Automation Anywhere Reviews

We'll be discussing our implementations for Salesforce and using Automation Anywhere to automate sales for processes within the organization. We focus mainly on sales and BFSI.

A very important piece within sales is that we've noticed most of the salespeople hesitate from updating their Salesforce at a frequent interval. You jump on a call, you have multiple calls with your customer, and you hesitate to keep dealing these updates within Salesforce. The idea behind this implementation, or this specific solution, is that we take care of all the updating of Salesforce processes. We take care of all lead conversions, lead updates, lead generations, etc. through our RPA. All you need to do is have a conversation with your bot, and say, "Hey, I just had a conversation with Nick. He seems good with all the implementations. We should convert him from Level 1 to Level 2." These basic implementations have been taken care of.

We're also looking at mobile transcription. So, if you are on a call with XYZ, you say, "Hey, I'm jumping on a call with XYZ, just transcribe what I'm talking about." So, you transcribe those calls and update them in your total documentation. That's the idea.

Automation Anywhere has been an integral part of this product's evolution in general. A hindrance that we were faced with was companies who did not have API integrations for Salesforce. This is where RPA and Automation Anywhere came in and helped us with integrating solutions which did not have API integrations within themselves. That's how we've evolved in the past two to three months.

IQ Bot seems to be a good solution that Automation Anywhere has come up with. It sets them apart from the other solutions. I want Automation Anywhere to work on IQ Bot further to help evolve the tool more and create a certain set of solutions using IQ Bot. They can maybe use better machine learning algorithms to come up with better accuracy for OCR extractions. This is an area that I want them to work on.

It is absolutely robust. Automation Anywhere as a solution, as well as our implementation, have been robust in nature with thorough testing and UAT processes being involved. Automation Anywhere can be considered as one of the most stable RPA tools in the industry, according to the perspective of the limited amount of tools that I've used. But, Automation Anywhere seems to be the most stable one.

We initially started off with a customer who had just three bots. We've now scaled them to 15 bots. It didn't take us more than an hour to scale. Automation Anywhere helped us scale from one bot to 100 bots within a period of hours, if not minutes. Unless you're scaling from 10s to 1000s, I think Automation Anywhere has it covered.

Support is five (out of five). The technical support is better than any other automation tool that I've seen. The ticketing resolution that they provide not only for paid customers, but for PoCs that we conduct, IQ Bot, and other scenarios wherein the product might not be functioning properly. The support is top-notch. There are scenarios wherein we need to be able to identify the best possible solution, and there is support for that as well.

We started off about one and a half years back initially. In those days, Automation Anywhere hadn't picked up so much. The initial setup was difficult, but as they have moved from on-premise to cloud, the setup has become much easier. Now, we are hands-on with the setup and can do it within hours.

With another client, we are saving about 20 hours. However, we are not able to justify that return on investment by just saving time. There are other parameters that we would have to look at for justifying the ROI.

The return on investment for most of our clients depends from scenario to scenario. Some of them look at it on a long-term basis and some of them look at it from the amount of time saved. For example, we are currently working on a solution for a CIO. We are saving about four hours of his time during a particular week. The return on investment for that particular person is humongous.

We evaluated all the solutions. We had different RPA tools. Looking at the feedback from the market and the type of technical support that we had received, we went ahead with Automation Anywhere. The major reason for going with Automation Anywhere was the technical support that developers have.

I'd rate it an eight point five to nine because there's still always room for improvement.

We mostly use it on engineering processes. We also use it for finances in SAP — uploading, invoice creation, etc. But we have mostly focused on our engineering processes.

An example from the finance area is when we need to invoice a customer. We open our SAP account and upload all the data into SAP, create an invoice, and send a notice to the finance team that the process has been completed. They then move the process further along. It's a daily type of operation, whenever such requests come.

We are using the on-premise version because the cloud version (A2019) is not out yet.

One of the ways it has improved our organization is regarding working on Saturdays and Sundays. Obviously, employees don't like to come in on those days. When a user is not there and we want certain processes to be done, we don't expect the engineers to sit there and do them. We can schedule things via email so a bot runs on Saturdays and Sundays. That results in a reduction of man-hours. 

It automates all the processes which do not require human intervention, things which are very repetitive. That means we can give more important work to the engineers now, rather than asking them to do repetitive tasks.

We have these invoices which gets generated every month. We have to enter these invoice details into the stacks. It is a tedious task that is done by our finance team. We have automated the process of entering the details into the stack, and t reduces a lot of manual work.

The best feature of AA is the scheduling and the triggering part of it. Whenever an email comes in we can just use Automation Anywhere. We don't have to sit there. The unattended bots of Automation Anywhere are something which we find very useful.

It does not require much onboarding skills. It's easy to train anyone. We just ask them to apply logic.

One very important thing would be more support for Citrix automation. We want something to support Cisco. Citrix automation is not a very good tool. We are not able to use it properly. Even if we go through a remote desktop connection, it goes along only with the keystrokes and image recognition.

Also, when we are moving from one version to another version, it's very difficult because most of the features stop working. They should first test everything and then release the new version. For example, there's a system variable known as the Excel Cell Row. It gives you the current row of the inner loop. When going from version 11.1 to 11.3, this variable was suddenly not supported, and most of our bots were dependent on that. Everything went down and we had to start from scratch. If you do not have a developer who has done this, it's going to be a big problem in terms of the time it will take.

We need the migration from version 11 to A2019 to go smoothly. Our developers cannot be expected to enter the code again.

I'm not sure about the stability because there are a lot of upgrades all the time. Whenever we move from version to version, like 11.1 to 11.3, if we have ten bots we have to go around and test all ten bots. And in case something is not working, we have to make changes. If they support a migration utility properly, I think it's a great tool.

The scalability is great. Nearly a 100 bots have been deployed in finance, HR, and mostly engineering. We will be implementing bots going forward in procurement.

It has taken us two years to scale to our current number of bots because we spent a lot of time on training at first.

Technical support from Automation Anywhere is great. I have written to Automation Anywhere support many times and there is a great response from them. Even if they do not have the exact answer, they always say, "You can try this option or you can try this option."

We started with Automation Anywhere. The biggest reason our company chose Automation Anywhere was because we found it more reliable for our operations than any other. Also, the response from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We started with version 10.7. When we started, initially downloading the Control Room and those types of things was a bit complex. We had the user manual, but I don't think it's very good. It misses many points. When we missed something, we needed to contact Automation Anywhere support, so there were some delays in the process. 

Then we moved to version 11.1, which was more complex and requires more of your system space.

Overall, the other process is a bit complex. They have said they're coming out with the cloud version. I think that will be a bit easier. 

The development process took us about six months.

We have a team in our company which is responsible for RPA. It's something which we do internally for our company.

There has been a great return on investment. We are interested in saving manual engineer man-hours. So far, we have saved $100,000.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. We chose Automation Anywhere because of how well it suited it our office.

Automation Anywhere is easier to use. With drag and drop, we don't need the uploading skills, etc. Everything is just there. You can just drag and drop, then just go ahead and do it. With UiPath, it was a little difficult to understand the process. Also Automation Anywhere has email automation.

I would rate the solution at seven out of ten. One main drawback is that migration issue. Another thing I would like to see is support for all the other scripting languages, like Python, JavaScript and all.

Go through the Automation Anywhere courses properly to be aware of all the system variables and all the features it has. Then proceed with the development phase. Until you're clear on the basic things you cannot do anything in the tool. You need to know those things.

I have done the Masters course on Automation Anywhere University. I have a Masters Certification from them. Their courses are pretty interesting. At the end of the Masters course, we had an interview on the course itself. There were a lot of informative things and it was a great experience.

Next year, we should be moving into cognitive document processing.

We are currently using it for a lot of projects, like repetitive or manual tasks. We are building bots to free human beings from boring jobs/tasks. We are working daily on Automation Anywhere to automate our processes.

We are using it on-premise. We are not using cloud for deployment. As of now, we are running it on our client machines. We develop automation on our desktops, then deploy our automation on our physical desktop using Automation Anywhere.

We have automated web scripting, downloading documents from particular websites, scraping data from websites, and extracting the data from PDF files. We are also updating the application with some user inputs. E.g., if you have an Excel sheet to update into a particular application, we can use Automation Anywhere tool and automate the process.

We have built some Java applications in Automation Anywhere. I have also coded macros and Python scripts to include in our Automation Anywhere tool.

The Automation Anywhere tool is very handy to use since I have some programming background, like I previously worked on Java. It's very easy to use Automation Anywhere because there is not much of coding involved. We just need to drag and drop the commands, then we can do the job.

Automation Anywhere is good for integrating other programming languages and other tools. The ease of use is very good, as we can directly code other programming languages, like Java or JavaScript, into our application and get output.

I have done work using a VPN, connecting via a remote desktop. The good thing about Automation Anywhere is if a client works without Internet, e.g., if we deploy on a client mission and the network is off, then a bot will still run offline.

If we want to read a scanned PDF, we use IQ Bot. Using the cognitive detail of IQ Bot and some machine learning abilities, we can train the IQ Bot to process all scanned PDF documents and give the results in an Excel file. This is a very good feature introduced by Automation Anywhere. IQ Bot is doing well.

The Bot Store is like a marketplace for bot developers. We already have some utility bots that are simple bots from there. We can download the bots from the Bot Store and use them in our current process. That's very helpful for the bot developers, especially for beginners who have just started with Automation Anywhere developing bots. There are a lot of bots deployed in the Bot Store. If you find any interesting bots, we can also upload bots to the Bot Store, making them available for everyone to download and use.

With attended automation, we need human intervention to provide input for bots. We make sure files are presented in a particular folder to pick up those files and feed it to the bot. Attended automation sometimes might go into exceptions, thus we need to monitor it in-between, then check whether it is working properly. This way, we ensure the bot is working properly.

Currently, I have developed between 20 to 25 bots. From when I started, we have deployed as a team between 30 to 40 bots. Their status is as fully running on our client machines.

We collaborate as a team if any face roadblocks or issues, discussing among our colleagues. Then, we involve the Automation Anywhere support team. They are very good. We can raise a ticket and get knowledge from their team. They help us resolve any issues.

The bot creation workflow is pretty simple. We check for feasibility, and if it is feasible, then we go about creating bots for the task. We have some measurements for ROI. We check the return on Investment to determine if it's feasible or not. We check the typical measurements, then go for Bot creation. After creating the bot, we don't have a production environment after creating the bot. We just deploy and run that bot.

If the process is huge and involves 10 to 20 steps, then it might take from creation to production three to four weeks of time. If it is a simple bot, it involves just launching a website and scraping data from the PDF, then putting it in Excel. For that type of bot, we can build it in one week and deploy it in seven to 10 days.

The return of investment on Automation Anywhere very good because I have automated some processes, like scraping the data from websites and updating some applications, and if we deployed full-time employees on these tasks, it would take more than a year and a half. However, if we automate the process and deploy a bot, it can be completed in just a month of time. The ROI is very good because the output is very accurate and the speed is very fast.

Our company is investing a lot of money in Automation Anywhere. They have saved money wherever humans are working. They invest a lot of money in FTEs and other logistics, so the money saving is very pretty good with Automation Anywhere. While I don't know the exact figure, the tool is saving us millions of dollars as well as saving about 40,000 hours in the last year. 

Currently, we are using attended automation. We do have unattended bots but are in the process of procuring some other licenses. In future, we will make a few bots unattended as well.

I did the Advanced Certification on Automation Anywhere University. I have also done IQ Bot learning. I am currently doing a Masters Certification. The courses are very clear. Any user can understand the content. If you are a beginner, go with Automation Anywhere. If you have some basic programming knowledge, that is enough. You can easily learn Automation Anywhere. It is not a big deal, and you can learn with the certification.

If a person doesn't have a programming background or skills, they can use Automation Anywhere and build bots. It's not a big deal. It's easy for business users to use. You just need some basic programming skills, like Ethernet and loops. 

I heard from Automation Anywhere that version A2019 will be released in either November or December. It is completely cloud-based and contains two IDs. One ID is a flowchart diagram and another ID has some commands. Therefore, any business user who has some basic knowledge can develop bots as well.

Version A2019 will be adding a lot of new features.

I haven't had a chance to work on Citrix automation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using the on-premise deployment model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise, stability seems to be good.

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

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

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

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

We have not taken Automation Anywhere University courses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We evaluated Softomotive and UiPath. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our primary use case is for our shared service center that is located in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. These are our key target areas.

For a finance process, we are able to initially do it at segment level. We handle one section, then automate that section. We will then move onto the payroll side and automate that part of it. At a higher level, we are able to merge both processes. Now, we are able to do end-to-end automation: 

1. From creating a quotation.
2. To creating a purchase order.
3. To doing a payment to the vendor.
4. To payment to our employees. 

We are able to visualize the areas of automation as well as do the automation in a fast manner. That's one of the immediate contributions that we are having.

The turnaround time of building bots is quick. We are deploying around four bots per month. The turnaround time to get a design, build, and deploy is very fast. This is very good for us. It has helped us out when scaling up in a better manner.

We want them to have a clear roadmap on what they want to do and follow it. If they are moving to version 11, we want them to stay with that version. Now, I hear that they have a new version out there. I have to plan out every upgrade or movement from one landscape to another. This is a cost for us. I have to get buy-in from my leadership. That becomes a challenge for me. I need assurances that wherever you are going, you are clear on what you want to do. You don't end up with doing multiple upgrades every now and then. It's not a sustainable solution for us.

One of the things that I see in the forums is they are planning to build an ML platform on it soon, whereby we can use RPA as a starting point and have leverage on all the machine learning services available across multiple vendors: Azure, Google, and Amazon. I'm really interested to see how that works because we are already using those entities but in a different manner. We want to see how all of them work together as a platform. That's one of the requirements we are looking for.

I would like them to have more collaboration with SAP and Oracle, as those are our key products. This would provide more value for us.

The biggest challenge that I have with Automation Anywhere is the pace of upgrades that they do. We are not an IT company, we are a mining company. We are very conservative in doing our upgrades and moving from one platform to another. Upgrades are one of the challenges we are having with Automation Anywhere.

Stop upgrading, it's a pain for me. Or, make it easy. I would like a plan for it. Every time they upgrade, I have to upgrade my systems. I have to make sure that all the test bots are working fine, and this is a cost for us.

We are now scaling it up on the operations side for people literally sitting in the mines. They want to use Automation Anywhere for their day-to-day operations. That's the next scalable area that we're looking at.

We have developed a competency within the team as well as with our partners but we are at a juncture where we want to scale up. We are figuring out how we want to do it. One of the discussions that happened in today's forum was the different operating models we can have: a COE, business unit, or federated model. Today, I'm having calls with couple of Automation Anywhere guys to understand the best fit for us. That's how we will decide how we can scale up. We have the potential but we need to do it in a manner that can be sustainable over a period of time. 

The technical support is really good. The response time is good from the support team. When we reach out to them, it is only when we have a problem. Most of our team is a bit on the aggressive side if they feel the bots are not working well, but the language and communication that the operations team uses when dealing with us is very smooth. It helps us calm down and come to realistic expectations because we can't expect every problem to be solved in the first day. Their communication and interaction are really smooth. 

Our customer success manager has been really good at her job.

This was our first RPA solution.

When we started out initially out, we were told that the infrastructure we had would be supported by RPA. We were going to use Amazon as one of our platforms, but it did not happen, so we had an initial challenge. We were behind our schedule by around seven months because of this mistake. Both of us learnt from our mistakes. We now have a sustainable RPA. But, at the start, this was one of the big challenges, selecting the right infrastructure.

We have already seen ROI. We show ROI in terms of productivity. We are already clocking in around 7000 hours of savings per month

IQ Bots are very costly. It's not a sustainable bot for us as of now. We will look for better, alternate options for that.

We had two options: UiPath and Automation Anywhere. UiPath was the cheaper option for us but the cyber security standards of Automation Anywhere were better compared to UiPath. UiPath got rejected because of that. Automation Anywhere has passed our cybersecurity standards, and that is why it was our preferred option.

SAP is also launching its own RPA tool. Therefore, it will be tough to convince my management why I should stick with Automation Anywhere until they provide the intelligence part. Though, I think they are on the right track.

Learn from our mistakes. Choose the right RPA product and partner. The initial mistake that we did was that we wanted to do it on our own. If you are not an IT company, don't get into that. Learn from partners and use them. Use the right partner and learn from Automation Anywhere too, as they have done their own mistakes. Learn from them. Instead of assuming that you know everything and getting into the RPA world. That's the wrong choice.

Automation Anywhere is doing well compared to the market.

We are using it for finance and logistics-related tasks in departments that we are automating. E.g., for finance, we are using it for cash and bank reconciliation. For logistics, we automated eBay billing for the government portal before any goods can come out of the airport or get inside the airport for any package. We are using Automation Anywhere to create the transits IDs for this.

The product is deployed via internal cloud.

For the cash and bank reconciliation, we brought down amount of days it takes to do the reconciling and announcing the results. Previously, it took 10 to 15 days. Now, it takes two days.

It runs in the background.

It doesn't require any coding knowledge. Any business person can automate this process.

We started with attended bots and are in the process of migrating to unattended bots. We are facing a lot of issues with unattended bots as Automation Anywhere is not supporting this. When we run unattended bots in the background, the screen resolution changes. That needs to be improved because it might cause our IR operations or objects to fail.

Attended automation is fine but it is not the favorable because we are looking for an unattended bots. If we want to trigger bots manually, then we need a resource for that. Therefore, there is no point in hiring a resource only to run the bot. They need to improve the scheduler.

There are a couple of issues which needs to be rectified. Otherwise, Automation Anywhere is like using the Windows Scheduler. Aside from the Control Room, it's normal automation, and you can use other tools for that.

Sometimes, the ESX services will stop. We are working with IT to resolve this, as it's not our fault. Automation Anywhere is stopping the service, and during that time, the bot will be stopped. Right now, we are logging into the client machine and restarting/rebooting them, then restarting the services. As some of our processes run at night, we won't know that the service is down since our processes run 24/7. This issue is then escalated to the manager. This is the current challenge that we are facing, and we would like them to improve this.

Automation with bots runs fine only if it is an attended bot. With unattended bots, the bots run only 25 to 30 percent of the time.

We are not using it to its full scale. We have deployed only nine bots in production and two in development. We are only using three or four bots completely. Rest are going unused, so we are not looking to scale out anytime soon.

We hardly get a solution out of the technical support. I would rate them as a five out of 10. There is a lack of ownership.

In Juniper, we had automation for different tools, like dashboards and visualizations. We used Tableau. Therefore, we upgraded some of the manual gap, then we began to explore other tools at that time. That is how we came to know about Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Approvals are taking us more time than development. For the bigger products, it takes four to six months to scale. If it is a smaller product, then it can take 45 days.

We are using consultants who are developing our bots for us.

We receive help from customer support.

We have not seen ROI in the last year. We should see ROI on the platform in two or three years.

If we use attended bots, there is no ROI in the product.

Our annual licensing costs for the entire company are $100,000.

We did a PoC with UiPath as well. We felt Automation Anywhere was better than UiPath because of its features, like its Control Room.

UiPath is better for development because its workflow feature.

I would rate the solution as a six out of 10 due to the resolution issue. It is a major issue that we are facing with the tool.

Get the approvals done before investing. We wasted the license for six months. The licenses were unused because we didn't have the approvals for the application. We procured it and kept it for six months. Therefore, before investing, get the approvals internally, then go for it.

We have integrated Automation Anywhere with SAP (ERP system) and BlackLine (reconciliation tool). For integrating, we are using web scaping tools and object cloning.

I am certified Automation Anywhere RPA professional with Automation Anywhere University. I am looking for courses on solution architecture and would like to have something for this in the University.

We don't use Citrix automation.

My day-to-day activity was to take data from invoices and put it into an Oracle DB. I have already automated banking uses, which deal with some of the invoices. The second case solution which I had worked with was multi-bot architecture.

We have certain kinds of applications spread across our organization and the data coming into that organization is common. We made a solution as a multiBot: one Bot is working on one application and we have hundreds of applications. So a hundred Bots work together on the same set of data to integrate it.

The applications are different. Say one is Oracle, one is SAP (System Analysis and Program Development) and one is Salesforce. In the way we implemented this, we segregated the workload into parts: part as a master Bot, part as a worker Bot and part as the closure Bot. The master Bot will work on the input part of the data set, the worker Bot will work with the individual (designated) applications, and the closure Bot will consolidate all the data and feed it back to the designated user. This was the plan for our architecture.

The Automation Anywhere product has improved our organization with the speed of processing. It is very fast in execution time, it requires less support time, and it is a good value for the money.

The most valuable features I see right now pertain to dealing with the servers. That has become a distant concern. Because data is already on the cloud, I can use a controller and my client as one unit. That is the best thing. I can use Automation Anywhere in my mobile, I can run my Bot through an Android app. This flexibility and centralization without worrying about availability is a good thing.

I think that all the expectations I had for the new release of the product are covered in the coming version A 2019. I'm very happy about what I hear about it. I think once I use this A 2019 release, I'll come to know what the things are that I'll want in the future. We have access now to a community edition version, which I have to download and will be testing out shortly.

The first of the new features that I believe will do me the best is the customization of the commands. I can build my own package as per my convenience. Let's say we have a variable command. We already have the ability to use XML commands and we have some Excel commands that are provided by Automation Anywhere. Now Automation Anywhere is allowing us the opportunity to build something of my own in their environment and deploy that in production. Before I could imagine that component and not build or deploy it. I can build it now and that an important new feature for our progress.

As far as the stability of the product, it's doing well. My experience over the two years I have worked with it as a developer, going to the cloud has been good for reliability and accessibility.

We have not experienced downtime from the Automation Anywhere setup. When our infrastructure is down it definitely impacts my accessibility to Automation Anywhere. This is not actually the fault of the product as far as I have experienced.

I feel the one thing which I can tap to enhance the scalability of the system is the AI component of Automation Anywhere — that is IQ Bot. I think this is something which can really grow into a massive Bot solution with great advantages. I heard recently that the accuracy of that data reading for invoice processing is something like 70% accurate currently. I think they are trying for 90 or 90 % plus as a goal now.

We have definitely had the opportunity to use technical support and I evaluate them as very good. If I have any data stuck somewhere, I query to the Automation Anywhere support guys. If I have some problem with the 11.x version, they'll admit that there's a bug in that version for a particular process or function and they will develop a patch for it in a new upgraded version. We definitely feel confident going accordingly with that and patch the update as a solution.

Our reason for adopting the product and why most of our clients prefer it as a solution is that we talk with them honestly about what capabilities they will need and why this product fills the purpose. Everyone can choose to do their tasks in a different way and other solutions could work to develop automation. What matters for me is the way the product allows users to easily develop the Bots. I do believe that Automation Anywhere is giving me the opportunity to quickly and easily develop stable Bots and it is better at that than other competitors you might want to compare it to.

It is definitely not a simple setup. It is at a medium-complex level. It depends on what actually gets put into the brackets.

When there is a level of complexity, it's all related to the server, where I'm hosting my applications and my client. In the 11.x version, we control one server from another server. When we have to use many servers, the complexity of the setup begins to become more involved.

We developed our architecture on our own by our own, designed to fit with our needs and purposes. We have also done the initial setup now for a number of different customers.

In some ways, we have seen a return on investment. For example, we have one customer who is aware of the FTE reduction (Full-Time Employee) on the repeated Bot creation jobs. They have scaled up by having their workers work in a different way. We are actually automating the repetitive Bot creation jobs and reducing the FTE where that human effort is not actually required. The company resources can spend more time focusing on the creative part of the work rather than creating the Bots.

I don't know exactly what the pricing schemes are for the product as this type of negotiation is not my responsibility, but I think the basic pricing comes to $15,000. We have many employees and perhaps not so many doing Bot development and deployment. The Bots can service a lot of people and I think the rest of the pricing is based on usage.

For people looking for my recommendation for an automation product, I definitely would recommend Automation Anywhere instead of going for a more orthodox or older technology. With older tools, you are just doing the same things and not improving processes. With RPA a digital transformation is actually required for an organization to adopt a better way so they scale up and create an enormous amount of new opportunities for their organization to grow. It is a step to go in the direction where AI is going in. You cannot see the destination yet, but somewhere you have to start up using an RPA that is right for you. That is what I would recommend to my colleagues.

If you start talking about innovation as streamlining day-to-day processes, that is where to start from. It is where we started. We give clients various approaches, but we recommend that RPA is one thing which has stability and which is a good, long-term return on investment.

Once you invest you don't get the returns immediately. You have to wait some time while you work at creating the solutions by scaling the number of Bots you have and the processes you simplify and improve. After a time, your efforts will improve results. That is what we communicate with our customers. When we have them interested, then we come to a conclusion as to how we will go about implementing it.

On a scale from one to ten where ten is the best. I would rate this product as a ten-out-of-ten because the company and product have done everything to meet my expectations.

We used to expect new things in the A 2019 version and the company delivered on that. So, once I use this release of the product for some time again, I will probably have some new expectations. By 2020, I think we will send them feedback again.

Our primary use for the product is to automate business processes. Mostly this means financial processing. We have a lot of use cases in finance. For finance alone, we have 30+ bots in production. Other bots are for a variety of other business uses like the supply chain, networks, and business processes. We have 400+ bots in production as of now, all together. 

We have automated business processes, like finance, supply chain, network systems, and payment systems.

We are using it on-premise and migrating it to the cloud at the end of the year.

The product has improved our organization by allowing us to better use our resources. We can have a strategy implemented using bots and make better use of our time instead of spending it on repetitive tasks or tasks the bots can do more efficiently.

The most valuable thing about using this product is that we are able to use the time that we spent doing manual processing for other progressive purposes. The bots we implement free up our time. The second best part is that we don't need to see the automated processes happening.

We have business user utilizing the bots who don't have any technical expertise. We trained them, and they're able to do a couple of minimal bots which are required for them.

For us at this point, I don't think the product needs more features. There is already a new release coming up with a bundle of new features which we will have access to and have to learn. As a user and developer, I only look at stability. That's it. I want the most stable environment — a stable version of the product — where I can close my eyes and sleep and the bots run and do their jobs.

The basic system is very ease to use, but the difficulty comes when we make changes. For example, any change in the name, even if we have wild characters in place, the bot fails to identify the filename. It identifies the same filename in non-prod, and it does not identify the file in production.

We need a more reliable tool. Sometimes, the same check (a 70 percent scan) identifies numbers, and sometimes it does not identify the numbers. We are not sure why it is behaving weird.

We don't use the Bot Store because it is not legal for us to use.

I have been using it for almost two years now.

On a scale of one to ten, I can rate the stability between seven and eight. We have found that sometimes a little change in the environment brings down an application or a bot stops working. We are working on that issue. Stability improved from three out-of-ten to between seven and eight. We hope to bring that stability up to at least a nine.

The solution is very easy, but the tool behaves weird sometimes, environment to environment. It is not as robust as it has been designed. The smallest changes will bring down the bot. It's not capable of environment to environment changes. We have to make sure that the bot is running in each environment. 

Be a little patient while developing because the tool behaves weird. Even 11.3 is not behaving well. Once it starts working, it will work.

As of now, we are migrating from a Micron database. Once we have completed that, we believe the scalability will be a cakewalk.

We have almost 500 bots spread across different portfolios. They are scheduled and running on daily basis.

We did not integrated this solution with any other applications. This is running as a standalone thing in our environment.

We are in different time zones, but we still get a response from technical support when we call. On a scale of one to ten, I can say tech support is an eight. The thing that would make support a ten is that we get a solution on the fly when we contact a person in support. Sometimes they provide us some other solution that we already know or a workaround. We don't need alternatives, we need solutions that work.

The login mechanism seems to be only understood by the AA guys. We raised a ticket since we don't understand the login mechanisms most of the time.

Initially, we did the certification program from Automation Anywhere University. It could be better than what it is. It might have been upgraded recently. We took it more than one and a half years back. The ease of doing the course could have been better. You need access to a system when going through the course and completing it. There was no simulation. We were in the initial stages of procuring the systems, so it was a little tough for us to complete the courses too.

I was not involved in the decision to move to Automation Anywhere. It was a big decision handed down from the top management.

The initial setup was complex. Because we are in the finance industry, the initial strategy had to take a lot of data into account which needs not to be secured and not exposed to the outside world. So we struggled a little with how that has to be implemented. For example, passwords are critical data. We came up with a cyber bot at that point in time to deal with the potential password issues. 

The business team has a lot of doubts about how Automation Anywhere is being implemented and the processes it affects.  Because of this, it was really a huge effort to make them understand what we are doing. Any time we would have to make changes to infrastructure, even a small change on the infrastructure side could make an application unstable or make a bot come down.

We have got to put in more hours at this point to make the implementation stable and further deployment possible.

Bot creation process:

1. We have a PDD document available once the use case is identified. 
2. Once the PDD is available, if it is a legal/security issue, then we go for the next stage: development. 
3. We develop the SDD. 
4. Based on the SDD, the bot is developed. 
5. Once it is all developed and the UAT testing is done, we'll show it again to the legal/security.
6. Then we go for the approval across the business teams. There will be lot of approvals required. 
7. Once it is approved, then it goes to production. 

We'll create a bot ID in-between once the use case is good.

Based on the complexity of the bots, it takes six to 16 weeks for us to create bots (pilot to completion).

Initially we did use a consultant to get going with the implementation. It was a small group of guys who were also in India who we had come to work with us. Our experience with them was good.

When all the big problems were solved and there was nothing immediate on the plate to resolve, we were able to make out what we needed to do and judge the steps to take ourselves. So we slowly got away from support from the implementation group. 

We are able now to rely on the support that we are getting from Automate Anywhere technical support.

We just started looking at the fruits of our labors to understand the return on investment so we do not have a clear picture of the actual value yet.

We are not converting to a dollar amount. We are saving time. Last year, we save around 50,000 hours.

For Runner we paid around five-thousand dollars and for Creator we paid around three-thousand dollars.

The cost depends on the environment of an organization. I don't have the exact figures, but these are the production figures provided to me. 

We don't have a license for cognitive document processing yet. We are identifying the use cases for it.

We also evaluated UiPath, and for the attended bots right now, we'll be using UiPath, not Automation Anywhere. When we evaluated Automation Anywhere, it did not reach the same level as UiPath for management on attended mode, e.g., a huge number of licenses on attended mode.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a seven. Because we did not explore any other RPA tool as of now, and we are exploring UI parts without knowing more, it is hard to compare. 

The only thing that keeps me from rating it higher independently is the stability. Maybe it's stable in some other companies, but somehow we don't seem to share that stability in our environment. Because we have virtual machines that have to be up and running all the time and they are mostly Windows-based, Windows may also one of the reasons why stability is not so good. I don't blame the automation tool directly, but it could be more robust.

As far as giving advice to people considering the product, I say to give it time and learn to use it because it is the best. If the process is clean, we can automate to any extent.