Vale is one of the largest mining companies in the world and Automation Anywhere is our primary process automation tool. We're using it globally across several branches and locations. There are multiple processes involved in mining, transporting, and shipping iron ore that benefit from process automation. We can also automate our corporate use cases, such as finance, HR, and back office processes. Automation Anywhere is integrated with our core company systems, including SAP solutions and some in-house applications we've built.

Automation Anywhere enables us to standardize and replicate operations and processes. We have a lot of repetitive processes that are time-consuming to perform manually. We aim to increase productivity and save time for our business users. Over five years, we've saved about 68,000 hours. Automation Anywhere integrates well with our workflows and business applications. We haven't had any issues.

We see some cost savings, but we also tend to think of cost avoidance. We have some compliance and regulatory processes that need to be completed in a timely fashion to avoid fines and taxation on top of that. Our CoE is responsible for a critical portion of the automation. In addition to thinking of how we can automate existing processes, we create new processes. When you automate something that isn't optimized, the results aren't as good.

We like Automation Anywhere's Citizen Developer program. We've been doing this for a while now. It helps to expand platform adoption within our company and encourage more people to use it. It has been good to see the engagement. We've done some events and hackathons and hope to do another one in November. We like having an easy tool to share with our business users.

It isn't hard for business users without technical skills to use Automation Anywhere. We've received positive feedback from them, saying it was an easy tool to learn, especially with the latest version. We set up a training program, and new developers can learn the basics in around a week and start programming bots in three weeks to a month.

We are currently doing some PoCs for generative AI and trying to see if it fits, but we're also concerned about the safety of our users and information security, so our approach is always conservative. We don't want to do anything that creates unnecessary risk for the company.

Our users would like more online community forums where they can exchange information. I would also like a better way to monitor and manage all the automations we have running within our systems because our CoE governance must be robust so we are always aware of what's happening.

We have used Automation Anywhere since 2018.

There have been some changes in personnel over the years, but they have always been great people who provide excellent service and solve problems quickly.

We previously used Microsoft Power Automate.

The platform was not hard to deploy, but each company has its own security protocols to deal with. Once we worked through all the security requirements, it was straightforward. Automation Anywhere requires some maintenance.

In the first year, we needed to adjust the size of the machines and optimize the bots. However, it hasn't required much maintenance since then. We developed some better processes in CoE governance to develop and track the bots, so it's much easier now. We set up alerts that send us messages when the bots have errors.

In 2018, we looked at some other products on the market, but Automation Anywhere was a perfect fit. We didn't have any issues that Automation Anywhere couldn't solve. The critical factor for us was its ease of use. We liked the drag-and-drop interface and the low-code capabilities.

I rate Automation Anywhere eight out of 10.

We use Automation Anywhere to automate tasks throughout the company, enabling our employees to be more productive and conduct more analysis.

We can save money by implementing automations. Before implementing Automation Anywhere, we had a lot of repetitive tasks that weren't adding value. It improved morale by automating some of the boring, repetitive tasks, allowing our employees to focus on more creative, meaningful work.

I like Automation Anywhere's development interface. Our developers love it because it's easier to learn, and they can pick it up quicker than the other tools. We can integrate Automation Anywhere with Slack to get alerts from our bots.

It's also integrated with our core banking application and many legacy applications that we could not integrate without the Automation Anywhere platform. Around 70 percent of our environment is integrated with it. The integration is fast and seamless. Integrating tools through the APIs is simple, reliable, and efficient.

We have a lot of ideas for leveraging Automation Anywhere's AI capabilities. For example, we use it to conduct analysis for our clients. We can use it to check a lot of documents. It can not only read but write documents. Using AI, we can run checks to see if a customer has been approved for credit.

It can help this process go faster, and we can enhance our employee's potential by augmenting their analysis with AI. We are already using generative AI. It has been a huge success because we are using it like a copilot to improve our employees' potential. We can scale it faster with another process in the automation manager.

We have developers, so all of our team has technical knowledge. However, Automation Anywhere's learning platform is comprehensive and it's easy to learn things on your own. Many of our developers didn't know anything about the platform, but it was easy for them to learn and become fully productive.

I think there are some opportunities to improve integration with monitoring tools already on the market to make this even faster. We struggle a little when applying the upgrades because the control room has some flaws. That's one advantage of migrating to the cloud. If we do that, then we don't have to upgrade manually. There is a SaaS option, but we decided to opt for on-prem and perform the upgrades ourselves. We're thinking of choosing the cloud options in the next version to make it easier.

We have used Automation Anywhere since 2022.

Automation Anywhere is highly scalable. That's one of its advantages. It's easier to scale than other solutions. We are a financial institution serving around 26 million clients with only 3,000 employees. We need automation to attend to our operational tasks. Otherwise, it would be challenging to manage all of our clients

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. The local support in Brazil could improve. While it has gotten better in the last few months, we've struggled as a global company trying to contact them sometimes.

The initial deployment took three months, but it took a year to change the legacy bots to Automation Anywhere. We decided to automate new projects that would yield more ROI before finishing the migration of our legacy bots.

We get a significant ROI even though the licensing cost is higher than average. The gains we realize from the initial development make up for it. In the last three years, I estimate we have saved around 2,200 hours of labor. To date, we've saved almost $6 million.

The cost of Automation Anywhere is fine.

We looked at two other solutions before making the decision to choose Automation Anywhere. One reason was reliability. When we implemented it, Automation Anywhere was already a widely used and popular tool. It has high availability, which is one requirement for a banking solution. It's also easy to learn, use, and implement. We looked at the leaders in Gartner's, such as Blue Prism and UiPath. Automation Anywhere stood out for its development interface.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10.

We use Automation Anywhere to automate tasks in our organization.

We needed to connect with multiple bank websites to retrieve payment confirmations. However, banks, being banks, did not provide direct API access or placed significant restrictions on such access. Therefore, we decided to utilize Automation Anywhere to collect the data and integrate it with our automated system.

At the time, all of our automation goals centered on connecting to these sites, which required a great deal of manual effort. Despite the low cost of labor, it was error-prone and highly subjective. As a result, using Automation Anywhere helped us automate this process, eliminating the need for human intervention. We were able to achieve all of our initial objectives using Automation Anywhere.

The learning curve for our non-technical users was a couple of days.

We aim to automate our activities that currently require human intervention, which is susceptible to errors and inconsistencies. This approach is similar to how others have successfully employed AI or RPA tools. Our primary objective is to ensure that our processes are scalable and repeatable.

We successfully integrated Automation Anywhere with our local database. Like any implementation, we faced some challenges with change management, understanding, and other issues, but ultimately, it was a success.

Automation Anywhere helped save the organization time and money.

The overall usefulness of Automation Anywhere is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

The price has room for improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere is scalable, but scaling it can be costly, making it a matter of economic viability for many organizations.

The support is good.

The implementation was completed by the Automation Anywhere team.

Automation Anywhere is expensive.

We also evaluated UiPath and Selenium, but we ultimately selected Automation Anywhere because they had more experience in this area, which gave us greater confidence that the project would be successful.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten. Automation Anywhere is a versatile and powerful platform, but it exceeded our organization's budget.

Maintenance requires three or four team members because the target systems tend to change.

Our use cases are around finance processes and one business function that we have a lot of automation. We're an agriculture and supply chain company, so we also have a lot of processes that would deal more with order processing, order management, customer service, and those types of processes.

We also have a use case from a document processing standpoint. We have a use case where farmers in Asia, in the APAC region, would handwrite inventory of that particular product, send a photo of it, and then someone would manually take that information and put it into the system or put it into a spreadsheet. We've been able to automate that. It not only saves time, but the data is 85% to 90% accurate versus it used to be about 60% beforehand.

We're finding time savings as a benefit. One example would be a customer service rep might get a question about an order, usually through email. It can take a good three to seven business days to answer a customer's question about their order. When we automate it, it takes hours, if not minutes.

We also are building out a new model for our metrics. Our biggest challenge is because Cargill is an international traditional company, we work with many different regions that have to abide by certain local rules and regulations.

We don't have just one order management process at Cargill. We have over one hundred and trying to simplify those processes first before we automate it is our biggest challenge.

We're in conversations with Automation Anywhere now about process discovery. We've just kicked off. We are installing a tool with process discovery that we still haven't figured out what the best practice for utilizing it with Automation Anywhere will be.

We have a federated model. We are a center of excellence. We own the platform, and we build out the governance framework. We also provide training and updated communications to all of the users.

The learning curve is small. It takes only about four hours to learn it, but hands-on experience is different. That's what takes a little bit longer. Some users sit within IT, and some of the users sit within the business. It's fairly easy to teach others to leverage it. They have to have an interest in learning it, but it's fairly easy.

Overall, Automation Anywhere has helped us save time. But we're also looking at customer satisfaction. We track sustainability numbers, if that comes into place. So we have a lot of different metrics that we look at versus just time.

One of the reasons that we chose Automation Anywhere years ago was because of the security because we need to secure both our customer and our vendor data.

We have a lot of confidential data that we work with every day.

Automation Anywhere has an audit tracker feature. When you build a bot, it has a trail of how you went about developing that particular bot.

We integrate other tools within Automation Anywhere. Overall, it's fairly easy. We have about 265 bots in production today. We see bigger challenges on the business side if they change a template and then fail to tell us that we need to change the bot.

We leverage IQ BOT. We have another tool that we leverage as well for document processing called Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).

I want to learn more about CoPilot and then the process discovery tool.

We are part of the Pathfinder program. It's more of a program versus a tool, but we're working with people to learn how we can scale our whole program using Pathfinder.

We've been using Automation Anywhere for about five to six years and continue to scale about 50 bots per year.

I'm very comfortable with being able to scale, especially now that it's moving into the cloud.

We've had really good support with Automation Anywhere.

We have weekly tech meetings with Automation Anywhere. I also have strategic meetings every week and quarterly strategy planning meetings. We have a really good support system.

UiPath was one of the competitors, and we did bring on UiPath specifically for the Chinese language. That program has not scaled as we expected so we really are an Automation Anywhere shop.

We're going through the 360 migration right now. The bots that we have in production are fairly complex. It hasn't been an easy migration. We're getting through it, and we have a lot of support to get through the migration. But it's really more of the complexity of our organization.

We wanted to put together a streamlined platform versus having puzzle pieces and taping them together using different vendors.

I wanted us to be more streamlined so that we don't have glitches down the road with upgrades and version updates. That's one reason that I wanted to stay with Automation Anywhere.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. The only reason I wouldn't rate it higher is because a COE Manager still not getting the full benefit from it and because the premium is a little bit expensive. We don't necessarily have the budget to bring on a full new feature. Also, the process discovery tool is taking a little bit longer to implement than I thought it would.

Some of our use cases for Automation Anywhere have been embedding automation into our AML process and Anti-money laundering process as well. Also using automation to navigate some of our legacy applications to extract information from the UI.

The challenge we're trying to solve with Automation Anywhere is extracting information from our legacy applications. We do not have exposed endpoints. We have to use Automation Anywhere to be able to navigate and extract information for customers and from data information as well.

The processes and tasks automated by Automation Anywhere are a little bit more detailed. What we've come to figure out is the processes previously were not documented correctly. And Automation Anywhere allows us to get more insight and documentation out of our processes.

One of the immediate opportunities we see to leverage AI within our processes and our operations is customer service. Leveraging the natural language models and human response to be able to generate customer-focused responses is something that we plan to leverage very soon.

Automation Anywhere has improved our organization by allowing our resources to focus on the task at hand that impact our customer, while we use Automation Anywhere to replace some of the redundant work that some of our users and internal team members are facing.

Our company approach to generative AI for Automation Anywhere is more in line with building the future, allowing us to enhance our processes without necessarily embedding our internal team members with redundant tasks, allowing them to focus on the actual deliverables of a business versus generating a response to email or reading email. Allowing them to be a more human-focused team member.

Looking into Automation Anywhere in terms of the relationship with AWS, we manage our servers locally for our VMs and are looking to migrate to AWS. The partnership with AWS will allow us to integrate some of our processes and allow access to some of our DVs. This will be a good improvement for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use for people who don't have experience because it is a no-code solution and is user-friendly in terms of being able to generate automation with a plethora of available tasks and variables.

One or two automation walkthroughs of the actual process are required to learn Automation Anywhere. It takes a short amount of time for a user to get acquainted with Automation Anywhere. There are some latencies with being able to expose certain things such as APIs or establish a certain connection, but building automation is short in terms of development.

We have a few tools that are integrated with Automation Anywhere. We use a lot of Microsoft tools. Azure AD is integrated directly with Automation Anywhere and allows us to expand our ability to automate processes. We also have some desktop applications and some proprietary software that we would like to integrate with Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is a robust platform that allows us to make multiple connections and scale horizontally across the actual environment to give us a more robust integration or automation that allows for downstream impact whether it is internal users or external users of our products. It allows us the ability to go horizontally fast with a lot of multiple integrations of products.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save time and costs, sometimes in the same automation as well as replacing some of the redundant tasks. Some of our users are giving us the ability to scale quicker without adding additional resources. That saves costs. We save hundreds of hours with some automation and two to three hours for others, but the cost impact of being able to do that with automation has saved a ton of costs as well. We have a lot of bots running daily, manipulating and removing the redundancies of those manual tasks. The resource costs saved equal hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The feature we found to be the most valuable is the documentation automation as it allows us to focus on the actual important piece of building automation instead of tracking some of the repugnant documentation that goes along with building automation.

Automation Anywhere's network has room for improvement. Expanding its partnership with a few other vendors. The likelihood of including companies like AWS, Google, and things like that is the exact approach to what I think Automation Anywhere can improve on. It allows business users who participate and are clients of those vendors to a seamless process integration with Automation Anywhere. This allows for an ecosystem that supports a more robust development of automation because we get a broader use case amongst multiple users of the same product.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere allows us the ability to scale across multiple platforms and in different volumes. At a small scale, we don't have to readdress that automation or that bot to be able to scale if configured and built correctly. It is a very scalable approach that we can take in terms of the integration that we have access to. It allows for an open platform to be able to scale.

The technical support is user-friendly. They are responsive and normally respond within 24 hours. They provide us with updates so we are not left in the dark and keep us involved. They make sure to follow up with a call if anything is needed.

We did not use any automation beforehand but we have a partnership with Workato that allows us to leverage more API-driven automation as well. We utilize both due to the actual diversity of Automation Anywhere. It gives us the ability to navigate a UI, a more legacy application whereas Workato gives us the ability to connect APIs. We use both of them in the same automation platform.

It took us a month to deploy. We set up a few runners or virtual machines to be able to do that work with our IT team who configured some of the runners and made sure that we embedded applications that were gonna be useful and practical for the actual automation itself. We then walked through a few test automation and were able to deploy our first automation within a month.

Automation Anywhere pricing and licensing are competitive compared to the other automation vendors. Automation Anywhere gives us a platform to scale quickly without embedding a lot of costs on our end. It is reasonably priced.

We evaluated the landscape of automation and the partners and vendors that offer the service before we chose Automation Anywhere. My positive previous experience with Automation Anywhere helped make the decision a lot easier for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use. It is a simple platform to understand. A simple platform to roll out. We don't need a robust education in terms of automation. We can train internally. We can expose other POs or PMs to the actual application and they will be able to give us additional insights of automation that we can improve.

The con is the resources assignment outside of our internal team members. Finding resources who have good experience variant with Automation Anywhere in the States may be a con for us.

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten. From what I have seen, they are headed in the right direction to get a ten.

We do not currently use Automation Co-Pilot, but we are excited to start using it. We are going to have a session about using Co-Pilot with our internal teams.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is simple in terms of the control room to be able to do an upgrade or speak to our account executive to get additional licenses or products added to our instance.

Maintenance depends on how we build the automation. We keep in mind the actual process of being able to manage automation as we build it, which will ultimately save us a call for maintenance at the end. Being able to enable notification error handling within the automation helps reduce the actual maintenance requirements for automation.

Not many people are involved in the maintenance of our automation because we embed some of the process owners into the process so they are aware if a bot was to fail. Then we give them corrective actions in terms of exception handling to be able to oversee that bot as well as to reinitiate a bot or add additional variables into the bot to allow the success of that bot. A minimal amount of people are required for bot maintenance.

Initially, when we started, we were using it for back-office automation. The solution has definitely evolved. We're focusing on implementing customer and experience-facing use cases. Time is the most valuable piece, and that's how we measure the success of automation now.

The solution is helping our customers save time.

We were trying to solve a few different challenges with Automation Anywhere. For example, during the pandemic, gaining bandwidth was huge. Hiring while shifting to remote was challenging. There was such an accelerated use of the technology during the pandemic. Having to integrate with existing and older systems was key. That flexibility to work with other applications and other aspects of the platform really drove our decision to adopt more and more of the solution.

We've noticed time savings. The time saving varies. We look at how much value the customer gets. We've noticed time savings of up to 40 minutes, based on wait time and verification delays. Sometimes, we might only be saving a minute or slightly less. However, this is a slightly higher volume scenario where something needs to get done by the end of the day. It offers a broad range of time savings. For example, if someone calls in for the healthcare side to get benefits verified. Typically, that would take 45 minutes in terms of gathering information and validating information and prep work both before and after. Now, we can do that autonomously in a matter of minutes.

Within the processes of automation, robots learn differently than humans. They are very interactive and literal. Diving into that tribal knowledge that makes an organization unique was really what we had to do differently. For example, if you tell someone, "Go check your email," they know what that means. With a robot, you have to translate that action into a specific language, and that was the challenging part from the process side.

Copilot is great at bringing agents and humans into the loop. Creating that AI assistant that can almost tell someone the next step, that suggested intelligence, is helpful. Getting the data an organization has over to a customer very quickly is effective with Copilot. Simple queries that may take 15-20 seconds to answer, you still have to, for example, to find the number, make the call, et cetera, and suddenly that 20 seconds if two minutes longer. Having that information ready in a conversational way is where generative AI can really help compress time.

There's a lot of human involvement in the workflow. Automation Anywhere does a fabulous job of integrating users into the workflow. That's important. You wouldn't be able to automate with just the technology. Teaching users to interact in a relatable way with relatable interfaces has had a big impact on the business users' side.

Understanding the technology is very easy based on the way it is positioned. There are a lot of great resources out there.

How much time it takes to get comfortable using the automation process varies. You need to gain the knowledge of understanding ways to do things, then have the practical knowledge of how to apply; then, there's a third piece of constantly improving, monitoring, mentoring, and iterating. That piece is ongoing.

Copilot is helpful for pure-play back-office stuff. From the call center side, it's integrated and becomes available as an option as well. Any document processing is great for Copilot.

With the new enhancements, it's very easy to integrate. It integrates well with infrastructure solutions and testing products, as well as data and analytics.

The integration with workflows has only been enhanced over time.

In terms of document processes, there is some uncertainty between structured and unstructured. However, the intelligence applied cut down time by 50% or more. That's in time to do the work, not necessarily accuracy.

In terms of APIs and applications, when automation first came out, they shunned APIs. That was a challenge due to the fact that, when you sold it to an organization, they asked why it would be done a certain way when they already had an API. Now, it's making it easier to use solutions. You can bring in your tool kit and create synergy.

Copilot has helped us increase productivity. It's a new feature, so it's hard to quantify. I do see the established value increasing exponentially.

The product has helped us free up staff time. The biggest thing we measure is experience. If it's moving towards higher-value projects, it's great. However, so is going home and not taking work home with you.

If we look at the concept of bringing automation to a broader user group in an organization, the focus right now is on how to build it properly. We're building it out with instruction manuals and working to make it more user-friendly. We need to do a lot of work from the perspective of education. The messaging is essential. Also, figuring out the platform so that users know where they need to interact. We're pointing users towards that and giving them the help to do that. The messaging and education around how to leverage the platform need to be more precise. Understanding what the benefits are going to be needs to be very clear.

When you are implementing it initially, it's challenging as there's a lot of change management. That's where the lessons need to be learned. That curve is hard to overcome.

There are more challenging integrations that should be left to more expert users.

We've been using the solution since 2015. It's been about eight years now.

Technical support is good. You don't have to reach out to them very often. The new layers are great. The services you get alongside the solution are helpful, and combining that with bug fixes, et cetera, makes it fit for purpose for all uses.

I'm familiar with other options. The difference is the people side of things. The team outside of the technology, the people putting it together, is what makes the solution itself better.

It's important that Automation Anywhere is easy to use. There's an intimidation factor when you present people with a massive ecosystem. It's practical and fit for purpose from the outset, yet very flexible and versatile.

I was involved in the initial setup.

If you start out pretty simple, the challenges that cause delays are more from change management and security and clearance. That's outside of the platform itself. That takes 80% of the time.

You can stand it up in a couple of days, however, it can sometimes take a month for reasons outside of the platform.

You can get things going within a week, which you can iterate on pretty quickly.

Maintenance depends on usage. There are tools where you can build automation to provide alerts. You need someone who's at least slightly dedicated to that. Once you get bigger, you'll need a dedicated team, and then you have to figure out how to prioritize your time, in terms of evangelizing it, making more automation, et cetera.

The pricing is okay. We've established the value of bringing it into our organization. For scaling, you can't beat the price of adding a robot that provides basically unlimited scale.

Our strategy when it comes to automation and AI (and generative AI) right now, as with any technology, there's a lot of buzz. Historically, we've had periods of punctuated innovation, like automation in general, that was a real change in how organizations did business. Right now, we're seeing an iteration of that with generative AI. We have the foundation down with these platforms. Our strategy is the same: understand the technology from the people's side. We're the ones using the technology. You can't blame a piece of technology - it's still on us. We need to establish it. At the end of the day, we need to own it. Technology isn't a silver bullet. However, if we approach it right, we'll have all the success in the world.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.