Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary intention is to automate business processes where manual work is heavily involved, wherever it is feasible. That is our core objective. We want to free up our time and concentrate on what is very important for the business by moving processes to automation.

We have automated pretty much everything: premium registration, claims processing, underwriting. We have touched upon many processes.

Recently we have implemented one particular RPA function which helped the business to complete a particular renewal within a day, a process which took a month to complete before. They were able to reach out to the customer ahead of time. The customer was surprised to see a quicker response. The automation improved business value.

We use the solution for Citrix automation and the AISense is pretty good. It is very nice to use. It has helped us to resolve many security issues, whatever we have encountered so far. They were nullified when we moved into the Citrix AISense automation. We don't need to worry about any sorts of security vulnerabilities or security access issues. We can do everything in Citrix automation with the use of AISense. Previously it was not possible to do object cloning with Automation Anywhere. When this feature came out it was so nice to be able to use it.

It is very easy to use, very easy to learn. That is the main advantage of this tool. You don't need to have very specialized skills to learn it. It's very easy to use and user-friendly.

It gels with any other application we have. We can take everything from legacy technologies to advanced technologies. You don't feel any difference when using it with any of the applications.

It would be nice to have the IQ Bots integrated with the Enterprise Edition without requiring extra licenses. That would be great.

It is quite stable. Over the last two years we've had around 50 bots and there have not been many issues with Automation Anywhere. We do have problems, but they have been logged with the portal and should be resolved in the next releases. Overall, it is quite stable.

The scalability is good. We started with very few bots and it was quite scalable. We now have about ten Bot Runners.

Technical support has been very good. That is a major advantage of using Automation Anywhere. When you log your particular issue, within the next two to three hours a technical person will be available to walk through the problem, identify and troubleshoot it.

We would like to use the IQ Bot only, for PDF extraction. Currently, we are using PDF data extraction and finding whether the data is present. If we go with the IQ Bots, the main reason will be the capability. At the moment we are having some sort of problem with reading the images. We are using OCR and Python for that right now.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

Currently, we are using it for the labor savings, we are not very particular about what the cost savings are. We look at how much time we are spending on manual efforts and where we can reduce them.

So far we have saved about 15 FTEs in the last one-and-a-half years.

I'm not sure what the monthly licensing cost is, as that is taken care of by another team, but I would say it's around $100,000.

Our shortlist consisted of two products. When we started the journey we evaluated three or four products. We chose Automation Anywhere for two reasons:

• It's easy to learn and
• it's business-user friendly.

Without thinking twice, I would recommend going for Automation Anywhere.

We have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and that was good. It is a good learning platform. We touched almost all the courses. It also has the certification course. It was very good learning there. We even have our business associates logging in to the Automation Anywhere University and learning for themselves, learning about the platform and playing around.

The process to get to our first bot took about one year. 

For our bot creation process, we first have a business meeting to understand what the business processes are doing and we look at the process metrics. We have a spreadsheet to capture the processes for which it's feasible to do automation. Then we look at the suitability of automating a given process and what would be the return on investment if we did the implementation. Once everything has been finalized, we contemplate the development time, do the development, the testing, and then put it into production.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten. Its usability is very good. The problem is that the IQ Bots' capabilities are coming out slowly.

We use it to augment our staff and remove some of the manual processes in our business.

Our team, consists of two college kids who are doing almost all the work, along with a couple of business people to help teach them what is going on. The ease of use has been pretty simple, or they would not have been able to catch onto it so quickly.

With the new regulation on China tariffs, we were hit with a regulation that we weren't prepared to take on. By using a few bots, we were able to satisfy the requirements for that regulation without going into programs and making changes.

We have automated our China tariffs, some invoicing stuff, a lot of processes for finance, and some mundane closing tasks.

We have had a lot of great success with attended automation. The business has taken a hold and embraced it. So, we're very excited about it.

I would like more with OCR and data capture. We are partnering with IBM to help bridge this gap, but Automation Anywhere should continue to expand on their product line and provide these capabilities, as well.

The installation and setup for the bot runners and bot creators need improvement. The installation and setup for the control room is also a difficult task. Therefore, improving the ease of implementation would help out a lot.

We've not had any problems with the platform going down. Right now, it's been very stable.

We're still pretty small, so we haven't had a need to scale out too much. 

We have seen the roadmap for scaling out, and it doesn't look to be too difficult. So, we should& have a problem with it.

We have only had the tool for about eight months. From start to finish, we have put over a dozen bots in place, some of which are highly complex and took a lot of weeks to properly deploy.

The tech support for Automation Anywhere has been really good, so far. We haven't had to call them very much, but when we have, we have received a good response.

This was our first bot solution. We did do our research and looked to our partners to see what they were using, then created a shortlist. This product was on everyone's shortlist. Also, they partner well with IBM, and we have partnered with IBM for years. This made it very attractive and was the key selling point.

The initial setup was pretty complex. Everyone who offers this platform is still trying to find the right tools which go with it. Without an integrator, we would have had a lot of difficulty getting it set up ourselves. 

As this product matures, it will continue to get easier to set up.

We used an integrator (BP3) for the deployment. They've been tremendous to work with, satisfying all of our needs.

We measure our ROI mostly by time saved, from a real person doing a task versus a bot. In some cases, we have been able to recoup revenue because processes weren't being followed correctly. Because the bot was doing the task the same way every time, we have recouped some revenue that we had lost in the past.

We save 34,000 hours of time per year and have recouped up to $6000 in lost revenue.

We have a three-year contract with Automation Anywhere.

UiPath was also on our shortlist.

Every piece of software has its goods and bads. For your organization, you have to ensure that the goods outweigh the bads for your use case. This solution has been great for our company in almost every way possible. Obviously, we made a good choice. Therefore, I would recommend taking a good, hard look at Automation Anywhere as your bot platform.

With the latest version, I know they have improved the UI. That will already be a big help,

Return of investment has been pretty easy, so it has not been a problem with getting funding for this solution. Our executive team was immediately involved, where I know with most IT projects, they really don't care until they see the output. They had done their research, as well. So, they were really excited for us to take on this endeavor.

Our primary use case for it was financial back-end operations. We dabble in Automation Anywhere. We don't use it.

We have an old ERP which required human interactions because of the lack of a system. For example, we were copying and pasting from an invoice to a spreadsheet, and then from the spreadsheet, we would run a macro that would plug it into our ERP. What we did is have the robotics read an invoice and plug it directly into our ERP, avoiding the extra steps, let alone a human doing it. We placed a robot and technology in place of a human. It saved about an hour-and-a-half a day. We measure in FTEs and we measured the savings as 20 percent of an FTE.

In Automation Anywhere we liked 

• the drag-and-drop 
• easily stitching the recording of mouse control and keyboard controls. 

They were not unique but they were user-friendly. 

For developers to pick up a new tool, you need something user-friendly where it's easy to create reusable snippets of code and use them in another process down the road. I would rate the ease of use at eight out of ten.

It was very stable. We didn't have any issues with it and, if there were, they wouldn't have been Automation Anywhere's problem. They most likely would have been our infrastructure.

We didn't have to scale too far, so we didn't experience its scalability.

We didn't use Automation Anywhere's technical support, even for deployment. We read and learned what we needed to know. We got on their support site, got their documentation, took the requirements, how to deploy, and what the right architecture was. We scaled based on what we thought we would use it for. My guys like to learn, they like to try, and I allow them to dig a hole and fall into it and then fix it later. They just didn't fall into a hole.

The documentation was good enough for us to read. Granted we're technical people, but it was good enough to read and take actions based on the content. It was really good.

Setting up Automation Anywhere was fairly straightforward. I personally did it. I had my team behind me. They set up the IIS side and the SQL side. But for installation of the product, I did it myself because I wanted to know. I'd still like to learn, even though I don't do the work.

To install here, on-prem, at the server level, only took two people a couple of hours; perhaps a total of eight man-hours.

Our implementation strategy was, "Let's try it." We had an objective to save FTEs as well as to introduce technology to get around our lack of a decent ERP. It was a matter of picking among the big three, and some third-world country type of RPA as well, and seeing which one hit the button. We figured out what the requirements were, and we have a pretty hefty on-prem hosting, so we spun up some servers and installed it.

After deploying, our developers then took control. We had a team of three developers. In terms of maintenance, we usually set up our environment where we install updates monthly. That should take a couple of hours per server. I don't recall Automation Anywhere standing out as a "problem child." So maintenance on the infrastructure side might be about two hours a month.

We couldn't put the math together. When we decided to actually procure and get the quotes, they gave us free trials for a while and extended them for months. But when it came down to it, we couldn't do ROI because our company outsources to India. Our employees are in India, and in India, $250,000 goes a very long way. We just couldn't make up the money fast enough.

Cost is the biggest area in need of improvement for Automation Anywhere. Annually it's $250,000. That's what deterred us right away. We stopped using it as a primary solution because of the costs.  We did not apply hardware to that, because we've already got the cost baked into our infrastructure. Otherwise, there would have been hardware costs on top of that. If we really took a full, all-in cost for Automation Anywhere, it would have been much higher. But we don't do it that way.

There are three big, heavy-hitters in RPA, with Automation Anywhere probably being the premier, followed by Blue Prism, and then UiPath. Of those three, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are very expensive, but the accomplishments are the same. UiPath is pretty affordable as a buy-in, with the accomplishments being the same.

Overall, each has its own uniqueness, strengths, and weaknesses, but when it comes to looking at it on the financial side, Automation Anywhere is probably one of the most expensive to have an all on-prem solution. We're all about on-prem. It was very expensive to stand that up.

We went with UiPath.

In terms of differences between Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath from a functional standpoint, there really weren't any. They all do the same thing. It's coding in .NET, coding in Java. They all have their strengths. Automation Anywhere stood out because of its high cost. 

When we put them side-by-side, everything we could accomplish in UiPath, we could accomplish in Automation Anywhere. Each one is making its own jumps. For example, when we were evaluating them, UiPath was making leaps in OCR and reading natural language, and Automation Anywhere was taking a back seat in that. But Automation Anywhere was advancing in its process improvements. Now, they're doing it the other way around, and Automation Anywhere is jumping forward ahead of UiPath. So they play this game, but either one is equally good.

My advice would be "due diligence." Make sure you read, and make sure you engage the Automation Anywhere team and the support. We didn't, but we didn't have to. But do due diligence based on cost, and scale, and really what you're going to do.

RPA is the hot word right now. Everybody wants to do RPA. But what we did is just put it into our arsenal of other tools. It's not the golden bullet. It's not the one that is the end-all. It's just one of the tools in the arsenal that IT has. That's why we chose not to spend $250,000 and, instead, to spend much less. Sometimes RPA is the answer. At other times it's system integration, and at other times it's just raw development. That's what I even tell our customers. That's our toolkit. Our arsenal is developer's RPA, and we use a third-party integration tool as well.

Just the developers were using it in our organization. They tout it as it's user-friendly: Give it to a user and they can do it. But we didn't discover that at all. We couldn't just hand it to a user, so our developers were taking the processes and applying them with development code behind them. Automation Anywhere has "record-the-screen," but when our users were doing it, they would move an icon and it wasn't smart enough to find the icon that had moved.

In terms of extent of use, it was used daily for some of our daily processes. The finance process I talked about earlier is one example. We automated that and that robot ran on a daily basis. As for increasing our usage of RPA in general, we scaled up pretty quickly. Internally, we have four or five robots running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We use it to automate all kinds of business processes. The primary use case is the RPA platform, even though they have the cognitive platform and the analytics platform. We use it for so many different things it's hard to focus on one, but it's automating business processes in our banking system.

We're interfacing a lot with Excel, our ERP systems, some legacy systems, the databases, file folders, text files, CSVs. It's hard to pin down one.

Through the software, we have been able to reduce the time that we spend on manual, repetitive tasks, so that we can focus on activities that add value to the business or to our partners and customers. The most important things are saving time, increasing control, and increasing automation.

If you ask our CFO, I think he would say that the most important thing is that we saved some money, with more efficient operations, etc. But I feel the ability to change from doing non-value-added tasks into work with added value is important.

We have saved the equivalent of about $40,000 to $50,000 by using it, during my time here. That's a lot. We recently did a large migration that saved us a lot of time on things that were going to be done manually. We were able to automate it and we saved around $15,000 to $20,000 on just that migration. That's quite substantial.

One of the features that we have used the most is an action in the Workbench called Object Cloning. We find that very reliable and very useful for implementing different business processes.

In general, the security and role-based access control - credentials security - are also important. We have a high focus on security in the bank. It's obviously a very highly regulated environment, so security is a top priority for us. To be allowed to automate different processes, we need to have a good set of controls around who is allowed to do what, and what credentials people can and can't use. It allows us to manage access to make sure that we have full control.

Other things that I also find very useful are the Bot Store and the Apeople community. If we run into troubles, we can always ask the forum and get an answer. People know if there is a pre-existing bot in the Bot Store that we can use to solve a problem. It's very useful to take advantage of the community. When they launched the Bot Store, it was a unique thing in the RPA market and it is providing tremendous value to a lot of businesses.

Also, their MetaBot tool is a very useful building block. We call it Lego bricks, here in the Nordic region. So if you build a wheel for your car, you don't have to build three more, you just use the same wheel over again. That's very useful and it makes the development phase even quicker. I hear other people talking about how they're spending three months on one process and that's a bit crazy. We deliver new processes every week and we estimate a process should not take a lot more than two weeks. But on average, we're spending two weeks per process, to get from idea to production.

The main things I've found that could be better are small things that can be annoying when you're using them a lot. I would recommend they add a feature where, if you mark the start of an "If" sentence it will highlight the end of the "If" sentence. That would make it easier to get a better overview. The small things are the most important in our day-to-day work with their software. Incremental improvements for a better overview or better user experience would help.

Also, we would like to see more options for merging and un-merging PDFs. More flexibility there would be good. We've figured out ways around this and, using their software, we've been able to do everything we wanted to do. It just took a bit more time to do it. We were on version 10.5 and in their Bot Store they actually had a bot that did exactly what we wanted to do, but it was for Version 11.0.

I find that they are making a lot of improvements that we are able to take advantage of with every release. I can't really think of something large that's missing.

It's been very stable. I can't really put my finger on things that haven't been stable that are under Automation Anywhere's control.

There have been some troubles for us when it comes to doing monthly Windows updates. That always turns off the Bot Runner machines and we have to do a complete, new log-on once a month on those machines. But we are aware of it and it's on our side, not Automation Anywhere's side.

Other than that, the runtime might differ. Sometimes it goes very fast, sometimes it can go a bit slower but I think that's also due to the speed of internet access as well as the computers we're running it on. Some of them have less computing power. We don't have the perfect virtual environment yet, so we're still working on improving that. But we can't blame Automation Anywhere for our having a legacy infrastructure.

In general, it works very well and we're really happy with the stability.

The scalability is good. I think we haven't really used the Bot Farm product yet, but that looks very exciting. We're planning on moving the infrastructure into the cloud and it's then a very interesting prospect to be able to scale up from 100 bots to 1,000 bots with just the click of a button. To my knowledge, it's probably the most scalable RPA software out there. We haven't really met any major challenges when it comes to scaling up, other than our own computers. But that's an in-house problem, not an Automation Anywhere problem.

I've talked to people using other RPA vendors and they have said they face some major issues once they pass 40 automated processes, but we haven't really faced those kinds of challenges. It has been running smoothly.

It's very scalable and it's easy to have control. There is a good audit log in the Control Room. And there is the ability to create your own roles and have strict, role-based access control where you say: This role is able to run this bot on this machine but it's not able to run another bot on the same machine. That's good from a security standpoint.

Technical support is really eager to close tickets as fast as possible, which is good. But as with any support, it can sometimes feel like it's slow because they have to do these standard checks to rule things out. Even though I say I've done them, they have to do them anyway. They have to be able to say, "Okay, this is checked off, this is checked off, this is checked off. Alright, now we can move to the actual issue." It can be a bit slow at the start, but they're always able to resolve our issues.

In general, I'm very happy with it and I can understand why they have to do those checks because if it's a stupid error, it's good to identify that early.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I've actually done installations of Automation Anywhere and I have no IT background. I've been able to set it up on a server and some virtual machines and get everything working.

The deployment took some time for us, but that was due to a lack of a good environment on our side. To do a clean install would take some three or four hours to get everything up and running, depending on what kind of machines you have. If you have all the accesses you're supposed to have it can take a very short time. But, if you're installing it in an enterprise environment, it can take longer because you might not have all the accesses. At least for me, coming from the business side, I don't have all the administration accesses that I would need, but that's not Automation Anywhere. Overall, it's pretty straightforward and doesn't take a lot of time.

For our implementation strategy, we started out with a pilot, together with a consulting partner. We automated two processes and created a proposal for an operating model, governance, and a framework. After that, we just tried to pump out new automations as fast as possible to prove the value to upper management. After a while, we got some traction and we went from being just me in 2015 to between 12 and 15 people now. Some of them are not working full-time on it but we have at least 12 full-time employees working on RPA across our organization. We started out in Norway, but now we also have operations in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, with people working full-time on automation in all of those countries.

All the developers are doing some maintenance. We don't have anyone who is assigned to doing only maintenance because we all find that a bit boring. We share the responsibility among all the developers so that everyone has the chance to do new processes and maintenance when needed.

We have a two-pronged approach there. The processes that are important for business continuity, the business-critical processes, are often maintained proactively. We are notified that a change is coming to the system, so we need to test it out and make a new version that will work when the upgrade of the system is live. So we're proactive in those kinds of processes. Non-business-critical processes are maintained reactively. We try to do it in the most sensible way possible, but there's always room for improvement, obviously.

We put a lot of responsibility on the process owners. They're responsible for notifying the RPA team in case of any changes in the graphic user interface or changes to the process, because of new rules and regulations or any other reason. The process owner or someone in his or her team will always know if there is a change in the user interface or the process.

If there is an error in the code, it is the RPA team's responsibility to fix it and we do most of that ad-hoc, when it happens. We always have some resources available to do those kinds of things and that's taken into account when estimating how long we will spend on creating a new process. We know that something might happen during that week or those weeks, so we add some padding.

In addition to the developers, we have a lot more people using the Control Room to schedule the processes.

So we tried to run fast and then we took a step back and re-evaluated. We built an even better framework, redid the infrastructure, put more thought into the security aspect, and we have industrialized our implementation. We still have some issues when it comes to our operating environment, but that's not Automation Anywhere's fault; that's more in our IT department's hands.

We used Accenture, they're our technology partner in Norway. We had good experiences with them, but I think it could have been better planned on both sides. We were not able to mirror their organization as we should. Ideally, we would have been more self-sufficient after those ten weeks, and it was only by chance that I had the time to be present during all ten weeks, every day, in the project. If we didn't have the people learning how to develop, how to do the business analysis side, and working closely with them, we would have been in some trouble going forward.

The project was a success either way, given where we're at right now. But they should have been a bit clearer on how much time people would need to spend and what was expected of us. It's always better to make the customer self-sufficient.

I think they also proposed a bit too-ambitious operating model with a bit too many people from the get-go. That was not that well received by our management. We're a larger organization right now than what they proposed, but I don't think that our management would ever have accepted or have had the guts to do the leap of faith and say, "Okay, we will have six people working full-time with RPA from today," in 2016. They didn't know the potential and didn't really see that we had that many manual processes.

These are small things. In general, we're happy with what they did. It's just that if I were to point my finger at something that could have been done better, those are the things that could have been done better.

Regarding the number of people involved in the deployment, from Accenture's side there were two developers, two business analysts, and one project leader. On our side, we had a project leader and seven or eight other people, but eventually, it was just me and the project leader who spent our full time on the project, while it was going on. Everyone else was also doing their day-to-day jobs. And with all those people, it was still too few.

We have triple-digit returns, in percentage. I feel it's worth every dollar we paid for it. We have seen a lot of the returns in operations and back office because we had so many manual tasks there.

A good example is a process that we automated where, on that specific process, the return on investment is above 30,000 percent. The total cost of ownership is around $1,000 and the return is something like $400,000 in direct cost savings. And that's still increasing. It's an ad-hoc cleaning job that we're doing, but for every contract we change, we save about half-a-dollar per month, per letter we're sending. It amounts to a lot.

We spent one day creating that process and four days running it so the cost of ownership is really low. Those kinds of processes are unicorns. You won't find them in every business and you have to have the right people and the best ideas. But we were lucky to find that process and, by itself, it has paid for a lot of the license cost.

We just did a round of price comparison on a global scale and found it's so hard to compare the license prices. But, Automation Anywhere, in general, is on the same price level as the other vendors, a bit lower in some cases. 

If we're thinking about the list prices, the Enterprise platform license fee is quite high. If you have five Bot Runner licenses, five bot creator licenses, a Control Room, and an Enterprise License fee, Automation Anywhere is much more expensive than the others. But if you have a global agreement with them, the Enterprise platform fee is shared between all the entities that are using Automation Anywhere. In that scenario, it would be a lot cheaper. The prices are quite okay.

We evaluated Blue Prism at the time.

We did the assessment together with Accenture and I think they actually recommended Blue Prism vs Automation Anywhere. I find that a lot of the consultants in our region are recommending Blue Prism or UiPath because they have generous compensation and incentive packages for the consultants who sell their products. I'm not sure if Accenture would recommend Blue Prism if they didn't have some interest in it. If they were totally agnostic, I'm not sure if they would have done the assessment the same way. But it's hard for me to say.

If I were going to do a new evaluation today, I would evaluate Automation Anywhere vs UiPath, but I would still choose Automation Anywhere. I've seen demos of both Blue Prism and UiPath and I think the basic capabilities are the same - they're all based on the .NET framework and you can kind of do a lot of the same things with them. But when it comes to the scalability, security, etc., I think Automation Anywhere is superior.

Another major factor that played a role in why we chose Automation Anywhere was their prompt replies to any questions or issues.

I'm not sure how this part is with the other main providers, but Automation Anywhere has a really good customer success program. I have a customer success manager that I'm in contact with daily. He helps us elevate our issues to the correct people and makes sure that, if we have any action points that are pending on someone at Automation Anywhere, they are resolved as quickly as possible. The follow-up from Automation Anywhere's side has been fantastic. They give us information about what's in the roadmap and what's to come, and if we need any additional information for our IT teams or our management team - anything to would help us with information - they are available to do calls and presentations.

My advice is to get started and get help. It's very useful to have consultants come in to help you get started. That will kick-start your implementation journey. Also, look at it as a journey. You won't get to an end-state where you will say, "Alright, now I'm done," because you will have to improve your implementation at all times, keep progressing, moving towards AI.

In my opinion, the vendor you choose in the first year is kind of irrelevant. But when you come to a point where you're about to scale up, then it's important to be associated with the best vendors out there. For us, being a customer of Automation Anywhere puts us in a really good place to keep progressing and keep scaling up.

It's important to remember that we are not doing a full integration here, we are doing RPA. It's okay to do 80 percent of a process - the high volumes - and then do all the exceptions manually. You won't necessarily get a good enough return on spending an extra month to do all the exceptions. You want to go live with the volume that represents the 70 or 80 or 90 percent, as soon as possible. Then see if it makes sense to handle all the exceptions, the last ten to 30 percent. It's important for us to be able to deliver fast, as well as securely and controlled, and with the MetaBot and the other tools that we have through Automation Anywhere we are able to do that.

We have automated in excess of 60 processes running on 17 Bot Runners, which are like machines we can operate 24/7. We have 15 bot developers and we are closing in on capacity so we would have to expand the number of licenses soon. 

Our plans for ramping up are about pumping out new processes every other week. We're working Agile with the RPA so we try to do short sprints and deliver something every week. The usage increases every week actually. I'm not sure if we are planning to have even more developers because we don't want to be in a position where people don't have things to do. We would rather have some backlog rather than having to fire five developers.

We are planning to continue on the same pace and ramp up the number of bots, rather than the number of developers. We did a proof of concept last year with Automation Anywhere's IQ Bot which was very successful. We did not, however, have time or resources available to implement that last year. Hopefully, this year we will have time and we will make the purchase of the IQ Bot license and start using their cognitive platform. We're thinking about implementing their analytics platform as well, because that's very useful for keeping track of our progress.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement and, of course, we would want cheaper licenses and would want them to add even more things that we haven't thought about to their product. Still, we're really happy with the software provider that we're using.

We were looking to replace employees with a robot for repetitive and tedious tasks, to save time.

Automation Anywhere is saving hours and hours of employees' time. We can do the same tasks with fewer employees. 

We have increased the automation of processes in our organization. It is really obvious how automation has improved the performance of our processes. We have two tracks of automation. We do traditional automation using application management and integration, and that is done by a big team. But we can compare our small RPA automation team to that big team. Both are increasing automation in our organization, each accounting for about 50 percent of our automation.

There is definitely another business benefit from using it: Processes have been re-engineered after being reviewed.

There are ready plugins and connectors to integrate with APIs for common systems like Oracle or Microsoft.

There could be improvement in the reporting and insights into the ROI. The ROI tool that shows the performance and the return on investment is not very accurate. I have developed my own tool to do that instead of using the native tool that comes with Automation Anywhere.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

It is a stable product.

The system can be expanded easily if you scale up the team or the process itself. It's the perfect product for that. It's definitely scalable.

We didn't have a previous solution.

There were some difficulties regarding the connection of the servers and performance issues, but we overcame them by reading about the product and seeing how things can be done. We also opened tickets with Automation Anywhere but it took them a long time to respond. There was a ticket that never closed during six months. But with an upgrade to the new release, it disappeared automatically.

Automation Anywhere has a learning curve, but it's not that hard and it's not very easy. Someone without tech skills can learn it by taking courses. When you try, you get into some problems, but in the end, it's nice and not hard. I haven't tried training non-tech people to use it, but in general, it may take people without a tech background about three months to learn it.

From time to time we need to do some maintenance of the infrastructure servers and make sure that the CPU and memory utilization is optimized. Occasionally, we need to increase the memory. There are two or three people involved in the maintenance from our organization's application support team.

The solution is quite expensive. Not every organization can consider this option. That's one reason they might go with real integration via API.

There are additional support costs. We didn't buy the support because we have a capable team that is doing the job.

We have seen options from the competitors, and we decide to go with this one. There were many aspects to our decision, but the main ones were the cost of the solution and the support available in our country.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere as a serious option. You will find it easy to use, overall, making it a very good choice.

When it comes to deciding between an API integration and RPA, integration is the best option, not automation. If API integration is available and ready to use, it's better to go with that option. However, sometimes, based on my experience, there are cases where you don't have control of those things and you have to think of other solutions. For us, the alternative was automation using RPA. But when an API integration is possible, I prefer to go with that option, rather than going with the RPA. When that is not possible or easy to do, we go with RPA.

We're using Automation Anywhere (AA) for the financial departments of a lot of civil engineering companies here in Greece. There's also one pharmaceutical company that uses it in their financial department.

I find Automation Anywhere (AA) to be really fast on the development side. They are also using a good engine. They have an efficient and intelligent system, e.g. it's IBM's, so it's one of the best. The connectors in Automation Anywhere (AA) are also good, and they're working fine. These are all the features I found most valuable in the tool.

One area for improvement in Automation Anywhere (AA) is its monitoring system. It's not that good.

The scalability of the tool also needs improvement, because when you set up another machine to run the process, the system would become full.

We've been using Automation Anywhere (AA) for three years.

My impression on the stability of Automation Anywhere (AA) is that there's still room for improvement there. A lot of times during the day, one or two out of 20 cases lose their elements, or lose a window, and that should be improved.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere (AA) needs to be improved.

Setting up Automation Anywhere (AA) was not that hard, but I can't say that it was easy. I don't know if I did something wrong in the configuration when I first installed the tool. You have to configure the database yourself, and I believe that the tool should configure itself.

Licensing for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid on a yearly basis. Out of all the RPA tools, it has the most value for money, e.g. what you pay is what you get.

On a scale of one to five, with one being cheap and five being expensive, I'm rating the price of Automation Anywhere (AA) a three. It's not as expensive, but it's not that cheap, too. If you'll use it long term, then it's better, but the company that you're selling it to, they have to trust you, and you should also have knowledge about the sales.

We're now using version 16 of Automation Anywhere (AA), and that is the latest version. Previously, I was able to use version 11.

I have not contacted the technical support team for Automation Anywhere (AA), because we are partners with IBM who are partners of Automation Anywhere (AA), so I'm working with IBM and talking with IBM support, instead of the support team for the tool.

If somebody wanted to use Automation Anywhere (AA) for the first time, the advice I would give that person is that it's the only tool that's easy to learn in terms of how to develop, but you have to read the manual about the monitoring system and the control room, especially about the control room, because it's really complicated. I found the control room complicated.

Overall, I'm rating Automation Anywhere (AA) eight out of ten. I'm giving it an eight, just because of the cases that you are losing according to the spying or monitoring system. You're losing a lot, and your customer is not really happy about that.

We use it to automate all kinds of business processes. The primary use case is the RPA platform, even though they have the cognitive platform and the analytics platform. We use it for so many different things it's hard to focus on one, but it's automating business processes in our banking system.

We're interfacing a lot with Excel, our ERP systems, some legacy systems, the databases, file folders, text files, CSVs. It's hard to pin down one.

Through the software, we have been able to reduce the time that we spend on manual, repetitive tasks so that we can focus on activities that add value to the business or to our partners and customers. The most important things are saving time, increasing control, and increasing automation.

It has reduced a lot of repetitive manual work and manual mistakes that can occur while doing repeated work. This tool is very accurate. Everyone wants to automate their day to day work because of which we will be getting more and more work.

Since more and more companies want to automate their process because of the current situation, jobs for RPA developers have increased. Automation Anywhere has made tedious jobs so easy and time-saving. If the project is super automated, it can be finished in a very short period of time.

String extraction, Excel integration, and web services are the most valuable features. Because we are using web services it is so easy to connect with third-party applications. 

Excel automation is one of the best features in Automation Anywhere. If we have to work with multiple excel sheets with lots of rows and columns, it gets really difficult to keep track of this is done manually. But Automation Anywhere makes it really simple and error-free. 
Email automation is another command which is really good and time-saving. If we have to send out emails to a group and if it is everyday job, AA is very helpful

I would suggest adding more fields while calling in API. There is no option to generate an Authentication token within the Bot.

While using REST web services, we faced a lot of issues as we were trying to connect with the Salesforce application which needs an authentication token to connect. Since there was no option to create an authentication token we had to find a different solution altogether. This feature can be improvised.

Object cloning is another feature which is not very stable and this can be improved as well

I have been using AA for three years.

Cost Licensing is little high.

We are working for the Telecom industry, so there are multiple orders that come every day for service changes, add, and disconnect, so we have automated repeated steps using Automation Anywhere.

We use the Schedule feature to run an Unattended Bot, which gives a structured report prior to office hours, and we can directly start manual steps once we log in or come into the office.

It is easy to automate SAP by using Cloning and Metabot.

We can easily perform actions on a vendor-based tool that is specially designed for the Telecom industry or for database purposes.

Real-time mail notification is useful when reporting Bot status.

It definitely changed our approach; we automate repeated process steps using the simple GUI of Automation Anywhere's Bot creator, commands, and variables.

The Scheduling and Trigger features make Automation Anywhere fabulous in terms of unattended or independent automation.

We are showcasing our Automation potential to our clients. We offer them a cost and time-effective solution for repeated and time-consuming processes, which surely help a lot in terms of improving quality. It helps to exceed expectations beyond a predefined service level agreement. 

Once you create or paste the file/folder into a specific location, it will trigger the assigned Bot for execution.

We are getting the real-time status of the Bot, indicating whether it is successfully completed or failed.

The Mail notification feature also gives us the exact route cause of Bot failure using the Error Handling feature. It also gives a Snapshot of the error.

We can easily assign roles as Bot Creator, Bot Runner, Attended, or Unattended using the Control Room. We can also create custom roles as per our or clients' requirements.

We can smoothly monitor the status of the User, Bot Status, and many other metrics using the Dashboard feature in the Control room.

The time taken to execute a Bot through A2019 can be reduced. It takes time to upload Bots/Files once you click on Run, and it is difficult to wait while we are developing automations because deadlines are always a risk factor for developers. Code needs to be run code multiple times to achieve requirements shared by the client or team.

Migration from V11 to A2019 is difficult and needs more attention because it should be simpler.

They need to improve the  Object Cloning feature because it creates problems when the resolution is changed.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than three years. We started working on AA Version 10.X.

It is more stable than any other solution available in the RPA industry.

The scalability is tremendous and it is like a magical stick in your hand for automating repeated tasks.

Technical Support is always available and they help from scratch, trying to resolve each query.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to AA.

The initial setup was difficult but later, it gets easier in each progressive version released by Automation Anywhere.

We did not evaluate other products.

Automation Anywhere is most easy platform to learn about Robotic Process Automation and show potential of Automation.