Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use case is working with different applications, like Excel and SAP. We get the data and reports, then produce results with Automation Anywhere. For IQ Bots, we're still working on it for data extraction.

I think version 11.3 is good, but I am looking forward to working with version A2019.

The drag and drop is valuable because you can easily read the commands and know what a particular line of code is doing. 

The error handling and troubleshooting are very good. It is easy for a developer to know what happened in any particular line of code.

I would like Automation Anywhere to integrate with Google activities, like Google Sheets. While this should be available in A2019, I would like it to be scaled more.

Version A2019 will have better error handling. They are also adding Python script.

I would like them to add dictionaries to it.

From variable to variable, it is giving me blank code. We have seen this in the IQ Bot, but not in the main code.

Sometimes, I have to restart the automation services to make them work properly.

The scalability is good. We have five bots that we are currently scaling. 

We are looking to invest more in Automation Anywhere.

We contact Automation Anywhere's technical support via email. I would like the support to be faster. Their response time is one to two days. Their customer care could be faster.

Our IT did the initial deployment.

We measure our success with our customers' happiness.

We have seen some return from the product.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere. You can test the tool before purchasing it.

We use this solution for quality and GXP.

We are a pharmaceutical company and have marketed products that are about to be shipped into the market. Part of our process is a compliance check of those products. We have specifications ready, and we have the parameters with which it has been manufactured, and we have to compare those to ensure that they match. This compliance check is what we have automated using this solution.

The operational side of our business has become more civilized since we implemented this solution.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that the code can be made as complex as necessary because our processes are not simple.

This solution can be moved easily between platforms. We work on SAP as well as many other internal platforms, and this solution can very easily be moved between them.

There should be a meeting between the Automation Anywhere team and the end-users to understand whether the process can be made to work on the first attempt. This would save a lot of time, especially in cases where it doesn't work in the end. This introductory meeting would include what the processes are and what platforms are compatible with Automation Anywhere. 

I would say the product is stable, although sometimes we have connection issues and control room issues. Some of these issues are internal. Overall, the product is fine.

We had had issues with scalability. Recently, we had a use case which we were working on, but we could not do it because Automation Anywhere could not connect to the system. It was an older system, and perhaps the newer systems are more compatible with this solution. We have seen a few companies that use downgraded systems, and that is where we see that Automation Anywhere does not work. 

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten.

Usually, we have a very good response from technical support. However, we did have a case that we wanted to be resolved as soon as possible, and it took a very, very long time. Probably more than a month. They gave us a lot of solutions but nothing worked. Ultimately, it was our team who actually found a resolution for it. 

I think that the initial setup of this solution is good. Because we are a pharmaceutical company, it is a lengthy process because we have a lot of GXP, compliance issues, and quality issues. That considered, it did not take a very long time for deployment.

We have just deployed and are still in the validation process, so we have not seen a return on investment yet. It will take a little more time to see ROI. 

This solution costs approximately $3,500 USD per license. For a large company, this cost would not matter, although if I had a very small organization and I wanted to automate a small process then this would be a bit costly.

We looked into UiPath, but we felt that Automation Anywhere was the choice for us.

Initially, we actually wanted to use both. We looked into both but there are a lot of systems and a lot of complex steps to follow. The developers suggested that Automation Anywhere was a better processor to develop the code because when we wanted to look into the errors or when we have any issues it is easier to look into the Automation Anywhere line than UiPath.

This is definitely a solution that I recommend, but there are a few things that you need to look into. We actually started with a process and ended up thinking that it would not work. You have to ensure that the proper groundwork is done in order to understand whether the process can actually work. It will be possible to find solutions in any case, but it may take a very long time. The longer it takes to automate, the longer ROI will take.

I have been using this solution for a while now, and I think that it is a very good platform. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Automation Anywhere to automation some of our menial processes.

We have automated our pricing update and audit functions that we do as an operations team.

Our organization used to have a process which took five business days to do: our monthly pricing update. This was a very manual process. Our very first bot built was to automate this process. Now, the bot runs in the background every month and the process takes less than a day to run.

It is easy to use and learn.

Working with the Automation Anywhere servers and domains have proven to be difficult. We are trying to get more licenses and servers set up, so we can run multiple scenarios simultaneously. 

I am excited for the web browser Automation Anywhere. This will be helpful for us because the solution is limited to our team at the moment. A web browser solution would allow us to expand it to different teams.

I haven't really had to work with the Automation Anywhere technical support. I mostly use my in-house technical support.

Their previous process was terrible, so they started looking at automation as a solution.

While the initial setup is fine, the servers have caused us a few headaches.

Our first bot was complicated, and probably not the best thing to start with. However, as we learned from that experience and more of Automation Anywhere's features, we can now push bots out fairly quickly. The process is a lot smoother. Our infrastructure and design have improved tremendously.

We deployed the solution with our in-house team.

We were spending 50 to 70 hours a month doing manual processes and possibly making errors. Introducing bots has saved us on hours and eliminated of errors (as bots don't make them). We have not had an accuracy issue since introducing bots.

In terms of monetary savings, we automated a bot in three days that has saved us $30,000 in costs.

A lot of companies are putting a lot of effort into increasing and improving their front office processes.

It is a great resources right now. I am really looking forward to ramping up for my second year of going into automation.

I have implemented it for multiple use cases. 

One of the use cases that it was implemented for is filling out timesheets from the managers. There are certain managers who have to allocate hours to multiple employees, around 40 to 45 employees. Each month, they decided how much time that they will allocate to each of resource. Using a robot, they can automatically fill in the timesheet on Zoho, which is the timesheet system that the company uses.

Another use case was that we used to have certain lists of vendors who billed every month. They had a specific format to their invoices. Using bots to read through those invoices, we were able to pick up relevant data and enter it into the finance systems.

It has improved the efficiency and reliability of the data in the systems. A user is always going to make errors. By adopting robots, we are able to have more accurate processes, plus time is saved.

It saves time for the people who operate it. This particular bot is an attended automation bot, and before running the bot, the manager tweaks some of the values which are important. Overall, this will save the managers time during their processes and create value.

It is not always required to have a technical background. It is not necessary to know programming languages. This makes it easier for a business user to create his own bots.

It is pretty stable on a day-by-day basis. It is much better than when I started working on RPA solutions three years ago.

Manually, I have worked on adding/scaling bots, but I need to work on cloud availability, possibly discussing scaling with cloud providers, like AWS.

For different processes, the scaling time period is different. For some processes, we could develop bots in two weeks, then go to production with one or two bots. For other processes, it could take three months or more. It varies based on the process.

We did not use another solution previously.

The setup process is not easy compared to the competition, and this can be a barrier to entry.

We implemented it ourselves.

The time savings depends on the process. By using a bot, we have saved 40 to 70 percent. If the process uses unattended automation, it saves a lot of time.

Currently, I don't think that we have saved money with this solution.

When I started working on it, it was difficult to obtain a trial version (barrier to entry). Now, they have a Community Edition, which may make it easy to get started.

We looked into UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. Our client was interested in Automation Anywhere.

UiPath has an easier setup process.

I recently took a look at the Bot Store, and it's a good initiative. I haven't started using it. I downloaded a couple of the bots, and hopefully soon, I will try to use some of them in a production environment.

The real beauty of robotic automation is when it is running from the back-end (unattended).

It is primarily used for accounting apps. So far, it has been okay. It's for a small implementation.

We have automated account reconciliations.

The most valuable feature is its ease of development.

It's pretty easy for people who don't have a tech background to use. It is one of the easiest tools for them to use. We are using it for scripting, and it is end user based with screen captures. It is a bit easier to use than any of the other tools out there.

There are a few things that could be done better, so we can monitor properly. They need to improve in terms of development and enhancements. We need to get the right feature sets in place as an enterprise.

We would like to use Citrix going forward. We use Bot Runners to scale up, and it gets to be expensive. Using Citrix, it can mitigate costs.

We went through the documentation, it looks pretty easy to scale.

It took six months to scale from pilot to our current number of bots.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The document was good. Everything went as expected.

The deployment was done in-house.

We don't have an ROI in any of our processes. We are just trying it out now to see if it works.

We haven't had any savings yet. We have been putting more time in than saving time at this point.

Our annual licensing costs are around $100,000 a year.

We chose Automation Anywhere through a process of elimination. We evaluated all the RPA products out there and decided on Automation Anywhere mainly based on ease of use.

We also looked at Blue Prism.

We looked at the Bot Store initially and didn't find much. We looked a year ago, so maybe we will take a look again.

I don't have much experience with attended automation.

We have four core business areas: Energy, financial services, healthcare, and our internal corporate. We're spread pretty evenly across the four areas.

We have automated a lot of processes serving human resources, legal, life sciences, financial services, healthcare (on the payer and provider sides), and IT. We're all over the place.

We're still in the rapid expansion phase. The last six months have really been an explosion, so we're trying to keep everything under wraps and control it.

We are getting massive efficiencies across our back office, internally.

Th Enterprise platform: Automation on a platform, as opposed to scattered automation.

The ease of use is improving for development. We've had a lot of issues with the installation and performance on a variety of computers, onshore and offshore. Our network bounds multiple domains, and we've had issues there, as well. So, we are looking forward to the web-based development versions.

The bot creation process is getting better. The general development process and change management deployment process is moving more towards enterprise-level and catching up with the more mature software industry around it.

So far, the cognitive document processing is not available at the enterprise level. However, this is being worked on by Automation Anywhere.

I would like them to start building continuity between employees and customer contacts.

There are a lot of new features coming with the release of version 11.

The stability is improving.

The technical support is inconsistent. It seems like every time we call, there's someone who has only been with Automation Anywhere for a couple of months. Oftentimes, if you call two different people, you'll get two different answers, back-to-back. What we tend to do is, if we don't get a fix or resolution right away, we'll call back immediately or submit a second ticket immediately, and try to find someone else.

Our business teams pushed for an RPA solution.

We worked with Automation Anywhere on the deployment.

We have saved time and money using this solution. It varies pretty heavily by use case. We have some bots which are saving a week or month of multiple employees' times. We have some bots saving an hour a half during a day of a team of 30 people's times. So, there is some significant savings that we've uncovered.

Our annual license is somewhere in the neighborhood of $115,000.

Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath, and Kryon were on our shortlist. 

At that time, Automation Anywhere was the most responsive to working with us. That actually tipped the scales.

The more you preplan, defining processes and governance upfront, the more successful you will be down the road.

The solution integrates well with others. When it doesn't, it is usually the fault of the other solution.

The courses on Automation University were generally good.

We have not done anything with Citrix automation yet.

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. 

Our clients use it for different things. One uses it for invoice processing and another for the aggregation of documents based on certain characters. Another uses it to automate processes for the admin department. That company has seasonal workers, and they have to create passes for those seasonal workers. Most of the document uploading and validation is done by Automation Anywhere. Most of those documents are issued by the federal government, and they have a standard format.

One thing I really like is the recorder where you can connect with multiple systems. The OCR is also good. In one case, we used a different OCR than Automation Anywhere, but in document processing, using the OCR engine is good.

And providing automation at scale is something I feel is a strength of Automation Anywhere compared to most tools. It depends on the segment we are dealing with. There are small organizations that might not need robust applications, but for mid-sized and large customers, we usually propose automation anywhere. It's quite robust, and the performance is good. When we are proposing a solution, the automation at scale makes it much easier for us, post-sales and post-implementation.

Also, the integration of the solution's bots with APIs and business applications is good. There are certain prebuilt integration APIs in Automation Anywhere. That's especially true when you're connecting with SAP. There are issues with SAP, but in general, they have connectors with most of the popular CRM tools. The API connectivity is much easier.

We only faced some problems when integrating it with SAP, and Oracle integration was a bit challenging, especially with Oracle Fusion. We had some issues when we were trying to connect some of the applications on the API level. But, in general, integration using Automation Anywhere is fine.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere since 2019, or about four years.

In the last year, the cloud has become bigger, but before that, it was implemented more on-prem only. 

From our side, the number of staff needed for an implementation depends on the number of processes we need to deploy. For the initial configuration, we may not need many people. But, for one of our customers, there are 70 processes that need to be developed over the next 18 months. Obviously, the number of people involved will be much greater than in a project where we're looking at 10 or 15 processes to be implemented. But on average, each process takes at least two to three resources, depending on the complexity.

Once you have deployed an application, you need to maintain it. Compared to other products, it takes slightly fewer people. Maintenance on the admin side requires one to two people. We always assign one FTE for this, at a minimum. Depending on other factors, we might go for two.

Automation Anywhere is more stable compared to some of the other tools on the market. And, post-implementation, we have very few issues with it compared to others. For me, it's all about post-implementation and why customers are happier with Automation Anywhere.

For small and medium-sized customers, we may not suggest Automation Anywhere because of the cost difference.

UiPath has gotten much better in the last two years. They have really grown in terms of overall performance and bot capabilities. There has been a huge improvement there.

As for non-technical users, it's not a low-code type of solution where you draw and drag and drop. Still, it's okay, to some extent, if they at least have some understanding of technology. Generally, it's easy to learn. If you have access to Automation Anywhere University, you can really learn it. But because I am from a technology background, it was much easier for me. We give our customers 13 or 14 sessions to bring them up to speed, and that might span over the period of a month to two months.

In the discussion about RPA versus API integration, one definite advantage of automation is that scheduling, bot management, and those kinds of things are automated. It's more about the customer and their perspective. With automation, you already have something cooked up, and you don't have to worry about much at a later stage. That makes automation much easier for them than using an API integration. You have to maintain an API integration, and there is the cost of maintaining it. With all those factors, automation becomes much easier for the customer.

We have been proposing Automation Anywhere to multiple customers. It's good. It's robust. But it's a bit expensive compared to other RPA tools on the market. Sometimes, it's too heavy for customers, especially if it's on-prem. Also, maintenance is slightly higher.