Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use it to automate repetitive tasks. When an employee logs into an organization and their work is mundane (doing a repetitive task), I personally feel that it will take a toll on their motivation. We have to do something better as human and it should be more creative. Any repetitive task has to be automated. This improves the morale of employees and will bring out a lot of creativity in them to make more decisions. This is how people start to innovate and how companies grow.

There was a particular use case where we had to automate a customer's email. This customer had a couple of customers to whom they have been writing for intern management. We needed to monitor the intern management emails and pick up the right keywords from the emails, automatically go to the CRM tool, and book a ticket for them. Then, we had to go back to the customer with the acknowledgement email. It was quite interesting.

Initially, there were some hiccups. They were not able to automate the regular chain of automation because of multiple API issues. Then, they thought RPA wold be a better solution and approached us. One of the interesting things was the data that they prepared for us was unstructured. Handling RP unstructured data was a bit hard, but we were using Automation Anywhere. We were able to find the right hot words because they were following certain patterns. We were able to find those patterns within emails.

Bot Insights is the most valuable feature. We don't have to struggle with generating metrics around how the bots are performing. This information coming out of Automation Anywhere is useful to us because of the way the metrics are generated. It inspires confidence in our customers. 

Version 11 is a bit heavy. At times, it takes a toll on the computing resources. It consumes a lot for computing power. We have seen multiple instances where computers or the client has crashed because of this particular problem. Automation Anywhere can improve this a lot. However, the A2019 version will be a lot lighter because it is all web-based. In the future, we expect to see lighter version, but for now, it is okay.

The features around holding and handling Excel data need to be improved. They need to be able to handle data tables, data variable, and Excel numbers.

They need more scripting integration.

It is pretty stable. The error handing features are pretty good. 

Scalability is awesome and on par, but they could do better.

The technical support has been brilliant and good. They have been quick to respond with the right answers, as much as possible.

Our customers get to know about RPA through multiple channels. They are looking to join the race. 

The push for RPA is usually from bottom to top in a company. Someone does research on RPA then needs to convince management. Afterward, they will contact us to run automation scenarios for them.

It is not a one click installation. We need to need to install the SQL Server, then we need to connect them all. This is where I think a normal agent wouldn't be able to do that. We need to deploy senior engineers to do this since it is slightly difficult. We had to train our IT guys on this.

Compared to the competitors who have a fast, swift installation, Automation Anywhere's installation is hard and needs work.

Our customers have better use of their manual resources. 

Costs savings have been seen by employing bots for multiple shifts instead of people. Bots are also more stable.

Automation Anywhere has better brand and marketing than its competitors. They have a lot of success stories from top level people from around the world, which is encouraging.

Go through the Automation Anywhere training modules to understand the tool. Developers should go through the developer training module while business analysts should go through the business training module. This will give you an idea of what Automation Anywhere can do and what it can't do.

The primary use case is automation in respect to the financial sector. We have been operating with trades across globe. 

Right now, we have been upgrading to version 11.3.2. Two months prior, we had been using version 10.7.5.

We have automated a few processes, which take four to five hours to do manually. When we automated these processes that time became less than one hour with RPA. This was our goal. We have reduced the time frame.

The best feature is the MetaBot, which we've been integrating and calibrating with a lot of stuff. This has been helpful to us.

I like the object cloning.

The development period is shorter.

It is easy to fix bug issues which you encounter in the post-production process.

MetaBot still needs to be optimized, though Version 11.3 did integrate all the commands into it. We are not able to see all the lines of code which are executed in MetaBot. 

Integrate .NET functionalities instead of installing Visual Studio, which is an additional resource to us.

Needs more Excel features and functionality.

We are moving onto Python machine learning and would like to have additional functionalities to be added, especially to MetaBot. This would help for the use cases that we are working on.

There are some discrepancies in respect to the variable creation of copying and pasting the code. However, in version 11.3, these type of disturbances has been removed.

The stability is up to 90 percent. It's not a meeting 100 percent because we keep on upgrading. Whenever we upgrade, we have to fine tune a few of the products because we have been interacting with some of the older applications and legacy parts. In those cases, it is somewhat failing. 

The application is very stable in respect to automation. I am able to automate the Terminal Emulator, along with the Linux part, of a command prompt, the web application, and even the simplest application. It has been stable. However, in few cases, it has some pitfalls and stability get reduced.

Scalability is up to the mark. We have been building our solution from the low to high level. It is scalable.

Technical support has been a great asset. We have been encountering migration issues associated with database activities due to computer database back-end. We have contacted the technical support with database issues due to object cloning and SAP Objects. They have been helpful.

Their response time is within one to two hours. In some cases, it has dragged on up to six hours. I haven't found it dragging on for one to two days.

We kept on hiring resources to do the same type of operations, which increased our team resources. So, our SLAs were not up to the mark. the client that we were supporting was not satisfied. Therefore, we pushed toward RPA to optimize a few areas, such as onboarding employees, company access, and reading invoices from the PDF files. 

The documentation is very clear in respect to the installation and migration. If there are any bugs or anything goes wrong, the technical support team helps. The installation and setup are very straightforward. It was very easy for us.

We have seen ROI as we keep on increasing bot utilization and building our own solution. We have optimized a few bots and integrated them into our solution. These bots have helped us prioritize our operations.

We are increasing our SME's time. Depending on the bots that we code, we are sometimes increasing or decreasing our developers' time.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is more flexible in development and production. The development timeline is short. 

UiPath has a lot of functionalities, but a lot of those functionalities can be replicated using MetaBot.

Blue Prism uses a workflow functionality, which seems like chaos to me.

I would encourage a developer to learn RPA and enhance their knowledge. If they start with Automation Anywhere, it will be easy to continue learning on the tool. It is harder to transition for another RPA tool to Automation Anywhere.

We're using it across a number of departments. So far we have implementations for finance and cost-control, as well as operational and logistics uses.

Our deployment is a hybrid solution. We have an on-premise component and some portions are in Azure.

We've implemented a few solutions that are helping us out in a couple of different dimensions. One of the big ones for us is cost-control. We've been able to identify certain billing errors and to dispute them or avoid overpaying in certain instances. It's helping us to improve both the visibility of the accuracy of the invoices we're receiving, as well as any instances where there might be disputed amounts. It's also allowed us, for certain tasks that have previously been repetitive or manual-data-entry heavy, to centralize and then automate them and reduce the number of actual employees we need on those mundane tasks. It's been very helpful for that.

The core functionality, the ability to automate these tasks and to interact, both with our own in-house software solutions as well as with our customers' and vendors' solutions and portals, has been incredibly valuable for us.

We're also beginning to dip our toes in the water with the IQ Bots, to do some OCR and some machine-learning. So far that is looking like it will be very valuable to us as well.

One thing about it that we have not found to be exceptionally useful are the built-in bot analytics, the Bot Insights. From our own extensive experimentation, as well as from what we've understood from other people using this solution, we've been able to come up with better solutions using our own in-house analytics and our own systems than through theirs.

Also, we're seemingly plagued with certain technological issues or bugs. In particular, at the moment, we're in the middle of a pretty serious issue that's blocking our further development. We have been working with the Automation Anywhere support team on it, but it's been dragging on for a while now and we still haven't received a solution from them yet. We're hoping to get that resolved and move forward. 

There's definitely some funkiness or some jankiness, sometimes, with working with them.

The stability has been mixed. In fairness, it's hard to say how much of that is issues with the solution itself, versus any issues that we may have had in the setup and integrating it into our own systems. It's definitely taken us a while to get to a point where we're comfortable with it being able to run consistently and smoothly. We've made a lot of progress in that regard and we're seeing a lot of improvements as well.

Our issues tend to be more on the development side. We've had pretty decent success once the solutions are fully developed and deployed, as far as stability is concerned. But, we have definitely encountered a lot of issues and hiccups along the road, while developing.

It seems pretty scalable. We're looking into scaling up in the near term. The pool seems pretty scalable and good to us from what we've seen so far.

We currently have six or seven processes that we've automated using Automation Anywhere and we're looking to increase that number quite a lot here in the U.S. We have a prioritized list of another 50 or so tasks that we'd like to try to automate with the solution. In addition, we're working to generate interest among some of our other agencies and countries worldwide, in using it.

Their technical support is good. Any issues that we've raised, they've gotten right back to us and helped come up with solutions. It has taken longer than we would have liked for some of our thornier problems to reach a resolution. At the moment we're a little stuck, based on a problem that we're having, although tech support has been responsive and has worked closely with us to try to come up with a solution.

This is the first RPA solution that we have used.

The initial setup was definitely complex. It took us and our IT teams quite some time to get everything set up the way we needed it, with our three environments. Part of that was getting the Control Room installed and set up, as well as making sure that the client was running properly on all of our machines. It definitely took us some time to get that all running smoothly, a few months to get everything deployed.

We're a global company and our U.S. offices have been running this as a pilot for global. We've been sitting with different departments and stakeholders to try and understand what processes might be right for automation and for this kind of solution. We've been compiling that list, prioritizing, and trying to get the buy-in of the people who will be most impacted by it. We've also been trying to get some early, big wins as far as ROI is concerned, and as far as demonstrating the value of the technology, so that we can continue to roll out more, here in the U.S. and, hopefully, more broadly later on.

It has all been done in-house.

We are definitely seeing positive ROI on this, between some cost reductions as well as some FTE replacement for the more repetitive or mundane tasks.

Licensing is done on a yearly basis. There are some additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. There are a couple of add-ons we've looked at: The IQ Bot for OCR and machine-learning were add-ons, as well as the Bot Insights - the analytics.

We got The Bot Insights rolled in immediately, on a trial basis. The Meta Bots, if not immediately, we had added on very early on. The IQ Bot is something that we've been looking into recently. We have not yet purchased that license. We have run a PoC with it and are looking into adding that on.

We did evaluate other options but I wasn't directly involved in the initial screening process. I do know that we examined three or four other solutions before settling on Automation Anywhere.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that nothing is as easy as it seems it should be.

One of the things a number of people are looking for out of an automation solution is a reduction in FTEs. I know Automation Anywhere would prefer we not describe its usefulness in those terms, but I know that's something that a lot of people are into. While it certainly can achieve that, the estimates going in tend to be very high and the reality is that you're not really hitting those numbers. So be very conservative when you evaluate it. It has absolutely been worth it for us and has provided us with good value. But the optimism going in - and I've heard this from other people we've met at the Imagine events, etc. - is over-optimistic and the actual numbers are less than what is estimated. Being realistic about that is very important.

Also, if you're using any kind of custom, in-house software, seeing how it interacts with that is important. It can be a little persnickety about interacting correctly, especially if it's an older, legacy system. It runs very smoothly across many different types of software and modern interfaces. But it can be a little challenging working with something that's a little older or more specialized and customized.

Currently, we have five to ten users, ranging from very much involved to just being onboard or peripherally involved. We have a number of developers directly using the technology, as well as project managers. Those are the people who are directly involved. The number is much larger if you include the business users who are impacted by the solution, impacted by the bots that we've created and their results. I would estimate, roughly, 50 users are benefiting from it right now.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, we're getting back to that five to ten people. We have four or five developers who are developing new bots. We have three IT people who are involved very directly in maintaining our servers and the virtual machines that we're running these on, as well as providing technical support for the overall infrastructure and setup. Those are the people who are directly involved at the nuts-and-bolts level.

It's been very helpful. In many ways it's doing what it says it can do. It's automating processes, it's got some good settings for controlling, running, monitoring, and maintaining that. On the other hand, our experience in actually developing with it and making the bots has been rockier than we would like. Also, the setup - getting the infrastructure and the installs set up properly - and updating, when updates roll out, are a bit complex.

The tool is used to automate any business process. Some examples are:

• If you want to download some data from a website or push some data onto a website.
• If you work with an Excel application and want to automate it, or any Windows-based application, you can automate it as long as you know what the business process is.
• If a person is doing a day-to-day activity and you want to automate that activity, you can use the Automation Anywhere tool to do it.

I have worked with the Windows, Excel, and web applications, along with some SAP automation and how to automate that SAP data. I use Automation Anywhere to determine automation for how to:

• Distribute the process. 
• Schedule the process. 
• Run the process. 
• Design the process.
• Distribute the data for 1000 to 10,000 data points (in Excel).

I have automated the invoicing in a finance department, where the finance department wanted to automate the invoicing process. They wanted to do the following:

• Invoice the data.
• Create the invoice.
• Mail the invoice.
• Download the invoice data.

If you have 10 operators currently performing these activities everyday, then you automate the process, by removing the 10 operators and having only one operator required, this will decrease costs. It will also increase the efficiency of your company.

In the automatic invoicing system, we created a file which pushes onto a shared folder. The bot will pick up the file automatically from the shared folder and process the invoice. Therefore, if tomorrow, another bot were to be created, we could just create a file and copy it to the shared folder, then it would pick up the file and process the invoice.

I utilize all the commands provided by Automation Anywhere, such as all the recorders. I use these commands to develop my processes and bots.

Automation Anywhere has a drag and drop process.

Automation Anywhere needs to improve Excel and its commands. In Excel, if you want to add a sheet, you cannot add a sheet. There is no command for adding a sheet. Also, if you want to rename something in Excel, you cannot rename it. You always must keep a list that you can rename through your keyboard, but there is no specific command in Automation Anywhere. 

The email automation command also needs to be improved. The email automation command sometimes is not working properly. When you connect the mail server, it is not being done properly.

The OCR feature is not that reliable.

With the PDF command, you can only read structured data. If your data is in an unstructured format, there is no command for it in Automation Anywhere. Then, people need to use Python coding if their data is in unstructured format. Therefore, Automation Anywhere needs to improve in the PDF area.

I have been using the product for the last two years.

I didn't have any stability issues. 

I haven't found any scalability issues with it. If the volume increases tomorrow, another bot can be added from the Control Room.

I worked with a single deployment model, which didn't have a load balancer requirement. Higher availability deployments require load balancers.

I haven't dealt with Automation Anywhere's technical support.

For the implementation, you just follow the proper process on how to deploy the proper hardware configuration on the production environment. The process does not take that much time as you push files to the Control Room, then from the Control Room, you can download the client. It does depend on how many bots you are implementing and how you are scheduling them.

Automation Anywhere is deployed from a deployment guideline in a step-by-step process. Automation Anywhere provides some deployment guidelines, which can be referred to.

Only one person is required for deployment: the Control Room administrator.

The number of people required for monitoring the solution depends on the amount of bots deployed.

It saves time and money. If a bot does the same work as nine out of 10 people, then you are saving money through wages. Also, a bot will work all hours without interruption, whereas FTEs may need time off or vacation. 

I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator. 

The Automation Anywhere automation tool is user-friendly, especially compared to UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere's deployment is also easy compared to other RPA tools.

The solution is good for people who want to do their job quickly without any delay or problems. 

The future of IT will require every organization to need automation.

The Control Room is good in version 11, as compared to the previous versions of the Control Room.

We use it for every aspect of our company: Financials, purchasing, HR, etc. 

It has taken a lot of manual Excel manipulation that we have previously did, and removed that work away from people who did that for ten hours a day, five days a week. We now have a robot doing this manual work, allowing us to refocus those our resources into more value-add activities, simplifying our landscape.

The flexibility: If there is anything the tool cannot do, we have the ability to make a MetaBot to achieve that functionality. The overall flexibility of the tool makes it very useful for us in our landscape.

We have integrated it with everything from standard off-the-shelf products, like SAP and Oracle, to custom apps that we built within our landscape. The integration to other applications is very good and easy.

I would like more integration into the entire Microsoft Suite of products, not just Excel. Companies use all of Microsoft products at the same time, and being good at just one Microsoft tool is a limiting factor. Being able to use Microsoft Excel, Access, and Outlook together and have them integrated (as standard) into the tool would be very useful, especially when you go into attended automation.

They keep rolling out more features in selected areas. They should broaden their scope.

We intentionally took a long time to scale up to our current number of bots because we focused on using large processes, instead of small ones. For us to grow to scale, it took us about a year and a half. However, we have been focusing on processes with tens of FTEs per year, instead of about processes that are one to two hours per day.

The technical support is good. Whenever we have issues with the product, the support team gets back to us normally within half a day, or sometimes even sooner, with direct answers of how we can solve our issues. If they don't have documentation for it, they have somebody call us, and we have the issue resolved in a day or two.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was in-house.

We did the deployment in-house.

Do your homework on your use cases. Knowing which use cases are really good for RPA is crucial in getting the program started. If you don't have your use cases identified, or have your functional processes identified, that want to automate, then it makes the scaling aspects more challenging.

I am RPA professionally certified through Automation Anywhere and have taken multiple classes through the Automation Anywhere University. The courses are good. They are just like any other online training courses, which I have taken through other vendors, like Microsoft or SAP. It is on par with those vendors who have been doing this for a long time.

As long as a person has a semi-technical mindset, the product is very simple to use. Even for the traditional business user, with just a little training, we are able to bring them up to speed on how to use the tool fairly easily. The tool is very good, as far as ease of use.

As long as you have a technical mindset or are able to think in a certain manner, the creation of a bot is very intuitive, especially since the tool is drag and drop. For example, I am able to take any of the commands that I need and put them in the right sequence of orders. This makes it very intuitive to create a bot from start to finish.

We are evaluating the cognitive document processing as something to use in the future, but are not currently using it.

I use Automation Anywhere to automate the data input process and produce the forecasting output.

We store our data in Databricks, which is sometimes shared via email. To automate this process, I've created a pipeline using Automation Anywhere that extracts CSV files from emails, uploads them to Databricks, saves the resulting table on a selected AWS page, processes the data, and feeds it into the model.

Automation Anywhere is user-friendly, with drag-and-drop features for nontechnical users.

The learning curve is no more than one month.

It integrates well with other tools.

Automation Anywhere saves us one month per year.

Automated data processing is the most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for 16 months.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

Automation Anywhere is scalable.

Automation Anywhere supports automation to scale.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The deployment is straightforward and can be completed within one and two weeks.

Before implementing, we want to ensure we have all the support and collaboration.

Automation Anywhere is affordable.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten because it is practical and user-friendly.

My business Analysis team describes the cases, and my architect team works based on that. I look into how this architect team is working to fulfill the requirements of my client.

Our use cases mainly are for the financial domain. We are working for an international organization. The automation that we are building is going to be utilized in various projects for tracking the expenditures of projects, managing the budget, and maintaining the planning. The information is then returned to the core finance providers. 

We have integrated it with TMX and the public finance model. Government Resource Planning or GRP is integrated. We have implemented a lot of triggers to give all the information to various points.

We have our own architecture. It is able to take the information from the core engine, API engine, or triggers from databases or data pipelines and execute the process based on the defined logic. It is able to give information to various process owners using the workflow.

In most places, the processes are scheduled automatically, so it saves time because we are not executing any process manually. For example, we are able to get information about the utilization of the funds given to a particular country for a specific purpose. It triggers an alert if the funds are being spent in a particular area that is not allowed based on the business logic.

Being able to implement automation is valuable. We take the business logic and provide a solution to the client. Defining the intelligence pipeline is the most interesting and challenging aspect for me.

For us, nothing is complicated. It is quite easy. We have a competency and learning team that gives training to clients. It does not seem very difficult for them.

The approval process needs improvement.

We have been using this solution for approximately one and a half years. I do not directly use it, but my team uses it.

It is a private server farm where we have implemented AWS because the governments do not allow hosting on the cloud in most countries. This is a restriction from the government side.

We have two teams. One is the technical team, which is involved in network security and the server side. I am from the functional team where we are involved in all the services, all the applications, and all the databases. The technical team takes care of the software installation, maintenance, patches, and upgrades. We are only working on the application side.

I did not evaluate any other solution. I got the instructions from my company to use it.

We have a full-fledged deployment of automation in our organization, and we have a number of projects in the pipeline. There are definitely a lot of possibilities inside the organization, not only for me but also for my team members.

The main challenge currently is that we do not have proper resources, and the requirement of the client is very specific. Apart from that, I have not felt any problem with my team in deploying any of the solutions at the client site, so at this point in time, I cannot say that a specific technology is the best technology or that Automation Anywhere is the best. We are facing some challenges, and we are working on that. We are getting references of some of the other solutions, and we are working. We are doing the research every day and providing the solution to the client. Every day, it is a new challenge, and we are implementing the solution on the client site and understanding how to overcome those challenges.

At the moment, a person like me who is only working on one particular technology cannot compare it with other available alternatives in the market.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I have used AA to automate window-based applications like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Database, Microsoft Office (Excel, Access), CSV/TXT file, folders based operations, etc. When it comes to web-based applications, AA really shines. Automation applications Share-point, Blackline Reconciliation, Agile point submissions, and Web-based reporting exercises are in real-time.

When it comes to the database AA also works pretty well with SQL and Oracle by executing CRUD queries.

Automation Anywhere has improved my organization by automating many rule-based and nonjudgmental processes in domains like telecommunications, human resources, financial services, and daily or monthly reporting. The deployed bots/automation helped the organization in terms of errorless progress, meeting SLAs in time, 24/7 working hours, reducing dependencies from the human workforce, and FTE realization.

The realized FTE was deployed in more of a complex process and the employee utilization also improved. 

Out of all the features from Automation Anywhere version 11, IQ Bot, is the most valuable feature because it helps us in the conversion of semi or unstructured data to structured data which made it possible to automate a lot of complex processes.

Other than the IQ Bot, the below commands in the task bot also shine in a very useful and reliable way:

Excel Spreadsheet Commands, Database Commands, API Integration, Credential locker management feature and Workload management feature.

The Automation Anywhere Control room component features can be improved, as of now it contains too many roles and rules which makes it confusing to use it.

They should make it more simple because a lot of times I have to go through the user manual while dealing with the Automation Anywhere Control Room.

I always wanted a python and javascript editing console in version 11, which I later found in A2019. Earlier, only Run script command was there to directly run the scripts which somehow creates one additional dependency to the solution.

I am using AA v11 for three years and A2019 for the last two months.

Its pretty nice actually. AA is very stable with Windows-based applications.

When it comes to scalability, the mini bots comes into the picture and helps us to scale the automation. 

It was very satisfying.

I have used Blue Prism as a primary automation tool but due to the limitation of commands/stages the organization considered AA as a primary tool. 

It was very easy to install since it automatically validates if all required files are installed in the machine or not.

My organization is partners with Automation Anywhere.

I am just a developer so I have no idea about ROI.

I do not have that much knowledge about cost/pricing or licensing details.

I worked with Blue Prism also.

I am pretty impressed with the A 2019 version.