Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use case is anything that is structured data and highly repetitive. We also see a lot of gain right now in paperwork, so AR, AP, and record to report. The cognitive product seems to be doing a really good job, and the pace of that going fantastic.

We have done a little bit of everything: 

• Oracle
• Salesforce.com
• Using Citrix, we did an order to cash.
• In the IQ Bot world, we seem to be doing a lot of AR and invoice-to-pay (those are the two that we see the most). 

We will be moving into medical billing next. Since we have done some really good prototypes with medical records, I think we are ready to go there next. 

One of the largest use cases that we have about a $10 billion company which does something like 20 thousand AR invoices a month. They had a solution in place. We actual replaced that IQ Bot, and we are hosting it out of San Jose right now. We are getting some phenomenal straight through processing. So, we took what would have taken 30 to 35 people and are able to do that little bit more accurately with about six.

Believe it or not, the first client that we ever did was a Citrix client. We cut our teeth on Citrix around the RPA product. It has some quirks to it, but it is becoming much better. So, we have quite a few instances of that Citrix machine in production at the client. 

The most valuable feature of our solution is the cognitive computing because that is coming onto stream a lot faster than you would think. What used to be in the middle of, "Can this be done or not?", is becoming, "It can be done." We are getting some incredible straight through processing rates with AR around healthcare and financial services. 

Integrating RPA and cognitive with other solutions is relatively straightforward. Originally, it came out that Automation Anywhere did screen scraping, but the technology is way beyond that now, where you can do object cloning, even moving into API. We have even coded a couple of APIs into the applications that most people will use. We actually do that now instead of going through a screen. 

Our impressions of IQ Bot are that it goes relatively fast at the pace that it is being advanced every six months, which is good. I believe that we have a couple of the largest installations of it in the U.S. right now. So, we are processing somewhere in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of AP and AR invoices. We actually have robotic operation centers on the West Coast and the East Coast. 

The IQ Bot has room for improvement. It is not that it doesn't do a lot of things today, it is just that it can do so much more. I think that that product is going to go crazy.

The next big thing that you are going to see is the analytics engine. I think people finally realize that you can do analytics on what the bots are doing. I think that you will see that come alive in the next six to nine months.

If you write them correctly and have good architectures internally, then scalability is relatively straightforward. This also applies to reliability. However, you sort of need to write a few before you get to this point. As more of these go to production, these are going to be the two big drivers.

Probably one of the faster scales that we have done is we did a prototype with IQ Bot that had about 500 invoices and a 1000 vendors. In about two and a half to three months time, start to finish, we went from the original amount to 15,000 invoices and 2500 vendors. I would suggest in that 90 to 120 day time frame, if you have done things properly and your architecture is good, that you should be able to scale at any pace that you care to.

We have seen both straightforward and complex initial setups. If you are behind a firewall, it is relatively easy to setup. When you are hosting the application, that is when it is a little more complicated (we actually host applications for people). You need to talk to the IT department, as you are actually outside of their firewall, then you are coming back inside their cloud. 

Depending on the architecture, it can be relatively straightforward, and it can be put up in just a day or two. Whereas, if you are hosting it and coming back in, it is a little more complicated.

What we did was we took the Automation Anywhere ROI calculations and added quite a few things to it. We actually ask 15 to 18 questions around process time, number of systems used, how people, and how many hours. Ultimately, we can stack rank those ROIs on a process, then we typically try to start with the largest ROIs first. So far, with what we have done, we have seen has been relatively close (as it is almost impossible to hit the ROI exactly), but the ROI on the product is good.   

No one is balking at the cost. They are market rates and will change, but no one is saying, "That is ridiculous or impossible." They are saying, "Show me the ROI and prove that the cost is accurate."

One of the things that will be good for the community will be to get the free version to download, which came out just a month ago called Community Edition. So, you can actually download it and try it for yourself. 

Ease of use is something that you need to get trained on. Once you have gone through the proper training, it is relatively straightforward to use. There is quite a bit of online training on their website, as well as in the Community Edition. After 30 to 40 hours with it, you should be pretty good with it.

One of the promises that we made to Automation Anywhere when we started was that everyone in our company would be trained and certified. Even as a Board Member, I am certified. 

Bot creation is relatively straightforward. Probably within 20 hours, you should be pretty good at it. There are some nuances around it though that I think separate first time developers versus seasoned developers. What you will see in the marketplace is how easy it is to develop one compared to how easy it is to develop one that runs in production 99.9 percent of the time.

Across the board, I would give it a nine out of ten. There are some areas that they can move up into, but they are working on it right now. I am assuming that everybody is working on it, so we will stay in that nine range.

Go do your homework. Call some of the larger clients because they seem to face the largest problems. Automation Anywhere has five to ten gigantic accounts that you can just talk to. Ultimately, I would just be careful in the way that you implement it. It is like any tool, if you know what you are doing, "Great," and if not, then you can make a mess. Therefore, be careful and know what you are doing.

We use it for backoffice processes. We are part of a shared service, so we do billing, credit, collections, and those types of processes.

We have done close to 50 projects in the last three years. AA improves our speed as far as moving files goes. It also helps in getting people prepared to work on a daily basis. We have a lot of jobs that run at night so that when people come in in the morning, everything's ready to go for them.

For example, we have two very separate systems which need to talk to each other. It sounds very simple, but we have a job that takes a file from one system and loads it into another. But it has to do that close to 1,500 times in the middle of the night. It's a job that used to be done manually by 150 people in 150 different markets. Now, it's something that's done during the night, and when they come in it's all completed. So it was a very simple task, but there was a lot of volume. It has saved everybody a lot of time and it has saved a huge amount of manpower. It saves us thousands of hours a month.

It's also very useful as far as interacting with employees. Employees can kick off jobs on an as-needed basis rather than scheduling them. It's always very helpful to have a tool that's interactive with the employees.

One of the most valuable features is object cloning, the ability to get into websites and do things faster.

I also like its usability. It's pretty easy to learn, pretty quick to get things taken care of with it. Our average developer is up within 30 days. We have our own training program. We don't use anything from AA for training. We've been doing it long enough that we created our own.

In addition, the user interface is easy to use. It's fairly user-friendly when you don't know anything about it and open it up for the first time.

The scheduling is a little difficult at times. Rather than setting up individual instances, it would be really nice if we had the ability to set repetitive jobs easily. Right now, if you want a job to run every 15 minutes, you have to schedule it a lot of times. I'd rather have the ability to just say 'run every 15 minutes.'

There could be some improvements made in the Control Room. I really like the concept of the application that they've got, so you can now access the Control Room from a mobile device, but there's only a lot of potential, there's not a lot of functionality there yet. That would be a great place for it to be able to expand, so you could have full functionality of the Control Room through a mobile device.

And in general, I would like to the solution to get into more machine-learning/AI. I know that the IQ Bots are looking to go there, but there's definitely a lot more potential there as well.

We haven't had any problems with the actual application going down. We really haven't had any issues. We have issues with third-party products going up and down, but we've never had AA just stop.

We're a small user, so we haven't had any problem with scalability. We've talked to a lot of people who have used it on a much larger scale. For us, it's very easy to add TaskBots. We're more than satisfied with the scalability.

We're always looking for expansion of the solution within our company. We use most of the commands available. There are very few that aren't applicable to what we're doing. We're always trying to get the solution into other departments within the organization itself. We use it a lot within the shared services, the area which we own. But outside of the company, we have several projects that are not within the shared service and we're always looking to talk to the other departments and get them involved.

We have 25 bots, meaning 25 licenses. Our core team that does development has four people plus a project manager.

Tech support has greatly improved. Three years ago we didn't necessarily have the best experience, but over the years they've gotten better.

As a side note, we go through a third-party first, through ISG. That's through how our service model works. Then ISG gets AA involved if they can't answer the question. We don't necessarily directly contact AA. Most of it's through the third-party provider, and then AA eventually.

ISG is great. We really haven't had a lot of problems. When we implemented version 11.3, we went so quickly - we went with it right when it came out - that there were a few questions that ISG wasn't aware of yet because it was so new. We went to AA through ISG and they were able to answer the questions right away. But for the most part, ISG is very on top of it, and we don't need to engage AA.

This is our first go in the RPA world. We had an internal resource, somebody within the company who had seen Automation Anywhere used in other companies. That person introduced us to the concept and, from there, we did some research and saw that that's where the market was going.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I did it myself and I'm not an IT guy, so it wasn't super-difficult. It took me a couple of hours, including configuration. Our IT team set up the actual virtual machines themselves, but the installation was done completely by me.

Our implementation strategy was that we started super-small. At that time, we started with five bots and the Control Room. It wasn't overly difficult. I just followed the documentation provided to install the service and configure everything.

Our initial project had to have an ROI, and that's why we started small. We have never not had a yearly ROI. We've always greatly exceeded the cost of, or the investment in, the tool. In terms of how much it's saving us, I don't want to be quoted on the exact amount, but it's more than millions of dollars a year.

We purchased AA through ISG and have done both annual renewals and a multi-year renewal, the latter recently. It has been very easy to add bots on an as-needed basis.

There are no additional costs from Automation Anywhere, but there is obviously the infrastructure costs for the VMs.

We definitely evaluated lots of different options at the time. Of course, it came down to Blue Prism or to AA. We went with AA because of the feature set, the way that the development was laid out. And support was also a factor. We were much more interested in States-side support.

Any company in today's environment would be foolish not to implement RPA. There are definitely different types of use cases where you could spread it out amongst the organizations and let them do their own thing. We have chosen to keep it centralized and have been pretty successful in doing it. But everybody should be using an RPA in some capacity.

I would absolutely recommend specifically Automation Anywhere.

Our experience with the solution has been a ten out of ten. I can't speak to the other tools because we haven't used them, but we're very satisfied with what we have.

We mainly use the bot to make our operation more efficient, save the effort of human beings, and reduce the overall cost to the organization.

Automation Anywhere has improved our organization by allowing us to reduce the number of new hires, enable us to keep the same workforce, and increase productivity.

The product is very precise, and very efficient. We run bots almost five days a week. We just tell the bot what they have to do and it is always accurate and precise, no issues.

I believe version 11 is much better than the previous version we were using.

They should make the product smarter. The bot we use right now is kind of fundamentally basic loop-based. We really want to see a little bit more advanced capability, that way we can undertake more comprehensive tasks.

The scalability, I think will be feasible, but so far we don't have any plans to increase the bots to the large scale of the operation.

So far, the bots run very stable and have little problems, we see the bots becoming more stable every day.

We can define certain procedure we already know, but we continue develop more user cases, which bring from the other end users.

I cannot say how much exactly we have made regarding ROI, but we can see the saving down the road.

We have a few licenses. They cost roughly $10,000 each.

I think understanding the product is very important. People have to understand what the bot can do before they implement one in their environment. That is very important.

We have Automation Anywhere version 11. We put all the bots on the virtual machine. We run continuously every week.

When it comes to attended automation, we try to introduce more use cases and let more people understand what the bot can do, and expand the capacity of the bot, so it can serve our organization.

We have many solutions, like Data Rebate, for example. We need to compare this information, regardless of the information that we save in the Experian databases, against information in government websites, in order to ensure that everything is up to date. The information of the company address, for example, took around 47 minutes to compare, while using RPA it now takes around 10 minutes for each one.

Automation Anywhere has improved our company a lot, because we are currently trying to leverage automation in different departments to allow employees to work where more human intervention is needed. The SLA of some tasks that we need to deliver to some clients has improved greatly. The productivity has increased a lot in my organization.

Interaction with websites is the feature most valuable to us. Most of the systems are web-based, so using a very accurate web-based identification like objects, extracting information from tables inside websites, and checking websites differences using MetaBots is very helpful with Internet Explorer. This allows us to separate the functionality by using an object where we store all the assets, or screenshots of the webpages, instead of changing the logic of a website. It's very useful.

Ease of use of this solution depends on how complete you want to go. From my perspective as a system engineer, the curve was very, very low because you have a lot of understanding about technology. On the other hand, we have examples of people that the curve was a little bit high, but coaching them to improve their knowledge about Automation Anywhere and how friendly the interface is right now is very useful.

MetaBots and Control Room may have some room for improvement.

The bot store has a large amount of pre-designed bots. I made some tests related to language, browser scene, and image recognition. It was very nice.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as seven out of ten. There are a lot of things that need to be improved, especially related to the Control Room, but you can develop and scale with this tool very, very fast.

Our primary use case is banking/financial. Processes we have automated include loans, ledgers, mortgage loans, and even some of the record management systems.

In some of our use cases, people were spending more than three hours per day just generating reports. And then we created an automation for this and it reduced the time to 30 minutes. It improves employee productivity so they can use their time in other areas.

I like the way it works with structured data in the back office and the way it does repetitive work.

In terms of ease of use for developers, we're able to create reusable components. We don't want people to have to rebuild things from scratch. In this way, developers can take the reusable components and complete their development processes more quickly.

The bot creation process is pretty straightforward. Anyone can go in and learn it easily, and then they can build a bot. I like it.

When it comes to integrating the solution with other applications, there are some challenges. For some third-party solutions, there are no direct interconnections. For example, there were no direct connections with SAP systems. So, we had to create connectivity between Automation Anywhere and some third-party solutions. They have now improved that situation a lot and we can connect SAP and other systems as well.

If they want to sustain their position in the market, they have to be flexible, working on how we can integrate with third-parties, working on a machine-learning product. People are expecting that and it would be really helpful.

From the IQ Bot perspective, frankly speaking, they still have to improve a lot. I got IQ Bot training in San Jose. My expectation from a straight, technical, architectural point of view was that I would be able to create my own algorithm and integrate it. But with IQ Bot, I am not able to integrate anything. It is already well-defined, so I have to use that particular option only. I know I can not go with any other machine-learning platform. I hope they will be coming out with version 12 where we can integrate it with Python algorithms and other stuff. It might only be in the future, it might only be on the roadmap. But as of now, it is lacking a lot in that area. We are expecting, for most of the documentation, things like tags, that there would be a checkbox option. That's lacking in IQ Bot.

The stability has increased a lot. When we started with version 10.2, there was a lot of instability. There was no way we could keep the bots active, there were scenarios where it became disconnected. There is also the code deployment perspective and a lot of other angles. People are always only thinking from the business perspective, but as a technical architect, I think about operational effectiveness and how they can improve the product's maturity.

The stability has improved a lot.

However, when upgrading, they changed their internal architecture. They moved it to a JT Java platform. When moving, some of the existing features did not work in the new version. It might be that they have to improve their regression testing to improve clients' satisfaction. It can happen that what is running in production currently, if I move to a new version, suddenly is not working tomorrow. People are not happy with that and say, "I want to roll back to the older version." They are not able to use the new features.

When moving to a new version, they have to think about what features people are using and what kind of impact there will be. Small business users will be fine, those who have ten bots or 15 bots. But there are organizations like mine that have around 700 to 1,000 bots, and that makes changes very difficult to handle. It could be that 10,000 tasks are using something and if that thing is changed it will be hard to update. I might have to spend a year on that. People will never accept that.

Scalability-wise, they have increased it a lot, based on the clustering method. As a technical architect, I'm going with always-on production and data centers. That means that if any data center goes down - there is a natural disaster or something else that happens - how do you make it such that you can bring up another data center? I'm coming up with a design for that based on the latest version, version 11.

The initial setup is very simple. It's Windows-based and it's a straightforward installation. We used to say they need to come up with a silent installation option, with the previous version. But now, with version 11, they have introduced, even at the server level, a silent installation. That means we can make it automated instead of manually installing it.

We measure the ROI of automated processes by how much of a benefit we're getting from it. We look at how much time it takes and how many robots we're using and we include the licensing and operations costs. Finally, we take into account how much faster the performance of the bot is, compared to how long it took to do the process before automation.

We have saved time and money, but when people think of going with RPA they cannot expect that they will immediately see ROI. They have to sustain and increase the RPA options. They will have to spend a minimum of one or two years increasing their use cases for automation. Then they will see a good ROI. They should not expect, within three months, to say, "Hey, I have automated, where is the ROI?"

All organizations have a certain strategy or checklist. In this case, management will think first about licensing cost, about the total cost of investment. After that, they will think about the product's features and functionality. They will also look at support. They will consider the use cases, the current processes they have identified already, and based on all that they will decide whether to go with Automation Anywhere or another product.

In terms of our bot creation process, people come to me and say, "I have a process. How do we automate it?" We need to understand if it's a cognitive use case or a straightforward use case. If it's straightforward, we tell them we'll use this product and build it for them with four to six weeks of development. Then it can go to production. If it's cognitive, then we really need to understand it better. We need to use a third-party product, like Kofax or maybe an IQ Bot if it is fit for the scenario. Based on that, it takes some time and then we'll move it to production.

We have a process architecture review committee where we review all the processes. We cannot blindly go forward with all the processes that have scope for automation because it's all licensing cost. We need to think about whether we can automate a given process with any other IT automation solution, like scripting or macros. If that is not possible then we have a fit for RPA. Then we have to go through our checklist, walk through the use cases, and look at the percentage of the automation scope: Is it a 100 percent automation scope or 80 percent or 20 percent? We need to to know if there is any manual validation or manual intervention required and how that is handled.

Initially, we failed with the Citrix automation where we have a lot of use cases. We ran into a lot of limitations with Automation Anywhere in version 10.5. But with version 11, they have AI Sense which we can use for Citrix applications. We are currently exploring this option.

I have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and I have advanced professional certification from Automation Anywhere, which I completed for version 10.5. I'm also doing it for version 11. I also have an official certificate for IQ Bots.

At the moment, for us, everything is on-premise. We're not ready to go with cloud. So we have to build our own platform. We have to build our own bots.

I would rate this solution at seven out of ten. They have to improve on the product's maturity level. When they are introducing new versions, they have to conserve the existing commands and features, so that they work when we move to the new version. And they also have to come up with more flexibility, so their solution can integrate with our scripting and our own algorithms. That will make it easy to convince our business areas to increase the adoption of RPA.

We use it to augment our staff and remove some of the manual processes in our business.

Our team, consists of two college kids who are doing almost all the work, along with a couple of business people to help teach them what is going on. The ease of use has been pretty simple, or they would not have been able to catch onto it so quickly.

With the new regulation on China tariffs, we were hit with a regulation that we weren't prepared to take on. By using a few bots, we were able to satisfy the requirements for that regulation without going into programs and making changes.

We have automated our China tariffs, some invoicing stuff, a lot of processes for finance, and some mundane closing tasks.

We have had a lot of great success with attended automation. The business has taken a hold and embraced it. So, we're very excited about it.

I would like more with OCR and data capture. We are partnering with IBM to help bridge this gap, but Automation Anywhere should continue to expand on their product line and provide these capabilities, as well.

The installation and setup for the bot runners and bot creators need improvement. The installation and setup for the control room is also a difficult task. Therefore, improving the ease of implementation would help out a lot.

We've not had any problems with the platform going down. Right now, it's been very stable.

We're still pretty small, so we haven't had a need to scale out too much. 

We have seen the roadmap for scaling out, and it doesn't look to be too difficult. So, we should& have a problem with it.

We have only had the tool for about eight months. From start to finish, we have put over a dozen bots in place, some of which are highly complex and took a lot of weeks to properly deploy.

The tech support for Automation Anywhere has been really good, so far. We haven't had to call them very much, but when we have, we have received a good response.

This was our first bot solution. We did do our research and looked to our partners to see what they were using, then created a shortlist. This product was on everyone's shortlist. Also, they partner well with IBM, and we have partnered with IBM for years. This made it very attractive and was the key selling point.

The initial setup was pretty complex. Everyone who offers this platform is still trying to find the right tools which go with it. Without an integrator, we would have had a lot of difficulty getting it set up ourselves. 

As this product matures, it will continue to get easier to set up.

We used an integrator (BP3) for the deployment. They've been tremendous to work with, satisfying all of our needs.

We measure our ROI mostly by time saved, from a real person doing a task versus a bot. In some cases, we have been able to recoup revenue because processes weren't being followed correctly. Because the bot was doing the task the same way every time, we have recouped some revenue that we had lost in the past.

We save 34,000 hours of time per year and have recouped up to $6000 in lost revenue.

We have a three-year contract with Automation Anywhere.

UiPath was also on our shortlist.

Every piece of software has its goods and bads. For your organization, you have to ensure that the goods outweigh the bads for your use case. This solution has been great for our company in almost every way possible. Obviously, we made a good choice. Therefore, I would recommend taking a good, hard look at Automation Anywhere as your bot platform.

With the latest version, I know they have improved the UI. That will already be a big help,

Return of investment has been pretty easy, so it has not been a problem with getting funding for this solution. Our executive team was immediately involved, where I know with most IT projects, they really don't care until they see the output. They had done their research, as well. So, they were really excited for us to take on this endeavor.

Our primary use case is to automate all the back-end processes, which are accounts receivables, accounts payable, automatic settlement, and a lot of processes in the supply chains. Afterwards, we move onto the front-end transactions.

It provides, not only hard benefits, but also soft benefits. This means to leave the human capital (which they are required to do); leave the human mind free of all voluminous repetitive tasks. Let the workers do the work that they are intended to do, which is thinking. The bot can work for you. There is no comparison to the human mind. 

The customer engagement is really deep, and they work with the “gemba”. They work with operations very closely. I also believe they have a good product roadmap. 

I’ve already mentioned the future of our human mind and thinking are limited. We only think in arithmetical progression, not GP.  So, I have no answer for this.

When you scale up, like on Proof of Value (PoV), it’s okay. You can have one full, dedicated person working on the site. However, when you scale up, and imagine there are 150 people including bots in an organization of 20,000 people, then they need to be loved and cared for (every single one of them). They will need much more support, because it is a new thing and it’ll never fail because of productive partners. It will fail if people on the “gemba” don’t adopt it.

We are in the Proof of Value stage, not proof of concept. Like any business, production lines, or bots, there will be outtakes that you’ll have to deal with and build up.

If you ask me, my personal belief is you can’t even begin to imagine what you can do.  You can imagine, but you are limited by your own imagination and thinking, so you can go exponentially. 

On a scale of one to ten, Automation Anywhere would be a seven to eight.  

From my point of view working in the market and examining at it, this market needs more skill sets. This market needs more bilingual people and some more process-oriented people who can understand the business processes and help the customers grow.

Every industry has its own unique business processes, but this market is short on labor, even in skills, and also in terms of people who can articulate the value of process automation. That is a value piece from Automation Anywhere’s side. These guys need to build a good team.  

There were five big criteria:

1. Cost. 
2. Features and functions. 
3. Global and local support. 
4. Customer service. 
5. Technical support. 

In our office, there was a full team with a full process and close to 10 to 15 people from procurement, technology, business, and also “gemba”, as I keep calling operations. They went into the evaluation and had a very scientific way of doing so. 

There was another partner who we felt was very close, but the edge was the customer service and the support. That was the edge.

It was very easy and simple.

We brought in a partner. However, it was very easy the way things, and if someone has moved in the industry and business processes, they can do it. It was not that difficult at all.

Of course, yes, we have seen ROI. Especially in this market, human capital is valued in an ageing society. If you don’t find skilled people, who’s going to do the job? If you remove the neutrality of people and build it through the bots, that is the best way to do.

For my company and me, we come from a good technology company. Every company is a technology company. Without technology, you cannot live. When you are building up your back-end processes, especially in the shared services, what next?

In the Asian markets, they have come to a point of maturity where labor is the normal average. Looking at China, the Philippines, Malaysia, or even India, these markets are becoming more exponentially expensive. Therefore, what is our next wave of forward industrial evolution? To me, these digital automation RPAs going into artificial intelligence and machine learning are the areas of industry that we’ll need to move into very quickly. We need to take a very conscious call in preparing ourselves for the future.

Did we try some other solutions, to that extent, of automating the right business processes? I don’t know. 

Was the solution good or bad? I don’t know. 

But the perceived value of it, either in terms of real value or dollar value, or in terms of releasing the sources to do better thinking work, those are the areas where personally I was not convinced. So, let’s try something which has a more futuristic outlook. I call it glocalization, globally present and locally present. That was the whole idea behind our inception into reality.

The moment you say you are a vendor and looking at your contract, your relationship is over. You want business partners who can help the industry. We know how to make beverages, and for example, we make the best. I hope so, and I’m confident. We need some partners who know their stuff as well, and who understand the pain points of the industry and can help with them. Those are a couple of criteria which can make you successful partnerships and business relationships, not a vendor.

I would rate this product an eight.  

If I fast forward two to three years. At that point in time, how would it look like? Maybe we have the same amount of enthusiasm, or if it we become very big, then we may become less agile. If you are small, you are more agile. The moment you become big, it goes into its own dimensions.

I’d would advise, first of all, if you are an end user like me, don’t think of yourself as a customer. You have to see your customer as your “gemba”, as the people in operations. Your product partners, implementation partners, and you are responsible for servicing the customer. Thus, it will always be a win-win game for everyone. Don’t try to put a blame on the product or the partner. You are all equally responsible, and need to put your skin in the game. Just go ahead for it. 

Foreign Language: (Japanese)

この製品を主にどのように使用していますか？

我が社の場合の主なユースケースはまず、自動バックエンド業務全般です。これは通常APつまり未払金と売掛金、それにサプライチェーンの多くがあります。後はフロントエンドコミッションです。

Automation Anywhereのどんなところに満足していますか？

顧客関与が非常に深く、彼らは現場でよく働くと思います。 業務部と密接に協働してくれます。それに製品ロードマップが良いと思います。

では、彼らと築いた関係に満足しているということですね。

当ソリューションを使用するとどのようなメリットがありますか？御社が機能する上でどのような改善をもたらしましたか？

はい、後で話しますが、大きな点の1つはハードメリットだけでなく、ソフトメリットでもあります。つまり、実際にすべき仕事に人的資本を使うことです。それは少なくとも人間の精神を大量の反復作業から解放することにつながります。彼らがやるべき仕事をする。ボットは私達のために仕事をしますが、人間の頭には及ばないと確信しています。

 には考える力を発揮させる。

当ソリューションの安定性に関して、どのような印象をお持ちですか？

それはまだです。まだ価値実証の段階で。実証実験を多く行っています。でもどんなビジネス、どんな生産ライン、どんなボットでも同じように対処して構築しなければならない支障はあります。

当ソリューションの拡張性に関して、どのような印象をお持ちですか？

それはまだです。まだ価値実証の段階で。実証実験を多く行っています。でもどんなビジネス、どんな生産ライン、どんなボットでも同じように対処して構築しなければならない支障はあります。

Automation Anywhereのテクニカルサポートを利用しなければいけなかった経験はありますか？ある場合は、サポートをどのように評価しますか？

はい。 10が最高の評価とすれば、彼らは7から8ですね。

10に達するには、何が必要ですか？さらなるサポートですか？

私の見解では、この市場は－私はこれまで様々な市場で働いてきましたが－この市場にはさらなるスキルセットが必要です。より多くのバイリンガルの人々、そしてビジネスプロセスを理解して顧客の成長を助けるプロセス指向の人々が必要ですね。

具体的な例を挙げると？ ビジネスプロセスやスキルセットについて？

どんな業界にも独自のビジネスプロセスがありますが、この市場は明らかに労働力が足りません。労働力が足りない上、スキル、それにプロセスの自動化の価値を明確に表現できる人がいません。ですから、Automation Anywhere側からの価値観で言うと、彼らは良いチームを確立させる必要があると言います。もっともっと。

もちろんです、はい。でも 拡大の余地はあります。急激に進めるための余地、そして急激に進めるなら、パートナーも同時に成長する必要があります。生態系全体が成長する必要があるので、ビジネスが成長するだけでなく、生態系が成長しなければサポートも難しくなります。

Automation Anywhereからのサポートを直接受けていますか？

そうです。直接…名前は言いませんが、製品部で指導を受けたパートナーがいました。というのは、製品を最大限に活用するためには、全機能を探索する必要がありますので。

初期セットアップはどうでしたか？簡単、それとも複雑でしたか？

とても簡単でシンプルだったと思います。

自分達で、それともパートナーを使って？

パートナーを連れてきましたが、そのままでもとても簡単だし、ビジネスプロセスで移動したことのある人になら誰にでもできます。全く難しくはありません。

当ソリューションの次のリリースに含まれていたらいいなと思うのはどのような機能ですか？

すでに言いましたが、人間の思考の将来は限られています。私達はGPではなく、自動化の進歩で考える。だからこの質問への答えはありません。

現在のバージョンで改善されると思いますか？

まだ完全に見れていないので、改善に関して答えるのは難しいです。

スケールアップをすると、価値実証でのように、現場で働く専任スタッフを1人増員することはできますが、その場合、規模を拡大して2万人の組織内でボットを含む150人がいるとします。その一人一人が親身なケアを受ける必要があります。そうすると、もっともっと沢山のサポートが必要となります。というのもこれは新しいものであり、失敗すれば、これは生産パートナーのせいではなく、現場の人間がそれに適応しないからなのです。

ROIは出ていますか？

もちろんです、はい。言うまでもなく。この市場では特に人的資本が少ないです。高齢化社会で熟練した人がいない。なら誰がその仕事をするのでしょうか？ そこで人の中立性を取り除いて、ボットを使って構築するのです。それが最善の方法でしょう。

新しいソリューションに投資をする必要があると思ったのはどうしてですか？

私自身そして我が社は素晴らしいテクノロジー会社を経て来ています。先ほど申し上げたように、このテクノロジーについては後でお話しますが、会社はすべてテクノロジー会社です。テクノロジーなしでは生存はできないし、特に共有サービスにおいてバックエンドプロセスを構築するなら、必要なものは何でしょうか？アジアにおけるこれらの市場では、労働が通常平均という成熟の地点に実際に達しています。中国、フィリピン、マレーシア、もしくはインドを見てください。これらの市場は急速に高価になってきています。では今後の産業革命の波は何か？私の思うには、これらのデジタルオートメーションRPは、人工知能、機械学習へと移行します。これらは非常に迅速な移行が必要となる分野です。 そこで私たちは未来に向けて意識的に自分達自身を準備する行動を取ったのです。

以前に別のソリューションを使っていましたか？その場合はどうして変更しましたか？

これまでにいくつかのソリューションを試しましたが、適切なビジネスプロセスを自動化したかどうかは分かりません。そのソリューションが良かったか悪かったかも分かりません。でも、本当の価値、あるいはドル価値のどちらかの観点で認識した価値、またはより良い働き方をするために情報源をリリースするという観点から言えば、私個人的にはあまり納得していませんでした。なので、より未来的な見通しのあるものを試そうと思ったのです。私はそれをグローバリゼーションと呼んでいます。グローバルに存在し、ローカルに存在することなので、これが発端から現実までの背景の全体像です。

他のベンダーも検討しましたか、それともAutomation Anywhereだけでしたか？

12のパートナーから選出されたプロセスから始めました。

ベンダーを選ぶ際、決め手となる、その他の条件は何ですか？5つのうちトップの2つはどれですか？

違う答えをしたいと思います。まず彼らはベンダーではなく、ビジネスパートナーです。なのでその定義は違うと思います。彼らが、自分達はベンダーだと言い、契約を見始める瞬間、私達の関係は終わりだと思います。欲しいのは業界に役立つことのできるビジネスパートナーなんです。例えば、私達は飲み物を作る方法を知ってるとします。最高の製品を作っている。私はそう思うし、確信もしています。ここで必要なのは自分達の製品に精通していて、業界の支払いポイントを理解し、助けてくれるパートナーです。こういったことがベンダーではなく、成功するパートナーシップやビジネス関係を作るための2つの条件でしょう。

Automation Anywhereを選んだわけは何ですか？

条件を決めていました。5つの大きな条件が。もちろん、コスト。まず、特徴と機能。 グローバルおよびローカルサポート。3つ目はもちろんカスタマーサービスです。そしてもちろん、テクニカルサポート。私たちのオフィスは完全なチームがあり、完全なプロセスがありました。 調達、技術、ビジネス、そして私が「現場」と呼び続けている運営からの10〜15人近くが非常に科学的な方法で評価を行っています。 非常に密接だと感じていたパートナーがいましたが、決め手は明らかにカスタマーサービスとサポートです。それが最重要です。

Automation Anywhereについて、その他に付け足すことはありますか？

いいえ、何もありません。皆さんのご清栄をお祈りすると同時に、Imagineを東京デビューさせてくれた彼らに感謝します。彼らはロンドンへ行き、ニューヨークに行き、今ではインドにも進出したことを知っているので、うまくいけば私たちの市場はこれから持つべく相互作用から恩恵を受けることでしょう。

製品、サポート、環境の全体に1から10の評価（10＝最高）を付けるとしたら、どのように評価しますか？

8

特定したものではないです。2、3年時間を早送りしたとしたら、どうなっているでしょうか？同じだけの情熱を持っているか、もしかしたらとても大きくなっているかもしれない。だとしたらアジャイル性を失います。小さければもっとアジャイル性があります。大きくなった瞬間に自分だけの次元に入ってしまうんですね。

このソリューションあるいは同様なソリューションを探している、同社あるいは他社の同僚の方に、どんなアドバイスをなさいますか？

まず、私のようなエンドユーザーであれば、自分を顧客とは考えないことです。自分の顧客を現場の人として、運営の人として見る必要があります。 製品パートナー、実装パートナー、そしてあなたは内部にいる顧客にサービスを提供する責任があります。だから、これは皆が勝つことのできるゲームです。製品やパートナーに責任を被せてはいけません。皆で同時に責任を負い、ゲームを進めるべきです。

We use it to automate all kinds of business processes. The primary use case is the RPA platform, even though they have the cognitive platform and the analytics platform. We use it for so many different things it's hard to focus on one, but it's automating business processes in our banking system.

We're interfacing a lot with Excel, our ERP systems, some legacy systems, the databases, file folders, text files, CSVs. It's hard to pin down one.

Through the software, we have been able to reduce the time that we spend on manual, repetitive tasks, so that we can focus on activities that add value to the business or to our partners and customers. The most important things are saving time, increasing control, and increasing automation.

If you ask our CFO, I think he would say that the most important thing is that we saved some money, with more efficient operations, etc. But I feel the ability to change from doing non-value-added tasks into work with added value is important.

We have saved the equivalent of about $40,000 to $50,000 by using it, during my time here. That's a lot. We recently did a large migration that saved us a lot of time on things that were going to be done manually. We were able to automate it and we saved around $15,000 to $20,000 on just that migration. That's quite substantial.

One of the features that we have used the most is an action in the Workbench called Object Cloning. We find that very reliable and very useful for implementing different business processes.

In general, the security and role-based access control - credentials security - are also important. We have a high focus on security in the bank. It's obviously a very highly regulated environment, so security is a top priority for us. To be allowed to automate different processes, we need to have a good set of controls around who is allowed to do what, and what credentials people can and can't use. It allows us to manage access to make sure that we have full control.

Other things that I also find very useful are the Bot Store and the Apeople community. If we run into troubles, we can always ask the forum and get an answer. People know if there is a pre-existing bot in the Bot Store that we can use to solve a problem. It's very useful to take advantage of the community. When they launched the Bot Store, it was a unique thing in the RPA market and it is providing tremendous value to a lot of businesses.

Also, their MetaBot tool is a very useful building block. We call it Lego bricks, here in the Nordic region. So if you build a wheel for your car, you don't have to build three more, you just use the same wheel over again. That's very useful and it makes the development phase even quicker. I hear other people talking about how they're spending three months on one process and that's a bit crazy. We deliver new processes every week and we estimate a process should not take a lot more than two weeks. But on average, we're spending two weeks per process, to get from idea to production.

The main things I've found that could be better are small things that can be annoying when you're using them a lot. I would recommend they add a feature where, if you mark the start of an "If" sentence it will highlight the end of the "If" sentence. That would make it easier to get a better overview. The small things are the most important in our day-to-day work with their software. Incremental improvements for a better overview or better user experience would help.

Also, we would like to see more options for merging and un-merging PDFs. More flexibility there would be good. We've figured out ways around this and, using their software, we've been able to do everything we wanted to do. It just took a bit more time to do it. We were on version 10.5 and in their Bot Store they actually had a bot that did exactly what we wanted to do, but it was for Version 11.0.

I find that they are making a lot of improvements that we are able to take advantage of with every release. I can't really think of something large that's missing.

It's been very stable. I can't really put my finger on things that haven't been stable that are under Automation Anywhere's control.

There have been some troubles for us when it comes to doing monthly Windows updates. That always turns off the Bot Runner machines and we have to do a complete, new log-on once a month on those machines. But we are aware of it and it's on our side, not Automation Anywhere's side.

Other than that, the runtime might differ. Sometimes it goes very fast, sometimes it can go a bit slower but I think that's also due to the speed of internet access as well as the computers we're running it on. Some of them have less computing power. We don't have the perfect virtual environment yet, so we're still working on improving that. But we can't blame Automation Anywhere for our having a legacy infrastructure.

In general, it works very well and we're really happy with the stability.

The scalability is good. I think we haven't really used the Bot Farm product yet, but that looks very exciting. We're planning on moving the infrastructure into the cloud and it's then a very interesting prospect to be able to scale up from 100 bots to 1,000 bots with just the click of a button. To my knowledge, it's probably the most scalable RPA software out there. We haven't really met any major challenges when it comes to scaling up, other than our own computers. But that's an in-house problem, not an Automation Anywhere problem.

I've talked to people using other RPA vendors and they have said they face some major issues once they pass 40 automated processes, but we haven't really faced those kinds of challenges. It has been running smoothly.

It's very scalable and it's easy to have control. There is a good audit log in the Control Room. And there is the ability to create your own roles and have strict, role-based access control where you say: This role is able to run this bot on this machine but it's not able to run another bot on the same machine. That's good from a security standpoint.

Technical support is really eager to close tickets as fast as possible, which is good. But as with any support, it can sometimes feel like it's slow because they have to do these standard checks to rule things out. Even though I say I've done them, they have to do them anyway. They have to be able to say, "Okay, this is checked off, this is checked off, this is checked off. Alright, now we can move to the actual issue." It can be a bit slow at the start, but they're always able to resolve our issues.

In general, I'm very happy with it and I can understand why they have to do those checks because if it's a stupid error, it's good to identify that early.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I've actually done installations of Automation Anywhere and I have no IT background. I've been able to set it up on a server and some virtual machines and get everything working.

The deployment took some time for us, but that was due to a lack of a good environment on our side. To do a clean install would take some three or four hours to get everything up and running, depending on what kind of machines you have. If you have all the accesses you're supposed to have it can take a very short time. But, if you're installing it in an enterprise environment, it can take longer because you might not have all the accesses. At least for me, coming from the business side, I don't have all the administration accesses that I would need, but that's not Automation Anywhere. Overall, it's pretty straightforward and doesn't take a lot of time.

For our implementation strategy, we started out with a pilot, together with a consulting partner. We automated two processes and created a proposal for an operating model, governance, and a framework. After that, we just tried to pump out new automations as fast as possible to prove the value to upper management. After a while, we got some traction and we went from being just me in 2015 to between 12 and 15 people now. Some of them are not working full-time on it but we have at least 12 full-time employees working on RPA across our organization. We started out in Norway, but now we also have operations in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, with people working full-time on automation in all of those countries.

All the developers are doing some maintenance. We don't have anyone who is assigned to doing only maintenance because we all find that a bit boring. We share the responsibility among all the developers so that everyone has the chance to do new processes and maintenance when needed.

We have a two-pronged approach there. The processes that are important for business continuity, the business-critical processes, are often maintained proactively. We are notified that a change is coming to the system, so we need to test it out and make a new version that will work when the upgrade of the system is live. So we're proactive in those kinds of processes. Non-business-critical processes are maintained reactively. We try to do it in the most sensible way possible, but there's always room for improvement, obviously.

We put a lot of responsibility on the process owners. They're responsible for notifying the RPA team in case of any changes in the graphic user interface or changes to the process, because of new rules and regulations or any other reason. The process owner or someone in his or her team will always know if there is a change in the user interface or the process.

If there is an error in the code, it is the RPA team's responsibility to fix it and we do most of that ad-hoc, when it happens. We always have some resources available to do those kinds of things and that's taken into account when estimating how long we will spend on creating a new process. We know that something might happen during that week or those weeks, so we add some padding.

In addition to the developers, we have a lot more people using the Control Room to schedule the processes.

So we tried to run fast and then we took a step back and re-evaluated. We built an even better framework, redid the infrastructure, put more thought into the security aspect, and we have industrialized our implementation. We still have some issues when it comes to our operating environment, but that's not Automation Anywhere's fault; that's more in our IT department's hands.

We used Accenture, they're our technology partner in Norway. We had good experiences with them, but I think it could have been better planned on both sides. We were not able to mirror their organization as we should. Ideally, we would have been more self-sufficient after those ten weeks, and it was only by chance that I had the time to be present during all ten weeks, every day, in the project. If we didn't have the people learning how to develop, how to do the business analysis side, and working closely with them, we would have been in some trouble going forward.

The project was a success either way, given where we're at right now. But they should have been a bit clearer on how much time people would need to spend and what was expected of us. It's always better to make the customer self-sufficient.

I think they also proposed a bit too-ambitious operating model with a bit too many people from the get-go. That was not that well received by our management. We're a larger organization right now than what they proposed, but I don't think that our management would ever have accepted or have had the guts to do the leap of faith and say, "Okay, we will have six people working full-time with RPA from today," in 2016. They didn't know the potential and didn't really see that we had that many manual processes.

These are small things. In general, we're happy with what they did. It's just that if I were to point my finger at something that could have been done better, those are the things that could have been done better.

Regarding the number of people involved in the deployment, from Accenture's side there were two developers, two business analysts, and one project leader. On our side, we had a project leader and seven or eight other people, but eventually, it was just me and the project leader who spent our full time on the project, while it was going on. Everyone else was also doing their day-to-day jobs. And with all those people, it was still too few.

We have triple-digit returns, in percentage. I feel it's worth every dollar we paid for it. We have seen a lot of the returns in operations and back office because we had so many manual tasks there.

A good example is a process that we automated where, on that specific process, the return on investment is above 30,000 percent. The total cost of ownership is around $1,000 and the return is something like $400,000 in direct cost savings. And that's still increasing. It's an ad-hoc cleaning job that we're doing, but for every contract we change, we save about half-a-dollar per month, per letter we're sending. It amounts to a lot.

We spent one day creating that process and four days running it so the cost of ownership is really low. Those kinds of processes are unicorns. You won't find them in every business and you have to have the right people and the best ideas. But we were lucky to find that process and, by itself, it has paid for a lot of the license cost.

We just did a round of price comparison on a global scale and found it's so hard to compare the license prices. But, Automation Anywhere, in general, is on the same price level as the other vendors, a bit lower in some cases. 

If we're thinking about the list prices, the Enterprise platform license fee is quite high. If you have five Bot Runner licenses, five bot creator licenses, a Control Room, and an Enterprise License fee, Automation Anywhere is much more expensive than the others. But if you have a global agreement with them, the Enterprise platform fee is shared between all the entities that are using Automation Anywhere. In that scenario, it would be a lot cheaper. The prices are quite okay.

We evaluated Blue Prism at the time.

We did the assessment together with Accenture and I think they actually recommended Blue Prism vs Automation Anywhere. I find that a lot of the consultants in our region are recommending Blue Prism or UiPath because they have generous compensation and incentive packages for the consultants who sell their products. I'm not sure if Accenture would recommend Blue Prism if they didn't have some interest in it. If they were totally agnostic, I'm not sure if they would have done the assessment the same way. But it's hard for me to say.

If I were going to do a new evaluation today, I would evaluate Automation Anywhere vs UiPath, but I would still choose Automation Anywhere. I've seen demos of both Blue Prism and UiPath and I think the basic capabilities are the same - they're all based on the .NET framework and you can kind of do a lot of the same things with them. But when it comes to the scalability, security, etc., I think Automation Anywhere is superior.

Another major factor that played a role in why we chose Automation Anywhere was their prompt replies to any questions or issues.

I'm not sure how this part is with the other main providers, but Automation Anywhere has a really good customer success program. I have a customer success manager that I'm in contact with daily. He helps us elevate our issues to the correct people and makes sure that, if we have any action points that are pending on someone at Automation Anywhere, they are resolved as quickly as possible. The follow-up from Automation Anywhere's side has been fantastic. They give us information about what's in the roadmap and what's to come, and if we need any additional information for our IT teams or our management team - anything to would help us with information - they are available to do calls and presentations.

My advice is to get started and get help. It's very useful to have consultants come in to help you get started. That will kick-start your implementation journey. Also, look at it as a journey. You won't get to an end-state where you will say, "Alright, now I'm done," because you will have to improve your implementation at all times, keep progressing, moving towards AI.

In my opinion, the vendor you choose in the first year is kind of irrelevant. But when you come to a point where you're about to scale up, then it's important to be associated with the best vendors out there. For us, being a customer of Automation Anywhere puts us in a really good place to keep progressing and keep scaling up.

It's important to remember that we are not doing a full integration here, we are doing RPA. It's okay to do 80 percent of a process - the high volumes - and then do all the exceptions manually. You won't necessarily get a good enough return on spending an extra month to do all the exceptions. You want to go live with the volume that represents the 70 or 80 or 90 percent, as soon as possible. Then see if it makes sense to handle all the exceptions, the last ten to 30 percent. It's important for us to be able to deliver fast, as well as securely and controlled, and with the MetaBot and the other tools that we have through Automation Anywhere we are able to do that.

We have automated in excess of 60 processes running on 17 Bot Runners, which are like machines we can operate 24/7. We have 15 bot developers and we are closing in on capacity so we would have to expand the number of licenses soon. 

Our plans for ramping up are about pumping out new processes every other week. We're working Agile with the RPA so we try to do short sprints and deliver something every week. The usage increases every week actually. I'm not sure if we are planning to have even more developers because we don't want to be in a position where people don't have things to do. We would rather have some backlog rather than having to fire five developers.

We are planning to continue on the same pace and ramp up the number of bots, rather than the number of developers. We did a proof of concept last year with Automation Anywhere's IQ Bot which was very successful. We did not, however, have time or resources available to implement that last year. Hopefully, this year we will have time and we will make the purchase of the IQ Bot license and start using their cognitive platform. We're thinking about implementing their analytics platform as well, because that's very useful for keeping track of our progress.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement and, of course, we would want cheaper licenses and would want them to add even more things that we haven't thought about to their product. Still, we're really happy with the software provider that we're using.