We use it in the healthcare domain and automate legacy systems to reduce processing time.
We have given services to clients and automated processes with 30 to 40 bots and their ROI has increased a lot. The turnaround for tasks done by bots is very quick, and, even on weekends, bots are running.
The integration abilities of Automation Anywhere are valuable and so is document processing.
It is also easy to design and implement, even for business users who don't have technical skills. A little bit of training is required, about five to seven days, and then they can start. The learning curve is low.
The document processing, OCR, needs to be more accurate. Sometimes, when you try it on documents, it keeps on failing and goes to a different queue. It needs to mature.
I would also like to see the solution include generative AI functionality because that would provide a lot of features.
I have been using Automation Anywhere for about six years.
The stability is quite good. There are no major problems there.
The technical support from Automation Anywhere is good. I worked with the Automation Anywhere platform for a long time, and it improved a lot.
For example, I worked on a migration project and there were some infrastructure issues and dependencies, things that were very hard to catch. The response time of the Automation Anywhere support team was slow. But now, their support has matured a lot.
It takes 30 minutes to an hour for the initial deployment of the platform.
In health care, providers need to follow up after every visit within 10 days, 15 days, 20 days, 30 days. There are different frequencies with which they need to go back to the patient and come up with personalized communication. For that reason, we have created about 10 bots that have saved our clients a lot of time on operations.
When you compare the cost of Automation Anywhere with UiPath and Blue Prism, those others are much less. Licensing-wise, UiPath wins the deal.
I started off using Automation Anywhere and, since then, I have also used UiPath. The reason is due to the cost. Automation Anywhere's licensing costs and package costs are very high. Most of our clients are being forced to move to UiPath because of that.
Another thing is that switching between versions of Automation Anywhere, for example, from Enterprise A2019.11 to the latest version, is a headache.
From the time of deployment, it takes between 15 days and one month to automate a process. There is a center of excellence for each client. They set the standards and deployment and release procedures. And they have quality assurance procedures as well, before pushing something to production.
Deployment is straightforward because the development is on the cloud, so it's a smooth process of moving from development to UAT, and from UAT to production takes little time.
While deploying, we test the solution. We have a sanity checklist in which we will ensure all the prerequisites are covered and code-based code reviews are done. We run all the test cases and make sure everything is working fine before pushing to production. After pushing to production, we will run smoke tests with dummy data for a production sanity check. We'll ensure proper functionality and, otherwise, we have a rollback procedure.
Bot maintenance includes monitoring in case there are any failures. We have a monitoring team that monitors all 150 or 200 bots. If there is a failure, communication will come from the bot and the monitoring team will create a ticket and a developer will work on it. We have two people dedicated to this task. The amount of time they spend depends on the frequency that bots run. Some bots run every half an hour and others run once a day or once a week.
Regarding using an API integration instead of RPA, if you have a system where you can expose API services, that would be great. But when it comes to legacy systems, like mainframes, you can't expose an API. In that situation, naturally, RPA is the solution.
Overall, I recommend Automation Anywhere. Technically and feature-wise, and in terms of its stability, everything is fine. If they could just make the migration process from one version to another version very smooth, that would be great. And I am not satisfied with the document understanding and OCR. That should be improved.