Automation Anywhere Reviews

The tool is used to automate any business process. Some examples are:

• If you want to download some data from a website or push some data onto a website.
• If you work with an Excel application and want to automate it, or any Windows-based application, you can automate it as long as you know what the business process is.
• If a person is doing a day-to-day activity and you want to automate that activity, you can use the Automation Anywhere tool to do it.

I have worked with the Windows, Excel, and web applications, along with some SAP automation and how to automate that SAP data. I use Automation Anywhere to determine automation for how to:

• Distribute the process. 
• Schedule the process. 
• Run the process. 
• Design the process.
• Distribute the data for 1000 to 10,000 data points (in Excel).

I have automated the invoicing in a finance department, where the finance department wanted to automate the invoicing process. They wanted to do the following:

• Invoice the data.
• Create the invoice.
• Mail the invoice.
• Download the invoice data.

If you have 10 operators currently performing these activities everyday, then you automate the process, by removing the 10 operators and having only one operator required, this will decrease costs. It will also increase the efficiency of your company.

In the automatic invoicing system, we created a file which pushes onto a shared folder. The bot will pick up the file automatically from the shared folder and process the invoice. Therefore, if tomorrow, another bot were to be created, we could just create a file and copy it to the shared folder, then it would pick up the file and process the invoice.

I utilize all the commands provided by Automation Anywhere, such as all the recorders. I use these commands to develop my processes and bots.

Automation Anywhere has a drag and drop process.

Automation Anywhere needs to improve Excel and its commands. In Excel, if you want to add a sheet, you cannot add a sheet. There is no command for adding a sheet. Also, if you want to rename something in Excel, you cannot rename it. You always must keep a list that you can rename through your keyboard, but there is no specific command in Automation Anywhere. 

The email automation command also needs to be improved. The email automation command sometimes is not working properly. When you connect the mail server, it is not being done properly.

The OCR feature is not that reliable.

With the PDF command, you can only read structured data. If your data is in an unstructured format, there is no command for it in Automation Anywhere. Then, people need to use Python coding if their data is in unstructured format. Therefore, Automation Anywhere needs to improve in the PDF area.

I have been using the product for the last two years.

I didn't have any stability issues. 

I haven't found any scalability issues with it. If the volume increases tomorrow, another bot can be added from the Control Room.

I worked with a single deployment model, which didn't have a load balancer requirement. Higher availability deployments require load balancers.

I haven't dealt with Automation Anywhere's technical support.

For the implementation, you just follow the proper process on how to deploy the proper hardware configuration on the production environment. The process does not take that much time as you push files to the Control Room, then from the Control Room, you can download the client. It does depend on how many bots you are implementing and how you are scheduling them.

Automation Anywhere is deployed from a deployment guideline in a step-by-step process. Automation Anywhere provides some deployment guidelines, which can be referred to.

Only one person is required for deployment: the Control Room administrator.

The number of people required for monitoring the solution depends on the amount of bots deployed.

It saves time and money. If a bot does the same work as nine out of 10 people, then you are saving money through wages. Also, a bot will work all hours without interruption, whereas FTEs may need time off or vacation. 

I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator. 

The Automation Anywhere automation tool is user-friendly, especially compared to UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere's deployment is also easy compared to other RPA tools.

The solution is good for people who want to do their job quickly without any delay or problems. 

The future of IT will require every organization to need automation.

The Control Room is good in version 11, as compared to the previous versions of the Control Room.

The primary use case is for ticket creation. They send in an email, then based on the priority, it creates a different ticket in Jira as well as the ticketing tool. In the end, they must consolidate all the tickets, whatever it has created, and sends that information in an Excel sheet to the stakeholders.

This was for an internal PoC.

It was a value-add for the organization. For each ticket, they would have to create a ticket for each of the three portals. However, after the PoC was done, then they would send a mail to a board, which will now send out the ticket number.

By using SNMP configurations and Excel, I was able to read the mail. I used this functionality to categorize the fabric, then I used this information to correlate the value to Jira along with Excel.

They must create the same ticket in three portals. Instead of that, they are now sending the mail to support. Support needs to take that mail and each bot needs to check the inbox. It will take that mail and categorize the subject, then prioritize it. We will take that description, paste it, and create a new ticket on these reporting tools.

The UI is very user-friendly, even for someone who doesn't have much coding knowledge. They can easily pick it up. Or, get training for two weeks, then pick it up. Someone from a coding background can pick it up easily too.

The MetaBots and IQ Bots are advanced tools for the market.

The functionalities and UI could be improved.

We have HTML mode and Windows mode, but Automation Anywhere is limited in this. It would be better if they were able to provide different specification modes.

I used Automation Anywhere for three months at work about a year ago.

The version that I used (10.3) was not that stable. It easily crashed in-between processes. 

In later versions, they have come out with better updates with things like MetaBot. I feel that version 11 is a robust solution.

The scalability is really good. 

The technical support team was very good to work with, as they were knowledgeable and provided good explanations. They were quite responsive.

The initial channel setup for was quite easy. However, we had to configure the control room. With that, we had to be very careful.

It took me half a day to deploy. I installed the SQL Server, the control room, etc.

The control room access gives the ability to create different roles, which helps when purchasing additional licensing.

Their overall pricing falls in the middle of the market. Cost-wise, Automation Anywhere is quite expensive because of their analytics, IQ Bots, and MetaBots. For a standalone machine, the pricing is okay. When adding in the licensing for IQ Bots (or MetaBots), it can become quite costly.

They recently launched a Community Edition, which is okay, but they should have done this a long time ago.

It is a very handy product.

As of now, Automation Anywhere has a very good place in the market.

Our company is an implementation partner for Automation Anywhere, and XLNC Technologies is a consulting organization for whom I work. I am the head of delivery operations.

We are working with around 14 clients who are on Automation Anywhere. We have been able to recommend and further resell starter and enterprise packs. Implementations performed by us scale up from one bot to 10 bot runners

My primary use case for Automation Anywhere would be the one which yields higher ROI , has repetitive tasks to be performed and doesnt involve fuzzy logic for sure . Cases that we have achieved success are extraction of data from PDF's , SAP automation, AD Integration, Integration with CRM and Payment links, KYC documents and web scrapping. Listed are low hanging fruits and will boost confidence of the stakeholders in the RPA deployment , recommend to look at such use cases when looking at Automation Anywhere and its implementation.

I have worked in Dubai, and we implemented RPA for one of the major retail giants. We started out with one process (bank reconciliation) and scaled up to almost 200 bots in six months. Sales was improved by at least by 80 percent. 

During the Dubai shopping festival, there were big launches that happened on the sales/retail domains. Bots compared products with other competitors, looking at the pricing ranges then locating the price for your own product, then bringing them to the home page for easy access. All these sort of changes were managed by bots. It had a direct impact on the customer lifecycle. 

In my current implementation, which is happening in India, with the poker companies, if you played poker, then you would have observed when you are trying to make out a cash-out if you don't get your cash-out in four to eight hours that you tend to get worried about the poker game in which you were playing. One of the use case that we received was to go ahead and make cash-outs almost on a real-time basis along with the tax deduction. Because in India, there are tax deductions which happen. Before, it used to take almost a day to go ahead and get the tax deducted. Then, the cash-outs were being made in eight hours. Now, it is happening in one to two hours. This boosts the customer confidence and experience. When the customer experience increases, obviously sales will increase. 

Automation Anywhere has multiple features in it. If you could look at the agnostic tools that are available on the market, almost everybody has a similar features, but Automation Anywhere has quite a secure platform. It is highly encrypted.

It is highly scalable on cloud and virtual machines. 

Automation Anywhere is a tool. It is not able to go ahead and extract the hand-written documents. Most of the automation tools that we have in the market are not able to get an accuracy of close to 80 to 90 percent on hand-written documents. So, I'm eagerly looking at a release from Automation Anywhere, wherein they could plug in an LP or look at some sort of a platform which could convert hand-written documents into a readable format. If they could bring in they own platform, this would make a big in-roads for the entire automation industry.

If it is able to integrate with any plug-ins available on the market which could read hand-written documents, that would be good. IQ BOT is one cognitive bot that they have launched, and if they could extend this particular cognitive bot to hand-written documents, then they would have an edge over other automation giants already in existence.

Recently, they launched the business analytical dashboard, which is cutting-edge. We can see in real-time the business dynamics and the way the metrics are behaving when the bots are being run. If we could have a ready-made application allowing for input processes and metrics into it. Then, it provides the approach that you should take to start the automation and when the process should expect to be completed. 

Automation Anywhere already has bots stores and digital workers being enabled on the website. Instead of putting it on the website, if a couple of digital workers could be made inherent in the tool itself, then the customer who is buying the package gets an edge over other partners or other vendors. E.g., if Automation Anywhere could package a digital worker along with my existing tool, as sort of an add-on, then that would add value to my package. Similarly, if I am from SCN, maybe an SAT module digital worker could add value.

There are hundreds of codes or utilities available. 60 percent just go down the drain and are never used, because there is no utility towards them. If they did something like Amazon, a pay-as-you-go, to get a digital worker, it would be cutting-edge technology. This would save costs for me and would optimize my implementations. The same benefits could then be shared with my customers. 

Stability is an important part of the product. It has accolades across the globe. If it did not, stable companies in the tech and finance industries wouldn't have gone for it. It's stable because it's highly scalable on cloud and virtual machines. The codes developed in Automation Anywhere don't tend to go back, skip, or miss out. 

The current version launched is 11.3. We are more comfortable with 11.3 now. However, the earlier version, 10.7 was good to work with, but since there even newer version coming, we work with 11.3 for now. Version 11.3 does have some bugs, but they are manageable because there is a good technical support team provided by the Automation Anywhere. We haven't had any major hiccups.

The moment that you start having access levels missing or security is being quite stringent about not opening a couple of bots, they are not providing admin access rights nor providing accesses to VPNs, that's when the stability issues come in. Then, we start blaming that the application stability, which in fact is wrong, because you are not meeting the prerequisites.

Other tools tend to give me exceptions when I am scaling them on the cloud. While the infrastructure might be available, systems won't be able to talk to each other. The codes tend to miss paths, and sometimes codes are not getting applied in the application. However, with Automation Anywhere, we haven't seen any such issues until now, wherein large scale developments are being found to be unstable. 

The good thing about Automation Anywhere is the website has a detailed architecture which talks about having a load balancer and how you can scale up. 

Currently, I have been working with clients in the US and Dubai through remote support. I have been developing bots remotely where I have been able to access their virtual machines. The virtual machines are separate for creators and runners. I have around six creators on virtual machines, which is good enough to start off. There are around 25 runners which are deployed on 25 VMs. This is in US. That's how we are operating them, and it's the largest setup that we work on.

In India, clients start small. They start with a starter pack, which is only allowed to be issued by an implementation partner. If you go onto the Automation Anywhere website, there is nothing called a starter pack. So, organizations will tend to start small with a starter pack, which may come in a bundle of two or three creators, one runner, and one controller. They want to test how it is functions in their organization. If they can pick up low hanging fruit, which means if they're picking processes which are smaller but high in volume, then they will have higher ROI. Then, these organizations tend to jump onto an enterprise level deployment in a maximum of six months. That is the trend that we have seen. 

However, the moment the client starts going big and is not able to get the right ROI in place, that's where they tend to start dropping the ball. Then, they start looking for another RPA software or decide RPA is not for them.

I have been receiving good technical support them, and hence I'm sitting on the sidelines. This is because if I didn't get the right support along with the right documentation and KMS, then I would not be able to fix issues first on my own. If I'm not able to do this, then relying on the technical support would be the last thing that I would do. The technical support that Automation Anywhere provides is fantastic, especially their acknowledgment and response times. Their knowledge base articles are quite descriptive. You will be able to fix issues on your own if you are quite tech savvy. Even if you are not, then they're quite detailed enough to follow.

If you don't get the right support, then there is an escalation channel available which you can reach out to. There is a community, where get solutions. There doesn't seem to be any issues with the support currently being provided by Automation Anywhere. I find them quite responsible and available whenever I have issues.

It is quite straightforward doing an initial setup of Automation Anywhere. This is because it has a well-defined installation guide which talks about how to install Automation Anywhere software. However, automation only works when IT support is quite adequate. So, if the IT and infrastructure teams at the client site are not supportive, for example, then I'm not able to provide admin rights or open security ports. That is when the entire installation moves into a messy state. There is a way to cater to such issues. Because this is a new technology coming, if you meet with the IT support team along with the CISO of that particular organization and set the right context and objective that company wants to achieve with automation, this roadblock can be fixed.

Otherwise, I haven't faced any issues with the setup.

We start off with the planning phase. Then, we go into the asset process gathering phase. We map it along with data gathering, wherein we gather data about the collaterals, the documents which are required in the process, standard operating procedures (SOPs), user login credentials, access rights, and business logics. Once that is done, we recommend a target operating model. Once approved by the business, that's when we start development. We start doing regression testing when post development is over. Finally, we do the handover the new app to the customer operations and can deploy the bot.

If I have to do a process discovery, which includes understanding the data gathering and creating an address process map, it takes a maximum five to ten business days (simple process). It takes this amount of time because the SME has to give me their time, and I never get all the information that I need in one shot since there are a lot of business and technical exceptions that I have to cater to. I have to be quite inquisitive in asking in the process, then the process gaps and the exceptions. I have to make a map, follow up with a sign off, then get it close.

A medium level complexity project can take 25 man days and a complex process could take a least a month and a half.

If I am deploying eight to ten processes in a span of six months, I need maximum three developers. If I'm developing out 50 bots in six months, then I need 20 developers.

Once the bots are deployed, I need a support team which works in three shifts. My support team would consist of a solution architect and three developers spread across three shifts. The monitoring team would consist of a solution architect and one or two IT support people. This is for a large scale bot development. If it is a smaller scale deployment, a smaller support team is needed for monitoring.

We have saved customers 400% in terms of time saved by implementing this product.

We implemented automation in an HR domain. We had 60 percent reduced error rates, 25 percent freed working hours, and the response time from the HR department was faster than before. We automated candidate screening, payroll automation and expense management. In finance and accounting, they had a reduction in 70 percent error rates, 35 percent working hours were freed, and there was improved satisfaction for the internal customers after the automation implementation. Finally, in IT, there was 90 percent is the reduced error rate, because in IT everything is binary.

The pricing and licensing of Automation Anywhere plays an important rule in the Indian market because in the Indian market $10,000 USD is too much. Hence, the pricing tends to go down depending on the customer relationship with the partner: A starter pack is $10,000 and an enterprise pack is $100,000. If you go through an implementation partner, you can get good deals. They can save some money. 

An annual contract is really beneficial for support.

I have been working in RPA for almost two to three years now. We started off with Softomotive. Then, we began working with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

We have (or are currently working on) PoCs with WinAutomation, WorkFusion and Blue Prism.

The biggest difference between Automation Anywhere and their competitors are the spread that they have. You don't need to look out for testimonials on why to use Automation Anywhere. There are big giants who are already using it. The feature list that they carry with them makes them stand out. Their industry first bot, IQ Bot (a cognitive bot), has already won an award for the best technology deployed in 2018. It goes in and extracts data from invoices and applies machine learning if the data is not set to the right columns, putting it back to the right columns, then goes ahead and extracts data from purchase invoices. 

It's the best product that we have at this moment.

Start small. Don't take big steps if you are automating.

We use this solution for automating business tasks in certain areas of the organization (so far). This involves creating bots to handle mundane tasks, so employees can be freed to work on other tasks that require higher thinking skills. We installed the product locally with the vendor's help.

The Automation Anywhere software has improved our organization by moving us into the RPA climate and allowing us to save on our overhead. By using bots, we have virtual workers that work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, all without taking a salary.

So far, we have found Customization and Ease of Use to be the most valuable features. We are also working on scalability now (within our bots), so other business areas can use the same bots that were already created. At the same time, we will be continuing to build other bots.

I would like to see a built-in read-only role for the control room so that the bot creators can log in and monitor the production environment without any auditing concerns. Currently, our development team cannot log into the production control room, due to audit concerns, and it would be beneficial to see the bots running, confirm the schedules, etc.

So far, it has been stable for the past nine months, which also included an upgrade to the client and control room.

We are currently scaling our bots and as a platform, it is very scalable.

All of the times that I contacted technical support were pleasant. Tickets were assigned quickly and resolved. We even have a customer liason weekly tagup call with the vendor to help with anything that may arise.

Previously, we didn’t use this type of product. We needed to lower our overhead costs.

This initial setup was straightforward. The documentation that was provided was thorough.

Our in-house team was used, along with the vendor's documentation and installation guides. Overall, it worked well.

Being one of the Bot Creators, I wasn't included in the breakdown, makeup, or negotiation of pricing or licensing. I only know the total cost.

We only installed the evaluation version of Automation Anywhere, and our Proof of Concept was successful.

Don’t employ all non-technical employees to create bots. Use software engineers. In our environment, we use REST, API, and SOAP, which may be daunting to non-technical folks.

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.

The primary use case for bringing in Automation Anywhere was to make sure that we take away the work which our resources don't want to do, they don't like to do, or they find that there is something more meaningful and useful they can use their time for. That was our primary factor. 

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode bots, because we don't need to go and look at what they're doing. They just go by themselves. That's the state we need to get to, but we are currently attended. Based on the projects or PoCs that we have done, we've got a last transmission program coming in, which is exciting.

The bot insides should come in the same package versus having it as a different bundle by itself. If we could have this product come with all the inside solutions altogether, that would help.

I was talking the other day in a session that when we go into this, how do we ensure that the right security policies are in place? Because now, we are talking about people accessing these bots from anywhere outside of the restricted access zone. So, that is where we should put focus on, because it takes only somebody to snatch the phone and start breaching. Therefore, that is where we should put the focus on.

We started off with the 10.5 version, where we didn't find any major hiccups. Then, we upgraded to version 11.3, which we find more useful. I think version 11.3 is the way to go.

As with every solution or a product, it goes through that journey. I think the RPA for Automation Anywhere is going through that journey. I can see the stability improvements from 10.3 to 10.5 to 11.3. From this conference, I could see the end-to-end governance coming into play. So, stability-wise, they are getting there. I'm not saying that it's fully stabilized. But, it's working for us, and the path is on the right track.

We started off with this showcase piece. Now, we are going into details regarding how we can scale. Can we scale it horizontally? Can we just start putting VMs on it? So, these are the factors that we are assessing right now, but we feel that it is scalable.

We wanted to be able to kick-start this journey, so we brought in an automation team, as this is where the whole industry is moving with our clients. From here, we will have success stories year after year.

We did not use a previous solution. We were trying to shop around and see what was best for us. Automation Anywhere was always promising and the use cases that we saw were interesting. So, we said, "We'll start with that." It works well so far.

The initial setup wasn't complex, but it wasn't straightforward. It was somewhere in the middle.

We didn't go Big Bang on thinking how much money that we were going to save. I wanted to make sure that could we show improvements in the efficiency, in terms of headcount. Ultimately, it comes boiled down to cost, but then if I can get one headcount reduced from the team, and be able to utilize that to somebody else, that would be a winning situation for my client and me.

We measure the ROI through FTE. Of course, there is a dollar value associated with it.

We have started to see the ROI. We are starting to see the following:

• Activities in which resources in my team would have taken four to five hours are now done in 30 minutes. 
• Some of the weekend monitoring
• Some of the weekend missing report generations
• Monday monitoring of a heavy load system. 

These are things that we are already starting to see where the time taken to do a task has been drastically reduced. So, we are seeing the performance improvement as a result.

I have nothing specific regarding the Automation Anywhere University. But, we have taken some of the online courses available and done a few sessions, which has been a wonderful deal.

I am putting it somewhere between a seven and eight (out of ten). That is what I'll rate it, because as I said, the stability and governance are on that path. As we get there, I'm sure it'll make it to a ten. So far. the journey is on the right track.

For somebody searching for a solution, it primarily concerns the use case. But if this is what they are looking for, I will definitely advise.

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 are an IT services firm. We use it for simple processes, but also for complex. We usually take up simple processes for manual tasks, which are easy to automate.

We have mostly done financial services: finance and accounting processes. That has been for the most part. We have also used it in HR and recruitment to find resumes online, and in other processes.

Its ease of deployment is the most valuable feature. We have found with many customers that it's quite easy to deploy. The other valuable feature, which is not from a technology perspective, is how Automation Anywhere collaborates with us. So, it has made our journey much easier than with other partners that we have.

Room for improvement is more on the IQ Bot side: How quickly we can adopt and deploy it? 

Another area which I feel would help is how the business can adopt it:

• Is it easier for the business to make changes to the tool once it's deployed? 
• How can the business take up roles in the man-machine continuum? 
• How can the business and machine work together, and how does the role change for the business stakeholder. 

It's more on the change management side, but includes all of the tool enabler.

It has been quite good in terms of making changes. As we are working on the process, it's much easier to make changes.

In terms of scaling up, we have not had issues with bots which are in production. In UAT, there have been scaling issues. But in production, as long as a solution is good, then it works.

It was a strategy from our company. We were looking to reduce the cost of operations for our existing clients. We were looking at different ways in which we could reduce our business, in a way, by reducing costs and get more business from the same clients. So this is where we started, by looking at automation as a major thing for Hexaware itself. It starts from our visions, which aligns very well with what Automation Anywhere provides, as a platform. That is where we started, then we have obviously grown and been able to automate many processes, which helped us to get many deals where we are upfront and able to tell clients how much optimization is possible. This is sort of my role, to showcase to the clients how much automation is feasible, in a particular process. We are quite good at that and have been able to do multiple engagements in this space.

We have automated one process, which was running with 109 people. We reduced it down to 69 with automation.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and World Fusion, and we struggled. Initially, we worked with other firms, but we have seen a great synergy with how Automation Anywhere integrates with our team and how we are getting support from Automation Anywhere. When we are going to a client with Automation Anywhere, it's much easier. That collaboration with their support team, and their advice to us, is extremely good. That's why we end up referring Automation Anywhere.

I would like to use IQ Bot a little bit more and understand more about what is offered, as to what features are there. One of the key challenges that we have had, in implementation, is for complex processes, especially where the input is not standardized. So, IQ Bot seems to be a good tool to use there. Hopefully, it will address everything, but mostly on that.

I would rate the product around eight to eight and a half. Mainly, because there is always room for improvement, and we're happy with the tool. There are areas which we need to understand more, as well, like IQ Bot for instance. We did one engagement with IQ Bot, but we need to mature ourselves into how we can utilize it. As the product matures, I'm sure it will be easier for us.

My advice will be to get a partner who is wiling to work with you and is willing to collaborate. This will make your life easier in the automation journey. There will be initial hiccups when you are getting into this journey, and that's just part of any journey. You need to look internally as to how you can improve, and work with a strong team, to deploy the solution.