Automation Anywhere Reviews

Accounts payable is our primary focuses for automation, and we are looking forward to this report. Thanks.

We are in the early stages and need to see how it goes for future bot building especially Bot Store today.

• Very comprehensive with different platforms especially SAP and Oracle EBS. 
• The digital worker is interesting.

I am interested in discovery, and what this means for companies like mine. I think the pricing model should be more flexible.

This solution was originally introduced to help operations reduce manual tasks. After seeing positive results, we have now implemented this RPA solution in IT.

We have been able to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks completed by operations, allowing individuals to move onto tasks which cannot yet be automated.

Currently, under Automation Anywhere, we only use the Bot Runners and Bot Creators. This ensures we can automate processes without the need for manual interaction.

I would like to see more stability around scheduling a bot to run headless. I believe version 11 may be more stable and have less issues when trying to run headless.

It is more stable now than it was three years ago. So far, I have no major concerns and am looking forward to upgrading to version 11 in Q3.

As we have a small number of bits in production on version 10.5.4, we found it easy to scale. Version 11 will provide a load balancer, making it easier for us to run a pool of VMs to complete a task.

We mostly use it for operations right now. We are looking at possible IT RPA use cases.

The tech support has improved over the years. I believe the tech support to be sufficient right now.

I wasn't part of the original PoC team who completed the initial setup. 

After joining the team, we engaged in two upgrades to deal with stability issues. We found this a painful process as we were early adopters. This meant that the install wasn't stable. To resolve this, we decided on an approach where we would only upgrade to a major release six months after its release.

The deployment is quick. You could complete this in a weekend. Realistically, you need a week to prep and another week to triage unexpected issues.

Our implementation strategy has been to upgrade development, confirm everything functions as expected, and only then upgrade production.

We have a team of six, which consists of developers, a tech lead, and manager. We have set up a run support team to handle maintenance and bot stability issues. Their role is to get the bots back up and running in the event of an issue.

It is expensive. Automation Anywhere has reduced the price slightly, as we have grown. However, the price is still excessive enough that we are engaged in PoCs on other tools.

I wasn't part of the initial conversations, though I believe we proceeded with the number product in the market.

As a total package, this is probably the easiest solution to start with. Even if you add something that you will not need, e.g., Bot Insight won't be required until you have more than 50 bots in production. Even then, see if you can develop this through in-house metrics.

Generally, it is used in the banking and financial domains for Oracle and Java-based systems. We also use Automation Anywhere for integration where a third-party tool has to be triggered.

The are many features and we can do many things with it. They've now included the code so we can add some additional code. That's good.

I'd like to see the OCR feature be perfected. Today we get an accuracy ratio from OCR of around 40 percent to 50 percent only. Better OCR would be very useful in the industry because most of the documents in the banking sector are scanned and hand-written and they want to compare them with other documents.

I would also like to see them provide more support: profile documents and guidance. It would also help to have use-case demos available publicly, not on the Automation Anywhere website. Overall, better promotion of the solution would be good for Automation Anywhere.

Stability depends on the local system. It is good. But when we switch the system, when we go to Citrix or we jump to RDP, the modern stuff, it breaks sometimes.

Comparing Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I would go for Blue Prism's stability. It is very stable. Once the coding is done, meaning all the flowcharts are designed, it will work, it will not break. But sometimes, Automation Anywhere fails. It doesn't take the values from the input at times.

The scalability is good.

Automation Anywhere's technical support is good. They provide it via email. There are no issues with it. They have opened their offices for technical support in India. Usually, within 24 hours, we get a resolution via a reply to our email: "This is the issue, and this is the solution," or, "This is the way to do it." It usually doesn't take longer than that.

The setup is usually straightforward, not complex. If you're doing a basic installation, it takes around one hour. If you're installing MetaBots or any plugins, it will take some more time.

The team we work on develops on the weekend. We have Control Room access so we deploy from there. It doesn't require a team though, an individual person who is working on a given project can also install it.

We don't see ROI immediately. It takes from six or seven months to one year to get the ROI from what we develop. The client needs to trust the RPA solution. Once they trust it, the process, etc., they have more confidence and say, "Okay, you can do automate these other things as well." Build a client's confidence takes time.

But at the end of the day or, really, the end of the year, we can see that the ROI is there. There are benefits and they can see the benefits.

Licensing is not done by us but by the server team. They provide the infra and they manage the installation and licensing because licensing is very costly. It's a very confidential thing. They cannot share the license with everyone.

If I compare it with Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is cheaper. Blue Prism is very costly. Automation Anywhere's pricing follows the market, not less and not more.

It's important that all processes are documented properly.

In terms of maintenance, our policy is that we do two weeks of hyper-care. After two weeks it's over to the client and they maintain it from there on. But for those two weeks initially, if there are any errors we will change the code and deliver it. But the maintenance is good. We don't need to modify many things.

Since we are an insurance company, there are many administrative tasks, such as, the enrollment agreement process, address change after enrollment, issuing of various certificates, making payments, etc. We wanted to automate these administrative or back office operations, so this is where we first started. After we verified that the products by Automation Anywhere can work with our organization, we decided to expand their use to the making of sales materials and business performance documents for our sales division, as well as administrative processes for our operations division. Other uses include compliance related matters and checking of anti-social forces. We are taking the initiative to automate all sorts of administrative tasks of the company with the help of robots and RPA. 

The solution has been implemented into 27 divisions.

The immediate impact is administrative tasks which were traditionally done manually are now being done by robots. This reduces the workload for people. This not only improves efficiency, but also expands the type of work which can be done by people. 

When I spoke to people who have used the solution, they mentioned that they have much less stress. As we are an insurance company, a finance company, where avoiding administrative errors is critical. We need to check things over constantly, but with the use of these robots, there is no need for it any longer. In addition, robots take care of pre-process tasks and notify us in advance, so we don’t forget what we need to do. In these ways, it reduces stress.

This solution is valuable because it can automate tasks which would otherwise be left for us to process manually without us incurring an enormous investment for the cost of the system.

Since we are a life insurance company, our contract terms are very long. They could last for 50 years, or even a lifetime, which means we have many old contracts. If we make an investment into a system, this is an enormous cost for us. If we automate with a system, there would be a wasted cost. So, we had almost given up on automation, thinking the future of our company would have to rely on manual processes. That is when we found out about this solution. By implementing it, we were able to solve the issue of automation, which we had almost gave up on.

The fact that its robots can touch on various systems, like humans, this is what is ground- breaking. It means it can handle various systems.

It’s not about the solution itself, but our administrative work is mostly done in the morning. This is something I have been speaking to Automation Anywhere about. If they could offer licenses only for use in the morning, we’d have a bigger savings cost-wise. Currently, the license is good for 24 hours, but there is not much to do at night and plenty to do in the morning. So, if we could use more in the morning, that would be a great, as we also have a bot farm. This is also when we increase the number of tasks to be stabilized. If they are managed within the client or server, there will be a risk of losing the service in case of emergencies, such as power outage. Therefore, we are working to manage them virtually on servers. With Deloitte’s help, we have been setting up a structure where we can get the robots to work without having the client. That would hopefully ensure stability and viability in case of emergencies.

If we could hire part-time workers on shift-based employment, that would be ideal.

As far as stability is concerned, there have been some challenges. Sometimes, we experience our computers freezing up for no apparent reason or the network being inaccessible. So, when the robots stop working, the cause may be the RPA or it could be some other culprit. 

While there is room for improvement, I do think that we need to take into consideration that the robots may stop working at any given moment. That’s why we need a tool that supervises the robots. The Automation Anywhere products already include such tools within them. We need to be able to monitor them. We need to be able to find out as soon as the robots stop and where the processing has ended. These functions are included, so we just need to quickly jump on the recovery process. That is what I think is important.

It is highly scalable. At the time of implementing this solution, we thought that the scaling might be challenging if the setup process took a lot of time. However, it turned out to be very scalable because, by segmenting, it can also be applied to other new business processes. In addition, it can be done without engineers or system engineers. It does not need to be developed, but we do need to set it up based on rules. 

The cost for scalability is much cheaper than developing a new system.

We are using Automation Anywhere products, but we are getting technical support from Deloitte, from whom we purchased a license. They get back to us swiftly. When they can’t handle an issue, they elevate it to Automation Anywhere, who tackle issues daily. My impression is that we don’t really have technical issues. In general, we follow the manuals that we created, and this solves the issues. There has not been a situation where we have had to contact the technical support everyday for some technical issue. We don’t need to use them that much. That differentiates this from our more comprehensive IT systems.

The reason why we thought that we needed a solution is the management of our contracts last for long periods of time, which includes the maintenance of old products as well. It’s almost impossible to systemize everything from the cost standpoint, as well as the time standpoint, but it can be done if we use a robot. However, it can’t be solved unless we use this RPA. The fact that we can tackle this is huge. We thought that we could improve the productivity if we use it. This is what triggered us to implement it. It was shocking for us when we first saw a software that can handle tasks like a human. 

When we decided to implement an RPA solution, it was our goal to be able to set it up ourselves from the beginning. As we had no knowledge on this product, we asked Deloitte to help us create a manual which suited our needs. The systems being used are different from company to company, so we needed to make it so it work for our company. Generally, product manuals are written in a way that says this command does something. While ours does say this, e.g., to activate this system, use this command. We worked closely with Deloitte to standardize our manual. Deloitte also taught us how to build it as we attempted the skill transfer. 

We had some challenges in the beginning. However, if you have experience with Excel macros with End User Computing (EUC) or have used Access, it’s an easy transition. If you have not done any EUC, you will have to learn from scratch. So, it may take some time. In general, it is much easier than programming.

Automation Anywhere has different types of solutions. When you have a large-scale operation, you need something that is scalable, which can monitor server sinking and operations, and is suitable for the large-scale business development. In addition, it is highly adaptable with the existing systems. So far, except for the few systems, it can recognize all the systems currently used by us.

I would to give the solution a ten, but considering the stability issue and its readiness, I would say that it is between an eight to a nine. 

Foreign Language: (Japanese)

この製品を主にどのように使用していますか?また、パフォーマンスはどうですか?

まず我々が取り組んだところは、第一生命は保険会社ですので、保険にはもの凄く加入の時の 契約の手続きであったりだとか、加入されてからの色々な住所変更だったりだとか、色んな証 明書の発行だったりとかですね、で最終的には保険金をお支払いする、そういった事務がかな りの量であります。で、まずはそういう事務のオペレーション、バックオフィスですね、そう いった所を自動化していこうという所で、そこからまず始めて行きました。で、ある程度そこ で、Automation Anywhere の製品が機能するんではないかと言うことが確認できましたので、 それをもっと広げていこうっていうことで、今は営業部門の色んな資料作りであったりだと か、業績の管理の資料作りだったりだとか、あとはそれ以外の運用部門、資産運用部門の 色々、バックオフィスの事務であったりとかですね。あとは例えばコンプライアンス関係です ね、いわゆる反社会的勢力のチェックであったりだとかですね、そういったまさに第一生命の 中にある色んな事務をロボット、RPA を導入してオートメーション化していこう、そういった 取り組みを進めています。 

当ソリューションはどんな点において最も役に立ちますか?

そうですね、やっぱり機能と言いますか、なかなかシステム投資をすると膨大なコストがかか ってしまうとかですね、そういったいわゆる手作業で残っているところをこのソリューション を使うとやはり自動化できるということですね。我々は保険会社ですので、契約の機関と言う のがもの凄く長いんです。50 年であったりだとか終身保険であったりだとか、そうすると、古 い契約っていうのがもの凄く一杯あってですね、これはシステム投資をすると莫大なコストが かかってしまうと。これをシステムで自動化すると無駄な費用が掛かる。そういった所で諦め

ていて、これはもう第一生命は未来を手で処理をしていくしかないなと思っていたところに、 こういったソリューションがあるということで導入して、少し諦めていたようなところも RPA を導入することによって解決することができたということかなと思います。

やっぱりあれですね、ロボットは色んなシステムを触ることが出来る、人のようにね。そうい った所が画期的なところです。

色んなシステムを動かすことができるということです。

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?

やっぱり直接的な効果というのはこれまで人がやっていた事務の作業をロボットがやってくれ ることになったので、その分、業務の量が削減できるということです。で、それは単に効率化 っていうだけではなくて人がやるべき仕事をもっと拡大することができる、ということかなと 思います。もう一つがやってみてやはりユーザーの実際にこれを導入している人と話をする と、もの凄くストレスが無くなる、と。我々は保険会社、金融機関ですので事務のミスとかっ ていうのはもの凄くナーバスで、何重にもチェックしないといけないとか、そういった所がこ のロボットでなくなる、とかですね。後は前処理みたいなことはロボットがやってくれてお知 らせしてくれるので、やらないといけないことを忘れない、とかですね。そういったストレス がなくなるということがそういった効果もあるのかなと思っています。

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?

安定性っていう意味では、やはり色々課題があって、それは通常、普通に事務作業で我々パソ コンを触っていると、たまに原因が分からないけどフリーズしたりとか、ネットワークがたま たま繋がらないとか、そういった、この RPA が原因のものとかですね、RPA が原因じゃなく てロボットが止まるということはよくあります。だから、それは色々改善していくところもあ るんですけど、ある一定程度、そういうロボットが停止するっていうこととかは織り込んでお かないといけないことなのかなと思っています。そのためにも、やはりロボットを監視できる ツールであったり、そういったものは Automation Anywhere さんの製品にはすべて入っていま すが、そう監視できるようにしておく。止まったらすぐ分かるようにしていく。どこで作業が 終わったら、止まってしまったのがすぐ分かるようにする。そういった機能も完備されている ので、それを速やかにリカバリーする態勢を取っていく。そういうことが重要なのかなと思っ ています。

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?

まず、拡張性についてはですね、極めて高いんではないかなと思っています。我々もこれを導 入する当初から、あまりにもセットアップしていくのに時間がかかるっていうものだとなかな か拡大できないと思っていましたが、それを部品化することによって、要は、一度作ったもの をどんどん新しい別の業務にも適用することができるというところで、その拡張性って言うの は高い。しかもあまりエンジニア、システムエンジニアがなしでできるというところですね。 開発ではなく、そのあるルールに基づいてセットアップして行けばいい、という形になってい ますので、そういったところでは拡張性と拡張するためのコストがシステム開発するよりかな り安い、ローコストでできるんじゃないかと思っています。

このソリューションにテクニカルサポートを利用したことはありますか?ある場合は、サポー トをどのように評価しますか?

我々、Automation Anywhere さんの製品を導入しているんですけど、テクニカルサポート関係 は保守っていう面ではライセンスを Deloitte さんから経由で買ってますので、Deloitte さんに一 時的なサポートをしてもらっています。あそこにはもの凄く迅速に対応していただいています し、また Deloitte さんでは解決できないところは Automation Anywhere さんが日々、解決に当 たってくれているということです。ただ、あまりテクニカルな問題で問題になるようなことは そこまで多くないというのが印象ですね。大体、自分たちが作ったマニュアルだとかそういっ たことを読み込むと、大体解決できるということで、そこまでテクニカルな問題が発生して、 日々問い合わせをしないといけないとかですね、そういったことはあまりないです。なので、 あまり、そういった意味ではあまり活用しなくても大丈夫というようなですね。そこが IT と は、完全なシステムとは違うっていうところなのかなと思います。

初期セットアップには関与されましたか?セットアップは簡単、それとも複雑でしたか?どう いった意味で簡単、あるいは複雑でしたか?

RPA のソリューションを導入するにあたっては、目標としては自分たちでできるようになるっ て言うのが最初から目標にしていました。ただ、もちろん我々もこのソリューションには何の 知識もない状態でしたので、最初は Deloitte さんに来て頂いて、我々の第一生命に合うマニュ アル作りというのを一緒に取り組んできた。例えば、会社によっては色んな使っているシステ ムも違いますので、そういったものが第一生命で合うようにしていく、と。具体的には通常用 意されている製品のマニュアルっていうのは、このコマンドは何をするコマンドというような 書き方になっているのですけど、逆に第一生命のこのシステムを起動させるためにはこのコマ ンドを使う、とかですね。そういったマニュアルで標準化をしていくということを Deloitte さ んと一緒にやってきました。で、その作り方も Deloitte さんに教えてもらいながら、スキルト ランスファーを図っていくということです。もちろん最初は少し苦労した面もありましたが、

ただある意味 EUC でエクセルのマクロを作ったことがあるとかですね、アクセスを触ったこ とがあるとかですね、そういったことにある程度知識がある人だと、すんなりとというか、ス ムーズに入っていける。まったく EUC もやったことない人だと、やっぱり一から覚えて行か ないといけないので、少し時間がかかるかなと思います。ただ、一般的にはですね、プログラ ミングをするとかよりはずっと容易にできるのかなと思います。

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? また、それはなぜですか?

ソリューション自体ではないんですけど、どうしてもわれわれの事務の仕事っていうのは、朝 やりたい仕事が多くてですね。なので、これは Automation Anywhere さんともお話ししている んですけど、午前中だけ使えるライセンスとかですね。そういうのがあると、コスト的にもも っとメリットが出てくるのでは。今、24 時間動かすと、なかなか夜中にやらせる仕事があんま り少なくてですね、朝一でやりたい仕事が多くてですね。それをもっと沢山稼働できるように なれば。ボットファームなんかもあるんですけど、そういった所をもっと充実して頂ければい いかな、と思います。ここもやはり製品というよりも、安定化していく業務数が多くなってく ると何か、サーバーとかクライアントとかに、例えば停電が起こったりした時にクライアント で管理していると、全部止まってしまうとかですね、そういったリスクもありますのでロボッ トについてはバーチャルで、サーバーで管理できるようなですね、そういったことを今取り組 みを進めています。Deloitte さんに手伝っていただいたりしながらですね、クライアントを持 たずにロボットを動かすような仕掛けづくりを今、検討を進めていると言うところです。それ によって安定性もありますし、何かトラブルがあった時の堅牢性が確保できるという風に思っ ています。

パートの人を雇ってシフト勤務とかですね、そういったことが出来るといいなと思っていま す。

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?

まずソリューションが必要だと思ったところはやはり、我々は...さっきの話と繰り返し になりますが、契約の管理と言うのはもの凄く長期間に渡っていかないといけない、 と。そうすると、古い商品の管理って言うのも沢山あります。それを全部システム化し ていくっていうのはコスト面、その時間の面でも不可能な話なので、そういったところ をこのロボットが解決できる。逆にこの RPA でないと解決しようがないというところ ですね。そういったところが取り組めるというところがもの凄く大きい。これであれば そういったことも解決できるんではないかと思ったところです。それが、導入のきっか けです。人と同じように作業ができるというソフトウェアと言うのは、見た時はかなり 衝撃的なもので、これであればもっと生産性を高めることができるんではないかと言う 風に考えたものです。

最終的に当ソリューションを選択した理由は何ですか?

Automation Anywhere さんの製品は色々なソリューションがあると思いますが、やはり 大規模で展開している上で、さきほど質問があった拡張性ですね、サーバー撃沈を監視 できる、運用を監視できる、それか大規模に展開することに適したものかなと思ってい ます。あとは既存のシステムとの認識度合いも極めて高いということですね。今まで、

一部の例外を除いて第一生命が使っているシステムをすべて認識して触ることができる という風になっています。

このソリューションに 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?そしてその理由は何ですか?

10、と言いたいところですが、さっきの安定性の所とかでまだまだ工夫していかないといけな い所があるので、でもそれは製品だけじゃなくて我々の態勢を含めてですね、そういった意味 では 8 点。8 点から 9 点くらいです。

I deployed this solution mostly in the finance and accounting space. We had two primary use cases. One was automating the procured invoice to pay process and the other was automating the order to cash cycle, OTC process.

It increased productivity. It raised the productivity percentage of individuals 20 to 35%. We also saw cost reduction.

Automation Anywhere was easier to learn for the developers. It has a lot of out of box features when it comes to SAP, Excel, and others. However, on the other hand, I did not like one feature which is a built-in linear code that is a straight line and it does not have the modular functionality of UiPath so the code becomes one long code and if you need to make changes you need to look through the entire code and make changes. After the code is returned, even if there are some changes in the process, the support cycle is really difficult because, with UiPath, it's modular in structure. For example, one variable changes so it's declared as a variable and you can just change it and the code automatically reflects the change. It creates a nightmare to maintain. That was the one key drawback from Automation Anywhere. The good thing about Automation Anywhere was learning the best practices of it and using the development framework was easier so getting developers who knew AA was relatively easier than getting developers who knew UiPath or Blue Prism.

We faced a big challenge when moving from AA9 to 10. That was a nightmare. The whole process took six months to one year because we had to do it for 12 to 15 clients in my organization and I was leading the Automation Anywhere deployment for 25 clients.

The biggest issue was that the new license required upgraded hardware infrastructure so we were getting all new tech stuff procured which meant that we were getting updated RAMs and things like that. Getting the licenses was easier but building the infrastructure which was required to support the new version was difficult.

Automation Anywhere is one of the least stable RPA tools out of the top five RPA solutions. A lot of times you need to rely on certain features that are really unstable. Three years back 90% of our projects were on AA. Two years back it became 70% with 20% being on Blue Prism and 10% UiPath. This year onwards it's around 50% on UiPath and 50% on Automation Anywhere. The reason why we have 50% on AA is because we have a developer strain on AA. The code is not stable. You have to recode again and again. Then when you do recode, changing the code is really tough.

Scalability is good. It's one of the better ones.

We didn't face any issues from their technical support. They were responsive and helpful.

The initial setup is more straightforward compared to other solutions like UiPath. Initially, it is relatively difficult. If you have a very simple straight linear process then Automation Anywhere is easy to implement and to deploy but as soon as you get into complexities or where you have more rules like finance or accounting where I deployed specifically at times, there are a lot of variances in the process. That's where Automation Anywhere actually becomes a headache to manage.

If you implement it right way the ROI can start within one year. It delivers quick benefits in terms of ROI.

It's cheaper than other similar solutions.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. 

I would advise two things to someone considering this solution. Go for it if you are positive it is very simple and you understand your processing end to end. It is a cheaper tool compared to others and the initial implementation is relatively easier. You will get results faster. Second, if your process has many variations, is complex, and you do not know a lot about your process, do not use Automation Anywhere, otherwise, you will run into trouble while going live and after support.

My primary use cases are where I'm dealing with a lot of raw data extraction and transformation so that the data can be used by other systems.

An example would be getting the data out of PDF files, transforming it from semi-structured to structured and putting it into an extra-stable system like Excel or a CSV so that it can be used by other systems.

A lot of clients I work with have legacy systems and a lot of API access is not available. Some of the systems might be running off a server located somewhere else, while some would be running on a mainframe and I'm actually restricted to working with the screen. So these clients have a very good use case. If I'm working with the screens, Automation Anywhere really does help me because it gives me the control over the screens. If you are not looking at integrating legacy software, Automation Anywhere gets the job done. But if you need integration then you start looking for other RPA tools.

It definitely saves time and effort. Improving the workflow, that's not something Automation Anywhere provides. That's a different challenge altogether - to do a business process improvement so that automation gives you even more value. That type of process works in combination with Automation Anywhere, but it's not a part of Automation Anywhere. So the process improvement is separate. We optimize the process and then we run it through Automation Anywhere.

You can probably use any similar tools. But Automation Anywhere is one tool that actually gives me automation capability right at the start, without worrying about process improvement in the first place. I can just act like how another person would. Whereas if I do a little bit of process optimization, I can use another tool also. If I get access to APIs, I might use Blue Prism. If I get access to web elements, I go the way of UiPath. If it is a human-mimicking behavior, that's where I use Automation Anywhere.

What I like about Automation Anywhere is the object cloning and the way you can move the mouse and either go to a particular point or go to an element. That's very easy and intuitive in Automation Anywhere.

It gets the job done in terms of getting the data out of the pages. Although I have other tools, I still have this habit of going through the clicks. If you're going through the clicks, Automation Anywhere is the best.

Let's say you are on a website. You move the mouse around. You click on certain places. Automation Anywhere is better at that because you can adjust the screen directly or you can adjust the element. Whereas in, let's say, UiPath, it's a little bit complicated on the inside because there isn't a direct command for that. I have to go to a web scraper. In Automation Anywhere, I have the direct command to move my mouse. If I need to mimic a human behavior, I will use Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is troublesome for some people because of the way it is organized. It's organized as an encrypted script, which gets run via a domain-specific language which the user sees. 

There's a loss of overhead on the computing resources in Automation Anywhere. If you have an encrypted bot, the Automation Anywhere software has to read it first, decrypt it, and run it. So there is a potential that, if the logic of the bot isn't good enough, a lot of CPU and memory overload will happen. This is something that Automation Anywhere should look at because it takes a lot of computing resources. I have seen CPUs running at 100 percent.

In terms of additional features, if I am dealing with a dynamic workflow where the workflow might change based on the input parameters, then Automation Anywhere doesn't help me because the code is pretty much fixed. When I need those types of workflows I go to UiPath.

It's highly stable. I'm pretty happy with Automation Anywhere. I'm pretty happy with the security of the bot. Once you make a bot, if you don't have access to Automation Anywhere, you really can't mess with the bot. I'm pretty happy with the stability. 

The only problem I have is that it takes a lot of memory and CPU usage for Automation Anywhere to do its internal encrypting and decrypting.

I'm not yet happy with the scalability of Automation Anywhere. Scalability is good up to about 100 bots. Beyond that, I need to spread it into multiple sites, which means there is additional licensing cost.

I would give Automation Anywhere's technical support about three-and-a-half out of five. They do have a lot of information published, but the response times aren't great within India, where we are located. I can't say anything about support in other markets.

One thing they need to improve on is the way they have been putting out so many terminologies in the market: IQ Bots, MetaBots. They need to define them properly, in simple terms. If I go to my client and say "IQ Bot" or "MetaBot," they don't understand anything. It falls back on us to figure out whether these types of things will be useful for our process or not.

Regarding their support, when they bring in these features, like IQ Bot and MetaBot, there isn't a lot of documentation that comes with them, which can cause confusion in the client's mind as well as the developer's mind. Even Automation Anywhere's guys aren't really clear on IQ Bots, MetaBots, and things within Automation Anywhere because, when we ask, they just give us the definition. That's not very helpful.

It's pretty straightforward in terms of setting it up. It's not a lot of work, as compared to what you would do in Blue Prism, or even in or WorkFusion. I would say UiPath is the easiest to install and configure, while Automation Anywhere would be number two. Blue Prism would be way down because it's difficult installing and configuring it.

It doesn't take much time to deploy Automation Anywhere. We have built a script. We just run the script and within three or four minutes we are done. We don't really install Automation Anywhere by running it and then monitoring it, rather the script automatically installs it. That script lightens our load; we automate our own jobs as well.

In terms of implementation strategy, we have a set of requirements for the client's environment and hardware. For the environment, we need to look at the .NET framework, which version, the directory structure, folder structure, paths. And there are multiple items to be checked out regarding the hardware: We need to look at the RAM, the hard disk space, the connectivity. There's a lot of checking which must be done, but we do that through the script itself.

We have all the environments set up in one local place and once the script runs it goes and installs all the required software components. The .NET framework will be installed, the run-time engine will be installed, Automation Anywhere will be installed, and the policies will be set automatically for at least the end user, so that we can go and create more users.

Once we have the hardware, and once we are ready to install the environment, it takes us about 15 to 20 minutes.

For deployment of Automation Anywhere, we don't need a lot of staff. But when we are deploying the bots, we generally have an experienced guy who will look at the deployment of the bots within the Control Room. That's a different scenario altogether.

We don't require a lot of people for maintenance. What we do is, we transfer some of the load to the client's staff, in terms of monitoring and scheduling. Of course, we have one person keeping an eye on the entire thing. We have one person on a chargeable basis per client location. And this person also doesn't have a lot of work, so sometimes this person moves among the sites if there is no problem at all with the installation.

Companies now are not willing to put a large investment up front into these tools, unless the service provider that is developing the bots can assure that the bot will be successful and there will be certain savings. Clients are actually talking to the service providers first, rather than the RPA Software Vendors. It used to be that Automation Anywhere would go to the customer, convince them and sell them five licenses, and then the client would go out and start hunting for Automation Anywhere service providers or resources. The whole model has now changed 180 degrees. Now the clients are more interested in talking to consultants and trying to figure out which tool would be good, how many licenses they would need, what the scalability roadmap is, what will they be doing again in six months, 12 months, two years, etc.

It's hard to get a clear picture of the financial value that it can bring. For example, when we go in, we look at a process and we look at the value that automating the process can bring in, but there are other aspects which we look at, which are a kind of "chain effect." If I automate this, what else will break in the whole chain of processes? When there are processes A, B, and C, if I automate B, either A or C or both will feel the heat from this automation effort. If A and C are not conducive to screen-based automation, then I am in a fix because I can automate B using Automation Anywhere, but for A and C, I might need to use something else.

That type of analysis is now coming into the picture. Earlier, it was: Pick a process, automate it, feel the benefit, and then go for another. That is one reason why now we can also recommend hybrid models where multiple tools could be used via a single interface. We have to build the interface to Automation Anywhere and UiPath, or Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism to get the job done. That becomes an additional cost to the client.

If you look at the capital expenditure, Automation Anywhere is number two to UiPath. But if you take a long-term view, on a scalable model of a large number of bots coming out, it slowly goes on to become the costliest tool. There is something they can do about that.

I did a cost comparison on short-term basis, long-term basis, CapEx versus OpEx, and Automation Anywhere is the costliest. Surprisingly, Blue Prism becomes the cheapest, if you look at the long-term view.

That's because of the licensing terms, the pricing policy, and the engagement models. Blue Prism doesn't want you to buy just one license. They want you to sign up for the long-term, for at least a minimum block of ten licenses. Automation Anywhere can give you a single license, so the capital expenditure is low. But as you go on, the OpEx, the regular increase in the number of licenses and the price per, starts to add up.

The capital expenditure goes out right at the point of buying the tool. For Automation Anywhere, I would need to spend $20,000. UiPath can give me something for $6,000, while Blue Prism will come in at $300,000. If I'm just experimenting, or I don't have a need for a large number of bots, or I can optimize my design to run bots sequentially on the same machine, Automation Anywhere vs UiPath is quite comparable.

Every tool has its own drawbacks. Blue Prism would probably be an eight out of ten, but the nearest comparable tool to Automation Anywhere would be Softomotive WinAutomation. They both work on the same principles, although the internal storage is different. WinAutomation also works on a domain-specific language system, and I would rate it a little notch higher than Automation Anywhere and give it a seven-and-a-half out of ten, but they are all in the same category. I don't really see any of them getting a ten, on my scale, right now.

UiPath can do wonders, but the technology is old. If I want to do machine-learning, I can't do it with UiPath. I would have to create another "open UiPath" for myself to be able to use machine-learning and artificial intelligence libraries which are there in the market, because I can't use them with UiPath. That's where UiPath also loses a couple of points.

It's a very dynamic market and everyday new tricks are being discovered. My advice would be: Look at your process. If your process is screen-based, doesn't have a lot of things to do with APIs, go for Automation Anywhere. If somebody's looking specifically to implement Automation Anywhere, irrespective of what process they're automating, I would probably call it a bad move.

Role-wise, we follow our own system. We have a solution designer and we have an architect. These two guys work hand-in-hand, from solution design to a technical architecture of the Automation Anywhere bot. Then we have developers who develop the system. And we have the leads, of course, who are managers. They are senior staff who understand how the bot code is to be published and released into the Control Room. Most of the time, it's the solution designer and the architects who are critical for us, rather than the developers. The development part is easier than the design part. Designing automation takes a lot out of us.

In our organization we have 42 people, and most of these are multi-skilled on multiple tools. We do only specialized stuff, so some 20 of them would have been working on Automation Anywhere at some point. We use multiple tools. We are tool agnostic. We figure out which tool to use and go with that tool.

We don't have plans to push future usage of Automation Anywhere, most importantly because of extensibility of the tool: I can't extend it. So we created a workflow tool for ourselves similar to UiPath, but it's open to extensions. I don't see a lot of projects happening on Automation Anywhere for us unless the customer asks for it. In the Asia-Pacific market, it's either UiPath or Automation Anywhere. If they don't have a tool then, of course, we'll have to look at the type of project and recommend a tool.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at seven out of ten. The architecture is great. It's only the way they have tried to protect their own bots that is causing them to cannibalize themselves. Otherwise, it is great software. It works on a domain-specific language. You really don't need to understand .NET or Visual Basic or C# to work with it. The domain-specific language is more like English. They have done a great job making something, but there is a big scope for improvement if they want to really unsettle the other guys.

In my opinion, instead of sitting in their offices and not conversing with people out there, there are a lot of things Automation Anywhere can do if it listens to the people who are actually evaluating it, using it, and are happy or unhappy with it. I don't really see a mechanism where Automation Anywhere can be seen listening to this feedback. Secondly, they should be more open about their roadmap and where they are going with Automation Anywhere. What I want them to do is to make some more noise about their plans, rather than their current situation, because customers are not looking to buy Automation Anywhere for the next three years. They're looking to buy it so that if their processes change or if Automation Anywhere changes, it can still be usable for their organizations.

I can't keep on changing tools. Let's say I use Automation Anywhere where it's obvious and then it becomes unsuitable, so I have to change to another tool. That rarely happens because the users are familiar with it and change is the biggest barrier. People don't want to change. And the cost of training is actually more than the cost of the Automation Anywhere tool itself. You need to train different people with different skills, not only in Automation Anywhere but for every tool. You need different skills and different people to actually make the whole thing work.

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.

Most of our use cases are for primary supply chain management. We have a lot of business processes and back office automation that we do primarily for our product people and our finance team. Most of the work is automation done in supply chain management, product setup, and product administration. 

I have been using this solution for almost four years and one year at my current company.

We have automated our critical functions, like supply chain management and purchase orders. Overall, there's been a direct benefit from it so far. We just completed our Phase I project this year. We have staff who have been moved out of the mundane tasks and are now doing value-added activities. 

Object cloning is the primary way of capturing inputs from screen scraping or mimicking the user flow, and it is 70 percent of the work that we do using Automation Anywhere.

We have a few issues which have persisted. These end up restarting the machine. We are hoping in version 11.3 of Automation Anywhere, our compatibility and infrastructure issues will be resolved. 

If you are using object cloning, it is stable. However, if you work with image recognition and custom objects, there are stability issues. 

We are on version 10.5.7. We have upgraded bits of it to 11.3, but it is still not operational on 11.3. We are currently working on migrating our infrastructure to version 11.3.

We are still small from a robotics implementation standpoint. We are just about 20 bots right now with no issues. If we scale up to 500 bots, I am not sure how the infrastructure and systems will behave, but I have had a good experience from a scalability standpoint on the tool so far.

I have a team of about 25 people with six people in support with the rest in development. At any given time, we have more than 50 people running Automation Anywhere.

This particular ticket management system works well. It's a reliable. If we need to a raise ticket for any issue, there is an escalation mechanism. Though, I have not used it. I try to utilize our customer success manager to be able to right person from Automation Anywhere. My experience has been good, though not excellent, from a support standpoint.

We were not using a solution before Automation Anywhere.

In version 11.3, the setup changed. So far, it has been simpler. Also, in version 11, they have changed the design into a Java Jetty architecture, which is more stable. However, we were not familiar with it, so we had some issues with it. Thankfully, Automation Anywhere diligently answered our calls and helped us through the installation. It wasn't easy to install on our own using the guide. We needed support from a technical entity from the support site to be able to do it.

It needs a lot of coordination between the DBAs, which is a separate team within our organization, the infrastructure team, our team, and the Automation Anywhere teams to execute the deployment. Getting them all together was a good three hours exercise just to install.

Two people from my team worked on the deployment, one of them being a DBA.

I have a technical team of support members who know our internal infrastructure. We built it in-house and the support is not outsourced to any IT vendors. We take care of the infrastructure provisioning, support, etc. We do everything ourselves, along with the help of Automation Anywhere.

I have a deployed team of six people for maintenance. 

We have seen more efficient processing and less number of errors due to quality control.

Savings have not been able to catch it that much. I believe there is huge potential here. This year, we are focusing a lot on the indirect benefits of speeding up the process. For example, we want our key customers to benefit, or buyers and suppliers boost up their business to receive benefits indirectly by freeing up their time.

They give us a good deal on the licensing because we bundle and customize things. If you ask to get a bulk business deal, you will receive more benefit. If you take other products from the suite, like IQ Bot, you can also receive a deal on the licensing. 

We have also worked with them for so long now that we have developed a relationship.

My current company looked at UiPath. We decided to go with Automation Anywhere vs UiPath, because of cost, reliability, and scalability.

We do look at companies like Microsoft Azure to do unstructured data processing for us.

It is a good with a good support app, but I would like it to work 100 percent of the time.

We are looking to increase our usage in the future. First, we need to locate the opportunities to automate within our organization to automate which are good contenders for RPA engines. We are also trying to standardize our processes to push more processes into the automation pipeline, leading to expansion. We are getting Automation Anywhere to assist with this as part of our Phase II project, and increase our bot usage by the end of the year.

If you are implementing it, you should have a good business case. Know what you're using it for: Is it for your direct or indirect benefits and what is the business value that you're going to bring in on the tool. Providing the tools for your business are important before onboarding it. Once you have onboarded it, you will need a good, capable team in-house to be able to keep the infrastructure maintained. 

Start slow. Don't start with a huge approach, then you decide that you failed. Do some proof on concepts. Ensure there is work for your organization. Gain the trust of your stakeholders. Then, take baby steps to move forward.