Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use for this solution is the building of a digital workforce by implementing Robotic Process Automation to improve our operational efficiency. It is also intended to create capacity for our staff to focus on client-servicing matters, which are areas that require decision-making processes.

We have implemented two processes to date, for our Hong Kong office and Japanese office. The process automated for Hong Kong is for Company Secretarial business. The process automated for Japan is for Payroll business. Repetitive mundane tasks are now being executed by the robotic processes.

I mostly use the Control Room to monitor and manage bot runs. Since we can register multiple bot runners in one control room, and we can easily monitor and re-run bots when necessary, it is convenient for me. I would like to find out more about the dashboards and what they actually mean.

I have noticed that after the bots have been delivered to run in a production environment, there are issues in terms of quality and performance. For example, if the government website takes too long to respond, or there is an apostrophe in names, then these exceptions are not handled in the bot. I would like to see a higher quality in the final bots that are delivered to production.

My primary use case with my current customer is automating various business processes used by a large financial institution.

Automation Anywhere is not necessarily a new technology, but what it does is it enables people who have a non-technical background to take advantage of the value of automated tools. When you look at businesses in the past, you had to have a really high level of programming skills to be able to even think about automating things. But with Automation Anywhere, you can actually teach somebody how to automate a business case in one day. So, to see people with no interest in coding get excited about automating things, that's huge. For a tool that can be fun to use and make people's job better on day one, that is the most valuable feature.

My impression of the Bot Store is good. It is a really smart offering. A lot of the time customers need the same things, and there's not necessarily a lot of logic in reinventing the wheel. When you take the Bot Store, you allow people to share knowledge, you allow best practices to be immediately adopted by users, and you can share good knowledge, saving a lot of time for customers. It's a really good thing.

A useful feature of Automation Anywhere, which is on the way, is the ability to use inline code for both Python and VBScript. The reason that this is so useful is a lot of the time people who are doing RPA are people with technical backgrounds who have been developers. Although, Automation Anywhere is very powerful, sometimes what you need to do is a very specific task which is accomplished more efficiently with code. So, I'm really excited that this feature is coming soon.

Another feature that would be cool to see in Automation Anywhere is more use of artificial intelligence. Right now, RPA is basically limited to a bot which is simply following the instructions that it was given. However, what would be really useful is if a bot was able to more flexibly respond to issues. For example, sometimes there are erroneous errors and pop ups. With good code, you can certainly build your bots to be able to handle that. However, it does take time and a bit of technical know-how to be able to do that. But because a lot of those technical challenges tend to be pretty similar, I would like to see Automation Anywhere include more robustness into the way that errors are handled.

The biggest area of improvement with Automation Anywhere is on the enablement side. A lot of the times, people have the capabilities with the tool, and it's all there, but it's not necessarily so easy to see that roadmap to RPA success. This is very new technology, and there's not a pre-walked path to success. It's unique to every organization, but there are certain commonalities. What Automation Anywhere could do to improve the solution is help customers understand what the tool is really capable of. Walk customers through what changes are needed both organizationally and in terms of infrastructure to really see success with RPA.

I've seen customers who have the licenses. They have the know-how. They have all the pieces from Automation Anywhere to achieve success. But, where they fell short was there maybe wasn't necessarily commitment from the right stakeholders within the organization or maybe there were other forces which were holding things back. What they needed was vision for it:

• How can they operate efficiently? 
• How should it work? 
• How should it look? 
• What roles are needed? 

These are the areas where I've seen customers struggle, and somewhere where Automation Anywhere could really improve.

One of the best things about the stability of Automation Anywhere is that when you have an automation, even if the product changes, there are so many tools built into Automation Anywhere that allow you to take those little problems and spot an issue immediately. You can see the health of your bots at all times. The dashboards and analytics provided by Automation Anywhere allow you to have an overall picture of exactly what's happening with your bots. Even if something changes, because things will always break, when that happens you're able to spot it immediately. You know exactly what happened and can have it changed that day, and it's back in functional production. If you weren't able to spot those problems so easily, you wouldn't be able to scale. However, because of the tools provided in the Control Room and other features with the analytics that Automation Anywhere has, it is very easy to scale automation using Automation Anywhere.

I have a very positive impression of the scalability of Automation Anywhere. The Control Room enables you to take an automation that was built once and have it be deployed in a very effective way.

Customers who I've worked with in the past have told me that they chose Automation Anywhere because of the Bot Games. The great thing about Bot Games is it gives people a chance to really experience RPA. It's one thing to hear about what the tools are capable of, but when you actually get there on the ground and you see what these things can do, that's how you get customer buy-in. That is how you get the people on top and the people on the bottom all to agree that this is a product that we can really use and can add value to our organization today.

The installation and setup of Automation Anywhere are quite simple. Most of the time that I've worked with customers setting up Automation Anywhere, it's gone off without a hitch. It's pretty much as simple as once your infrastructure is in place, you install the client and Control Room, then you can be ready to go building users and getting your automation started very quickly.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven.

We try to automate processes within the operations department of our company.

For Automation Anywhere, there are a few commands that are my favorites. The object cloning command is the strongest command that I've worked with, as well as all the Excel commands.

You do not need to have IT skills. I come from a finance background, so I can attest to the fact that you do not need IT skills to use Automation Anywhere to leverage it on your teams.

More interactions with PDFs would be great for Automation Anywhere. 

The ability to use more legacy technology for object cloning, flash plugins, etc.

A lot of their Excel commands could use some improvement. I noticed sometimes the functions don't work properly or the ability to use over a macro isn't as efficient. So, definitely the Excel commands and the ability to use formulas for Excel could use improvement.

Automation Anywhere has had a increased positive impact in terms of stability. Leveraging the use of this technology with other emerging technologies has had a positive impact on our company.

With scalability, it is all about the frequency. I can have the bot run 24/7 or I could have the bot run on weekends. In terms of scalability, it definitely works faster and more than a human does.

When it came to a lot of people in our company just doing mundane, repeatable tasks, we realized that they are not interested in their workflow. So, if we can automate the tasks that are mundane and repeatable, our employees will be able to engage in more higher value tasks, then be happier at work.

It was a straightforward setup. There are definitely some hurdles that we had to go through. 

Just trying to get IT and Automation Anywhere to work together to build a resilient solution was a bit of a challenge, but it was more straightforward.

I would give it a 10 out of 10. The ease of use of the application is very smooth for us. Coming from a finance and business background, I did not have any challenges using the application. It is extremely versatile. I can use it with internal applications, external applications, websites, Excel sheets, and so many other documents. So, it's definitely one of the best of RPA applications that I've used yet.

We have several back office use cases right now that we are working on. Some of them are workforce management, IT provisioning, and deprovisioning. 

I would give you an example of a most recent process which we have: one of the largest accounts for workforce management. There were about three to four people who were manually updating data into a system, then we replaced that process or augmented that with a bot. That bot now reaches data and enters it on behalf of users, which gives significant hours back to the business. So, those people can work on some other high value task.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very easy to use, so to get started, you don't really need hardcore development skills. However, over a period of time, when you have a complex use case, then you really need to improve your end user development skills.

One of the things that the product should have is to add more advanced level developer capabilities into the platform. I know it is easy for business, non-technical people. However, for the developers, there should be some more features within the product so they can build advanced level use cases much faster.

To be honest, I would rate it about an eight (out of ten). I would not give two points because there is still room for improvement for some of those real use cases that we are working with. 

I'm very optimistic about future releases of the product.

Our primary use case for Automation Anywhere is to help our clients achieve efficiencies in their businesses and capture revenue opportunities that they would otherwise miss, either due to lack of ability or lack of speed.

We have automated a different variety of processes, anything from inbound communications, from clients to our customer. Those inbound communications have to be processed and digested, then acted upon, some of which can be straight-through process automated, which is a fantastic time savings for them. The ones that can't be, can be routed to the right folks in a very quick manner, rather than being manually read and inspected, then categorized and passed on.

We have also addressed financial processes around invoice reconciliation or accounts payable. There are processed around sales. If you think about how people use Salesforce and spreadsheets and other systems around Salesforce. There is a lot of copying and pasting of data in and out of Salesforce, then into those other systems. We can make all that go away, so their sales reps can focus on selling. So, there are a lot of great use cases like that.

One thing for our organization, Automation Anywhere has helped us find new clients and help those clients find new opportunities to improve their businesses that previously seemed out of reach to them. There are other ways that we could solve these problems which are more expensive and difficult to implement. With RPA, specifically with Automation Anywhere, it has really helped us engage with those clients and achieve the results that they want.

With Automation Anywhere, we have had good success, having folks with all different varieties of technical backgrounds. Both our most technical staff, as well as our least technical staff, have been able to engage. We can engage directly with our clients' representatives, their business users, and their IT users, then get them up to speed, so they can all be part of the process. Making everyone part of the process is what really makes it catch on in an organization.

When I think about Automation Anywhere, it's not a specific feature that really defines it. It is how the whole package works together and a type of holistic view of how you attack automation problems, particularly with RPA and IQ Bots. So, there is a real sense of the whole picture, not just one feature or specific thing that jumps out for me.

The areas for room for improvement are always going to be around experience, making it even easier to get engaged, and get started. Because lowering that threshold to get started is what enables an additional set of problems to be solved. So, I sort of look at it like a water level. If I can lower the water level, then there is more surface area of the business area exposed above the water, and that's the stuff that we can go solve.

As a partner of Automation Anywhere, I view it as part of our job is to create scale problems for Automation Anywhere to solve. To make the solution big enough that it finds those edge cases. We haven't had any problems with scale and stability with Automation Anywhere, so I hope to create those problems, then work with Automation Anywhere to solve them.

Our experience with technical support at Automation Anywhere has been great. They have been very helpful, especially during the PoC, processes which are sort of early on in their sales cycle, or when we were just starting with Automation Anywhere a couple of years ago. We got great support for getting it onboarded in-house and getting our team up to speed. So, we have found it to be a great partnership. 

Our clients use all types of software, whether it's process offer, decision management, RPA and they even use multiple tools of those. Our objective is to make sure we take care of the client, whatever we want to use. However, we've found that our clients are successful with Automation Anywhere, and it's been a good place for us to invest with our clients to achieve great results.

From two perspectives:

1. The initial setup, as a partner, was very straightforward.
2. The initial set up from a technology point of view, although it was unfamiliar to us when we started, was also pretty straightforward.

We measure ROI. The way we do it though depends on each client and whether we as a service provider have access to that information, which also depends on the client. But our clients, they measure it in a bunch of different ways. My favorite example is one where we were enabling service providers for them, basically a set of new sales reps coming onboard that have to be certified with government and have to go through an approval process. That process used to take months to run through, but with RPA, we were able to automate it and get it done in a week. So, from a revenue enablement point of view, we took all the friction out of that process, which has huge ROI for our clients.

Prior to working with RPA at BP3, we worked with a lot of process and decisioning technologies and also integration technologies. So, we have sort of a unique perspective on how RPA fits in and plays well with others. In particular, we're partnered with IBM and Automation Anywhere, and we saw them on stage together, presenting. I think Automation Anywhere, from a cultural perspective does a really good job partnering, but they also provide a product that works well with other products, so it's easy to integrate too. It's easy to include it in a solution and easy to use it to drive a solution which leverages other technology.

In today's market, you have to think about, how was RPA today and how would I rank it versus what it can be in the future? I think we're in the early innings of what RPA can be and what Automation Anywhere can be. We saw some indication of that in the keynote speeches. You can just get a sense for the scope of the vision and where they want to take RPA at Automation Anywhere. I won't try to rate against the future, but I think we're in early innings, two or three versus a ten. But, when you compare it to the state of the art today, I'm really impressed with RPA, and I think it's an eight or maybe nine (out of ten).

I would recommend if you're starting out to look at RPA and how to get started with Automation Anywhere. That is the first thing that I would do is. Find a couple of problems that you think are easy, then take a moment to really think about problems which are important to your business, because you have a limited amount of focus for your business. You business only has a few limited resources: time, money and focus. If you're going to spend that focus, spend it on something that matters. It's fine to do a research project or a pilot project, something that doesn't have a lot of risk. You have to do something that matters for your business, and if you're having trouble finding that and making it make sense in an RPA context, then I'd say work with someone who can help you reframe the problem so you can find those opportunities.

One of the biggest challenge that everybody has, and all the customers are thinking, my process has no structure or doesn't follow a pattern. That is the biggest challenge that everybody thinks. Even though our human minds are very powerful, there is a logic behind it. We try to go to customers, and say, "There is a logic always, so how do we apply the logic? The Automation Anywhere product enables us to do that. What you are doing in a repetitive task, or even some of the aspects of cognitive processing, combine both of those things together and build solutions. 

We build solutions for the oil and natural gas industry, HR, finance, and a lot of industries that can actually help customers on their journey as well.

What we have automated is taking on the automating process and making sure the automation process is touching all the components in a sequential fashion, then somebody is offboarding it. How do you make sure all the systems access either taking out or restricting it in a way that is one automation? We can only do that with Automation Anywhere because it has helped enable us to do that faster.

There are a couple of other examples, e.g., loan processing system, where there are multiple documents coming in multiple formats. Structure on structure, and often, there are a lot of back office operations where this is happens and you are actually consuming the data, feeding it to your loan processing systems, or any other systems that you use. 

What we have used with Automation Anywhere is take those desperate applications which are coming in with the various forms of data with the intent that they are built-in with IQ Bot of Automation Anywhere, then combine them with the tasks that MetaBots from Automation Anywhere provides, and we were able to automate the process. So, how can we cut shorter on the areas of arrangement, decision-making, and error reduction? We were able to do that in one of the loan processing system applications.

PDF comes in multiple ways. PDF is an actual PDF or it could be a scanned image, but people assume it's a PDF. Sometimes, it's not an actual PDF, but an OCR. So, there are multiple ways of skinning the cat. Automation Anywhere helps with the visibility of using a PDF or using OCR technology. These functions are already available, and you can extend it and beyond, as well.

The ease of visibility in the processes which are working is its most valuable feature. Take, for example, Control Room. This is one of the unique features of it, because at the end of the day, the business does not need to know whether it is a MetaBot, IQ Bot, or anything like that. How do you give the terms of business visually? Control Room is another big aspect of it, from the business point. 

From the technology point of view, it's supposed to do activities that you do in your day-to-day life. It is also extendable. Of course, we cannot solve the whole world's problems, but we can extend it with additional coding, and things like that. 

There are two things that it can provide you. 

1. Quicker in automating the task that you already have. Sometimes, the process is chaotic, but the business needs that way to perform some tasks. With automation, what we can do is accelerate the automation, then look into the process optimization that we engineer. That's where we help. Automation Anywhere helps us to accelerate the adoption of automation faster so the customer can realize the benefits.
2. It allows us to look into processes for what can be optimized. 

That is where it helps.

Last month, Automation Anywhere launched communications, which is a very good thing, because now you can actually get two things when you use it.

1. Developer experience: The developer experience is essential for the product to go into the market very well. So, that helps it. 
2. You want to get back what is working and not working, what the developers wanted, etc. 

What Automation Anywhere brings to the table is how do you actually connect these things together? The purpose of automation is automating the task that everybody is doing in their day-to-day lives or some of the cognitive side of it.

The availability of Automation Anywhere to integrate with various applications. whether it is SAP, web forms, Excel, or PDF, exposed quite a bit of integration opportunities within the organization. Definitely, this is one of the key assets, as well, for us to work better with the customers.

One of the biggest challenge that everyone is facing is in the format of the document. The document management processes that IQ Bot gives has very good functionality of how you can actually take unstructured data and make sense out of it, connecting inferences, then making the data available to the user. So, IQ Bot is one of the best tools that I can think of in that aspect. This solves the problem of various document structures, document formats, etc.

The Bot Insights is one of its big assets, because that's what they have given you the visibility.

We did use quite a bit of Citrix automation. Of course, AI Sense helps you through that. There are two big challenges that I can think of with Citrix automation. 

1. Your making multiple hops into end-to-end systems. 
2. As you are rating the screen, which is a screen within a screen, which is what Citrix automation is, the complexity increases.

That is where the two things will come in: the tool's functionality and the beauty of design. These two have to come in together to make it work. If you don't have one or the other, it's not going to work.

Let us take the example: Guidewire. We all know Guidewire. The way that guidewire is set up in the organization, or any tool, is it goes into a VDI, and from the VDI, I go into the SAP VDI. From there, I will access my IBM mainframe system, so there are multiple hops. Unless you have any iSense, and also the best design, you will not be able to achieve the outcome that you wanted.

One of the biggest challenge of automation is if you don't automate it, or if you don't execute the process then it is okay, but don't do it the wrong way. That is the biggest challenge that we try to solve. That's actually impacting the customer if I make a wrong decision. I'm okay to go back to the customer, and say, "I could not execute this process." But, I don't want to go back, saying that I executed the process in the wrong way. That's what we always believe in.

When we go to customers and talk to them about automation, "Everything is great." We can automate their process. However, one of the biggest challenge that we see personally as we automate a task, but our automation of the process is very manual. The DevOps side of it has not yet evolved. That is one aspect that I would think about. The second aspect of it is the testing side of it. Right now, automation testing is really manual testing. On one side, we are saying automating with automation. On the other side, we are automating manually. These are not going that well. As Sage IT, we have products that we are building on top of it to solve this particular problem. 

The technology is the last piece of the puzzle. The important thing is how to make sure the business has the confidence in the technology. The infrastructure, environmental management, and availability are a very big challenge in this one. They are important because you are assuming that bots are going to run automatically and will to do my work, but you don't want to find after the fact that the bot is not running and my processes did not run. So, infrastructure management and deployment mechanisms are very critical. If the deployment is not right, you get the frustration, not the automation. As soon as the frustration kicks in, the automation adoption goes away, then everyone blames the product. That's the first thing they do. Everybody blames the product, so that's where we'll look at it.

With scalability, from what I've seen when we visit some of our customers, they don't look at how do you optimally run the bots. You can run bots left, right, and center at the same time, even though there is no dependency required. That is where the stability of the automation level is great. But, if you deploy it in the wrong way, the stability would be impacted. For example, running multiple bots on the same VDI, you don't have to do it, nor do you have to tie a bot to one VDI without multitenancy. Those are some of the challenges that we've seen and can be addressed.

One of the important from the community side of it is the Bot Store, which is one of the biggest factors that I can think of. It is like a marketplace. 

The ease of use is one of great assets for Automation Anywhere. I would want it to be continued in this fashion. Of course, there is still always room for improvement for any product, but we do that as well.

On the tools' side of it, when I look at it, a lot of commands have ease of use with every task, whether it is Excel or PDF, each are commonly used tasks and automatically available to you. Again, there are some that we may to develop.

I went through most of the Automation Anywhere courses: Architecture courses and even RPA for the business user courses. The courses are very good. It also gave me a very good perspective. The only thing that I would recommend on top of it: Getting the community to grade how much better each course is. At the end of the day, when we publish courses, what's the impact of that to the customer? It's not there. If that comes up, that would be good, so some the more popular courses get more time than other courses, which are really important, but do not get that much visibility.

The bot creation process: They said we should not look at it as a technology as the first thing. I would say technology the least problem that we have. I would first look at common sense: 

• What is the bot actually doing? 
• What is the task or workflow which you are trying to automate and is it actually doing it? 
• What is the value that is actually getting to the customer? Or the impact that it is having on the customer? 

That's very important to identify. That is what it gets you the ROI, etc. You have to look at those aspects of it. 

The second aspect of it, how can you make it ease the pain? For example, if some customers are using the process, and I know to whom to talk about process, then I can determine when it is a bot, system, or mission. We have to make sure the bots and humans are working together and smarter. The second aspect that you look at is the design of it, which is very critical. 

The third aspect of it is adoption. That is what I always come back to, whether the customer has adopted it, and whether those in the chain management are communicating to the underlying teams and are right or not. We need to help all of those things. Then, developing the bot with Automation Anywhere is actually a cakewalk. I would call it very straightforward.

We are a biotech company. We make medicines to cure cancers. 

We use Automation Anywhere for intelligence automation or robotic process automation. So, we use it finance, accounting, and supply chain. We are actual using it across multiple functions in the company.

We have automated a number of processes in accounting and finance: month-end close, eliminating profits, reconciliation, some in HR, some in operations, inventory to sell, and various other finance and account processes.

The most valuable feature for Automation Anywhere is that it enables developers to build bots and feel like they can contribute.

I love the Bot Store. I encourage a lot of my staff to use it, because it changes the game and the time that it takes to build automation. It has a lot of reusable things that you can use off the bat.

My impressions of the front office attended automation are that it really changes the game from automation which doesn't have high value. It can actually help people organically build automation. It helps change the game for more wide spread use.

I would like to see a lot around API integration going forward, like the ability for other systems to talk to the AI better by opening it up. I would like to see more chatbots or anything in the journey of making it truly immersive for human workers working with these bots.

There are a couple things that have room for improvement: Its openness and more APIs should be exposed to allow people to integrate. How do you make it easier to integrate back with this technology?

I would like it to do more predict, which means if I have a thousand bots in product, how do I check which of the bots may be at risk of failing? This would really help in supporting the bots when scaling the programs.

The more later versions that you implement, the better that they get. Any enterprise software has its gaps, but it is how quickly it is being addressed. In the latest versions, it has become much better compared to what was there in the past. 

We have them implemented in a cloud-based environment. Cloud by itself allows you to scale. As long as the software works there, it allows you to really scale.

To scale from pilots to the current number of bots that we are using, it took three to six months. That was the time frame. We started pilots on some functions, and learning from our pilots was key.

There is definitely some room for improvement there. It is sort of a hit and miss with their support engineers, you have some really good ones and some that aren't. Consistency is the key. There is room to get consistent. I am giving them the feedback, because as you get more customers, support becomes the linchpin where you can either drive a customer away or get them to use the product more.

For the last year, we were really focused around using it for the right purposes and processes. We have had fragmented solutions, then we decided to pick one player. We already had the tool (Automation Anywhere). It was more about doubling down on our investment on one product, then really getting good at using it. 

We have had the solution for a long time. As you go to cloud-based solutions, there are some nuances, which is less about the initial setup and more about when you have a version that you need to migrate or update. This is an area where we have faced some hiccups, but we were able to get around them.

We used a combination of an integrator and consultant for the deployment. We have used many different companies who are premium partners with Automation Anywhere, and we are also focused on building a COE internally, so we can do some of it ourselves. 

We measure ROI by a number of factors: 

• Hard savings from cost dollars
• Looking at the NPV over number of years.
• Labor
• What control or compliance things that we could be saving.
• Productivity
• Employee satisfaction. 

Roughly, as of today, it is around $250,000 annually.

We had literally everything under the sun, like WorkFusion and UiPath. It was more about focusing on Automation Anywhere, and only if we hit a roadblock that the solution could not solve, then we should look at the other tools.

I would say that they are a nine out of ten. Because if they are a ten, then they sit back and relax. To get a ten, there are some small tweaks to be done. I think the company is going in the right direction. It just needs more focused attention in certain small gaps, then they will get there.

The ease of use is its key novel feature. It is much better than earlier versions. I have actually trained people in finance who have not written a piece of code in their lives. They are able to pick it up. There is a learning curve, some it takes them some time, but it is definitely easy for them to use. I have a couple of folks who have not done automation before, and now they are able to go back to their jobs where we used to build automation for functions. They can now understand what we built for them and actually contribute to a certain extent for it.

Get started with the tool. Think of the structure because using the technology is not the problem, it is more on the governance and how to use it. How can you maximize your benefits that you are receiving? It is about getting your hands dirty and trying it on small PoCs. That is how we started; we started on small PoCs. That's the key.

Cost savings.

Cost savings to the client and business transformation makes life easy. 

We have the Bot Store, and also we have contributed a lot of things into Bot Store. We have about 40 different bots in your Bot Store.

I think that one of the coolest features that what Automation Anywhere has come up with is AI Sense. I see an immense potential there. Using AI Sense, we can automate outside Citrix. That's going to remove the client dependency or overall automation journey, and that can give lot of optimization, cost saving, and the time to market.

Improvement areas will be there for everybody. I think one area which I would like to see improvement is in IQ Bot. Maybe it has improved a lot in version 11 X but I think that that's one area which definitely scope to improve.

Thumbs up both sides. Stability and scalability. I think these are the least spoken things with Automation Anywhere. It's been in the market for long and they have been proving this right from the start.

It's straightforward, easy going. Anybody can start that. Only thing is that the people should have common sense.

The first one is the FT savings. That's directly proportional to the cost, what client is going to spend. The second thing is, once again, time to market or the optimization and process delivery.