Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are in the banking domain. We use Automation Anywhere for loan processing to support its journey from each state until the loan is approved. We focus on title commission. We are trying to remove the human repetitive component, bring in automation, and help humans do value-added jobs.

Up until August, we were using version 10.5. Recently, we migrated to the new version 11.3.2.

We have hundreds of cases a day. There were around two to three employees who were just moving a case from one state to another. This was a repetitive, tedious job, which was frustrating for the employees. It helps to have the bot doing this work now. We have immediately seen effects, so this is a good use for it. 

The Control Room is the most valuable feature. This is where I can schedule a task. It runs 24/7, so it's a great feature that I love. If we are not in office, we can schedule something and leave, then the bot will run at the scheduled time.

In the previous version, we were facing auto login failure issues. The production machine would go down on a daily basis. Later, once we had stability, the tasks don't fail because of the object cloning issue. Therefore, all issues have been resolved in the new version. I'm happy with that. 

In the new version, we got options for running the bot in attended mode as well as unattended mode.

Triggers work in the attended mode on Automation Anywhere. I would love it if we could use triggers in the unattended mode too. This way we can use the feature more in our IT sector. E.g., when any service or folder is accessed by unauthorized person, we want to be able to get an immediate trigger, even on "out of office", this would be helpful for my organization.

The stability issue in the previous version has been resolved. So, we are happy and this have improved our trust. We will be happy to build more processes.

We are still near the end of migration. Two of our processes are still running on the older version.

Our scalability has been increased with our new version. We do not see any issues.

We have used the technical support. I am quite unhappy with the support part. The higher priority tickets are not getting resolved within the SLA. Higher priority tickets for production issues should be looked into immediately. However, until they get escalated, tickets are not receiving higher priority. I would like to see this improve.

The initial setup was straightforward. I updated the license files after we got them. I needed to update them in the Control Room. I think a non-technical person would be able to do this.

We are focused on reducing repetitive jobs.

Know your process, design, and how you want to re-engineer everything.

A lot of issues that we were facing in the previous version have been solved in the latest version. We are happy with the scalability and reliability now. We have more trust in the tool and are happy to grow and build more tasks going forward.

We use this solution to assist us in the collection of data. We have patients who fill out an application that contains information based on the affliction that they have. For example, a migraine patient or a diabetic patient will have different sorts of information contained in the application.

It starts with them giving us information. There are no regulations that govern the format of what they give us. Based on what they give us, we provide them with our application. Our overall goal is to give them a better quality of life.

We use MetaBots to ensure that the data goes into the proper channel and in the proper pattern.

Before we implemented this solution, we had to manually deal with a lot of emails. People would send us unstructured data in the form of Notepad or Wordpad. We spent a lot of time manually entering the information.

With Automation Anywhere, what used to take us two days now takes us twenty minutes.

The most valuable feature of this solution is automation using MetaBots.

We would like to see support for macOS, rather than just Windows machines.

Whenever you start Automation Anywhere it opens the IE browser to notify you. It would be really great if you had the option to not open IE when it starts.

If you want to use Chrome then there are three or four additional steps that need to be completed.

This solution is pretty stable.

Scalability is good, although it would be better if they supported more than just Windows machines.

The technical support for this solution is pretty good. The turnaround time is good, as well as the response. The technical support people are well trained and we appreciate it.

We have in-house people who have been trained and handle this for us.

We have certainly seen ROI when it now only takes twenty minutes to perform a job that use to take us two days.

I am involved in making the decision as to whether we use Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism in our upcoming projects.

For each of our projects, we do a POC that lasts three months for each of the tools. Out of that, we come up with the best solution that we can offer for a particular project.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to first identify all of the use cases around your project. If you don't do your due diligence then I don't recommend this solution. You need to have the use cases identified.

We wanted to use IQ Bot to assist with unstructured data, but we were not able to do it. Our next step is to create a workload to handle our information processing.

This solution saves us time but there are some things that make it clumsy for the end-users. When we have to tell them that there is no macOS version then we put our heads down and tell them that we have to wait for that. Also, if you want to use Chrome then there are three or four additional steps that need to be done.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

People are now trying to automate many different kinds of technology. They have use cases related to ARP, invoicing, and three-way matching, for example.

We are seeing an incremental need for legacy systems which do not have an architecture in place or API integrations. Our customers are doing things like simple website scraping, bringing the data into Excel, taking that data and then putting it into their legacy systems. We are seeing customers that read a lot of invoices.

Our customers have been using Automation Anywhere for a lot of integration purposes. They've been using it not only for process integration but for application integration as well.

Using Automation Anywhere, we are able to reduce human functions. We aren't exactly replacing the human, but efficiently increasing the productivity of that particular human by collecting and entering the data into a CCD system like contract systems.

I think there are quite a few new features which have been introduced, but right now we've been using a lot of object cloning and screen scraping. Those are some of the primary features, but we've been able to use other features very wisely as well. These include inbuilt email functionality, some integrations to incorporate heterogeneous systems like Python scripting, and also other things.

Compared to the rest of the industry, this product is easy to use, not only from the technology perspective but from the business user side as well. We have been very successful, in that we haven't seen a situation where we trained a particular set of users or customers, and they complained that they are not able to use it.

Some of the other products in this industry have not been able to succeed because of this issue. Although they are really great, they are too focused on technology and IT, rather than business focused.

Cloud was one of the features we wanted to see because it makes it much easier. The second feature is ease of use in terms of agnostic, which was released in the next few quarters. A lot of customers had been asking about the operating system agnostic, so today it runs mostly on Windows and I believe agnostic is also coming.

There are a few features that we would love to have: running on the cloud, running on Linux, out of the box integration availability with larger ecosystems like Salesforce, Workday, or Microsoft. If somebody is using an AWS shop it should be much easier for them to use this. So there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of infrastructure, provisioning, cloud usability, and ease of use.

This product has pretty scalable so far. The number of customers is growing year over year. People are deploying hundreds of thousands of bots. We haven't hit any scalability issue at this point in time.

I come from an investment background, so when we were doing a SWOT analysis of which product to go with we looked at a couple of free products. We looked at UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. We found that Automation Anywhere was the easiest to use. Their offer was much more appealing compared to the other products, so that's why we ended up choosing them.

We analyze ROI with what we call 3D or 3V. We look at the value proposition in three ways. First is, of course, the direct cost savings in terms of how many manual labor hours we are saving. The second thing is indirect, such as productive improvisation of the bot, and the third thing is the overall efficiency of the system. Today, when people do the ROI calculation, they just focus on a particular process. In the case of a supplier, if the requisition creation was taking a week, the rest of the processes were getting delayed.

The ecosystem processes what automatically improvises well even though RP did not even touch it. So those are some of the things what we try to bring into the picture when we do the ROI calculation other than the direct cost.

One way to measure ROI is based on how much customers are spending. Most of the customers start with the smaller licensing pack and they are increasing their investment in terms of the licensing and services every year. Some customers start with about $10,000 and end up spending about $300,000 just on the licensing over a two years period. That speaks for itself.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as seven and a half or eight out of ten. It's not because the product doesn't serve the purpose, but every product has a lot of room for improvement. Hopefully, we'll get it to a nine out of ten by next year.

The primary use case is to automate our current exports and fraudulent transaction processing in the back office.

Automation Anywhere brings speed with accuracy. We are replacing a lot of manual work that our agents used to do. This has been automated now, and we get things done faster.

Non-developers can use the tool to create bots. Also, it is very easy for developers to use.

The bot creation process is easy enough with its drag and drop, then add some logic. However, once you're done with it, you can't really work outside the tool that the AI provides. It is drag and drop, then work right there.

It took a couple of months to scale from our pilot to the current number of bots that we are using. The bot scaling process was painful, when you go beyond a few bots, and because we had stability issues. We had to work through the issues, and they took us a long time.

Technical support is good. They need to improve their response to production issues. They need to have knowledgeable people to fix issues when things are down in production.

The initial setup is straightforward, but the scaling was an issue.

We worked directly with Automation Anywhere. Their help was good, but sometimes it took a couple days for them to get back to us.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere. Though, it depends on how they plan to build the environment: on-premise or cloud. There are some issues that we're facing in the cloud.

The current features are good, but we are not using all of the product's existing features at the moment.

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

Transaction processing is our primary use case.

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

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

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

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

The stability could be enhanced.

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

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

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

We used an integrator. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We used Thirdware for the deployment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scalability is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's important that all processes are documented properly.

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

We use it for automating Excel sheets and for uploading some data.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we minimize the manual work and improve workflows. 

The benefits depend on how you use it. When standard automation is not supported, you sometimes need to use robots to eliminate the human interface or human interference in the processes.

We integrated Automation Anywhere with ERP. We had Oracle EBS. There are always challenges, but we can overcome all the challenges. We have the technical expertise to do that. Overall, it works fine. It is good.

Automation Anywhere has saved us time, especially in distributing Excel sheets to multiple users and sending emails. The consolidation of these Excel sheets used to take a lot of time. It would take us a day to consolidate them. In case of errors, it would take one and a half days. With a tool like Automation Anywhere, we can do the consolidation within hours. If we have everything in the portal, it will do that quickly.

I am happy with most of the features. Notifications and triggers are especially good.

You can learn it quickly. All resources are available on the web. It is a matter of time. If you want to learn more, there are enough resources available online. You can log in and learn. 

It is user-friendly as compared to the other products. The time it takes to train non-technical employees varies. Simple training will take a week. 

It is a cloud solution. It is a good platform.

It is constantly improving. It is AI-embedded. They can further improve the AI. It is already at a certain level, but it can be improved.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three to four years.

I have not worked with any other solution. I have a little idea about UiPath, but I have not worked with it. 

It is mostly in the cloud, and it is mostly deployed on the Microsoft cloud. They also have their own cloud.

In terms of maintenance, every software needs to be updated. Before upgrades, you should do stress testing and be aware of the changes. You might have to update the robots as per the changes.

It is subscription-based. They have different schemes. The price depends on how you negotiate with the local partner or local representative in your country.

It is a good product, but it also depends on how you use it. It is all about how you educate and train people. It also depends on your approach and training. 

Automation and AI, especially Generative AI (GenAI), is a trend. Everyone is looking for automation. So far, I have not worked on it. In the future, I might work on such a project.

In the beginning, automation is a bit difficult because you need to understand the requirements and other things, but later on, it gets easier. Once you have a deep understanding of requirements, it is easy to do automation. It is just a tool. Before using it, you need to have a good understanding of the process. You need to understand where the gap is, what you want to do with it, and how Automation Anywhere can help you. 

It takes time to implement automation. For example, if you are using Automation Anywhere OCR, it takes time to understand different kinds of documents or invoices. It will sometimes fail. In one or two cases, it might fail. There might be a failure rate of 2% to 3%. In such scenarios, some users might have a negative impression. You should be able to address such challenges. It is a matter of time. You need to have patience and a little bit of tolerance. It is not perfect. Nothing is perfect in the world. The users need to be educated on it.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.