If you haven't heard about Product Club — the Pathfinder Community Product Club is a monthly virtual meetup led by Automation Anywhere product leaders that focuses on our latest proprietary product innovations. It offers a place for community members to stay informed, connect with product leaders, and gain insights into real-world applications of the latest innovations in intelligent automation.

P.S. If you can’t attend a meeting, no worries — we'll be dropping a recap of each month's session right here in our Product Club hub.

HOSTS

Lu Hunnicutt, Community Manager (Automation Anywhere)
Arun Mudaliar, Principal Product Manager (Automation Anywhere)
Eric Kern, Solution Architect (TriNet)
 

TOPIC

In this super special Product Club Super Session, we demonstrate how you can extract super metric tracking capabilities with CoE Manager.

Here’s a rundown of the session:

1. Arun discusses the capabilities and benefits of CoE Manager.
2. Eric shares how CoE Manager has transformed ROI tracking at TriNet.
3. Arun performs a live demo.
4. Arun and Eric answer live audience questions.

THE POWER OF CoE MANAGER

“Imagine having the ability to systematically identify, qualify, prioritize, and track AI-based automations.”  This is the mission of CoE Manager. 

Every investment needs meaningful ROI tracking. CoE Manager aims to be a singular source of truth for all your automation programs deployed within your environment. Even if you work with other automation vendors (UI Path, Blueprism, etc.), you can integrate those systems into CoE Manager to track ROI in real time.

What insights can you derive from CoE Manager?

• Current state of manual labor and effort
• Forecasted annual savings
• Potential additional benefits such as freeing FTEs or reducing manual errors
• Cost savings from bot runners or licenses
• Prioritization of opportunities

REAL CUSTOMER JOURNEY: TRINET

For the first 5 years of its automation program, TriNet used excel spreadsheets to manually manage the program lifecycle. This caused problems because:

• It was a manually intensive process to calculate value realized
• Process metrics were not standardized
• There was a lack of visibility into the value added by the automation team

Once CoE Manager was added to TriNet’s licenses, it empowered TriNet’s automation team by:

• Establishing role-based access
• Standardizing process metrics across departments
• Enabling mapping from other vendors into CoE Manager to track metrics

COE MANAGER PLUS DEMO

In the main CoE Manager dashboard, you will see that everything is tracked in terms of opportunities. 

Under the “Admin-Advanced” tab, you’ll find an opportunity intake form URL. Share this with your organization to enable a form that anybody can fill out, include details of their ideas, and attach relevant files. This information will then be collected in the “Opportunities” tab. An admin can also add opportunities themselves by clicking the “+” button. 

Click on the “Ideas” tab to drill down into the details of each opportunity potential. The CoE team can input additional benefits at their discretion such as costs avoided, customer satisfaction, productivity improvement, etc. complete with the cost estimate for each. Additionally, you can assign a value of degree of complexity and alignment with business strategic goals. All of these assumptions will be calculated into the dashboard stats summary at the top.

A bubble chart view is available to compare the complexity vs alignment score. The opportunities located in the most top right-hand corner are the least complex with the most significant benefit—a great visual for choosing opportunities to pursue. However, underneath the bubble chart is also a standard table view for reference. 

“Execution Tracking” is where you can map an opportunity to an actual automation or set of automations. Simply input the automation ID and data will start fetching every 4 hours, all of which is timestamp-based. Then it will begin taking actual executions and including that data into the benefits realized. Additionally, you can track failed executions and include a cost estimate for failed executions.

**With the .35 release, you can track task bots, API tasks, Document Automation, and WLM or queue automation. End-to-end processes can be tracked and you can view a process tree to observe which parts of the process are generating the greatest returns. 


SESSION Q&A
Thank you to our audience for submitting their questions! Unfortunately, we aren’t always able to answer them all during the live session. We want to express our gratitude to our special co-hosts, Arun and Eric, for providing their expertise and responses.

**Please note that all answers were shared live during the January 2025 meeting, and are subject to change. We strongly encourage you to contact your account management team for any specific licensing and pricing inquiries.

Q: Can you track multiple metrics in CoE Manager for a single process e.g. we have a bot that has a cost savings for every transaction the bot performs. Can CoE Manager track both time savings and costs savings for that bot? 
A: Yes. When when it comes to .35, you'll be able to track the different parts of a process differently. The amount of the percentage of tasks that can be automated, the hourly wage, the number of times it's performed, and the frequency it's performed. These can be set differently for the different parts of your process and then that gets consolidated to your overall process view.

Q: When you worked with your other IT teams to bulk import their enhancement, were those enhancements for automation anywhere work or was it outside of AA where the enhancements would take place?
A: There were outside of AA. They were generic enhancements that hadn't been classified yet for what kind of solution would be made for them. So some of them eventually did come to the automation team, but some of them were a process reengineering effort.

Q: Does integration also include Azure or ServiceNow capability?
A: ServiceNow, yes. Azure we don't support out-of-the-box, but it is possible to integrate it because—I'm presuming it is Azure DevOps which is similar to Jira and ServiceNow which we do offer out-of-the-box—so you should be able to integrate yourself and there are guides on how you can do that.

Q: If a bot is looping through records, how is CoE Manager able to track the number of records completed?
A: There is this concept of the analyse open and close actions that are there in A360 control room. So when you have a loop that is used, say line 5 is loop start and then six through 10 is inside the loop, count that loop as one record. Let's say that means if the loop runs 10 times, then you want to count it as 10 records. So what you'll need to do is you'll need to put this analyze open just before the loop's line that is line number four, and analyze close just after the end of the loop. Then essentially what happens is the analyze open-close block is counted as one record. Now when you do that, when the loop runs 10 times, then that block is counted 10 times as 10 records.

Q: Is this something available in automation anywhere already or something you had to build or customize to get so much detail?
A: What was shown in the demo is exactly what you get out-of-the-box. If you have the the CoE manager variant, then you can go and customize the view and all those charts by yourself to any extent possible. For example, there are 4 stages that I showed you idea pipeline in progress and deployed right now. Let's say you want to add a fifth stage that is after in progress, you want to add a UAT. We have one custom move with that, so you can go and add and a new stage in between any of the charts that you want to. If you want to modify the charts, then you can go and modify the charts. You can create a new dashboard all together. All this is possible, but whatever I showed you is what you get out-of-the-box when you purchase the same agent license.

Q: How can I display the accumulated savings from multiple automation anywhere tasks within the same folder or project?Additionally, if my tasks involve calling VBS, Python, or similar scripts to process LAN items, how should I handle that?
A: OK first part of it: when you have multiple tasks within the same folder of project, you can add the bot ID into the opportunity under the automation section. There you can add multiple bots so all of them can go into that same opportunity and all of them can therefore get tracked under the same opportunity. But the downside to that is that you'll then have to count the financial value of all those automations equal, meaning to say that because each opportunity captures one set of labor costs, that is what is the hourly pay for these people are. So that is fixed for all the automations that are there within that opportunity. But if that's still OK for you, then yes, you can go and map all of them. Then, all of those automations can get counted under that opportunity and they will simply go and get accumulated under that dashboard. Second part of oyur question: if your tasks involve calling VBS, Python or similar scripts, how do you handle that? As long as you define within the bot how you define the records—whether you define the calling of VBS script or a Python script as one record or end record—how many records you want to call the mode that needs to be scripted accordingly in your bot using the Analyze open close, and it'll automatically start getting counted appropriately on the same address. So it's all about how you use the Analyze open close.

Q: So are there courses?
A: Yes, there are courses. They are getting released by the end of this month and that will includea very in detail course on how to use the analyze open close so that it helps you understand how to use this analyze open close block to define your record blocks.