Automation Anywhere Reviews

We primarily use this for customer data management.

We use this tool to help perform transformations on our data.

This solution has helped our customers to work with large data. They want to perform data transformations to assist them in making decisions. Our customers are very happy with this tool.

The most valuable feature is the ability to transform data into clusters.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see a plug-and-play tool for NLP programming.

This solution needs to have more support for big data, including decision-making abilities.

The stability of this solution has improved. We have less than one percent downtime in a day, so it is stable.

This solution scales based on licenses and the number of processes. The bots, themselves, are very mature and can scale. The bots are plug-and-play.

We don't have very many issues so we have rarely used technical support. I would say that my experience with them has been satisfactory. 

We had a lot of manual processes that we wanted to automate. We also had a lot of industry-specific automation tools, but we were not doing bot development. 

I was not involved in the initial setup of this solution, but I have been responsible for some of the updates. The update process is not complex. 

We used a local company to assist us with the implementation of this solution. 

I have seen customers save resources by using this tool. One of them replaced two hundred users with automation.

The licensing fees are approximately $10,000 USD for between five and ten users.

We were already familiar with this solution because we had recommended it for customers in past project proposals. We had also helped them with implementation.

We are having a very good experience with this product. It has capabilities for artificial intelligence, analytical programming, and machine learning. Once you understand your data, you can understand your customer.

In the long run, we see that Automation Anywhere will have a very good place in the market. Data is very important, and we feel that this tool will be a market leader.

This solution is very mature compared to some of the others in the market.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this product is BOE (Bill of Entry affecting imports in India) analysis and processing.

Previously, we were checking the inventory with checklists and two kinds of Excel validations, and sending the mismatches to have them reassessed in a manual process. Before four of us were working on the data reliability, and really three people were completely dedicated to this task full-time. We were repeatedly taking the Excel inventory and the Excel invoices we are getting from the different vendors, and then we would check all the attributes of the data. This would mean we had to review invoice numbers, invoice dates, currency codes — so many little things needed to be validated. The detail also had to be examined like the number of items, the SKU (Stock Keeping Units) numbers and check those against the item names by validating with a checklist.

So after, we created a bot with Automation Anywhere for that issue to speed up processing. Now the automated checking time is reduced to 15 minutes. That's all.

The product has improved our organization cost-wise and bank savings in transactions. Everything has been changed for the better. It is easier to track various domains, various kind of devices, and control recording of all the process. The quality of the results are improved, we spend less time and resources, so the time we save can be spent on other things. This all reduces the time spent on menial activities and reduces the cost of processing. It is very important that we have increased accuracy and control over data errors.

The best part of this solution is that this product has more capabilities than our previous solution with Excel. The error handling and sending mail — all those additional features — give us more control when using Automation Anywhere with less time and effort.

In the future, I think we would like to see more capability for integration and more customization with some features. For example, email records should have their subject like email that's been downloaded. Because it is not doing this, we now need a separate solution for this based on the subject line. Integrations that we'd like to see are that the product is more friendly with languages like Python and JavaScript. These are the type of integration we are expecting. Also, it should be more friendly with Excel commands which it does not seem to agree with or have so that we can customize the output.

The product is not working sometimes with the methods we prefer. If it is going to be a flexible product it should include some more common things. There are so many small issues with the product it is not as good as it could be.

We really have had no stability issues ourselves, or actually there were some minor things. There has been nothing we could not resolve.

As far as scalability, it is one of the most important things for us. We were looking for that only when we went to upgrade our process. We want to automate any of the processes that we can by using Automation Anywhere. It is the whole point for us using the product.

We have never had to call into technical support.

We were not involved in this decision to adopt this product.

For the implementation, almost everything was a little complicated. We faced issues actually but everything was manageable and then we addressed the issues and the initial setup was fully completed.

Mostly the issues had to do with security. The product was new to us and we had to set everything up for the first time so we had to learn about some things, like how to deploy the security features correctly. That is the kind of issue we faced as a learning curve.

During our onboarding, we had some issues and during integrations, we were having various small issues. But the reason for all of that is this was a new technology for us and we had to learn something about it. We learned by working with the product and all the integration issues and security things have all been resolved.

We did not use an external integrator, reseller, or a consultant. We implemented the product ourselves.

Our return on investment is that it costs us less. One of the problems with some licensing is if you have six employees and later 27 people are working, your cost can go up even if nothing extra is used. Now we need one developer's license only. One license and it is covered. There are more problems if you have to purchase one license per user. For example, if five people never work with the product and two of us work daily we are charged for the minutes for the CPU. It is not wasted.

The pricing strategy is one license, one creator. It is more complicated than that depending on the options you choose.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

When we update to the newer version, maybe it will have what we want and it will be better. It could be a ten if it were a perfect partner for us without any errors or had all the features we would like.

This is a very good product, but like managing other software and solutions, issues, bugs, and all various activities, you see the things that could be better. Obviously we think users will be satisfied by your outcome with using Automation Anywhere as we have had success. But right now it is an eight.

We use this solution to automate the following task:

• Open MS-Excel-File from Folder
• Update the data with keystroke-command
• Wait for calculation of the result
• Save the file
• Loop the command above for each file in the folder
• Send email-notification to the task owner
• Send Quality Check to task owner (.pdf-command)
  
• Error handling (where applicable)

This solution gives us greater employee satisfaction because manual recurring work has been reduced. We also have a savings of manpower, independently of office-hours thanks to bot scheduling.

We redesigned tasks before the implementation of bots, and have higher stability through standardized Bot Runner.

We find several functions valuable, including:

• The Files/Folder command makes it easy to work off each file in a folder. I don't know how else to do this command.
• The Variable Operation makes it easy to work with variables. The system variables catalogue is helpful.
• The Send eMail Command helps with the flow of information.

In the Microsoft Excel features, it needs a command to wait for a calculation to complete.

In Microsoft Excel, why isn't it possible to share a session in different tasks? It's complicated to program all of the commands in the same tasks (loss of overview).

The Filter function only supports four commands (Mouse/Key/Delay).

In the Optical Overview for the Loop command, an if/else would be helpful.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

It takes a lot of effort to build up the internal infrastructure/topics like Virtual Machine/Security/development-Governance/Usecase-Management.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Our use cases for this solution are all related to Telecommunication Companies (Telcos) because these are our prime customers. We also use this solution to automate the support system.

Some examples of use cases are service creation, service deletion, getting complaint details, ticket booking, and ticket updates. We have created unattended bots to handle these processes.

We have found that the automation bots we have developed give great savings in terms of higher productivity and efficiency. We are able to provide value-added to our customers because these processes were done manually, not automatically. It has improved our customer satisfaction.

This most valuable features of this solution are the drag-and-drop interface, and it is easy to code.

We have begun using the IQ Bot, and while we are not using as much of the document analysis functionality, I'm sure that we will be using these features for automating more processes for our customers.

Change management can be an issue because as applications change, the bots need to be modified.

There are some business areas for which this tool is not capable of doing, such as in the areas of graphically-based input. The image capturing of the network management systems is not up to date for all of our customers' processes. We are seeking some kind of improvement in this light. We have use cases that the tool does not currently support, and we will be able to do many more if this capability is also covered.

Technical support for this solution could be improved if they categorized according to severity. At the highest degree of severity, one dedicated person should work to resolve it as early as possible.

It would be helpful to have a repository of use cases that are created by different customers. They could be accessed from the Bot Store. For us, it would help if we had access to use cases specifically for Telcos.

We have a lot of problems installing for some customers. In particular, if it is a distributed environment then we face challenges. For example, the database should be installed in a network other than where the control is installed. It can be very time-consuming, and support for these situations is very important.

The stability of the bots is generally good. Sometimes, the applications get changed for business reasons, so we have to recapture the data that was used to develop the bot. For this reason, we do sill have some challenges.

I don't think that we will have any challenges with scalability. We started in a small way and I'm sure when we really require it, we will be able to scale.

Technical support for this solution is good, and they have provided us with resolutions to our problems. We are partners, so naturally, our support systems are connected.

Normally we need to wait for a message from the technical support team, and then we have to capture screenshots and do some monitoring. We also need to do some analysis. This makes for a huge gap in resolving an issue.

We do have a customer with a technical issue that was taking quite a long time because of their Oracle integration. There was a very long gap in time before resolution, so the customer was a little bit unhappy about it. They have to be able to foresee these types of use cases and ensure that they have a stable tool that is able to cater to my new ones.

There are some complexities with the initial setup of this solution. Most of our installations are done in our client's network environment, and there are challenges because there are two or three parties involved. Our IT team, the customer's IT team, and Automation Anywhere are involved. With the different stakeholders, we have to ensure that all of them are in sync and able to complete the installation on time.

We have seen ROI. In fact, before starting automation we performed an initial feasibility analysis which resulted in our proceeding with the implementation. Most of our deployments see ROI between six and nine months.

I will be focusing more on the artificial intelligence and analytics part of this tool that they are bringing in.

For anybody considering this type of solution, I would first suggest that they look at what kinds of processes they are trying to automate, and then look at the right tool. It depends a lot on what the process is. For standard ones, this is a mature tool so they can use it. However, for a very mixed set of processes then you look at the specific tools for those types of automation.

This solution is good, but there are still more features to add. There are some use cases that I cannot handle, otherwise, the solution would be perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have several use cases for Automation Anywhere:

• Grab data from one site to another.
• We run all cache processes through it.
• We can get more information using IQ Bots.

The platform is easy to use, especially for business users.

I would like to see web and cloud-based platforms for future releases.

While it depends on the customer, it generally takes about two to two and a half months to scale up bots for production.

We are the integrator for deployment.

We have saved time and money using the solution.

Licensing costs range from $50,000 to $200,000.

There are five to six competitors in this market.

Make a list of all your processes before starting, then decide on two or three processes that you want to automate.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. The new learning course model is more inviting and easier to use.

As a solution, RPA integrates well with other solutions.

It is very easy for us to work with the Citrix applications.

Our primary use case is banking/financial. Processes we have automated include loans, ledgers, mortgage loans, and even some of the record management systems.

In some of our use cases, people were spending more than three hours per day just generating reports. And then we created an automation for this and it reduced the time to 30 minutes. It improves employee productivity so they can use their time in other areas.

I like the way it works with structured data in the back office and the way it does repetitive work.

In terms of ease of use for developers, we're able to create reusable components. We don't want people to have to rebuild things from scratch. In this way, developers can take the reusable components and complete their development processes more quickly.

The bot creation process is pretty straightforward. Anyone can go in and learn it easily, and then they can build a bot. I like it.

When it comes to integrating the solution with other applications, there are some challenges. For some third-party solutions, there are no direct interconnections. For example, there were no direct connections with SAP systems. So, we had to create connectivity between Automation Anywhere and some third-party solutions. They have now improved that situation a lot and we can connect SAP and other systems as well.

If they want to sustain their position in the market, they have to be flexible, working on how we can integrate with third-parties, working on a machine-learning product. People are expecting that and it would be really helpful.

From the IQ Bot perspective, frankly speaking, they still have to improve a lot. I got IQ Bot training in San Jose. My expectation from a straight, technical, architectural point of view was that I would be able to create my own algorithm and integrate it. But with IQ Bot, I am not able to integrate anything. It is already well-defined, so I have to use that particular option only. I know I can not go with any other machine-learning platform. I hope they will be coming out with version 12 where we can integrate it with Python algorithms and other stuff. It might only be in the future, it might only be on the roadmap. But as of now, it is lacking a lot in that area. We are expecting, for most of the documentation, things like tags, that there would be a checkbox option. That's lacking in IQ Bot.

The stability has increased a lot. When we started with version 10.2, there was a lot of instability. There was no way we could keep the bots active, there were scenarios where it became disconnected. There is also the code deployment perspective and a lot of other angles. People are always only thinking from the business perspective, but as a technical architect, I think about operational effectiveness and how they can improve the product's maturity.

The stability has improved a lot.

However, when upgrading, they changed their internal architecture. They moved it to a JT Java platform. When moving, some of the existing features did not work in the new version. It might be that they have to improve their regression testing to improve clients' satisfaction. It can happen that what is running in production currently, if I move to a new version, suddenly is not working tomorrow. People are not happy with that and say, "I want to roll back to the older version." They are not able to use the new features.

When moving to a new version, they have to think about what features people are using and what kind of impact there will be. Small business users will be fine, those who have ten bots or 15 bots. But there are organizations like mine that have around 700 to 1,000 bots, and that makes changes very difficult to handle. It could be that 10,000 tasks are using something and if that thing is changed it will be hard to update. I might have to spend a year on that. People will never accept that.

Scalability-wise, they have increased it a lot, based on the clustering method. As a technical architect, I'm going with always-on production and data centers. That means that if any data center goes down - there is a natural disaster or something else that happens - how do you make it such that you can bring up another data center? I'm coming up with a design for that based on the latest version, version 11.

The initial setup is very simple. It's Windows-based and it's a straightforward installation. We used to say they need to come up with a silent installation option, with the previous version. But now, with version 11, they have introduced, even at the server level, a silent installation. That means we can make it automated instead of manually installing it.

We measure the ROI of automated processes by how much of a benefit we're getting from it. We look at how much time it takes and how many robots we're using and we include the licensing and operations costs. Finally, we take into account how much faster the performance of the bot is, compared to how long it took to do the process before automation.

We have saved time and money, but when people think of going with RPA they cannot expect that they will immediately see ROI. They have to sustain and increase the RPA options. They will have to spend a minimum of one or two years increasing their use cases for automation. Then they will see a good ROI. They should not expect, within three months, to say, "Hey, I have automated, where is the ROI?"

All organizations have a certain strategy or checklist. In this case, management will think first about licensing cost, about the total cost of investment. After that, they will think about the product's features and functionality. They will also look at support. They will consider the use cases, the current processes they have identified already, and based on all that they will decide whether to go with Automation Anywhere or another product.

In terms of our bot creation process, people come to me and say, "I have a process. How do we automate it?" We need to understand if it's a cognitive use case or a straightforward use case. If it's straightforward, we tell them we'll use this product and build it for them with four to six weeks of development. Then it can go to production. If it's cognitive, then we really need to understand it better. We need to use a third-party product, like Kofax or maybe an IQ Bot if it is fit for the scenario. Based on that, it takes some time and then we'll move it to production.

We have a process architecture review committee where we review all the processes. We cannot blindly go forward with all the processes that have scope for automation because it's all licensing cost. We need to think about whether we can automate a given process with any other IT automation solution, like scripting or macros. If that is not possible then we have a fit for RPA. Then we have to go through our checklist, walk through the use cases, and look at the percentage of the automation scope: Is it a 100 percent automation scope or 80 percent or 20 percent? We need to to know if there is any manual validation or manual intervention required and how that is handled.

Initially, we failed with the Citrix automation where we have a lot of use cases. We ran into a lot of limitations with Automation Anywhere in version 10.5. But with version 11, they have AI Sense which we can use for Citrix applications. We are currently exploring this option.

I have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and I have advanced professional certification from Automation Anywhere, which I completed for version 10.5. I'm also doing it for version 11. I also have an official certificate for IQ Bots.

At the moment, for us, everything is on-premise. We're not ready to go with cloud. So we have to build our own platform. We have to build our own bots.

I would rate this solution at seven out of ten. They have to improve on the product's maturity level. When they are introducing new versions, they have to conserve the existing commands and features, so that they work when we move to the new version. And they also have to come up with more flexibility, so their solution can integrate with our scripting and our own algorithms. That will make it easy to convince our business areas to increase the adoption of RPA.

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).

We were looking to replace employees with a robot for repetitive and tedious tasks, to save time.

Automation Anywhere is saving hours and hours of employees' time. We can do the same tasks with fewer employees. 

We have increased the automation of processes in our organization. It is really obvious how automation has improved the performance of our processes. We have two tracks of automation. We do traditional automation using application management and integration, and that is done by a big team. But we can compare our small RPA automation team to that big team. Both are increasing automation in our organization, each accounting for about 50 percent of our automation.

There is definitely another business benefit from using it: Processes have been re-engineered after being reviewed.

There are ready plugins and connectors to integrate with APIs for common systems like Oracle or Microsoft.

There could be improvement in the reporting and insights into the ROI. The ROI tool that shows the performance and the return on investment is not very accurate. I have developed my own tool to do that instead of using the native tool that comes with Automation Anywhere.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

It is a stable product.

The system can be expanded easily if you scale up the team or the process itself. It's the perfect product for that. It's definitely scalable.

We didn't have a previous solution.

There were some difficulties regarding the connection of the servers and performance issues, but we overcame them by reading about the product and seeing how things can be done. We also opened tickets with Automation Anywhere but it took them a long time to respond. There was a ticket that never closed during six months. But with an upgrade to the new release, it disappeared automatically.

Automation Anywhere has a learning curve, but it's not that hard and it's not very easy. Someone without tech skills can learn it by taking courses. When you try, you get into some problems, but in the end, it's nice and not hard. I haven't tried training non-tech people to use it, but in general, it may take people without a tech background about three months to learn it.

From time to time we need to do some maintenance of the infrastructure servers and make sure that the CPU and memory utilization is optimized. Occasionally, we need to increase the memory. There are two or three people involved in the maintenance from our organization's application support team.

The solution is quite expensive. Not every organization can consider this option. That's one reason they might go with real integration via API.

There are additional support costs. We didn't buy the support because we have a capable team that is doing the job.

We have seen options from the competitors, and we decide to go with this one. There were many aspects to our decision, but the main ones were the cost of the solution and the support available in our country.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere as a serious option. You will find it easy to use, overall, making it a very good choice.

When it comes to deciding between an API integration and RPA, integration is the best option, not automation. If API integration is available and ready to use, it's better to go with that option. However, sometimes, based on my experience, there are cases where you don't have control of those things and you have to think of other solutions. For us, the alternative was automation using RPA. But when an API integration is possible, I prefer to go with that option, rather than going with the RPA. When that is not possible or easy to do, we go with RPA.