Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are usually asked by clients to introduce the topic of RPA and bring it to life for them. We explore what the value proposition of adopting a new technology is for them. We typically enter the discussion with an agnostic view of tools, help them understand what the differences are between tools and capabilities, and then synthesize a business case for adoption of those tools.

The perfect example that I have is where we're able to address an audit finding for a client. They had a situation where they had to show a tangible and very scalable solution to an internal audit as part of a finding that they had in the payroll area. In that situation, we created a database for them that worked alongside Automation Anywhere to conduct the validation and checks that were required to appease and provide comfort to the internal audit, while accomplishing savings in the form of error omissions.

We automated processes within: finance, accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoicing, validation, HR, payroll, onboarding, candidate screening, and IT from a provisioning perspective.

The value of RPA in general is the ability to actually emulate human behavior and transactions. The value of Automation Anywhere, specifically, lies in the ease of use that it has as a platform and the ability of individuals to learn relatively fast. There is a very accelerated learning curve on the platform.

The IQ Bot is a tremendous product. The more we can make the IQ Bot intuitive, as an application, and start connecting it to real-life examples, the more value it's going to bring to clients.

The human training area is still something that needs to be improved. It's not so much the actual technology learning, but rather how you bring this to life with all the peripheral competencies that are needed for it. Incorporating some of the Lean Six Sigma type of principles into the process optimization, as well as the change management, would make it a much more comprehensive solution than what it is today.

I think the tool has come a long way. We've had situations where it wasn't working well with Java in the past, then Citrix environments, etc. Every new release is better than the last one. They are listening to the customers and they definitely integrate the solutions to their product very fast.

I think it's a very scalable application as well, but I think the scalability is not just tied to the technology itself, it's also the organizational appetite to go fast and go the right way forward. The huge component of that is talent, and I think Automation Anywhere, with the internal consultants that they make available to clients on occasion, does accelerate the adoption.

From a pilot to scale, I would say the couple of clients that I've actually worked with took about six months to one year to get to what we would consider a repurchase point, but I wouldn't necessarily call that scale. The model that we bring forward to clients, at least in the past, was one where we actually teach them how to fish versus fishing for them, so we're not necessarily there to see them all the way through scale. We're there to see them through stability.

I think the technical support team is very responsive. This is probably one of the differentiators that Automation Anywhere has in comparison to some of their peers.

I had other platforms that we did the proof of concepts for, but they didn't go anywhere. I think part of the reason why they didn't go anywhere is because they were not scalable.

The initial setup, at times, has been a little undefined, in terms of requirements, just because people don't know the process, nor what they're going to need, as a result of putting something into production. On the other hand, I think those were growing pains that we experienced probably two or three years ago less than we experience today.

ROI is often associated with FTE, or full-time employees, but we are now increasingly finding that we could acheive ROI in different ways, not just as cost elimination. It could be cost avoidance or revenue acceleration. The ROI actually differs by use case, but in most situations, we're able to accomplish sufficient ROI to justify scaling the solution.

On average, the return that I've seen is about three dollars for every dollar spent on RPA.

Time-wise, I would say you're still bound to the pace of the systems that you are applying RPA to, so you're not getting an acceleration to the systems themselves, but you do get the ability to process transactions in those systems faster, because a bot tends to transact things a little faster than we do.

I've seen the price vary by opportunity cost, in essence, for Automation Anywhere. If they think that the client is going to scale and adopt a tool, the price could change. There is variability based on how quickly and how substantially you want to invest in it.

I think the Bot Store is actually growing. It's still in development. It's an idea in development in my mind. I think there is definitely repurpose-ability of bots that are being made available in the store, but it's not by any means, in my mind at least, something that you would actually take and put into production without making it specific to your organization and use case.

Regarding front office automation, I haven't actually been part of those discussions, but I know, as an organization, we definitely assist with front office automation. I would say the principles that dictate what you do in front office govern the ideas and how we bring this to life in the middle as well as the back office for us.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as nine out of ten.

My advice is not to lead with the tool selection. Lead with the process optimization and then understand fully what the tools actually have as an offering, and make sure that the way that the tool is deploying its learning is aligned to your organizational capabilities.

The primary use cases are for card and HR automation.

For our interorganizational processes, it has automated some of those processes.

The Bot Store has helped tremendously with accelerating integration from other applications. Especially with Workday, which is one of the main applications that we look to integrate.

It automates forms for our customers and our analysts.

They could improve around continuous integration, e.g., Jenkins and GitHub, stating how you could use those products and integrating them into Automation Anywhere. This is one area that we need to see more improvement on. We had to learn a lot of this on our own, as it is unavailable and not documented. I would like for them to be more verbose in putting this in the documentation.

In the next release, we would like to see more error handling functions for the bots, the ability to kill an errant bot, and have more visibility into a lot of the process flows going on in a more automated fashion.

There is a lot guesswork in areas.

The initial pilot was for two processes, which took us about four months. Then, the other processes were more extensive, so that took longer, only because we needed to do more with the process documentation, not so much in the bot creation. It just depends upon the complexity of the process, but also how well-documented your processes are.

The technical support is good, but I would like to see improvement with the documentation. 

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was complex, only because of the process that was selected. That took us longer than usual, because it had a lot of cognitive decisions in it. Part of our new process is to evaluate if a process should be automated or not, and does it have more repetitive tasks than a lot of decision making. This has greatly increased how we are able to put a process into play for bot creation.

We leveraged a third-party, as far as our bot creation, initially. That is how we did it. We have worked with partners to create bots.

Before the automation, it used to take about two to three hours. Now, with automation, it takes about 40 minutes. We measure ROI with time.

We also evaluated UiPath.

Take into account your processes. As part of the automation journey, don't look at just the technology part. This is where a lot of people make a mistake. They focus so much on the technology that they forget about "process" of RPA. They need to take a longer look at this and break down the process at its task level to see if it is worth going the RPA route. Once you do this, look at the vendors to see which one provides more in the way of bot creation and scalability, especially if you are in a cloud environment. Then, with the continuous integration, you will need to have a lot of this as you are putting things into production from development.

For ease of use, version 11.3 was an improvement compared to version 10.5. I am looking forward to seeing what 2019 provides for developers.

I would rate version 10.5 as a six out of ten and version 11.3 as an eight out of ten. I would rate version 11.3 higher because there have been changes made to how the bot creation is now done, the interfaces, the ability to utilize the VDI environment, and multitenancy.

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.

I primarily used Automation Anywhere to streamline and automate standardized business processes. This included tasks such as claims handling, policy registration, and document processing from customers. Our focus was on creating efficient and consistent workflows for handling routine documentation flows.

We aimed to solve the challenges of a hands-off, lights-out approach by implementing Automation Anywhere. The goal was to automate processes like claims handling and document registration, minimizing manual intervention and ensuring a more efficient workflow.

Anywhere contributed to increased efficiency, reduced manual efforts, and notable time savings across various processes.

There is room for improvement in terms of costs and procurement considerations. Additionally, aspects like procurement conditions, technical connectivity, and global reach with Automation Anywhere could be enhanced as well. As part of procurement, these factors become crucial, especially in a global operating context where using the platform in various countries is a key consideration.

We started using Automation Anywhere in 2018.

I wasn't entirely satisfied with Automation Anywhere's support. Cultural differences between them and UiPath or DDI were noticeable, and understanding their company perspective was crucial. Despite this, I handled it professionally, and it was generally okay with no major issues. I would rate the support as an eight out of ten.

Positive

Before using Automation Anywhere, we initially explored three different automation solutions. One was widely mandated across the company and had better pricing. The second was used regionally, but the local teams struggled to adapt to robotics process automation. 

When comparing Automation Anywhere specifically, the solutions were acceptable and useful, but pricing conditions and procurement leverage were areas that could be improved. Overall, the transition to Automation Anywhere enhanced our processes. The choice depended on factors like regulations and conditions. Automation Anywhere didn't have the ease of a global solution we experienced with another tool. We also used DDI locally, which was good in quality but needed transformation into a full RPA solution. Comparing Automation Anywhere with UiPath, UiPath was more global, scalable, and had better contract and pricing conditions.

Automation Anywhere requires limited maintenance, and at the time, three individuals were involved in maintenance and implementation. As the applications expanded, there was a need for a gradual increase in the team for ongoing support and enhancements.

Introducing Automation Anywhere to non-tech-savvy business users had its challenges. Some needed training to understand and develop their use cases with technical support, while others already grasped the requirements and could effectively communicate with developers. Managing this diverse group required a centralized approach. Training typically took one to three months, depending on individual skill sets, to bring non-technical employees up to speed on using Automation Anywhere.

We currently use standard RPA with Automation Anywhere, not incorporating Automation Co-Pilot. The challenge is identifying repetitive tasks suitable for RPA. We are exploring whether these functionalities are embedded in existing software or if direct engagement with RPA providers is necessary. The ongoing discussion revolves around the potential future integration of robotic solutions into software. For artificial intelligence, we distinguish between IoT, machine learning, and similar aspects, with development ongoing from both smaller players and major companies like Microsoft. The goal is to combine both robotic and AI solutions for comprehensive automation eventually.

Integration with other tools and applications with Automation Anywhere was smooth, especially for cloud-based applications. We did not encounter any significant difficulties, and the process was straightforward, meeting relevant requirements.

Automation Anywhere provided us with good automation at scale, and we did not encounter any problems with its ability to handle large-scale automation tasks.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the SAP application and the DLLs that Automation Anywhere provides. These DLLs help automate the SAP application. In A360, the latest version of Automation Anywhere, they provide many connectors for the different frameworks, like Office 365 or any other APIs, so those connectors are useful.

They still need to improve the SAP application's ability to use the features it has. For example, we have been using a MetaBot to automate SAP applications. They have given the SAP the ability to command Automation Anywhere itself, but we have encountered some limitations. Microsoft Power Automate has so many connectors, like its connector with Microsoft Office and SharePoint. On the other end, I have found Power Automate to be overpowered compared to Automation Anywhere because they already have so many connectors with Office 365, Teams, and other APIs. There are even more if you consider the cloud flow of Power Automate, so it's easy to get triggered.

Automation Anywhere is not so easy to trigger. For example,  I can create an automation in Power Automate where the user provides input into a form, such as Microsoft Form, and that info gets pulled into SharePoint. In Automation Anywhere, we do not have some trigger like that. We have to keep one bot running 24/7 to get this data into SharePoint. Power Automate does not have anything like scheduling. Whenever you fill out the form, it gets triggered on its own, and the information is saved into SharePoint. So this is an advantage of Power Automate that Automation Anywhere does not have.

Automation Anywhere should add the same feature that Power Automate has, so whenever I create a flow, there is a trigger given by Automation Anywhere. Instead of scheduling that bot on CR, there should be something running in the background constantly, so I do not have to schedule the bot or trigger the bot manually. The trigger should be integrated into Automation Anywhere. Also, if I am creating one variable in one module, I have to make the same variable in another subtask, then I have to create a mapping between those two. If Automation Anywhere were to come out with a feature like Power Automate's environment variables, then that variable could be created globally and used throughout the process. That would be better. 

Another feature I would like to have in Automation Anywhere is "Go To Line." When we are writing the code, it sometimes extends 500 to 600 lines. If I want to go to some line numbers — say, the bot has failed on line number 120 — I have to go manually to line 120. If Automation Anywhere provided something like a "Go To Line" feature, that would be useful for us. For example, if you face an error at line number 500 and your code is 1,000 lines, you have to scroll so far down to get to line number 500. 

Furthermore, in Automation Anywhere, you have to write a DLL separately when you want to have something from a .NET perspective. In UiPath and some other tools, there are direct call functions available. It would be nice if Automation Anywhere came up with something like that, where you can directly have the method called.

I've been using Automation Anywhere for around four years.

Automation Anywhere is quite stable. It has been around for many years now and has undergone several updates.  

To some extent, I can say Automation Anywhere is scalable.

The technical support by Automation Anywhere is quite good. Whenever we have an issue, we create a ticket on the Automation Anywhere support site, and the support from their side is quite extensive.

Setting up Automation Anywhere is a bit complex. When I entered into the RPA industry, Automation Anywhere had just been launched. Automation Anywhere was first released in 2014 or thereabouts, and I started working on it in 2017. I was just a novice when I began my journey with RPA, and it was a whole new concept in my organization as well. When we were setting up the control room server and the client, it was a bit daunting. We had to do so much in the background database and then the client. It is pretty complicated to set up the Automation Anywhere control room and the high availability clusters. 

I'm not too sure about the pricing part, because our organizers handle that. I'm just a developer. We get the software already installed on our machine. 

I would rate Automation Anywhere seven out of 10. It is a simple tool to learn, and with A360, they have gone way beyond. They also have an intelligent bot. However, I would suggest going with Microsoft Power Automate ranter than Automation Anywhere because Power Automate's cloud flow is easier to use. In addition, you can use Power Automate with very minimal coding. With Automation Anywhere, you need extensive knowledge of SQL and .NET. You have to learn so many things before implementing Automation Anywhere. 

I have worked on Automation Anywhere for four years and also UiPath. Between these two, I have found Automation Anywhere easier to work on. Also, it's stable because I have delivered around 20 plus automations on Automation Anywhere to date. Based on my experience, I have found Automation Anywhere to be more stable and accessible. I prefer Automation Anywhere. 

In my previous organization, I had worked on UiPath, but I haven't worked on UiPath much for the last two-plus years. So I only have six to eight months of experience on UiPath. I find the Orchestrator feature quite complex and difficult to understand. When I was working on UiPath, they had just introduced their advanced features in Orchestrator, so I found UiPath much more valuable from the .NET perspective. But if we're talking about how easy it is to program, Automation Anywhere is more straightforward. For the past one or two months, I have started getting my hands on Power Automate. In terms of cloud flows, I find Power Automate more useful. Every tool has its pros and cons. After working on Automation Anywhere for around four years, I do find it easy and scalable. But now, now that I've been introduced to Power Automate, I find that I like it because of built-in connectors and templates.

Automation of AP 3 Way Invoice Matching Process. Details from PDF invoices with the corresponding data in terminal. This project involved applications like Outlook, Aurora Terminal, PDF reading by IQ Bot, and Excel. The current scope of the project was to process around 600 invoices per day from 20 different suppliers which has saved a lot of time for the end-user. It has been deployed in production and the customer is pretty much happy with the performance of the bot.

On-Premise installation of CR with 1 runner and 2 creator license.

IQ Bot

16GB RAM

It has improved a lot. We could identify a lot of manual processes that can be automated for our customers. The scope of automation by using Automation Anywhere has become wonderful. IQ Bot and AI sense are the incredible features provided.

The features and the architecture of Automation Anywhere make it easy to analyze any process and conclude good candidates for the automation. The flow chart view helped our customers understand the code pretty easily. The handover or knowledge transfer also becomes very comfortable. 

• The most valuable features I see on the actions added have a lot of commands that were unavailable in older versions.
• The concept of packages with the flexibility of adding our own package. The packages for running Python Scripts, different packages for excel, and it has the option to work with Excel if it is not installed in the machine.
• Exception handling with try, catch, finally and many other actions introduced.
• Concept of different data types.
• The different views for writing code like Flow or List or Dual.

1) We have encountered some issues in the actions like Terminal Emulator-> Send Key -> Page Down/Up not working.

2) We found difficulties while copy-pasting commands after the end of "IF" condition and "Loop".

3) A scroll bar will be good in the "Flow" tab.

4) When any command is double-clicked, if the command opens in a popup window as we had in AA desktop versions, then that could have saved some space for development as the code writing section seems to be less which creates difficulties when there are loops in the loop.

5) Email trigger was also not working.

I have been using AA for four months.

Currently, it is a beta version but has pretty good performance stability. There are issues in some packages. I hope with all the updated packages the solution will be much more stable.

For example: Terminal Emulator-> Send Key -> Page Down/Up command is currently not working.

Excellent.

Supportive but takes longer time to respond.

I always used Automation Anywhere from version 10.5 to A2019.15

It was easy and straightforward.

In-house.

ROI of the current project delivered saved 4 hours of time per day of the end user.

The setup cost is less than other solutions in market

Blue Prism. I personally did not like the way and features provided for developing bots.

It's an awesome solution for automation.

Use case: Extraction from Main Frame Application

Solution : 

The bot will log in to the email box and then picks the invoice no, order invoice amount, and surcharge details. 

Based on a single line item and multiple line items, the bot will log in to AS400 and feed and check all the information. If there is a discrepancy then the bot will update it based on the tolerance limit. If there is no discrepancy, the bot will accept the orders. The bot will validate costs in Excel and AS400 application and it will allocate cost for each invoice.

Easy to access: Without the need to download and install software on a local machine, we can access the RPA application from virtually anywhere.

Easy to use: Automating a business process is as easy as logging in, clicking, and automating any kind of business.

Value for time: with the help of Enterprise A2019, we can get instant value. We can log in, set up automation, and go live within minutes, giving an immediate return on your investment.

Scalability: With help of Enterprise A2019 is a highly scalable application, we can deploy a few bots and automating any kind of business processes.

1) By using Workload Management in Automation Anywhere a lot of manpower was reduced. 

2) Credential Manager used to keep customer/client information's more secure.

3) The product is dedicated to the business user and comprises advanced capabilities to offer an intuitive interface for the business user and bot developer.

4) This platform is easiest to use, avoids complexity, and ensures fast adoption & rapid deployment. 

5) It not only fulfills the requirement of the digital workforce but also be flexible to evolve with the business needs.

1) Needs some improvement in IQ BOT:

* while uploading input files we are facing issue with grouping even the same kind of PDFs

* consuming of CPU utilization and requiring more RAM

2) It is not able to use OCR effectively and has limited usability.

3) Handwritten documents are still a drawback.

4) Some of the control room GUI can be improved, it is also difficult in terms of control room management.

5) If Excel gets hanged Automation Anywhere does not give any notification.

6) Needs improvement in image recognition.

7) BOT insights taking more CPU utilization.

I have been using AA for three years and five months.  

Automation Anywhere is a stable RPA application.

Enterprise A2019 is a highly scalable application, we can start small by deploying a few bots and automating any kind of business processes.

We are satisfied with their customer service and technical support.

We have used Blue Prism for Automation. Cost wise it is higher than Automation Anywhere.

A2019 has zero installation required.

We didn't look at other options while choosing Automation Anywhere.

UiPath and Kryon.

There is only one option Automation Anywhere for cost-effective RPA.

Project 1: Built an unattended bot to automate a complex Audit process for a healthcare client. There are 90+ bots deployed and it is processing 1000+ cases of different types every month.

Project 2: Built assisted bot for a healthcare client. It was used by customer service representatives. Unfortunately, this process was not used for a long time due to latency issues and a functionality gap.

Project 3: Working on migrating the Audit process automated using Automation Anywhere v10.5 to the new version, A2019.

AA has helped to automate a complex Audit process. The process was tedious to the auditors, as they need to log in to a number of applications to collect audit data for validation. It involves web, desktop, and mainframe applications (total of 20+ applications of 40+ roles).

The whole process was automated such that the bot will log in, collect screenshots, build the PDF, and then report the results to the auditors. This saved auditors from doing the mundane manual task of logging into multiple applications independently. Also, the auditors had to manage credentials for all of the applications before, whereas now, the bot takes care of storing the details in a secure vault.

The most valuable features for us are:

1. Object cloning with an option to enter wildcard selection was very useful when working in a web application that generated dynamic HTML content.
2. The Terminal client options have helped in automating terminal applications effectively.
3. The Windows capturing features that allow for automating desktop applications works seamlessly compared to web application automation.
4. Excel automation is one of the clean and very useful features that helps in reporting, as well as other Excel-related operations. Having the option of using Excel as a database helps with performing logic.

Areas that can be improved are:

1. For assisted automation, the AA bot needs the facility to be triggered through an application interface after collecting input from the user. There is no inbuilt option available in AA to collect all the inputs in an interface. In our case, we built a desktop application to collect all of the user input and, on submit, the .NET code will run the ATMX file.
   
   Can AA provide a simple user interface through which a user can collect input and submit it to trigger the bot?
   
   
2. It needs an option to change the Windows resolution.
   
   
3. It needs to have an option to select an object after a three to five-second delay. It is useful in the case of menu selection and this option exists in other tools.

We have used several versions of Automation Anywhere since 2019, as follows:

• 2019 May - 2020 January: Used Automation Anywhere v11.3
• 2020 March - 2020 October: Used Automation Anywhere v10.5
• 2020 October - Current: Migrating from AA 10.5 to A2019

We have used WorkFusion RPA, which had options for machine learning features first.