Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case for bringing in Automation Anywhere was to make sure that we take away the work which our resources don't want to do, they don't like to do, or they find that there is something more meaningful and useful they can use their time for. That was our primary factor. 

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode bots, because we don't need to go and look at what they're doing. They just go by themselves. That's the state we need to get to, but we are currently attended. Based on the projects or PoCs that we have done, we've got a last transmission program coming in, which is exciting.

The bot insides should come in the same package versus having it as a different bundle by itself. If we could have this product come with all the inside solutions altogether, that would help.

I was talking the other day in a session that when we go into this, how do we ensure that the right security policies are in place? Because now, we are talking about people accessing these bots from anywhere outside of the restricted access zone. So, that is where we should put focus on, because it takes only somebody to snatch the phone and start breaching. Therefore, that is where we should put the focus on.

We started off with the 10.5 version, where we didn't find any major hiccups. Then, we upgraded to version 11.3, which we find more useful. I think version 11.3 is the way to go.

As with every solution or a product, it goes through that journey. I think the RPA for Automation Anywhere is going through that journey. I can see the stability improvements from 10.3 to 10.5 to 11.3. From this conference, I could see the end-to-end governance coming into play. So, stability-wise, they are getting there. I'm not saying that it's fully stabilized. But, it's working for us, and the path is on the right track.

We started off with this showcase piece. Now, we are going into details regarding how we can scale. Can we scale it horizontally? Can we just start putting VMs on it? So, these are the factors that we are assessing right now, but we feel that it is scalable.

We wanted to be able to kick-start this journey, so we brought in an automation team, as this is where the whole industry is moving with our clients. From here, we will have success stories year after year.

We did not use a previous solution. We were trying to shop around and see what was best for us. Automation Anywhere was always promising and the use cases that we saw were interesting. So, we said, "We'll start with that." It works well so far.

The initial setup wasn't complex, but it wasn't straightforward. It was somewhere in the middle.

We didn't go Big Bang on thinking how much money that we were going to save. I wanted to make sure that could we show improvements in the efficiency, in terms of headcount. Ultimately, it comes boiled down to cost, but then if I can get one headcount reduced from the team, and be able to utilize that to somebody else, that would be a winning situation for my client and me.

We measure the ROI through FTE. Of course, there is a dollar value associated with it.

We have started to see the ROI. We are starting to see the following:

• Activities in which resources in my team would have taken four to five hours are now done in 30 minutes. 
• Some of the weekend monitoring
• Some of the weekend missing report generations
• Monday monitoring of a heavy load system. 

These are things that we are already starting to see where the time taken to do a task has been drastically reduced. So, we are seeing the performance improvement as a result.

I have nothing specific regarding the Automation Anywhere University. But, we have taken some of the online courses available and done a few sessions, which has been a wonderful deal.

I am putting it somewhere between a seven and eight (out of ten). That is what I'll rate it, because as I said, the stability and governance are on that path. As we get there, I'm sure it'll make it to a ten. So far. the journey is on the right track.

For somebody searching for a solution, it primarily concerns the use case. But if this is what they are looking for, I will definitely advise.

Our primary use case for Automation Anywhere is to help our clients achieve efficiencies in their businesses and capture revenue opportunities that they would otherwise miss, either due to lack of ability or lack of speed.

We have automated a different variety of processes, anything from inbound communications, from clients to our customer. Those inbound communications have to be processed and digested, then acted upon, some of which can be straight-through process automated, which is a fantastic time savings for them. The ones that can't be, can be routed to the right folks in a very quick manner, rather than being manually read and inspected, then categorized and passed on.

We have also addressed financial processes around invoice reconciliation or accounts payable. There are processed around sales. If you think about how people use Salesforce and spreadsheets and other systems around Salesforce. There is a lot of copying and pasting of data in and out of Salesforce, then into those other systems. We can make all that go away, so their sales reps can focus on selling. So, there are a lot of great use cases like that.

One thing for our organization, Automation Anywhere has helped us find new clients and help those clients find new opportunities to improve their businesses that previously seemed out of reach to them. There are other ways that we could solve these problems which are more expensive and difficult to implement. With RPA, specifically with Automation Anywhere, it has really helped us engage with those clients and achieve the results that they want.

With Automation Anywhere, we have had good success, having folks with all different varieties of technical backgrounds. Both our most technical staff, as well as our least technical staff, have been able to engage. We can engage directly with our clients' representatives, their business users, and their IT users, then get them up to speed, so they can all be part of the process. Making everyone part of the process is what really makes it catch on in an organization.

When I think about Automation Anywhere, it's not a specific feature that really defines it. It is how the whole package works together and a type of holistic view of how you attack automation problems, particularly with RPA and IQ Bots. So, there is a real sense of the whole picture, not just one feature or specific thing that jumps out for me.

The areas for room for improvement are always going to be around experience, making it even easier to get engaged, and get started. Because lowering that threshold to get started is what enables an additional set of problems to be solved. So, I sort of look at it like a water level. If I can lower the water level, then there is more surface area of the business area exposed above the water, and that's the stuff that we can go solve.

As a partner of Automation Anywhere, I view it as part of our job is to create scale problems for Automation Anywhere to solve. To make the solution big enough that it finds those edge cases. We haven't had any problems with scale and stability with Automation Anywhere, so I hope to create those problems, then work with Automation Anywhere to solve them.

Our experience with technical support at Automation Anywhere has been great. They have been very helpful, especially during the PoC, processes which are sort of early on in their sales cycle, or when we were just starting with Automation Anywhere a couple of years ago. We got great support for getting it onboarded in-house and getting our team up to speed. So, we have found it to be a great partnership. 

Our clients use all types of software, whether it's process offer, decision management, RPA and they even use multiple tools of those. Our objective is to make sure we take care of the client, whatever we want to use. However, we've found that our clients are successful with Automation Anywhere, and it's been a good place for us to invest with our clients to achieve great results.

From two perspectives:

1. The initial setup, as a partner, was very straightforward.
2. The initial set up from a technology point of view, although it was unfamiliar to us when we started, was also pretty straightforward.

We measure ROI. The way we do it though depends on each client and whether we as a service provider have access to that information, which also depends on the client. But our clients, they measure it in a bunch of different ways. My favorite example is one where we were enabling service providers for them, basically a set of new sales reps coming onboard that have to be certified with government and have to go through an approval process. That process used to take months to run through, but with RPA, we were able to automate it and get it done in a week. So, from a revenue enablement point of view, we took all the friction out of that process, which has huge ROI for our clients.

Prior to working with RPA at BP3, we worked with a lot of process and decisioning technologies and also integration technologies. So, we have sort of a unique perspective on how RPA fits in and plays well with others. In particular, we're partnered with IBM and Automation Anywhere, and we saw them on stage together, presenting. I think Automation Anywhere, from a cultural perspective does a really good job partnering, but they also provide a product that works well with other products, so it's easy to integrate too. It's easy to include it in a solution and easy to use it to drive a solution which leverages other technology.

In today's market, you have to think about, how was RPA today and how would I rank it versus what it can be in the future? I think we're in the early innings of what RPA can be and what Automation Anywhere can be. We saw some indication of that in the keynote speeches. You can just get a sense for the scope of the vision and where they want to take RPA at Automation Anywhere. I won't try to rate against the future, but I think we're in early innings, two or three versus a ten. But, when you compare it to the state of the art today, I'm really impressed with RPA, and I think it's an eight or maybe nine (out of ten).

I would recommend if you're starting out to look at RPA and how to get started with Automation Anywhere. That is the first thing that I would do is. Find a couple of problems that you think are easy, then take a moment to really think about problems which are important to your business, because you have a limited amount of focus for your business. You business only has a few limited resources: time, money and focus. If you're going to spend that focus, spend it on something that matters. It's fine to do a research project or a pilot project, something that doesn't have a lot of risk. You have to do something that matters for your business, and if you're having trouble finding that and making it make sense in an RPA context, then I'd say work with someone who can help you reframe the problem so you can find those opportunities.

We primarily use it for finance and marketing applications in our company, since we do a lot of our back office tasks at our company. We have automated in marketing, finance, our commercial organization, and are moving into HR.

The tool performs very well.

We are using it to backfill a lot of our resources who are retiring, so we are hiring less people as we go.

The object cloning is its most valuable feature.

It is easy for business users to utilize, who don't have IT skills.

We would like to have collapsible code loops.

It would be nice to upload a project, instead of individual files, so we can look at file and versions changes.

We would like to have more features inline with our traditional IDE, like what is in Visual Studio.

It scales pretty well as long as you have enough developers to scale it with you.

We can scale the bots in about a year. When we started, we went from a pilot of about 14 bots, which all got stripped away. Then, we ended up implementing 30 different bots about a year later.

I don't use the technical support a lot. It feels like a lot of time that they will ask us to check the user manual. When we eventually just tell them, "No, we want to set up a call." Then, they are usually pretty helpful on the call.

This is our first RPA solution. We haven't previously used another solution. Our strategy group and IT department were the ones who decided to use Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was complex. However, Automation Anywhere came onsite and helped us with our architecture, then it was fine.

We used a reseller for the deployment. We really enjoyed working with them.

We evaluate ROI as time savings and resource costs not needed resulting from deployed automation.

We save approximately 10,000 hours per year.

We also looked at Blue Prism and UiPath, but Automation Anywhere was more secure.

Ensure that IT is invested. Don't expect your business to carry the load.

We like the idea behind the Bot Store, but we haven't really adopted the Bot Store yet.

We're an insurance company and we use it to automate what would normally be done person-to-person by hand. We're gluing together the applications, going from one to the other to collect information to process them.

I can't speak for the bigger picture, but we have had a great deal of success with gluing together some of the old applications. They were built, isolated, and somewhat siloed. We have this one where you go to get this information, and we've got that one where you go to get the rest of the information. Now, rather than the team going and collecting all of that information, we can have the bots do it, and that has been fantastic.

We've had a number of processes plugged into this that have become the daily job schedule. There was a ridiculous amount of old work: Request this report, download the PDF, grab the numbers off of it and entering them. Having the automated system, while I can't put numbers on it yet, it's very easy to sell the value of the product.

I really like the way the bots are built, being able to take some old, clumsy screen that someone built and put your keystrokes and your information onto it. It's fairly simple as well.

I would describe bot creation with the word "exciting." We've had a couple of team members who have been working on projects who say, "Let me do it!" They're familiar with the product and they're very comfortable with the building process.

I also very much like the integration of this solution with other applications. We have some old web applications that we've been using, and we've been writing some of our own DLLs to integrate with it. It has worked really well. We're able to have the bots take over what would have been a lot of training and a lot of meticulous work.

I love the XML feature behind the scenes.

If there were one thing I could ask for it would be a text-based language. Right now it's proprietary, so you always have to go through the tool, even for things like basic compares. What we're trying to do is spin up other teams to get them using more and more of it. That would help, the basic .NET for basic tasks. The language itself has been working well. They should just keep doing what they're doing.

We just got onto Windows 10 and that has gone absolutely flawlessly. Not only has it been working well, but we're seeing a huge performance upgrade. They are running considerably faster. I'd give a thumbs up on the stability.

Scaling has gone remarkably well too, the ability to literally just spin up another bot. We have a collection and we'll add a couple more and no big deal happens to the scheduler. It has worked well.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we’re currently using has taken about two years. We did a lot of experimenting before we committed to it, but once we got through a couple of those experimentation projects, we were able to form a team, figure out exactly what we were going to have to accomplish from a business point of view, and dive in. After those couple of pilots, it took about a year from when we initially startied playing with it. There was a little bit of getting our feet wet, feeling comfortable with it. But now, we have several teams and it's working great.

I have not personally had to call much, I'm not part of the team that would do that, but they've been fairly responsive. We've found one or two problems that we had to come up with workarounds for and they did that fairly quickly. Then the permanent solutions came along fairly well. We have a very good relationship with them; being able to call and get that help right away.

It was really straightforward and made sense to me. Put it this way: I have always been able to see where the product is going. It seems somewhat impressive the way it's designed, and that's why it made sense. Some of it might have been due to the fact that I took the classes at Automation Anywhere University. I got to talk to the developers, so I could see exactly what they were thinking, and it made sense.

The nice part about being on the software development side is that we have don't have to deal with licenses etc. I've had to in the past. Put it this way: It becomes easier and easier to sell when they can see what we're doing.

I was brought in right as our pilot was getting ramped up, so they had already made the decision. I did hear about the other ones but I don't know exactly what the decision process was.

The biggest advice I could give is to just be patient. There's a lot to learn and you really don't know, at first, exactly how you go about it, how does this happen?

I started approximately two years ago, and having seen improvements to the software, I'm so excited right now about finding out where they're going. I've seen a great deal of the investment in the product as they develop it. so I'm fairly excited to be using it.

Sadly, I have not gotten into much of the solution’s cognitive document processing (IQ Bot) yet. It's a matter of learning more about it and then taking the next step. It's a matter of finding out what else we can do and we can start developing that.

I took a few courses at Automation Anywhere University when we first started. The more people that we've had on Automation Anywhere, we've found it's been working extremely well. It seems as though we're able to get them up to speed relatively quickly.

Right now, I would rate Automation Anywhere at about eight out of ten because it's obvious there have been huge improvements and it's nice for us to work with. There extra two points would come from the improvements that we're looking for: simple things like the programming interface, they could clean that up. And the compare windows are small, it would be nice if those were bigger. There are always refinements they can make. And we've seen some already. It has become faster, cleaner to use.

As a partner, we've been serving a lot of customers with primary use cases in BFSI, healthcare, and oil and gas. 

We have automated some 30 or 40 processes including ERP, Financials, manual data scraping from various websites, offloading data from Excel into an application, etc. We've done quite a few.

It improves productivity, it improves efficiency. But most of our customers are automating processes which were taking way too long for them to execute. In some of these cases, as a result of what we have done, they are saving more than 40 hours per person, for multiple people. That's been great.

Among the most valuable features that we've been able to utilize are the screen scraping and object cloning. These are two features we have used so far. We are also utilizing the API integrations.

We are excited about the solution's cognitive document processing, IQ Bot. That's an interesting one and we have at least a couple of customers who are looking for those features.

There have been a lot of nuances in the technologies that are missing. Being a tech company, where the technology is moving forward, I'm excited to see what is coming in the near future.

At this point in time, the installation is one of the biggest challenges in terms of being on a particular instance.

Also, we've been working very closely with Automation Anywhere on some of the integrations. There are some workarounds we have had to do, but I think in the newest features of version 11.3 there are things like callback, especially for the API integrations. We are looking forward to that.

There is room for improvement in that it is still on Windows and there is no self-service. Even though the product is easy to use, there are some challenges when we move across different environments; there's a lot of setup needed.

There is room for improvement in the stability of this product.

In terms of scalability, we haven't been in a situation where it has been a challenge for us. We've been able to scale to what we need. Having said that, we haven't deployed thousands of bots yet, but for the bots we have done we've been doing great.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we're currently using, took us between eight and 12 weeks.

Technical support is pretty good. They are reachable and they've been able to solve the problems.

We work exclusively with Automation Anywhere.

The setup has been okay. We haven't seen many challenges.

We do automation ROI using three dimensions:

• absolute time-savings
• efficiency improvement 
• reduction in manual labor.

In some cases, we see savings on the order of $100,000 and, in the newer processes that we are trying to do, it may be up to $1,000,000.

The cost is anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000.

I invested a lot of time in evaluating the different vendors but because of our relationship with Automation Anywhere, it was a clear winner.

My advice is to go for Automation Anywhere.

In terms of the bot creation process, it depends on what you're trying to do. The simple bots are easy, the complex bots have their challenges. The biggest challenge is when the settings change between environments. That's when we have faced a lot of challenges with things as simple as screen resolution.

I've taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and they have been pretty good. It's been really impressive.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at about seven out of ten.

We deployed Automation Anywhere for our clients. It is used for tasks like HR, procurement, supply chain, visa processing, client onboarding, etc. 

Productivity increased when we implemented Automation Anywhere, but it did not meet the client's expectations regarding the number of human workers it replaced. We are currently trying to optimize it to use the maximum potential channels and identify ways to improve performance.

The clients are willing to use AI. They are conservative about it but still progressing in that direction.  The integration of Automation Anywhere into our clients' workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents was seamless, but it was a bit of a struggle until we realized that it has a built-in integration platform. Using the platform, we could define the process so that it also does downstream automation as well. 

Automation Anywhere's central command center is good. We've used Automation Anywhere's AI copilot. It can integrate with around 70 to 80 percent of our client's applications. There are still issues with the other 20 to 30 percent. 

We had some issues with screen-scaping and recording. Also, some of the components are not user-friendly enough compared to UiPath. The learning curve isn't very long if you come from a programming background, but it may be difficult for someone without a technical background to understand. 

We used Automation Anywhere for two years. 

Automation Anywhere is stable. 

Automation Anywhere is quite scalable.

I rate Automation Anywhere support eight out of ten. We get support from local partners. It's good. 

Positive

We also use UiPath. It depends on the client's preference.

The initial setup was complex, but upgrading the automations was easy. The bots require some monitoring. It isn't more than an hour daily. We check to see if there are any issues or whether a process has gotten stuck. That's rare. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of ten. There are many more tools on the market that are much better than automation anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is similar to Blue Prism. We do a lot of process mining and RPA tasks. We've used it in some very large companies. It's for automating activities in large service centers like home loan originations, insurance claims, or for service desks for utilities for telephone companies.

Companies were trying to eliminate a lot of manual processes that were being handled by people at keyboards and some of the repetitive nature. A lot of it is the front-end handling of incoming phone calls or incoming service requests that might be sent via email or text. Rather than having people look at the request on a green screen or on a website, the robots would actually handle some of the routing of the requests or the routing of the documents. For example, for a home loan application or some kind of claim. A lot of the time, most of the companies have people sitting in a service center, receiving those requests and reviewing them. However, now, a lot of the inputting of the data can be handled by the robot.

The solution is easy to deploy. It scales. It's easy to configure. They are pretty generic. There's not a lot of difference between any of the three big RPAs. 

Automation Anywhere is very focused on the Microsoft world. They don't do anything other than Windows and Microsoft, whereas Blue Prism and UiPath compete with other platforms.

The learning curve is low. It's faster to learn than the others.

Some people in my company have used the Co-Pilot functionality. Right now, they use Salesforce, although they have their own RPA now and they are going to replace it with MuleSoft's automation.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide automation at scale for Microsoft is excellent. 

The integration of RPA bots, APIs, or business applications and documents is pretty robust.

They should consider being more multi-platform.

I've used the solution since 2018. I've used it for about five years. 

I've never used technical support.

I've also used Blue Prism in the past.

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The project would dictate how long it would take to deploy. It could take a couple of days to a couple of months. There's a question of governance proliferation and compliance that needs to be considered in RPA. The internal policies would affect the overall setup. 

There is maintenance in the form of updates. It doesn't take much maintenance. We don't use bots and therefore do not need to maintain them.

I don't have any thoughts on pricing or licensing. 

For someone who wants to use an API integration instead of a robust process automation solution, I'd advise it depends on the culture of the company, and the complexity of the integration that one wants to do. Depending on the culture, on average, it's a 50/50 split. There are some environments where RPA is the right thing to do since it's quicker. It's faster. It's easier to manage them from the perspective of just configuring the conformance and compliance with internal policy. However, in other parts of the same organization, you might need API integration depending on what you're integrating.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Nobody gets a ten. Nobody's perfect.

We use it for processes related to IT operations in the manufacturing industry.

There are hectic IT processes, jobs that run overnight, weekly, and monthly. We can optimize, rewrite, and automate them. They represent the most important use cases that I have been involved with: IT operations and software for manufacturing.

It has helped our organization increase automation consumption by 20 to 30 percent.

The most valuable feature is the Control Room.

Also, the integration of RPA bots with other processes and documents is good. We don't have any issues there. We could have more connectors, but it's fine. I have used it for SAP and for direct API-to-API, and that went well.

It is good for standard procedures with an SOP. For those, it works well. But there are processes that are tricky and need human intervention and intelligence. In those cases, the process gets stuck. Something that is a straight-ahead process—you do A, B, C, and D—is fine. But when you do A and then have to decide whether to do B or C, where there is a need for logical thinking and human intervention, we find it difficult to automate those cases. We have to break down those processes and do that tweaking.

We would like to see a more seamless UI, and we would like AI help. Wherever we are stuck or there is a logical error, AI help, with prompting and suggestions on what to do, would be good. If I have dragged and dropped something in the wrong logical sequence and it fails during execution, there should be automated AI help.

We use NetBeans IDE where we get something like automated help, but that's a platform for doing standard Java and PHP development. Automated help is coming up more and more in many tools. For example, Microsoft is providing it. We would like to have something like that in Automation Anywhere, with automated debugging and self-help.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Overall, the product is stable for SOP-based use cases. It is not very stable for complex use cases.

It is not very scalable for complex use cases.

Their technical support is good overall, not excellent. They can improve the response time and on-call support. We have SLAs, so we need support to be immediate.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

Recently, automation has gone to the cloud, and that has been most beneficial because installation was quite hectic before. On-prem was quite difficult, but the moment they launched the cloud version, it became easy.

With on-prem, there were issues with installation over production as well as the setup of the Control Room. Often, the Control Room would go down or hang, and we would have to do restarts. It was not seamless.

The licensing cost could be improved. It costs a lot. At the very least, the developer licenses and the control panels should be made free to enterprises, and the production environment licensed. Production should bear the cost; we would be okay with that, but not the development side.

Business users didn't find it that easy to use, but for developers who are building the use cases, it's quite easy. For the business users, the issues were standard ones, such as navigation, user friendliness, and the terminologies that they needed to understand. They often require training before using it, and not just one training session, but training and retraining. On a scale where 10 represents a low learning curve and one is a large learning curve, Automation Anywhere is a seven. For non-technical people, it's difficult. For them, the learning curve is a four or five. It usually takes four to five months for them to be able to really use it on their own.

We have developed solutions for IT back-end processes, so there are no end-users. These jobs run weekly, fortnightly, and monthly. There are two or three people involved with it, but it's the jobs that we have automated.

We need three to four people to maintain the solutions, but that doesn't take a lot of time—about four hours a week. It's not something that needs to be done every day. Before the jobs run, they check to make sure everything is okay, that no errors or notifications are coming up. The maintenance is very low.

Automation Anywhere is good but not exceptional. It's good because, for simple use cases, we use it with different technologies. For complex processes, automations should perform better.