Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We work in a very complex type of environment. We do a lot of data analytics and strategy consulting work. The work that we have automated so far is our legacy suite of applications, doing all the reporting, data extraction from different web sources, and collating the information, then publishing to websites.

We use RPA or the Automation Anywhere tool to orchestrate the whole process. We combine it and integrate it with other API and Python solutions to help get the data from a particular source, whether it be an FTP source or AWS environment. Then, we make those validations using Excel. After that, we do our QCs and validations, then publish or submit the reports.

We partner with a few other vendors as well for different use cases based on the type of clients that we are working with.

We feel our team is more involved in the whole process to give better ideas and give new use cases to help automate things. Things that were very repetitive and manual, such as creating daily checklists and reports, those have been reduced considerably. Our team is very happy about that.

Automation Anywhere has a very rich and easy to use interface. This makes it very intuitive. As an organization, we give training to business users to help them automate themselves. It is an easy to go, create your own scripts, and logic. The typical commands which they have in the workbench are very helpful for us.

New versions keep coming up. The challenge for us is to have the downtime to do the migrations. This could be improved upon. We would like fewer version changes and upgrades happening to the application. While the downtime is not that much, depending on the business processes, there are times few critical processes are running on a daily or hourly basis. We would expect the downtime to be even less for them.

There are a few internal applications that we have where Automation Anywhere needs to be added. We need to get those applications embedded so the integration process between those applications is smooth. E.g., With a Citrix type of environment or VDI environment, we have not been able to get the right information. We have to use the coordinates. Recently. we attended a session and realized that they have come up with an IQ Bot and computer vision technology. Therefore, we have some use cases which we want to leverage.

Our focus would be for them to keep innovating for more intelligent solutions which can merge your text to speech. These types of solutions, along with other ML and AI capabilities, can solve for the larger objective and typically RPA platforms are not able to do. The type of applications that we use are very large and different. They are not the typical ERP systems or systems which normal organizations would have. If they could bring AI and ML capabilities onboard, this would help me rate them even higher.

The stability is great. We have very few issues. 

We just migrated to version 11. Though, I don't know the exact version. It was a seamless experience. The whole integration and migration has been very smooth for us.

Scalability is an important aspect of it. We believe they have been doing it pretty well. Earlier, we were doing everything as an on-premise implementation. Later, we moved to an AWS environment, hosting everything on our cloud machine. This helped us scale the whole solution and reach our multiple clients in projects that we were engaged in very quickly.

We believe the A2019 version is meant to scale the tool to a larger audience.

If we have issues, the Automation Anywhere team is always available to support us, as there are account managers and customer support managers.

We use the technical support a lot. We have our own dedicated tech support. Whenever an issue arises, we raise a ticket and it gets resolved based on criticality - within a few hours to 24 hours is usually the turnaround time. They are very helpful in terms of setting up conversations and meetings to understand an issue, then take it forward for resolution.

We already had a process excellence transformation team doing the typical operation excellence type of work process improvement and process re-engineering. We decided that it would be better to help us take the leap of automation and go from the third or fourt-generation improvements we were doing since those were long-time deployments and bring a change. We were looking for faster adoption, an easy to deploy solution, and achieve a quick ROI. This is also sellable to our leadership and makes sense to take to a larger scale. That was the whole idea.

We first thought of implementing internal system automations, legacy application automations, and Excels automations. However, when we realized the potential of this technology, and how it integrates along with its seamless environment setup. That was the go ahead for us, and we started our journey.

Initially, because we started everything in-house (did not partner with a consulting firm or the typical technology integrators), it was difficult. Then, we started learning the architecture and environment. Automation Anywhere gave us a dedicated support to set up the whole journey for us in the initial few years. It went from strength to strength after that.

We built up the whole capability in-house. Automation Anywhere helped us with the setup.

From the second year onward, ROI is achieved, which is a great thing because year-over-year you are accruing those benefits.

We have deployed it across multiple processes: reporting, data management, or sales strategy work. We have achieved a scale where we are in a position to close $1M of benefits.

The number of licenses that required when evaluating a solution was not a hundred bot licenses or Bot Runner machines. At that time, we were not looking at scale and that is where Automation Anywhere helped us.

Including the AWS setup and everything per license, it costs us around $10,000 on an annual basis. I believe that is pretty reasonable considering the teams that we have. 

We evaluated the top four vendors: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath, or Kryon. But, we realized the type of use cases that we had and wanted to try first to deploy them. Those vendors had enterprise large-scale license models in place, but we wanted a use-per-license type of system and support structure with its communities. Automation Anywhere reached out to us, and said, “We will do a free PoC and pilots for you. If you feel the solution is suiting your set of use cases, then go ahead and purchase.”

We set up the whole team and evaluated a few vendors. What prompted us to go with Automation Anywhere was our typical use case that we cater to. They were not run-of-the-mill, large volume, highly repeatable work. We have processes where only two to three people are doing the work and not many volumes coming in that.

We wanted our vendor to understand our challenges. We had multiple meetings before Automation Anywhere could understand what work we do. Then, it was like, "Aha." So, it took us time to reach where we are, but we have now partnered with them, and it's going great for us.

1. See how your use case fits with the solution. A few uses cases may be good for you.
2. Take a look at the cost model. Do you want to go for a big bang approach or large-scale implementation?
3. Customer support: Organizations fail to understand when you have deployed bots in the production systems, and they are up and running, that you need a very robust, strong support system. This way if any issues come up regarding the application/solution, teams are there to support you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From two perspectives:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MetaBots and Control Room may have some room for improvement.

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

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

We have automated some fund management and fund reconciliation processes, which has been done successfully. The tool has been performing well. 

In our fund management and fund reconciliation process, we had a lot of headcount. Automation has significantly reduced our FTE count, investing that IT personnel into other work. Also, the quality of the work has slightly improved.

Our development time has been reduced because the solution is very user-friendly. You don't have to know a lot of things. It has an IDE with drag and drops, in addition to workflow development. This gives developers an edge to write code quickly.

I am a developer with nine years of experience in full-stack development. I have found this tool strikingly different, compared to the other tools, in terms of ease to use. Anybody can be taught it, and it has a very small learning curve.

Automation Anywhere has some limitation with its integrations. You can build your logic with MetaBots and .NET components, e.g., if something is not gathered by Automation Anywhere or built into functionality, you can write a MetaBot. A MetaBot is like an external component. You can write it through C# or .NET code, and make a DLL, and import it. This is not open to all data types or EXE functionalities which can be written through C#. You have to define your variable types, matching them with Automation Anywhere existing variable types. Because of the knowledge required, I cannot let another person, who doesn't know Automation Anywhere, build my external DLL code.

They are already addressing some concerns that I have been having, like having cascaded code blocks, which is very helpful for developers to use when finding and debunking codes. Until now, we haven't had collapsible cascaded code sections in Automation Anywhere. This is not typical, as any IDE will usually have it, on any language.

The current interface for business users is not intuitive, as it is a code-based view. A business user wanting to develop a process may find the interface a bit elusive. Automation Anywhere is now working on a process flow view with a drop and drop, which should be better for business users.

There is not much guidance for implementing DevOps, like continuous development. Nowadays, the technology has come for the deployment part, it should be part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD). 

With Jenkins or TeamCity, there is a job, and I want to see them have integration with Automation Anywhere, so we can directly code check-in, run, test, and deploy. Now, we are doing this manually for deployment, but I want to see a DevOps job instead.

We had couple of Windows' tools that we automated. The stability is remarkably good. 

In some cases with RPA web development, where we had to integrate with some websites, there were some problems in terms of reliability or stability. The issue is not constant. Different browsers, like IE, work well, where others, like Chrome, don't work well. With legacy websites, based on old technology, it also does not work well. 

The scalability is fine. You can create small, repeatable tasks. You can expand through different bots. So, you don't have to recreate the same stuff. Automation Anywhere provides the facility so you can reuse components to make a scalable solution.

We are improving scalability on a daily basis, as RPA is new to us. Our code is now more scalable and reusable than we developed our basic structure. Going forward, if we have to create a new bot with any given scenario, it will take 20 to 40 percent less time to create. This is because we have already made the scalable, reusable components.

In terms of accessibility, the Automation Anywhere technical support is the best. Out of all the RPA tools that I have used, their support forum is more agile and responsive. For any issue, we just have to create a ticket and a technical person will get assigned in no time. They are the best in terms of responsiveness, but I have mixed feelings about the quality of those responses. I feel sometimes to support their fast responses that they probably compromise their quality.

We used to get a lot of emails from the original fund management users (the consumers) asking about their estimated stock prices: monthly and biweekly. This information comes through a lot of emails. We had to read those email, classify and categorize them, then go into a different portal to get some more data, and finally, send them a result in an Excel format.

We used a consultant, and the deployment was very smooth. We have been maintaining three environments: development, UAT, and production. The deployment procedure is pretty simple. We just have to export from one to another environment where the dependency is just a package file. 

We are thinking of implementing Bot Insight and the CoE dashboard to calculate our ROI, since our bots are not analytics-based. We are just using our bots as a bot. They are not integrated with any analytics. I know that they have a CoE dashboard, where you can define parameters to automatically calculate ROI. At the moment, we are manually calculating our effort savings.

I don't agree with the IQ Bot licensing costs, which depends on the consumption of the document rather than per bot or user. This is confusing for me, because most of the cases for us in a possible future scenario, there would be a lot of invalid data to be scanned to get to real data. E.g., we would have to supply approximately 100 pages of scanned data to extract two pages of original data. In these type of cases, the IQ Bot might be a costly venture.

The company also looked at UiPath. From my understanding, Automation Anywhere was chosen for ease of use and licensing.

The IQ Bot seems interesting in the terms of populating semi-structured data and gathering intelligence of its own. Though, I haven't implemented in my project yet.

I didn't know Automation Anywhere seven to eight months back. All my learning came from the Automation Anywhere University. Though, I have experience in other RPA tools, the courses are really helpful, as they helped me to gather the knowledge needed to implement and master the product. Right now, I'm applying the information to my domain and company.

I haven't used it in a Citrix environment.

I very excited to see the next version of this product.

As part of our retail banking group, we are using Automation Anywhere for various processes within it. In addition, we are using it for our risk and compliance teams for money laundering investigations and fraud investigations.

We are using it primarily to remove out the human element of various processes.

It gives us the capability of leveraging our investments in different applications. I can use Automation Anywhere to tie a number of applications or processes together, without having to do in-depth coding to automate something.

It's been pretty good at integrating with our other applications and tools that we're using.

We started out with three production bots last year. From the time that we were deploying them into production to being able to use them in a production mode, it took somewhere between four to six months.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

One of the things that we did was purchase the solution originally through IBM, as they had an value-added layer on top of it. Once we had another group come on, they purchased additional bots directly from Automation Anywhere, and they wouldn't integrate well. We had to uninstall the solution that we had purchased from IBM and reinstall those bots to move forward. 

Now, we purchase our bots directly from Automation Anywhere, because this other layer from IBM put us behind, and I don't know if IBM has resolve this issue or not. It was a bit disturbing and surprising, that during the sales cycle, we were told by Automation Anywhere that this layer/enrichment was not seamless to the upgrade process.

We did use an integrator, Cognizant, for the deployment. 

It frees individuals up from mundane tasks so they can concentrate on being more active and creative other things that they need to do. There are two use cases that we have around for this: 

1. We receive benefit and reduce tying up of valued resources. 
2. For processes which are executed less frequently. E.g., there may be monthly processes with one to two people, and instead of relying on those individuals to run those processes, I can automate them. Then, I can get more consistent results when relying on a process which is manually driven.

• Pega seems a lot more hands-on with technical capabilities. They also seemed like if I wanted a steak, I had to buy the entire cow, then eat it.
• UiPath seems to be more of a recording type application, and if I want to change something, I have to do a rerecording.
• With Blue Prism, it is like they wouldn't really engage except through a third-party partner, which was sort of a turnoff.
• Automation Anywhere is in the middle ground. It allows me to easily drag and drop things into the development platform. I can also do recordings. However, if I'm having issues, I can dig down into the flow of the code, if necessary.

Take a good long look at the processes that you are trying to automate. Look at the talent pool that you have to develop the bots. Do you want to become a development shop? Or, do you want some of the capability to be put in the hands of business users? In our case, we wanted that mix of technical and business users having capabilities around this application. Some of the other products didn't offer that. This was one of the things that we drew us to Automation Anywhere.

We have some of our developers taking courses around Automation Anywhere University.

We're an insurance company and we use it to automate what would normally be done person-to-person by hand. We're gluing together the applications, going from one to the other to collect information to process them.

I can't speak for the bigger picture, but we have had a great deal of success with gluing together some of the old applications. They were built, isolated, and somewhat siloed. We have this one where you go to get this information, and we've got that one where you go to get the rest of the information. Now, rather than the team going and collecting all of that information, we can have the bots do it, and that has been fantastic.

We've had a number of processes plugged into this that have become the daily job schedule. There was a ridiculous amount of old work: Request this report, download the PDF, grab the numbers off of it and entering them. Having the automated system, while I can't put numbers on it yet, it's very easy to sell the value of the product.

I really like the way the bots are built, being able to take some old, clumsy screen that someone built and put your keystrokes and your information onto it. It's fairly simple as well.

I would describe bot creation with the word "exciting." We've had a couple of team members who have been working on projects who say, "Let me do it!" They're familiar with the product and they're very comfortable with the building process.

I also very much like the integration of this solution with other applications. We have some old web applications that we've been using, and we've been writing some of our own DLLs to integrate with it. It has worked really well. We're able to have the bots take over what would have been a lot of training and a lot of meticulous work.

I love the XML feature behind the scenes.

If there were one thing I could ask for it would be a text-based language. Right now it's proprietary, so you always have to go through the tool, even for things like basic compares. What we're trying to do is spin up other teams to get them using more and more of it. That would help, the basic .NET for basic tasks. The language itself has been working well. They should just keep doing what they're doing.

We just got onto Windows 10 and that has gone absolutely flawlessly. Not only has it been working well, but we're seeing a huge performance upgrade. They are running considerably faster. I'd give a thumbs up on the stability.

Scaling has gone remarkably well too, the ability to literally just spin up another bot. We have a collection and we'll add a couple more and no big deal happens to the scheduler. It has worked well.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we’re currently using has taken about two years. We did a lot of experimenting before we committed to it, but once we got through a couple of those experimentation projects, we were able to form a team, figure out exactly what we were going to have to accomplish from a business point of view, and dive in. After those couple of pilots, it took about a year from when we initially startied playing with it. There was a little bit of getting our feet wet, feeling comfortable with it. But now, we have several teams and it's working great.

I have not personally had to call much, I'm not part of the team that would do that, but they've been fairly responsive. We've found one or two problems that we had to come up with workarounds for and they did that fairly quickly. Then the permanent solutions came along fairly well. We have a very good relationship with them; being able to call and get that help right away.

It was really straightforward and made sense to me. Put it this way: I have always been able to see where the product is going. It seems somewhat impressive the way it's designed, and that's why it made sense. Some of it might have been due to the fact that I took the classes at Automation Anywhere University. I got to talk to the developers, so I could see exactly what they were thinking, and it made sense.

The nice part about being on the software development side is that we have don't have to deal with licenses etc. I've had to in the past. Put it this way: It becomes easier and easier to sell when they can see what we're doing.

I was brought in right as our pilot was getting ramped up, so they had already made the decision. I did hear about the other ones but I don't know exactly what the decision process was.

The biggest advice I could give is to just be patient. There's a lot to learn and you really don't know, at first, exactly how you go about it, how does this happen?

I started approximately two years ago, and having seen improvements to the software, I'm so excited right now about finding out where they're going. I've seen a great deal of the investment in the product as they develop it. so I'm fairly excited to be using it.

Sadly, I have not gotten into much of the solution’s cognitive document processing (IQ Bot) yet. It's a matter of learning more about it and then taking the next step. It's a matter of finding out what else we can do and we can start developing that.

I took a few courses at Automation Anywhere University when we first started. The more people that we've had on Automation Anywhere, we've found it's been working extremely well. It seems as though we're able to get them up to speed relatively quickly.

Right now, I would rate Automation Anywhere at about eight out of ten because it's obvious there have been huge improvements and it's nice for us to work with. There extra two points would come from the improvements that we're looking for: simple things like the programming interface, they could clean that up. And the compare windows are small, it would be nice if those were bigger. There are always refinements they can make. And we've seen some already. It has become faster, cleaner to use.

We use it for finance, and it performs very well.

We have automated every finance-based operation, from collections to invoice processing. We have also worked to implement the solution with customer service, operations, and IT.

It has streamlined many manual processes, eliminating errors and inefficiencies. It has also allowed us to introduce metrics, so we can generate operational reports and improve our overall business.

• Its large command set
• MetaBots and IQ Bots are great features, which have been improving.
• The Bot Store, with its extensive number of MetaBots, has been very helpful.

I have been very impressed with the Bot Store. We have used several MetaBots already, which has saved us many weeks of development.

We have been able to implement several bots from non-developers in the finance department. They were able to implement solutions for existing business processes with no technical programming background.

• The development environment needs to be improved. 
• Making edits across files is hard. 
• Not being able to resize Windows has proven challenging.
  

We have seen vast improvement in version 11. We are still hoping to see improvements in its ability to have the client answer automatically and reconnect when Windows updates are applied. 

I would like to see improvement in its scalability. While workload management is a nice feature, from a practical usage and client usage standpoint, we would like to see improvement.

We usually start a pilot automation with a single Bot Runner. Then, based on volume, we will increase it to two. Afterwards, we'll increase exponentially from there based on volume. 

I've received different levels of support from Automation Anywhere. It has thoroughly improved, and I have seen quicker turnaround times from my questions.

We switched to this solution because our previous solution needed to be updated.

The installation of version 11 is fairly straightforward. I do like the new server architecture based on Java, as it is very straightforward.

We are an integrator and consultant company. We work with clients to do the deployment.

We initially started with a number of full-time employees (FTEs) who we can now reassign. 

For example, with the collections process, millions of dollars might be gained by a company, because now the automation can handle the collection of unpaid bills. Previously, it was too much for human workers to handle.

Time and monetary savings can range from 20 to 90 percent.

Costs varies per client.

The other vendors that clients wanted to review have been UiPath and Blue Prism. In some cases, those vendors were selected.

We have used Automation Anywhere for both attended and unattended automation. 

I worked for a call center company and most of the use cases were related to developing automation for our clients. We also created some automation for internal processes.

The integrations of Automation Anywhere with the mainframe application for banking companies are among the most valuable features. Banking companies have a black screen (a text-based user interface) used in some banking core systems. In our case, we were able to create very good solutions integrated with that kind of platform using Automation Anywhere. 

Also, if you need to use OCR automation to process standard invoices and send the information to another platform, that is also a very good feature.

The goal of any automation is to provide efficiencies. I would like a way, within the platform, to track the benefits. If you are the center of excellence manager, you need to show to the C level the value that you are adding to the company. The unique way to show that to the C level is how much money you are bringing into the company or how much money you are saving the company in costs. I would like a default feature where each bot gives us data on all the benefits it provides from its process.

They also need to improve and work very hard on the user experience to democratize automation.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

It's a very good platform in terms of stability.

Automation Anywhere has very good scalability when you want to scale an existing bot.

It is very easy to contact them and receive support from them.

Positive

We were working with a local system.

The initial setup is very easy. If you are not setting it up in a virtual environment, it takes between half an hour and one hour, maximum.

We have deployed it on the cloud, using AWS.

There is no maintenance of the solution on our side.

My team did the setup.

These types of companies, in automation, need to evaluate their business models. They sell it by license, but if they could charge by case or by interaction, that might be better. Right now, it's expensive when you want to scale or use them for simple processes.

I know my Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism and, now, Microsoft Power Automate. If you want to automate a simple process, these solutions are very good. But if you need to integrate different platforms or systems using an API, or if you want to widen the scope of automation to create an automated process, end to end, that is going to be difficult for any user. You need to be a developer with very good programming skills. If you are going to automate, for example, downloading emails, Automation Anywhere is okay for non-technical users. But the license is very expensive, so you have to weigh the benefit that you are going to receive.

For me and my team of around 150 developers who are engineers, the learning curve was very easy. For them, it took two or three months because they were already familiar with the logic. Automation Anywhere has good information on the web where the guys can access material and forums to learn about creating different types of automation.

The benefits, for us, from Automation Anywhere are more related to the business case than the tool. You need to have a very good approach from the business analyst's perspective to understand the added value that an automated process can bring to the company.

The most important thing is to train the business analysts in your company to identify what the best processes are to automate, to get the most benefit from the tool.

Overall, this is a very good tool if you have all the permissions and accesses, and you can work without any virtual environment, like VDI or Citrix.