Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case is for the financial services industry where we do tax credit for different departments. We do automation for them. 

If I have to go into an application and download the information to do some cleanup activity, then I have to do that by manually. This might take somewhere around an hour or an hour and a half. By using Automation Anywhere, I'm saving that time. I can use that time for a valuable purpose.

IQ Bot is a valuable feature. It processes unstructured data to structured data. It helps me by making tasks less time consuming. It reduces the effort it takes versus manually.

I would like to have some of the features that I have seen for future releases. I'm using the outdated version, as compared to the current one. That's the reason I'm rating it as a seven out of 10. If I was using the latest version and all its features, then I might rate it a bit higher.

In terms of stability, the tool is stable. I don't see errors occurring during the production or  development stages.

Because I am using an older version, I am rating the scalability as a seven out of 10. I feel a lack of convenience when I try to scale it. When I use an upgrade version of Automation Anywhere and I don't feel this anymore, then I will rate the scalability better.

We have reached out to Automation Anywhere when we deployed our system. I was not able to use a few of the commands and the system was overwriting a set of folders. Then, we got support from the Automation Anywhere tech center.

I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

Automation Anywhere is installed with a VM, then it will be handed over to us. That's how it works.

We have a center of excellence team.

We calculate our ROI as FTE and dollar savings.

It costs up to $1,200 per license.

No other competitors have the cloud-based feature that Automation Anywhere is launching with its A2019 version. I am excited to explore this feature more.

I recommend Automation Anywhere. This product makes my life easier. It has been a very robust product to use in all our segments.

There is not one specific use case in the sense of what we use the product for. In the broader scope, it would be automation. But right now we have several applications. We started our journey with the tool in 2017, and we have automated several processes in finance, IT, and engineering. 

In finance, for example, we have automated cash application, billing processes, reporting, payment processing, and we are using IQ Bots to automate our invoice processing. We completed the pilot, which provided us with phenomenal results. So we tested with a small entity with 30000 invoices and around 300 suppliers with a high level of success.

The character extraction capability of IQ Bot is much, much better than the other OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engines that you have in the market today. So we are completely pleased with that, and we are planning to upscale our invoice automation processing.

Today while we look at the opportunities in front of us, our customers are expecting us to be more productive and execute with greater speed to be relevant and competitive in the market. The expectation as far as the accuracy is really very high, and we need to be compliant. We have experienced that the more manual and hands-on that we are that there is a higher risk of being non-compliant.

There are skilled companies who are spending more time on transactional activities. For example in the engineering field, there are engineers who are spending time on transactional activities and there are finance guys who are spending time on transactional activities that could be automated. 

We can use intelligent automation with great value in helping these people upskill themselves into newer areas of analytics, new roles in reporting, and project accounting in finance. We're trying to eliminate these transactional activities, be faster over time. We started by looking at specific activities and we looked at the processes. Now, we are looking at a complete value chain. When you look at the complete value chain, that's when you actually begin driving positive change in business results. That is our projected approach for the next couple of years. We'll be looking at the complete value chain and see how bots can help us make our process more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the IQ Bot's ability to extract information accurately. It can do things like process table-level information, line-item level information, etcetera, and the accuracy is really very high. All of our users are accountants rather than programmers or anybody with an IT background. The accounting people can easily learn Automation Anywhere. We tried a few other tools but our folks were more comfortable using Automation Anywhere. They felt that it is easy to learn, and it was easy to train them as to how to use it.

In the next release, I think it has to be more compatible when deployed with the Citrix environment. That's one bottleneck that we have seen. Technically when we used the IQ Bots, we couldn't work directly through the Citrix environment. With our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) setup, we needed to access it through the Citrix environment. Because we were not able to do that, we had to have a workaround. We are currently working with Automation Anywhere to have that fixed. They have given us confidence that it can be done.

When looking at stability, we have to remain ready for any surprise even if we have not experienced any stability issues. We don't know what that kind of surprise will be, but we have backup plans in place.

In case the tool fails, we may not be as fast as the bots, but we have a BCP (Business Continuity Plan) but we know we can't be specific on what challenges will come, because we don't know.

In two years, I think once in one process where a bank changed its user interface on the bank website, a bot failed. We had to go and correct it. It was a fairly quick fix because to create it doesn't take much time. Changes like this are not predictable.

If you look at our shared services, we are growing and we need to keep our costs flat. This means I cannot hire more people. This need for greater efficiency is made up by what I have been able to gain out of the automation. We are actually using automation to move more processes into our shared services. Ours is a private business and we create big cement plants. One project could last for five years. When we land a big deal our volume spikes. It's a very cyclical business. It has been very easy for us to deploy scalable solutions now.

The company is very service friendly and willing to work with us when we need it. I would give them high marks for attention to customer service.

Our decision to go with an RPA solution was one that I made. One of the reasons I was hired into this organization was to drive automation. There was a specific goal for that which I was tasked with.

When looking at other options in the market Automation Anywhere seemed to be the company for us for a couple of reasons. One is that when we had our first engagement with Automation Anywhere we felt that they were very customer-focused. We did not see that with the other service providers. They really came prepared when they first met with us. They had all their books, IT, operations, delivery plans and such, so they were able to answer all our questions. They were very flexible in meeting our requirements and needs.

They were willing to go out of their way to support us and to ensure that we would succeed in the journey. Some of the service providers even refused to create POC's for us. But Automation Anywhere said they would and they went ahead and created them.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward and easy.

We did not use any consultants for our deployment. We worked directly with Automation Anywhere. Our belief is that we know our business better than anybody so we opted for maximum direct involvement.

Before deciding to go with Automation Anywhere we looked at other products for comparison like UiPath. We looked at the desktop automation tool, I currently don't even remember their name. The choice seemed obvious from the first impressions.

If I have any advice to give to people who are considering this product as a solution to their automation needs, I would say don't waste time thinking too much about adopting it and just go ahead and start.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

If you look at the first year we had the product, we had a 6% efficiency gain. This year we are looking at 10% in finance and 12% in IT. The more we discover ways to use it, the more efficient we will become.

Being a bank, we have a lot of processes which we have automated. I am a Project Manager for HR functions. The majority of my processes are in terms of income and skills processing. Those are all automated.

We were one of the few to start up this journey with Automation Anywhere. Interestingly, the majority of our processes were determined to be boring. People did not find them to be very interesting. Those processes have been automated. Being a bank, we have some sensitive processes which we cannot automate. Those processes have been given to human intellectuals. Otherwise, the majority of our processes are automated.

It has boosted our processing time by seven times. Typically, something that has taken eight to 10 minutes now can be done in two to three minutes. So, we have seen some value-add there. 

Resources are being processed earlier and involved in a different type of a governing kind of role. This sort of builds a layer for them to move and scale up. The solution is fast and easy to deploy. Our use cases lasts for two to three sprints and we can churn out solutions very fast.

We do not have a server type of an environment. We use a desktop version of Automation Anywhere which is easily customizable and quickly built-in. We do not have to go through major security iOS applications, etc. These are all enterprise applications that we have onboarded. Each of our functions take their responsibility of building their bot and deploying it. 

It is fast and reliable. 

Older versions of Automation Anywhere required specific skill sets to use it. It is no longer like that.

The version A2019 GUI allows you to drop and drop.

As far as version 10.1 is concerned, we have been using it for the last two years. It is okay. As an organization, we look forward to next version. However, being a bank, we have certain processes that we have to follow. We are happy with the version that we are using and haven't experience downtime.

We have been looking at processes which can easily transition into a large scale environment, where you can have cloud or hybrid model. However, being a bank, some of our processes are critical and we would like to hold those on-premise. This limits us with our usage of Automation Anywhere.

The support that we receive from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We have specific customer success managers as a platinum partner. We have support extended to us when we have any type of concerns and issues. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. It didn't really affect our processes at any levels, which really helped. The process was fast and easy.

The support team kept our team calm.

We have an in-house Automation Anywhere team who supports us.

It saves us man-hours, headcount, and processing time.

We have automated the equivalent headcount of 500 FTEs since we started. Those people haven't been laid off. They are just doing different types of work activities.

We did not evaluate other vendors beside Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere was a pioneer in the market at the time that we were evaluating vendors. It was a good match.

Explore the new version A2019 that is coming out. It is user-friendly and can be onboarded quickly.

I would love to use the next version A2019 that is coming out.

We are in the banking domain. We use Automation Anywhere for loan processing to support its journey from each state until the loan is approved. We focus on title commission. We are trying to remove the human repetitive component, bring in automation, and help humans do value-added jobs.

Up until August, we were using version 10.5. Recently, we migrated to the new version 11.3.2.

We have hundreds of cases a day. There were around two to three employees who were just moving a case from one state to another. This was a repetitive, tedious job, which was frustrating for the employees. It helps to have the bot doing this work now. We have immediately seen effects, so this is a good use for it. 

The Control Room is the most valuable feature. This is where I can schedule a task. It runs 24/7, so it's a great feature that I love. If we are not in office, we can schedule something and leave, then the bot will run at the scheduled time.

In the previous version, we were facing auto login failure issues. The production machine would go down on a daily basis. Later, once we had stability, the tasks don't fail because of the object cloning issue. Therefore, all issues have been resolved in the new version. I'm happy with that. 

In the new version, we got options for running the bot in attended mode as well as unattended mode.

Triggers work in the attended mode on Automation Anywhere. I would love it if we could use triggers in the unattended mode too. This way we can use the feature more in our IT sector. E.g., when any service or folder is accessed by unauthorized person, we want to be able to get an immediate trigger, even on "out of office", this would be helpful for my organization.

The stability issue in the previous version has been resolved. So, we are happy and this have improved our trust. We will be happy to build more processes.

We are still near the end of migration. Two of our processes are still running on the older version.

Our scalability has been increased with our new version. We do not see any issues.

We have used the technical support. I am quite unhappy with the support part. The higher priority tickets are not getting resolved within the SLA. Higher priority tickets for production issues should be looked into immediately. However, until they get escalated, tickets are not receiving higher priority. I would like to see this improve.

The initial setup was straightforward. I updated the license files after we got them. I needed to update them in the Control Room. I think a non-technical person would be able to do this.

We are focused on reducing repetitive jobs.

Know your process, design, and how you want to re-engineer everything.

A lot of issues that we were facing in the previous version have been solved in the latest version. We are happy with the scalability and reliability now. We have more trust in the tool and are happy to grow and build more tasks going forward.

We use this solution to assist us in the collection of data. We have patients who fill out an application that contains information based on the affliction that they have. For example, a migraine patient or a diabetic patient will have different sorts of information contained in the application.

It starts with them giving us information. There are no regulations that govern the format of what they give us. Based on what they give us, we provide them with our application. Our overall goal is to give them a better quality of life.

We use MetaBots to ensure that the data goes into the proper channel and in the proper pattern.

Before we implemented this solution, we had to manually deal with a lot of emails. People would send us unstructured data in the form of Notepad or Wordpad. We spent a lot of time manually entering the information.

With Automation Anywhere, what used to take us two days now takes us twenty minutes.

The most valuable feature of this solution is automation using MetaBots.

We would like to see support for macOS, rather than just Windows machines.

Whenever you start Automation Anywhere it opens the IE browser to notify you. It would be really great if you had the option to not open IE when it starts.

If you want to use Chrome then there are three or four additional steps that need to be completed.

This solution is pretty stable.

Scalability is good, although it would be better if they supported more than just Windows machines.

The technical support for this solution is pretty good. The turnaround time is good, as well as the response. The technical support people are well trained and we appreciate it.

We have in-house people who have been trained and handle this for us.

We have certainly seen ROI when it now only takes twenty minutes to perform a job that use to take us two days.

I am involved in making the decision as to whether we use Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism in our upcoming projects.

For each of our projects, we do a POC that lasts three months for each of the tools. Out of that, we come up with the best solution that we can offer for a particular project.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to first identify all of the use cases around your project. If you don't do your due diligence then I don't recommend this solution. You need to have the use cases identified.

We wanted to use IQ Bot to assist with unstructured data, but we were not able to do it. Our next step is to create a workload to handle our information processing.

This solution saves us time but there are some things that make it clumsy for the end-users. When we have to tell them that there is no macOS version then we put our heads down and tell them that we have to wait for that. Also, if you want to use Chrome then there are three or four additional steps that need to be done.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

My company' objective in using this tool is to automate every rule-based operation possible. We're looking forward to automating anything that does not need a human to make a judgment call. We have automated most operations in several applications, including mainframe, Linux, web-based URLs, Citrix automation, and in Excel extensively. We have done a variety of projects but we are looking forward to growing more into other areas that we have not yet explored.

The biggest value that I see from the product is the way it works in general. The unattended mode that Automation Anywhere promotes, works great. That is the best thing, I would say. It runs code that performs on a virtual machine unattended. No one gets involved in the triggers because the bot controls the tasks. When you use a person to manually monitor a task, such as getting a quality check done, automating the task to work unattended eliminates all the human effort. It's a solution that is quite simple and straightforward to implement and is available 24/7, 365 days. No disaster recovery is required as the server is always intact because processes run to assure uptime, security, etcetera.

We are aiming to have 100% unattended runs. We don't want attended runs because it increases bandwidth which is not great for support guys and clogs the system. Also, you can have some unattended InfoSec (Information Security) breaches and things. We constantly aim to have the best. At the moment performance is not 100% but I would say it is constantly improving.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to operate by working on AA-level development without all the trouble of having VMs set up, setting up ports for it, having the environment so that the developers can work on it, etcetera. With Automation Anywhere, I don't think we need a technical guy, an IT guy, or specifically a specialist engineer to accomplish things. Automation Anywhere is that good. A layman who has a keen interest or even a little bit of curiosity can learn the product end-to-end, sustain himself if he wants, learn how the VM is developed down by the ports. The product and support make it easy to learn. The knowledge is readily available.

The whole package that Automation Anywhere offers is really good. The variety of commands that it offers made to play well with other integrations. It could be using a C# module, code on JSM, the APIs — I want to use database XM. Ultimately, I want to use anything that makes it friendly for me to accomplish what I need to. That is a help because it often will be something I have already learned, it will be easy to access, easy to build, easy to sustain — as long as the commands work as expected.

Unattended Automation is the best feature for me. Because I use it extensively, it is also one feature I am very familiar with and so it is also one of the areas that I would like to see more improvements on. Any time I speak with people who promote automation and say that it is unattended, they may have a machine perform an operation. Very few understand that each unattended operation packet is unattended at all times. No matter what time of the day, if you just click Run once and it operates to get something done. You don't continuously relaunch it.

In my current role, the only thing that I focus on is how sustainable the code is. It has to run for a long time — years. I am expected to run extensive testing. So, in this position, I'm working on the current stability of all the commands and how that can play into the future. I'm not looking for new features. Really the opportunity for automation is already offering this opportunity to create your own features. Adding new features is almost too much. If I've got enough tools to use, I should learn to utilize them first. Use them and then maybe get something new once I have exhausted the possibilities. There are already enough options that AA provides to use. The commands that it offers out of the box are okay for people to begin to work with it. If you don't know it, all you have to do is ask. 

It is not an end-to-end solution for everything, but it is very good at what it does with allowing automation and freeing up other resources — both human and hardware. It is not an end-to-end solution for everything.

The only area for me that I would consider as an improvement is sustainability in areas I face every day. On CSM (Central Management System), for the most part, it works every time, but those areas exist where it does not perform as expected. For example, we had a problem with our ticketing system. What we do is we have a ticket open so that the issues stay open for a week even if we have it fixed. It is supposed to stay in the system continuously for a week — a hyper-care period — so that the issue stays open and we are sure the issue is fixed. That hyper-care period never seemed to end in the application. The problem was it extends a week, to two weeks, to three weeks, but we did not achieve that four-week period of no error of the full runs for the solution.

We worked at resolving the issue and thought we fixed it permanently. We locked in the solution. We were happy. We almost won. Then in a week, we had a reversion to the same problem without making a change. It was not possible to explain. It is my only concern that some things get handled erroneously or changed. 

Without question, Automation Anywhere is generally a stable product. It's not like I can bank on it always performing. I know a few bots we created are not perfect, but I also know that most of them — 60% of my bots — are good. No one calls me about them from the time they're deployed. I haven't had a single escalation or a single error reported about them. This is great.

I still have the other 40%. I think some things go wrong in situations you face unexpectedly or an error occurs. This is not the way it is supposed to be. It's supposed to be really easy: just plug it in and you have the service. But it doesn't work sometimes.

It is frustrating at times to experience this instability, but we do find a solution and we are working on it to be better. With the new version and features that AA is proposing, it looks promising that we can achieve that goal. It looks like the new version will be really stable compared to the version I am currently in, but I will never be sure until I use those new versions.

Another form of stability is in upgrades. Currently one of the pain-point areas on my to-do list is migration to 11.3.2. We have been working on it for almost a month now. We haven't reached the deployment stage. When I migrated to 10, I had some bots that no longer worked after the upgrade. It was not expected. We got on a call to support to explore the problem and had to resolve them.

Right now, I'm not really sure when to migrate. We have 50 bots and every fortnight, there's a part that goes wrong. If I have to take the action and migrate into a new platform — 11.3 2019 A — there is something of a leap of faith. I'm really not sure that I can take that leap now considering the relative stability that I'm experiencing at the moment.

Working with Automation Anywhere, I have been taking steps to use more of the functionality in the product. In a migration, I will want to use the new version as extensively as I have used the current version. At each step, the newer versions were better than what I have used in the past and I have used version 8, version 9, and now version 10. I've used these three versions and there have been improvements each time. We're seeing improvements to come, which I'm looking forward to exploring. But we have to be sure the migration point is realistic.

A lot of times that I have raised issues with support, the command in question is simply not performing. Object learning may not be working as expected, an action's not executing or it is not connecting to the database at all. The simplest solution is often to copy basic commands and replace them and it works. With the number of calls I made to Automation Anywhere, the guys know me now because I have so many issues. They work with me on it. We try to find solutions. At the end of the day, we find some way or other — a shortcut, say, or copy and paste — and get the code to work. We may not be able to figure out the root cause as an answer so that it doesn't happen again. The bottom line may be that the code might be corrupted, my part of the implementation is corrupted, the ATMX (Automation Anywhere Task Files) part is corrupted, etcetera. But the patches are not a perfect solution when I'm in charge. It's a lot to know a process well enough to fix the root cause of an issue. But these concerns remind me that Automation Anywhere as a tool is great, but there are areas to improve.

Automation Anywhere is definitely scalable in several ways. It's easy and accessible. It's designed the best — almost perfect. It has many more usable components than I was familiar with, and I had so much to learn. Now, with some experience, it is not foreign, and we just don't need to build to get what we want. But to get that you need to start at the design phase, you should not start at development at all. People try — even me — when you're starting, just to aim at building usable components. We can ask a developer to do that, but then the developer will not design to build a reusable component. It will only be specific to his assignment, the development, his process, and he will get it done to complete the job.

Scalability starts with a designer who is the one who makes the call. They need to know what to standardize or how to do things by thinking globally to make sure that a resolution is usable and adaptable if desired. That is the standard we adopted. Other big companies have more bots compared to our 50. They may think what they have is a lot more scalable than it is.

We have ongoing support from AA. I appreciate Automation Anywhere support when I talk to them. There are quite a few hiccups as we go along. At times I don't get straight to the support people when you need them as they are busy supporting other users. But the response has been great.

The setup is a bit complex but it is not so bad if you are a little interested and a little curious in learning about the product. It helps to have a little background knowledge on how it works, what are the features that you need to look for, what logs you need, etcetera.

Some basic guidelines will help you along in the initial setup — a basic brush-up on what to do and expect can suffice. Of course, there is the AA's guide that you can follow if you don't know what to do. Initially, when we didn't know the server, we didn't know what are the application calls were, the documentation did help. It was not that complex to do the installation, but the IT guys did not support it. They were surprised I wanted to learn about everything and work with another product when they had resources to accomplish what was needed.

If you choose to try it out, when you need to know more, ask for help. If you're ready to set up deployment, start from some base and set a restore point.

For those who are considering Automation Anywhere as a solution, I would ask how good their team was already. To take on a new product and take a chance that people will try to enhance their skills by learning it may not be the best course of action. Many will have to learn something new and do better than they did with previous solutions by learning and using AA. If the response is that they have hardcore developers, web designers, C# developers, etcetera. They may be looking for quick resolutions, hardcore development and coding bit. They will want any other product or UI that appears to give you far more than AA. AA does all of that — it is not that it isn't able to do it — but it's easy and it is different. With other solutions, you will need someone with that knowledge and ability to code in a particular language. But AA is a platform that can be used as an opportunity for people to up-skill themselves. That's something that is different compared to any other code.

AA commands are not the same as other languages. It has its own dictionary, its own library, its own way of working. I see that this is the same thing mentioned by others as to what they think about the product. It is possible to learn it by just using the Q&A.

I use it to develop for the HR domain, where I am using Oracle PeopleSoft and Salesforce applications. Mostly, I use the object cloning command and Excel operations. 

I work in a banking company. We use Automation Anywhere for global HR payroll operations and payslip-related automation. We have also automated hedge loans and credit card approvals.

We use versions 10.3 and 11. Compared to 10.3, version 11 is good and easier to automate because they introduced more options. You can also automate complex things. They introduced the Control Room feature too. 

It is installed on-premise at our company.

We are using Automation Anywhere for our leave approval process. We used to have three FTEs on the day shift working on this process. Now, we only have one FTE working on the leave approval process. The bot supports everything else in the process. With this bot, we are saving the cost of two FTEs.

• OCR
• Object cloning
• Excel automation
• Reusable
• Scalability
• Code free

Most back-end operations start with Excel. With Automation Anywhere, we can easily automate the CSV in Excel operations. It is integrated with Microsoft Office 365.

The Control Room feature is very good.

We are using Taskbot for attended automation and unattended automation.

From the Bot Store, we can download bots. We can analyze the code. I have downloaded some bots just for coding standard purposes.

I would like more integration with Microsoft Excel. More screenshots that can be integrated with Excel would help our customers too. It is good that Automation Anywhere is now willing to partner with Microsoft.

I need to be able to work on Citrix with the solution. 

I need cloud-based applications. Now, we are manually running the application.

The stability is good.

The scalability is perfect. It is a reusable product.

We have around 200 bots in the entire company. We have allocated separate systems for these bots. We have almost 350 processors that we have automated using the bots. 

I have not used their technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

For the bot creation process, we have a solution architecture team. They will analyze the process and check for feasibility before proceeding to next level. They'll check whether the process can be automated, then prepare a document which will come to me. Then, I'll try to make the SDLC. I'll check whether the process is possible, then we'll go for development. This is the structure:

1. Analysis and feasibility study.
2. Documents preparation.
3. Development.
4. UAT.
5. Deployment.

There's a process requirement. If I get request today, it will take some two to three months to develop and close the incident.

A cost savings example is processing parental leave applications. The volume per day that one FTE can do is eight or nine applications. When using Automation Anywhere, we can do 15 applications per day. Another thing is the improvement in accuracy and reduction in errors.

I like Automation Anywhere better than UiPath because you can review the drag and drop activity. You can also review the code line by line. 

We are not using any other tools as we are partners with Automation Anywhere.

I used to work on UiPath. Automation Anywhere can easily be adopted and learnt. UiPath requires some programming skills and knowledge. Compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere is easy to learn with its drag and drop commands. In UiPath, the commands were difficult to work with and also architecture. 

Recently, Automation Anywhere introduced its cloud-based Control Room, where you can monitor the bot. Also, Automation Anywhere recently launched a mobile application, which UiPath doesn't have. 

Automation Anywhere has Credential Manager.

You can easily build and deploy the bots with it.

Train more people on a team to understand the tool to build teamwork. Share the development tasks.

Automation Anywhere has plugins for Excel, but we haven't integrated it with Oracle.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. I am certified in Automation Anywhere. I have the Advanced certification and am now doing the Masters certification. The courses were good and helpful for anyone wants to learn about Automation Anywhere. Everything is on the website, e.g., information about installation, configuration, bot development, and bot assessment. 

Automation Anywhere and RPA are not that difficult to learn. It can be learnt and be adopted easily, but you need at minimum practical knowledge. You need to take courses and scenarios. E.g., even if I know about object cloning, I still have to go and work with object cloning to understand the possibilities of object cloning.

We are not using IQ Bot.

Task schedules and runs are good candidates for bot automation.

We wanted to automate as many business processes as possible within the finance organization since the office that we work in today is called the finance transformation office. We transform all the business processes of finance for a better, simpler, scalable finance organization. We are constantly pursuing transformation of the finance organization as far as Cisco's changing dynamic business models. We are a predominantly product-oriented organization. We transformed our business models from products to software and subscription-based business model.

Users can develop for themselves. This is the end stage goal for our organization: To have our finance users developing automation for themselves. Automation Anywhere lets us do that, as users can develop the bots by themselves.

I have taken one of the finance processes, which is completely Excel driven, and consolidated more than 20 Excel files of large volumes of data by drawing pivot tables and all sorts of yield curves on the Excel files. I converted this structured, formulaic process to the bot. There are features within the Automation Anywhere which let you do types of keystrokes, formatting in Excel sheets, etc. The process used to take more than 30 hours for the user to complete on a quarterly basis. With the development of this bot, the bot can run the entire process within an hour and a half. It saves about more than 20 hours of time for the user. This is just one example. There are other bots saving hundreds of productivity hours per quarter. 

It lets users add value with their time other than focusing on downloading Excel files, consolidating, and drawing up formulas. Since everything is structured, these easily are incorporated into the bot's work.

Anybody can develop a bot by themselves. It's not a technical language oriented program. Specific skill sets with language learning skills are not required. Any finance person can get in and develop a bot with a little training on Automation Anywhere. They can go in and develop themselves. 

In the version that we have, there are some challenges with the browser-based applications, the cloning of the objects, and the solution's stability. 

Automation Anywhere must be able to maintain a consistent resolution. 

The latest edition, which is enterprise A2019, has better analytics and the cloud all integrated into the bot framework. 

The client version is getting challenging to use because you have to maintain a lot of infrastructure. You must have the machines to deploy the client. However, you don't need a large infrastructure, if you can do it on the cloud. 

I would like a Bot Store for MetaBots. The MetaBot feature needs to be expanded. E.g., I would like a copy/paste from the top row of Excel where I don't need to write a keystroke. Instead, I could just use MetaBot for this.

We have already launched more than 20 bots live into production. They are up and running. We are doing very well with these. We are in a convenient spot for delivering 50 to 60 more bots in the next couple of quarters.

Because it can accommodate 200 to 300 bots, the scale is not a constraint for us. It is scalable.

The technical support is good. I have contacted technical support of Automation Anywhere quite a few times during the process of developing a bot. Their responses were good and up to the mark. There were very responsive and proactive in resolving issues. They were on top in terms of supporting the features of the applications.

Our finance organization needed to transform itself to meet the changing business models. We established the finance transformation office to meet the entire organization's financing transformation needs. As part of that, we identified a couple of quarters ago that RPA was one of the software solutions which could help us automate several of our business processes. This is apart from the re-engineering and re-architecture that we do to transform our entire business process. Now, there can be some use cases within finance which can be transformed through usage of automation software, like Automation Anywhere.

We have streamlined several activities, cutting down on manual activities. This has happened over the last six to seven years.

I was not part of the setup process.

We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI.

At the end of the day, finance analysts expect faster outcomes while having their manual work taken away. There should be a more diligent way for them to add value and contributing to the organization through analytics and providing valuable insights. This removal of manual work can be done using a bot. That is the goal.

Our enterprise IT team chose Automation Anywhere as our product for doing automation. Automation Anywhere is one of the best, leading automation software tools for developing enterprise automation.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere.

I am excited about the Microsoft partnership that was announced today. Excel is a daily core tool for us. With an automation plugin, this works like a miracle for the finance team. The potential is unlimited, e.g., Office 365 and Internet Explorer will have plugins.