Automation Anywhere Reviews

We did the PoC in 2016. It was mainly in the services process. We were more focused on the company billings, where there were multiple subprocesses and sub business units. We have did the complete landscape of more than 15,000 FTEs. We are talking around 153 different work types. As the main lead, I was to provide the real-time support to the customers who needs us to fill out required details. That was a completely repetitive task. We decided to conduct a PoC on that, which we did.

If we talk about the automation RPA. it definitely has worked very well for us. I'm talking about giving good savings, about more than 180 FTE savings, after implementing more than 200 plus bots. It has worked well. As an organization, it has supported us very well, and also for our customers.

Our task was very repetitive in nature. We had to fill information from Excel to some application. That was quite repetitive and the volume was also very high. Initially, we did the PoC from that process, which was easy to implement. Because it was a first for us, it was very easy to implement. That has provided good savings for us, where we have implemented 13 bots with the reduction of 16 FTEs.

There were also some tasks where we needed a cognitive approach or an OCR solution. There were some scanned documents in a PDF format. We were in the initial stages and struggled at that time. I'm talking about in 2018. We struggled to get them into the structure format.

In the current stage, there are lots of opportunities in terms of claims, insurance, and banking where we need AI and cognitive solutions to automate unstructured documents. That is a need of ours. Automation Anywhere should improve in this field so they can provide support for artificial intelligence and cognitive solutions.

Initial days, we struggled. When we started the automation for six weeks, the solution design was put on hold because of the system capability. But, they provided us good support and upgraded their systems, and now, it works smoothly.

If you ask me to rate the technical support from one to five, I will rate them a four. I will say that the technical support is good. If it is required that they provide their resources, they will send their resources to your organization to support you in terms of development and technical support. 

I have experience with UiPath too. If we talk about Automation Anywhere and UiPath, it's a completely different experience. Our work now is more for the claims and payroll processes where thought and human intervention are involved to process transactions.

This is now a completely different experience. Initially, it was a very repetitive task. Now, manual intervention is required. We have to go and read through documents. We have to read through histories. In terms of that, I can rate equally Automation Anywhere and UiPath. However, if we talk about artificial intelligence in 2019 and what Automation Anywhere is coming out with, it is great then.

The initial setup was not that great. The road was very up and down. We struggled. A lot of the features were not compatible with applications which we are using. That was the reason. This was the initial days, we are talking about 2016 to 2017. The buzz was not as much as we are having now. 

From that time until now, Automation Anywhere has upgraded their systems. They are at a good pace now. But, at the initial stage, we struggled in terms of getting things sorted. We also needed support, so the Automation Anywhere team sent some support to us who helped the developers in terms of coding and finding solutions.

Some of the features were not very well identified at that time. The Automation Anywhere team provided the support for that. Initially, it was like a rollercoaster for us.

If we talk about time, normally bots take more time than users. The benefit is the bots can work 24/7, if your application supports. With the solutions that we have now, we can have attended and unattended bots.

There are savings in terms of ROI, but It's not only about savings. It's about the customer experience nowadays. If we talk about the customer experience, your experience will be improved. There will be a lot of reversals which happen when you are processing transactions manually. When you are implementing the RPA, you eliminate those reversals. You deliver the product right the first time. That is more important in terms of keeping your organization having consistent growth. That is a very important thing. 

You will see savings, not in the same year, but in the coming years. In two to three years, you will definitely save money.

Automation Anywhere works very well. When you have a large number of accounts, have to automate, and the task that is repetitive, you can use Automation Anywhere. The features work very well.

I will rate it an eight (out of 10). We had that experience where we struggled to have the structured format of scanned documents and PDF formats. There, we struggled a lot. That is the reason for the rating. The rest, I think is perfect. The services are fine. Automation Anywhere services are good. It is easy to implement. The best thing: It's simple and easy to implement.

We are planning to introduce a bot for every employee in the organization. There are around 9,000 employees in our organization. We are trying to introduce a bot for each one. That's our use case currently. We are working on how to improve their day in, day out life, how to make them work efficiently, removing repetitive tasks from day-to-day work, and give them important tasks/solutions that they are supposed to work for.

A valuable feature of Automation Anywhere for my needs is IQ Bot because it covers most of the semi-structured and structure data. That's where we are struggling a lot. So, IQ Bot is a very good solution to know and bring onboard for the automation of unstructured and semi-structured data.

Another valuable feature in Automation Anywhere is the analytics, like what data is coming, the process, and the number of times it's processed. That information is very powerful in Automation Anywhere.

I am looking for artificial intelligence and machine learning. I hope that they introduce them in A2019. I'm looking forward to what will be there in A2019 because that's the area that we need to go forward. We are looking for Automation Anywhere to put up their efforts to make it easier by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. Along with RPA, this would make our automation journey very easy. We can bring more processes into automation, that's where I am looking for automation to focus on.

It's a very stable, reliable product. We know a lot of use cases for customers that are running successfully. It's a pretty good product and very stable.

It's scalable. The analytics are very powerful. We can give the customer what has happened with the bot, how much time it ran, and how much time is ideal. All this information, we can easily show how successful it is, how much our productivity it is giving to them, and what ROI they're getting at the end of the year. It's pretty easy to go with Automation Anywhere.

We get a lot of support from Automation Anywhere. For any issue, we just call the people, and they're ready to be there. They send up people to our organization to set up and resolve issues. Any sort of glitches which we are facing, we can contact them anytime. They're ready to give us a solution. They even send up people to our premises to look and give the solution for us.

It is very straightforward and easy to install. They are going to introduce version A2019 online without a need to to install. There will be just one click of the URL to start developing within a minute or two, and it will start. There's nothing easier than that.

Money-wise, we get a lot of ROI. Efficiency-wise, it removes all the repetitive tasks from a person. An engineer's job is not to enter the data, check the Excel everyday, and put the data from Excel to somewhere application. If you automate the process and let Automation Anywheret do it everyday, you have a lot of time for more complicated issues. Engineers are meant to resolve issues, not doing the repetitive tasks, like Excel. Efficiency-wise, it is very good. ROI, It's also pretty good.

I can give a 10 (out of 10). It's a perfect product. It's made my life very easy and a lot of people's lives very easy. It removed a lot of people's hectic, repetitive, boring work. You give a lot of free time to people, so they can do some other work which they really want to do. It's a very good product.

I'm responsible for the digital practice within the tax business. We are building a lot of our solutions using the Automation Anywhere platforms, both with IQ Bot as well as the regular RPA, in which we offer it to our clients.

I belong to the tax practice. My role is to see how we deploy technology to increase the efficiency of tax departments and help build new revenue streams from technology in the process . We work with our clients offering digital solutions in the tax space. That's really what I do for a living. We have had a lot of success using Automation Anywhere products. We've actually built a few solutions that were done on the EY cloud, which are offered to clients as a managed service.

I'll just talk about one use case using IQ Bot. Interestingly, every time an employee travels in India, the tax that you pay on each invoice, that is an amount that you can claim from the government as a tax credit. To be able to extract that information and put it together into a return can be massive. Because there are large companies where thousands of employees traveling every month and so on, what IQ Bot does using Automation Anywhere, is it reads through multiple sets of invoices, which can be in any format, extract the tax amounts, then it creates the return which is then used to file with the tax authorities. We don't even stop at that. We also compare this data with what is the actual travel that any company has. In many cases, what we've seen, there is a lot of tax where invoices have not been received. We also plug those gaps. There is a lot of value that clients derive using that aspect as well. It's not just about getting your tax right. You need to find where the leakage is and get that back to the company.

 I can tell you what our clients are always looking for. The big challenge with our clients is that while ERPs are only handling 20 to 25 percent of the requirements. There is a lot of unstructured and semi-structured data that exists in the ecosystem which they can't leverage. That's really what they want the bots to do. How can they complement the current IT infrastructure in a good way to be able to get that outcome?

IQ Bots are extremely powerful. We are using them increasingly more where we're about to look through a lot unstructured sources, like PDF documents, scanned images, contracts, etc. We are able to take the data out, then use that toward processing structured data and creating insights for our clients. 

They have done a fairly good job on the RPA space, but more and more, the whole cognitive AI space and machine learning are where I see the industry actually going. I'm sure Automation Anywhere is also focused on that topic, but we would like to see more coming down the pipe, as early as possible.

So far, we haven't had any issues that I want to highlight, so I'm assuming that it's quite stable. It is working as we desire it to work. 

I think we have more than 50 clients who use our solution at this point. So, the scalability of the platform is well proven.

Every client is looking at scalability because they don't want to do just one or two processes. But, you will not be able to realize the value if you just limit yourself to a limited set of processes. So, the scalability is a very important task for clients. But there are certain challenges in scaling up. To be able to identify the right use cases that bring value is huge and very important.

Secondly, the technology infrastructure can be challenging if you scale up because you always have to add new servers to scale. That has always been a challenge. Having said that, I think what we heard today from Neil, there's a cloud version available that will be easily scalable. That is extremely exciting as a developer. That will be able to address a lot of the scalability issues that we've come across from our clients.

We have two models: 

1. With many clients, we actually go and have them implement Automation Anywhere in their own premises.
2. The second model has actually proven more beneficial to lot of our clients. It is where we have set up the bots in our own EY private cloud on Microsoft Azure where we have implemented certain standard tax processes. So, we only get clients to migrate their processes onto our platform. There, we just take out the pain around the whole implementation, because it is not really relevant to our clients. They just start to get outcomes, and don't have to worry about it.

We have developed a very strong capability internally that is proving to be strong differentiator for EY in the market.

the ROI of the automation investment for tax processes is very strong as apart from the process efficiency, there is also a financial aspect of lost tax credit that our solutions help to capture.

 A lot of the clients have some footprint of the other competing RPA vendors who they want to leverage. We often come across those type of situations.

There are some inherent advantages that Automation Anywhere offers. Both in terms of the commercial structure, as well as from a platform perspective, that makes it very compelling for clients to actually look at using Automation Anywhere for tax processes. in our case, in India especially, some of our clients really want to start small. So, they don't want to start with a big bang, like 20 to 25 bots. It is always easiest for them to start with one process and one bot, go with a proof of concept, and gradually scale up. We have a very good arrangement with Automation Anywhere, where we can offer that as a partner pack, where we bundle services and the license for small processes. This makes it quite compelling for clients. 

The way the platform is evolving, we also see some technology advantages using Automation Anywhere, especially if you combine RPA plus IQ Bot along with the Bot Insights platform. That gives it a different shade compared to some of the other existing platform vendors.

I would rate it a six and a half (out of 10).

We started off with accounts payable type of processes. That was our proof of concept. We built that within two or three months. It was highly successful, then we got a high level of endorsement from the wider organization. From there, we moved into academic processing where there's a lot of opportunity around the processing of student results, assessing students for admission into the university and handing out offers to students. There are a lot of things in that academic space which are highly manual. Often, these take quite a long time to process, so there's a clear benefit to the student by reducing the cycle time, which has led to great benefits for the organization.

In my case in particular, I come from a business background, not an IT background. So, it sort of speaks for itself that I was able to pickup its functionality and how it works. In the space of two years time, I've gone from a junior developer to a senior specialist. So, it really speaks for itself in terms of being user-friendly.

There are often a lot of functions within the software that will do the same thing, but it's up to the developer to decide which is the most appropriate. If there were a way of the product sort of indicating or automating which function is most applicable for that field for that particular purpose, that would be great. I think that might be a ways away. But, I think a lot of the improvements that we're looking to find are going to be in the new cloud release. So, we are really looking forward to getting on that.

Every piece of software has its downfalls. The great thing about AA, particularly in Melbourne, is we have local support. So, if we do raise a ticket, it's addressed by our local team down there. If they can't handle it, it'll be expedited abroad. So, we're always very comfortable that we're going to get a prompt reply and support, if for whatever reason, we have an issue with the software. We've sort of developed coding standards which has helped us to avoid any downfalls or pitfalls. Throughout our journey, we've learned how the software really works. We're developing it in a more mature way now, which has reduced the number of errors and breakages of the code.

it's just a learning process. As long as you're willing to learn and engage with the software, it can be quite stable.

With Automation Anywhere, there are multiple ways to achieve the same outcome; many different ways to design a bot and execute a bot. But, there's definitely a best practice out there. For those with little experience, they might be inclined to follow the quickest or the easiest way to develop a bot, but that's not necessarily the most sustainable solution. So, we sat down as a team at the university and agreed upon a certain set of standards that we will always follow. We initiated a code review process, so every code that goes into production, or every bot that goes into production will go through multiple rounds of code review. If it doesn't meet our standards, it'll be pulled back out of production, reiterated, and eventually then it'll go live.

We've gone down the Reagan approach, which was referred to in the session earlier today, where we essentially started out with that low hanging fruit. We built confidence within the business and from there, it was quite an easy sell because it was quite obvious to the business that we could deliver and could deliver fairly quickly. 

In terms of scalability, we've had to grow the team slightly. It's really important to have the right team. You need someone with a lot of experience around the tool. From there, you can bring in a range of skill sets, including SMEs. We have SMEs on the team now that don't come from an IT background or development background. By having that range of skills, we've been able to sort of up the velocity of releasing bots.

We could always do better though, and we're still learning.

The technical support in Melbourne, it's great. We have a strong relationship with Andrew Rowlands, who's our customer relationship manager down in Melbourne. We really enjoy working with him. If we do have any issues with tickets that have been unanswered, he will address them for us. I think one of Automation Anywhere's strong points is really its focus on the customer. Because naturally issues do arise with the software here and there, some of which have been addressed in later releases of the product.

We haven't yet updated to the latest release. The company is well and truly able to support all versions and is always really responsive. We typically will receive a solution within 24 to 48 hours.

The initial setup actually came before my time at the organization. I think it is a little bit of an ongoing struggle, because we don't deal with the infrastructure. We have a separate infrastructure team that sorts all that out. So, sometimes there are communication issues just trying to get our internal IT team onboard to run through the installs and that sort of thing. But, definitely with the new cloud version coming onboard, we'll be looking toward going to that. Hopefully it'll resolve some of that friction that comes about through the install process and complexity.

Obviously, the easiest way to create a bot would be using things like keystrokes. It's very intuitive, simply entering the database and what you would see on a keyboard. However, it doesn't really relate to what you're seeing on the screen. So, quite often, you'll be entering data in the wrong field if there's a performance issue with the system. While if you use object cloning, which is another function within the software, it's more dynamic. It'll wait for certain fields to appear, then you will lower the risk of breakages of code.

Just an example, in a period of two to three years, we have a positive ROI. We have a positive return. We've delivered 25 to 30 bots, which equates to over 1000 atmx files. So, for a relatively small team, we've been able to scale up quite effectively.

In regards to how AA works, UiPath has more of a design flow view, where you'll be creating process maps and executing bots face on the process flow. While Automation Anywhere has this task view, or line by line view, that I find it very easy to use and intuitive. It's just really a great piece of software.

It's a solid eight out of 10. We've delivered tremendous value in a really short amount of time. We've gotten a lot of support from our organization. Of course, there are always improvements which could make it even more powerful. But I know the company is well and truly across those. I'm sure it's going to go from strength to strength.

From the business side, we're not an organization that has tremendous volumes, like a big global bank, perhaps that sort of comes into play a bit. But again, it comes back to coding standards. We have a lot of confidence in those standards. We just really ensure that new members of the team are strictly following those for sustainable bots.

The primary use case for bringing in Automation Anywhere was to make sure that we take away the work which our resources don't want to do, they don't like to do, or they find that there is something more meaningful and useful they can use their time for. That was our primary factor. 

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode bots, because we don't need to go and look at what they're doing. They just go by themselves. That's the state we need to get to, but we are currently attended. Based on the projects or PoCs that we have done, we've got a last transmission program coming in, which is exciting.

The bot insides should come in the same package versus having it as a different bundle by itself. If we could have this product come with all the inside solutions altogether, that would help.

I was talking the other day in a session that when we go into this, how do we ensure that the right security policies are in place? Because now, we are talking about people accessing these bots from anywhere outside of the restricted access zone. So, that is where we should put focus on, because it takes only somebody to snatch the phone and start breaching. Therefore, that is where we should put the focus on.

We started off with the 10.5 version, where we didn't find any major hiccups. Then, we upgraded to version 11.3, which we find more useful. I think version 11.3 is the way to go.

As with every solution or a product, it goes through that journey. I think the RPA for Automation Anywhere is going through that journey. I can see the stability improvements from 10.3 to 10.5 to 11.3. From this conference, I could see the end-to-end governance coming into play. So, stability-wise, they are getting there. I'm not saying that it's fully stabilized. But, it's working for us, and the path is on the right track.

We started off with this showcase piece. Now, we are going into details regarding how we can scale. Can we scale it horizontally? Can we just start putting VMs on it? So, these are the factors that we are assessing right now, but we feel that it is scalable.

We wanted to be able to kick-start this journey, so we brought in an automation team, as this is where the whole industry is moving with our clients. From here, we will have success stories year after year.

We did not use a previous solution. We were trying to shop around and see what was best for us. Automation Anywhere was always promising and the use cases that we saw were interesting. So, we said, "We'll start with that." It works well so far.

The initial setup wasn't complex, but it wasn't straightforward. It was somewhere in the middle.

We didn't go Big Bang on thinking how much money that we were going to save. I wanted to make sure that could we show improvements in the efficiency, in terms of headcount. Ultimately, it comes boiled down to cost, but then if I can get one headcount reduced from the team, and be able to utilize that to somebody else, that would be a winning situation for my client and me.

We measure the ROI through FTE. Of course, there is a dollar value associated with it.

We have started to see the ROI. We are starting to see the following:

• Activities in which resources in my team would have taken four to five hours are now done in 30 minutes. 
• Some of the weekend monitoring
• Some of the weekend missing report generations
• Monday monitoring of a heavy load system. 

These are things that we are already starting to see where the time taken to do a task has been drastically reduced. So, we are seeing the performance improvement as a result.

I have nothing specific regarding the Automation Anywhere University. But, we have taken some of the online courses available and done a few sessions, which has been a wonderful deal.

I am putting it somewhere between a seven and eight (out of ten). That is what I'll rate it, because as I said, the stability and governance are on that path. As we get there, I'm sure it'll make it to a ten. So far. the journey is on the right track.

For somebody searching for a solution, it primarily concerns the use case. But if this is what they are looking for, I will definitely advise.

Our primary use case for Automation Anywhere is to help our clients achieve efficiencies in their businesses and capture revenue opportunities that they would otherwise miss, either due to lack of ability or lack of speed.

We have automated a different variety of processes, anything from inbound communications, from clients to our customer. Those inbound communications have to be processed and digested, then acted upon, some of which can be straight-through process automated, which is a fantastic time savings for them. The ones that can't be, can be routed to the right folks in a very quick manner, rather than being manually read and inspected, then categorized and passed on.

We have also addressed financial processes around invoice reconciliation or accounts payable. There are processed around sales. If you think about how people use Salesforce and spreadsheets and other systems around Salesforce. There is a lot of copying and pasting of data in and out of Salesforce, then into those other systems. We can make all that go away, so their sales reps can focus on selling. So, there are a lot of great use cases like that.

One thing for our organization, Automation Anywhere has helped us find new clients and help those clients find new opportunities to improve their businesses that previously seemed out of reach to them. There are other ways that we could solve these problems which are more expensive and difficult to implement. With RPA, specifically with Automation Anywhere, it has really helped us engage with those clients and achieve the results that they want.

With Automation Anywhere, we have had good success, having folks with all different varieties of technical backgrounds. Both our most technical staff, as well as our least technical staff, have been able to engage. We can engage directly with our clients' representatives, their business users, and their IT users, then get them up to speed, so they can all be part of the process. Making everyone part of the process is what really makes it catch on in an organization.

When I think about Automation Anywhere, it's not a specific feature that really defines it. It is how the whole package works together and a type of holistic view of how you attack automation problems, particularly with RPA and IQ Bots. So, there is a real sense of the whole picture, not just one feature or specific thing that jumps out for me.

The areas for room for improvement are always going to be around experience, making it even easier to get engaged, and get started. Because lowering that threshold to get started is what enables an additional set of problems to be solved. So, I sort of look at it like a water level. If I can lower the water level, then there is more surface area of the business area exposed above the water, and that's the stuff that we can go solve.

As a partner of Automation Anywhere, I view it as part of our job is to create scale problems for Automation Anywhere to solve. To make the solution big enough that it finds those edge cases. We haven't had any problems with scale and stability with Automation Anywhere, so I hope to create those problems, then work with Automation Anywhere to solve them.

Our experience with technical support at Automation Anywhere has been great. They have been very helpful, especially during the PoC, processes which are sort of early on in their sales cycle, or when we were just starting with Automation Anywhere a couple of years ago. We got great support for getting it onboarded in-house and getting our team up to speed. So, we have found it to be a great partnership. 

Our clients use all types of software, whether it's process offer, decision management, RPA and they even use multiple tools of those. Our objective is to make sure we take care of the client, whatever we want to use. However, we've found that our clients are successful with Automation Anywhere, and it's been a good place for us to invest with our clients to achieve great results.

From two perspectives:

1. The initial setup, as a partner, was very straightforward.
2. The initial set up from a technology point of view, although it was unfamiliar to us when we started, was also pretty straightforward.

We measure ROI. The way we do it though depends on each client and whether we as a service provider have access to that information, which also depends on the client. But our clients, they measure it in a bunch of different ways. My favorite example is one where we were enabling service providers for them, basically a set of new sales reps coming onboard that have to be certified with government and have to go through an approval process. That process used to take months to run through, but with RPA, we were able to automate it and get it done in a week. So, from a revenue enablement point of view, we took all the friction out of that process, which has huge ROI for our clients.

Prior to working with RPA at BP3, we worked with a lot of process and decisioning technologies and also integration technologies. So, we have sort of a unique perspective on how RPA fits in and plays well with others. In particular, we're partnered with IBM and Automation Anywhere, and we saw them on stage together, presenting. I think Automation Anywhere, from a cultural perspective does a really good job partnering, but they also provide a product that works well with other products, so it's easy to integrate too. It's easy to include it in a solution and easy to use it to drive a solution which leverages other technology.

In today's market, you have to think about, how was RPA today and how would I rank it versus what it can be in the future? I think we're in the early innings of what RPA can be and what Automation Anywhere can be. We saw some indication of that in the keynote speeches. You can just get a sense for the scope of the vision and where they want to take RPA at Automation Anywhere. I won't try to rate against the future, but I think we're in early innings, two or three versus a ten. But, when you compare it to the state of the art today, I'm really impressed with RPA, and I think it's an eight or maybe nine (out of ten).

I would recommend if you're starting out to look at RPA and how to get started with Automation Anywhere. That is the first thing that I would do is. Find a couple of problems that you think are easy, then take a moment to really think about problems which are important to your business, because you have a limited amount of focus for your business. You business only has a few limited resources: time, money and focus. If you're going to spend that focus, spend it on something that matters. It's fine to do a research project or a pilot project, something that doesn't have a lot of risk. You have to do something that matters for your business, and if you're having trouble finding that and making it make sense in an RPA context, then I'd say work with someone who can help you reframe the problem so you can find those opportunities.

We primarily use it for finance and marketing applications in our company, since we do a lot of our back office tasks at our company. We have automated in marketing, finance, our commercial organization, and are moving into HR.

The tool performs very well.

We are using it to backfill a lot of our resources who are retiring, so we are hiring less people as we go.

The object cloning is its most valuable feature.

It is easy for business users to utilize, who don't have IT skills.

We would like to have collapsible code loops.

It would be nice to upload a project, instead of individual files, so we can look at file and versions changes.

We would like to have more features inline with our traditional IDE, like what is in Visual Studio.

It scales pretty well as long as you have enough developers to scale it with you.

We can scale the bots in about a year. When we started, we went from a pilot of about 14 bots, which all got stripped away. Then, we ended up implementing 30 different bots about a year later.

I don't use the technical support a lot. It feels like a lot of time that they will ask us to check the user manual. When we eventually just tell them, "No, we want to set up a call." Then, they are usually pretty helpful on the call.

This is our first RPA solution. We haven't previously used another solution. Our strategy group and IT department were the ones who decided to use Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was complex. However, Automation Anywhere came onsite and helped us with our architecture, then it was fine.

We used a reseller for the deployment. We really enjoyed working with them.

We evaluate ROI as time savings and resource costs not needed resulting from deployed automation.

We save approximately 10,000 hours per year.

We also looked at Blue Prism and UiPath, but Automation Anywhere was more secure.

Ensure that IT is invested. Don't expect your business to carry the load.

We like the idea behind the Bot Store, but we haven't really adopted the Bot Store yet.

We're an insurance company and we use it to automate what would normally be done person-to-person by hand. We're gluing together the applications, going from one to the other to collect information to process them.

I can't speak for the bigger picture, but we have had a great deal of success with gluing together some of the old applications. They were built, isolated, and somewhat siloed. We have this one where you go to get this information, and we've got that one where you go to get the rest of the information. Now, rather than the team going and collecting all of that information, we can have the bots do it, and that has been fantastic.

We've had a number of processes plugged into this that have become the daily job schedule. There was a ridiculous amount of old work: Request this report, download the PDF, grab the numbers off of it and entering them. Having the automated system, while I can't put numbers on it yet, it's very easy to sell the value of the product.

I really like the way the bots are built, being able to take some old, clumsy screen that someone built and put your keystrokes and your information onto it. It's fairly simple as well.

I would describe bot creation with the word "exciting." We've had a couple of team members who have been working on projects who say, "Let me do it!" They're familiar with the product and they're very comfortable with the building process.

I also very much like the integration of this solution with other applications. We have some old web applications that we've been using, and we've been writing some of our own DLLs to integrate with it. It has worked really well. We're able to have the bots take over what would have been a lot of training and a lot of meticulous work.

I love the XML feature behind the scenes.

If there were one thing I could ask for it would be a text-based language. Right now it's proprietary, so you always have to go through the tool, even for things like basic compares. What we're trying to do is spin up other teams to get them using more and more of it. That would help, the basic .NET for basic tasks. The language itself has been working well. They should just keep doing what they're doing.

We just got onto Windows 10 and that has gone absolutely flawlessly. Not only has it been working well, but we're seeing a huge performance upgrade. They are running considerably faster. I'd give a thumbs up on the stability.

Scaling has gone remarkably well too, the ability to literally just spin up another bot. We have a collection and we'll add a couple more and no big deal happens to the scheduler. It has worked well.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we’re currently using has taken about two years. We did a lot of experimenting before we committed to it, but once we got through a couple of those experimentation projects, we were able to form a team, figure out exactly what we were going to have to accomplish from a business point of view, and dive in. After those couple of pilots, it took about a year from when we initially startied playing with it. There was a little bit of getting our feet wet, feeling comfortable with it. But now, we have several teams and it's working great.

I have not personally had to call much, I'm not part of the team that would do that, but they've been fairly responsive. We've found one or two problems that we had to come up with workarounds for and they did that fairly quickly. Then the permanent solutions came along fairly well. We have a very good relationship with them; being able to call and get that help right away.

It was really straightforward and made sense to me. Put it this way: I have always been able to see where the product is going. It seems somewhat impressive the way it's designed, and that's why it made sense. Some of it might have been due to the fact that I took the classes at Automation Anywhere University. I got to talk to the developers, so I could see exactly what they were thinking, and it made sense.

The nice part about being on the software development side is that we have don't have to deal with licenses etc. I've had to in the past. Put it this way: It becomes easier and easier to sell when they can see what we're doing.

I was brought in right as our pilot was getting ramped up, so they had already made the decision. I did hear about the other ones but I don't know exactly what the decision process was.

The biggest advice I could give is to just be patient. There's a lot to learn and you really don't know, at first, exactly how you go about it, how does this happen?

I started approximately two years ago, and having seen improvements to the software, I'm so excited right now about finding out where they're going. I've seen a great deal of the investment in the product as they develop it. so I'm fairly excited to be using it.

Sadly, I have not gotten into much of the solution’s cognitive document processing (IQ Bot) yet. It's a matter of learning more about it and then taking the next step. It's a matter of finding out what else we can do and we can start developing that.

I took a few courses at Automation Anywhere University when we first started. The more people that we've had on Automation Anywhere, we've found it's been working extremely well. It seems as though we're able to get them up to speed relatively quickly.

Right now, I would rate Automation Anywhere at about eight out of ten because it's obvious there have been huge improvements and it's nice for us to work with. There extra two points would come from the improvements that we're looking for: simple things like the programming interface, they could clean that up. And the compare windows are small, it would be nice if those were bigger. There are always refinements they can make. And we've seen some already. It has become faster, cleaner to use.