Automation Anywhere Reviews

In our own company, we are using it for own employees. They are building bots for our own employees.

In an organization that you join, there are so many things. Today, you have different type of requests for laptops or any type of service that you want from the team. There are different sort of things. We have created a bot (use case) where your bot will do everything for you.

Once you join our company, you can ask your bot to create different types of tickets, whatever you require. Also, in our organization, you have to fill out timesheets on a daily basis. For that, we have also created a used case, where you have to order your bot to fill out your timesheet. So, it will automatically fill it out. You don't need to do it manually.

The automation does the basic things needed in our day-to-day work. We have implemented Automation Anywhere, and our bots are doing all this work.

For your daily work, if you are investing three to four hours doing your repetitive work, e.g., you are taking data from SAP and some warehouse, analyzing all the data, then manually doing all the formulas of Excel and checking the output. It takes three to four hours on a daily basis. With automation, you can reduce that effort to half an hour or an hour. So, it will improve your efficiency and save you a lot of time, so you can improve your time in other work. Therefore, you can be faster than the previous way.

Automation Anywhere has many functionalities. The newest version of Automation Anywhere, A2019, has improved a lot. So, it has many functionalities for Excel, such as, Excel automation. Throughout the entire organization, we have different types of work-related Excel, which you can easily automate to Automation Anywhere.

Also, Automation Anywhere includes IQ Bots. So, IQ Bots is the key part of Automation Anywhere. You can work on any type of PDF, images, invoices, or billing things in any company. You can just upload it and extract the data, then use it as you require. It is a key part of Automation Anywhere: the best part.

There is a small thing from a development point of view. There should be a static site box for finding any command if I am writing a code. If there are hundreds of functions, you can only scroll up and down to find one each one. There should be a site box where we can find the commands and easily use them.

In the new version, they have included a flow chart instruction. This should be easily removed by mouse cursor. It's basically no problem; like we have to always use keyboard or mouse. This should be independent since we are either using a mouse or keyboard. This should be running smoothly.

These are very small things which need to be improved.

Stability is good. It is improving. Even with the newest version, they have improved a lot. Earlier, we used to face some blockages. Now, with the newest version launch, there will be so many new functions.

Previously, there were very few functions for Excel automation. We had to put in logic for everything, like in other coding languages. Now, they have included so many functions in Excel. You can easily automate your Excel work to the function without writing a script. Hardly, a script is required.

We have the option of handling exceptions. They have given us so many options to handle exceptions. If your bot crashes, you are trying to find some page, or you're trying to find some file and it is not found, we have alternatives. We can handle the exception, like coding in Java or Python. We can handle the error because we have the functionalities. Also, we can write a small code for handling all these exceptions. So, it is easy to use without any fuss.

We have IQ bots. In IQ Bots, they have the option of uploading around a maximum of 150 documents at once. So, if your organization is generating some PDFs or images on a daily basis, maybe it's hundreds of documents, you can upload them at once. You have to train IQ Bot for one of these documents, then it will automatically take for the rest of these documents. It will easily map all the keywords and extract all the exact information that you want. That is important.

We are creating bots, as of now, for different areas and use cases that we have. Once, that is completed and pushed to production, then the support team will come in. We have lifetime support for production, which is for the partnership.

We are currently developing the bots. Once, we are done with our development, then production will finally start.

I am a developer on the development side. I am not a business person.

For the current version, I will give them an eight out of 10.  The future version will get more one plus one.

I lead the automation team in UI. In the UI, we automate mostly PDF and shared devices, then most web applications. For large volumes, we mostly automate PDFs.

I have enjoyed using all the features of this tool, not just one feature, e.g., object cloning, Excel automation, and the web recorder. 

The tool is very easy to use and mostly user-friendly. I like that when using it I don't need much expertise.

With the IQ Bots that use AI, I want to see more features using that type of machine learning and artificial intelligence in their products.

It is a very scalable product. With the market, every time and every day, we can scale it.

It is very easy to interact with the support team for Automation Anywhere whenever it's required. Sometimes, if the training is required, they would visit our premises. We can also visit their premises. In terms of training and product support, if you have any challenges as a developer, they help all the time. It is very easy to connect with them.

It is very straightforward.

I have seen a huge difference in how it is improving products.

I use them mostly. I would recommend it to all my friends and team. I encourage team member to use it, even those who are not from a technical background. They can also move to Automation Anywhere, use, and can learn from it. If they go to use Automation Anywhere University and other training tools, the training materials are available for them. So, it's very easy to learn as well. Different platforms and technology members have also moved to use the RPA platform, and are now using the Automation Anywhere tool.

I'd give it a nine point two out of 10. There is still a way to go for Automation Anywhere where we can see improvement. Mostly, we want to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning. Now, I can see only this mostly in the IQ Bot where we construct the data from PDFs. I also want to see more features where we can use the artificial intelligence in automating tasks as well.

Our primary use for this solution is mainly to support our email vertical, so it helps automate the management of financial, commercial and operations between our multiple domains using logistics and libraries and data points.

We just use it to get data from different sources and massage some data with some specific protocol. After that, we simply have to put back the data. It is a system for data treatment and to notify the proper business handler.

The product has helped our organization tool-wise to expand capabilities and offerings. To keep it short and simple, I'd say there are useful features that will definitely help us as we do more development in the near future.

The most valuable feature is that we can automate data manipulations. We can save IP's, we can save time, we can use manual reports. The main benefit of this tool is that it is a robust solution.

The feature I think that helps most is the ability to integrate. There is SAP integrations, SAP application integration, web application integrations, and email integrations. We have multiple features — there are a lot of features. They are also very good features which enable us to do many things.

What may be able to be improved is that sometimes there'll be a connection that is not from our clients and servers and that's a situation they may want to address. The solution for that may need to be built differently based on the needs from organization to organization. In that case, it is not particularly or specifically about the tool. It is just something I could see they might help enable.

That the product is now available as a cloud-based solution is a good feature that they added. So with that and new features already coming out, I don't have a lot of suggestions. I will have to work on this new version, then let's see if there's something I think they need to add.

There are a number of current tools which can be improved because they have many limitations. Like some better controls in emails, and better support for features in Excel and PDF. Especially things like that which I need more than new features.

I'll be enabling the current features, but I'll have to see them and what they do before I can feedback more.

The product is not totally stable. I feel like it could be improved on in that way. It's just stable, not very stable, and that's the difference.

The problem is mainly handling enterprise data. There can be connections which are not the nature you would expect. It is not from the client or the server but something else. There can be performance issues.

Scalability is a trend we are experiencing in IT. We have to have a scope for a project and we have to create a scope again in the future millennia. So I'm waiting just to see the functionality of the additional features in this package.

We have never had to use the technical support as we were able to work with and implement the product. We act as consultants and supply technical support to clients.

I do not think it is straightforward to start working with this product. It's a little complex to start out working in the database. After this when you gain a little experience with the product, then you will understand it and be able to smooth out your processes and how you approach development and it will be easier.

We are a consulting organization, so we have experience with this product now. We have started up administration for the solution for many other clients. We did not use an external reseller or integrator and did everything in-house or ourselves. So we have worked it both ways: we did our own deployment and then we did deployments for other organizations.

Right now we are just mainly focusing on our internal development with our workforce only.

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

Now they have a nice tool that is mostly stable with most of the features I could want being covered in the functionality of the product. More features are coming soon with this release so that's why I rated it an eight. The product right now will probably be better with the release.

I think it would be very difficult to consider the product a nine or a ten. To reach that level and to connect with innovations in the technology that are coming is very hard to anticipate and solve. There is always a limitation to what they can develop at once, so they will delay some work.

If I'm talking to a user who is not comfortable with automation tools, I recommend that they try the Automation Anywhere tool only. It's very easy to learn and easy to implement. It is not something you are making a sacrifice to use. It is a good tool.

We have many use cases. We are solving business problems for our clients. E.g., it could be as simple as doing data entry or creating a mashup solution with intelligent automation, which is a buzz word these days. It can also be as complex as having AI integrated with RPA. It depends upon a lot of use cases. This is what we are solving.

We are the partners of Automation Anywhere, so we are solving our client's problems with Automation Anywhere as an enabler. In addition, we are a consumer of Automation Anywhere.

We have digital workers with us who assist us in doing our work in robotic process automation. They solve all the problems where we need to do mundane activities and tasks that users should not be doing. Users should be utilizing their brain part, then the remaining roles and activities should go to the digital workers that we have.

We have automated that complete process of code review. The bot is solving the problem of ensuring the compliance of reviewing code. People used to generally skip the code review process because it was exhaustive. Bots can review the complete standards of the code, whatever is there, ensuring the compliance and eventually saving time.

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode. Switch off your work when you are out of your office. The bot auto logs into your desktop and asks what they should do be doing, then it works. Tomorrow morning, you come back into the office, you have the output on your desk.

We used to face a lot of challenges with older versions, like auto login. 

Nothing is perfect. The tool should always evolve to the better and more efficient.

If we are talking about evolving, then we are talking about intelligent automation. There should be more features included in the package with this type of software. For example, IQ Bot is something that we used to have and was working well. However, there are other use cases of machine learning and complex cognitive solutions. Those should be included in the package, as they will solve major problems which we face today of unstructured data. This is part of the evolution process and these changes won't happen in a day.

The latest version is very stable and reliable. I have a lot of confidence in it as we deploy this bots at the client site. I have confidence that the bot will auto login in the night and do the work.

If you have 500 digital works for an enterprise, then someday you will need to update. Automation Anywhere is not very scalable because the update and upgrade process requires immense effort from the IT organization to do a tool check. 

Automation Anywhere Control Room should update to the newer versions with one click, including the newer features. There should be minimum effort required from the IT organization. The major resistance from any organization is from the IT organization because they have a lot of dependencies and will sometimes resist doing changes because they have  other activities and applications to manage. Future versions should minimizing their work.

I have used the technical support a lot of times. It has improved a lot. The response time has been very good. 

We used to face many problems for auto login and scheduler. It is lot of tickets for these problems, but Automation Anywhere was very responsive at that time. While they didn't have a ready-to-go solution, they ensured in the next release those improvements were there and now it is very stable.

The initial setup is not straightforward, but it's not complex. if somebody knows how to do it with an SOP, they can do it. The setup is tedious, but it's doable. 

We are a consultant for the deployment.

We have seen ROI with this product. With this product, we go for any RPA use case. If it is not solving anything or giving quantifiable benefits, it does not make sense.

I've been involved with my clients in recommending Automation Anywhere.

It is a good tool and one of the market leaders. The ease of implementation is very good in Automation Anywhere compared to other tools. If somebody is just starting out, Automation Anywhere is the best tool to look at to rapidly start because it delivers quickly robotic process automation.

The market is very dynamic. The product needs to be constantly evolving.

They have improved the product a lot since I started working with it.

We have many solutions, like Data Rebate, for example. We need to compare this information, regardless of the information that we save in the Experian databases, against information in government websites, in order to ensure that everything is up to date. The information of the company address, for example, took around 47 minutes to compare, while using RPA it now takes around 10 minutes for each one.

Automation Anywhere has improved our company a lot, because we are currently trying to leverage automation in different departments to allow employees to work where more human intervention is needed. The SLA of some tasks that we need to deliver to some clients has improved greatly. The productivity has increased a lot in my organization.

Interaction with websites is the feature most valuable to us. Most of the systems are web-based, so using a very accurate web-based identification like objects, extracting information from tables inside websites, and checking websites differences using MetaBots is very helpful with Internet Explorer. This allows us to separate the functionality by using an object where we store all the assets, or screenshots of the webpages, instead of changing the logic of a website. It's very useful.

Ease of use of this solution depends on how complete you want to go. From my perspective as a system engineer, the curve was very, very low because you have a lot of understanding about technology. On the other hand, we have examples of people that the curve was a little bit high, but coaching them to improve their knowledge about Automation Anywhere and how friendly the interface is right now is very useful.

MetaBots and Control Room may have some room for improvement.

The bot store has a large amount of pre-designed bots. I made some tests related to language, browser scene, and image recognition. It was very nice.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as seven out of ten. There are a lot of things that need to be improved, especially related to the Control Room, but you can develop and scale with this tool very, very fast.

Right now, we have two business units which use it for automation, mostly for:

• Back office
• Shared services automation
• Accounts payable
• Accounts receivable
• Most finance functions.

We have two different business units which have already begun their journey. One has been doing it for two years, and another one for one year. We have another two business units which will be beginning their journeys this Summer. Certainly, the value of it has been proven already in the business units which have already started their journeys. They have seen the value in terms of automating some of their redundant, important processes. This has allowed some of their users to move onto more value-added activities.

The most valuable feature is that it is intuitive. It is designed so business users can use it with a drag and drop functionality to develop automation of business processes. Since they are the experts on business processes, there are probably the best ones to create the automation.

They designed the bot creation process where we can drag and drop and all of the commands are available to us on the left side of the screen, but in some ways, it can be overwhelming. There is a lot at a developer's fingertips to do their development process.

I would like the ability to extract the code. You can go line by line, then open up each line of code and dig into the details, but it would be nice to extract all of the lines of code and all of the details into a document so we could read through everything. Right now, there is no way to really consume all of the code at once, except line by line, which can be fairly time consuming if we don't really know what we are looking for.

As we deploy more solutions and take advantage of some of the features, like the Credential Vault, where we are introducing new administrative processes, we continue to have to go in and change passwords on a monthly basis. Tools that would make these administrative tasks more streamlined is an area where Automation Anywhere could really add value.

I love the new features that they're offering and the direction that they're going. We've tried to deploy some of them. Sometimes, we're running into some bugs in different things, so they haven't worked out all of the kinks yet. Hopefully, they can get some of these things resolved and continue introducing new features like they have been.

Our first business unit who started their journey two years ago went from one bot initially to about 55 over a two-year period. Typically, they were averaging a new bot about every two to three weeks. That was with a team of five to six people sort of dedicated to the process. We have had consistent growth with our numbers over that time.

We have been pleased with the technical support. Their response times, capabilities, and patience when working with us, taking the time to understand the issues, and helping us to resolve them. This has improved over time. We are encouraging our users to use them as a resource when they do have questions or problems.

I was involved in setting up our upgraded environment for the new version. The documentation that they provided us was very thorough. We chose to go back to our integrator (our consulting company) to help us build our new environment, just so we would have ready resources available if we ran into questions. However, in this situation, we were able, from start to finish, to build the new environment without many problems, by just following the documentation.

We did initially use an integrator (consulting company) to do our training. That was a very important part of the process, and it helped us be successful.

Automation Anywhere is a great tool. I have been in IT for 30 years, and am amazed at how far we have come with technology and tools to help us do our jobs. The ease of use and the power which the product offers you in a matter of minutes, if not just an hour, and what you can create with it.

It integrations really well with other applications, as long as you have access from the same computer which you're running the software on to your other systems. Then, it can interact with those other systems just as if you were any user who is on that same computer. From this aspect, it is more powerful than other tools which I am familiar with.

We are just starting to look into the solution's cognitive document processing by doing a proof of concept.

Early on, I did try a few of the Automation Anywhere University courses, mainly to get familiar with what was available, so I could guide others to the website for training. At this point, there hadn't been much there that I needed for myself. However, we have looked at the courses, and we are encouraging a lot of our business users to take advantage of the tools.

The important thing about any RPA tool is it has to be a collaborative effort between IT and the business. It needs to be driven by the business, or it won't be successful. An important overall goal or strategy to have as you start your journey: Have good buy-in and ownership from the business. They have to want to do this and take advantage of this new tool.

We are automating internal processes, mostly at the task level. We are going in and looking for manual work which can be reduced through the use of automation.

Primarily, we have automated finance and cost control related expenses.

We are still in the proof of concept and pilot stages.

We have had some moderate, qualified success, so far. We are just starting out, but we have been able to take an accounting task and clear a very large backlog. Therefore, being completely up-to-date of the task since implementing a bot on it.

The ability to automate low decision, highly repetitive tasks and clear large backlogs of tasks that we could not do with our human staff.

We have had some difficulty with ease of use. As far as getting the overall architecture setup, we had a lot of difficulties ensuring the control room was installed correctly and that we were setting up our runner machines correctly, as well. Some of that was due to our own IT not being fully up-to-date on the process and being properly informed. We also just found the install procedures somewhat cumbersome to use. In addition, we have had some difficulties getting it to interact in predictable ways with our in-house software.

We would like a smoother process for moving bots and tasks between the different development environments, from development to testing to production. We find this to be pretty cumbersome to work through.

We have had some issues with stability. However, we think this is as much on our end as on Automation Anywhere's side. They have been very helpful with their customer service on resolving these issues.

The initial setup is complex.

We are doing everything in-house.

We look at ROI in a couple of different ways: FTE reduction, hours saved of human work, or errors caught. We are also looking at finding errors in our invoicing for our accounts payable team to be able to reduce those errors.

We spoke with a number of vendors.

Look into what the requirements are from an IT standpoint and involve the IT team in ensuring that the installation and setup are handled smoothly. Make sure that the IT team is onboard and invested in a way that makes them a close partner in the automation process.

The bot creation process is pretty user friendly for a lot of tasks, such as the object cloning. I know a number of our developers have felt that it is a bit cumbersome with its logic and variable manipulation. A lot of us want to be able to start typing in directly rather than having to click and drag things, but as far as the core automation functionality, we found that pretty easy to use.

We have not used the IQ Bot.

I have not taken any course on Automation Anywhere University.

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.