Automation Anywhere Reviews

I have worked for two companies in the past who have used Automation Anywhere. Both primary use cases have fallen under finance and accounting, with a lot of finance and accounting based functions primarily for data processing: 

• Extracting data from different systems.
• Aggregating data.
• Doing analysis on data.
• Porting data into other systems.
• Doing accounting based functions, such as reconciliations and transaction uploads.

• At the most granular level, automating people's daily tasks has been helpful by freeing them up to do higher value-add activities, which is definitely beneficial. 
• On a larger scale, the tool is improving processes overall by making systems and processes more stable. It returns hours, time, and money back to the business.

• From a developer perspective, the user interface is user-friendly and easy to use. 
• From the admin side, the Control Room is simple to use. There is a lot of functionality with a lot of analytics and oversight that you can draw from just simple web pages. It is definitely the most useful.

Integrating this solution with other application has been good for the most part. A lot of the issues that I have are related to the actual applications than with Automation Anywhere. Any additional functionality which comes out in regards to integrating it better with more widely used applications, like Salesforce, Oracle, or Workday, is definitely beneficial and helpful at the end of the day.

I have been hearing great stuff in terms of upping the product's cognitive game. Anything that can be done to work with unstructured data sets would be helpful, like increasing the subjectivity of bots, and moving away from solely rules based processes to anything which actually requires subjective judgment. If Automation Anywhere could code that into the bot design and framework, having it sort of act like a human, that would be helpful. 

Anything that can be done to increase the stability from a system standpoint in regards to large-scale systems, which are being used by a number of applications, e.g., Salesforce or Workday. This would help us, as well.

Automation Anywhere should work to continue maintaining its ease of use.

One to three years.

My current and previous companies have had stability issues. 

I started on version 11 of Automation Anywhere, then when I joined a new company, they used version 10. Therefore, I have seen both versions. With version 11, some of the development stuff was a bit clunky in terms of the tasks that we were performing. They didn't perform as expected, or perform properly, when we were developing the bot. Then, once we deployed it into production, the bot would run for a specific process and work properly about 10 times, but on the eleventh time, it would break. It was always random. Nothing had changed at all, in regards to our system, architecture, or infrastructure.

On version 10, things had been a bit more stable. We made sure that we build code which effectively captures all use cases and exceptions, but stability is key. When you're building automated solutions using bots, people are already skeptical and hesitant to adopt them. Anything you can do to improve the stability is definitely helpful. Ultimately, it depends on what your goal with RPA is. If you're using RPA as a stop-gap to build large-scale system integrations, then it's very helpful. If you're using it as a be all, end all, then stability is your number one concern. 

The product is definitely scalable. A lot of it will depend solely on the architecture of the organization who is implementing it. If you are using on-premise servers, it is much harder to scale up versus if you are using cloud-based architecture. Automation Anywhere provides the tools and expertise to make it scalable.

At the previous company that I was with, we had a pilot in September 2017 with approximately 20 bots. Then, in production, it took nine to ten months. With the organization that I'm currently with their process took a little longer, but they were standing up their COE initially. So, they went from pilot to about 30 bots in production. This took roughly a year and a half to two years. 

With regards to process, there is a lot involved. If you want to have a successful RPA and Automation Anywhere implementation at the ground level, you need to lay the foundation and the framework. Therefore, you need to build your center of excellence, and make sure you have dedicated people who will focus on whatever their role is: People related to support, governance, development, architecture, oversight (who will work with your security teams to get your reviews done), and IT personnel (who will provision servers and licenses and do Control Room administration). There is a lot involved to take it from inception to a successful program. 

The technical support has been helpful from what I've used. Initially, when we were exploring solutions and using Automation Anywhere, as a vendor, their technical support seemed to be lacking a bit. It seems like in the last few months or year, they have been stepping up their game, in this regard. They are very prompt to follow up with issues and want to make sure issues are thoroughly resolved before they close tickets and move on, which has been helpful.

At both companies, we never used a different solution before Automation Anywhere. 

We had individuals working at the companies who spent years going to school, but could not necessarily download reports nor input data into spreadsheets, and this was something that could be easily automated. We wanted to free up users and people to perform higher value-add activities, exercising analytical and critical thinking, as opposed to being cogs in the machine.

Certain aspects of the initial setup were complex, but that's a given when you're talking about technical architecture and getting the infrastructure you need in place for a successful rollout. Though, some aspects of the initial setup were simpler. 

The simpler aspects are designating roles for people based on what it is they want to provide to the center of excellence for RPA and how they see their fit in the organization. The more complex piece of it is working with all the stakeholders, internally and externally, to get all the infrastructure in place that you need in order to develop, deploy, test, and run bots in production. 

For deployment, at the first company that I worked for, that was all in-house, as we were deploying our own bots. The architecture, development, and deployment were all in-house. 

At the company that I currently work for, we have a managed services company who does development for us, and we still handle deployments. It is more like a segregation of duties, where we handle the full deployment on the end once code is ready for production.

We have seen ROI, otherwise we would have stopped using the product.

At a base level, for ROI, we equate a dollar value out to the process owner, or the business user, and multiply that out by the number of hours being saved. However, that is really base level. There are other factors involved that will help:

• If you reduce the number of errors.
• If it's related to month-end or quarter-end close for a business cycle. 
• When automating a base level process, that saves time, but it doesn't always account for the additional time given back to the user to perform another higher value-added task, as well.

On the shortlist were some of the largest players in the industry: Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. This was in 2017, when I was involved with the PoC. We chose Automation Anywhere because of ease of use and overall functionality. I think the cost was also a big factor, but I don't have much insight into it.

People seem to be a bit skeptical about the cognitive document processing. I don't know if they see the power that IQ Bot provides relative to other world leading software products, such as ABBYY, which is another big OCR technology that I have used. If Automation Anywhere is stepping up its game in the cognitive aspect, this will help guide adoption in the future.

Consider all relevant factors before making a decision on a provider. Don't just randomly decide to choose one provider over another. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you are trying to achieve by implementing an RPA solution, what you're looking for in an RPA service provider, and who is willing to best address that and meet the needs of what it is you're hoping to achieve. You should consider RPA as a solution, and there are a whole host of other automation software solutions across the spectrum, as well, which are relevant for different things, but RPA has its place in any organization. Just know exactly what it is you are hoping to achieve. Based on that, you'll be able to find the best provider for you.

For developers, it's relatively easy to use. I know some developers are hesitant to use it because they come from traditional technical backgrounds. The product is counter-intuitive to everything that they have studied. If they studied computer science, they're really reticent towards something that can just automate what they learned. For someone with a nontechnical background, it's relatively easy to use and easy to build tests out. It takes a bit of effort to master and build sustainable solutions, but it is easy to use from a development perspective.

I have not been able to take courses in Automation Anywhere University for the new platform. I started using Automation Anywhere back in 2017, and the Automation Anywhere University wasn't available. There was another platform, at that time. We did the online training center for it, and it had eight different sections. Back then, it was a little clunky. You had to go through one section and complete it before moving on another. From what I've heard about Automation Anywhere University, it's much better and more functional. I haven't had the opportunity to use it yet, since I haven't really needed to use it. However, I do plan on exploring it in the future.

I don't use Citrix automation.

We have so many use cases. One of them is in finance and accounts. We have customer billing portals where there are invoices and purchase orders. The bot goes through these and gives a roll-up of the billing numbers. It goes through each customer portal. One example of a customer is IBM. It goes to the IBM portal, it logs in with bot credentials to SAP Ariba, opens an invoice and matches the purchase order items with that invoice, line by line. It then posts that invoice for billing purposes in that customer billing portal.

With the above bot in place, the cash-collection process will actually improve.

One of our other use cases is that in our general ledger process, our accountant was actually doing cash-to-bank reconciliations. He was going into SAP, downloading the open items, and then going into the bank statements and comparing the balances. By using Automation Anywhere, we were able to automate this process and now a bot is actually working as a bookkeeper and it's trying to close all the open items of the previous month and the current month. It ensures that the unidentified balance between the bank and the SAP balances is zero.

That cash and bank reconciliation is part of our book-closing process. It used to take 20 days for books to be closed. It now takes between ten and 12 days to close the books. That's an eight-days reduction and that's because of only one activity we have automated. 

As we speak, we have automated general entries and the AR reconciliation process as well. The time needed for our month-end close has been reduced.

MetaBot is the most valuable feature. Other products have robotic functionality but MetaBot is a kind of functionality by which code is created. For example, if you log in to the SAP Ariba portal and the MetaBot functionality is used, then whenever anyone within our company has to use the SAP Ariba portal, they will not need to code the process again. It will become a drag-and-drop functionality so business users who do not have coding knowledge can drag and drop. Out of ten steps, that user is able to drag and drop six of them to MetaBot. He is left with only four steps that need coding. It saves a lot of time, but these functionalities cannot be achieved overnight. You have to invest time and energy, create a set of libraries.

There is room for improvement when this application is used in a Citrix-based environment.

Another thing I have noticed is that the previous version does not have log functionality. If an external audit is happening, those logs are not available to show what changes have happened in the application. But in the new version they improved it and now those logs are available. So when our external audit came, we were able to demonstrate that whatever changes are happening in the application are getting logged somewhere and saved for future reference. In the future, if any fraud happens, we'll be able to backtrack that fraud into that application.

Stability is good, but it totally depends on the kind of infrastructure the organization is using. If the organization using Automation Anywhere has a sound infrastructure, the stability is good. But if the infrastructure keeps changing, then the application becomes a little erratic.

Scaling is very easy. We were able to scale it up very easily.

For 2018, we thought of doing eight projects, but we completed 25. We're definitely planning to scale up, but scaling up does not depend on Automation Anywhere. It actually depends on our organization's strategic plan, and how fast we want to do it. As an organization, we want to be a tortoise in the journey, rather than being a hare. We want to have a consistent pace of implementation. Initially, we were like the hare and did some extra implementations, but now we are trying to match it up with the pace of the organization. Sometimes, too big a change can rock the boat, which we don't want to do.

But equally, we were able to demonstrate that this application can do wonders for the organization, help us to digitally transform the way we're working, and introduce a new way of working to any organization. Now, humans have started adopting bots as their new team members.

Automation Anywhere has a very nice support team, and it's just a call away. You don't have to log tickets, although that functionality is also available. I have a dedicated person at Automation Anywhere. I can call her at 12 am and she will pick up and ensure that the issue is prioritized and solved the next day for me. I like the way that is done. It doesn't cause me sleepless nights.

The initial setup is straightforward. They have a guidebook to help our IT infrastructure team to set it up. It was very easy. Anybody who does not come from a software background could read it and would be able to install the application and start using it. I have done it myself and I don't have a technical background. It's like downloading Microsoft Word and using it. It's very simple.

Our deployment took three months.

Our implementation strategy is PDCA: Plan, Do, Check, Act. We planned this implementation, and then did it. We then checked whatever was not done correctly in the first instance and acted on it to complete the implementation. We believe in having a very simple approach. We planned to do automation using Automation Anywhere and then we acted on it. Then we checked that out of, say, ten milestones, we were able to close seven of them. We acted on completing the other three milestones.

They're very flexible around pricing and licensing.

We evaluated:

• Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism
• Automation Anywhere vs UiPath
• Automation Anywhere vs NICE 
• Automation Anywhere vs WorkFusion

However, the Automation Anywhere payment plan, the flexibility they have shown, and the customer service support were fantastic. At a customer service level, we don't want to buy a product and then struggle with the support they're providing.

Go slow. Don't rush into things. Try to adopt this implementation around the business strategy your organization has. Don't follow other organizations blindly. Have a digital policy around adopting this technology. Have a Chief Digital Officer, who is able to understand this and then internally sell it.

Don't go with a "big bang" approach, but rather, go with the right test use cases, and then try to actually solve a complex business challenge through this implementation. Don't implement it just for the sake of it. For example, when we implemented it our focus was not to implement robotics. Our focus was to use this technology to solve a complex business problem so that it makes a meaningful difference in the lives of people who are doing that process daily.

For example, now a bot is able to do customer billing for us and we are able to collect fast. It directly impacts the revenue. On the other hand, if the cycle closing month-end is fast, my CFO has more time for his final quarter closing. He has more time to go through what didn't go well, rather than struggling to close the books and not having time to do an analysis and get insights into what actually works. So we are trying to solve complex business challenges. We're not here to implement robotics.

We could use any technology but, up until now, this technology has helped us.

We have ten-plus users of this solution in the roles of bot manager and bot runner. There are eight people responsible for implementation and deployment and they are solution architects.

We use automation for a tax invoice process, finance process, and human resource process.

In the tax process, it collects all tax invoices from a folder, then AA reads a QR code on the document to confirm, then extracts it to an Excel sheet for the success process and failed process.

For finance, AA calculates the tax type on each project. After that, AA inputs the data into the ERP system for further processing.

For the HR department, AA will shortlist the candidates on the portal. It will then send an email to qualified candidates to follow further instructions for testing. Then, AA will collect the results of the test and send them to the HR staff to process further.

On the tax, finance, and HR processes, AA will automate collecting documents, then extract them into an Excel file, and also do the confirmation using a QR code. In the past, these processes were completed by three or four staff over one to two days. Using automation, these processes are completed in between one and two hours, using one robot. With these savings in time, the staff can do more in other areas. 

These advantages improve staff productivity and creativity. It also means that they do not need more overtime. As a result, it will impact positively on the company overall. 

It's a cloud-based solution, so we do not need any on-premises server. Having a cloud-based deployment provides more flexibility because we just need an internet connection for connecting the agent into the AA cloud.

For a few workflow processes that need credentials, AA provides more security for this. Their encryption is to ensure that our credentials are always secure and cannot be accessed by unauthorized people.

The dashboard can be accessed by several roles. User monitoring, for example, can view the dashboard, watch how many robots have failed, and other stats, but they cannot change how the robot works.

For the short term, in this pandemic era, they should have a feature to write and save directly into Word documents, Office 365, or Google Docs. As it is now, it can only save to Excel files.

In the long term, in the cloud era, it would be great if they had an API or connection into other cloud services, such as SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS. This would mean that their automation ecosystem would be more complex, helping to improve our productivity and creativity.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about a year.

Stability-wise, this is a good product.

The scalability is good.

We have not yet tried to contact technical support.

Before AA, all of our processes were done manually.

The initial setup is straightforward, as this is a cloud-based deployment.

We implemented using an in-house team.

Our ROI is approximately USD $40k to $50k.

The cost of this solution is a little bit high, but it is worth the price.

We evaluated UiPath before choosing Automation Anywhere.

So far, all the features and services match today's technology, and we expect it will remain current for at least the next two to three years. I hope that they keep this great work on RPA.

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

We used AA for all of our healthcare clients for multiple use cases. We have automated most manual steps of Claim Adjudication, Claim Pre-Work Validation, Overpayment Recovery, Triaging, Quoting Census, etc.

In the front office side, we have automated Provider Calls as attended solution which helps Agents to take calls hassle-free while Bots gather the required information from multiple applications. We have automated KFI process where AA OCR identifies the CMS1500 form run it through IQ BOT and further post it on the target application.  

By automating most of our LOB's on the healthcare side and putting it on production, we have saved millions of dollars and were also able to achieve FTE benefits. It has improved our quality, AHT, and was also able to achieve target TAT and SLA. 

We have successfully processed 10 million claims through unattended BOTs. We also saw significant improvement in Agent performance for provider calls where we deployed attended Bots. Overall, Automation Anywhere has been great for us and helped us in generating revenue as well. We had recognized by Automation Anywhere as Innovation Partner of the Year - 2020 in Payer Segment which helps us in selling our solutions to new healthcare clients.   

There are many features of Automation Anywhere that were found to be most valuable like WLM, PDF integration, Advanced Excel Commands, Terminal Emulator and its commands, Interactive Forms building features of A2019 which helped us in developing UI for our front office automation and integrate it with multiple rest APIs. The new features which were introduced in A2019 like Data Table, custom DLL, IBM Watson Speech to Text, IQ BOT, Document Extractor has been impressive. The option to use the Python Script has been very helpful.

We noticed slowness in a few of the commands like Object Cloning, Web Recorders, etc. on which Automation Anywhere can work to make it more robust. There are improvements required in the WLM solution provided by AA, which can make it a more robust queuing system and the system should retry by itself in case of failure due to system error. There should be the option of selecting credentials by passing variables and not just limit it to selection. Retry mechanism should be included in Enterprise 11.x version which helps developers to reduce the number of lines of code.

I have been using AA for 4.5 years.

Whatever product they launch they make sure that it is 99.9% stable. The stability of this solution is pretty high.

It is scalable for sure and has the capability of becoming the world's number one RPA tool.

It was nice interacting with CS/tech support. Most of the time they resolves issues within 24 hours.

Before AA, we tried a few other RPA tools but those have few challenges in terms of security and interaction feasibility after the AA worked for us nicely.

The initial setup is straightforward and does not necessarily requires technical knowledge.

In our case it was both. The level of expertise was 9 out of 10

We saved millions of dollars and had FTE benefits.

The licensing model and cost are very impressive. Now, you do not have to worry about infra setup cost like Server, Database as it comes free of cost with the A2019 cloud version.

We evaluated BP, UiPath, Pega,  etc.

One word for Automation Anywhere keeps shining and helps your customers/partners to automate & gain more.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA was used in conjunction with Automation Anywhere IQ Bot and Automation Anywhere Bot Insights to reduce the time taken to process a mortgage application by automatically verifying the applicants, the address, title, and scheduling a settlement meeting. The automation solution extracted information from or entered data into more than six applications including four major bank web applications. The environment included a Control Room server, an IQ Bot server, a bot runner machine, all running windows server 2012.

Automation Anywhere is stellar and the pre-built bots on the bot store help reduce the development time and effort. The IQ Bot solution can read from scanned images and documents which has hugely benefited the mortgage processing team.

The professional services team at Automation Anywhere helped in designing and architecting the solution effectively and their modular approach to the solution meant, the solution could be tested for user acceptance in stages. It helped the team provide early feedback and suggest changes to optimize the automation solution.

There are several valuable features : 

(1) Validate the data extracted from digital and scanned documents.

(2) Schedule the bots to run at specified intervals and report on the execution status.

(3) Ability to resume automation from intermediate states in case of exceptions.

(4) Ability to introduce human in loop for making decisions without requiring the mortgage application to be started again.

(5) Reporting on straight through processing, exceptions and failure.

(6) Business user friendly interface, easy-to-learn tools and availability of on-demand training for free.

There are some areas that the product can be improved : 

(1) Better exception handling mechanism.

(2) Parallel processing of branches to improve execution time.

(3) IQ Bot: An easier way to tag the document's source after extracting information from the document. (Which group does the document or a transaction belong to).

(4) Better integration with external data sources for Bot Insights.

(5) Advocating and encouraging use of queues and device pools by providing implementation details with success rate and support from services for the same.

I have been using AA for 1.5 years.

V11 is very stable. 

A2019's stability is yet to be determined but most usecases would not have any trouble being automated in A2019. It is more robust in terms of feature availability and bot code maintenance.

Highly Scalable.

Stellar.

We used UiPath and Kofax Kapow.

Not quite straightforward. Required support from Automation Anywhere Support team but that was made available at no cost.

Vendor team and Automation Anywhere's Professional Services.

>80%

Calculate the IQ Bot page count and usage.

Factor in the development as well as training time required for IQ Bot training and validation. The effort is easily underestimated.

We evaluated UiPath but Automation Anywhere's IQ Bot solution was the only fit for our use case at that moment. (UiPath was yet to unveil their "Document Understanding" product suite).

The learning curve is less steeper compared to other automation products in the market. 

Our primary use is a bot to look up accounts from Excel to the source system and entering it back into Excel.

We have a bot running on a computer that is doing manual tasks that we used to do. There is an initial setup time but pays off quickly.

I haven't done anything fancy yet, but the basics work for me for now.

It would be better to make it more user-friendly so that individuals with no experience can pick it up pretty quickly.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

The primary use case of this solution is that we are automating repetitive processes such as daily currency calculation, data entry in the EPR system, email reading and sorting data, extracting data from webpages, and extracting data from invoices.

We also use automation for data massaging on Excel data, database connectivity, PDF data extraction, scheduling bots, and the validation of extracted data from webpage or invoices.

We use error handling to point out which of the bots are failing. 

We are using v11, A2019, and IQ Bot. 

With the help of Automation Anywhere, our organizational efficiency has increased. We have automated HR-related tasks such as CV shortlisting and salary slip generation processes. This has decreased our time consumption for these tasks.

We have also improved our clients' organizations by automating repetitive processes. With this, the ROI has increased and the overall time consumed by processes is reduced. We now use this manpower for other important tasks.

Human intervention is not required for most of the processes and also, they are auto-scheduled.

The most valuable features are data extraction and entry into webpages, extracting data from unstructured invoices, email sorting and attachment downloading, Excel actions, database connectivity, IQ Bot for extracting data from invoices, connectivity with ERP applications, as the REST and SOAP web services.

With the help of these features, we can automatically fetch data from invoices and websites, which is followed by the automated data entry into the webpage and ERP system.

Excel actions help us for automating work on Excel workbooks.

The A2019 Community version does not fully support Mozilla Firefox, as it has problems when you try to capture data from the Firefox window. 

I would like to see more features added in the Community editions to improve developer hands-on practice. 

When you try to capture an error snapshot in A2019, it's not capturing the proper data compared to V11. 

The Recorder action in the A2019 Community edition is not supported. 

If we refresh the window then it does not show the Chrome window title in the list. This only works on Internet Explorer.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last two years.

The technical support team was helpful at the time of installation and setup. Whenever we are stuck, the support team's help is very important.

I haven't used an RPA solution other than Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward. With help of the Automation Anywhere technical support team, it is easy to set up.

We implemented using the vendor team. The level of expertise is very good, and they help very well.

The setup cost for this is onetime and licensing is based on your choice of product.

We evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath before choosing Automation Anywhere.

Overall, the product is very good where the repetitive tasks are more in manufacturing industries and the finance department. It is the best solution for any type of industry to automate their repetitive process, leading to increased ROI and reduced time consumption.