Automation Anywhere Reviews

We generally do stuff to automate websites and SAP that we have in our company.

It has helped us to save a lot of FTEs for our solutions that we have provided to our companies. Suppose a job which was done by a group of eight to nine people on a daily basis for 24 hours was taking a lot of time, so we created a bot with Automation Anywhere. It was done with a bot working 24/7. It reduced the numbers of guys required to do that process.

The cognitive solutions that it provides.

The feature to automate the use case by simply extracting data, putting it into SAP, and automating the data. This is mostly website based, which is pretty easy for us to work on.

I would like to see some more with the Excel commands that they have. Also, with the cognitive, that is coming up we need to see what else they have, e.g., some SAP features to enhance the product more.

It is moving to a stable version right now. Version 10.5 was more stable and version 11.3 is having some glitches. But, we are moving to a newer version. Let's see what that brings to the table.

Technical support could be much better with the responses which we get. Also, guys come to our company and help us whenever we have some big challenges, so it is quite good. However, it could be done in a better way.

Now, it is a big complex to download the product and install it, then again to install the patches. So, it takes a lot of time to download it. But, the newest version that they are coming out with is web-based so it will be quicker on the cloud. As the CEO said, "Booking an Uber takes more time than downloading Automation Anywhere and even making the first bot."

It has provided us ROI.

It is a bit close, but I feel UiPath has an edge over Automation Anywhere.

I would rate the product a proud seven (out of 10). It could be improved more. With the newest version, we need to check the product. I am giving it a seven (out of 10) as a developer and because I'm using it daily.

Being a bank, we have a lot of processes which we have automated. I am a Project Manager for HR functions. The majority of my processes are in terms of income and skills processing. Those are all automated.

We were one of the few to start up this journey with Automation Anywhere. Interestingly, the majority of our processes were determined to be boring. People did not find them to be very interesting. Those processes have been automated. Being a bank, we have some sensitive processes which we cannot automate. Those processes have been given to human intellectuals. Otherwise, the majority of our processes are automated.

It has boosted our processing time by seven times. Typically, something that has taken eight to 10 minutes now can be done in two to three minutes. So, we have seen some value-add there. 

Resources are being processed earlier and involved in a different type of a governing kind of role. This sort of builds a layer for them to move and scale up. The solution is fast and easy to deploy. Our use cases lasts for two to three sprints and we can churn out solutions very fast.

We do not have a server type of an environment. We use a desktop version of Automation Anywhere which is easily customizable and quickly built-in. We do not have to go through major security iOS applications, etc. These are all enterprise applications that we have onboarded. Each of our functions take their responsibility of building their bot and deploying it. 

It is fast and reliable. 

Older versions of Automation Anywhere required specific skill sets to use it. It is no longer like that.

The version A2019 GUI allows you to drop and drop.

As far as version 10.1 is concerned, we have been using it for the last two years. It is okay. As an organization, we look forward to next version. However, being a bank, we have certain processes that we have to follow. We are happy with the version that we are using and haven't experience downtime.

We have been looking at processes which can easily transition into a large scale environment, where you can have cloud or hybrid model. However, being a bank, some of our processes are critical and we would like to hold those on-premise. This limits us with our usage of Automation Anywhere.

The support that we receive from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We have specific customer success managers as a platinum partner. We have support extended to us when we have any type of concerns and issues. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. It didn't really affect our processes at any levels, which really helped. The process was fast and easy.

The support team kept our team calm.

We have an in-house Automation Anywhere team who supports us.

It saves us man-hours, headcount, and processing time.

We have automated the equivalent headcount of 500 FTEs since we started. Those people haven't been laid off. They are just doing different types of work activities.

We did not evaluate other vendors beside Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere was a pioneer in the market at the time that we were evaluating vendors. It was a good match.

Explore the new version A2019 that is coming out. It is user-friendly and can be onboarded quickly.

I would love to use the next version A2019 that is coming out.

We have a lot of business use cases that we are using this tool to automate processes for. These include different business verticals, like credit, fraud, enterprise operations, and marketing. Each team has a separate dedicated RPA (Robotic Process Automation) team of its own.

We primarily automate processes for the banking and financial sectors. This means all credit related stuff, such as loan applications and operations.

I'm working on enterprise operations. We have different business processes that our business folks handle manually and our job is to automate them using RPA and the Automation Anywhere tool.

We are using the tool on-premise.

Automation Anywhere helps improve our organization by allowing us to automate processes that should not be manual. An example which we are working on currently is that we have a business process wherein we get emails from our business customer support providing monthly statements. Currently, we have a dedicated team who are taking the requests, going to our web, downloading the statements, and sending an email.

Because this does not have to be a manual process, we are currently working on automating the entire thing. So we'll be freeing up resources through automation which will save us close to 750k in a year.

The most valuable feature for me in the current tool is the ability to develop the code quickly. This is a feature which is out-of-the-box. It has about 90% of the things that we want, just included — a plug-and-play kind of solution. That helps us in quickly developing bots. It's robustness to access Excel documents is a useful feature because we use Excel a lot. So that kind of gels pretty well with what we need from the tool. So these two features are something which I can consider most valuable.

It is easy to use. You can get up and running using the training. It's pretty easy to get started with the tool. Only our technical team is involved in the development Automation Anywhere and bots, which is the direction our organization has chosen. We don't encourage non-technical team people to deal with it. That's our strategy.

We just did the PoC for IQ Bot, and it went fine. We have quite enough workload to be productive for this quarter, so probably early next year is when we are planning to start using IQ Bot.

One thing that they have to fix is scalability. We are scaling at a fast pace, and they promised us that they would implement multitrigger. If they don't get that enhancement out it is very inconvenient. When we asked when they could deliver the stable version of that feature, they said it would be sometime in August or September. But when I discussed this enhancement with one of the product owners, it doesn't look like they have had that on their development roadmap for even a September or October time frame.

But that's something which we are desperately looking for because we are scaling at a massive level, and without that feature, we are doing a lot of workarounds. It is a wasted effort. It would also be a good addition to the product. I am sure in a lot of organizations, are also facing that need or they'll come eventually to it. We have interacted with our customers and our partners and they agree. Some are already also in the same boat.

We would definitely like to see the Workload Manager (WLM). We thought that we would not need it. We thought that with the WLM feature, they were making a mistake and going nowhere. But right now, first and foremost, it is the most important feature I would like to have. The rest all are secondary for me. There are other organizations desperately waiting for that product. I don't see that the release will be happening soon.

I have using this solution for a year and a half.

The product overall is pretty stable. We do not see any big issues on the stability risk, so it is pretty decent in that way.

As with any other solution, it is evolving. We had our own challenges with the tool, but it is getting more stable as we progress. There is a learning curve.

We are using it on a pretty large scale. We currently have close to 60 bots running in production, but in the coming couple of months, we will scale up close to 120 bots. We have plans to scale up much larger, then eventually move to the cloud. That is in our roadmap.

A big problem that we are facing with the tool is that it is not scalable. For example, we have processes that are going to run for 36, 40 hours. It is running as a single trigger. Currently, Automation Anywhere doesn't support multitrigger. For multitrigger, you develop a solution once and install in multiple machines and run parallel. AA doesn't support this so we had to do workarounds to make that achievable.

We also got a tool from Automation Anywhere that was supposed to fix or patch a problem, but it didn't work. It was a horrible, pathetic product that they brought out when it wasn't ready. We had such a very bad experience using the extra feature. We worked with Automation Anywhere to get it to function. They also said that they don't know that the tool will work if you set it up because someone developed it and he left the organization. That feature is still not there in Automation Anywhere. Even in higher management, they instructed us not to use that feature, even for basic functionality. That's how bad the product was. I just discussed it with one of the product owners about the same, and they also kind of agreed that the solution was brought out prematurely. In all, they wasted our time on something that did not work.

We have tried to use tech support for this product and it was a pain. When we interact with them, we get all the lower level customer tech support. They have no idea how to solve feature problems. We might explain to them that a feature doesn't work right and only after four or five interactions, we asked to be escalated to a person who has good technical knowledge.

A person came on-premises and tried to explain a few things we had trouble with. We were much ahead of where they were because we did all the testing already. We could tell them more about what was working and what is not working than they knew. Again that person agreed that someone did the design and he left the organization. The person who came, who is representing the company didn't have complete knowledge of the product he was sent to fix. He just said to not use that product. Period. It is not the resolution we were hoping for.

We had already decided long before which product we were going to choose to use so we did not actually consider other products and used this first.

We scaled up pretty fast. Initially, it took a couple of months for our pilot, then we were up and running pretty fast.

We follow the same standard methodology which Automation Anywhere recommends for creating bots. When going through the process, we try to optimize it before we start doing development, then making sure the process is suitable for automation. It's a standard process that we follow across the board.

We have a consultant. and a vendor partner who worked on the installation. We are struggling with our vendor partner also. They are not up to the grade when it comes to knowing the product. So we are having a lot of challenges with our vendor partner setup.

Knowing about return on investment is not in the normal scope of what I do. But we have a lot of bots running which are saving time and effort while being more accurate, so I'm sure the company has an ROI.

Automation Anywhere University is pretty good. They make it available free for everyone. You can download and learn from it. The courses are tailor-made. It's pretty decent. One can just go through the courses and start developing bots straightaway.

We have evaluated other products: UiPath and Blue Prism. However, we chose Automation Anywhere for security purposes and the Control Room, so that it can be centrally managed.

Because I have experience with multiple RPA tools at an insurance-based company or a telco, I saw and worked with other tools, like Blue Prism, which are more efficient than Automation Anywhere. But as in financial institutions, like the banking sector, Automation Anywhere and some other products are predominant.

identifying the processes which need automation. If you're just trying to start up with your automation journey, the recommendation would be to identify low complexity fruits first, so everyone can get a taste of what automation can bring to the table. Then try to go for complex things, because if it fails, this will be a big obstacle in your journey. So, take smaller steps, then once everyone gets a taste of what automation can bring, there is no stopping necessary. Start slow, but scale and learn fast.

On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere around six or seven. The reason it is not a higher rating is for one critical thing: as your code gets longer, it is difficult to analyze. It's just lines of code going from top to bottom. It is pretty good at developing the code and does make things faster. But analysis is not effective. If I had to choose between six or seven, I would have to choose the six. 

The important thing for those considering the solution is to analyze what business processes are in place and select a tool appropriate for what needs to be accomplished.

We are not yet integrated with other applications. We are trying to integrate Automation Anywhere with Splunk, which is a dashboard that shows all the information in a dashboard. However, that's in the pipeline for early next year.

We do not use the Bot Store because we don't know the authenticity of the code that is running underneath. As a leading financial institute, we want everything to be transparent. We can't take code built by someone else not knowing where the data will go.

We do not use Citrix automation.

We do not use attended automation.

My advice is to really evaluate your business process before you choose a product.

We have an ITMS Service Desk that has a lot of tickets coming to it. As an enterprise, there are too many applications there, which are being used by employees. This service desk enables them to address all the issues which they are facing, whether it is on the application, infrastructure, etc. There is a group who manages all these tickets coming through ServiceNow. These numbers are huge. To manage these services or change requests, we use Automation Anywhere when it is not possible to use either an API or do scripting.

My company is using the latest version.

I have one application that does not publish any APIs. However, there is one activity where every employee needs to be registered in that particular application. Now, we use Automation Anywhere for this. So, we get the data from the source data using the front-end of that application through the Automation Anywhere script. Then, we do registration of the employees into that application. Previously, this was being done by people on our service desk. Now, we are using Automation Anywhere to do this activity. This has saved a lot of time. 

Just for this use case, we had around 300 tickets coming in every month. We went live last month and the tickets went down to around 80 as of August 20th. While it might touch around 100, over a period of around six months it will become zero because we have not removed all the legacy data. We are just doing it from the go date of when we went live. The target is that it will be zero after three months. So, it's working well.

A work in progress is a request which came in from employees using ServiceNow to create a VPN account for them. Today, this is a manual process where the service desk people have to raise a ticket to another team who create the VPN account for the employees. This is why we are currently automating this process.

I like that it can login to any system as a robot and do the work that humans can.

Automation Anywhere is unable to connect to the database directly. What we are doing now is directly writing the PL/SQL scripts and trying to push the data from the database into Automation Anywhere. This feature is available in UiPath, but not in Automation Anywhere.

I am unaware if Automation Anywhere is able to read unstructured data, build some intelligence around it, and then push it into the application. We do have some requirements in our organization where invoices are scanned, and based on the data, hard copies of the data are fed into some applications. Today, we are using different tools for these features, but if it is available in the tool, then that would be good.

We are a midsize company in the Indian market running one or two bots. 

From a scalability perspective, I don't think there will be any issues. It is pretty good.

Support-wise, it is great. 

We installed this on a cloud infrastructure and had a lot of challenges. However, there was a dedicated support person who was helping us to do the installation.

The initial setup was definitely complex. Layman people cannot do it. People with a bit of knowledge need some help from Automation Anywhere.

It took a month and a half to do the basic installation of this software along with some internal processes related to our firewalls.

We had a dedicated person from Automation Anywhere who was supporting us at the time of the initial installation.

While our Automation Anywhere's implementation is in a premature stage, it has really decrease the workload on our service desk. We are looking to decrease the ticket counts too. I definitely see this solution helping us in the future.

Our tickets have decreased. We have more than 40 uses cases. We definitely see some ROI in the future from this product.

In the Indian market, I feel that for mid-size companies, such as ourselves, that having multiple bots costs a lot. If Automation Anywhere wants to expand in the Indian market, they will need to look at their pricing.

One of the major reasons that we went for Automation Anywhere was a global MSA, which our company has with Automation Anywhere. They wanted us to use this particular tool for our end customers too. 

I am part of an internal CIO team, where our customers are our employees. However, as an organization, we had a global agreement with Automation Anywhere where they wanted to deliver this tool to the end customer as part of their solutions. Because of that agreement, we went with Automation Anywhere.

My team (who uses both Automation Anywhere and UiPath) says that UiPath has better modules and functionality than Automation Anywhere.

I'm seeing some results in the use case for whatever we are trying to automate. So, it has been really helpful.

Don't use an RPA tool for any problem statement. I've seen people use any RPA tool available for their problem statement just to say that they are using some type of RPA. E.g., We had a use case where we had to read information from an Excel table and generate a report, so people started using Automation Anywhere. However, it would have been better in this scenario to use Power BI by creating scripts.

We use it for back-office administrative business processes, within order-to-cash. We have an end-to-end process automation that supports customer billings. We also have task-based automations that process either customer credit memos, or credit and re-bills, working within SAP.

We started with the solution on-prem and we have shifted to an AWS cloud environment.

It has allowed us to establish more reliable business processes, when transacting in our enterprise systems. It has improved the reliability of our monthly billing processes that, in the past, was dependent on manual, nine-to-five types of activities. We can now schedule those activities, process 24 hours a day, and then we review exceptions. I would emphasize and underscore the reliability aspect and the ability to process 24/7.

It is highly reliable, both from an uptime perspective and regarding data-quality and input into the systems. It's doing the same thing, every time, with 100 percent accuracy.

To put it in terms of hours, we are approaching 10,000-plus hours of capacity on an annual basis.

There aren't any features that are specifically valuable. We are not using IQ Bots.

On the cognitive side, some of their competitors, when we were originally shopping, were a little more advanced in that space. Making use of probabilistic outcomes and presenting them to a business user is a feature that, at the time of our evaluation, did not feel like a strong, mature solution for Automation Anywhere. Nevertheless, they won our business. That is one feature where I feel they are trying to make investments to address those gaps.

The platform has been very stable. There have been a few Control Room issues when adding new VMs, but overall it's very reliable. I'm pleased with the performance so far.

We are pleased with Automation Anywhere's ability to scale. We are convinced that it is a platform that we can scale, and we are convinced that it can function and operate within our environment.

We have six-plus use cases in production today. But those business processes are very complex. They are touching many systems. Our definition of a bot is a business process, not a task. Some companies call a bot a task. We don't do that, we call it a business process. We have six business processes that are running, which are very complex in nature. 

Regarding the scalability of a single business process, we have found that to be very easy. We have found Automation Anywhere to be very friendly when it comes to that. We add capacity in the form a virtual machine and a license to scale and meet the needs of the business.

We have not dealt directly with Automation Anywhere's tech support. Historically, they've been pretty good. I'm relaying that from my systems integrator and my helpdesk support. I always ask if they are getting what they need when they need it and the answer is yes. I'm pleased with the feedback I'm hearing.

The original setup was easy. What was difficult was adding licenses. I went a month where I was paying for licenses that I couldn't use, for various reasons. That was painful.

I'm not familiar with how long it took to stand up the environments. It was pretty simple from a PoC point of view, with the free trial licenses that were made available to us by AA in conjunction with their preferred systems integrator. That was fairly painless. Standing up the production environment was relatively painless as well. We had no problems whatsoever there. However, as we scale and add licenses, we have challenges.

Based on our use cases, we have seen a return on our initial investment for the PoC, and we are continuing to leverage the platform as we scale.

Price is where I'm least satisfied. Other vendors are more willing to offer discounts.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and WorkFusion. Those were the vendors that were strongly considered when we were evaluating Automation Anywhere's capabilities. There was a laundry-list of others, prior to those, which we evaluated from a market-research point of view.

We valued the market presence of Automation Anywhere. We valued the ease of use, when we were thinking about scaling out to the business. The recording feature, while not a developer tool - it is a tool for a business user who may not possess the thought process of a developer - we valued that in our evaluation. Those were the two major factors. 

And at the time, the commercial terms as well, the one-year commitment, was appealing to us when we were shopping the solution. We didn't want to sign a multi-year deal on a technology platform that wasn't proven out to our business. That was another factor which gave us comfort as part of the decision-making process.

At the start, I advise picking a portfolio of use cases to start with. Some will over-perform and others will not. Think of it in terms of a portfolio approach to sell the concept to your organization. My second area of advice would be: Do not automate systems that you do not own or control, unless you are willing to accept the degree of maintenance associated with that automation.

The biggest lesson I've learned so far from using it is that it's not as easy as the salespeople say. The biggest challenge is that not all automations are created equal. To give you some context, there are automations that I still don't have in production which have taken me over half-a-year to build. You talk to a sales guy and he says, "Hey, you can build an automation and be up in two weeks." Yes, but will that automation add a drop of value to the business? Probably not. The challenges are around stabilizing our complex automations.

Anything Google-related is challenging. I didn't really receive any help from our systems integrator or from AA when it came to the Google platform. We paid, extensively, to learn the hard way.

As part of our CoE, we rely on a third-party for development and maintenance of our automations. That means we have no users of the solution in our organization. The third-party has access to Bot Creators, they have access to our development environment and Control Room. They promote code to production and maintain the automations.

We have plans to increase our usage of the solution in the future. It is our intention to build an internal capability, over time. The processes we are looking to automate are more within order-cash and back-office. We have some administrative, travel, maintenance. Our IT ticketing system spawns maintenance; there's also account-creation and maintenance. That's an area of focus for us. And we're exploring reporting capabilities which are on the simple side. That's the area where we're targeting internal development and building an internal competency. It's what we characterize as simple automation use cases.

Overall, Automation anywhere is pretty good. It's not perfect but it's up there. I don't have a point of reference, other examples, but I think it's pretty good at what it does.

We use it for automating manual processes that are done by people now, data-entry type tasks.

We're using it to process line items in invoices. We get the invoices via Excel and we have to validate the accuracy of the line item charges. We get them once every two weeks and there are about 30,000 to 40,000 line items, and each one has to be validated. With a person doing it, it would cost more money than it would save to catch the defects. But to have a bot do it is much better because a person can only sample a certain amount. Now, we can have the bot check all of them.

There are a lot of valuable features. It's a very complex piece of software. One of the most valuable features is the different possibilities it gives you to manipulate the interface screens that you're working with. It's helpful to have a certain solution already baked into the environment. 

You really need a four-hour conversation about specific features because there are a million moving parts inside of the software. It's not that one feature is so helpful, and that I decided to purchase it over something else because of that.

Having some more pre-mapping and pre-setup analysis of what you're going to be doing with it would be helpful.

The stability is good. The only issues we've had with the product have been responded to pretty quickly. We've also had some infrastructure issues on our side. But on the Automation Anywhere side, it's been pretty good.

So far, it's scalable.

We have four developers doing the developing in Automation Anywhere. We set it up so that things are triggered automatically by somebody putting a file in a folder. Right now, we have seven bots in production for seven departments.

The four developers handle deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We're looking to increase usage of the solution. We're doing a workshop in a few weeks to bring a lot of our managers in to get them thinking about things that exist in their areas that can be automated.

Technical support, so far, has been pretty good. We haven't had any major issues and the ones we did have were answered pretty quickly.

This is a brand-new implementation. We didn't have a previous solution.

The setup was a pretty complex undertaking. We're a global company. We have our virtual IT management done in Switzerland, while our hardware is in New Jersey. So to get the different stakeholders of Automation Anywhere within our company working together to iron out the Control Room stuff and the virtual side of things, as well as the on-prem software side of things - to have it all connecting properly - was a pretty complex implementation.

The setup of just the developer environment and the actual Bot Runners took about three weeks. As far as building the bots goes, we haven't scaled as far as we can, yet.

We didn't really have a deployment strategy, per se. We just followed the action items that we were given to do by Automation Anywhere. We're still working on how to implement it across our organization. We have Automation Anywhere coming in with some Professional Services people in a few weeks. We still have to work on getting things moving with the managers, teaching them what are good processes to automate, etc.

We deployed ourselves. We own a technology company, so we had that benefit.

So far, we haven't seen return on investment, but I think we're getting there.

Yearly, our licensing costs are about $90,000 to $100,000. There will be additional licensing costs when we add more Bot Runners to our infrastructure.

We evaluated UiPath. We went with Automation Anywhere primarily because of the bot analytics, called Bot Insight. The analytics capability was a big one. UiPath didn't have the kind of functionality we were looking for in analytics.

Definitely do a very thorough infrastructure assessment first and make sure you're all set up there. Do some testing of the solution on any proprietary software that only exists inside of your company. Have a good understanding of what you're looking to automate. Don't just take a manager's word for it, but really look at it yourself to make sure that the process doesn't have any decisions that have to be made by a person or that there aren't some small things there that might stop you from automating.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at eight out of ten. It would have been good if they had helped us be a little bit more realistic about feasibility. If they had asked us for some examples of processes that we're looking at automating and had pre-tested some of those, it would have been helpful. The expectations of what we thought was possible, versus what appears to be possible, were a little bit off. They should investigate, early on, exactly what you're trying to do to make sure it's a good fit and set expectations.

I deployed this solution mostly in the finance and accounting space. We had two primary use cases. One was automating the procured invoice to pay process and the other was automating the order to cash cycle, OTC process.

It increased productivity. It raised the productivity percentage of individuals 20 to 35%. We also saw cost reduction.

Automation Anywhere was easier to learn for the developers. It has a lot of out of box features when it comes to SAP, Excel, and others. However, on the other hand, I did not like one feature which is a built-in linear code that is a straight line and it does not have the modular functionality of UiPath so the code becomes one long code and if you need to make changes you need to look through the entire code and make changes. After the code is returned, even if there are some changes in the process, the support cycle is really difficult because, with UiPath, it's modular in structure. For example, one variable changes so it's declared as a variable and you can just change it and the code automatically reflects the change. It creates a nightmare to maintain. That was the one key drawback from Automation Anywhere. The good thing about Automation Anywhere was learning the best practices of it and using the development framework was easier so getting developers who knew AA was relatively easier than getting developers who knew UiPath or Blue Prism.

We faced a big challenge when moving from AA9 to 10. That was a nightmare. The whole process took six months to one year because we had to do it for 12 to 15 clients in my organization and I was leading the Automation Anywhere deployment for 25 clients.

The biggest issue was that the new license required upgraded hardware infrastructure so we were getting all new tech stuff procured which meant that we were getting updated RAMs and things like that. Getting the licenses was easier but building the infrastructure which was required to support the new version was difficult.

Automation Anywhere is one of the least stable RPA tools out of the top five RPA solutions. A lot of times you need to rely on certain features that are really unstable. Three years back 90% of our projects were on AA. Two years back it became 70% with 20% being on Blue Prism and 10% UiPath. This year onwards it's around 50% on UiPath and 50% on Automation Anywhere. The reason why we have 50% on AA is because we have a developer strain on AA. The code is not stable. You have to recode again and again. Then when you do recode, changing the code is really tough.

Scalability is good. It's one of the better ones.

We didn't face any issues from their technical support. They were responsive and helpful.

The initial setup is more straightforward compared to other solutions like UiPath. Initially, it is relatively difficult. If you have a very simple straight linear process then Automation Anywhere is easy to implement and to deploy but as soon as you get into complexities or where you have more rules like finance or accounting where I deployed specifically at times, there are a lot of variances in the process. That's where Automation Anywhere actually becomes a headache to manage.

If you implement it right way the ROI can start within one year. It delivers quick benefits in terms of ROI.

It's cheaper than other similar solutions.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. 

I would advise two things to someone considering this solution. Go for it if you are positive it is very simple and you understand your processing end to end. It is a cheaper tool compared to others and the initial implementation is relatively easier. You will get results faster. Second, if your process has many variations, is complex, and you do not know a lot about your process, do not use Automation Anywhere, otherwise, you will run into trouble while going live and after support.

My primary use cases are where I'm dealing with a lot of raw data extraction and transformation so that the data can be used by other systems.

An example would be getting the data out of PDF files, transforming it from semi-structured to structured and putting it into an extra-stable system like Excel or a CSV so that it can be used by other systems.

A lot of clients I work with have legacy systems and a lot of API access is not available. Some of the systems might be running off a server located somewhere else, while some would be running on a mainframe and I'm actually restricted to working with the screen. So these clients have a very good use case. If I'm working with the screens, Automation Anywhere really does help me because it gives me the control over the screens. If you are not looking at integrating legacy software, Automation Anywhere gets the job done. But if you need integration then you start looking for other RPA tools.

It definitely saves time and effort. Improving the workflow, that's not something Automation Anywhere provides. That's a different challenge altogether - to do a business process improvement so that automation gives you even more value. That type of process works in combination with Automation Anywhere, but it's not a part of Automation Anywhere. So the process improvement is separate. We optimize the process and then we run it through Automation Anywhere.

You can probably use any similar tools. But Automation Anywhere is one tool that actually gives me automation capability right at the start, without worrying about process improvement in the first place. I can just act like how another person would. Whereas if I do a little bit of process optimization, I can use another tool also. If I get access to APIs, I might use Blue Prism. If I get access to web elements, I go the way of UiPath. If it is a human-mimicking behavior, that's where I use Automation Anywhere.

What I like about Automation Anywhere is the object cloning and the way you can move the mouse and either go to a particular point or go to an element. That's very easy and intuitive in Automation Anywhere.

It gets the job done in terms of getting the data out of the pages. Although I have other tools, I still have this habit of going through the clicks. If you're going through the clicks, Automation Anywhere is the best.

Let's say you are on a website. You move the mouse around. You click on certain places. Automation Anywhere is better at that because you can adjust the screen directly or you can adjust the element. Whereas in, let's say, UiPath, it's a little bit complicated on the inside because there isn't a direct command for that. I have to go to a web scraper. In Automation Anywhere, I have the direct command to move my mouse. If I need to mimic a human behavior, I will use Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is troublesome for some people because of the way it is organized. It's organized as an encrypted script, which gets run via a domain-specific language which the user sees. 

There's a loss of overhead on the computing resources in Automation Anywhere. If you have an encrypted bot, the Automation Anywhere software has to read it first, decrypt it, and run it. So there is a potential that, if the logic of the bot isn't good enough, a lot of CPU and memory overload will happen. This is something that Automation Anywhere should look at because it takes a lot of computing resources. I have seen CPUs running at 100 percent.

In terms of additional features, if I am dealing with a dynamic workflow where the workflow might change based on the input parameters, then Automation Anywhere doesn't help me because the code is pretty much fixed. When I need those types of workflows I go to UiPath.

It's highly stable. I'm pretty happy with Automation Anywhere. I'm pretty happy with the security of the bot. Once you make a bot, if you don't have access to Automation Anywhere, you really can't mess with the bot. I'm pretty happy with the stability. 

The only problem I have is that it takes a lot of memory and CPU usage for Automation Anywhere to do its internal encrypting and decrypting.

I'm not yet happy with the scalability of Automation Anywhere. Scalability is good up to about 100 bots. Beyond that, I need to spread it into multiple sites, which means there is additional licensing cost.

I would give Automation Anywhere's technical support about three-and-a-half out of five. They do have a lot of information published, but the response times aren't great within India, where we are located. I can't say anything about support in other markets.

One thing they need to improve on is the way they have been putting out so many terminologies in the market: IQ Bots, MetaBots. They need to define them properly, in simple terms. If I go to my client and say "IQ Bot" or "MetaBot," they don't understand anything. It falls back on us to figure out whether these types of things will be useful for our process or not.

Regarding their support, when they bring in these features, like IQ Bot and MetaBot, there isn't a lot of documentation that comes with them, which can cause confusion in the client's mind as well as the developer's mind. Even Automation Anywhere's guys aren't really clear on IQ Bots, MetaBots, and things within Automation Anywhere because, when we ask, they just give us the definition. That's not very helpful.

It's pretty straightforward in terms of setting it up. It's not a lot of work, as compared to what you would do in Blue Prism, or even in or WorkFusion. I would say UiPath is the easiest to install and configure, while Automation Anywhere would be number two. Blue Prism would be way down because it's difficult installing and configuring it.

It doesn't take much time to deploy Automation Anywhere. We have built a script. We just run the script and within three or four minutes we are done. We don't really install Automation Anywhere by running it and then monitoring it, rather the script automatically installs it. That script lightens our load; we automate our own jobs as well.

In terms of implementation strategy, we have a set of requirements for the client's environment and hardware. For the environment, we need to look at the .NET framework, which version, the directory structure, folder structure, paths. And there are multiple items to be checked out regarding the hardware: We need to look at the RAM, the hard disk space, the connectivity. There's a lot of checking which must be done, but we do that through the script itself.

We have all the environments set up in one local place and once the script runs it goes and installs all the required software components. The .NET framework will be installed, the run-time engine will be installed, Automation Anywhere will be installed, and the policies will be set automatically for at least the end user, so that we can go and create more users.

Once we have the hardware, and once we are ready to install the environment, it takes us about 15 to 20 minutes.

For deployment of Automation Anywhere, we don't need a lot of staff. But when we are deploying the bots, we generally have an experienced guy who will look at the deployment of the bots within the Control Room. That's a different scenario altogether.

We don't require a lot of people for maintenance. What we do is, we transfer some of the load to the client's staff, in terms of monitoring and scheduling. Of course, we have one person keeping an eye on the entire thing. We have one person on a chargeable basis per client location. And this person also doesn't have a lot of work, so sometimes this person moves among the sites if there is no problem at all with the installation.

Companies now are not willing to put a large investment up front into these tools, unless the service provider that is developing the bots can assure that the bot will be successful and there will be certain savings. Clients are actually talking to the service providers first, rather than the RPA Software Vendors. It used to be that Automation Anywhere would go to the customer, convince them and sell them five licenses, and then the client would go out and start hunting for Automation Anywhere service providers or resources. The whole model has now changed 180 degrees. Now the clients are more interested in talking to consultants and trying to figure out which tool would be good, how many licenses they would need, what the scalability roadmap is, what will they be doing again in six months, 12 months, two years, etc.

It's hard to get a clear picture of the financial value that it can bring. For example, when we go in, we look at a process and we look at the value that automating the process can bring in, but there are other aspects which we look at, which are a kind of "chain effect." If I automate this, what else will break in the whole chain of processes? When there are processes A, B, and C, if I automate B, either A or C or both will feel the heat from this automation effort. If A and C are not conducive to screen-based automation, then I am in a fix because I can automate B using Automation Anywhere, but for A and C, I might need to use something else.

That type of analysis is now coming into the picture. Earlier, it was: Pick a process, automate it, feel the benefit, and then go for another. That is one reason why now we can also recommend hybrid models where multiple tools could be used via a single interface. We have to build the interface to Automation Anywhere and UiPath, or Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism to get the job done. That becomes an additional cost to the client.

If you look at the capital expenditure, Automation Anywhere is number two to UiPath. But if you take a long-term view, on a scalable model of a large number of bots coming out, it slowly goes on to become the costliest tool. There is something they can do about that.

I did a cost comparison on short-term basis, long-term basis, CapEx versus OpEx, and Automation Anywhere is the costliest. Surprisingly, Blue Prism becomes the cheapest, if you look at the long-term view.

That's because of the licensing terms, the pricing policy, and the engagement models. Blue Prism doesn't want you to buy just one license. They want you to sign up for the long-term, for at least a minimum block of ten licenses. Automation Anywhere can give you a single license, so the capital expenditure is low. But as you go on, the OpEx, the regular increase in the number of licenses and the price per, starts to add up.

The capital expenditure goes out right at the point of buying the tool. For Automation Anywhere, I would need to spend $20,000. UiPath can give me something for $6,000, while Blue Prism will come in at $300,000. If I'm just experimenting, or I don't have a need for a large number of bots, or I can optimize my design to run bots sequentially on the same machine, Automation Anywhere vs UiPath is quite comparable.

Every tool has its own drawbacks. Blue Prism would probably be an eight out of ten, but the nearest comparable tool to Automation Anywhere would be Softomotive WinAutomation. They both work on the same principles, although the internal storage is different. WinAutomation also works on a domain-specific language system, and I would rate it a little notch higher than Automation Anywhere and give it a seven-and-a-half out of ten, but they are all in the same category. I don't really see any of them getting a ten, on my scale, right now.

UiPath can do wonders, but the technology is old. If I want to do machine-learning, I can't do it with UiPath. I would have to create another "open UiPath" for myself to be able to use machine-learning and artificial intelligence libraries which are there in the market, because I can't use them with UiPath. That's where UiPath also loses a couple of points.

It's a very dynamic market and everyday new tricks are being discovered. My advice would be: Look at your process. If your process is screen-based, doesn't have a lot of things to do with APIs, go for Automation Anywhere. If somebody's looking specifically to implement Automation Anywhere, irrespective of what process they're automating, I would probably call it a bad move.

Role-wise, we follow our own system. We have a solution designer and we have an architect. These two guys work hand-in-hand, from solution design to a technical architecture of the Automation Anywhere bot. Then we have developers who develop the system. And we have the leads, of course, who are managers. They are senior staff who understand how the bot code is to be published and released into the Control Room. Most of the time, it's the solution designer and the architects who are critical for us, rather than the developers. The development part is easier than the design part. Designing automation takes a lot out of us.

In our organization we have 42 people, and most of these are multi-skilled on multiple tools. We do only specialized stuff, so some 20 of them would have been working on Automation Anywhere at some point. We use multiple tools. We are tool agnostic. We figure out which tool to use and go with that tool.

We don't have plans to push future usage of Automation Anywhere, most importantly because of extensibility of the tool: I can't extend it. So we created a workflow tool for ourselves similar to UiPath, but it's open to extensions. I don't see a lot of projects happening on Automation Anywhere for us unless the customer asks for it. In the Asia-Pacific market, it's either UiPath or Automation Anywhere. If they don't have a tool then, of course, we'll have to look at the type of project and recommend a tool.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at seven out of ten. The architecture is great. It's only the way they have tried to protect their own bots that is causing them to cannibalize themselves. Otherwise, it is great software. It works on a domain-specific language. You really don't need to understand .NET or Visual Basic or C# to work with it. The domain-specific language is more like English. They have done a great job making something, but there is a big scope for improvement if they want to really unsettle the other guys.

In my opinion, instead of sitting in their offices and not conversing with people out there, there are a lot of things Automation Anywhere can do if it listens to the people who are actually evaluating it, using it, and are happy or unhappy with it. I don't really see a mechanism where Automation Anywhere can be seen listening to this feedback. Secondly, they should be more open about their roadmap and where they are going with Automation Anywhere. What I want them to do is to make some more noise about their plans, rather than their current situation, because customers are not looking to buy Automation Anywhere for the next three years. They're looking to buy it so that if their processes change or if Automation Anywhere changes, it can still be usable for their organizations.

I can't keep on changing tools. Let's say I use Automation Anywhere where it's obvious and then it becomes unsuitable, so I have to change to another tool. That rarely happens because the users are familiar with it and change is the biggest barrier. People don't want to change. And the cost of training is actually more than the cost of the Automation Anywhere tool itself. You need to train different people with different skills, not only in Automation Anywhere but for every tool. You need different skills and different people to actually make the whole thing work.