Automation Anywhere Reviews

We typically use Automation Anywhere for backend operations and financial processes, such as APR.

The biggest benefit of Automation Anywhere is that it makes our processes error-free. Accuracy is how you build efficiency within the system and increase productivity.

Document automation, one of Automation Anywhere's core features, is excellent. All the other features are also useful, and their cloud solution is pretty seamless. 

Automation Anywhere is relatively accessible to non-technical business users. It's about 60:40. Around 60 percent of the solution is intuitive, but you still need to do some work to learn the platform. The company offers strong learning resources. Most people can easily learn Automation Anywhere in a couple of months using tutorials.  

Automation Anywhere works with POST and REST APIs, so it's easy to integrate with any platform or application. Automation Anywhere is applicable to any industry or department where there are large volumes of processes that are straightforward and require no manual human intervention. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for nearly four years.

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10 for scalability. We usually optimize one or two processes until we can achieve an ROI and scale them up for the entire organization.

I rate Automation Anywhere support 10 out of 10. They have a solid team to address any issues or glitches as they arise. 

Positive

We typically deploy to Automation Anywhere's public cloud. We haven't used the private cloud option because it's expensive. I'm the project delivery manager, so I was involved in the deployment. It doesn't require any infrastructure because it's in the cloud. 

The deployment time depends on the complexity of the processes. Simple processes can be configured in a couple of weeks, but complex projects might take up to three months. 

The number of people involved also depends on the client's needs and the licenses purchased. You need a developer license for each engineer. Automation Anywhere licensing is based on the individual users, not the partners. For example, let's say a project will take one engineer three months, but the client wants it done in 45 days. You would need to double the number of engineers and pay for an additional license. 

Automation solutions require some maintenance and change management because no process remains constant. You will need to update and optimize the bot as the process mechanism changes. 

We have seen an ROI. It's hard to give a solid metric because every organization has a different way of calculating it and it varies between processes. However, I can say that Automation Anywhere reduces costs while increasing productivity and accuracy. By automating repetitive tasks, we can shift our human employees to more productive work that requires imagination and creativity. 

Automation Anywhere is expensive. They should consider lowering the price to make Automation Anywhere more affordable to SMEs, which comprise a huge segment. The license is annual, not monthly. You need to pay for some of the advanced features, such as document automation, which doesn't come with the base package.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. RPA can be integrated with API and integrated on top of any application. However, it's always better to go with API if you have that option. It's steadier, more scalable, and more robust. The best part about RPA is you can create a hybrid model, so you can use API when available or RPA when that isn't the case. 

I've used Automation Anywhere RPA as one of the RPA platforms to automate business processes within the company. It started as attended automation initially and then moved to unattended mode. We're using the on-prem version with Runners on virtual desktop. 

We have used/are using the AA360 Platform for automating the business processes in HR, Finance, and telecom operations.  

IQBOT is also used for purchase order processing to capture the semi-structured data and process it in ERPs to achieve straight-through processing of these documents.

Implementation of Automation Anywhere (AA) allows us to automate business processes and has brought productivity gains, error reduction, and speed of execution in multiple HR and Finance operations. 

This automation has also helped in achieving better compliance and standardization of the processes. A number of processes were able to be digitalized 100% without much human interaction required. The only exceptions are managed by humans although the RPA bots are doing the majority of the work. 

Implementation of IQBOT has helped in capturing the semi-structure data from pdfs and doing the straight-through processing of these documents.

Web-based ID for development is helping developers to use any machine (laptop, VDI, etc.) to access the environment and develop it.

Enabling collaborative development where multiple developers can work together is great.

The flow view is helping us to view the overall flow of the activities and is helping the functional review faster without jumping to the code level, ensuring all the exceptions are handled accordingly and there are no exceptions that are not handled.

The addition of multiple drag and drop functions in the development of IDE helps ease the development work.

Queue management is still missing from the latest version which is a barrier to using the platform to start implementing complex cases where you have parent and child transactions going through multiple stages.

Without queue management, it is not possible to manage the multiple-step work item processing. For example, task automation instead of process automation is where hands-off is required in between the workflow steps.  

Simplification in managing multiple environments for dev, test, and production would be useful.

There needs to be more stability in the platforms.

I've been using Autoamtion anywhere for the last five years. I've used a different version and now have migrated to AA 360 for the last year.

The stability is an improvement area for the product. We still have issues sometimes where bots hang up.

It's a scalable solution. We didn't face any issue in that regard.

There is good technical support available from the AA team.

Positive

We started with AA for more attended automation.

The setup is a bit complex and was done by the AA team.

We implemented the solution using an internal team and external partner.

We say an ROI after six to nine months.

The solution is cost-effective in comparison to others. However, you need to pay for the control room for each environment. You also need developer licenses and even runners are required for test and pre-production environments.

We evaluated UiPath.

We are in services. We are consultants and we use these automation tools to automate processes for clients. I'm not using it for my own organization, however, I'm using it for clients' organizations.

Use cases are largely cross-business process automation, back office automation. It could be used in finance or accounting. It could be in underwriting, if it's an insurance client, for claims processing.

We have done automation largely in the lending space, including wealth management and customer onboarding. 

The solution helps with reducing operational costs, which can be reduced by up to 30% to 40% in savings in terms of operational cost. That's your basic benefit, which is delivered quite well.

It's usually the RPA functionality that I prefer, which is more widely used. They also have an IQ Bot for document processing, which is a bit of advanced OCR. That's not used as frequently as their RPA tool.

The stability is good.

As it is on the cloud, it's quite scalable. 

Their OCR is a bit expensive, meaning the IQ Bot. There are a lot of customers who don't want to use it due to the price tag. Maybe if they price it more aggressively, it could be widely used as well. Otherwise, it has pretty much industry-leading functionalities, similar to any other RPA tool. 

In general, their roadmap is well defined and we are pleased with its offering. 

I've used the solution for about two years. 

The solution is pretty stable. It's good. Whenever there are issues, there are frequent platform upgrades provided by the vendors. It's very stable.

The scalability is great as it is on the cloud. It can be scaled up pretty fast.

On average, I would say, per company that we've seen, there are close to 50 to 100, users - depending on the size of the organization. If it's a small bank, they have somewhere around 20 to 30 users, however, if it's a large company, it's closer to 100 to 200 users. We work with the solution on a daily basis.

We tend to contact technical support once a month. We deal with them pretty regularly. 

I'm also familiar with UiPath. UiPath and Automation Anywhere are often used in many organizations. UiPath can be on-prem or on the cloud, however, AA is basically now on the cloud. 

What we've largely seen is clients more using VBA or .NET-based automation solutions. Before moving into these platforms, either an Automation Anywhere or UiPath was used.

The initial setup is pretty simple and if any issues are noted, the vendor can assist.

The platform can be set up in two to three months. I have not seen clients directly start on the cloud version. Usually, people have had on-prem which they have migrated to the cloud. Basically, the on-prem setup took two to three months. Maybe if there are new clients who are starting directly with cloud, it could be lesser, maybe a month or so. 

From then on, subsequent automation of processes can take anywhere between two to four months, depending on the complexity. If you have a simple business process, for example, invoice processing or claims payment, that can take one to two months. If you have something more complex, that can take anywhere between two to three months.

In terms of the amount of maintenance, it depends on how many processes have been automated. Usually for a small-scale setup, if there are 50 bots or there are 50 automation, there could be maybe 5 FTEs required to maintain it. If the operations are large, with thousands of bots, the team size can vary anywhere between 30 to 50 FTEs. The larger the operations are and the larger number of processes that have been automated, the bigger the support team requirements are. On average, 1% should be able to support 6 to maybe 10 automations.

There's support from the vendor, so I don't see a major challenge in setting this up.

While the RPA is still competitively priced, usually IQ Bot is expensive. That's what we have seen.

For the OCR, my understanding is that it's a one-time cost. I've seen instances where it's $15,000 or so and on top of that there is some cost on every document processed or maybe a bunch of documents. Per every 1,000 documents processed there is a cost that is recurring. That said, the initial one-time cost is quite high.

We are AA partners. 

I would recommend the solution based on its scalability and stability. 

Generally, people who adopt these tools do a tool assessment between multiple vendors. Usually, we have seen that it's either UiPath or Automation Anywhere that is shortlisted. These two seem to be the most preferred options.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

The AA architecture was as suggested by the AA technical support team. We had one server dedicated each for the control room, bot creator, bot runner, and DB server. The servers were hosted on cloud services offered by Microsoft Azure.

Our primary use case included mostly the internal operations orchestrated by the IT team. It included processes like automation of AD ID creation, updating, and deletion.

Other services were offered to the Business and Finance groups, Human Resource department, and marketing department.

Automation Anywhere has played a pivotal role in expanding the current portfolio of the company by integrating with new Aae technologies like AI and ML and increasing the efficiency of the existing processes.

Some of the changes the organization has observed and appreciated the RPA services implemented by AA are listed below:

Regulatory and Compliance Standards: Prior installation of RPA services, there used to a lot of transcription errors through out the processes which proved quite fatal during periodic audits and in meeting compliance standards. Plus, detection and rectification of these errors was quite time and resource consuming.

Improved Efficiency: Post RPA services, the efficiency and accuracy of the processes have increased tremendously and now the employees can focus more on important research and analysis work.

Customer satisfaction: RPA has automated the repetitive and time consuming tasks which has eased off the pressure from the employees. Now the employees can concentrate on client specific requirements and in order increasing the client satisfaction by responding quickly in a periodic manner.  

Automation Anywhere is fairly easy to use and understand. It requires no prior coding experience. Personally, I started my RPA journey with AA learning about RPA as a technology and AA tool from Automation university and found it quite useful.

The bot store feature is quite useful since it provides pre-built bots for complex systems and it helps a lot when starting the RPA journey.

The AA commands provide a drag and drop option which is quite easy to use.

The Bot insight provides a lot of information ranging from bot deployment, success, and failures, and bot efficiency. This is quite informative and easy to understand which can be directly presented in front of business leaders too.

IQ Bot provides AI and cognitive capabilities that prove extremely useful in extracting texts from scanned images and unstructured invoices and documents.

Automation Anywhere provides more than 300 commands but it lacks in certain areas like Excel automation. For eg: there is no command to add, rename, or delete sheet. However, meta bots can be utilized for the same.

AA sometimes poses compatibility problems with new web browser versions like Chrome.

The AA control room is fairly difficult to understand and maintain initially.

Integration with new technologies and scripts like Python. However, I have heard that A2019 supports Python scripts.

The license prices vary drastically depending upon the partnership with the client.

Debugging of SQL queries is hard. The error description is not accurate. I have to initially test the queries on Access and then only I paste them on AA.  

I have been using this solution for more than two years now.

Automation is quite stable even with Citrix environments. However, it posed some problems when in the production phase. We encountered some random errors which used to come on a random basis.

AA was quite stable when used with Window applications and other applications like SAP, proprietary software, and databases.

The solution is quite scalable and best suited when used for processes involving a high volume of data.

The existing infrastructure can easily be migrated to the cloud and upgraded to a higher version too with minimal effort.

The configuration can easily be scaled up when being used in a cloud environment. A lot of bots can easily be run on the same bot runner server while being maintained by the control room.

The technical support team was cooperative and quick to respond to any query. I am highly satisfied with the AA support team. 

I started with AA v 10 and switched to v11 later on.

The initial setup was provided with installation documentation which was detailed. It posed no problems and in case of queries the support team was there to help.

I implemented it through a vendor team who were fairly new to both the RPA domain and AA tool. 

The ROI of AA is best when utilized for processes involving a high volume of data. 
It plays a pivotal role in cost saving by replacing the existing time and resource-consuming project with a fast and efficient RPA solution.

Since it can be utilized 24/7, the ROI is pretty high with minimal efforts and resources by using unattended automation.

Automation anywhere is best suited for processes that have high volume and are repetitive.
They offer good discounts when purchased in bulk or they provide extra bit runner runners with the existing prices. 

The setup cost basically depends on usage. They can be installed both on-premises or on the cloud depending upon the user's requirement.

Not specifically. We were already AA partners by the time I joined the practice.

I have been using the IQ bot and the latest A2019 version and still exploring new features. I personally liked replacing the various recorder and object cloning command with a single recorder command.

The solution sometimes poses problems in the production phase.

We work for a credit card client. There are a number of manual processes that can be done with Automation because the processes are truly rule-based and absolute for Automation. We delivered 10+ end-to-end solutions using AA version 11. 

A few examples are managing customer surveys, managing credit limits for a card, commission payouts, tax recovery, insurance claim documents, etc. In the above solutions, we worked with web applications, desktop applications, databases, Excel sheets, and other file formats. Automation Anywhere is easy to maintain and works well for years without any issues in production. We achieved good ROI and STP with AA in the last two years. We are happy to use AA as an enterprise version.

We are working for a credit card supplier client and there are a large number of manual processes that are rule-based and need a large human workforce to do the process which requires a large number of investments. By automating those processes we achieved high ROI, great customer satisfaction, better STP, reduced manual work, reduced processing time, high accuracy, and 24/7 working capacity with the AA bots. Our customer is highly satisfied with the given solution and they are ready to invest more in the near future to automate a number of tasks.

We use AA Client, Bot runners, Control room, IQ Bot, Bot insights. With the AA Client, we are able to automate almost all kinds of automation requirements without any big challenges. We found the availability of the number of commands provided by AA is really helpful to do automation within a small time frame. We used IQ Bot to extract information from the structured documents and we achieved better accuracy with IQ Bot for field extraction and we did the process in less time compared to manual efforts thanks to AA providing such a business-centric solution.

While using IQ Bot we found that data extraction accuracy is a bit weaker in semi-structured documents compared with structured documents. We would like to see improvement in the data extraction part of Automation Anywhere IQ Bot. In version 6.5 handwritten data extraction capabilities were not there so if we can get it in upcoming releases then it will be great opportunity to automate tasks which are working on some handwritten documents. 

Another additional feature we are looking for is logo matching and signature matching capabilities with IQ Bot.

In addition we would like to see more compact version of AA which can be controlled over mobile devices.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

My primary use case is automating the reports from SAP for various domains like accounts, billing, shipment, etc. AA is consolidating the reports for these various domains across different employee numbers and order numbers, then sending them to different business owners using the SMTP server. This reduces human intervention and effort.

This automation helped the functional people to focus on other tasks instead of looking into these, and this saved around 50% of the total effort of the day.

Since business users receiving reports on time and with accuracy, this helped us in achieving better customer satisfaction

AA has vastly improved my organization in gathering more business, reducing human efforts, and optimizing client business. It does this by automating the business processes in almost the domains of SAP, which results in better client satisfaction.

With the help of Automation Anywhere, we have provided more automation ideas from our side, which helps the client in building trust with us and providing more business opportunities to grow.

We started with a team size of five and within the short span of three years, we have increased our team members to 25, handling different business domains.

We use the IQ Bot and Metabots extensively in almost all of our tasks. We have created the bots to consolidate reports from various resources like webpages, databases, and different message formates like PDFs, Excel, XML, and submitting them to the business owner.

Scheduling helps to generate and send reports without any delay.

We have used this functionality to automate business processes that submit the order forms in SAP for a large number of orders without any human intervention.

Automation Anywhere should think about the integration with Machine learning and deep learning with ease, so that AA can be used in various other domains that require human calculation and logic to work. A good application would be IVR, as this can help businesses reduce the response time and achieve better customer satisfaction

AA should include more features in the mobile app, such as monitoring and debugging bots. This can help the administrator to look at the status on the fly.

They should provide more features to improve the visibility of bots.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last three years.

I would rate the customer service a ten out of ten, as they provided excellent support, and in a short timeframe. This helped to resolve all of our issues quickly and as efficiently as possible.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to Automation Anywhere.

We have implemented in-house.

Before choosing AA, we evaluated IBM, Blue Prism, and UiPath.

We are planning to introduce a bot for every employee in the organization. There are around 9,000 employees in our organization. We are trying to introduce a bot for each one. That's our use case currently. We are working on how to improve their day in, day out life, how to make them work efficiently, removing repetitive tasks from day-to-day work, and give them important tasks/solutions that they are supposed to work for.

A valuable feature of Automation Anywhere for my needs is IQ Bot because it covers most of the semi-structured and structure data. That's where we are struggling a lot. So, IQ Bot is a very good solution to know and bring onboard for the automation of unstructured and semi-structured data.

Another valuable feature in Automation Anywhere is the analytics, like what data is coming, the process, and the number of times it's processed. That information is very powerful in Automation Anywhere.

I am looking for artificial intelligence and machine learning. I hope that they introduce them in A2019. I'm looking forward to what will be there in A2019 because that's the area that we need to go forward. We are looking for Automation Anywhere to put up their efforts to make it easier by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. Along with RPA, this would make our automation journey very easy. We can bring more processes into automation, that's where I am looking for automation to focus on.

It's a very stable, reliable product. We know a lot of use cases for customers that are running successfully. It's a pretty good product and very stable.

It's scalable. The analytics are very powerful. We can give the customer what has happened with the bot, how much time it ran, and how much time is ideal. All this information, we can easily show how successful it is, how much our productivity it is giving to them, and what ROI they're getting at the end of the year. It's pretty easy to go with Automation Anywhere.

We get a lot of support from Automation Anywhere. For any issue, we just call the people, and they're ready to be there. They send up people to our organization to set up and resolve issues. Any sort of glitches which we are facing, we can contact them anytime. They're ready to give us a solution. They even send up people to our premises to look and give the solution for us.

It is very straightforward and easy to install. They are going to introduce version A2019 online without a need to to install. There will be just one click of the URL to start developing within a minute or two, and it will start. There's nothing easier than that.

Money-wise, we get a lot of ROI. Efficiency-wise, it removes all the repetitive tasks from a person. An engineer's job is not to enter the data, check the Excel everyday, and put the data from Excel to somewhere application. If you automate the process and let Automation Anywheret do it everyday, you have a lot of time for more complicated issues. Engineers are meant to resolve issues, not doing the repetitive tasks, like Excel. Efficiency-wise, it is very good. ROI, It's also pretty good.

I can give a 10 (out of 10). It's a perfect product. It's made my life very easy and a lot of people's lives very easy. It removed a lot of people's hectic, repetitive, boring work. You give a lot of free time to people, so they can do some other work which they really want to do. It's a very good product.

We started off with accounts payable type of processes. That was our proof of concept. We built that within two or three months. It was highly successful, then we got a high level of endorsement from the wider organization. From there, we moved into academic processing where there's a lot of opportunity around the processing of student results, assessing students for admission into the university and handing out offers to students. There are a lot of things in that academic space which are highly manual. Often, these take quite a long time to process, so there's a clear benefit to the student by reducing the cycle time, which has led to great benefits for the organization.

In my case in particular, I come from a business background, not an IT background. So, it sort of speaks for itself that I was able to pickup its functionality and how it works. In the space of two years time, I've gone from a junior developer to a senior specialist. So, it really speaks for itself in terms of being user-friendly.

There are often a lot of functions within the software that will do the same thing, but it's up to the developer to decide which is the most appropriate. If there were a way of the product sort of indicating or automating which function is most applicable for that field for that particular purpose, that would be great. I think that might be a ways away. But, I think a lot of the improvements that we're looking to find are going to be in the new cloud release. So, we are really looking forward to getting on that.

Every piece of software has its downfalls. The great thing about AA, particularly in Melbourne, is we have local support. So, if we do raise a ticket, it's addressed by our local team down there. If they can't handle it, it'll be expedited abroad. So, we're always very comfortable that we're going to get a prompt reply and support, if for whatever reason, we have an issue with the software. We've sort of developed coding standards which has helped us to avoid any downfalls or pitfalls. Throughout our journey, we've learned how the software really works. We're developing it in a more mature way now, which has reduced the number of errors and breakages of the code.

it's just a learning process. As long as you're willing to learn and engage with the software, it can be quite stable.

With Automation Anywhere, there are multiple ways to achieve the same outcome; many different ways to design a bot and execute a bot. But, there's definitely a best practice out there. For those with little experience, they might be inclined to follow the quickest or the easiest way to develop a bot, but that's not necessarily the most sustainable solution. So, we sat down as a team at the university and agreed upon a certain set of standards that we will always follow. We initiated a code review process, so every code that goes into production, or every bot that goes into production will go through multiple rounds of code review. If it doesn't meet our standards, it'll be pulled back out of production, reiterated, and eventually then it'll go live.

We've gone down the Reagan approach, which was referred to in the session earlier today, where we essentially started out with that low hanging fruit. We built confidence within the business and from there, it was quite an easy sell because it was quite obvious to the business that we could deliver and could deliver fairly quickly. 

In terms of scalability, we've had to grow the team slightly. It's really important to have the right team. You need someone with a lot of experience around the tool. From there, you can bring in a range of skill sets, including SMEs. We have SMEs on the team now that don't come from an IT background or development background. By having that range of skills, we've been able to sort of up the velocity of releasing bots.

We could always do better though, and we're still learning.

The technical support in Melbourne, it's great. We have a strong relationship with Andrew Rowlands, who's our customer relationship manager down in Melbourne. We really enjoy working with him. If we do have any issues with tickets that have been unanswered, he will address them for us. I think one of Automation Anywhere's strong points is really its focus on the customer. Because naturally issues do arise with the software here and there, some of which have been addressed in later releases of the product.

We haven't yet updated to the latest release. The company is well and truly able to support all versions and is always really responsive. We typically will receive a solution within 24 to 48 hours.

The initial setup actually came before my time at the organization. I think it is a little bit of an ongoing struggle, because we don't deal with the infrastructure. We have a separate infrastructure team that sorts all that out. So, sometimes there are communication issues just trying to get our internal IT team onboard to run through the installs and that sort of thing. But, definitely with the new cloud version coming onboard, we'll be looking toward going to that. Hopefully it'll resolve some of that friction that comes about through the install process and complexity.

Obviously, the easiest way to create a bot would be using things like keystrokes. It's very intuitive, simply entering the database and what you would see on a keyboard. However, it doesn't really relate to what you're seeing on the screen. So, quite often, you'll be entering data in the wrong field if there's a performance issue with the system. While if you use object cloning, which is another function within the software, it's more dynamic. It'll wait for certain fields to appear, then you will lower the risk of breakages of code.

Just an example, in a period of two to three years, we have a positive ROI. We have a positive return. We've delivered 25 to 30 bots, which equates to over 1000 atmx files. So, for a relatively small team, we've been able to scale up quite effectively.

In regards to how AA works, UiPath has more of a design flow view, where you'll be creating process maps and executing bots face on the process flow. While Automation Anywhere has this task view, or line by line view, that I find it very easy to use and intuitive. It's just really a great piece of software.

It's a solid eight out of 10. We've delivered tremendous value in a really short amount of time. We've gotten a lot of support from our organization. Of course, there are always improvements which could make it even more powerful. But I know the company is well and truly across those. I'm sure it's going to go from strength to strength.

From the business side, we're not an organization that has tremendous volumes, like a big global bank, perhaps that sort of comes into play a bit. But again, it comes back to coding standards. We have a lot of confidence in those standards. We just really ensure that new members of the team are strictly following those for sustainable bots.