Automation Anywhere Reviews

We'll be discussing our implementations for Salesforce and using Automation Anywhere to automate sales for processes within the organization. We focus mainly on sales and BFSI.

A very important piece within sales is that we've noticed most of the salespeople hesitate from updating their Salesforce at a frequent interval. You jump on a call, you have multiple calls with your customer, and you hesitate to keep dealing these updates within Salesforce. The idea behind this implementation, or this specific solution, is that we take care of all the updating of Salesforce processes. We take care of all lead conversions, lead updates, lead generations, etc. through our RPA. All you need to do is have a conversation with your bot, and say, "Hey, I just had a conversation with Nick. He seems good with all the implementations. We should convert him from Level 1 to Level 2." These basic implementations have been taken care of.

We're also looking at mobile transcription. So, if you are on a call with XYZ, you say, "Hey, I'm jumping on a call with XYZ, just transcribe what I'm talking about." So, you transcribe those calls and update them in your total documentation. That's the idea.

Automation Anywhere has been an integral part of this product's evolution in general. A hindrance that we were faced with was companies who did not have API integrations for Salesforce. This is where RPA and Automation Anywhere came in and helped us with integrating solutions which did not have API integrations within themselves. That's how we've evolved in the past two to three months.

IQ Bot seems to be a good solution that Automation Anywhere has come up with. It sets them apart from the other solutions. I want Automation Anywhere to work on IQ Bot further to help evolve the tool more and create a certain set of solutions using IQ Bot. They can maybe use better machine learning algorithms to come up with better accuracy for OCR extractions. This is an area that I want them to work on.

It is absolutely robust. Automation Anywhere as a solution, as well as our implementation, have been robust in nature with thorough testing and UAT processes being involved. Automation Anywhere can be considered as one of the most stable RPA tools in the industry, according to the perspective of the limited amount of tools that I've used. But, Automation Anywhere seems to be the most stable one.

We initially started off with a customer who had just three bots. We've now scaled them to 15 bots. It didn't take us more than an hour to scale. Automation Anywhere helped us scale from one bot to 100 bots within a period of hours, if not minutes. Unless you're scaling from 10s to 1000s, I think Automation Anywhere has it covered.

Support is five (out of five). The technical support is better than any other automation tool that I've seen. The ticketing resolution that they provide not only for paid customers, but for PoCs that we conduct, IQ Bot, and other scenarios wherein the product might not be functioning properly. The support is top-notch. There are scenarios wherein we need to be able to identify the best possible solution, and there is support for that as well.

We started off about one and a half years back initially. In those days, Automation Anywhere hadn't picked up so much. The initial setup was difficult, but as they have moved from on-premise to cloud, the setup has become much easier. Now, we are hands-on with the setup and can do it within hours.

With another client, we are saving about 20 hours. However, we are not able to justify that return on investment by just saving time. There are other parameters that we would have to look at for justifying the ROI.

The return on investment for most of our clients depends from scenario to scenario. Some of them look at it on a long-term basis and some of them look at it from the amount of time saved. For example, we are currently working on a solution for a CIO. We are saving about four hours of his time during a particular week. The return on investment for that particular person is humongous.

We evaluated all the solutions. We had different RPA tools. Looking at the feedback from the market and the type of technical support that we had received, we went ahead with Automation Anywhere. The major reason for going with Automation Anywhere was the technical support that developers have.

I'd rate it an eight point five to nine because there's still always room for improvement.

We are an Automation Anywhere partner and we use it in the finance domain, in areas like B2B or B2C, etc. We also use it in HR and other domains for our clients. We have used it for vendor-invoice processing and recruitment. Those are our two major use cases as of now.

We have automated the recruitment and onboarding process for one of our clients. In that scenario, it has saved a lot of time. A process that used to take seven to ten days has now been reduced to half an hour. It has created a lot of efficiency.

It has also helped in terms of security because of all the off-boarding processes that we have automated. If an employee leaves, all his security access, email IDs, etc., are disabled on that same day. That person no longer has access to work on the company's domain.

IQ Bot is one of the most valuable features because it helps in processing different formats from different vendors.

As of now, it's only available on Windows machines. I would love if it were to also be available for Mac machines. That is something which is lacking as of now.

A cloud version was also missing, but now, with the new A2019 version, that's coming.

When I compare Automation Anywhere with the competition, some of the competitors have ready-made, off-the-shelf modules. For example, UiPath integrates with Windows AD. That is missing as of now in Automation Anywhere. If that became available it would also be great.

Stability-wise, it's a fine product. We haven't faced any major challenges up until now.

Scalability is also great. You automate one process and replicate it again and again.

For example, one of our clients has global operations. What we automated in one country, we were able to implement around the globe. We were also able to just keep on adding on new virtual machines in a given location, to have more and more processes automated. 

It's easy to scale.

Technical support is great. We have raised multiple queries over time and the results have been really good. The responses have been really good and fast. The feedback I have heard is that they get back to us same-day or, if not, the next day.

We had a good due-diligence process before we finalized. We compared different aspects like security, reliability, and compliance. AA scored high on the compliance front, so that's why we went with it.

The initial setup is straightforward. I don't see any complexity involved.

We have seen ROI in areas I mentioned earlier like time savings. We have seen good results.

The product starts at $10,000 and then it's up to you regarding how much you can consume. Comparatively speaking, the costs are higher for Automation Anywhere.

It's a good product. Compared to the competition, you can do multiple processes with one license. So there are a lot of savings in terms of license costs. It's easy to use and has good, UI-based interaction. It's easy to deploy as well. Clients can also train their own staff to do easy implementations, so they can save costs there as well.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at eight out of ten. There is always scope for improvement. There are a few ready-made things that they need to incorporate.

The primary use case would be to do automated processing using Excel with an application, even SAP. We use it for extracting data tables, clicking on data, recording records, and extracting the records table. We use it for all the Excel operations. 

We updated Automation Anywhere already to version A2019 with all the Excel operations.

It has reduced the number of full-time employees. 

The Excel operations are very good. Even in the MetaBot, they have included all the commands. Because of security, we automate our processes in MetaBot. 

IQ Bot is good compared to the other tools available in the market.

The dashboard and Control Room are very good compared to the market.

They are launching cloud into the market, which is very good.

They need to improve the OCR engine which is not up to the market.

We still cannot use IQ Bot with our documents.  

They have to work on the OCR and object cloning features.

However, I have not used version A2019 and cannot comment on the latest Automation Anywhere updates.

I would rate the stability as an eight out of 10.  There is an issue with the object cloning in Excel. OCR is also not that stable. Image recognition works fine, but not all the time.

Scalability is very good.

It is easy to set up.

The licensing costs are a bit high, but the profits are very good. 

I have worked on Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. The user interface of Automation is good and helpful. 

I have gone through the online training.

We are in the financial business and we use this solution to help provide reports for management.

We download data, perform Excel manipulation, and then generate reports. The reports are then sent to the higher levels of management.

There are things that used to take us a lot of time, like manual entries or HR queries, but now that the bots are in place, we are saving a lot of time. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is recording macros. The MetaBot is also great.

People can easily go in and automate anything they want.

This solution will connect to the database directly.

DLLs can be used to automate the MetaBots.

The GUI can be improved by making it more user-friendly.

Python integration is coming with the next release, and they should expand on that.

This solution could be more stable because sometimes I see some bugs.

This solution is very scalable. The bots do not depend on any specific system.

We have more than one hundred bots in production.

Technical support is great, but some of our tickets have not been solved.

There was a lot of manual effort being put into our processes, and we decided that we needed automation. 

The initial setup was really straightforward. We spoke with AA about what kind of architecture it needs, and they have created it in a way that is very robust.

We evaluated UiPath and some others and decided that Automation Anywhere had the best features.

There are a lot of different features that are built-in, and this is a great product.

There are some bugs in the version that I am using, and it can be improved.

I would rate this version an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is automation of processes for people services, such as data management of the employees, and financial processes, like reporting, financial reporting, and month-end closing activities.

it helps to save time when doing processes. E.g., when you do a manual process for eight hours, that time is saved because the bot will do that task for you. The process owners will be able to do the analysis part. The repetitive/manual part will be done by the robot. 

Another advantage is that bot functions 24/5 and humans cannot do that for our processes because they need to go home.

• Easy to use
• Very user-friendly
• Easy to learn

When using MetaBot, we cannot viably search inside it. 

When we debugging the automation, we cannot see where the automation goes after doing a subtask.

The object cloning is inaccurate sometimes, but this can be improved with future versions.

For A2019, I am looking for a faster running bot because I am still experiencing delays when running the bot.

Automation Anywhere is stable right now. It is constantly improving its user experience and the tool. The stability depends on how process owners, the business, and developers use Automation Anywhere to improve the processes of the company.

80 percent of the bots do not need to be supervised. However, 20 percent need to supervised because sometimes errors occur during the run. Most of the errors that I have encountered have been because the object cloning did not capture the buttons properly.

Automation Anywhere is very scalable as to the costs and benefits to the company.

I have already created 15 to 20 bots already. I think they're running well today.

The tech support of Automation Anywhere is very supportive regarding the voice of the customer. E.g., they ask for our feedback about what should be improved on their automation tool. This is one of the things customers look for in a product or tool.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I just use the tool.

Our IT team set up the automation without the help of a third-party.

The main difference is between Automation Anywhere and its competitors (UiPath and Blue Prism) is that Automation Anywhere is user-friendly. You still need programming language to use UiPath and Blue Prism. For Automation Anywhere, even if you don't know a programming language, you can easily learn the tool and use it.

Automation Anywhere is a great, user-friendly automation tool, but it still has room for improvement, like the MetaBot and object cloning part.

We have several back office use cases right now that we are working on. Some of them are workforce management, IT provisioning, and deprovisioning. 

I would give you an example of a most recent process which we have: one of the largest accounts for workforce management. There were about three to four people who were manually updating data into a system, then we replaced that process or augmented that with a bot. That bot now reaches data and enters it on behalf of users, which gives significant hours back to the business. So, those people can work on some other high value task.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very easy to use, so to get started, you don't really need hardcore development skills. However, over a period of time, when you have a complex use case, then you really need to improve your end user development skills.

One of the things that the product should have is to add more advanced level developer capabilities into the platform. I know it is easy for business, non-technical people. However, for the developers, there should be some more features within the product so they can build advanced level use cases much faster.

To be honest, I would rate it about an eight (out of ten). I would not give two points because there is still room for improvement for some of those real use cases that we are working with. 

I'm very optimistic about future releases of the product.

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.

Our primary use cases are mainly around finance and accounting, so invoice processing, AP processing, those sorts of use cases. It's a quite wide use case but that's where we focus.

We work in the business process outsourcing arena, it has improved our organization mainly around freeing up people to do other things and that can be quite large numbers. It can be in the high tens, even hundreds of people that can be freed up to do other work.

The main processes that we have automated with this solution are order to cash, procure to pay and record to report. 

For us, it's about replacing repetitive dull tasks with technology, allowing users to be able to do more interesting aspects of their work that hold the most value. 

We work both attended and unattended bots amongst other automation so we very much look at the use case and see what's the best approach. Most of our solutions are a combination of the two.

We're in a digital world where everything's evolving. AI is coming out, so just looking at keeping moving, introducing new innovations into the product, nothing specific. The Automation Anywhere teams seem to know what the customers want.

Stability is good. I liken it to driving a Ferrari. If you drive a Ferrari down the freeway in second gear, it won't be very smooth and reliable, but if you know how to drive it properly, then you'll have a nice comfortable ride.

Scalability is about the right approach. It's not just about the technology, it's about the people, understanding the processes, putting everything in place to make sure you monitor and govern your bots. Scalability is not a problem as long as you're approaching it correctly.

We can scale from the bots to the pilot to the bots we're using very quickly. It can be a handful of weeks. Depends on the complexity of the process. We like to get things out there quickly because if it's going to take six months, then the business is going to go off and do other things. Our target is to get it done in a number of weeks.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a great environment to use.

Our ROI is around productivity savings, agile headcount savings, but we also look at things like improvement in net promoter scores. Customer satisfaction is very important as well. There's no point necessarily just saving money if your customers aren't going to be any happier.

We have saved both time and money.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10.

You can automate the wrong process and you won't get any value. Make sure it's the right process and make sure it's a good process. Re-engineer, if you need to first.