Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use case for it was financial back-end operations. We dabble in Automation Anywhere. We don't use it.

We have an old ERP which required human interactions because of the lack of a system. For example, we were copying and pasting from an invoice to a spreadsheet, and then from the spreadsheet, we would run a macro that would plug it into our ERP. What we did is have the robotics read an invoice and plug it directly into our ERP, avoiding the extra steps, let alone a human doing it. We placed a robot and technology in place of a human. It saved about an hour-and-a-half a day. We measure in FTEs and we measured the savings as 20 percent of an FTE.

In Automation Anywhere we liked 

• the drag-and-drop 
• easily stitching the recording of mouse control and keyboard controls. 

They were not unique but they were user-friendly. 

For developers to pick up a new tool, you need something user-friendly where it's easy to create reusable snippets of code and use them in another process down the road. I would rate the ease of use at eight out of ten.

It was very stable. We didn't have any issues with it and, if there were, they wouldn't have been Automation Anywhere's problem. They most likely would have been our infrastructure.

We didn't have to scale too far, so we didn't experience its scalability.

We didn't use Automation Anywhere's technical support, even for deployment. We read and learned what we needed to know. We got on their support site, got their documentation, took the requirements, how to deploy, and what the right architecture was. We scaled based on what we thought we would use it for. My guys like to learn, they like to try, and I allow them to dig a hole and fall into it and then fix it later. They just didn't fall into a hole.

The documentation was good enough for us to read. Granted we're technical people, but it was good enough to read and take actions based on the content. It was really good.

Setting up Automation Anywhere was fairly straightforward. I personally did it. I had my team behind me. They set up the IIS side and the SQL side. But for installation of the product, I did it myself because I wanted to know. I'd still like to learn, even though I don't do the work.

To install here, on-prem, at the server level, only took two people a couple of hours; perhaps a total of eight man-hours.

Our implementation strategy was, "Let's try it." We had an objective to save FTEs as well as to introduce technology to get around our lack of a decent ERP. It was a matter of picking among the big three, and some third-world country type of RPA as well, and seeing which one hit the button. We figured out what the requirements were, and we have a pretty hefty on-prem hosting, so we spun up some servers and installed it.

After deploying, our developers then took control. We had a team of three developers. In terms of maintenance, we usually set up our environment where we install updates monthly. That should take a couple of hours per server. I don't recall Automation Anywhere standing out as a "problem child." So maintenance on the infrastructure side might be about two hours a month.

We couldn't put the math together. When we decided to actually procure and get the quotes, they gave us free trials for a while and extended them for months. But when it came down to it, we couldn't do ROI because our company outsources to India. Our employees are in India, and in India, $250,000 goes a very long way. We just couldn't make up the money fast enough.

Cost is the biggest area in need of improvement for Automation Anywhere. Annually it's $250,000. That's what deterred us right away. We stopped using it as a primary solution because of the costs.  We did not apply hardware to that, because we've already got the cost baked into our infrastructure. Otherwise, there would have been hardware costs on top of that. If we really took a full, all-in cost for Automation Anywhere, it would have been much higher. But we don't do it that way.

There are three big, heavy-hitters in RPA, with Automation Anywhere probably being the premier, followed by Blue Prism, and then UiPath. Of those three, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are very expensive, but the accomplishments are the same. UiPath is pretty affordable as a buy-in, with the accomplishments being the same.

Overall, each has its own uniqueness, strengths, and weaknesses, but when it comes to looking at it on the financial side, Automation Anywhere is probably one of the most expensive to have an all on-prem solution. We're all about on-prem. It was very expensive to stand that up.

We went with UiPath.

In terms of differences between Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath from a functional standpoint, there really weren't any. They all do the same thing. It's coding in .NET, coding in Java. They all have their strengths. Automation Anywhere stood out because of its high cost. 

When we put them side-by-side, everything we could accomplish in UiPath, we could accomplish in Automation Anywhere. Each one is making its own jumps. For example, when we were evaluating them, UiPath was making leaps in OCR and reading natural language, and Automation Anywhere was taking a back seat in that. But Automation Anywhere was advancing in its process improvements. Now, they're doing it the other way around, and Automation Anywhere is jumping forward ahead of UiPath. So they play this game, but either one is equally good.

My advice would be "due diligence." Make sure you read, and make sure you engage the Automation Anywhere team and the support. We didn't, but we didn't have to. But do due diligence based on cost, and scale, and really what you're going to do.

RPA is the hot word right now. Everybody wants to do RPA. But what we did is just put it into our arsenal of other tools. It's not the golden bullet. It's not the one that is the end-all. It's just one of the tools in the arsenal that IT has. That's why we chose not to spend $250,000 and, instead, to spend much less. Sometimes RPA is the answer. At other times it's system integration, and at other times it's just raw development. That's what I even tell our customers. That's our toolkit. Our arsenal is developer's RPA, and we use a third-party integration tool as well.

Just the developers were using it in our organization. They tout it as it's user-friendly: Give it to a user and they can do it. But we didn't discover that at all. We couldn't just hand it to a user, so our developers were taking the processes and applying them with development code behind them. Automation Anywhere has "record-the-screen," but when our users were doing it, they would move an icon and it wasn't smart enough to find the icon that had moved.

In terms of extent of use, it was used daily for some of our daily processes. The finance process I talked about earlier is one example. We automated that and that robot ran on a daily basis. As for increasing our usage of RPA in general, we scaled up pretty quickly. Internally, we have four or five robots running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We are using Automation Anywhere for the automation of supply chain management, logistics, and procurement processes. We are automating invoices and supply chain processes.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to automate repetitive tasks. Because of this solution, my business is able to complete the work quickly. It saves a lot of effort and hours. It is time-efficient and cost-efficient. It reduces human error and manual effort.

It takes three to six months to realize its benefits because businesses need some time to understand what is the difference, but going forward, with the enhancements, there is a reduction in the cost and errors.

The integration of RPA bots, APIs, business applications, and documents is easy in Automation Anywhere. It is not difficult to get the details from the Automation Anywhere University, learn it, and do it. There is training for everything. For the APIs or document processing, there is limited material, but anyone can still learn it on the go. We have a portal where we can ask questions and get answers or suggestions.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption, but I do not have the metrics.

I use SAP connectors, and I use Excel operations and Windows operations. I also use the OCR functionality and the functionality for sending emails. 

It is easy to learn. There is an assistant in Automation Anywhere, so even a layman can access it, utilize it, and quickly learn it. It is not a problem. It takes a week for a new person to start working on it. It is straightforward. 

There are not many areas for improvement. As compared to V11, A360 is more user-friendly and flexible. It is fine. They have even included support for ChatGPT, Azure, and other things in the latest version. They have incorporated many latest technologies, such as AI, and there is always scope to improve the processes and have more stability.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for the past six years.

I can rely on it. 

Going forward, I can do more and more automations to save time. I can improve the business processes with the latest technologies as well, so from the scaling perspective, it is good.

I know our team is using Automation Anywhere, but I am not sure whether any other team is also using it. There might be more teams using it. 

We have plans to increase its usage. We are getting more projects.

For me, it is easy. Generally, if I am not able to understand something, I go through the documentation, and I am able to find the information quickly. In case of any issues, I inform the platform team, and they raise a ticket and get in touch with the Automation Anywhere team. They involve me in the issue description, but it is completely owned by the platform team because they do the first level of testing and go ahead with ticket creation and other things. The problem always gets resolved. In terms of time, the duration depends on the availability of the platform team. 

Positive

I did not use any other solution previously.

I was not involved in its deployment. For its maintenance, the platform team is there, and they are doing the maintenance activity.

It is an easy tool and easy technology. It is quick to learn. You can use Automation Anywhere University for learning.

Excel advanced operations are very good. Document processing is also very good. Handling of the web forms and sites is also good. Before using this solution, I thought it would take me time to automate all the processes, but I was able to use it easily.

Automation Anywhere is at the number one position now. That itself proves how good it is and how well it is doing. From the time I started using it, it has been going up. It never went down. There are more features and more technologies coming in.

To someone who wants to use API integration instead of an RPA solution, I would say that you can utilize the API integration in RPA as well. It might be a little faster in the API, but for certain business processes, you need user intervention or user clearance. In such cases, RPA is required.

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

We're using Automation Anywhere (AA) for the financial departments of a lot of civil engineering companies here in Greece. There's also one pharmaceutical company that uses it in their financial department.

I find Automation Anywhere (AA) to be really fast on the development side. They are also using a good engine. They have an efficient and intelligent system, e.g. it's IBM's, so it's one of the best. The connectors in Automation Anywhere (AA) are also good, and they're working fine. These are all the features I found most valuable in the tool.

One area for improvement in Automation Anywhere (AA) is its monitoring system. It's not that good.

The scalability of the tool also needs improvement, because when you set up another machine to run the process, the system would become full.

We've been using Automation Anywhere (AA) for three years.

My impression on the stability of Automation Anywhere (AA) is that there's still room for improvement there. A lot of times during the day, one or two out of 20 cases lose their elements, or lose a window, and that should be improved.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere (AA) needs to be improved.

Setting up Automation Anywhere (AA) was not that hard, but I can't say that it was easy. I don't know if I did something wrong in the configuration when I first installed the tool. You have to configure the database yourself, and I believe that the tool should configure itself.

Licensing for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid on a yearly basis. Out of all the RPA tools, it has the most value for money, e.g. what you pay is what you get.

On a scale of one to five, with one being cheap and five being expensive, I'm rating the price of Automation Anywhere (AA) a three. It's not as expensive, but it's not that cheap, too. If you'll use it long term, then it's better, but the company that you're selling it to, they have to trust you, and you should also have knowledge about the sales.

We're now using version 16 of Automation Anywhere (AA), and that is the latest version. Previously, I was able to use version 11.

I have not contacted the technical support team for Automation Anywhere (AA), because we are partners with IBM who are partners of Automation Anywhere (AA), so I'm working with IBM and talking with IBM support, instead of the support team for the tool.

If somebody wanted to use Automation Anywhere (AA) for the first time, the advice I would give that person is that it's the only tool that's easy to learn in terms of how to develop, but you have to read the manual about the monitoring system and the control room, especially about the control room, because it's really complicated. I found the control room complicated.

Overall, I'm rating Automation Anywhere (AA) eight out of ten. I'm giving it an eight, just because of the cases that you are losing according to the spying or monitoring system. You're losing a lot, and your customer is not really happy about that.

We are a company operating in the banking industry and we use the platform in deploying robotic process automation for executing various functions from customer service management.

The automated processes include ticketing, data extraction and analysis, and business intelligence, among others. It helps us automate our functions and this has brought a positive effect into our workflow and we have been able to grow our productivity.

The platform is versatile and users across the spectrum and in various industries are able to acquire it and use it intuitively.

The platform is easy to deploy and use in every organization and when we acquired it, it brought instant impact and our employees were able to productively integrate it into our workflows.

It has helped us relieve the workload on our human workforce and thus ensures that they remain productive and motivated at all times thus work efficiently.

Brings business process automation and this helps in scaling our operations and ensuring that we are able to work 24/7, thus improving our productivity.

It has brought artificial intelligence and this allows us to improve our planning and decision-making process, ultimately growing our company and the way we execute our workflow.

The starting price, which is a one-off fee is a bit high and this may deter mid and small-sized companies from acquiring and decide to shun the platform. It ought to be broken down into monthly installments, where the billing of using the platform is done monthly. This will increase its absorption in the market.

The vendor should increase the training and other engagements with users before they acquire the platform, as this will simplify its usage further and ensure that there no hindrances in using the platform. 

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past four years.

Customer support is available and this ensures that any user experiencing any challenge in using the platform is helped and becomes able to use the platform in a reliable manner.

It's affordable and this accords all users a chance to use the platform and grow their portfolio and withstand competition in their respective industries and markets over their rivals.

I, being a Robotic Process Automation Developer, extensively use various Automation Anywhere products on daily basis. I use Automation Anywhere for end-to-end implementation of processes for clients, as well as my organization.

We have many use cases. One of them is from the marketing department. Every organization needs to market their products and services to get future clients. The marketing people used to mail the prospective clients one by one manually, as per their mailing list. They used to spend approximately one minute on each email. We created a bot that helps the department in sending emails to prospects with product information, service information, brochures, etc. 

Now, the department needs only to specify the content file and an Excel file having email IDs, and the rest is done by the bot. It sends approximately 500 emails within 10 minutes. That makes the process of sending emails extremely fast, including customized content.

Automation Anywhere has helped save many man-hours in my organization by letting us automate monotonous and repetitive tasks. Let's take an example of procurement, to Purchase (P2P) Process in SAP S/4 Hana.

This task requires an employee to manually verify the invoice, feed data into SAP, Park Invoice, Validate Line Items, and generate MIRO. This takes approximately 10 minutes per invoice and that doesn't require any human intelligence. It is just a tedious task. Instead, we implement this solution using Automation Anywhere.

We used the Automation Anywhere IQ Bot to extract data from invoices.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise is used to automate email, for data entry into SAP, 3-Way Match in SAP, as well as MIGO & MIRO Generation in SAP. This frees up employee's time as well as increases the accuracy of the work.

I am inclined towards features such as Automation Anywhere Bot Store, Automation Anywhere Enterprise Client, Recorders, and Scheduling with the Auto-Login Feature.

Automation Anywhere Bot Store; The Bot Store is an online library where anybody can find different types of pre-developed, production-ready bots. Being production-ready and easily accessible saves development time. All bot submissions to the bot store pass through strict security checks, which makes them secure to download and deploy.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise Client; The Automation Anywhere client has 500+ commands to perform various tasks. It has a user-friendly workbench and UI. The most important part is the scriptless development, where you just drag and drop the command and you are ready to run it.

Recorders; Recorders make automating desktop applications, as well as web applications, very reliable and easy to implement. Think of creating a bot to extract data from a webpage in less than 30 mins and it can be run by pressing a button daily. It makes tasks easy to finish. 

Scheduling with Auto-Login Feature; Automation Anywhere has the most user-friendly way to schedule a bot. Scheduling is so accurate in Automation Anywhere that we don't need to worry if the task will be deployed at the specified time or not. I personally manage 30+ schedules and each runs at its set time. Scheduling comes with an awesome Auto-Login feature. This feature logs into locked Windows even when the system has a disclaimer message. It makes scheduling reliable and accurate.

For me, IQ Bot needs to be improved. It has great capabilities and works really well for fully structured and spotless documents. When we try to process structured documents but with some little pen marks, improper partitions, or faded documents, IQ Bot fails to extract data properly out of them. Typical Indian supplier invoices are hard to process through IQ Bot.

I would love to see a package for Regular Expressions with various sub-commands such as regex builder and regex replace.

OAuth2.0 native support should be added in future releases. From a security point of view, there is work that is needed.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than 30 months.

Stability is great If you follow the recommended hardware and software. If you do not meet the requirements then it sometimes creates problems. So, the hardware should be up to the mark for a seamless experience.

The product is highly scalable. Scaling is easy. We started with the Marketing department and within the next three months, we were able to deploy bots for six more departments.

Automation Anywhere has a superb support team. They are prompt in responding to queries based on urgency. If I log a ticket with a production-level issue, they quickly respond and help to solve the problem.

The overall experience with support has been great. They even follow up to see if the issue has been solved after giving the solution.

We did not use another similar product. We started our RPA journey with Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward. Automation Anywhere has descriptive documents to guide in installing the application on the server. Initially, I was the only person starting the RPA journey in my organization. I needed to set up the infrastructure, develop the bots, and give support as well.

Installing the application on the server was very easy. All credit goes to excellent documentation.

We implemented it through our in-house team.

With the newer cloud version of Automation Anywhere product, the setup cost has been cut down because the customer doesn't need to invest in new hardware.

Automation Anywhere is flexible in terms of costing and licensing.

We evaluated only one other vendor, which is UiPath.

Automation Anywhere seemed easy to work with, in our initial journey of RPA. So we choose it.

The product is promising and is successful. You should start your Automation journey with simpler processes and step-by-step, move towards bigger and more complex problems. They have a great support team and the product's community is active as well. This will help to make your automation journey seamless.

The platform is amazing. One of the things that we were worried about when we initially started looking into RPA was having the right people to be able to cope. The advantage of Automation Anywhere is that you don't necessarily have to come from a programming background. It's very easy to pick up. Within the team, we were able to train people within a very short period of time and start our process in as little as two months.

For now, because we just started using Automation Anywhere recently, it's probably a little difficult for me to answer that (room for improvement). But from the feedback that I've received from the team, it is a great tool. We're definitely looking forward to using it more in the future.

Because we are very new to our process, so we're still sort of working through it. One of the features that I just learned about in this particular conference yesterday was about the Enterprise addition that they're just coming out with. I think in about six or seven days. So, that's very exciting because I don't particularly come from a programming background. I think it'll be really easy for us to continue to do more RPA-related processes, and not necessarily have to worry about having the right programmer on the team, or programmers, for that matter.

For the enterprise, we've been using Automation ( /categories/security-orchestration-automation-and-response-soar ) Anywhere for a few years. In my specific team, we've been using the platform for about eight months now.

It was very easy. The Automation Anywhere community is extremely helpful with answering any questions that we had throughout the process, or any sort of concerns that we had. So, it really wasn't difficult at all.

I would highly recommend it. If RPA is something that they're doing for the first time, Automation Anywhere is definitely one of the best in the industry that they should stick to.

I would definitely give it a ten (out of ten).

I have had an opportunity to work on Automation Anywhere a lot. I have worked from version 8 of Automation Anywhere through versions 9, 10, now 11, and they are going to launch a new platform A2019. I have also worked on other modules of Automation Anywhere, like IQ Bots, MetaBots, Bot Insights. 

There was a process that we built as a reusable process that can be reused. It was a use case used by multiple companies, which can be used by multiple companies. We built it to be reusable so it can be just plugged and played. If you are a vendor or want to purchase that product from us, we can configure that product very quickly and give it to you. That was the use case which started a big change. It was a finance and accounting process.

This helped my organization, because if I want to build that solution from scratch, it would take almost ten to twelve weeks for the development. But if I have a reusable solution for that part and a company needs it, I can just customize it and give to that company within two weeks time. So, I save ten weeks of development time. It only requires customization of two weeks so my company gets good profit and the end customer is satisfied with the work that we have given them. It's a win-win situation for both of us.

The best part about Automation Anywhere is the easy to use UI. It's very user-friendly. You have everything that you want in front of your eyes. You just have to drag and drop, then build your logic accordingly. That's the biggest changing factor compared to other tools.

I would like to have reading from a handwritten text, which they are bringing in the next version. That will be a good thing.

The older versions, like version 8 and 9, were not very stable. With the changes that they have brought into the picture, it's now a very good tool and much stabler.

Scalability is easy with Automation Anywhere if you are on a cloud platform. 

They have a built-in feature for queuing so you can scale your product. It's a workload management feature so if you have fewer volumes than you can run on one or two bots. If you have a larger volume, then you can scale up to any number of bots. Scaling up or down works in real-time.

Their support team is very good.

It depends on how professional you are. If you are good, pro user, it will be easy for you. Even if you are a new user, there is an express version of installation that you can use and install it very quickly. If you are a pro user, you can always go with the custom mode and the installation is still very easy.

I have worked on other tools as well. I have worked on UiPath, Blue Prism, and Pega Robotic Process Automation.

I would like to give a nine (out of 10) to Automation Anywhere.

They are doing a great job. I don't think there is an area where they need to improve because they are doing a great job and improving themselves.

We have many use cases for this solution. These include use cases from our life science, procurement, and HR departments. More generally, it is used for our regulatory and life science tasks, and some finance as well.

We have a huge roadmap that includes a lot of processes that need to be automated.

For example, some of our processes are related to clinical trials and the drug development process. They include verifying documents and entering a lot of data that has to be processed. The automation reduces the effort and time it takes to complete these processes.

We have a mix of technology in our environment, including legacy systems and new technology.

This solution saves time when completing our pharmaceutical processes, which allows things to progress faster to the FDA.

The IQ Bot is a very good feature.

For our legacy systems, we are finding it very difficult to use the automation. Sometimes, forty percent of our work cannot be processed in an automated fashion. We need to acquire additional automation tools in order to reach one hundred percent automation.

Automation Anywhere says that you can use this tool for any type of application, but there are some for which it is not compatible. In cases where automation is not supported, there should be alternative tools that are inbuilt where they can be used to support or guide the automation forward, giving us one hundred percent automation.

The licensing model has to be changed to perpetual because even when we are not using a license, we are charged for it.

For simple processes, everything works. However, for a complex process with a lot of rules and mappings then we are finding it really difficult.

We are in touch with Automation Anywhere and the partners who can develop the system and increase the speed, or deal with other limitations that we have.

We have more than two hundred and fifty licenses, although they are not all currently in use by the bots.

We have a direct point of contact for technical support, although there are limitations.

In some instances, the technical support is on time, but in other cases it takes longer. When we commit to the customers we cannot give the time, for example, as a two or three-day turnaround.

When the Automation Anywhere team works with our technical team, they don't understand what kind of tools we have within the system in our company, and how that data is going to be interlinked with the other machines. This converting of data on the functionality side is where some of the limitations are.

The initial setup of this solution is easy, although sometimes you have service problems.

For example, we have a server set up as a load balancer, and sometimes these two systems have a problem where the nodes are not synching. I think that it is an issue with Automation Anywhere having a bug in the system. This is a problem when you are selling it to the customer because you have to make sure that it is reliable, and will stay that way for some time. You cannot expect companies to change their products every now and then, or continually upgrade versions. We need things to be stable for at least one or two years at a time.

Automation Anywhere helped us to set up our Center of Excellence (COA), and their partners assisted us with other aspects of the setup.

We have seen ROI but we are not up to the mark.

From the setup, we have spent somewhere between one and two million dollars over the past two years. I would say that our ROI is less than one million dollars. I don't want to say that it is a failure, but I would like to see a better ROI.

Had things gone the way we expected then we would have seen ROI by this time.

The licensing cost is approximately $4,000 USD, which is a seed license. You can have as many licenses as you want but the moment you start using them, they charge for them. For example, if you have purchased two hundred and fifty licenses to use over one thousand machines then at any point, only two hundred and fifty users can log in. 

In 2017 when we decided that we needed RPA, we evaluated several products. We tried Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere, in addition to other automation tools that were on the market. At that time, we found that Automation Anywhere was doing better, and had more features, than all of the others, which is why we chose the product.

An example of the additional features was the support for PDF conversion, Excel data transfer, and the IQ Bot.

We have purchased more licenses than we are currently using, which is why we need to enhance automation.

These days, I think that UiPath is picking up faster and with more relevant features. If they are able to overcome the limitations we have, for example in legacy systems, then it may be a better choice of a system that you can sustain for a long time.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.