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.

Most of our use cases have to do with Excel reconciliations, data entry or capturing data and entering it into a different portal or reconciling into Excel.

We have a lot of clients who have to track Excel work, or there may be data validation or reconciliation's to be done. In alignment with our primary use and because we are an audit firm, our primary purpose is basically to compare entered data and do data matching or verification. It is best for us to get quick output, and Automation Anywhere has been withstanding our benchmarks for performance. Whenever we have a goal or deadline to meet demands from clients in doing volume processing, it helps us to meet all those projections. We prefer the tool, and we are Automation Anywhere partners. 

The time from the installation to the execution of deployment is not very long, so it is a better solution for us than something else which would not allow us to provide results as quickly.

The most valuable feature would be that it is easy to use. Second, we have flexibility in terms of scalability on our support systems. The functionality of the product enables us in terms of the type of projects we can take and helps in advancing our business prospects.

Alert transition is happening in the Python space and on the front lines of AI and with other tools. You have the opportunity to use different data blending tools and data manipulation tools. It would be good if Automation Anywhere could make more plugins available to use with a greater variety of tools and additional options. I think it would be a better product if it had a greater capability for integration.

Stability-wise and from a security standpoint as well, the tool is very robust. I feel Automation Anywhere is better compared to other automation tools.

This product scales easily. You can just plug-and-play with whatever components you want to use. You can just add in things easily and you can scale it up.

Whenever we are stuck at any point where we don't know something about a feature, we just reach out to the support team. Their ability and knowledge have been very helpful to us.

I was not involved in the decision to adopt Automation Anywhere as that decision was made before I was part of the company. I came in during a phase where we were scaling up on the new deployment. They made the change to Automation Anywhere to more actively adopt the possibilities of automation.

One thing that's very good about the setup is that it is one-click. You just have to click to start the installation and then you configure everything as you go through the installation. One of the best parts of using the product for us is that it is easy to install and configure which fits in our business model.

We are resellers as well as implementation partners and channel partners. So we have been through and are involved in all the phases of implementation and deployment. We are the vendor team.

We have been able to witness a return on the investment. We have had clients where their scope was very broad and we have helped them reach their goals. The ROI that we see is not an instantaneous one because it occurs over time while you build out processes. Here and there you have greater success and the target for return on investment is made up over time.

As far as costs, it depends on your use. We started with a basic department pack, which is over 10K. The additional costs depend on the scale of the engagement and how it pans out. We customize to our needs on the go.

I have worked with Automation Anywhere on nine versions, including the 10.3 and 10.7 versions. It has been improving all along as they make further releases.

Considering that experience, on a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere somewhere around 8.5. It is one of the market leaders in their market segment. They have obviously proven their success and adaptability to the market enough to be very good at what they do. But I am scoring in terms of flexibility and in being more open-ended towards developer plans and preferences. In order to score nine or ten, they still need to provide more flexibility and integration with other tools and options.

My advice to people who are considering Automation Anywhere as a solution, is that you have to approach a decision from the point of view of what you want to accomplish. You can just go out and pick up a tool, but you have to actually dig into it and work on it. Automation Anywhere is a very good tool because it helps you along the process. The kind of support that you get from the community, as well as the partner enablement team, is encouraging. You can take it step-by-step. There will be some handholding from Automation Anywhere team. Our status as members of the customer success team is in the future. That kind of support and community helps new partners, existing partner, or those who are looking forward to becoming a partner.

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.

We've done a lot of automation with the product in the last two years. We started with accounts receivable processes in finance. I would say like AR function is one of the most mature functions in the product right now because we almost automated all the aspects of accounts receivable.

We have also started looking at automating the accounts payable process as well. I've only mentioned finance at this point, but we also have done a lot of automation with IT, as well as with procurement. Right now the penetration is higher with the support functions but we are also looking at different ways to automate. For example, we would like to use automation technology in core engineering. We also want to be expansive and do projects beyond our current boundaries — outside of just India. We've already done a small PoC (proof of concept) with a company in China and we also automated three small processes with a U.S. entity.

We use it daily and have done projects with the support functions, such as financial services, IT, and procurement support. We have 50 to 60 processes that have been automated using RPA in all three areas put together. This is the breadth and extent of what we have automated.

We are using the on-premise deployment model.

The product is improving our company in a number of different ways through the automation it helps us to create. I would say like the AR function is completely automated right now, but we are in the stages where we are looking beyond AR, beyond finance, and beyond support functions. 

All this time that we were using the product in the beginning, we chose to work on individual processes for automation. We are working in small pockets. We were identifying a project or a process as a small chunk of automation and we looked at opportunities within that particular function or a process and automated it step-by-step. 

For example, within the AR invoice process, there are different types of invoices that we do, like project invoices, manual invoices, past invoices, and other invoice variations. We had started building solutions for these things in isolation. We automated the SPA (Sales and Purchase Agreement) function first and then the project invoices. Then we saw an opportunity and made a change to bring all the invoices into the same platform. So now there is a bot which identifies what kind of invoice it is and it triggers a respective sub-rooting function what we have built-in. This is much more efficient. The AR function is something which we have automated end-to-end right now.

When bots start interacting successfully with each other, that is when we will see a true enterprise RPA (Robotic Process Automation) evolving out of using this solution. So we have benefitted a lot now, but expect that we will benefit even more in the future as we get better at using intelligence.

When we automate, we deliberately kept some manual toll gates. This was a very informed decision that we made. It's a conscious decision that we don't want to leave everything to the bot to do from start until the end because the accountability will not be there with any of the team members. This is one of the reasons why we have kept a manual toll gate in all our processes.

I would say the entire Automation Anywhere RPA functionality is the most valuable part of the product because it helps me to automate the mundane interpretative task. That is where most of my team members, who are part of the support team for product function, spend a lot of their time.

The IQ Bot is good. The pilot that we have done with one of our U.S. entities went well. Our accuracy has increased tremendously over the last two to three months. We have increased FTE efficiency. It's definitely a success for us. 

You spend some time trying to automate using RPA and then once a solution is created, they will gain back the time that they spent in development and then have more time to think about how they can further improvise and improve the process. That is all possible with the RPA. That is what we have been doing successfully in the last two years. The opportunity to customize and build out the platform makes it more useful and valuable.

We found it very comfortable because we are all functional experts. Nobody had any programming experience earlier. We all were able to learn Automation Anywhere in a four day classroom session that we had with one of the trainers from Automation Anywhere. With that, we started our own development. 

At least for our requirements, whatever version we have been using till now —  I think the current version 11.3.2 — is fantastic and more than we could use as we grew with the product. Any additional functionality I'm going to get in the upcoming version is a bonus for us as users. 

No product is perfect, so there is always some room for improvement. Right now we are most interested in cloud functionality. It could give us an additional option for managing everything in on-premises or in the cloud.

My experience and knowledge with respect to our initial deployment of Automation Anywhere were very limited. Had we had more experience, we probably would not have used the Intel landscape. We would have used something more relevant to our process and function. This compatibility might be improved.

I would definitely say Citrix automation is one area we have continued to struggle with for the last two months. If that can be an improvement in design for the next release it would be welcome. I know that a Citrix plugin has been already introduced by Automation Anywhere. If that can be made seamlessly integrated and easy to use, then I would definitely be very, very happy with that as an enhancement. The Citrix automation plugin that they have come out with until now has not been working for us. We are still in the process of figuring out how we can make that work. So, we are collaborating with the technical team from AA. There is an alternate solution where you can just move the system or application out of the Citrix environment and made it a standalone system. That will work. We know the workaround, but we still haven't figured out a solution to making it work in a Citrix environment. Hopefully, they will figure a solution in a month's time.

Any customer would look for advantages and changes in pricing. I won't say Automation Anywhere pricing is not good or not competitive. It is definitely competitive. But there are additional players in the market that they need to compete with and working on pricing could help. I believe there are competitors who do not charge anything for what is the AA Control Room (used for Bot creation). They charge only for the runners (Bot execution).

So there are other options available where you don't need to pay extra costs that may be more attractive depending on your usage. With Automation Anywhere I'm the creator as well as the Control Room. If Automation Anywhere could get a little more competitive on those aspects of pricing, I think it would be like heaven.

I would like them to combine a BPM solution with RPA. Sometimes you need to have BPM in place so your process orchestration will be smooth. It'll go through a standard process. On top of that, you are doing some manual activities that will be replaced with RPA. Automation Anywhere already has RPA, if they would allow us to create a simple BPM solution on top of it to use RPA that is the best resolution. It would solve most of my problems in my processing unit.

I have been using the solution for about 18 to 19 months.

I would rate the stability of the RPA as much higher than the stability of an individual manually handling processes. Because stability is pretty good, the machine will outperform an individual. With respect to individuals, there will be always some attrition — there will be some learning time and people will tend to do mistakes. That is not the case with respect to the RPA. So while that is not directly about the product, it does add stability to our processing.

Beyond that, whenever there is any change to your applications or environment where you have automated a function, that is when your processes or RPA can stop functioning. So it requires a little bit of customization, and again you upload it into the control group. Because the RPA is so flexible and so convenient to work with and easy to use, I don't think that is where the major bottleneck occurs at these junctures.

Beyond that, we developed a fallback plan. We test the fallback plan once a quarter by stopping all the bots in operations and then we invoke the fallback plan. We have this mapped out in a document where we ask the respective processors to do the processes and simulate a stability failure.

There will be always risk associated with anything that you do. It's all up to an individual to make plans as to how they deal with bottlenecks, how to structure plans for potential stability issues, how they mitigate these potential issues by having a proper solution and proper process in place. To me, that is where the secret of stability really lies. It is not really correct to blame the stability of the product when it is the fault of the process. It's all up to an individual better manage how to look at things.

I would say that scalability is a critical aspect of using RPA and maximizing efficiency. When you develop one bot. You can just use it for N number of ports with the same source code. So it doesn't require any retooling. Scalability is very high. There will be some process deviations or some nonstandard aspects associated with any process that may require rethinking and interaction.

For example, maybe because of the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or the different systems that we use or integrate at the time of taking over those processes, scaling may be influenced. The classic example for our company, I would say, is that we have grown manyfold by acquiring lots of companies in the last three decades.

Every time we acquired new divisions or companies, it is not only about the revenue or products. We also get legacy systems or along with those entities, there will be some processes and practices which are nonstandard for our organization. We'll need to incorporate these different systems in the ERP.

But scalability is always possible. With the RPA only those areas where there are differences need to be fine-tuned in your RP source code. Then you can redeploy it successfully. Beyond that, we also take this as an opportunity to evaluate processes because we don't look at the RPA project as an isolated project. It is an opportunity to grow and improve automation in various ways and not just this one project alone.

Even before we automate something, we look at processes to scrutinize what are the nonstandard activities we do. We look to see if there are ways we can make the process more lean, simple and straightforward. This can actually make the process that I'm trying to automate more efficient. Then it is also easier to accomplish the development, easier to integrate with other processes, and more adaptable when you automate the process. Working this way, I know for sure that what I am automating is going to be an efficient process. 

So scalability is very easy and very simple to achieve especially compared training individuals in a process. A bot needs no training. Making tweakings to the source code and deploying successfully in production is much faster and easier. Because of these reasons, I would say scalability is pretty efficient and easy to achieve using RPA.

We plan to increase usage in the future both in our current departments and new divisions of the business.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as one of the best in the world when it comes to customer service. I've had the opportunity to gain specific experience with certain members of their team and the service is consistent and excellent.

Initially, when we started with the IQ Bot project, we had some issues and experienced a bit of a learning curve. So we immediately raised those concerns. Our first issue took less than 24 hours to get fixed, and without adding any additional cost to the customer. That type of service and support of a product is an important thing.

I would say the customer service team, the project team, and even the aftermarket customer success manager are all fantastic guys. I know that the organization has people with strong capabilities and excellent talent. It is very, very evident when you interact with them.

I would definitely say Automation Anywhere is aggressive when it comes to driving success for the customers. They are very passionate about customer success and their focus on the customer.

Some of my team members have taken courses with Automation Anywhere. They still need to complete a few more assessments before they get their certifications. The courses are pretty good, the assessment is very cumbersome and complex (from what I understand). It's too technical for them. Maybe it is easy for technical guys, but not for functional people. I assume that this is the way it should be, because it's an assessment before you get a certification. It has to be tedious and cumbersome to crack it.

The best person in our organization to speak to the complexity of the initial setup is an IT guy from my team. He was responsible for a series of calls to the tech support team and he was involved in a lot of discussion with the Automation Anywhere team initially. Obviously we had contact with technical support so it may not have been so easy to do the initial setup, but I think that is quite acceptable or understandable. Anything which is new will probably be something you need to spend extra time on during the initial phase-in of a new product.

Beyond that initial setup and normal learning curve, I haven't seen any problem with respect to adapting the RPA technology in our company. It has been pretty smooth. The technical support team was great in terms of supporting anything we experienced in the way of technical issues. The only issues we experienced after that have been some issues with respect to using a Citrix environment. We are finding it difficult to automate on Citrix efficiently.

We have been continuously on calls and meetings with the technical support team. They have been coming up with a lot of innovative ways as to how they can fix that problem with Citrix. Of course, we are still in the midst of finding a solution to the issues. But I know for sure with the support that I get from the support team that we will definitely have a solution in the near future.

We did our own implementation with assistance directly from Automation Anywhere's technical support team.

There was a bit of a hand-holding in the beginning because Automation Anywhere developers came and developed a few bots for us. Beyond that, it is all on our own. We have been very independent. We hardly got support from the Automation Anywhere team after that. From our own experience, the tool is pretty easy to understand and start using.

The bot creation process has different processes depending on what we automate, e.g., accounts payable, IT, and procurement. These are miles apart. The complexity would differ based on the different applications that we trying to integrate using RPA.

We try to check the different applications involved for automation and whether they are compatible with Automation Anywhere. Then, we understand the process. We do a value stream mapping, e.g., what are the non-value-added activities that we are currently doing to make it lean, simple, and re-engineer the process. We identify the activities that can be automated using RPA, or any tool.

There'll be the extensive workshop conducted before we conclude what we want to automate, how we want to automate, and how long it is going to take to automate. We do an extensive study to determine:

• What'll be the return on investment? 
• What type of a return that you'll get by automating the process?

We document it and prepare it as a business case. We send it to the sponsor for approval. Once it is been approved, then we will kick-start our development. Once the development is completed, there will be UAT and we will roll it out to go live.

There will be a burn-in period where we will be providing the support. It's like a normal SDLC. It's the same model. However, we analyze the process in detail and a BRD will be prepared, then we will start the development.

A simple process might take somewhere around four weeks from start until the end. Something which is very complex in nature might take up to 12 weeks. Anything which is very complex, we would like to break into small pieces, then automate it step-by-step. We don't try to take the entire thing and digest it. We would rather try to break it into small portions, then move on. 

Calculating ROI for us is pretty simple. We identify efficiency at the beginning, then based on that we will just move the headcount out of the process. We try to compare with the cost spent versus the quote of the money that we have saved on the fully loaded employee cost. That's a simple comparison of what we do. This is a very crude way of calculating our return on investment because there are other benefits that are derived by doing an automation. Other benefits include:

• Improving the quality of the process.
• Eliminating some of the duplicate payments to save some dollars. 
• Making timely payments to the vendor to have better negotiation skills with them. 

These are some of the other overall business benefits that you can derive out of it, but they are too tedious to take into consideration when you're trying to do an archive. That's why we keep it very simple by comparing the labor cost saved versus the cost spent on the technology.

They are already coming out with a community license, which is really good. That's something that I wish to have.

We had looked at a lot of prominent players in the market and examined the different options as well, like Blue Prism and UiPath. Automation Anywhere was the one company who was flexible in terms of offering a PoC. We find this very comfortable. They were very approachable and aggressive, in terms of getting things done. This helped us make a decision in favor of Automation Anywhere. Also, Blue Prism doesn't have the functionality with attended automation that we would like to have. We are looking for the flexibility and convenience that comes with attended automation where you can still run your show.

We ended up choosing Automation Anywhere based heavily on their highly-approachable team. We thought of doing a PoC and Automation Anywhere was the first vendor to volunteer and say they would do PoC for us. That was not the case with the other vendors. They were very reluctant for whatever reason.

In terms of product, almost all the products are good. The differences are insignificant from the product standpoint. What makes Automation Anywhere a little different from the other players in the market is their presence in India. They have a very strong presence in India. They've an excellence sales team, very approachable solutions team, and technical team.

They are very approachable. They come and help you out in terms of creating a PoC, which is not the case with the other companies. The other companies are not that aggressive. They normally don't show that level of interest in terms of getting things done with the customer. They all come and approach for new business, but when it comes to going the extra mile to making something happen, that is where they are lacking. That is the difference for our decision of going in favor of Automation Anywhere.

But we got a lot of support from the company and they have always been willing to go the extra mile in terms of supporting the customer and making solutions happen. So that really influenced our decision, and that is one of the reasons why we want to go with the Automation Anywhere compared to other players in the market.

If I were to rate this product on a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would definitely rate them nine. It is not a ten because of what may be my ignorance of the entire Automation Anywhere platform. Probably I'm not aware or don't know the complete suite of assets. I'm not in a position to rate it a ten. To rate Automation Anywhere a ten means I should have complete knowledge of the product and I am sure there are things I have not yet explored. 

As far as advice, the normal tendency — and the mistake often made by organizations — would be to commit at the time of vendor selection by volume of features. They pay too much attention and focus on the product landscape. They think about one solution that has got 200 different functionalities rather than one which has got 210 different functionalities as being inferior just based on a number. But in reality, the users may probably not even be using even 10% of what is available in the tool or the platform. So they tend to give more weight to the product landscape. 

In our case, we made an effort to look at more than just features, but the qualities of the companies and vendors as well. For example, we learned about the leadership journey for each vendor, how long ago they started in this business, how much focus they put into coming up with the product development — the R&D. It is also important who the venture partners are and who the people are who are associated with the company and product.

We have done a lot of automation with our ERP systems. We also have some in-house applications which are on .NET that we have integrated with RPA. This should be the minimum expectation when you're signing for an RPA contract with any vendor. You would expect the RPA solution or tool to work seamlessly with any system. Automation Anywhere works well with no problems except for the Citrix environment. This is where we have had a bit of a challenge. Beyond that, we have never had issues with Automation Anywhere.

These details are relevant and important when you go to make a decision or when you take on a partner as an RPA solution provider. You are not just investing in a partnership for the next six months or a year. Probably some of the bots you are developing today you'll want to be using even after ten years. It's a long-term association what you're trying to make with an entity, the product, and with a company. So it's important that you go through all these checkpoints rigorously.

I've not used anything from the Bot Store.

Every technology has pros and cons with some limitations. There is no point in just harping on the limitations alone. You need to look at how you can make that technology work and solve your problems. This is where the human intelligence comes into the picture.

This technology is an enabler. It will solve most of my problems. It is up to individuals on how to make it work. That is where the trick of the trade lies. If you know how to work with RPA, you will not complain. I've seen many people complaining saying, "RPA doesn't work. It doesn't give you ROI." It's not the technology's problem. It's the people's problem. It's your mindset which is stopping you from getting automated and start using the technology. 

Biggest lesson learnt: You'll understand existing processes in a different dimension. You'll understand your people problems with the process in a better manner. It should not be just be looked at as an opportunity to automate it. If you look at the overall process to revamp and re-engineer it, then you can make your process efficient by making it lean, simple, and straightforward. On top of that, when you try to automate it, the overall process efficiency should increase tremendously. 

if you just look at RPA as a tool to automate everything, that is not a good approach. There are some things which can be automated efficiently using simple VBA Macros. Sometimes you might require a simple .NET solution to automate your end process, which is more efficient. You can make automation in the existing ERP, and that might work better. You have to look at different ways of automating things based on the process and complexity. You have to look at what is the ideal solution, then you have to pick and choose what you want to automate.

Don't look at RPA to solve all your problems. You need to use the right technology to automate, simplify, and minimize your problems.