Automation Anywhere Reviews

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. 

We use Automation Anywhere to track the travel and locking of our devices.

We implemented Automation Anywhere because we needed a way to track our devices and ensure they were not going beyond their boundaries.

Before Automation Anywhere we were manually tracking our devices and now it is done automatically.

Automation Anywhere helps to save a full day. Automation Anywhere helps save costs by allowing remote work and not requiring a person to be at the machine. 

The efficiency we get with Automation Anywhere is valuable.

The Automation Anywhere calibrating needs to be more user-friendly to avoid human error.

Non-technical people can not use Automation Anywhere.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

The stability of Automation Anywhere depends on the environment it is used in. For example, in hot environments, there can be deviations.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup was a little complex until we became familiar with the process.

The deployment took one week and required two people.

Automation Anywhere is reasonably priced because it can sustain us for a long period.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten. The technology is improving every day.

With the right tools, it is easy to upgrade Automation Anywhere.

Maintenance is required for Automation Anywhere to ensure proper functionality daily. Two people for 20 minutes each day is enough to oversee the maintenance.

I recommend completing some courses and shadowing experienced Automation Anywhere users to gain hands-on experience with the automation process.

I've used Automation Anywhere RPA as one of the RPA platforms to automate business processes within the company. It started as attended automation initially and then moved to unattended mode. We're using the on-prem version with Runners on virtual desktop. 

We have used/are using the AA360 Platform for automating the business processes in HR, Finance, and telecom operations.  

IQBOT is also used for purchase order processing to capture the semi-structured data and process it in ERPs to achieve straight-through processing of these documents.

Implementation of Automation Anywhere (AA) allows us to automate business processes and has brought productivity gains, error reduction, and speed of execution in multiple HR and Finance operations. 

This automation has also helped in achieving better compliance and standardization of the processes. A number of processes were able to be digitalized 100% without much human interaction required. The only exceptions are managed by humans although the RPA bots are doing the majority of the work. 

Implementation of IQBOT has helped in capturing the semi-structure data from pdfs and doing the straight-through processing of these documents.

Web-based ID for development is helping developers to use any machine (laptop, VDI, etc.) to access the environment and develop it.

Enabling collaborative development where multiple developers can work together is great.

The flow view is helping us to view the overall flow of the activities and is helping the functional review faster without jumping to the code level, ensuring all the exceptions are handled accordingly and there are no exceptions that are not handled.

The addition of multiple drag and drop functions in the development of IDE helps ease the development work.

Queue management is still missing from the latest version which is a barrier to using the platform to start implementing complex cases where you have parent and child transactions going through multiple stages.

Without queue management, it is not possible to manage the multiple-step work item processing. For example, task automation instead of process automation is where hands-off is required in between the workflow steps.  

Simplification in managing multiple environments for dev, test, and production would be useful.

There needs to be more stability in the platforms.

I've been using Autoamtion anywhere for the last five years. I've used a different version and now have migrated to AA 360 for the last year.

The stability is an improvement area for the product. We still have issues sometimes where bots hang up.

It's a scalable solution. We didn't face any issue in that regard.

There is good technical support available from the AA team.

Positive

We started with AA for more attended automation.

The setup is a bit complex and was done by the AA team.

We implemented the solution using an internal team and external partner.

We say an ROI after six to nine months.

The solution is cost-effective in comparison to others. However, you need to pay for the control room for each environment. You also need developer licenses and even runners are required for test and pre-production environments.

We evaluated UiPath.

Our primary use case is automation development supporting internal business operations at KPMG. We have 100+ live automations, with v10 and v11 deployments.

Using this solution has freed internal operations employees to do more "human value-add" work by removing mundane manual tasks. It has improved the quality of these tasks through automation and enabled us to do things we couldn't have previously done due to time and cost.

The most valuable feature so far is Task bot deployment. We hope to expand to IQ Bot this year.

Automation Anywhere's interaction with Excel is a key benefit.

Currently, Automation Anywhere's debugging functionality is minimal.  Most notable is that it works on only the top-level task (not on sub-tasks called by the top-level task).  This limits its practical usefulness.  Increasing the robustness of the debugging functionality would be very helpful.

Additionally, implmentation of a "global" variable concept (variables shared across tasks) would be very useful.  AA's variable mapping between tasks is cumbersome.  

We have been using Automation Anywhere for three and a half years.

Automate Business processes pertaining to various business units. We used Automation Anywhere Control room and different versions of AA 10.x and AA 11.x to deliver Robotic Process Automation Solutions for different clients. Automation Anywhere helped multiple clients to save a lot of data entry time and have automated almost every repetitive task. AA control room helped to manage the operations of both Attended and UnAttended automations and have helped a continuous run of the bots saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Automation Anywhere helped our organization to get our training and implementation needs successful by providing both community edition and partner edition. Automation Anywhere seamlessly handed off exceptions to employees from Automation Anywhere bots. It helped to better manage  Automation Anywhere bot capacity, as well as to reuse and repurpose the bots in the cloud. 

It helped in Monitoring Automation Anywhere bot progress and report on bot usage and value in the form of Insights provided instant details of the savings and work in detailed analytical charts.

A 2019 dual-mode is very useful and the Control room type of setup for use of A2019 Client is very useful as it eliminates disconnection issues. Also, the broad range of Commands and elimination of the need for Metabots is also very helpful in Automating the increased number of variable types cover an expanded range of web and window components. 

Bot insights and IQ bots are both valuable features if implemented in a cost-effective way for larger enterprises, Bot insights provide analytical details of the ROI that is generated by running bots and IQ bots help to automate document processing in an intelligent way minimizing the cost of document processing and hence saving a lot of employee time and money for any enterprise with a large volume of pdf data.

Version A2019, the Number data type variables should be available to display in "Message Box" command. This will help in debugging. At the present, a type conversion is needed to display it in the message box. There should be an efficient way to integrate AA 11.x. meta bots into AA2019.

Also, the Master certification should be provided free of cost for partners. More practical samples and examples of bots using new features in A2019 should be available in people Documentation. A2019 presentation material for proposing A2019 as an RPA choice should be provided to partners.

I have been using AA for six years.

Excellent

Straight Forward

7