Automation Anywhere Reviews

Automation Anywhere is an RPA tool. The use case is the same for all automation tools. In my most recent project, I've used it for three-way invoice matching and sending it to the accounts for verifications. The process was a mixture of IQ bot, which is an OCR from Automation Anywhere, and then other RPA bots. 

I've used it in health care, where people apply for insurance applications to the insurance companies. 

I have implemented more than five hundred use cases as of now.

It's helped manage repetitive processes. If there's a repetitive process, that is our best use case, and we can pitch to the customer that we can make it shorter. Then we save them man hours and increase their efficiency and accuracy. 

For example, mostly in finance, when companies are preparing the salaries and have to prepare 1,500 payments for employees, sometimes they make mistakes, and they have to spend time on that. 

We can instead provide a fixed format for the robot that they have to follow every month, and it saves a lot of time, a lot of man hours. One of our customers here in the Middle East has saved around 10,000 man-hours for a telecom company with the help of 50 to 60 robots initially, and now the same company is using around 4,000 robots now. 

It helps save time on manual tasks. Compared to manual input, the results are much better, faster, and more accurate. For example, we have clients that can now easily process 10,000 invoices in one day. They have around 55 employees for that. We can augment the workload with a root, and if an employee wants to take a holiday or needs sick leave, other employees don't have to pick up the slack. Robots can input information into the system. 

The era of automation has changed. It's time for hyper-automation now. RPA is moving from just handling repetitive tasks to allowing for AI and offering automation plus conversational AI. It will help me. Soon I will be able to use it in WhatsApp, and all of the information can be entered, and you can initiate appointments, et cetera. RPA plus conversational AI plus AI-enabled OCR systems will be the future. 

There are a lot of great features, especially the IQ bot. It has very good accuracy on invoices. Previously, we were dependent on different software, and now, we can build in Automation Anywhere only.

It's easy to use for non-technical people. It's not rocket science. A business user might take a few weeks or a month to learn it, and then they will be quite capable of doing things themselves. A technical person may learn it in 15 days. Everything needs time; however, the learning curve is not so bad. A lot of things are available to help with learning. If someone spends one or two hours a day, they will pick it up. You can Google information or watch YouTube videos. There are hundreds of demos, materials, and more free of cost.

We do use CoPilot. We try to build a center of excellence with all customers, and we're giving them training around any bottlenecks they have.

The solution has helped us increase productivity. How much of an increase differs from customer to customer. Usually, it improves by 20% to 30%.

There's lots of integration possible. We've integrated with business tools like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. We can integrate easily into various workflows and APIs. We can access APIs with just a few clicks. We can also build out a UI-based integration.

It's helped us save time. Every customer saves a different amount of time, percentage-wise. Some can save hundreds of hours.  I've had a client save 30% of their time over the past few years thanks to automation. 

There is a dependency issue around the control room. If the control room is not working, the bots will not work. When that happens, we have to wait for the control room to go back up. Other tools in the market do not have this issue. If something is down, it means everything is down.

I've been using the solution for three years now. However, I've worked with automation in general for six years. 

The solution is stable. It's good software. It works well. 

The product scales well. 

Technical support is good; however, sometimes it takes a while to solve problems.

Positive

I previously was using UiPath. It's quite easy to use. They are both very similar solutions. 

I was mostly involved in the infrastructure, so I was not directly involved in the deployment. My understanding is that it is not difficult. However, when we upgraded it, we had challenges. 

There is some maintenance required. Normally, it works fine. Sometimes, there may be migrations or updates required. Only one or two people need to handle maintenance. We don't maintain bots. However, we just deploy them. Maintenance can be completed by the customer, and it might take five to six hours or one day at a maximum. 

Compared to Microsoft, the solution is expensive. However, compared to UiPath, it's fairly low - maybe 25% less. Generally, within the market, the price is average. It's competitive.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We're a reseller. 

Some of our use cases for Automation Anywhere have been embedding automation into our AML process and Anti-money laundering process as well. Also using automation to navigate some of our legacy applications to extract information from the UI.

The challenge we're trying to solve with Automation Anywhere is extracting information from our legacy applications. We do not have exposed endpoints. We have to use Automation Anywhere to be able to navigate and extract information for customers and from data information as well.

The processes and tasks automated by Automation Anywhere are a little bit more detailed. What we've come to figure out is the processes previously were not documented correctly. And Automation Anywhere allows us to get more insight and documentation out of our processes.

One of the immediate opportunities we see to leverage AI within our processes and our operations is customer service. Leveraging the natural language models and human response to be able to generate customer-focused responses is something that we plan to leverage very soon.

Automation Anywhere has improved our organization by allowing our resources to focus on the task at hand that impact our customer, while we use Automation Anywhere to replace some of the redundant work that some of our users and internal team members are facing.

Our company approach to generative AI for Automation Anywhere is more in line with building the future, allowing us to enhance our processes without necessarily embedding our internal team members with redundant tasks, allowing them to focus on the actual deliverables of a business versus generating a response to email or reading email. Allowing them to be a more human-focused team member.

Looking into Automation Anywhere in terms of the relationship with AWS, we manage our servers locally for our VMs and are looking to migrate to AWS. The partnership with AWS will allow us to integrate some of our processes and allow access to some of our DVs. This will be a good improvement for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use for people who don't have experience because it is a no-code solution and is user-friendly in terms of being able to generate automation with a plethora of available tasks and variables.

One or two automation walkthroughs of the actual process are required to learn Automation Anywhere. It takes a short amount of time for a user to get acquainted with Automation Anywhere. There are some latencies with being able to expose certain things such as APIs or establish a certain connection, but building automation is short in terms of development.

We have a few tools that are integrated with Automation Anywhere. We use a lot of Microsoft tools. Azure AD is integrated directly with Automation Anywhere and allows us to expand our ability to automate processes. We also have some desktop applications and some proprietary software that we would like to integrate with Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is a robust platform that allows us to make multiple connections and scale horizontally across the actual environment to give us a more robust integration or automation that allows for downstream impact whether it is internal users or external users of our products. It allows us the ability to go horizontally fast with a lot of multiple integrations of products.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save time and costs, sometimes in the same automation as well as replacing some of the redundant tasks. Some of our users are giving us the ability to scale quicker without adding additional resources. That saves costs. We save hundreds of hours with some automation and two to three hours for others, but the cost impact of being able to do that with automation has saved a ton of costs as well. We have a lot of bots running daily, manipulating and removing the redundancies of those manual tasks. The resource costs saved equal hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The feature we found to be the most valuable is the documentation automation as it allows us to focus on the actual important piece of building automation instead of tracking some of the repugnant documentation that goes along with building automation. 

Automation Anywhere's network has room for improvement. Expanding its partnership with a few other vendors. The likelihood of including companies like AWS, Google, and things like that is the exact approach to what I think Automation Anywhere can improve on. It allows business users who participate and are clients of those vendors to a seamless process integration with Automation Anywhere. This allows for an ecosystem that supports a more robust development of automation because we get a broader use case amongst multiple users of the same product.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere allows us the ability to scale across multiple platforms and in different volumes. At a small scale, we don't have to readdress that automation or that bot to be able to scale if configured and built correctly. It is a very scalable approach that we can take in terms of the integration that we have access to. It allows for an open platform to be able to scale.

The technical support is user-friendly. They are responsive and normally respond within 24 hours. They provide us with updates so we are not left in the dark and keep us involved. They make sure to follow up with a call if anything is needed.

Positive

We did not use any automation beforehand but we have a partnership with Workato that allows us to leverage more API-driven automation as well. We utilize both due to the actual diversity of Automation Anywhere. It gives us the ability to navigate a UI, a more legacy application whereas Workato gives us the ability to connect APIs. We use both of them in the same automation platform.

It took us a month to deploy. We set up a few runners or virtual machines to be able to do that work with our IT team who configured some of the runners and made sure that we embedded applications that were gonna be useful and practical for the actual automation itself. We then walked through a few test automation and were able to deploy our first automation within a month.

Automation Anywhere pricing and licensing are competitive compared to the other automation vendors. Automation Anywhere gives us a platform to scale quickly without embedding a lot of costs on our end. It is reasonably priced.

We evaluated the landscape of automation and the partners and vendors that offer the service before we chose Automation Anywhere. My positive previous experience with Automation Anywhere helped make the decision a lot easier for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use. It is a simple platform to understand. A simple platform to roll out. We don't need a robust education in terms of automation. We can train internally. We can expose other POs or PMs to the actual application and they will be able to give us additional insights of automation that we can improve.

The con is the resources assignment outside of our internal team members. Finding resources who have good experience variant with Automation Anywhere in the States may be a con for us.  

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten. From what I have seen, they are headed in the right direction to get a ten.

We do not currently use Automation Co-Pilot, but we are excited to start using it. We are going to have a session about using Co-Pilot with our internal teams.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is simple in terms of the control room to be able to do an upgrade or speak to our account executive to get additional licenses or products added to our instance.

Maintenance depends on how we build the automation. We keep in mind the actual process of being able to manage automation as we build it, which will ultimately save us a call for maintenance at the end. Being able to enable notification error handling within the automation helps reduce the actual maintenance requirements for automation.

Not many people are involved in the maintenance of our automation because we embed some of the process owners into the process so they are aware if a bot was to fail. Then we give them corrective actions in terms of exception handling to be able to oversee that bot as well as to reinitiate a bot or add additional variables into the bot to allow the success of that bot. A minimal amount of people are required for bot maintenance.

Specifically, we use the solution for SAP where we have particular SAP processes that need automation. 

There were multiple processes where implementing a bot allowed us to automate processes and allow it to perform backend tasks. For example, employee onboarding, or creating orders. 

We were able to remove manual tasks and we were able to justify the processes based on the ROI witnessed. 

We see opportunities to operationalize AI. We aren't using it yet, however, in the future, we are looking to it. At this time, we do not have any AI use cases. 

Being able to connect with third-party tools is the best feature.

All RPA tools we are using have the same benefits in terms of automation.

The learning curve is okay. Practicing it is the key thing. Doing it over and over will help a person get comfortable. We do not have a lab environment where we can use and test it. That makes it difficult for users. They need to spend time with it, to play with it, to have a hands-on approach.

It took me two weeks to learn how to do an implementation. Going from the lowest knowledge levels to more of an expert takes a month or two. 

We have a few different tools and operating systems. It works well with other application data or operational items. 

With respect to your use case, it's easy to use and easy to implement. However, sometimes if there are complex requirements, the automation of processes gets a bit more difficult. 

If you come across any process, it can be automated via Automation Anywhere. However, companies need to better justify the ROI before usage - otherwise, they might spend money on things unnecessarily. 

I've been using the solution for around three years. 

It's a stable product. 

The solution can provide automation at scale. 

Technical support is quite responsive. Very rarely do I need to connect with the team, however, if I need to reach out, they are very good in terms of their response. 

Positive

I also use UiPath and SAP IRP. We work with different tools according to requirements. 

The initial setup is easy. It has its own orchestration and you just need to deploy it.

Any maintenance would fall under your organization's contract. 

We have saved us both money and time. 

The pricing is reasonable. The money you spend will be worth it. 

We are an Automation Anywhere customer. 

I would recommend the solution to others, so long as they have some previous knowledge before setting out. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We are in the retirement industry. We use it for application-based automation. We are trying to mimic our operations to redundant business users' tasks, like clearing claims and loans.

We are using version 10.7. We are currently trying to upgrade to version 11.3.

We use Bot Insights. Business users utilize Bot Insight dashboards to get analysis.

In the 10.7 version, the back-end port for the MetaBot password has looping. This has been a type of limitation. Now, we are upgrading and integrating the Control Room, which is a validating feature.

I would like them to add OCR features. This would help us deal with unstructured data and we can get more data out of images.

I would like to see more features related to artificial intelligence. 

The latest version is more stable. We have mostly legacy applications. We do interact with Automation Anywhere support for patches and DLLs which are compatible with our legacy applications. Maybe after our upgrade, we can expect more stability.

In couple of months, we are looking to upgrade. We have set up our environment for integrating in AWS into our architecture. We are setting this up now and planning to install Automation Anywhere 11.3 to see how it is.

It is scalable. Since we have only had it one year, we are still looking into the scalabilty factor.

The technical support is good. They are knowledgeable and don't waste much of our time. They are quick in resolving things by identifying the exact root cause. 

We try to resolve the issue from our side first because we are trained in the product. It is only when we can't solve the issue that we contact support.

The initial setup is straightforward, except when setting up with cloud-based services, like Amazon. The cloud-based setup process is complex.

Automation Anywhere came in and helped set up the tool for us since it was initially new when we onboarded it.

It has saved us a lot of hours, manual effort, and we can focus on more important tasks, which helps us with our ROI.

We purchase on a bot basis. Our costs are approximately $5,000.

There are a lot of vendors out there, like Blue Prism and UiPath. However, A2019 offers cross platform and single point, which is why I would recommend Automation Anywhere.

I have been very impressed with the A2019 version. This version is phenomenal. 

I use Automation Anywhere for a range of automation tasks, including desktop, web, and SAP automation, as well as handling PDF exceptions and facilitating application-to-application automation. Additionally, I establish database connections to perform database automation.

Automation Anywhere is easy to learn and use, even for individuals without technical skills, due to its user-friendly interface.

The learning curve for non-technical users of Automation Anywhere is relatively gentle, allowing them to grasp the basic functionalities and build simple automation quickly.  

Our goal is to reduce manual labor by 200,000 to 300,000 hours over the next five years. We are currently saving approximately 20,000 hours each year through automation, which will result in a total of 100,000 hours saved over five years. The benefits of using Automation Anywhere can be observed within two weeks of implementation.

Generative AI is used in some of our automation processes to eliminate paperwork within a three-hour timeframe.

I have integrated Automation Anywhere with various applications, including SAP, MySQL, and numerous desktop and web-based applications. My experience spans desktop applications, web-based applications like SAP Ariba and other portals, and automation of buying processes. I am confident that I have worked with the full spectrum of applications available in the current market, from desktop-based to cloud-based solutions.

Automation Anywhere can be easily integrated into our automation workflows.

Automation Anywhere saved directors five to seven hours of manual work daily and, from a business structure perspective, more than five times the savings.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use and user-friendly due to its intuitive interface and straightforward implementation architecture, making it accessible even for those without a technical background. Its community edition and clear process workflow make it easier to learn and develop on compared to UiPath or Power Automate, requiring less technical knowledge overall.

The AISense recorder in Automation Anywhere needs improvement in resilience and OCR capabilities, particularly in comparison to UiPath's superior OCR functionality. Furthermore, expanding the Automation Anywhere packages to include a wider range of desktop-based applications would enhance its utility.

Automation Anywhere needs to expand its reach across more industries by strengthening its sales team and increasing its market presence in India and globally. This broader approach will allow them to capture diverse sectors, increasing demand and creating more job opportunities within the company. This expansion is crucial, especially since the current client base utilizing Automation Anywhere remains limited.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for approximately five years.

Automation Anywhere is highly stable, and I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

Automation Anywhere allows for automation at scale, and I rate its scalability as a nine out of ten.

Automation Anywhere has good support features.

Positive

Before using Automation Anywhere, manual methods were used.

The initial setup was easy and took about a week. Two to three people were involved in the deployment.

The deployment was handled by the IT department which involved two to three people.

Automation Anywhere offers competitive and affordable pricing. However, a slight adjustment to align more closely with Power Automate's pricing structure could help them capture a larger share of the market.

I would rate the price of Automation Anywhere a six out of ten, with ten being the most expensive.

Other solutions evaluated include UiPath and Power Automate. UiPath provides better OCR and capture capabilities.

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

When I first became interested in the automation market, Automation Anywhere held a significant presence, especially during its expansion into India. While they continue to grow in the Indian market, they need to increase their market share compared to UiPath. From a developer's perspective, UiPath offers far more job opportunities. To be more competitive, Automation Anywhere should proactively expand its presence in industries like healthcare, telecom, and energy. This would lead to increased adoption of their product and create more job opportunities within the Automation Anywhere sector, ultimately benefiting the entire automation industry.

We have over 25 users of Automation Anywhere in our company.

The maintenance is done automatically by Automation Anywhere.

I would recommend using Automation Anywhere to others. It is a user-friendly tool, and developers can learn it quickly. Implementing automation often requires proof of concept, and Automation Anywhere is a viable option.

We use Automation Anywhere to automate specific use cases for our clients. The majority of use cases fall under the logistics and finance departments.

Our organization utilizes Automation Anywhere on the Automation Anywhere private cloud infrastructure.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to automate repetitive tasks and save humans time to focus on other tasks.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use with basic knowledge or training.

The learning curve is easy. We can learn how to use it within one week. There are a lot of courses available for Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere Co-Pilot is designed for situations where humans and bots work together, especially useful when users need to enter specific details during the automation process itself.

It has helped our clients significantly increase their production and has freed up time for employees to work on other tasks.

We have integrated Automation Anywhere with our SQL database.

Adding automation into workflows and APIs is easy.

Automation Anywhere helps save organizations time and money. 

Automation Anywhere's OCR functionality stands out as the most valuable feature for us, as it allows us to swiftly extract data for repetitive tasks, significantly boosting our efficiency.

OCR technology could be more inclusive by offering a wider range of supported languages, as its current selection is limited.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

Automation Anywhere does a good job of providing automation at scale.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere has impacted our ability to expand across more processes.

There was a time when the technical support was not able to provide an exact solution for my query.

Neutral

While I've used UiPath, I prefer Automation Anywhere for its user-friendly interface and competitive OCR capabilities. Automation Anywhere's bi-directional flow, allowing both graph and sequence views, offers greater clarity compared to UiPath's linear flow.

The initial deployment is straightforward.

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

Automation Anywhere requires maintenance and updates semi-annually. For an experienced person, it is an easy task.

We have eight people on our team who utilize Automation Anywhere.

I recommend taking advantage of Automation Anywhere's trial version to thoroughly test its capabilities within your specific environment before committing to a full deployment.

We have used AA for telecom industry repetitive processes, public retirement firms processes, and financial bank processes. The development has been with local developer desktops, remote VDIs, EC2s, as well as RDP clients of sorts for the individual company preferences.

We are currently building an Azure environment for our A2019 solution internally, with a VDI as our developer/UAT environment. Production will be a separate VDI operating from our main control room instance, as we create Bot Runner agents out of those VDIs for production.

I also deal with many federated lines of business, as they often develop locally and use attended automation as their source of RPA for their lines of business. Others utilize EC2s as their developer and UAT environments and have a separate production import process that keeps the separation of duties intact. Though this is not as productive as that team expected, they use it temporarily until their control room can be migrated and upgraded into A2019 instance as part of another line of business currently building out a sandbox environment for the remainder of 2020.

I am a consultant and our RPA practice on a personal level has improved the efficiency of the payroll, PTO, and timecard submission process within our company. It has taken time-consuming daily mundane tasks off the plates of our talented finance teams and allowed them to dedicate more productive time to working with more thought-heavy and human-centric activities.

Outside of our company, as we work with clientele, several improvement instances have been evident for those. One company had a very tedious process of monitoring an email inbox for several business units to send emails notifying that their daily database update process was completed. This took many hours of monitoring after hours, but in place of that, the RPA bot was able to perform the monitoring for them of that inbox, perform the necessary follow-up or escalation emails needed, and finalize the process once all was complete. This was unattended automation, saving them precious time, improving morale, and accurately informing everyone of the completion. 

Both v11 and A2019 have their strengths but the cloud-based forms with Excel, Microsoft applications, scripts integration, and functionality of A2019 have really stood out above the way v11 can do those things.

It takes far less code to work with A2019 than v11 for the tasks we have in place. In v11, the Metabot features have proven a tremendous help to work with smaller tasks such as file and folder operations, datetime operations, as well as credential management operations.

I'd say the most impactful and heavily or commonly used ability of v11 and A2019 has been the ability to integrate other code types and operations within the process. For example, if someone needed a heavy data comparison process to take place, utilizing AA could work but often takes a good bit of time to work through a large Excel or CSV file. Instead, activating a pre-developed or partner-developed Python script would be my choice because of the speed and efficiency of that language. I currently use this method and it's a major time saver.

In terms of improvement, usually, I have found is not as general as people think. Specifically, as a use case, I am excited to see improvements in having an A2019 cloud control room working and improved on the Lenox environments. A good bit of our finance infrastructure for web-based applications is built in that environment.

There is a good bit of dashboard-type development going on in this type of environment already, so the ability to integrate some of the functionality, as well as keep the synchronicity of everything within it, would be a major benefit.

Having fewer connection instances would make it more secure, more simple to troubleshoot, and possibly more flexible with the type of applications in use.  

I have been using the AA desktop application versions since 2014 (v09-v11), approximately six years, and A2019 for about four months.

I've not had any instability issues but only environmental stability issues that come down to the company that created the environment. 

I find it very scalable, especially with smaller automations, as they can often grow once proven to businesses that the processes work. 

The technical support was very knowledgeable, very easy to understand mostly, their ability to work with us to meet the needs and being patient was a huge help. 

I did not previously use different versions but currently use both. I do know that going forward with v11 sunsetting in 2021, we are migrating and going through a learning phase of A2019 to fully adapt to that application. 

The A2019 setup was straightforward for the applications themselves. The environments in which they are set up is a different story but, that again is on a per-company basis and often lends itself to the expertise of the DevOps teams. Sometimes, those folks are not familiar with RPA or A2019.  

We implemented through AA directly. The availability of their support was very good. Several meetings and work with their folks went well. 

Our ROI has ranged from thousands to hundreds of thousands, depending on the type of process being automated.

I really enjoy the pricing options with Automation Anywhere, as they are able to flex their ability to adapt to the needs of the customer really well. I am sure the specifics for some pricing are on a partner-by-partner basis but providing the ability to scale the licenses, setup, and pricing to the customer is a huge benefit with Automation Anywhere.

Their technical support system and response times directly to a partner are really good.

We did review UiPath, Blue Prism, and Power Automate. 

I'd say, fully go headfirst into learning the A2019 platform and all it can do for a business. There is something for everyone in that platform. Large or small scale automations, migration processes from v11 is already in place and tested, and there is no more need for Metabots because they are now "packages" that can be made or modified by a seasoned developer, and a plethora of other benefits are evident. Just jump in!! 

Currently, we are focusing more on finance, shared services, and interpretive related ideas. For accounting and finance statistic, we have reconciliation specific processes, such as rates uploads into systems. The majority of our development is on SAP and Excel. We are focusing on the financial services area, so our use cases are more related to finance and accounting. These are the use cases developed by the development team.

We are using an on-premise deployment model.

The main agenda for using the RPA is to see how we can get the benefit from reducing human capacity as well as quality output. These two are the major focus for us and what we are achieving.

Timeline-wise, it normally takes a long time to develop. With the AA and RPA concepts and their ready-to-use components, we can deliver a bot within couple of days or within a week time frame based on the use case.

It is easy to use and developer-friendly. The development time is very short. If any system needs to be changed or any functionality needs to be incorporated to any of the technology, it usually will be a long process, like months. With this innovative tool's automation, it is very dynamic, easy to develop, and deliver results quickly. With some of our use cases, we were able to deliver within the time frame of two to three weeks, which is the biggest plus with this tool.

There are good MetaBots available in the Bot Store. We were able to leverage them, as well as established our own reusable components. Considering that, it is easy to add on any software or applications that sits in the system.

We would like to have the Excel plug-in. We have a challenge with unattended bots in development which will be deployed on virtual machines. End users ask, "Why can't we run the bots whenever we need?" The new concept for getting attended bots as well as the Excel plug-in will solve this problem, but we'll wait for 2019 version, which may be a better solution for the business.

More structured and unstructured data collection will be a challenge. While we have the IQ  Bot tool, the success rate at the beginning will be lower. It will be around 20 to 30 percent at the start because you need to train the bot at regular intervals. Of course, this depends on the data. This area could use be improvement.

The marketing strategy is directed toward end users. These leads to confusion in the organization regarding, "Who needs to develop?" Is it IT or the business? This causes friction within the business. Whatever the approach, it is important to show how to get the most benefit out of the tool. There should be a clear roles for IT and the business when using the tool. This way teams and structure can be better established in a business.

For attended automation, there are still questions to be answered: How it is going to maintain the queue? E.g., there are 20 users who want to process their own processes, and when they trigger things, how will the Control Room react? How will bot work distribution happen? These things still need to be looked into, but conceptual-wise, attended automation is really good.

It is confusing: Who needs to develop the bot? The business or IT. At the basic level, the bots can be created. However, once they are moved into production, you have to make sure that the bot is stable and running 24/7 without any issues. Therefore, a lot of care is required due to the amount of controlling mechanisms required.

There are a few problems with deployment and maintenance. When it moves to other systems, the consistency will be somewhat lost.

RPA is decently established and stable as the market is coming up with new features. However, the unstable area is more the IT part of it where a lot of research still needs to be done, especially in the case of artificial intelligence. 

When we run bots, sometimes the systems will go down. Maybe it is because the same functionality worked once or even regularly, but then all of a sudden there will be an issue. It might be a network, latency, or some other issues. Still bot stability needs improvement. These are very rare situations. It works most the time, but one time it will fail and we don't know why.

When I talk about RPAs, it is to say, "Can this problem be solved with RPA?" Scalability-wise, we are in good shape. 

In terms of AI incorporation, this type of scalable incorporation would be benefit everyone. The trend looks like we are going to reach to this point in a good manner.

We were able to put more than 40 bots into production. There are around 20 more in progress. On average, we were able to save around 25,000 hours of manual efforts.

The technical support's response is very good. They gave back solutions quickly. We haven't face many challenges when using the tool. So, we haven't interacted much with the technical team, maybe two or three instances. 

We looked into moving into RPA because it was the trend in the industry.

We do regular acquisitions which leads to a lot of duplicate roles and resources along with similar activities. With this approach, we can streamline our processes and bring uniform processes across the organization. We have been able to establish this. If we use the bots on a lot of manual efforts, it will reduces effort. Going forward, we can use the bots in a better manner by using them for the strategy of delivery and appointments.

We started this journey with a PoC. For three months, we tried understanding the tool and its capabilities. 

The initial setup is not complex for the tool setup. The struggle points are establishing the right mechanisms to identify the candidates and prioritizing things. 

In April, we started the pilot. By July, we had the software as well as the use cases that we needed. We got the licenses in July or August. It took us at least a quarter to establish systems and resources. Then, we started delivering the bots from December 2018. It took six to eight months' time frame from PoC to first bot deployment.

For our bot creation process:

A business user, whoever is doing the manual process currently, will send their request with the details of the use case. Those details will be assessed by IT and the business functional groups to measure what will be the man-hour savings. Also, is it a possible candidate for RPA?Based on those measurements, we identify candidates for RPA, then we determine if they meet the current threshold of 500 hours. If it is more than 500 hours, we consider that a candidate for RPA. Based on that criteria, we identify and prioritize it. Afterward, it comes to the development team for development.

If we had been alone during the initial setup, might not have been that successful. However, when we partnered with the other groups, like consulting firms, then we were able to get the right mechanisms in place within a short time.

We did the deployment in-house.

We have a good dashboard to measure ROI. Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent.

To measure ROI, whenever we get a use case from the business when we do an assessment, one of the factor that we capture is the time saving. We try to measure and apply the country rates for the locations where they are doing manual efforts. We measure the time savings by applying the country rates and deriving the hours and value.

The time that it takes to develop and deliver is within two to three weeks.

It has good licensing costs which are average for the market.

We did try out UiPath, which is a good solution. 

We also look at Blue Prism.

We like Automation Anywhere's end user experience. We thought Automation Anywhere was the better solution for developing bots in the long run. It is a centralized tool because of its Control Room. It makes sense to have a solution where everything is in a centralized repository. AA has a more future-looking perspective which will help them in the long run.

We currently are not evaluating any other vendors.

When we saw the tool capabilities, we were so excited. We tried to start using them but we needed to have the right structure and mechanisms in place from the beginning to identify the use case for prioritizing. This plays a major role. 

If you are a big organization with a center of excellence, you need to bring all the people together. The establishment will play a bigger role than just developing and delivering bots. Developing and delivering bots is a very small portion, which is doable by any individual who has a basic technical background. To be successful in your journey, having the right structure upfront will help.

We experimented a little bit with IQ Bots, but we didn't see much use cases in this line currently.

A lot of people interact with RPA and the industry is really excited about it. However, you need to pick the right candidate to be successful in your journey, along with the right framework for the development. This will give you a good output. This is what the business needs to test. Pick a solution based on the organization's needs as well as the right approach. Have an assessment with an approach framework will help.