new prompt or a new Windows patch occurring, being able to handle those kinds of things on top of what Automation Anywhere already does and that automatically click through and do the reboots that are necessary to just have a clean run would be ideal. That way, no one has to wake up in the middle of the night and adjust something. That would be amazing. 

Our company has been using Automation Anywhere for seven years. I've been using Automation Anywhere since 2017.

From a stability perspective, whether it's servers or virtual desktops with agents, we have very few issues. We have multiple servers and have never experienced downtime. We have had one or two nodes go down based on hardware issues, however, it's resilient. 

We're now at 324 automations, and it definitely scales. The screens prioritize things, and you have dashboards that say what's working and what isn't. Those types of activities help drive us to where the problems are and show us what we need to resolve them.

Technical support is solid. We pick up the phone and call and create tickets. We get responses almost instantly. We've had many nights trying to figure out how things work on our network or looking at logs. They've been great about jumping in any time we've asked for help. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Throughout the history of development, people have tried to automate things. We've never used a tool that had the control room and the features, the scheduling, and the complexity that it could handle. When Automation Anywhere packaged the whole bundle together, that was the differentiator that really drove us to it.

When we think of ETL, all the standard tools, whether it's SQL or Oracle, we still have all those. However, for speed and simplicity and getting things to production fast, we'll leverage Automation Anywhere.

Many other options often require a data expert. You have to go to database tables to do automation or ETL-type activities, and you have to schedule that and know if there are conflicts within other systems. Plus, if there's downtime, you may not be able to run pieces. It's true coding. There is testing that's also required and the delivery time is not measured in weeks. It's measured in months. We'd all like everything to integrate seamlessly. That said, the real world comes into play, and I'm glad we have Automation Anywhere to fill everything out. 

Setup for us was probably the longest lead time. We're a bank, so we always have to scan the code base. We want to jump in, understand the connectivity, and understand how things are going to happen. There are a lot of planning-type activities before the install. We started in 2017 with version seven of Automation Anywhere. We went through version ten, then moved on to the A360. Each experience became better and better.

We have a PCI-compliant installation as well as our normal normal network.

Our experience deploying Automation Anywhere was seamless. From a server perspective, we run about a dozen servers in four dev IT QB production environments. We'll continue to do the first servers in dev and move to migrate them all the way through production. For any issues that we have along the way, customer service is right there with us to troubleshoot.

We've seen an ROI via hard saves. We define a hard save as someone having to leave the bank or a contract has to leave. We are net positive in our spend. We've managed to prioritize the highest use cases from a cost-saving perspective.

We find it comparable to other products out there. I wouldn't say huge differentiators from that perspective. 

We looked at autoIT to look at for specialty use cases. 

The very first bot that was rolled out was on my team. I've been able to see the control room and the code in progress and evolve over the years has been a pleasure. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

From an RPA perspective, it has all the core functionality. We can automate the bank's systems. The reliability, performance monitoring, and development time are excellent. In 2017, it used to take us six to nine months to develop. That was slow. Fast-forward to 2024, and it takes six weeks, plus or minus two weeks depending on complexity, to deliver an automation. 

We use Automation Anywhere to process our collections. 

We couldn't hire more people, but we had some information stored in Excel that we needed to distribute. The sales information was centralized in one area, so we automated the process of putting the information into Excel so everyone could help themselves. The benefit we get from this is increased efficiency. The bot performs the tasks four times faster than a human. Our goal is efficiency, not replacing bots humans with bots. We wanted to do more with the eight people we had and allow people to focus on what was important.

We got what we wanted, but the implementation took slightly longer than expected because we changed our methods and partners. We had some issues with our partner at the beginning, but we implemented the software in one or two months. It was fast.

I think the person in charge over there has the same mentality now, but we wanted to automate everything that is transactional or everything that impacts the client at the end of the day. We were looking to use AI to make development or programming more efficient, like finding some codes. I know Automation Anywhere has some kind of AI incorporated in it that can read PDFs and stuff. That would be nice to use, but I haven't had a chance to implement it.

We were working on a system called AS 400. Automation Anywhere performed well on that old system. It handled complicated processes. I had to review different menus and screens and give resources, storage, and databases. That's complicated.

We found a local Automation Anywhere expert and then trained someone inside the company to be a developer. This person had technical skills, so it was easy for him to understand the things in Automation Anywhere. The learning part was kind of quick, but I don't think that would be easy for a normal business user. I think it would be more complicated for a normal business user. I won't say that I learned all about Automation Anywhere, but I know how to automate simple tasks I learned by watching some videos and checking the community forums.

The Insight feature could be improved. I don't think there's a lot of information about how to use Insight, so you have to try different scenarios to understand that feature better.  

If I compare Automation Anywhere with UiPath, which has something cool that lets you automate a workflow. We have no positive response when we try to use it with Automation Anywhere. We are doing everything by code and the drag-and-drop component.

I don't think it's easy because Automation Anywhere is marketed as a low-code solution, but it isn't low-code at all. It requires some programming skills, and I don't think it would be easy for a non-technical user to program something on Automation Anywhere. 

One challenge the company faced while integrating Automation Anywhere was people. The IT department is big and has been divided into different areas, including databases, infrastructure, and support. To adopt automation anywhere, you have to put everything on the table and see what you want to do.  I also require resources with the capabilities and technical skills to program in Automation Anywhere.

We have used Automation Anywhere for four years.

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. The support is good. The team from Colombia responsible for selling in Latin America can provide whatever you need. I don't have any complaints about that. They are always willing to offer you proof of concept in case you have to use it. I talked to somebody in Colombia because we wanted to do something in terms of proof of concept about document automation because we had so many processes that included PDFs. 

Positive

Automation Anywhere is deployed on the cloud, so I think it was very straightforward and fast. It took around one to two weeks.

Automation Anywhere is somewhat expensive. The prices are slightly higher, but if you need something, you must pay for it.

We also evaluated Blue Prism.

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10. I would recommend It for a medium-sized or enterprise business. Because of the cost, it isn't appropriate for a small business. The solution itself is good, but it isn't a low-code product.

Initially, when we started, we were using it for back-office automation. The solution has definitely evolved. We're focusing on implementing customer and experience-facing use cases. Time is the most valuable piece, and that's how we measure the success of automation now. 

The solution is helping our customers save time. 

We were trying to solve a few different challenges with Automation Anywhere. For example, during the pandemic, gaining bandwidth was huge. Hiring while shifting to remote was challenging. There was such an accelerated use of the technology during the pandemic. Having to integrate with existing and older systems was key. That flexibility to work with other applications and other aspects of the platform really drove our decision to adopt more and more of the solution.

We've noticed time savings. The time saving varies. We look at how much value the customer gets. We've noticed time savings of up to 40 minutes, based on wait time and verification delays. Sometimes, we might only be saving a minute or slightly less. However, this is a slightly higher volume scenario where something needs to get done by the end of the day. It offers a broad range of time savings. For example, if someone calls in for the healthcare side to get benefits verified. Typically, that would take 45 minutes in terms of gathering information and validating information and prep work both before and after. Now, we can do that autonomously in a matter of minutes. 

Within the processes of automation, robots learn differently than humans. They are very interactive and literal. Diving into that tribal knowledge that makes an organization unique was really what we had to do differently. For example, if you tell someone, "Go check your email," they know what that means. With a robot, you have to translate that action into a specific language, and that was the challenging part from the process side.

Copilot is great at bringing agents and humans into the loop. Creating that AI assistant that can almost tell someone the next step, that suggested intelligence, is helpful. Getting the data an organization has over to a customer very quickly is effective with Copilot. Simple queries that may take 15-20 seconds to answer, you still have to, for example, to find the number, make the call, et cetera, and suddenly that 20 seconds if two minutes longer. Having that information ready in a conversational way is where generative AI can really help compress time. 

There's a lot of human involvement in the workflow. Automation Anywhere does a fabulous job of integrating users into the workflow. That's important. You wouldn't be able to automate with just the technology. Teaching users to interact in a relatable way with relatable interfaces has had a big impact on the business users' side.

Understanding the technology is very easy based on the way it is positioned. There are a lot of great resources out there. 

How much time it takes to get comfortable using the automation process varies. You need to gain the knowledge of understanding ways to do things, then have the practical knowledge of how to apply; then, there's a third piece of constantly improving, monitoring, mentoring, and iterating. That piece is ongoing. 

Copilot is helpful for pure-play back-office stuff. From the call center side, it's integrated and becomes available as an option as well. Any document processing is great for Copilot. 

With the new enhancements, it's very easy to integrate. It integrates well with infrastructure solutions and testing products, as well as data and analytics.

The integration with workflows has only been enhanced over time. 

In terms of document processes, there is some uncertainty between structured and unstructured. However, the intelligence applied cut down time by 50% or more. That's in time to do the work, not necessarily accuracy.

In terms of APIs and applications, when automation first came out, they shunned APIs. That was a challenge due to the fact that, when you sold it to an organization, they asked why it would be done a certain way when they already had an API. Now, it's making it easier to use solutions. You can bring in your tool kit and create synergy.

Copilot has helped us increase productivity. It's a new feature, so it's hard to quantify. I do see the established value increasing exponentially. 

The product has helped us free up staff time. The biggest thing we measure is experience. If it's moving towards higher-value projects, it's great. However, so is going home and not taking work home with you.

If we look at the concept of bringing automation to a broader user group in an organization, the focus right now is on how to build it properly. We're building it out with instruction manuals and working to make it more user-friendly. We need to do a lot of work from the perspective of education. The messaging is essential. Also, figuring out the platform so that users know where they need to interact. We're pointing users towards that and giving them the help to do that. The messaging and education around how to leverage the platform need to be more precise. Understanding what the benefits are going to be needs to be very clear. 

When you are implementing it initially, it's challenging as there's a lot of change management. That's where the lessons need to be learned. That curve is hard to overcome.

There are more challenging integrations that should be left to more expert users. 

We've been using the solution since 2015. It's been about eight years now.

Technical support is good. You don't have to reach out to them very often. The new layers are great. The services you get alongside the solution are helpful, and combining that with bug fixes, et cetera, makes it fit for purpose for all uses. 

Positive

I'm familiar with other options. The difference is the people side of things. The team outside of the technology, the people putting it together, is what makes the solution itself better. 

It's important that Automation Anywhere is easy to use. There's an intimidation factor when you present people with a massive ecosystem. It's practical and fit for purpose from the outset, yet very flexible and versatile. 

I was involved in the initial setup. 

If you start out pretty simple, the challenges that cause delays are more from change management and security and clearance. That's outside of the platform itself. That takes 80% of the time.

You can stand it up in a couple of days, however, it can sometimes take a month for reasons outside of the platform.

You can get things going within a week, which you can iterate on pretty quickly. 

Maintenance depends on usage. There are tools where you can build automation to provide alerts. You need someone who's at least slightly dedicated to that. Once you get bigger, you'll need a dedicated team, and then you have to figure out how to prioritize your time, in terms of evangelizing it, making more automation, et cetera. 

The pricing is okay. We've established the value of bringing it into our organization. For scaling, you can't beat the price of adding a robot that provides basically unlimited scale. 

Our strategy when it comes to automation and AI (and generative AI) right now, as with any technology, there's a lot of buzz. Historically, we've had periods of punctuated innovation, like automation in general, that was a real change in how organizations did business. Right now, we're seeing an iteration of that with generative AI. We have the foundation down with these platforms. Our strategy is the same: understand the technology from the people's side. We're the ones using the technology. You can't blame a piece of technology - it's still on us. We need to establish it. At the end of the day, we need to own it. Technology isn't a silver bullet. However, if we approach it right, we'll have all the success in the world.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

There are many use cases for Automation Anywhere. One of these involved reconciling numerous financial reports in the company I work for, which deals in consumer products and goods. Specifically, we handle credit notes and debit notes from various customers. These notes serve as certifications of transactions, indicating whether we owe something to the customers or they owe something to us. The challenge is that these notes come in different formats, all in PDFs. Consequently, someone has to manually go through each of them, input the data into Excel, and compare it with an existing Excel report. After verifying the information and ensuring it matches, we input the data into the SAP system. This process is a part of our monthly activities and involves a considerable volume of documents, given that we are a multinational company focusing on AMEA markets. 

To streamline this process, we utilized Automation Anywhere, making use of OCR technology to extract data from the PDFs. Another use case for the automation tool involved generating aging reports. As a company, we deal with numerous customers who haven't made payments yet, and we need to monitor the time they have left to pay or identify if they have exceeded the due dates. This information is available on our SAP system and needs to be created daily and distributed to all our sales teams.

If someone without technical skills wants to learn to use Automation Anywhere, it's not very difficult. However, if we simply want to use the solution without any prior experience, it may not be possible, but with proper training, someone can learn it in a month.

The learning curve is relatively easy, and it just takes time. Getting comfortable with the tool is, in my opinion, quite feasible; it can be done. The other aspect of the problem is understanding the use case and how to design it. How will we design our system? How will we design our process? Because it's never just one process that someone wants to automate; it's usually a bundle of processes. When we obtain a bot from automation anywhere, we cannot get just a fraction of a bot. We have to get a full bot. And if we have a process that does not consume all of that, then our cost-benefit ratio doesn't work. So we need to have a bunch of processes and then figure out how to schedule each bot, and how to process it. There are multiple ways of designing the flow of a bot. We should look for the optimum way considering the context, it depends on our context. The templates keep changing, and the sales keep changing, so we would have to define it in a different way where we have templates that can be replaceable. But if we are dealing with something related to compliance, then we would prioritize reliability and robustness, and we may have to compromise on flexibility while designing a solution with robustness in mind. 

All of that comes with expertise, and all of that comes with experience. However, just understanding the product and the tool to a good, fairly okay level where a business user can create a small automation and do something with it even if they don't fully maximize its value can be achieved in a couple of months. But becoming a true expert and being able to call ourselves an RPA expert will take a lot of time and further exposure to various use cases.

By using Automation Anywhere, we observed a reduction in paperwork costs and the implementation of a reliable bot. When we require manual report generation, workflow execution, and other tasks. Its efficiency is contingent upon the availability of the person overseeing the process. With Automation Anywhere, the reporting, workflow executions, and other tasks are automated and thereby enhancing overall reliability. Additionally, a notable advantage is the development of a digital mindset within the company. Exposure to automation fosters a digital way of thinking among employees, leading them to identify opportunities that can be automated. These benefits are just a few among several others, including financial gains and improved compliance.

The benefits are seen typically after three to four months per process, depending on its complexity. For processes of low to medium complexity, it usually takes about three to four months for the board to start functioning correctly. The payback ratio varies depending on the number of products or processes we have and their complexity. If we have many low-complexity processes that can be completed within six months, we will see returns on our investment within that time frame. However, it's important to note that the payback period ultimately depends on the complexity of the process. I have observed instances where processes have not yielded returns even after several months, as changes were required at three or six-month intervals, leading to additional expenses. So, the success of the process is contingent on its specific characteristics.

Automation Anywhere is able to provide automation at scale.

Integration is truly beneficial; it serves as a significant advantage of Automation Anywhere. The level of integration is highly commendable.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption by around 50 percent.

The way templates can be configured is quite simple - it's a matter of drag and drop. Within the console, which is easy to navigate if we've seen it before, we can understand how things work. This allows business folks to join calls if needed, and I comprehend what happens within the console. 

The Board Control room is a centralized place where we can monitor all our bots and see how they are running when they are scheduled to run, and how our CPU and CB usage are looking - basically, the entire orchestration. 

I noticed that they opened up to other service providers like Accenture and Avaya, which is not a platform feature, but it was very helpful for us. Automation Anywhere, being a product company, might not excel in service, so partnering with companies like Avaya or Accenture provided us with a reliable service operation. 

The capability of understanding and extracting documents is not very good. Therefore, automating unstructured documents or any structured documents that we want to automate on Automation Anywhere is not a good idea.

The UI is not intuitive and doesn't come across as smooth.

I would like the licenses to be transferable. Currently, we are unable to transfer a user license.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three and a half years.

I give the stability of Automation Anywhere a six out of ten.

I give the scalability of Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

We saw a return on investment with 50 percent of our automation processes. 

I give Automation Anywhere a six out of ten.

It depends on the specific capabilities you require. When we started out as a team at Mondelez we were setting up all the necessary components. At that time, we were primarily focused on basic capabilities such as having a good service partner, efficient bot operations, and a manageable console. Figuring out the licenses was crucial, as some companies were unwilling to share their licenses with others. So, if you had the license, you were the one responsible for using it, and it couldn't be transferred to someone else. Certain software had this complexity, and we were also not considering advanced features like OCR back then. 

Our focus was on basic RPA without many complexities. About four years ago, we believed Automation Anywhere was a well-established player in the market, so we chose them. However, later on, we realized that automation had much more to offer than simply configuring and automating certain processes. We discovered the concept of hyper-automation, which includes low-code and no-code applications that business users can build themselves. Document-related automation became crucial, and we found that Automation Anywhere lacked proper support for structured documentation and didn't leverage artificial intelligence or natural language processing effectively. Consequently, we had to explore other software options. As time progressed, we recognized the need for more capabilities. Therefore, we adopted two approaches to address this. Firstly, we sought a solution that offered modular usability. Consequently, we included Power Platform and are currently exploring the UI part. Additionally, we ventured into using newer technologies like Blue Prism, experimenting with various possibilities. Ultimately, our aim is to stay on top of advancements and adopt the best-suited tools for our needs.

The preference for API integration over a robust process automation solution depends on the capabilities of our in-house tech team. If we have an in-house tech team, then API solutions are significantly better than an automated bot. Additionally, our cost-benefit analysis, in terms of tech capabilities, also plays a crucial role in the decision-making process.

We did not perform any maintenance on Automation Anywhere.

We've done a lot of automation with the product in the last two years. We started with accounts receivable processes in finance. I would say like AR function is one of the most mature functions in the product right now because we almost automated all the aspects of accounts receivable.

We have also started looking at automating the accounts payable process as well. I've only mentioned finance at this point, but we also have done a lot of automation with IT, as well as with procurement. Right now the penetration is higher with the support functions but we are also looking at different ways to automate. For example, we would like to use automation technology in core engineering. We also want to be expansive and do projects beyond our current boundaries — outside of just India. We've already done a small PoC (proof of concept) with a company in China and we also automated three small processes with a U.S. entity.

We use it daily and have done projects with the support functions, such as financial services, IT, and procurement support. We have 50 to 60 processes that have been automated using RPA in all three areas put together. This is the breadth and extent of what we have automated.

We are using the on-premise deployment model.

The product is improving our company in a number of different ways through the automation it helps us to create. I would say like the AR function is completely automated right now, but we are in the stages where we are looking beyond AR, beyond finance, and beyond support functions. 

All this time that we were using the product in the beginning, we chose to work on individual processes for automation. We are working in small pockets. We were identifying a project or a process as a small chunk of automation and we looked at opportunities within that particular function or a process and automated it step-by-step. 

For example, within the AR invoice process, there are different types of invoices that we do, like project invoices, manual invoices, past invoices, and other invoice variations. We had started building solutions for these things in isolation. We automated the SPA (Sales and Purchase Agreement) function first and then the project invoices. Then we saw an opportunity and made a change to bring all the invoices into the same platform. So now there is a bot which identifies what kind of invoice it is and it triggers a respective sub-rooting function what we have built-in. This is much more efficient. The AR function is something which we have automated end-to-end right now.

When bots start interacting successfully with each other, that is when we will see a true enterprise RPA (Robotic Process Automation) evolving out of using this solution. So we have benefitted a lot now, but expect that we will benefit even more in the future as we get better at using intelligence.

When we automate, we deliberately kept some manual toll gates. This was a very informed decision that we made. It's a conscious decision that we don't want to leave everything to the bot to do from start until the end because the accountability will not be there with any of the team members. This is one of the reasons why we have kept a manual toll gate in all our processes.

I would say the entire Automation Anywhere RPA functionality is the most valuable part of the product because it helps me to automate the mundane interpretative task. That is where most of my team members, who are part of the support team for product function, spend a lot of their time.

The IQ Bot is good. The pilot that we have done with one of our U.S. entities went well. Our accuracy has increased tremendously over the last two to three months. We have increased FTE efficiency. It's definitely a success for us. 

You spend some time trying to automate using RPA and then once a solution is created, they will gain back the time that they spent in development and then have more time to think about how they can further improvise and improve the process. That is all possible with the RPA. That is what we have been doing successfully in the last two years. The opportunity to customize and build out the platform makes it more useful and valuable.

We found it very comfortable because we are all functional experts. Nobody had any programming experience earlier. We all were able to learn Automation Anywhere in a four day classroom session that we had with one of the trainers from Automation Anywhere. With that, we started our own development. 

At least for our requirements, whatever version we have been using till now —  I think the current version 11.3.2 — is fantastic and more than we could use as we grew with the product. Any additional functionality I'm going to get in the upcoming version is a bonus for us as users. 

No product is perfect, so there is always some room for improvement. Right now we are most interested in cloud functionality. It could give us an additional option for managing everything in on-premises or in the cloud.

My experience and knowledge with respect to our initial deployment of Automation Anywhere were very limited. Had we had more experience, we probably would not have used the Intel landscape. We would have used something more relevant to our process and function. This compatibility might be improved.

I would definitely say Citrix automation is one area we have continued to struggle with for the last two months. If that can be an improvement in design for the next release it would be welcome. I know that a Citrix plugin has been already introduced by Automation Anywhere. If that can be made seamlessly integrated and easy to use, then I would definitely be very, very happy with that as an enhancement. The Citrix automation plugin that they have come out with until now has not been working for us. We are still in the process of figuring out how we can make that work. So, we are collaborating with the technical team from AA. There is an alternate solution where you can just move the system or application out of the Citrix environment and made it a standalone system. That will work. We know the workaround, but we still haven't figured out a solution to making it work in a Citrix environment. Hopefully, they will figure a solution in a month's time.

Any customer would look for advantages and changes in pricing. I won't say Automation Anywhere pricing is not good or not competitive. It is definitely competitive. But there are additional players in the market that they need to compete with and working on pricing could help. I believe there are competitors who do not charge anything for what is the AA Control Room (used for Bot creation). They charge only for the runners (Bot execution).

So there are other options available where you don't need to pay extra costs that may be more attractive depending on your usage. With Automation Anywhere I'm the creator as well as the Control Room. If Automation Anywhere could get a little more competitive on those aspects of pricing, I think it would be like heaven.

I would like them to combine a BPM solution with RPA. Sometimes you need to have BPM in place so your process orchestration will be smooth. It'll go through a standard process. On top of that, you are doing some manual activities that will be replaced with RPA. Automation Anywhere already has RPA, if they would allow us to create a simple BPM solution on top of it to use RPA that is the best resolution. It would solve most of my problems in my processing unit.

I have been using the solution for about 18 to 19 months.

I would rate the stability of the RPA as much higher than the stability of an individual manually handling processes. Because stability is pretty good, the machine will outperform an individual. With respect to individuals, there will be always some attrition — there will be some learning time and people will tend to do mistakes. That is not the case with respect to the RPA. So while that is not directly about the product, it does add stability to our processing.

Beyond that, whenever there is any change to your applications or environment where you have automated a function, that is when your processes or RPA can stop functioning. So it requires a little bit of customization, and again you upload it into the control group. Because the RPA is so flexible and so convenient to work with and easy to use, I don't think that is where the major bottleneck occurs at these junctures.

Beyond that, we developed a fallback plan. We test the fallback plan once a quarter by stopping all the bots in operations and then we invoke the fallback plan. We have this mapped out in a document where we ask the respective processors to do the processes and simulate a stability failure.

There will be always risk associated with anything that you do. It's all up to an individual to make plans as to how they deal with bottlenecks, how to structure plans for potential stability issues, how they mitigate these potential issues by having a proper solution and proper process in place. To me, that is where the secret of stability really lies. It is not really correct to blame the stability of the product when it is the fault of the process. It's all up to an individual better manage how to look at things.

I would say that scalability is a critical aspect of using RPA and maximizing efficiency. When you develop one bot. You can just use it for N number of ports with the same source code. So it doesn't require any retooling. Scalability is very high. There will be some process deviations or some nonstandard aspects associated with any process that may require rethinking and interaction.

For example, maybe because of the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or the different systems that we use or integrate at the time of taking over those processes, scaling may be influenced. The classic example for our company, I would say, is that we have grown manyfold by acquiring lots of companies in the last three decades.

Every time we acquired new divisions or companies, it is not only about the revenue or products. We also get legacy systems or along with those entities, there will be some processes and practices which are nonstandard for our organization. We'll need to incorporate these different systems in the ERP.

But scalability is always possible. With the RPA only those areas where there are differences need to be fine-tuned in your RP source code. Then you can redeploy it successfully. Beyond that, we also take this as an opportunity to evaluate processes because we don't look at the RPA project as an isolated project. It is an opportunity to grow and improve automation in various ways and not just this one project alone.

Even before we automate something, we look at processes to scrutinize what are the nonstandard activities we do. We look to see if there are ways we can make the process more lean, simple and straightforward. This can actually make the process that I'm trying to automate more efficient. Then it is also easier to accomplish the development, easier to integrate with other processes, and more adaptable when you automate the process. Working this way, I know for sure that what I am automating is going to be an efficient process. 

So scalability is very easy and very simple to achieve especially compared training individuals in a process. A bot needs no training. Making tweakings to the source code and deploying successfully in production is much faster and easier. Because of these reasons, I would say scalability is pretty efficient and easy to achieve using RPA.

We plan to increase usage in the future both in our current departments and new divisions of the business.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as one of the best in the world when it comes to customer service. I've had the opportunity to gain specific experience with certain members of their team and the service is consistent and excellent.

Initially, when we started with the IQ Bot project, we had some issues and experienced a bit of a learning curve. So we immediately raised those concerns. Our first issue took less than 24 hours to get fixed, and without adding any additional cost to the customer. That type of service and support of a product is an important thing.

I would say the customer service team, the project team, and even the aftermarket customer success manager are all fantastic guys. I know that the organization has people with strong capabilities and excellent talent. It is very, very evident when you interact with them.

I would definitely say Automation Anywhere is aggressive when it comes to driving success for the customers. They are very passionate about customer success and their focus on the customer.

Some of my team members have taken courses with Automation Anywhere. They still need to complete a few more assessments before they get their certifications. The courses are pretty good, the assessment is very cumbersome and complex (from what I understand). It's too technical for them. Maybe it is easy for technical guys, but not for functional people. I assume that this is the way it should be, because it's an assessment before you get a certification. It has to be tedious and cumbersome to crack it.

The best person in our organization to speak to the complexity of the initial setup is an IT guy from my team. He was responsible for a series of calls to the tech support team and he was involved in a lot of discussion with the Automation Anywhere team initially. Obviously we had contact with technical support so it may not have been so easy to do the initial setup, but I think that is quite acceptable or understandable. Anything which is new will probably be something you need to spend extra time on during the initial phase-in of a new product.

Beyond that initial setup and normal learning curve, I haven't seen any problem with respect to adapting the RPA technology in our company. It has been pretty smooth. The technical support team was great in terms of supporting anything we experienced in the way of technical issues. The only issues we experienced after that have been some issues with respect to using a Citrix environment. We are finding it difficult to automate on Citrix efficiently.

We have been continuously on calls and meetings with the technical support team. They have been coming up with a lot of innovative ways as to how they can fix that problem with Citrix. Of course, we are still in the midst of finding a solution to the issues. But I know for sure with the support that I get from the support team that we will definitely have a solution in the near future.

We did our own implementation with assistance directly from Automation Anywhere's technical support team.

There was a bit of a hand-holding in the beginning because Automation Anywhere developers came and developed a few bots for us. Beyond that, it is all on our own. We have been very independent. We hardly got support from the Automation Anywhere team after that. From our own experience, the tool is pretty easy to understand and start using.

The bot creation process has different processes depending on what we automate, e.g., accounts payable, IT, and procurement. These are miles apart. The complexity would differ based on the different applications that we trying to integrate using RPA.

We try to check the different applications involved for automation and whether they are compatible with Automation Anywhere. Then, we understand the process. We do a value stream mapping, e.g., what are the non-value-added activities that we are currently doing to make it lean, simple, and re-engineer the process. We identify the activities that can be automated using RPA, or any tool.

There'll be the extensive workshop conducted before we conclude what we want to automate, how we want to automate, and how long it is going to take to automate. We do an extensive study to determine:

• What'll be the return on investment? 
• What type of a return that you'll get by automating the process?

We document it and prepare it as a business case. We send it to the sponsor for approval. Once it is been approved, then we will kick-start our development. Once the development is completed, there will be UAT and we will roll it out to go live.

There will be a burn-in period where we will be providing the support. It's like a normal SDLC. It's the same model. However, we analyze the process in detail and a BRD will be prepared, then we will start the development.

A simple process might take somewhere around four weeks from start until the end. Something which is very complex in nature might take up to 12 weeks. Anything which is very complex, we would like to break into small pieces, then automate it step-by-step. We don't try to take the entire thing and digest it. We would rather try to break it into small portions, then move on. 

Calculating ROI for us is pretty simple. We identify efficiency at the beginning, then based on that we will just move the headcount out of the process. We try to compare with the cost spent versus the quote of the money that we have saved on the fully loaded employee cost. That's a simple comparison of what we do. This is a very crude way of calculating our return on investment because there are other benefits that are derived by doing an automation. Other benefits include:

• Improving the quality of the process.
• Eliminating some of the duplicate payments to save some dollars. 
• Making timely payments to the vendor to have better negotiation skills with them. 

These are some of the other overall business benefits that you can derive out of it, but they are too tedious to take into consideration when you're trying to do an archive. That's why we keep it very simple by comparing the labor cost saved versus the cost spent on the technology.

They are already coming out with a community license, which is really good. That's something that I wish to have.

We had looked at a lot of prominent players in the market and examined the different options as well, like Blue Prism and UiPath. Automation Anywhere was the one company who was flexible in terms of offering a PoC. We find this very comfortable. They were very approachable and aggressive, in terms of getting things done. This helped us make a decision in favor of Automation Anywhere. Also, Blue Prism doesn't have the functionality with attended automation that we would like to have. We are looking for the flexibility and convenience that comes with attended automation where you can still run your show.

We ended up choosing Automation Anywhere based heavily on their highly-approachable team. We thought of doing a PoC and Automation Anywhere was the first vendor to volunteer and say they would do PoC for us. That was not the case with the other vendors. They were very reluctant for whatever reason.

In terms of product, almost all the products are good. The differences are insignificant from the product standpoint. What makes Automation Anywhere a little different from the other players in the market is their presence in India. They have a very strong presence in India. They've an excellence sales team, very approachable solutions team, and technical team.

They are very approachable. They come and help you out in terms of creating a PoC, which is not the case with the other companies. The other companies are not that aggressive. They normally don't show that level of interest in terms of getting things done with the customer. They all come and approach for new business, but when it comes to going the extra mile to making something happen, that is where they are lacking. That is the difference for our decision of going in favor of Automation Anywhere.

But we got a lot of support from the company and they have always been willing to go the extra mile in terms of supporting the customer and making solutions happen. So that really influenced our decision, and that is one of the reasons why we want to go with the Automation Anywhere compared to other players in the market.

If I were to rate this product on a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would definitely rate them nine. It is not a ten because of what may be my ignorance of the entire Automation Anywhere platform. Probably I'm not aware or don't know the complete suite of assets. I'm not in a position to rate it a ten. To rate Automation Anywhere a ten means I should have complete knowledge of the product and I am sure there are things I have not yet explored. 

As far as advice, the normal tendency — and the mistake often made by organizations — would be to commit at the time of vendor selection by volume of features. They pay too much attention and focus on the product landscape. They think about one solution that has got 200 different functionalities rather than one which has got 210 different functionalities as being inferior just based on a number. But in reality, the users may probably not even be using even 10% of what is available in the tool or the platform. So they tend to give more weight to the product landscape. 

In our case, we made an effort to look at more than just features, but the qualities of the companies and vendors as well. For example, we learned about the leadership journey for each vendor, how long ago they started in this business, how much focus they put into coming up with the product development — the R&D. It is also important who the venture partners are and who the people are who are associated with the company and product.

We have done a lot of automation with our ERP systems. We also have some in-house applications which are on .NET that we have integrated with RPA. This should be the minimum expectation when you're signing for an RPA contract with any vendor. You would expect the RPA solution or tool to work seamlessly with any system. Automation Anywhere works well with no problems except for the Citrix environment. This is where we have had a bit of a challenge. Beyond that, we have never had issues with Automation Anywhere.

These details are relevant and important when you go to make a decision or when you take on a partner as an RPA solution provider. You are not just investing in a partnership for the next six months or a year. Probably some of the bots you are developing today you'll want to be using even after ten years. It's a long-term association what you're trying to make with an entity, the product, and with a company. So it's important that you go through all these checkpoints rigorously.

I've not used anything from the Bot Store.

Every technology has pros and cons with some limitations. There is no point in just harping on the limitations alone. You need to look at how you can make that technology work and solve your problems. This is where the human intelligence comes into the picture.

This technology is an enabler. It will solve most of my problems. It is up to individuals on how to make it work. That is where the trick of the trade lies. If you know how to work with RPA, you will not complain. I've seen many people complaining saying, "RPA doesn't work. It doesn't give you ROI." It's not the technology's problem. It's the people's problem. It's your mindset which is stopping you from getting automated and start using the technology. 

Biggest lesson learnt: You'll understand existing processes in a different dimension. You'll understand your people problems with the process in a better manner. It should not be just be looked at as an opportunity to automate it. If you look at the overall process to revamp and re-engineer it, then you can make your process efficient by making it lean, simple, and straightforward. On top of that, when you try to automate it, the overall process efficiency should increase tremendously. 

if you just look at RPA as a tool to automate everything, that is not a good approach. There are some things which can be automated efficiently using simple VBA Macros. Sometimes you might require a simple .NET solution to automate your end process, which is more efficient. You can make automation in the existing ERP, and that might work better. You have to look at different ways of automating things based on the process and complexity. You have to look at what is the ideal solution, then you have to pick and choose what you want to automate.

Don't look at RPA to solve all your problems. You need to use the right technology to automate, simplify, and minimize your problems.