What is our primary use case?
Get manual tasks done by automations wherever possible. For now, we only use task bots. We use them across whole EMEA at RICOH for different departments like: Business Services, SCM, Annuity & Services, Data governance, Finance and Sales. When I joined Ricoh, there were 30 processes in production and now we scaled up over 50 processes in production and counting.
By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to get rid of the mundane tasks. They are better to be carried out by bots so that the employees can focus on tasks that need human decisions, not repetitive tasks. We also wanted better customer satisfaction.
We also have an email automation where people can write emails to us 24/7, and we create service requests inside Siebel. It is an Oracle app.
How has it helped my organization?
With all process in production so far, we reduced the manual effort which led to more satisfaction by employees to get rid of the mundane tasks and focus more on tasks which need human decisions. Especially for our Annuity & Services department we have a quicker response time, and this led to more customer satisfaction.
What is most valuable?
Automation Anywhere constantly bringing new features in their product. Which will open more possibilities for automation out of the box.
The integration of coding languages like Python, JavaScript an VB Script will allow to extend the capabilities.
The bot store is also a good point to explore pre-built automation to integrate in your tasks.
To keep yourself up to date they provide Skill Booster learning trails for the new features and product updates.
What needs improvement?
The website has a lot to provide, but with this whole variety of information it is hard for me to keep track and navigate through.
AI agents need constant improvement, but this is by the nature of AI.
We had a use case for handwritten documents, which we were not able to extract safely, so some improvements on document automation would be great.
For how long have I used the solution?
I am using Automation Anywhere as a developer since September 2021, so for almost 4 years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability because we can use the workload management feature.
We have approximately 20 people using this solution.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate their support an eight out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to Automation Anywhere, we were doing almost everything manually. We started with Automation Anywhere version 11 and later migrated to A360.
How was the initial setup?
We have a separate team that handles the integration and setup. We are still on the on-premises version of Automation Anywhere. We are not using the cloud version. We have virtual machines running for us developers. We have a development environment where we use our own dedicated VMs. We develop automation on these VMs, and then we push it through the UAT and the last life cycle for production.
As far as I have heard from our team, they said it was easy to implement.
We started with version 11 of Automation Anywhere back in 2019. When I joined the team in 2022, we were migrating from version 11 to A360. I directly started in the migration phase where I could help with my fresh knowledge, because I was one of the first ones certified in A360.
What about the implementation team?
Our central RPA team, which handles resources, currently consists of five people. I am not sure how many people from the service provider are involved, as they handle on-prem resources. On our side, we have five people pushing these things to production. As a developer, not much maintenance is required.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I am not involved in the pricing, but based on what I hear from our central RPA team, it is not very expensive; it is also not cheap. Its price is in the midrange.
What other advice do I have?
We are not using the AI tools from Automation Anywhere, but we have created some of our own modules, which we are triggering in combination with Automation Anywhere in Python scripting language. We are using this combination for text analysis and problem descriptions from our customers. We are getting the sentiment score to categorize these service requests so that our agents can handle them better. We will, for sure, investigate if we can use Automation Anywhere's AI capabilities in the future.
I am responsible for showing and teaching new joiners how to work with Automation Anywhere. We also have some new citizen developers. We have asked different departments if they have some people on their team who are interested in this. They are not professional developers like me, but I teach them the basics. I also recommend they join the citizen developer training provided by the Automation Anywhere University. They take that training first, and then we do in-depth training tailored to the RICOH processes. It takes them three to six months, but it also depends on how much time they can spend on the training because they also have their regular work.
If you start using Automation Anywhere I highly recommend the Automation Anywhere University platform to start with the learning trails.
These are focused on three roles: Automation Lead, Automation Developer and Citizen Developer.
Also, great content on the Skill Boosters which will give you in depth training on a particular topic.
To scale your automation journey, good practice is building central tasks like “switching a responsibility” in Oracle with proper error handling that not every developer needs to implement these by his own. With these generic central tasks, it will also save time in terms of maintenance.
For any questions you might have, you can ask them in the Pathfinder Community where you get answers from Automation Anywhere’s global community of Pathfinders.
For companies starting new process automation implementation, I would advise not to tackle the largest processes at the beginning. Start with small ones to track benefits and demonstrate to the board what process automation has achieved in a short time. In the past, we tackled larger problems first and spent one or two years getting them to work end to end as expected. This was not the best strategy.
I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.