Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use this solution for automating tasks such as:

• Manual journal entries on monthly closing
• Travel and expense claims processing
• Net sales monthly closing checks
• Logistics master data maintenance for every new shipment
• Vendor creation on master data for every new demand
• Order confirmation reminders automated for vendors 

We are just using it as one of the automation technologies. The major automation has already happened over SAP on the backend since the whole company globally runs on a single ERP. However, where conventional methods or basic solutions don't work, it definitely helps to use AA software.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the SMART Recorder.

The overall developer client has an easy-to-use UI.

The Control Room, scheduling features, and client repository are really good features that make day-to-day bot development and enhancement quite quick and easy.

The PDF Integration feature is also quite helpful, as well as the Send email command that helps us skip a lot of Outlook-based steps that are not necessary.

More support required to be embedded in the SMART Recorder for SAP objects.

IQ Bot should be available embedded as a feature on the developer client and not as a separate product.

Some NLP AI is required to work in combination with RPA, especially for reading unstructured emails. 

This solution is quite stable. We get one or two tickets in the whole year due to any downtime and that is never due to AA.

AA is the easiest and the best when it comes to scalability.

Technical support for this solution is the quickest and the best. I always get a response within the same day and their support matches our SLAs.

It was a little complex due to the IIS Manager and a lot of other features but with version 11 and beyond it is much easier to install and configure.

We performed the implementation in-house.

While calculating the setup cost you should account for the server, virtual machines, product licenses, maintenance costs, and running costs.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

Be careful with the installation of this solution. It is better to do it with support from the vendor at first.

One of the biggest challenge that everybody has, and all the customers are thinking, my process has no structure or doesn't follow a pattern. That is the biggest challenge that everybody thinks. Even though our human minds are very powerful, there is a logic behind it. We try to go to customers, and say, "There is a logic always, so how do we apply the logic? The Automation Anywhere product enables us to do that. What you are doing in a repetitive task, or even some of the aspects of cognitive processing, combine both of those things together and build solutions. 

We build solutions for the oil and natural gas industry, HR, finance, and a lot of industries that can actually help customers on their journey as well.

What we have automated is taking on the automating process and making sure the automation process is touching all the components in a sequential fashion, then somebody is offboarding it. How do you make sure all the systems access either taking out or restricting it in a way that is one automation? We can only do that with Automation Anywhere because it has helped enable us to do that faster.

There are a couple of other examples, e.g., loan processing system, where there are multiple documents coming in multiple formats. Structure on structure, and often, there are a lot of back office operations where this is happens and you are actually consuming the data, feeding it to your loan processing systems, or any other systems that you use. 

What we have used with Automation Anywhere is take those desperate applications which are coming in with the various forms of data with the intent that they are built-in with IQ Bot of Automation Anywhere, then combine them with the tasks that MetaBots from Automation Anywhere provides, and we were able to automate the process. So, how can we cut shorter on the areas of arrangement, decision-making, and error reduction? We were able to do that in one of the loan processing system applications.

PDF comes in multiple ways. PDF is an actual PDF or it could be a scanned image, but people assume it's a PDF. Sometimes, it's not an actual PDF, but an OCR. So, there are multiple ways of skinning the cat. Automation Anywhere helps with the visibility of using a PDF or using OCR technology. These functions are already available, and you can extend it and beyond, as well.

The ease of visibility in the processes which are working is its most valuable feature. Take, for example, Control Room. This is one of the unique features of it, because at the end of the day, the business does not need to know whether it is a MetaBot, IQ Bot, or anything like that. How do you give the terms of business visually? Control Room is another big aspect of it, from the business point. 

From the technology point of view, it's supposed to do activities that you do in your day-to-day life. It is also extendable. Of course, we cannot solve the whole world's problems, but we can extend it with additional coding, and things like that. 

There are two things that it can provide you. 

1. Quicker in automating the task that you already have. Sometimes, the process is chaotic, but the business needs that way to perform some tasks. With automation, what we can do is accelerate the automation, then look into the process optimization that we engineer. That's where we help. Automation Anywhere helps us to accelerate the adoption of automation faster so the customer can realize the benefits.
2. It allows us to look into processes for what can be optimized. 

That is where it helps.

Last month, Automation Anywhere launched communications, which is a very good thing, because now you can actually get two things when you use it.

1. Developer experience: The developer experience is essential for the product to go into the market very well. So, that helps it. 
2. You want to get back what is working and not working, what the developers wanted, etc. 

What Automation Anywhere brings to the table is how do you actually connect these things together? The purpose of automation is automating the task that everybody is doing in their day-to-day lives or some of the cognitive side of it.

The availability of Automation Anywhere to integrate with various applications. whether it is SAP, web forms, Excel, or PDF, exposed quite a bit of integration opportunities within the organization. Definitely, this is one of the key assets, as well, for us to work better with the customers.

One of the biggest challenge that everyone is facing is in the format of the document. The document management processes that IQ Bot gives has very good functionality of how you can actually take unstructured data and make sense out of it, connecting inferences, then making the data available to the user. So, IQ Bot is one of the best tools that I can think of in that aspect. This solves the problem of various document structures, document formats, etc.

The Bot Insights is one of its big assets, because that's what they have given you the visibility.

We did use quite a bit of Citrix automation. Of course, AI Sense helps you through that. There are two big challenges that I can think of with Citrix automation. 

1. Your making multiple hops into end-to-end systems. 
2. As you are rating the screen, which is a screen within a screen, which is what Citrix automation is, the complexity increases.

That is where the two things will come in: the tool's functionality and the beauty of design. These two have to come in together to make it work. If you don't have one or the other, it's not going to work.

Let us take the example: Guidewire. We all know Guidewire. The way that guidewire is set up in the organization, or any tool, is it goes into a VDI, and from the VDI, I go into the SAP VDI. From there, I will access my IBM mainframe system, so there are multiple hops. Unless you have any iSense, and also the best design, you will not be able to achieve the outcome that you wanted.

One of the biggest challenge of automation is if you don't automate it, or if you don't execute the process then it is okay, but don't do it the wrong way. That is the biggest challenge that we try to solve. That's actually impacting the customer if I make a wrong decision. I'm okay to go back to the customer, and say, "I could not execute this process." But, I don't want to go back, saying that I executed the process in the wrong way. That's what we always believe in.

When we go to customers and talk to them about automation, "Everything is great." We can automate their process. However, one of the biggest challenge that we see personally as we automate a task, but our automation of the process is very manual. The DevOps side of it has not yet evolved. That is one aspect that I would think about. The second aspect of it is the testing side of it. Right now, automation testing is really manual testing. On one side, we are saying automating with automation. On the other side, we are automating manually. These are not going that well. As Sage IT, we have products that we are building on top of it to solve this particular problem. 

The technology is the last piece of the puzzle. The important thing is how to make sure the business has the confidence in the technology. The infrastructure, environmental management, and availability are a very big challenge in this one. They are important because you are assuming that bots are going to run automatically and will to do my work, but you don't want to find after the fact that the bot is not running and my processes did not run. So, infrastructure management and deployment mechanisms are very critical. If the deployment is not right, you get the frustration, not the automation. As soon as the frustration kicks in, the automation adoption goes away, then everyone blames the product. That's the first thing they do. Everybody blames the product, so that's where we'll look at it.

With scalability, from what I've seen when we visit some of our customers, they don't look at how do you optimally run the bots. You can run bots left, right, and center at the same time, even though there is no dependency required. That is where the stability of the automation level is great. But, if you deploy it in the wrong way, the stability would be impacted. For example, running multiple bots on the same VDI, you don't have to do it, nor do you have to tie a bot to one VDI without multitenancy. Those are some of the challenges that we've seen and can be addressed.

One of the important from the community side of it is the Bot Store, which is one of the biggest factors that I can think of. It is like a marketplace. 

The ease of use is one of great assets for Automation Anywhere. I would want it to be continued in this fashion. Of course, there is still always room for improvement for any product, but we do that as well.

On the tools' side of it, when I look at it, a lot of commands have ease of use with every task, whether it is Excel or PDF, each are commonly used tasks and automatically available to you. Again, there are some that we may to develop.

I went through most of the Automation Anywhere courses: Architecture courses and even RPA for the business user courses. The courses are very good. It also gave me a very good perspective. The only thing that I would recommend on top of it: Getting the community to grade how much better each course is. At the end of the day, when we publish courses, what's the impact of that to the customer? It's not there. If that comes up, that would be good, so some the more popular courses get more time than other courses, which are really important, but do not get that much visibility.

The bot creation process: They said we should not look at it as a technology as the first thing. I would say technology the least problem that we have. I would first look at common sense: 

• What is the bot actually doing? 
• What is the task or workflow which you are trying to automate and is it actually doing it? 
• What is the value that is actually getting to the customer? Or the impact that it is having on the customer? 

That's very important to identify. That is what it gets you the ROI, etc. You have to look at those aspects of it. 

The second aspect of it, how can you make it ease the pain? For example, if some customers are using the process, and I know to whom to talk about process, then I can determine when it is a bot, system, or mission. We have to make sure the bots and humans are working together and smarter. The second aspect that you look at is the design of it, which is very critical. 

The third aspect of it is adoption. That is what I always come back to, whether the customer has adopted it, and whether those in the chain management are communicating to the underlying teams and are right or not. We need to help all of those things. Then, developing the bot with Automation Anywhere is actually a cakewalk. I would call it very straightforward.

Our primary use case is anything that is structured data and highly repetitive. We also see a lot of gain right now in paperwork, so AR, AP, and record to report. The cognitive product seems to be doing a really good job, and the pace of that going fantastic.

We have done a little bit of everything: 

• Oracle
• Salesforce.com
• Using Citrix, we did an order to cash.
• In the IQ Bot world, we seem to be doing a lot of AR and invoice-to-pay (those are the two that we see the most). 

We will be moving into medical billing next. Since we have done some really good prototypes with medical records, I think we are ready to go there next. 

One of the largest use cases that we have about a $10 billion company which does something like 20 thousand AR invoices a month. They had a solution in place. We actual replaced that IQ Bot, and we are hosting it out of San Jose right now. We are getting some phenomenal straight through processing. So, we took what would have taken 30 to 35 people and are able to do that little bit more accurately with about six.

Believe it or not, the first client that we ever did was a Citrix client. We cut our teeth on Citrix around the RPA product. It has some quirks to it, but it is becoming much better. So, we have quite a few instances of that Citrix machine in production at the client. 

The most valuable feature of our solution is the cognitive computing because that is coming onto stream a lot faster than you would think. What used to be in the middle of, "Can this be done or not?", is becoming, "It can be done." We are getting some incredible straight through processing rates with AR around healthcare and financial services. 

Integrating RPA and cognitive with other solutions is relatively straightforward. Originally, it came out that Automation Anywhere did screen scraping, but the technology is way beyond that now, where you can do object cloning, even moving into API. We have even coded a couple of APIs into the applications that most people will use. We actually do that now instead of going through a screen. 

Our impressions of IQ Bot are that it goes relatively fast at the pace that it is being advanced every six months, which is good. I believe that we have a couple of the largest installations of it in the U.S. right now. So, we are processing somewhere in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of AP and AR invoices. We actually have robotic operation centers on the West Coast and the East Coast. 

The IQ Bot has room for improvement. It is not that it doesn't do a lot of things today, it is just that it can do so much more. I think that that product is going to go crazy.

The next big thing that you are going to see is the analytics engine. I think people finally realize that you can do analytics on what the bots are doing. I think that you will see that come alive in the next six to nine months.

If you write them correctly and have good architectures internally, then scalability is relatively straightforward. This also applies to reliability. However, you sort of need to write a few before you get to this point. As more of these go to production, these are going to be the two big drivers.

Probably one of the faster scales that we have done is we did a prototype with IQ Bot that had about 500 invoices and a 1000 vendors. In about two and a half to three months time, start to finish, we went from the original amount to 15,000 invoices and 2500 vendors. I would suggest in that 90 to 120 day time frame, if you have done things properly and your architecture is good, that you should be able to scale at any pace that you care to.

We have seen both straightforward and complex initial setups. If you are behind a firewall, it is relatively easy to setup. When you are hosting the application, that is when it is a little more complicated (we actually host applications for people). You need to talk to the IT department, as you are actually outside of their firewall, then you are coming back inside their cloud. 

Depending on the architecture, it can be relatively straightforward, and it can be put up in just a day or two. Whereas, if you are hosting it and coming back in, it is a little more complicated.

What we did was we took the Automation Anywhere ROI calculations and added quite a few things to it. We actually ask 15 to 18 questions around process time, number of systems used, how people, and how many hours. Ultimately, we can stack rank those ROIs on a process, then we typically try to start with the largest ROIs first. So far, with what we have done, we have seen has been relatively close (as it is almost impossible to hit the ROI exactly), but the ROI on the product is good.   

No one is balking at the cost. They are market rates and will change, but no one is saying, "That is ridiculous or impossible." They are saying, "Show me the ROI and prove that the cost is accurate."

One of the things that will be good for the community will be to get the free version to download, which came out just a month ago called Community Edition. So, you can actually download it and try it for yourself. 

Ease of use is something that you need to get trained on. Once you have gone through the proper training, it is relatively straightforward to use. There is quite a bit of online training on their website, as well as in the Community Edition. After 30 to 40 hours with it, you should be pretty good with it.

One of the promises that we made to Automation Anywhere when we started was that everyone in our company would be trained and certified. Even as a Board Member, I am certified. 

Bot creation is relatively straightforward. Probably within 20 hours, you should be pretty good at it. There are some nuances around it though that I think separate first time developers versus seasoned developers. What you will see in the marketplace is how easy it is to develop one compared to how easy it is to develop one that runs in production 99.9 percent of the time.

Across the board, I would give it a nine out of ten. There are some areas that they can move up into, but they are working on it right now. I am assuming that everybody is working on it, so we will stay in that nine range.

Go do your homework. Call some of the larger clients because they seem to face the largest problems. Automation Anywhere has five to ten gigantic accounts that you can just talk to. Ultimately, I would just be careful in the way that you implement it. It is like any tool, if you know what you are doing, "Great," and if not, then you can make a mess. Therefore, be careful and know what you are doing.

We mainly use the bot to make our operation more efficient, save the effort of human beings, and reduce the overall cost to the organization.

Automation Anywhere has improved our organization by allowing us to reduce the number of new hires, enable us to keep the same workforce, and increase productivity.

The product is very precise, and very efficient. We run bots almost five days a week. We just tell the bot what they have to do and it is always accurate and precise, no issues.

I believe version 11 is much better than the previous version we were using.

They should make the product smarter. The bot we use right now is kind of fundamentally basic loop-based. We really want to see a little bit more advanced capability, that way we can undertake more comprehensive tasks.

The scalability, I think will be feasible, but so far we don't have any plans to increase the bots to the large scale of the operation.

So far, the bots run very stable and have little problems, we see the bots becoming more stable every day.

We can define certain procedure we already know, but we continue develop more user cases, which bring from the other end users.

I cannot say how much exactly we have made regarding ROI, but we can see the saving down the road.

We have a few licenses. They cost roughly $10,000 each.

I think understanding the product is very important. People have to understand what the bot can do before they implement one in their environment. That is very important.

We have Automation Anywhere version 11. We put all the bots on the virtual machine. We run continuously every week.

When it comes to attended automation, we try to introduce more use cases and let more people understand what the bot can do, and expand the capacity of the bot, so it can serve our organization.

We have a variety of different use cases, specifically for marketing and finance. 

• Our first goal is to look at automating repetitive tasks. 
• Our second goal is to have Automation Anywhere scale from RPA into a more cognitive tool, providing higher value solutions to the business.

We have been able to take resources that have been doing manual work and putting them into more productive work. This has been a positive impact.

We are using it to optimize our processes, then automating them.

It removes demotivating, repetitive work from our teams.

Orchestration is the valuable feature.

A lot more can be done to make the solution easy for developer to use. While it is good as a base product, it could have better logging and alerting features. We would like the tools to have more usability, especially for humans in the middle.

Other solution features which are offered by competitors, like IBM, should now be part of the part of the Automation Anywhere suite of products.

I need high value products to be created, so I need integration with other solutions. Machine learning and AI need to be integrated with Automation Anywhere. While IQ Bot is a good beginning, our company does not work with manual paperwork since we are already digital. We would like to see more integration with cognitive tools going forward.

It took us eight months to scale to our current number of bots.

We used a strategic partner (integrator) for the deployment.

Set good expectations with your senior management regarding going after the right processes. Look at innovative areas to implement a prepared robotic process automation workflow, so you can reap the benefits at a later time.

Automation Anywhere University is nice. The courses are very intuitive.

The primary use case is to automate our current exports and fraudulent transaction processing in the back office.

Automation Anywhere brings speed with accuracy. We are replacing a lot of manual work that our agents used to do. This has been automated now, and we get things done faster.

Non-developers can use the tool to create bots. Also, it is very easy for developers to use.

The bot creation process is easy enough with its drag and drop, then add some logic. However, once you're done with it, you can't really work outside the tool that the AI provides. It is drag and drop, then work right there.

It took a couple of months to scale from our pilot to the current number of bots that we are using. The bot scaling process was painful, when you go beyond a few bots, and because we had stability issues. We had to work through the issues, and they took us a long time.

Technical support is good. They need to improve their response to production issues. They need to have knowledgeable people to fix issues when things are down in production.

The initial setup is straightforward, but the scaling was an issue.

We worked directly with Automation Anywhere. Their help was good, but sometimes it took a couple days for them to get back to us.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere. Though, it depends on how they plan to build the environment: on-premise or cloud. There are some issues that we're facing in the cloud.

The current features are good, but we are not using all of the product's existing features at the moment.

Our first use case was to program a bot which could do the work of approximate 30 people, taking around half a year to implement. We did that bot around a year ago. This bot was the best case scenario for Automation Anywhere, making it the perfect application for RPA in our corporation.

Automation Anywhere can work with very old applications. For example, we had one application about to collapse and were able to capture all its information before the collapse happened.

The most valuable feature is its easy to use. For developers, the solution is super easy. I just learned the new Workbench editor, which is even better. In the version that we have now, we normally use a few TaskBots and a lot of MetaBots, so we can integrate DLLs and further enhance the bots that we have. It is very impressive.

The bot creation process is simple and useful. Whatever you need to do, it is there. If there is something else, there are the MetaBot functions.

It has been challenging integrating Automation Anywhere with other solutions, due to all of the controls, as we are a bank. 

We are really excited to have Python run directly from the bots. This would be a massive upgrade, as we could integrate AI even further with the solution. 

There is room for improvement in AI, but they are working on it.

They can work more on integrating the code. I would like to see more similar examples where we don't have to create the code in the bot, but can create the code in the Workbench.

The technical support is great, but I would like them to be faster with their response times. Sometimes, we have to contact them multiple time on the same ticket to receive a response.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, especially as a PoC. With the controls, it could be a bit more complex.

We have a third-party who manages our IT. They did an IaaS, then we did everything else.

We also evaluated UiPath and Automation Anywhere. 

We chose Automation Anywhere, as it was the more complete, simpler application.

Do a very simple automation of an application entry, like registration. Then, you will see how fast the application is and will start using it right away.

Every time a new employee starts with us, we start them on the Automation Anywhere University, "Hello Bot: Introduction to RPA" course.

While the cognitive document processing is very impressive, we sadly don't have it right now. We are working on acquiring it.

We don't use Citrix. We use Azure for every deployment. Azure has worked very well and is scalable.

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.