Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use this solution primarily for transporting data from Excel to SAP. 

This solution has decreased the time that our employees spend on manual processes. It has solved many of the problems for mundane and rule-based activities, so we can do some parallel creative work rather than taking care of these things.

The most valuable part of this solution is the import feature. We can take the data from where it is stored, in Excel, and upload it to a web site or where we need it.

The interface is user-friendly, well-developed, and straightforward.

When it comes to reading email, this solution is unstable and improvements need to be made. Specifically, it should be able to handle email based on the subject or the email sender.

This solution is quite stable for daily activities, but it has problems with reading email and improvements need to be made.

For the version that I have and what I'm using it for, the scalability is very good.

Technical support for this solution is very good. The response is very good and they come back to us very fast.

We did not use another solution prior to this one. Our employees were getting bored of doing the same thing, which is why we started looking into automation.

The initial setup of this solution was a little difficult. When we had trouble, we started calling the technical support team and they solved it. It was a little messy in the beginning.

We have just started using this solution, so we have not seen ROI yet.

We had heard great things about this solution so we chose it without evaluating other options.

This is a user-friendly solution that is all drag-and-drop, and very good.

When a new version of this solution is released, it would be very helpful if the vendor would give an explanation as to everything that is new. Simply releasing it is not a good idea.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our journey starts from discovering and understanding what process to automate. That's where our deep domain and process expertise come into the picture. We leverage process mining technologies over there, partnerships with Celonis and TimelinePI. We take advantage of that. The journey continues from there to designing and developing automations. Automation Anywhere is the RPA platform we use for creating the bots in automation and along with that we also use many of the technologies including AI and ML. 

Toward this life cycle, we have a very structured approach of governing, monitoring, and tracking. Insights we gain from this governance, we apply towards automation strategy and implementations. We've done this for many clients across the globe. We are happy to share those experiences with some of you as well.

The focus on usability and user experience is bang on. Addressing several personas and making it easy for every persona to adopt and embrace is the spot on focus. That's an area that has a lot more room to improve. In the absence of that, the skills and expertise in the industry are going to struggle and if you need broader adoption, which has maximum potential, the persona-based user experience is a focus and I'd say Automation Anywhere is already working on.

In terms of onboarding, we step back and think about how to leverage this technology. We have created some IP around this and leverage our deep learnings from several implementations. We apply the process and domain expertise and determine which process needs to be automated by leveraging what technology and what ROI will you get out of it.

We leverage the process insights technology, we bring that to the table, we understand what processes need to be automated and we apply the relevant technologies. Automation Anywhere is one of the many we apply in transforming across automating the entire process end to end.

Number one thing when you're trying to automate, you need to start thinking beyond productivity gains and think about other value drivers such as improved business outcomes and superior customer experiences. The creation of a bot is only one half of the journey. The other half of the journey is understanding what to automate, what technologies to use and having a digital workforce and a governance platform around it is the other half of the journey. That's the one big learning for all of us from the many implementations we have done.

I would rate it around eight to nine. We have personally seen the platform really mature from several implementations, from scalability to availability, to API programmability. The vision and the journey Automation Anywhere is on is phenomenal.

In our company, if you look at the SAP security area, there are a lot of user requests. There's a confusion around the rules. With Automation Anywhere, we can increase the automation capabilities and automate all the user-provisioning in that area.

It's definitely useful. I went through the enterprise client and the Control Room and using it, a lot of processes can be automated. The SAP integrations look to be very useful. We have a big SAP shop, so a lot of processes can be automated using that integration.

There are three parts to the savings: 

1. the number of hours saved
2. the dollar amount saved
3. how streamlined the process is.

A manual process can be one where an email is sent and then another email is sent to get the approval, and they have to wait one or two weeks until that email comes back. That full manual process can take three weeks while the automated task takes about 30 minutes.

Ease of use is one thing that definitely first comes to mind when I think of Automation Anywhere. The tools are built in a fairly straightforward way. The documentation is really good and a Knowledge Base is available on every topic.

The bot creation process is very straightforward compared to other tools I have used. ServiceNow has a workflow which is a drag-and-drop activity itself, and then you configure it. Here they are going in that direction too: flow, design. It's really good.

The number of activities available to automate is amazing. There are 500-plus so there are a lot of possibilities with that. I can automate a lot of processes.

I would like to see more bots available right out-of-the-box in the SAP area. For example, if you take the overall OTC in our organization, we have to contact 15 teams. Even if we provide one big bot for the OTC, it won't work. It will not be used by one person. So if there could be more specific bots out-of-the-box, that would be really helpful. 

An example would be a credit check. There might be one there but I'm just giving an example where it would be specifically targeting a single process. 

More Meta Bots would also be good because they are reusable. If we had more of them that would make it faster for whomever is working on them and make the process more seamless. They would be able to build the bots very fast.

As of now, we have one or two instances of Automation Anywhere, so I'm not yet able to comment on its stability. Once we install it in production, with multiple processes running, multiple bots running, we'll have to see how it performs overall, how scalable it is.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we're currently using went pretty quickly. I have talked to other teammates who are working on Automation Anywhere and developing the bots. I've heard really good feedback on that. It's within weeks, and sometimes days, depending on the complexity.

Doing a simple password reset went really fast. If they are doing something on an OTC process or a P2P process or integrating with SAP, it will be a long process. First, you have to get approval from all the business owners and understand the process. That takes time. But the technical aspect - once you have everything in place and you know what you are going to do - the coding itself, is pretty fast.

I have not yet had to contact technical support.

In terms of switching to a new solution, as a company, if we grow out of a solution or it's not at a level that will help us with all scenarios within the company, then they will usually look to change.

There are many factors they look at, such as return on investment and cost. They will look at all the parameters, but the main parameter will be that it should be very useful to all the different teams. It also needs to be scalable since we have about 50,000 employees.

The setup was straightforward.

We managed it ourselves.

You will usually see return on investment easily see because of the depth of things you can automate with it is huge.

My way measuring ROI of an automated process is that first, even before starting any automation, I will see what the input is for the process, how the process works, what the output from the process is, and I'll measure how much time it takes, end-to-end in the manual process.

There will be some initial investment ahead of time and, after that, everything is a return on investment. Based on the number of minutes it takes manually, versus automation, the reduced amount of time will be the savings that I calculate, per request. I'll put a dollar amount to it based on who the user is. If they are, for example, paid $50 per hour, and the automation saves 40 minutes, that's a savings of $33 per request.

Every time we do an automation, we definitely note how many requests it processes. For example, in ServiceNow we count every automation request that goes through, without manual intervention. It writes to a table and we go there and run a report on the table. Straight away, I know my return on investment from that part of the automation.

As you understand more and apply the tool to the processes, you will start to leverage the tool more quickly. 

I have looked at other tools, like UiPath. While I have not completely tested them, Automation Anywhere definitely has ease of use and a strong community available.

I have taken the developer courses and done certification in the Automation Anywhere University. It's really good and helpful and I was able to grasp things quickly by using it. I installed the Community Edition on my laptop and started using it straight away. It's very good.

I would rate the product at nine out of ten because of the number of uses. We have automated 30 to 40 processes. Those kinds of things have been very easy to automate using Automation Anywhere. We didn't need any other platforms. We were able to straight-out build all the bots. 

As I said, there could be more on the SAP integration side. Also, knowledge of the actual process of automating is not readily available outside. If they could build up their Knowledge Base more that would be helpful. That's where the real investment for the company is, not in automating the IT team's requirements. For example, if I automate an application for my IT team, that's one thing, but if I automate a business process and I'm able to provide them analysis and provide a report on something that the business really needs, that will help to deliver on the business side. There's a difference.

Most of our use cases are for primary supply chain management. We have a lot of business processes and back office automation that we do primarily for our product people and our finance team. Most of the work is automation done in supply chain management, product setup, and product administration. 

I have been using this solution for almost four years and one year at my current company.

We have automated our critical functions, like supply chain management and purchase orders. Overall, there's been a direct benefit from it so far. We just completed our Phase I project this year. We have staff who have been moved out of the mundane tasks and are now doing value-added activities. 

Object cloning is the primary way of capturing inputs from screen scraping or mimicking the user flow, and it is 70 percent of the work that we do using Automation Anywhere.

We have a few issues which have persisted. These end up restarting the machine. We are hoping in version 11.3 of Automation Anywhere, our compatibility and infrastructure issues will be resolved. 

If you are using object cloning, it is stable. However, if you work with image recognition and custom objects, there are stability issues. 

We are on version 10.5.7. We have upgraded bits of it to 11.3, but it is still not operational on 11.3. We are currently working on migrating our infrastructure to version 11.3.

We are still small from a robotics implementation standpoint. We are just about 20 bots right now with no issues. If we scale up to 500 bots, I am not sure how the infrastructure and systems will behave, but I have had a good experience from a scalability standpoint on the tool so far.

I have a team of about 25 people with six people in support with the rest in development. At any given time, we have more than 50 people running Automation Anywhere.

This particular ticket management system works well. It's a reliable. If we need to a raise ticket for any issue, there is an escalation mechanism. Though, I have not used it. I try to utilize our customer success manager to be able to right person from Automation Anywhere. My experience has been good, though not excellent, from a support standpoint.

We were not using a solution before Automation Anywhere.

In version 11.3, the setup changed. So far, it has been simpler. Also, in version 11, they have changed the design into a Java Jetty architecture, which is more stable. However, we were not familiar with it, so we had some issues with it. Thankfully, Automation Anywhere diligently answered our calls and helped us through the installation. It wasn't easy to install on our own using the guide. We needed support from a technical entity from the support site to be able to do it.

It needs a lot of coordination between the DBAs, which is a separate team within our organization, the infrastructure team, our team, and the Automation Anywhere teams to execute the deployment. Getting them all together was a good three hours exercise just to install.

Two people from my team worked on the deployment, one of them being a DBA.

I have a technical team of support members who know our internal infrastructure. We built it in-house and the support is not outsourced to any IT vendors. We take care of the infrastructure provisioning, support, etc. We do everything ourselves, along with the help of Automation Anywhere.

I have a deployed team of six people for maintenance. 

We have seen more efficient processing and less number of errors due to quality control.

Savings have not been able to catch it that much. I believe there is huge potential here. This year, we are focusing a lot on the indirect benefits of speeding up the process. For example, we want our key customers to benefit, or buyers and suppliers boost up their business to receive benefits indirectly by freeing up their time.

They give us a good deal on the licensing because we bundle and customize things. If you ask to get a bulk business deal, you will receive more benefit. If you take other products from the suite, like IQ Bot, you can also receive a deal on the licensing. 

We have also worked with them for so long now that we have developed a relationship.

My current company looked at UiPath. We decided to go with Automation Anywhere vs UiPath, because of cost, reliability, and scalability.

We do look at companies like Microsoft Azure to do unstructured data processing for us.

It is a good with a good support app, but I would like it to work 100 percent of the time.

We are looking to increase our usage in the future. First, we need to locate the opportunities to automate within our organization to automate which are good contenders for RPA engines. We are also trying to standardize our processes to push more processes into the automation pipeline, leading to expansion. We are getting Automation Anywhere to assist with this as part of our Phase II project, and increase our bot usage by the end of the year.

If you are implementing it, you should have a good business case. Know what you're using it for: Is it for your direct or indirect benefits and what is the business value that you're going to bring in on the tool. Providing the tools for your business are important before onboarding it. Once you have onboarded it, you will need a good, capable team in-house to be able to keep the infrastructure maintained. 

Start slow. Don't start with a huge approach, then you decide that you failed. Do some proof on concepts. Ensure there is work for your organization. Gain the trust of your stakeholders. Then, take baby steps to move forward.

We only use Automation Anywhere on the RPA site because our internal Automation Anywhere customers are varied. Since Automation Anywhere doesn't have an office in Turkey, our customers there work on UiPath. We are automating some business processes based on a checklist. Automation Anywhere is also used for a few OCR projects that involve scanning documents or images and extracting the information. We can automate those jobs with RPA technology. 

Automation Anywhere is user-friendly. Business users can easily use the solution to automate tasks like sending emails without any technical skills. Of course, you need some analytical thinking skills but don't need to know how to code. All the activities are in the tool if you want to replace or manipulate the text. While UiPath requires some development skills, any business user can use Automation Anywhere. It takes about 10 to 15 days to complete one process. If it is more complex, it might take around 20 days, but it's usually around 10 days. 

You can automate any system within your environment. There are various systems that Automation Anywhere can integrate. You can use it for web, desktop, or cloud automation. There are no restrictions on what it can automate.

The training Automation Anywhere provides is excellent. Anyone can easily learn about the solution. They also have a free trial version that you can use online. If you practice daily, learning the solution takes about two or three months. 

Automation Anywhere should make it easier for developers to manage queues and exception handling.  The OCR component could also be better. We have had to use other OCR tools to get information from the account documents. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere is a professional enterprise tool that can scale to meet all our business requirements. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of ten. We have used support a few times for one of our customers, and they respond quickly. If the issue involves a critical production system, they respond to the request on the same day. We can schedule a meeting to solve the problem together.

Positive

We also use UiPath. Implementing projects in Automation Anywhere is easier, but UiPath is more useful for DevOps. On the technical side, the two solutions are similar, but there are differences in the front end. UiPath is faster. Automation Anywhere runs a process in two seconds, but UiPath takes milliseconds. 

You can develop any process with these tools, but our Turkish customers prefer UiPath because it has an office in Turkey so that we can take support in our mother language. Both of them meet our requirements.

Deploying Automation Anywhere is straightforward. It doesn't take much time. All of the processes need some maintenance because the processes running in the system sometimes don't work. We need to rerun the processes or change the elements. We have a 17-person team, and three of us are responsible for maintaining. The time spent maintaining bots varies. Sometimes, the issue is easy to fix, but if you need to change the flows or do some development, it may take two or three days. 

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten. It depends on your skill. I would rate it higher for non-technical users. 

I worked for a call center company and most of the use cases were related to developing automation for our clients. We also created some automation for internal processes.

The integrations of Automation Anywhere with the mainframe application for banking companies are among the most valuable features. Banking companies have a black screen (a text-based user interface) used in some banking core systems. In our case, we were able to create very good solutions integrated with that kind of platform using Automation Anywhere. 

Also, if you need to use OCR automation to process standard invoices and send the information to another platform, that is also a very good feature.

The goal of any automation is to provide efficiencies. I would like a way, within the platform, to track the benefits. If you are the center of excellence manager, you need to show to the C level the value that you are adding to the company. The unique way to show that to the C level is how much money you are bringing into the company or how much money you are saving the company in costs. I would like a default feature where each bot gives us data on all the benefits it provides from its process.

They also need to improve and work very hard on the user experience to democratize automation.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

It's a very good platform in terms of stability.

Automation Anywhere has very good scalability when you want to scale an existing bot.

It is very easy to contact them and receive support from them.

Positive

We were working with a local system.

The initial setup is very easy. If you are not setting it up in a virtual environment, it takes between half an hour and one hour, maximum.

We have deployed it on the cloud, using AWS.

There is no maintenance of the solution on our side.

My team did the setup.

These types of companies, in automation, need to evaluate their business models. They sell it by license, but if they could charge by case or by interaction, that might be better. Right now, it's expensive when you want to scale or use them for simple processes.

I know my Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism and, now, Microsoft Power Automate. If you want to automate a simple process, these solutions are very good. But if you need to integrate different platforms or systems using an API, or if you want to widen the scope of automation to create an automated process, end to end, that is going to be difficult for any user. You need to be a developer with very good programming skills. If you are going to automate, for example, downloading emails, Automation Anywhere is okay for non-technical users. But the license is very expensive, so you have to weigh the benefit that you are going to receive.

For me and my team of around 150 developers who are engineers, the learning curve was very easy. For them, it took two or three months because they were already familiar with the logic. Automation Anywhere has good information on the web where the guys can access material and forums to learn about creating different types of automation.

The benefits, for us, from Automation Anywhere are more related to the business case than the tool. You need to have a very good approach from the business analyst's perspective to understand the added value that an automated process can bring to the company.

The most important thing is to train the business analysts in your company to identify what the best processes are to automate, to get the most benefit from the tool.

Overall, this is a very good tool if you have all the permissions and accesses, and you can work without any virtual environment, like VDI or Citrix.

Parts of Automation Anywhere (AA) that we are using include IQ BOT, RPA products, and a human in the loop attended Bots as well.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is useful for our customers.

Automation Anywhere IQ Bot is very strong in comparison to other vendors because Automation introduced this intelligent document processing product a long time ago, which is one of its unique features. 

When compared to UiPath and Blue Prism, the rest of the products are the same. They are distinct in comparison to the IQ Bot, but other than that, they share many of the same features as other products.

Automation Anywhere has a uniqueness with respect to the IQ Bot.

There is room for improvement; with the overall architecture as it is tightly coupled. Everything is coupled with the Control Room of the overall product architecture.

When I look at the UiPath product, where they have a mostly combined architecture and development environments. It should be more loosely coupled, but both products have advantages and disadvantages. 

The overall product in Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to improve a little bit on the overall architecture side.

Integrations should be included with the analytics platforms and third-party SAP, enterprise-level applications, as well as if there are any built-in connectors where you can connect with the ERPs to automate the required teams. 

There are ready-made connectors available, which will help to democratize automation across the enterprise with various customers across the globe.

They should include integration with not only analytics but also analytics and enterprise applications, as well as advanced AI/ML features. It's not just about the IdP; some AI/ML features should be available. Aside from computer vision, NLP, NLU, and NLG, as well as a variety of other advanced features, should be included.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere (AA) for six years.

For the last two years, Automation Anywhere (AA) has been deployed on the cloud, and prior to that, it was on-premises.

There are several versions of Automation Anywhere. They have version 11, as well as Automation 360 and Enterprise 360.

Version 11 is considered stable. You will also notice that Automation 360 is attempting to stabilize the overall product.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere's cloud version is excellent, but the on-premise version is a waste of time and money.

I'm familiar with both Automation Anywhere (AA) and UiPath.

Initial setup, after cloud, is fine. It was complicated earlier, but it's fine now. When you sign up for a cloud subscription, then it's plug and play, but it's a little more complicated in the case of on-premises.

I compared Automation Anywhere to UiPath and Blue Prism.

We are resale local partners.

I would rate Automation Anywhere (AA) an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution in my environment is to use bots to extract the important logistical information from each of the customer Microsoft Excel sheets. Next, the information is transferred, to be entered into the government official logistics documentation.

Prior to submitting the data to the company warehouse management system, it is checked and balanced. The same needs to be done before submission to the official government website.

It helps my organization to further improve the management and assigning of tasks to its human resources.

Through the use of Automation Anywhere bots, no longer do the staff in my organization need to carry out the task of transferring data from Excel sheets to our data or the government website. Thus, as all of these processes are being automated, this manpower can now be shifted to be used in other areas that can be beneficial to the company.

The most valuable feature is IQ Bot, as it allowed us to train it to extract important logistical information from customer PDF documents, irrespective of the format. This is valuable because not all PDF sheets have the same format. Many customers tend to use various formats to represent their data. Hence, with IQ bot, even with the wide variety of different PDF formats, the bots would still able to help us extract what we needed.

I hope that Automation Anywhere can further optimize its bots to help automate tasks with Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft PowerPoint documents because, in most organizations, there is a lot of reporting required. Hence, it would be great and more cost and time-efficient if there is a way to automate everyday tasks such as Microsoft Word Report Generation and Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation Generation.

Further, I would also recommend that Automation Anywhere assist users with automating tasks such as the monthly payment of essential services. For example, automating payment of utilities like the water bill or electricity bill, online.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic, as the bots can be run on multiple machines at the same time.

The customer service is fantastic and they always provide reliable feedback and help.

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

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have an in-house developer as well as a vendor team. The vendor team has a high level of expertise.

The ROI in terms of finance cannot be disclosed due to company policy but the bots have made the everyday process of extracting logistics information from customer Excel sheets or PDF files much more efficient and faster than the traditional manual method.

I advise others that even as of right now, the setup cost and licensing cost to automate bots on Automation Anywhere is steep but it is worth the investment!

We considered other Robotic Process Automation tools such as UiPath and Blue Prism.