Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use for the product is to automate business processes. Mostly this means financial processing. We have a lot of use cases in finance. For finance alone, we have 30+ bots in production. Other bots are for a variety of other business uses like the supply chain, networks, and business processes. We have 400+ bots in production as of now, all together. 

We have automated business processes, like finance, supply chain, network systems, and payment systems.

We are using it on-premise and migrating it to the cloud at the end of the year.

The product has improved our organization by allowing us to better use our resources. We can have a strategy implemented using bots and make better use of our time instead of spending it on repetitive tasks or tasks the bots can do more efficiently.

The most valuable thing about using this product is that we are able to use the time that we spent doing manual processing for other progressive purposes. The bots we implement free up our time. The second best part is that we don't need to see the automated processes happening.

We have business user utilizing the bots who don't have any technical expertise. We trained them, and they're able to do a couple of minimal bots which are required for them.

For us at this point, I don't think the product needs more features. There is already a new release coming up with a bundle of new features which we will have access to and have to learn. As a user and developer, I only look at stability. That's it. I want the most stable environment — a stable version of the product — where I can close my eyes and sleep and the bots run and do their jobs.

The basic system is very ease to use, but the difficulty comes when we make changes. For example, any change in the name, even if we have wild characters in place, the bot fails to identify the filename. It identifies the same filename in non-prod, and it does not identify the file in production.

We need a more reliable tool. Sometimes, the same check (a 70 percent scan) identifies numbers, and sometimes it does not identify the numbers. We are not sure why it is behaving weird.

We don't use the Bot Store because it is not legal for us to use.

I have been using it for almost two years now.

On a scale of one to ten, I can rate the stability between seven and eight. We have found that sometimes a little change in the environment brings down an application or a bot stops working. We are working on that issue. Stability improved from three out-of-ten to between seven and eight. We hope to bring that stability up to at least a nine.

The solution is very easy, but the tool behaves weird sometimes, environment to environment. It is not as robust as it has been designed. The smallest changes will bring down the bot. It's not capable of environment to environment changes. We have to make sure that the bot is running in each environment. 

Be a little patient while developing because the tool behaves weird. Even 11.3 is not behaving well. Once it starts working, it will work.

As of now, we are migrating from a Micron database. Once we have completed that, we believe the scalability will be a cakewalk.

We have almost 500 bots spread across different portfolios. They are scheduled and running on daily basis.

We did not integrated this solution with any other applications. This is running as a standalone thing in our environment.

We are in different time zones, but we still get a response from technical support when we call. On a scale of one to ten, I can say tech support is an eight. The thing that would make support a ten is that we get a solution on the fly when we contact a person in support. Sometimes they provide us some other solution that we already know or a workaround. We don't need alternatives, we need solutions that work.

The login mechanism seems to be only understood by the AA guys. We raised a ticket since we don't understand the login mechanisms most of the time.

Initially, we did the certification program from Automation Anywhere University. It could be better than what it is. It might have been upgraded recently. We took it more than one and a half years back. The ease of doing the course could have been better. You need access to a system when going through the course and completing it. There was no simulation. We were in the initial stages of procuring the systems, so it was a little tough for us to complete the courses too.

I was not involved in the decision to move to Automation Anywhere. It was a big decision handed down from the top management.

The initial setup was complex. Because we are in the finance industry, the initial strategy had to take a lot of data into account which needs not to be secured and not exposed to the outside world. So we struggled a little with how that has to be implemented. For example, passwords are critical data. We came up with a cyber bot at that point in time to deal with the potential password issues. 

The business team has a lot of doubts about how Automation Anywhere is being implemented and the processes it affects.  Because of this, it was really a huge effort to make them understand what we are doing. Any time we would have to make changes to infrastructure, even a small change on the infrastructure side could make an application unstable or make a bot come down.

We have got to put in more hours at this point to make the implementation stable and further deployment possible.

Bot creation process:

1. We have a PDD document available once the use case is identified. 
2. Once the PDD is available, if it is a legal/security issue, then we go for the next stage: development. 
3. We develop the SDD. 
4. Based on the SDD, the bot is developed. 
5. Once it is all developed and the UAT testing is done, we'll show it again to the legal/security.
6. Then we go for the approval across the business teams. There will be lot of approvals required. 
7. Once it is approved, then it goes to production. 

We'll create a bot ID in-between once the use case is good.

Based on the complexity of the bots, it takes six to 16 weeks for us to create bots (pilot to completion).

Initially we did use a consultant to get going with the implementation. It was a small group of guys who were also in India who we had come to work with us. Our experience with them was good.

When all the big problems were solved and there was nothing immediate on the plate to resolve, we were able to make out what we needed to do and judge the steps to take ourselves. So we slowly got away from support from the implementation group. 

We are able now to rely on the support that we are getting from Automate Anywhere technical support.

We just started looking at the fruits of our labors to understand the return on investment so we do not have a clear picture of the actual value yet.

We are not converting to a dollar amount. We are saving time. Last year, we save around 50,000 hours.

For Runner we paid around five-thousand dollars and for Creator we paid around three-thousand dollars.

The cost depends on the environment of an organization. I don't have the exact figures, but these are the production figures provided to me. 

We don't have a license for cognitive document processing yet. We are identifying the use cases for it.

We also evaluated UiPath, and for the attended bots right now, we'll be using UiPath, not Automation Anywhere. When we evaluated Automation Anywhere, it did not reach the same level as UiPath for management on attended mode, e.g., a huge number of licenses on attended mode.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a seven. Because we did not explore any other RPA tool as of now, and we are exploring UI parts without knowing more, it is hard to compare. 

The only thing that keeps me from rating it higher independently is the stability. Maybe it's stable in some other companies, but somehow we don't seem to share that stability in our environment. Because we have virtual machines that have to be up and running all the time and they are mostly Windows-based, Windows may also one of the reasons why stability is not so good. I don't blame the automation tool directly, but it could be more robust.

As far as giving advice to people considering the product, I say to give it time and learn to use it because it is the best. If the process is clean, we can automate to any extent.

We have many use cases. We are solving business problems for our clients. E.g., it could be as simple as doing data entry or creating a mashup solution with intelligent automation, which is a buzz word these days. It can also be as complex as having AI integrated with RPA. It depends upon a lot of use cases. This is what we are solving.

We are the partners of Automation Anywhere, so we are solving our client's problems with Automation Anywhere as an enabler. In addition, we are a consumer of Automation Anywhere.

We have digital workers with us who assist us in doing our work in robotic process automation. They solve all the problems where we need to do mundane activities and tasks that users should not be doing. Users should be utilizing their brain part, then the remaining roles and activities should go to the digital workers that we have.

We have automated that complete process of code review. The bot is solving the problem of ensuring the compliance of reviewing code. People used to generally skip the code review process because it was exhaustive. Bots can review the complete standards of the code, whatever is there, ensuring the compliance and eventually saving time.

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode. Switch off your work when you are out of your office. The bot auto logs into your desktop and asks what they should do be doing, then it works. Tomorrow morning, you come back into the office, you have the output on your desk.

We used to face a lot of challenges with older versions, like auto login. 

Nothing is perfect. The tool should always evolve to the better and more efficient.

If we are talking about evolving, then we are talking about intelligent automation. There should be more features included in the package with this type of software. For example, IQ Bot is something that we used to have and was working well. However, there are other use cases of machine learning and complex cognitive solutions. Those should be included in the package, as they will solve major problems which we face today of unstructured data. This is part of the evolution process and these changes won't happen in a day.

The latest version is very stable and reliable. I have a lot of confidence in it as we deploy this bots at the client site. I have confidence that the bot will auto login in the night and do the work.

If you have 500 digital works for an enterprise, then someday you will need to update. Automation Anywhere is not very scalable because the update and upgrade process requires immense effort from the IT organization to do a tool check. 

Automation Anywhere Control Room should update to the newer versions with one click, including the newer features. There should be minimum effort required from the IT organization. The major resistance from any organization is from the IT organization because they have a lot of dependencies and will sometimes resist doing changes because they have  other activities and applications to manage. Future versions should minimizing their work.

I have used the technical support a lot of times. It has improved a lot. The response time has been very good. 

We used to face many problems for auto login and scheduler. It is lot of tickets for these problems, but Automation Anywhere was very responsive at that time. While they didn't have a ready-to-go solution, they ensured in the next release those improvements were there and now it is very stable.

The initial setup is not straightforward, but it's not complex. if somebody knows how to do it with an SOP, they can do it. The setup is tedious, but it's doable. 

We are a consultant for the deployment.

We have seen ROI with this product. With this product, we go for any RPA use case. If it is not solving anything or giving quantifiable benefits, it does not make sense.

I've been involved with my clients in recommending Automation Anywhere.

It is a good tool and one of the market leaders. The ease of implementation is very good in Automation Anywhere compared to other tools. If somebody is just starting out, Automation Anywhere is the best tool to look at to rapidly start because it delivers quickly robotic process automation.

The market is very dynamic. The product needs to be constantly evolving.

They have improved the product a lot since I started working with it.

We started with finance use cases. Some of our biggest success stories have been with collection correspondence strategy around AR and the cash application. We also focus a lot on the financial close process to the month-end processes. These are the biggest areas of focus. We are starting to look at AP in finance. Beyond finance, we're also trying to look at the sales processes. 

Finance was sort of a pilot. We are now looking at sales processes starting from the customer order handling to services, and how we can enrich the experience. Our goal is to enhance the customer experience.

We have a suite of technology products. Most of the time, there is communication between various products. We get a number of emails from our customers that we send out. E.g., our system is based on some criteria that sends emails out to customers. Therefore, there is a lot of user interface level interaction. However, we always look at the problem statement and work through that.

We are a B2B company. We have a lot of communication with our customers in terms of collection correspondence, such as payment reminders. We started with the problem: Should we be a company focused on heavily calling as all companies traditionally are? Or, change that using Automation Anywhere, but how do we communicate with customer using the tool as it is more interactive and individual-driven. We created personalized emails using a digital correspondence strategy. This is an areas where we have delivered results. 

It is easy to code. While you have developers, somebody with a development or workflow mindset can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere by understanding how to put a process in a workflow. If you have that, then you can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere. Even a non-IT or business user can just look at the bot language and understand what the bot is doing, and that's the easy part. This is an interesting part of the product that we are trying to capitalize on.

They consistently endeavor to improve the customer experience. Customer success is their motto. The organization clearly knows who they are and what they stand for. 

We are one of the smaller startups in the area so we experience a lot of issues. Most of the issues have been: 

• How do you build up your platforms? 
• Automation Anywhere is more geared toward how humans work, and a bot works differently.

These are the specific challenges that we have seen.

Some small issues:

• A bot will be working and the the screen will lock out.
• The app has a password change policy every few days.
• One day, there will be a message box saying that the application is down or not available on a weekend. The instructions will say read the information and click, "Okay." But a bot doesn't understand the instructions because it is not the IQ system.
  

There are a lot of initiatives going on. E.g., there is one for the Excel part where they are building a plugin in Excel. Those type of plugins would help if they were built in various applications for integration across applications. I would like more plugins overall. It would be nice to have a plugin for all applications, like PowerPoint or any PDF to text converter, to make the tool easier to work with.

On the user side, we have seen issues with user training.

The product still requires programming knowledge. We would like it to become easy enough to use where anyone in the organization can utilize the tool and use the bots. The usability should be at the same level as a Microsoft Suite product. This is on Automation Anywhere's roadmap to evolve toward this.

It is an evolving platform, but it's fairly stable.

They have frequent upgrades. 

Scalability is dependent on the organization and customer size, but it's a stable platform.

We have not faced issues as we have scaled up.

They have a good 24/7 support system. Even if there is an issue, we are able to solve it.

The ticketing system: You create a ticket and can get support 24/7. That's already a big thing for us. We have had good reviews on it.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. Automation Anywhere did a lot of hand-holding through it

We used Automation Anywhere as our initial service provider.

Our return on investment has more been based on improving things which we could not do earlier. There were some aspects of processes which we had to outsource because we were not able to do these in-house. Our return on investment is based on bringing these outsourced services and processes back in-house. In addition, ROI is based on doing things to improve the customer experience.

We have also seen ROI based on employee experience. Quantification is not easy. We cannot quantify it, but we have millennials coming into the workforce who don't want to do "boring" activities. If you tell them that the organizations has a digital workforce concept, this is a driver for them to think that the organization is the way that it should be. This is bigger than dollars when quantifying value.

Automation Anywhere presented a pitch for the IT solutions that we have. 

We considered the top three vendors. We chose Automation Anywhere because of the customer engagement drives and their integrated services team. The other vendors didn't have this. Automation Anywhere's service team stands out.

If you're starting out and a smaller organization, their arrangement of products helps. Product-wise, there are some pluses and minus in everything

Think of what is the best fit for your organization in terms of a technology platform. Also, have goals in mind, like improving the customer experience, not reducing the FTEs in your organization.

Going forward, there will be new releases on the cloud. 

The primary use case is for a number of different transaction-based systems that the company has.

• We are able to create robotic tasks in a short time.
• Automation Anywhere receives high marks for its ease of use.
• It is able to integrate well with other applications.

A lot of the features that I want to see going forward will be included in the next release.

We have been a little frustrated by the frequency of cache releases.

It has been reliable.

It took a few months for us to scale from pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using.

Their customer support is fantastic.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have saved time and money using this solution.

Annual licensing costs would be about $100,000.

We also evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath. We chose Automation Anywhere because it was the market leader and their user interface is better.

Go for it. The product is easy to use.

For our bot creation process, we get somebody from the business unit to walk us through their process. We usually record that session, then we determine how to create the bot from there.

The Automation Anywhere University courses are very good.

My primary use case was for a project in Brazil, where we managed to download and extract all the invoices which were pending for my company and inputted them in our system. The tool works very well.

We are automatizing redundant activities, releasing employees to do value-added activities. 

The Control Room is a good feature.

I would like more integration around main applications, e.g., SAP.

Automation Anywhere has to keep their RPA tool connected to everything to maintain it in the RPA market.

So far, the stability is not good. We are trying to improve this because we are facing a lot of instability issues. We are now getting some support from the CSM. We are hoping that he will save us from this issue.

It took us three months to scale from pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. We started by experimenting with a very low number on the license: two Bot Runners and five Bot Creators. Now, we have 60 Bot Runners and 35 Bot Creators. We are improving as we are seeing new opportunities.

The technical support has been good. They have been working closely with us. However, at the beginning, their support was splotchy. Now, we are working on specific issues together, and they are getting more involved when looking at the problem as a whole.

This was our first RPA solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. However, integrating the application was not easy. The first setup was very easy, but building the infrastructure to support the application was complex. I am unsure if the problem was my company or the application, since my company has a lot of bureaucracy when raising new VMs and installing new applications. There are a lot of problems regarding security, which is stopping us to move forward and becoming agile.

We used Ernst & Young for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.

We have saved money with the solution.

This tools allows us to remove two FTEs from repetitive tasks to work on other things.

Annually, we are paying almost one million reais.

We looked at UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. We chose Automation Anywhere because it is easy to implement and a good UI, which is different from its competitors.

I recommend trying the tool.

We have a few attended automation bots, which are working well. They work better than the unattended automation. It is an evolutionary process.

We are doing the Automation Anywhere University now for our business, which helps with the ease of use. Our business users don't have development skills, and we are hoping that this resolves that. We have taken two courses, so far. We are now examining the collective results of the participants.

We have not used the Bot Store.

We have automated transaction processing, especially accounts payable, as well as document handling on the HR side, document-reading capabilities, and the downloading of reports from websites and sharing them with users.

Transaction processing is our primary use case.

We started using Automation Anywhere about 18 months ago and it has definitely increased the speed and reduced the total processing time of our transaction processing. It's pretty good.

It's pretty simple and non-invasive. Those are the key features. And the bot creation process is pretty easy.

OCR capabilities are what we're looking for. We started using IQ Bot but we are not utilizing it to the extent that we would like because of some technical issues. We would like to see some development on that side.

It would also help if they integrated AI and other predictive analytics into this solution.

The stability could be enhanced.

It provides high scalability. You can implement this across any industry, any sector.

It took us about one year to scale from pilot to the number of bots we are currently using.

I think we have gone through UiPath and Blue Prism, besides Automation Anywhere. I wasn't part of this team then, but when I go through the documents I see things related to UiPath and to Blue Prism.

We used an integrator. 

We are focusing on time saved. We have almost 27 use cases in production and, as of now, we have saved almost eight FTEs per annum.

I would definitely recommend Automation Anywhere because it's pretty simple, non-invasive, and easy to handle.

In terms of integrating this solution with other applications, the majority of the ERP vendors are now coming up with built-in robotics. That's something which Automation Anywhere has to look into because currently, with Automation Anywhere, integration is an add-on product. Many other technologies are actually integrating RPA into their products.

I haven't taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University, but my team has. It's pretty simple. It's pretty easy.

I would rate the solution at seven out of ten because of the stability issue. Hopefully they can enhance the product. I heard that in the next release they will have natural language processing, not only for English but for other languages.

We have developed apps for accounts payable (finance) to do three-way match.

We are making less mistakes and have more metrics available to understand what our problems are. Now, we can do root cause analysis and have less noise in the system during the process.

The solution has removed humans making errors while increasing our time savings. We now have a lot of more efficiencies in our process.

Our first bot took ten weeks to create. It took six months to create the number of bots that we are currently using.

I have take basic courses at Automation Anywhere University, because I an not actually a programmer. I just needed to know the high level of the product. The Automation Anywhere University was very good.

The setup was straightforward. Understanding what we wanted to do the tool, that was more complex.

We used Thirdware for the deployment.

Automation Anywhere was the only vendor because we were told by our private equity company that was who we were using. However, Automation Anywhere is the industry leader, so it was an easy choice. So, we didn't argue too much with the selection by them, and we did not actually go through a selection process ourselves.

We use a different solution for cognitive document processing, not Automation Anywhere, but we are rethinking this.

No tool will ever fix your company. It is always about the stability of processes, understanding your scope, and what your problems are. This tool is a great tool to help with that once processes are stable. It will always be dependent upon people. Make sure you program the bot to help people, not what you think it needs to be. There will be a lot of meetings, scope developments, and data review, which will need to happen first. Then, if you get good with that, then the tool's going to be excellent.

So far, everything has been good with the solution. It is a great tool.

The integration works very well. We have integrated it with four other software tools.

From a developer perspective, the solution is very simple. Our end users don't really see it. They just see the end result.

Generally, it is used in the banking and financial domains for Oracle and Java-based systems. We also use Automation Anywhere for integration where a third-party tool has to be triggered.

The are many features and we can do many things with it. They've now included the code so we can add some additional code. That's good.

I'd like to see the OCR feature be perfected. Today we get an accuracy ratio from OCR of around 40 percent to 50 percent only. Better OCR would be very useful in the industry because most of the documents in the banking sector are scanned and hand-written and they want to compare them with other documents.

I would also like to see them provide more support: profile documents and guidance. It would also help to have use-case demos available publicly, not on the Automation Anywhere website. Overall, better promotion of the solution would be good for Automation Anywhere.

Stability depends on the local system. It is good. But when we switch the system, when we go to Citrix or we jump to RDP, the modern stuff, it breaks sometimes.

Comparing Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I would go for Blue Prism's stability. It is very stable. Once the coding is done, meaning all the flowcharts are designed, it will work, it will not break. But sometimes, Automation Anywhere fails. It doesn't take the values from the input at times.

The scalability is good.

Automation Anywhere's technical support is good. They provide it via email. There are no issues with it. They have opened their offices for technical support in India. Usually, within 24 hours, we get a resolution via a reply to our email: "This is the issue, and this is the solution," or, "This is the way to do it." It usually doesn't take longer than that.

The setup is usually straightforward, not complex. If you're doing a basic installation, it takes around one hour. If you're installing MetaBots or any plugins, it will take some more time.

The team we work on develops on the weekend. We have Control Room access so we deploy from there. It doesn't require a team though, an individual person who is working on a given project can also install it.

We don't see ROI immediately. It takes from six or seven months to one year to get the ROI from what we develop. The client needs to trust the RPA solution. Once they trust it, the process, etc., they have more confidence and say, "Okay, you can do automate these other things as well." Build a client's confidence takes time.

But at the end of the day or, really, the end of the year, we can see that the ROI is there. There are benefits and they can see the benefits.

Licensing is not done by us but by the server team. They provide the infra and they manage the installation and licensing because licensing is very costly. It's a very confidential thing. They cannot share the license with everyone.

If I compare it with Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is cheaper. Blue Prism is very costly. Automation Anywhere's pricing follows the market, not less and not more.

It's important that all processes are documented properly.

In terms of maintenance, our policy is that we do two weeks of hyper-care. After two weeks it's over to the client and they maintain it from there on. But for those two weeks initially, if there are any errors we will change the code and deliver it. But the maintenance is good. We don't need to modify many things.