Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use for this solution is to use bots to automate our accounting reconciliations. So whatever reconciliation does not involve judgment or review and can be done by the bot using a series of steps. For those situations where it is possible, we are now using bots we created. This helps minimize a lot of the time as well as simplifying the reconciliation process.

We have a dedicated system for Automation Anywhere. We deploy it on-premise.

The way Automation Anywhere has helped our organization is that we've been able to evaluate our process of transaction reviews and identify tasks that subtract value from our efforts and automate them. We added automation to a lot of situations where human judgment and interpretation are not required. Our organization does not use as many resources in manual evaluation.

One of the best features of the product is that it eliminates a lot of unnecessary access to transactions. Secondly, it brings in a higher level of security. When the process is totally manual, there is more of a chance of inviting an element of human error. So using bots helps to eliminate these issues.

There are areas where the product can be improved and ways we can get Automation Anywhere to help us in other fields. For example, there are situations where legal interpretations are involved which have the potential for automation. We are not currently using the bots for these situations. So that's definitely one area where I would say there is room for growth for the product. 

Mostly, for my purposes, I'm looking for more support on reporting.

There is too much use of attended automation. I would like to move more toward unattended automation, where bots are capable to handle exceptions and give proper feedback to the users, e.g., how many exceptions we have that we can fix it, so we can make it more aligned.

I have not yet encountered any operating instability. The stability is good. It runs smoothly.

The product is scalable. Obviously, scaling the solution requires some time for development. Whenever you identify something that can be automated or want to work on something that already exists which is similar but slightly different than what you need, it requires time. So there is time expenditure involved in scaling, but the solution is definitely scalable.

We have about 11 accountants working on it.

We are fairly pleased in our experience with customer service. They are pretty good.

For the kind of company that we have, which predominantly relies on processing our revenue streams, it was a no brainer to move more and more towards AI and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) processing.

Genpact proposed Automation Anywhere and we found it to be suitable.

Initially, the implementation was tough. When we started, we were trying to do too much at one time. When we started just playing with small, bite-size pieces, rather than working with big chunks, we started to make more progress. That change in scope kind of helped us to scale things up faster.

We worked with Genpact predominantly to help us implement bots and automation. Our relationship with them has worked pretty well.

We implemented the solution for Genpact but are not users. We have seen the demo and how easy it works, but don't know what happens in the background.

We have definitely experienced an ROI in terms of saving. For example, the costs of service delivery contracts have come down because of our use of automation. 

ROI is determined by how much the account saves versus the cost of licensing that I have to pay to manage the bots. It saves me around $100,000 a year.

The extent of our usage is still quite limited. I think we can do a lot more. We had other priorities that took over and couldn't focus on getting the tool more widely used. In the coming year, we are focusing more on increasing the use of bots.

We are currently negotiating a contract. Depending upon that, we will definitely look at increasing usage.

Our goal in choosing a product was primarily due to an interest in advancing automation to speed processing of transactions. While the company probably evaluated other solutions, that decision did not involve me and was made at a higher level than mine.

My advice to those considering Automation Anywhere would be to be bold and try it out. There is no point in remaining in the dinosaur age and not taking advantage of the possibilities of automation.

Ensure your processes are standardized and exceptions are kept to a minimum. The more standardized processes are, the easier it is to implement bots, then your ROI will go up. You can extend automation to a much larger scale, but the more exceptions in the process, the more changes and tweaks in the process that brings. That makes it more complicated to invest in the bot and you will have to keep checking the deliver of the results being produced.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a seven or eight. In our case, it is closer to an eight. 

We use attended automation. There is some amount of human involvement in running the bots, but it's minimal just to ensure that exceptions are correctly captured, etc. The process works well.

The biggest lesson is to ensure that your processes are standardized, so you can increase the usage of bots. The more your processes aren't standardized, the more complicated it becomes to implement bots.

Our primary use of this product as a solution is developing bots to automate tasks and processing. For example, we have financial bots and we have IT bots. We have been involved in developing and monitoring the bots for about one and a half years, mostly for finance and IT. A majority of the tasks were done by other teams.

We have automated mainframe applications and integrated the tool with web-based applications and SAP. We have automated many SAP processes, including posting the entries and POs to SAP.

We are currently planning to migrate those bots into the current version (11.3.2) to make the bots more stable.

We are using the on-premise deployment model. We have multiple processes getting automated through this tool.

The major benefit for using Automation Anywhere is that it has provided a lot of FA (Finance Automation) benefits. That is a major plus point for using an RPA (Robotic Process Automation) tool. Any automation tool, for that matter, has its benefits. But because Automation Anywhere is easier to implement and learn, it is possible to move the bots to production faster. Speeding up that process helps in simplifying our workflow and productivity, and allows our people to do the most useful work we can do.

The basic Taskbot itself is the most valuable part of the product for what I do. The use of IQ Bot is still in a development stage. We are looking forward to August 2019 when we should be migrating to a newer version. That seems very promising. For now, we use Taskbot and Metabot with a variety of applications.

The ease of use is good. We had someone join the company who had no understanding of RPA. He was trained on it, getting his hands dirty, then he was able to develop and start automating processes quickly within a month. 

Resources are available online. A person can get certified and start automating right away.

The Bot Store is good. Although, we have not used the Bot Store much, there are some useful bots already built in it. We can just use them in our processes if feasible.

There are several things that would improve the product. I would like to see them include a group chatbot and make the IQ Bot more stable. Just those things would be great. Adding those kinds of features improves what we can do with the product. Using a client control room concept to ensure that everything is based on the web login, would also be great. Obviously we know that the development of new features will take some time.

We are expecting those kinds of features in the future. We expect more AI integration in our technology.

Automation Anywhere could use to be more stabilized. The product is becoming more stabilized with newer versions, but there are various things that still need to be stabilized. In the current version that we are using, we have a Control Room where the client will sometimes get disconnected. This will result in downtime. Therefore, we need some stabilization from the tool perspective. We don't have any other option than to raise a ticket to Automation Anywhere or get in touch with their support to get the issue resolved. So, we are having downtime. This can be improved.

We are not completely okay with the IQ Bot. We previously used version 5. The newest version does have more accurate results.

Technical skills are required to use the product. With these tools, technical programming is still required with the guidance of technical people. Business people can go ahead and try building a few smaller processes, then when they gain technical knowledge, they can use this tool to their full advantage.

Most of our processes are attended automation. It would be great if more processes were unattended automation, so we could release more FTEs.

We are currently using third-party Taskbots. We would like Taskbots directly integrated into the tool.

We have been using Automation Anywhere since version 9. Over that time the stability has improved a lot. We are expecting it to be even better in coming versions and this is why we are looking forward to our migration to 11.3.2 in August of 2019.

In program versions 10.3 and 10.7, what we were developing was okay. The stability was fine. In version 11.2, we had basic client login issues and database issues as well. When we have a better foundation as far as the stability, we are hopeful of getting better updates.

As far as being able to scale our usage of the product, until now, we have been doing well in diversifying. In the future, we expect to be able to get more from the tool. Our ultimate goal is to use the tool to automate most of our internal processing and reap the benefits of RPA.

Multiple users are currently using the product.

The technical support has been really good. Honestly, it is very good. We have been getting good support from the correct technical people quickly. One thing we would like to experience is that instead of waiting for a new version of the tool to resolve issues, that we could get immediate patch upgrades to cater to our requirements. That would be great. We are getting patches sometimes, but they do not perform as well as we might hope.

We have taken courses from Automation Anywhere University: version 11 and IQ Bot. We also attended training at the Automation Anywhere office for IQ Bot. The Automation Anywhere University courses are quite good. You can easily learn and get certified, which has some value in the market.

We were looking to Automation Anywhere as a solution in a relatively new concept. We believe it was our best choice and, currently, we are hopeful that the stability and the enhancements done to the tool will pay off. We are looking forward to using 11.3.

So far, the initial setup of versions has been straightforward and we expect it to be even smoother in the future.

Bot creation process: 

1. We identify the process.
2. That process will be well-documented along with the operations people, who will develop the BRDs. 
3. After the BRD creation, we'll come to know whether the process is feasible to automate.
4. Concurrently, a solution design document will be developed.
5. Developers will create the bot. 
6. Once the Bot is developed, UAT will be given to the operations people telling them whether the bot is performing as per their requirements.
7. Once finalized, we'll get a UAT sign off and the code will be moved to production where the bot will go live.

Scaling bots to production depends on the process and how complicated it is. For a simple process, it will take two to three weeks. If the process is a bit complex, it may take close to one to two months. It also depends on how your internal compliance is organized in the company. We have a compliance check done at every phases of automation, so it will take us more time to get the process live even for a simpler process since we have to get compliance sign off during every phase.

We did not use an external resource for the implementation, but I was there when the initial setup was in progress.

As I am currently part of a team of developers and people who perform functions, we are not directly involved in the deliberation of assets or ROIs. However, it is apparent that there is a return on investment, and we are noticing it.

We have many benefits reaped from the automation work we have done. So, I don't have the exact information about the cost and what our return on investment is, but it is benefiting the organization in a much bigger way by channeling efforts away from wasting manual time on processing.

As our team size increases, we may get some more licenses for the tool.

We checked on Blue Prism and UiPath. UiPath was still developing. 

We opted for Automation Anywhere. The pricing was okay for us. Also, It was easier to learn the tool and implement within the team. It is easier to learn, implement, and get things done with Automation Anywhere compared to other tools on market right now. 

Before automating, understand the process:

• How big is the process?
• Is it of use to the organization?
• How repetitive or complex is the process?

This is important because automating tasks requires resources.

On a scale of one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven. So far it has been good, but obviously there are opportunities to be so much better.

We expect more from Automation Anywhere based on the new technologies that we know exist concerning AI and also unstructured learning. There's a lot of room for improvement, so that's why I would not rate it higher. Other than that, for data structure, it has been good — apart from a few stability issues.

Ease of integration is good. We have automated a process in the current version. Automation Anywhere will tell us if it won't support this version anymore at this particular time, so we'll have to migrate that code to the currently released new version. At that time, we may face some challenges after moving the code. We may have to do some tweaks to the code. We can't directly run it as is, so we'll have to do some minor tweaks so that it is stabilized more, then it'll be better.

As far as recommending the software, that depends on what use case and what work requirements an organization has. For structured data and for simpler processes, it is fine. For unstructured data — which should be addressed by IQ Bot and additional features — I may not recommend it yet. But for dealing with automation of straightforward processes, Automation Anywhere is good.

RPA solutions are continuously improvement due to competition. Sometimes, it is worth waiting for the next version which is more stabilized to be released.

We are in the retirement industry. We use it for application-based automation. We are trying to mimic our operations to redundant business users' tasks, like clearing claims and loans.

We are using version 10.7. We are currently trying to upgrade to version 11.3.

We use Bot Insights. Business users utilize Bot Insight dashboards to get analysis.

In the 10.7 version, the back-end port for the MetaBot password has looping. This has been a type of limitation. Now, we are upgrading and integrating the Control Room, which is a validating feature.

I would like them to add OCR features. This would help us deal with unstructured data and we can get more data out of images.

I would like to see more features related to artificial intelligence. 

The latest version is more stable. We have mostly legacy applications. We do interact with Automation Anywhere support for patches and DLLs which are compatible with our legacy applications. Maybe after our upgrade, we can expect more stability.

In couple of months, we are looking to upgrade. We have set up our environment for integrating in AWS into our architecture. We are setting this up now and planning to install Automation Anywhere 11.3 to see how it is.

It is scalable. Since we have only had it one year, we are still looking into the scalabilty factor.

The technical support is good. They are knowledgeable and don't waste much of our time. They are quick in resolving things by identifying the exact root cause. 

We try to resolve the issue from our side first because we are trained in the product. It is only when we can't solve the issue that we contact support.

The initial setup is straightforward, except when setting up with cloud-based services, like Amazon. The cloud-based setup process is complex.

Automation Anywhere came in and helped set up the tool for us since it was initially new when we onboarded it.

It has saved us a lot of hours, manual effort, and we can focus on more important tasks, which helps us with our ROI.

We purchase on a bot basis. Our costs are approximately $5,000.

There are a lot of vendors out there, like Blue Prism and UiPath. However, A2019 offers cross platform and single point, which is why I would recommend Automation Anywhere.

I have been very impressed with the A2019 version. This version is phenomenal. 

The primary use case is data extraction: How to extract the data and run the components alongside it.

I have been using version 11 Community Edition, which is good. After coming to Bangalore and this morning session, they showed an example of A2019, which is the latest version. That is a game changer. What we did not have in the previous version has included in this version. I had a little preview of all the changes, and I'm pretty impressed by it.

Automation Anywhere has a Bot Store. E.g., you can download the bot from the Bot Store and utilize it's data extraction capabilities. You can extract unstructured data through IQ Bot. Getting unstructured data is not difficult. I once obtained an 84 page PDF file using an IQ Bot. This was just the trial version, and it was really good. I was able to get all the circuit IDs and properties that wanted in a simple CSV format. I had not seen anything like this before. When compared to other platforms, such as UiPath, they don't have these capabilities right now. They have activities like PDF extraction, but that's not good enough. That is a reason I'm referring Automation Anywhere as a game changer.

I would like more cognitive abilities, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. E.g., if I see you, your facial recognition has to be there. If I send your picture, it should tell me your name, where you are from, and when I met you because we forget people. It should have these type of capabilities. 

Stability is a key factor. It is pretty stable. After they launch the cloud version, whether you are in my country or I'm in your country, it won't matter. You can access it anywhere. You won't need a version to download or install. 

Right now, I have it on my laptop, but when it is on the cloud, it will be more stable. Anybody will be able to access it. That's the beauty of it.

The scalability is pretty impressive. You can scale it from one computer to hundreds of computers. You don't even need Citrix. Once it is on the cloud, you can access it from anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere technical support is pretty good. I would rate them as an eight out of 10. I'm giving them an eight out of 10 because this community is still developing right now. I will not say it's fully developed. We are in a market where other contenders are also there. It is a very neck and neck competition between UiPath, Blue Prism. and Automation Anywhere. Between them, somebody is good at some things, and somebody is good at others. That is why I cannot give the support a 10 out of 10. However, because of this product's features, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a 10 out of 10.

My sales team did the decision-making. We are in negotiations for some other clients, as well.

Our previous programs have run successfully with it.

I've used UiPath as a developer. Now, I'm using Automation Anywhere as well. When I compare both, the biggest point is cognitive abilities. The IQ Bot is the best in class. You won't find that even in UiPath. 

All the available versions of competing automation tools are available, UiPath or Automation Anywhere. Download them and think about it, then decide for yourself. 

Cost cutting is the primary reason to look at getting an RPA solution. Humans are not intended to do just manual work. If I give that manual work of 14 minutes, 30 minutes. or one hour to some bot, and it can do the work without any problems. That time is now yours, and you can do something else. You can build relationships, you can have a friendship with somebody, or you can do something nice. This is what we humans were intended to do.

I'm certified in a UiPath, and now I'm going to gain my certification in Automation Anywhere.

We have processes in our company that are manual and redundant. We need to reduce the time and improve the efficiency simultaneously. These will be the best use cases for automation.

We picking processes that are more manual and consume more time. We pick a case where it consumes more time when an individual does it. When an automation platform with a bot does it, less time is needed and it is more efficient. This way we have reduced manpower on these manual tasks. Individual workers can then pick up other work instead.

It is very user-friendly. Nobody has to sit down and work on coding. We have a drag and drop option where anybody can understand it. That is the advantage of Automation Anywhere.

We don't foresee any issues with the stability. The support team has given us their guarantee.

The processes that we have chosen in the initial phase are limited to certain regions. We have categorized them to phase one, two, and so on. Once phase one is good to go and we get good results out of it, we have plans to scale up to phase two, then so on. We have categorized the processes into regions, like Asia, US, EU, etc. Going forward, we will be implementing globally.

We are getting good support from the Automation Anywhere team. We have not found any cases or issues until now. They have been implementing and supporting us is in a very good way. 

As of now, we have developers who are supporting us from Automation Anywhere. They are very knowledgeable enough to understand our process requirements and build a solution for us. They interact with our SMEs on a regular basis. Once we implement the process into production, we will need continuous support from the technical team. We look forward to working with the same support going forward.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Giving access to our internal websites was not simple during the initial setup, but we could track the issue. After sometime, everything was streamlined. We now know for our next automation project with Automation Anywhere what has to be done because we have better clarity.

We have seen ROI in terms of cost and time with a couple of our projects.

We have a couple of projects with UiPath and Blue Prism. We also took Automation Anywhere as an option. When we compare other projects on other platforms versus Automation Anywhere, the technical support we are receiving in terms of efficiency, and even that they are giving us good price. This is what we are looking for. Therefore, we have plans to move our other projects, which are on UiPath and Blue Prism, onto Automation Anywhere.

We work in a very complex type of environment. We do a lot of data analytics and strategy consulting work. The work that we have automated so far is our legacy suite of applications, doing all the reporting, data extraction from different web sources, and collating the information, then publishing to websites.

We use RPA or the Automation Anywhere tool to orchestrate the whole process. We combine it and integrate it with other API and Python solutions to help get the data from a particular source, whether it be an FTP source or AWS environment. Then, we make those validations using Excel. After that, we do our QCs and validations, then publish or submit the reports.

We partner with a few other vendors as well for different use cases based on the type of clients that we are working with.

We feel our team is more involved in the whole process to give better ideas and give new use cases to help automate things. Things that were very repetitive and manual, such as creating daily checklists and reports, those have been reduced considerably. Our team is very happy about that.

Automation Anywhere has a very rich and easy to use interface. This makes it very intuitive. As an organization, we give training to business users to help them automate themselves. It is an easy to go, create your own scripts, and logic. The typical commands which they have in the workbench are very helpful for us.

New versions keep coming up. The challenge for us is to have the downtime to do the migrations. This could be improved upon. We would like fewer version changes and upgrades happening to the application. While the downtime is not that much, depending on the business processes, there are times few critical processes are running on a daily or hourly basis. We would expect the downtime to be even less for them.

There are a few internal applications that we have where Automation Anywhere needs to be added. We need to get those applications embedded so the integration process between those applications is smooth. E.g., With a Citrix type of environment or VDI environment, we have not been able to get the right information. We have to use the coordinates. Recently. we attended a session and realized that they have come up with an IQ Bot and computer vision technology. Therefore, we have some use cases which we want to leverage.

Our focus would be for them to keep innovating for more intelligent solutions which can merge your text to speech. These types of solutions, along with other ML and AI capabilities, can solve for the larger objective and typically RPA platforms are not able to do. The type of applications that we use are very large and different. They are not the typical ERP systems or systems which normal organizations would have. If they could bring AI and ML capabilities onboard, this would help me rate them even higher.

The stability is great. We have very few issues. 

We just migrated to version 11. Though, I don't know the exact version. It was a seamless experience. The whole integration and migration has been very smooth for us.

Scalability is an important aspect of it. We believe they have been doing it pretty well. Earlier, we were doing everything as an on-premise implementation. Later, we moved to an AWS environment, hosting everything on our cloud machine. This helped us scale the whole solution and reach our multiple clients in projects that we were engaged in very quickly.

We believe the A2019 version is meant to scale the tool to a larger audience.

If we have issues, the Automation Anywhere team is always available to support us, as there are account managers and customer support managers.

We use the technical support a lot. We have our own dedicated tech support. Whenever an issue arises, we raise a ticket and it gets resolved based on criticality - within a few hours to 24 hours is usually the turnaround time. They are very helpful in terms of setting up conversations and meetings to understand an issue, then take it forward for resolution.

We already had a process excellence transformation team doing the typical operation excellence type of work process improvement and process re-engineering. We decided that it would be better to help us take the leap of automation and go from the third or fourt-generation improvements we were doing since those were long-time deployments and bring a change. We were looking for faster adoption, an easy to deploy solution, and achieve a quick ROI. This is also sellable to our leadership and makes sense to take to a larger scale. That was the whole idea.

We first thought of implementing internal system automations, legacy application automations, and Excels automations. However, when we realized the potential of this technology, and how it integrates along with its seamless environment setup. That was the go ahead for us, and we started our journey.

Initially, because we started everything in-house (did not partner with a consulting firm or the typical technology integrators), it was difficult. Then, we started learning the architecture and environment. Automation Anywhere gave us a dedicated support to set up the whole journey for us in the initial few years. It went from strength to strength after that.

We built up the whole capability in-house. Automation Anywhere helped us with the setup.

From the second year onward, ROI is achieved, which is a great thing because year-over-year you are accruing those benefits.

We have deployed it across multiple processes: reporting, data management, or sales strategy work. We have achieved a scale where we are in a position to close $1M of benefits.

The number of licenses that required when evaluating a solution was not a hundred bot licenses or Bot Runner machines. At that time, we were not looking at scale and that is where Automation Anywhere helped us.

Including the AWS setup and everything per license, it costs us around $10,000 on an annual basis. I believe that is pretty reasonable considering the teams that we have. 

We evaluated the top four vendors: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath, or Kryon. But, we realized the type of use cases that we had and wanted to try first to deploy them. Those vendors had enterprise large-scale license models in place, but we wanted a use-per-license type of system and support structure with its communities. Automation Anywhere reached out to us, and said, “We will do a free PoC and pilots for you. If you feel the solution is suiting your set of use cases, then go ahead and purchase.”

We set up the whole team and evaluated a few vendors. What prompted us to go with Automation Anywhere was our typical use case that we cater to. They were not run-of-the-mill, large volume, highly repeatable work. We have processes where only two to three people are doing the work and not many volumes coming in that.

We wanted our vendor to understand our challenges. We had multiple meetings before Automation Anywhere could understand what work we do. Then, it was like, "Aha." So, it took us time to reach where we are, but we have now partnered with them, and it's going great for us.

1. See how your use case fits with the solution. A few uses cases may be good for you.
2. Take a look at the cost model. Do you want to go for a big bang approach or large-scale implementation?
3. Customer support: Organizations fail to understand when you have deployed bots in the production systems, and they are up and running, that you need a very robust, strong support system. This way if any issues come up regarding the application/solution, teams are there to support you.

Primary use case of Automation Anywhere is financial accounting reporting use cases.

We use unattended bots for all the financial reporting. We have also done some use cases in master data management (MDM). These are the things that we did early last year.

For the next year, we will be primarily focused on cognitive automation. We've already started with IQ Bot exploration. We will be looking into the new version of IQ Bot.

We released ERP, improving our workload balancing. For example, for each of our employees, we have release almost 400 hours of critical repeated efforts.

Automation Anywhere is very good for rapid development. It has all the capabilities in terms of giving a stable automation framework. It has very cool technical capabilities, like MetaBots, dev controls, and object cloning. 

We encountered issues during the upgrade of the framework. We were using the older framework of version 10.3.5. When we were upgrading, we were having a few issues in terms of getting the proper hardware and software prerequisites. For some things, like getting the controls of some of the application's tools, we were getting Automation Anywhere's help.

The operation happened both in hardware and software. There was some amount of friction in terms of technical and hardware operations. In terms handling capturing the controls, that's where we used the help of tech support.

We are looking forward to the release of cloud/web automation, which has yet to be released.

We having most of the use cases rely on Automation Anywhere. However, we face some challenges in terms of RPA implementation with Citrix.

Whatever use case we have deployed in production, we have found nil in terms of stability issues. 

For scalability, we are still working on the bot utilization framework and have created additional frameworks apart from the existing automation framework.

Tech support is one of its primary features, far better than the other RPA tools. We have been able to fix some big technical issues that we came across.

Initially, we were having a few challenges in terms of getting the approval from InfoSec since we wanted some Veracode reportt from our CSM. That took some time. Initially, we were having open issues with the older version, in terms of the Veracode code report. These were high-end critical. Eventually, we were able to get the final report after the approval from Infosec. Then, we were able to install all of the software to our Olam framework.

We started with an integrator, then went directly with Automation Anywhere. Our experience was good. They started by helping us work with the software and understand Automation Anywhere's capabilities.

We have released at least $400 to $500 a month during our peak period, so we have really seen ROI with the product.

I think it's $5,500 per license.

We had some RPA tool implementation strategies. We looked at all the tools and their features. We did a brainstorm session with all the tools and found out the nuances between them. We identified Automation Anywhere as the tool that we should implement in Olam.

We compared Automation Anywhere with UiPath, Blue Prism, OpenSpan, and WorkFushion.

Automation Anywhere is one of the easiest tools that developers can use for development. It takes them only a small amount of time. It has good stability in terms of implementing the automation use cases. We also found Automation Anywhere as a pioneer in terms of RPA implementation.

Automation Anywhere is a pioneer in RPA tools. I would recommend Automation Anywhere. Automation use cases will be rapidly implemented through it. It has a good amount of stability and cool features that can be robustly developed with the help of developers as well as business people.

We are looking forward to using IQ Bot as well as attended automation in the coming year. These are features that are available, but have not used yet. We are trying to do a PoC to start and implement them into our daily use cases.

Currently, we are focusing more on finance, shared services, and interpretive related ideas. For accounting and finance statistic, we have reconciliation specific processes, such as rates uploads into systems. The majority of our development is on SAP and Excel. We are focusing on the financial services area, so our use cases are more related to finance and accounting. These are the use cases developed by the development team.

We are using an on-premise deployment model.

The main agenda for using the RPA is to see how we can get the benefit from reducing human capacity as well as quality output. These two are the major focus for us and what we are achieving.

Timeline-wise, it normally takes a long time to develop. With the AA and RPA concepts and their ready-to-use components, we can deliver a bot within couple of days or within a week time frame based on the use case.

It is easy to use and developer-friendly. The development time is very short. If any system needs to be changed or any functionality needs to be incorporated to any of the technology, it usually will be a long process, like months. With this innovative tool's automation, it is very dynamic, easy to develop, and deliver results quickly. With some of our use cases, we were able to deliver within the time frame of two to three weeks, which is the biggest plus with this tool.

There are good MetaBots available in the Bot Store. We were able to leverage them, as well as established our own reusable components. Considering that, it is easy to add on any software or applications that sits in the system.

We would like to have the Excel plug-in. We have a challenge with unattended bots in development which will be deployed on virtual machines. End users ask, "Why can't we run the bots whenever we need?" The new concept for getting attended bots as well as the Excel plug-in will solve this problem, but we'll wait for 2019 version, which may be a better solution for the business.

More structured and unstructured data collection will be a challenge. While we have the IQ  Bot tool, the success rate at the beginning will be lower. It will be around 20 to 30 percent at the start because you need to train the bot at regular intervals. Of course, this depends on the data. This area could use be improvement.

The marketing strategy is directed toward end users. These leads to confusion in the organization regarding, "Who needs to develop?" Is it IT or the business? This causes friction within the business. Whatever the approach, it is important to show how to get the most benefit out of the tool. There should be a clear roles for IT and the business when using the tool. This way teams and structure can be better established in a business.

For attended automation, there are still questions to be answered: How it is going to maintain the queue? E.g., there are 20 users who want to process their own processes, and when they trigger things, how will the Control Room react? How will bot work distribution happen? These things still need to be looked into, but conceptual-wise, attended automation is really good.

It is confusing: Who needs to develop the bot? The business or IT. At the basic level, the bots can be created. However, once they are moved into production, you have to make sure that the bot is stable and running 24/7 without any issues. Therefore, a lot of care is required due to the amount of controlling mechanisms required.

There are a few problems with deployment and maintenance. When it moves to other systems, the consistency will be somewhat lost.

RPA is decently established and stable as the market is coming up with new features. However, the unstable area is more the IT part of it where a lot of research still needs to be done, especially in the case of artificial intelligence. 

When we run bots, sometimes the systems will go down. Maybe it is because the same functionality worked once or even regularly, but then all of a sudden there will be an issue. It might be a network, latency, or some other issues. Still bot stability needs improvement. These are very rare situations. It works most the time, but one time it will fail and we don't know why.

When I talk about RPAs, it is to say, "Can this problem be solved with RPA?" Scalability-wise, we are in good shape. 

In terms of AI incorporation, this type of scalable incorporation would be benefit everyone. The trend looks like we are going to reach to this point in a good manner.

We were able to put more than 40 bots into production. There are around 20 more in progress. On average, we were able to save around 25,000 hours of manual efforts.

The technical support's response is very good. They gave back solutions quickly. We haven't face many challenges when using the tool. So, we haven't interacted much with the technical team, maybe two or three instances. 

We looked into moving into RPA because it was the trend in the industry.

We do regular acquisitions which leads to a lot of duplicate roles and resources along with similar activities. With this approach, we can streamline our processes and bring uniform processes across the organization. We have been able to establish this. If we use the bots on a lot of manual efforts, it will reduces effort. Going forward, we can use the bots in a better manner by using them for the strategy of delivery and appointments.

We started this journey with a PoC. For three months, we tried understanding the tool and its capabilities. 

The initial setup is not complex for the tool setup. The struggle points are establishing the right mechanisms to identify the candidates and prioritizing things. 

In April, we started the pilot. By July, we had the software as well as the use cases that we needed. We got the licenses in July or August. It took us at least a quarter to establish systems and resources. Then, we started delivering the bots from December 2018. It took six to eight months' time frame from PoC to first bot deployment.

For our bot creation process:

A business user, whoever is doing the manual process currently, will send their request with the details of the use case. Those details will be assessed by IT and the business functional groups to measure what will be the man-hour savings. Also, is it a possible candidate for RPA?Based on those measurements, we identify candidates for RPA, then we determine if they meet the current threshold of 500 hours. If it is more than 500 hours, we consider that a candidate for RPA. Based on that criteria, we identify and prioritize it. Afterward, it comes to the development team for development.

If we had been alone during the initial setup, might not have been that successful. However, when we partnered with the other groups, like consulting firms, then we were able to get the right mechanisms in place within a short time.

We did the deployment in-house.

We have a good dashboard to measure ROI. Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent.

To measure ROI, whenever we get a use case from the business when we do an assessment, one of the factor that we capture is the time saving. We try to measure and apply the country rates for the locations where they are doing manual efforts. We measure the time savings by applying the country rates and deriving the hours and value.

The time that it takes to develop and deliver is within two to three weeks.

It has good licensing costs which are average for the market.

We did try out UiPath, which is a good solution. 

We also look at Blue Prism.

We like Automation Anywhere's end user experience. We thought Automation Anywhere was the better solution for developing bots in the long run. It is a centralized tool because of its Control Room. It makes sense to have a solution where everything is in a centralized repository. AA has a more future-looking perspective which will help them in the long run.

We currently are not evaluating any other vendors.

When we saw the tool capabilities, we were so excited. We tried to start using them but we needed to have the right structure and mechanisms in place from the beginning to identify the use case for prioritizing. This plays a major role. 

If you are a big organization with a center of excellence, you need to bring all the people together. The establishment will play a bigger role than just developing and delivering bots. Developing and delivering bots is a very small portion, which is doable by any individual who has a basic technical background. To be successful in your journey, having the right structure upfront will help.

We experimented a little bit with IQ Bots, but we didn't see much use cases in this line currently.

A lot of people interact with RPA and the industry is really excited about it. However, you need to pick the right candidate to be successful in your journey, along with the right framework for the development. This will give you a good output. This is what the business needs to test. Pick a solution based on the organization's needs as well as the right approach. Have an assessment with an approach framework will help.