Pathfinder Blog

As part of our MVP Program - that’s our [M]ost [V]aluable [P]athfinder Program - Automation Anywhere has assembled and recognized a cohort of dynamic leaders, innovators and skilled practitioners. They’re common bond? Being united to inspire and ignite a groundswell within the field of automation.    Without further ado, join us in recognizing our first class of esteemed MVPs:   These MVPs truly give back to their global community through volunteer leadership, mentorship, and ideation. They were chosen specifically for their efforts:    Facilitating Forum Engagement  Building Networks & Leading Community Groups  Sharing Expertise via Community Events  Influencing Automation Anywhere Product Development  Pa

Whether it’s a series of intranet posts, emails or a coveted Intranet hub dedicated to socializing your Automation Program, these are great tips for educating and inspiring your audience about the power of automation. Start by welcoming everyone to your Automation Hub or Email Series. Introduce Automation not so much as an army of bots (which can sound confusing, or scary) but as digital co-workers ready to help with routine work or make someone’s everyday life easier. Here are recommendations from the Automation Anywhere Community. Try them on for size in your own promotion and engagement efforts: Hello world, Meet Your Automation Program Encourage as many people as possible to get involved in the automation process. Let them know that the best way to start is by learning about the power of Automation or reaching out to team members with specific questions. Introduce Your Team Let everyone know your team has been charg

 What are A+ Accelerators? They're concise, pre-packaged, outcome-based services engagements. Created from real-world customer experiences, A+ Accelerators can help solve a wide variety of automation challenges. This collection has been curated specially for you as part of the Automation Pathfinder experience. Choose from a library of A+ Accelerators to solve any issue with scaling automation Delivered by our Professional Services experts who guide you and your team to the right solution Ensure success with validated outcomes-based packages Get the tools, training, and best practices necessary to help drive your automation program success From discovering the next set of processes to automate, to checking the health of your automation program, to improving employee productivity with human-bot collaboration, our Professional Services experts have identified be

 Your Short Cut to SuccessWe’re giving you a head start with some expert guides for every step of your automation journey. Whether you are just embarking on your intelligent automation journey, scaling your program or driving large scale transformation, these guides from our experts in professional services will help.  Bot Velocity Planning (Excel) Process Definition Document (Word) Solution Design Document - Co-Pilot Desktop (Word)

 Our User Group meetings are always lively and chock full of ideas, ways to overcome challenges, shared goals and so much more. Haven’t attended one yet? Here’s your chance to eavesdrop on the best of what we’ve seen come out of our most recent round of these community gatherings:  Theme: Meet our Meta Bot! One customer, a global retailer, shared information about their own automation journey and how they leverage a “Meta Bot” to achieve demonstrable ROI. What’s a Meta Bot? We thought you’d never ask. A “Meta Bot” is a piece of effective, reusable code that, with only a few tweaks, can have multiple applications to automate a range of business processes. Having a “template” bot not only reduces developer time and effort to iterate offshoots, it also blows open t

 AKA: So, you didn’t know you needed to be a marketer. When you launched into the position as Automation Leader you were charged with delivering automation to your organization. Obviously, right? Now you’ve delivered some automations and earned your first wins. Next, it’s up to you to communicate your program’s success. Whether it be to key stakeholders, other department heads, or potential business users in the automation orbit, it’s on you to spread the benefits of automation using your program’s results as proof of business ROI. Bet you didn’t know you needed to be a marketer too, eh? No fear – this is your chance to get important buy-in from the rest of your organization so you can accelerate transformation and deliver more impact to your company. Cue Automation fever.

 You want a continuous pipeline of new automation use cases to tackle. You already knew that, but how and where do you generate that thriving flow of automation priorities across diverse lines of business? From our experience here at Automation Anywhere (yes, we drink our own champagne), as well as from many community success stories, we’ve extracted three tips to help you drive a healthy use case pipeline. 1. Find Your LOBBF When it’s time to expand your reach after your first wins, there are typically two methods we see Automation Leaders employ to find their next use cases.  Crowdsource. This is a strong play for a high volume of ideas. Reach out to users and ask for input on what they should automate next. Theoretically, this is helpful to discover where pain points are for your end users. However, when automation criter

 When your automation program is up and humming, it’s undoubtedly providing value to your organization. But in order to understand just how far that value stretches, you have to ask the right questions to unfurl the more substantial, perhaps unquantifiable, metrics that are truly giving your program clout. And the best questions to ask—and answer with metrics—will likely shift based on the phase you’re in: Start, Accelerate, or Scale. Ask the Right Questions Think about baseball and the movie Moneyball. Haven’t seen it? Here’s a synopsis: Because of a limited budget, a young Yale grad comes into the Oakland A’s organization to help them draft and trade players based on some unconventional metrics. Most major baseball organizations with deep pockets like the Yankees draft top picks and pay multi-million dollar contracts to bring in big name, and sometimes overhyped, players. They often want big hitters

 AKA: Can just anyone really do this? Fact: Citizen Development is hot right now. It’s a buzzword, something stakeholders and sponsors are demanding we make happen and even something many of us may feel we’re behind on. After all, you have your automation program going strong, you’ve had some wins, you’re expanding across the business, it’s driving results…but you haven’t launched a Citizen Development program yet. Are you missing the boat? What is Democratization? Simply put, success at scale is about empowering more people through automation. And that’s NOT just Citizen Development. Democratization is about deliverin

 From the Desk of our CIO: An Email Template to Promote Your Automation Program If you can craft an email, you can get started on the road to evangelizing your Automation Program. Here’s how we do it at Automation Anywhere. <<Start with the title of your newsletter. Ours is obvious and includes a timeframe:>> Automation @Automation Anywhere Newsletter (FY23 1st Half Update) <<Start the newsletter out with a warm introduction that gets people excited about automation within the organization—here’s an example from our own Automation Leader:>>From the Office of the CIO While Automation Anywhere is helping its customers build a digital workforce, our Global IT organization is doing the same f

 Citizen Development is a lever for scale that many organizations leverage to expand and multiply the ROI for their automation programs. A citizen developer is an employee who comes from something other than a computer-science background - who is creating automations that are consumed by themselves or their team. Citizen Developers are typically motivated business users who’ve identified areas for streamlining/automating areas of their business processes and are interested in creating solutions to meet their own need(s). Organizations who’ve taken on Citizen Development programs have unlocked 2 key benefits:Faster Innovation - With business users able to self-identify, and prioritize their own use cases, they aren’t reliant on the capacity of a central automation development team to deliver innovative automations.ROI Acceleration - The development of additional automations means that orga

There’s a phrase that is said commonly in programming disciplines (developing automations not excluded) - “don’t reinvent the wheel”. This phrase is used to suggest that there may not be a great reason to create something net-new, if there are reusable, potentially optimized assets already available that can be leveraged to solve your problem. In this post, we want to examine how building with a “reusability-first” mindset can accelerate your automation development efforts and ultimately make life as an automation developer easier. Building with a Reusability-First mindset means going through the following thought pattern anytime you come across the need to do something repeatable within your build: Is there something that exists already that I can leverage to make my life easier here? This may be identifying and using a built-in package instead of trying to script something out or this may mean checking within the shared public repository of your Control Room to

 Now that you have a matured RPA practice, you can start building thought leadership and technical expertise showcase by contributing packages to Bot Store. Packages offer organizations maximum flexibility in the way they create reusable components that can be used across multiple bots. They are modular in that they can be updated independently, and maintain version controls in that upgrading a package doesn’t impact bots built off of a previous version of the same package. Here are some of the ways you can identify what are the packages to build: You have been building bots for a couple of years and you have identified features that would help multiple teams immensely but are not available out of the box, then it's a good use case to build. You want to build bots that automate specific enterprise applications, but there is no such specific package available and it’s currently being automated either using Recorder-Ca

As you now have exposure to building production-grade bots and automating a variety of use cases, you can explore contributing specific Bots to Bot Store. Gone are the days we built something for ourselves and thought we just want to keep it to ourselves as they are our USP (Unique selling point), however, what if we told you, there is a better way to build your brand by showcasing your expertise with the world and build competitive advantage online. Now you are curious to know how it can really help you by contributing to Bot Store, let’s look at some of the key benefits: Creates a Marketing funnelOnce you publish your bots on Bot Store, your work is seen by a lot of Automation Anywhere customers who look at the Bot Store for new automations to be built. When they download your bot, you will be notified with their email information, which you can use to follow up and understand how it's working for them and offer additional services to buil

Before you start automating any new use case related to a specific process or an application, you’ll want to know exactly what reusable assets you have at your disposal. Automation Anywhere’s Bot Store offers hundreds of pre-built bots and packages built by process automation and integration specialists. Leveraging Bot Store, developers can expect to accelerate their RPA development instead of having to build everything from scratch. Bot Store bots/packages are broken down by business process they serve, their categorization, and by the applications they engage with. Beyond being a location for downloading pre-built bots to include in bot builds, Bot Store is also an excellent place for automation ideas and to explore some of the “art of the possible” with RPA. Automation 360 platform is integrated with Bot Store, meaning, you can directly download the bots to the control room and start using it right away. Bot Store can help you in many way

 By now, you’ve hopefully built some familiarity with the Solution Patterns introduced in the Start phase. You’ve likely found that a good number of your use cases fit into one of those patterns, and your familiarity with the patterns has made the process of categorizing, documenting, and delivering automations a more streamlined process. We aren’t ditching those patterns. They are still valid and there are still plenty of new use cases that will come to you that will fit one of the patterns described. We are , however, going to explore a few new patterns so you can expand the types of automation opportunities that the team can take on. This isn't just for the sake of saying “there's different ones too!” Expansion into these new patterns represents a maturity in your use of the full capabilities of the Automation Anywhere platform and enables your automation practice to open up to new ways of thinking about how Automation Anywhere created automations can enable the various bu

One of the most appealing aspects of Automation 360 is that it's not programming-language-specific. You don't have to be an expert at any specific programming language to be able to build robust, high-impact automations, making for an easy-to-learn, approachable platform. That said, while learning about the capabilities of Automation 360, you may have noticed that it also enables developers to leverage several programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, .NET, etc) from within a bot by leveraging language-specific packages and a customizable package SDK. In this blog post, we'll take a look at why you may want to hold off on some of that functionality and when/where it makes sense. Out-of-the-Box Packages: Working with Interfaces Automation 360 offers a wide range of out-of-the-box packages designed to enable automation developers to automate with/on various interfaces. These available packages enable automation developers to automate on

 By this point in the journey for your Automation Practice, you’ve partnered with at least one new line of business for the delivery of new automations. Regardless of whether that delivery came by way of your core automation practice doing the design and delivery or you empowered this new line of business to be somewhat independent, the lessons learned and the momentum gained for the expansion of automation across your organization can empower the next leg of expansion within your organization. Let’s look at some keys to systematically scale your automation initiatives as you continue to expand. A Systematic Onboarding Approach Key to expanding your automation efforts to be organization-wide is systematically onboarding new “factories” to your automation practice. As you worked with onboarding your first few lines of business in the Accelerate phase, reflect back on the things that helped this onboardin

 With some successful deliveries attributed to your automation program and some grassroots evangelism efforts underway to communicate the value being delivered for the organization, it's time to explore delivering automations for a new functional area within the organization. As this is likely the first expansion of automation delivery outside of the automation center of excellence team, it will be vitally important to make this first delivery partnership successful, and set the stage for a systematic approach to scale as you move forward. Taking The Show On The Road Similarly to when your automation team got started with automation; identifying quick win processes, capturing and applying best practices, establishing a pattern for documentation and delivery, etc; it will be important that any newly-onboarded factory goes through some of those same steps, albeit enabled by the “lessons learned”

 The Vision for an Automation-First Company Culture Many of the lessons from this journey--from the production of bots, to a robust pipeline where anyone is encouraged to submit ideas, to the ongoing promotion and evangelism efforts--are designed to ultimately support an organization adopting an “Automation-First” company culture. An Automation-First company culture represents a shift for many organizations in the way that they view their processes, their people, and the platforms that they use daily. Knowing how an Automation-First organization views these assets can help set the stage for where your organization can go along its automation journey and can empower you with a vision for how the future of your organization’s digital transformation strategy can be empowered through the expanded adoption of automation.  Processes - Objectively looking at the processes that make up

 Once your automation program has "in orbit" (pun entirely intended) and ready to scale to that next level of your automation program growth. In this special Hyperscaling The Automation Journey series of #AAillustrates, we're diving into the proficiencies of automation programs that grow and scale - with our third session in the series: Scaling with Citizen Development. If you missed one of our previous sessions, we've got them all on the Hyperscaling The Automation Journey landing page - so be sure to check them out for additional content on growing and scaling your CoE. This session's focus is squarely looking at the experience of inviting business users (presumably with 0 background in computer science or information technology) to contribute to the automat

 Once your automation program has "taken flight" (pun entirely intended) - it can at times be challenging to know what exactly needs to be done to accelerate to that next level of your automation program maturity. In this special Hyperscaling The Automation Journey series of #AAillustrates, we're diving into the proficiencies of automation programs that grow and scale - with our second session in the series: 3 Growth Hacks to Accelerate Your Automation Program. If you missed session one, be sure to check out 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program from Growing. Whether you've just stood up your first CoE, or you've been doing this for a few years - these 3 growth hacks can be the jet fue