Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case is for automating our mortgage and loan origination processes. 

We brought onshore a lot of what we were doing offshore, saving our company close to $20 million.

Centralized automation is its most valuable feature.

The bot creation process is relatively simple.

It is reasonably useful for developers. It can be a challenge for a developer, as it limits what they can do.

I would like centralized orchestration and better exception handling in the next release.

Because of the stability of the application and how it interacts with some of our legacy applications, it does cause difficulties.

The stability of the solution is getting better. We have had some issues with the Control Room stability, which makes it harder for us to manage the bots. This is in recent versions.

We are scaling up, but I don't think that we are scaling correctly.

The technical support is solid. They are pretty responsive.

The setup is mostly straightforward.

We used Ernest & Young for the deployment. They helped us get a lot of the work done.

We measure ROI through time and labor savings (FTEs). 

We save time through our reduction in cycle time: 30 to 35 days.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

Have your business plan well-developed.

The solution is reasonably wide open, so it integrates quite well with other solutions.

The IQ Bots are of limited use to us right now.

We don't use AISense, and the version of the application that we use isn't capable with Citrix.

Our first use case was to program a bot which could do the work of approximate 30 people, taking around half a year to implement. We did that bot around a year ago. This bot was the best case scenario for Automation Anywhere, making it the perfect application for RPA in our corporation.

Automation Anywhere can work with very old applications. For example, we had one application about to collapse and were able to capture all its information before the collapse happened.

The most valuable feature is its easy to use. For developers, the solution is super easy. I just learned the new Workbench editor, which is even better. In the version that we have now, we normally use a few TaskBots and a lot of MetaBots, so we can integrate DLLs and further enhance the bots that we have. It is very impressive.

The bot creation process is simple and useful. Whatever you need to do, it is there. If there is something else, there are the MetaBot functions.

It has been challenging integrating Automation Anywhere with other solutions, due to all of the controls, as we are a bank. 

We are really excited to have Python run directly from the bots. This would be a massive upgrade, as we could integrate AI even further with the solution. 

There is room for improvement in AI, but they are working on it.

They can work more on integrating the code. I would like to see more similar examples where we don't have to create the code in the bot, but can create the code in the Workbench.

The technical support is great, but I would like them to be faster with their response times. Sometimes, we have to contact them multiple time on the same ticket to receive a response.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, especially as a PoC. With the controls, it could be a bit more complex.

We have a third-party who manages our IT. They did an IaaS, then we did everything else.

We also evaluated UiPath and Automation Anywhere. 

We chose Automation Anywhere, as it was the more complete, simpler application.

Do a very simple automation of an application entry, like registration. Then, you will see how fast the application is and will start using it right away.

Every time a new employee starts with us, we start them on the Automation Anywhere University, "Hello Bot: Introduction to RPA" course.

While the cognitive document processing is very impressive, we sadly don't have it right now. We are working on acquiring it.

We don't use Citrix. We use Azure for every deployment. Azure has worked very well and is scalable.

We have been creating a lot of bots for the finance department. At this time, we are trying to use the TaskBots and MetaBots, not IQ Bots. 

As of now, we have automated processes from the finance, accounting, treasury, and tax departments.

An example of how it has saved time: I know 10 to 12 accountants who were doing a lot of day-to-day manual tasks. Once we implemented the Automation Anywhere into my company, we freed up a lot of their time, so they could work on other processes. 

I like the OCR feature, where we can capture information from PDFs.

The commands provides by Automation Anywhere make the tool easy to use.

I know Automation Anywhere is available for front-end applications, but I don't know how it deals with the back-end. If they are sending technology which comes through to the back-end, that would be a big evolution in the industry.

Citrix is only in the development stage. Automation Anywhere could put some time into improving this more.

The stability is good.

We started with zero bots. In our first cycle, we developed around eight bots. In our second cycle, we created around five or six bots. Now, we are on our third bot cycle.

The technical support is good. They try to get back to us within one to two days. Once they do respond, everything is good.

The initial setup was complex.

Initially, we used an implementer for the deployment. Now, we do everything on our own.

We measure ROI by how much we are saving for our internal people.

Compared to the other competitors' tools that I have been experienced with for bot creation, Automation Anywhere is user-friendly.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. They are simple and detailed. The courses include videos and quiz questions.

We want to learn more about IQ Bots going forward.

It is for my partner development. We primarily work in the insurance business. So, we do a lot of insurance back office operations. These are the types of processes that we have automated.

We previously had a lot of manual processes. With the bot, we were able to automate them. Therefore, we are able to see the real-time value in our business area.

We have multiple developers on our team. With its user-friendly user interface, our developers are able to quickly pick it up. The ease of use is really good.

Bot creation is a cool feature. It allows the developer to do complex things. 

There are some places where Automation Anywhere needs improve a lot, especially from an integration perspective. We have had to build our own scripts to make this happen, building a bot in Automation Anywhere, along with some scripts. However, we have not yet implemented the Automation Anywhere MetaBots. So, once the MetaBots are implemented in our area, we should be able to achieve more.

If the bots become more stable, we can completely avoid using our additional scripts.

I would like to see the record management, data tracking, and database feature. Some of these have been implemented in the version 11. I have not used the latest release, version 11. Also, if some various cable features which come out with it, that will be really helpful.

I would not give stability good marks. There are a lot of negative things stability-wise. These things need to be improved, especially regarding reliability. When we have a huge end user process or need to automate a a huge volume, the failures are high.

The product is more stable versus older versions.

We face issues when we need to increase volumes. Currently, it is failing for some reason, and we don't know the reason. It fails or stops, then we need to see what is going on. We have to fix that, then our developers need to rerun it. These are mostly practical challenges for our team who uses it on daily basis.

Timing is a problem with the technical support. A person will be assigned, but that tech support person may only be available during our morning hours. In the morning, we might be in a meeting, not able to respond when the tech support reaches us, then when we try to reach them back, the tech support person may be on a call or not in the office. This is a challenge.

The initial setup was complex.

To scale from pilot to production takes a long time because the initial setup process is complex.

I am the consultant who does the deployments.

The ROI is really good. We have saved time and money.

We evaluated Automation, Kryon, and Blue Prism. Of those, we felt Automation Anywhere was more user-friendly. On the developer side, we received feedback that development was quick in Automation Anywhere, which is why we shortlisted them.

Since using Automation Anywhere, I might be inclined towards using another product.

Automation Anywhere is currently a good product. The RPA market is growing.

The integration with other applications is good. There are some complications. With some specific applications, it may not work. We are facing some specific issues, but we have found workarounds.

I am certified in Automation Anywhere University.

I have not personally used the IQ Bot nor have I used any trial version, but the features look really good.

I do not 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.

Here's a use case of Automation Anywhere (AA): In a bank, you have an account opening process. The customers go into the bank, then apply for account opening. They will go to a portal, fill out the form, then put their documents. All the data that had been entered and all the documents that are being uploaded will go into a document repository.

With Automation Anywhere (AA), you have a data capture solution that extracts the data, and will put the data extracted into a case management solution, instead of having somebody just taking data and doing manual data entry into the CRM platform or core banking platform. This solution can take the data extracted from the upload, log into the CRM platform, and key in the data one after the other, in that same order on the CRM or the core banking platform, instead of having a human doing that repetitive task of data entry. You can use this RPA solution to handle the document repository, extract the data from it, log into the CRM portal automatically, then key in the data as an automated data entry into the CRM.

There are other competitive solutions, e.g. Blue Prism and IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and those are very good ones, but if you asked me, Automation Anywhere (AA) really, really stands out.

One of the things I like about this solution is its functionality. It's highly functional, aside from it being stable and scalable.

I also like that the Automation Anywhere (AA) team is always innovating, e.g. they're always coming up with new features that would speak to various operational use cases.

Improving on the ease of use and user experience of Automation Anywhere (AA) could help.

We've been providing Automation Anywhere (AA) to our customers for 10 years now.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is a stable solution.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is scalable. It's one of the best you can have in the market.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has very good technical support.

Installing Automation Anywhere (AA) is not a complicated process. How long the installation takes will depend on the client environment. For the cloud version of this solution, you just need to configure it to the use cases of the customers. For the on-premises version, you have to set it up within the client data center environment, and even that doesn't take time. Installation is straightforward.

Our customers pay for the Automation Anywhere (AA) license yearly, for the cloud version.

We were able to evaluate Blue Prism and IBM RPA.

We currently have three customers using Automation Anywhere (AA). We have three people handling the deployment and maintenance of this solution: the system administrator, the developer, and the solution architect.

The advice I would give to other people who want to start using Automation Anywhere (AA) is that the most important thing is for them to understand their use cases before even embarking on the journey, so they can be sure their use cases are RPA related and can be taken cared of by this solution. Automation Anywhere (AA) cannot cater to all automation use cases, as it's mainly focused on clearly defined manual repetitive tasks.

The customers can decide whether they want to have this solution deployed on cloud or on-premises.

I'll give Automation Anywhere (AA) a rating of eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution in my environment is to use bots to extract the important logistical information from each of the customer Microsoft Excel sheets. Next, the information is transferred, to be entered into the government official logistics documentation.

Prior to submitting the data to the company warehouse management system, it is checked and balanced. The same needs to be done before submission to the official government website.

It helps my organization to further improve the management and assigning of tasks to its human resources.

Through the use of Automation Anywhere bots, no longer do the staff in my organization need to carry out the task of transferring data from Excel sheets to our data or the government website. Thus, as all of these processes are being automated, this manpower can now be shifted to be used in other areas that can be beneficial to the company.

The most valuable feature is IQ Bot, as it allowed us to train it to extract important logistical information from customer PDF documents, irrespective of the format. This is valuable because not all PDF sheets have the same format. Many customers tend to use various formats to represent their data. Hence, with IQ bot, even with the wide variety of different PDF formats, the bots would still able to help us extract what we needed.

I hope that Automation Anywhere can further optimize its bots to help automate tasks with Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft PowerPoint documents because, in most organizations, there is a lot of reporting required. Hence, it would be great and more cost and time-efficient if there is a way to automate everyday tasks such as Microsoft Word Report Generation and Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation Generation.

Further, I would also recommend that Automation Anywhere assist users with automating tasks such as the monthly payment of essential services. For example, automating payment of utilities like the water bill or electricity bill, online.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic, as the bots can be run on multiple machines at the same time.

The customer service is fantastic and they always provide reliable feedback and help.

We did not use another RPA product prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have an in-house developer as well as a vendor team. The vendor team has a high level of expertise.

The ROI in terms of finance cannot be disclosed due to company policy but the bots have made the everyday process of extracting logistics information from customer Excel sheets or PDF files much more efficient and faster than the traditional manual method.

I advise others that even as of right now, the setup cost and licensing cost to automate bots on Automation Anywhere is steep but it is worth the investment!

We considered other Robotic Process Automation tools such as UiPath and Blue Prism.

Primarily we use this to get rid of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as sending TDS certificates to the client according to their PAN details, invoice processing, and collecting data from online websites.

Processes related to the invoice, Sales Order, and Purchase Order are commonly used so as to avoid time delay and increase efficiency.

We have also developed bots to browse to share market sites and generate a report on the Top 10 Gainers and Top 10 Losers, which has been scheduled, and the report gets mailed to all at ease and on time.

Automation Anywhere has been a boon for our organization because the tedious task that used to be hectic and made us remain seated for hours is now done with a single click.

The development of bots has helped a lot for every branch in the organization, whether it be financing, HR, or the IT department. Now, employees are not depressed working the same repetitive tasks and that time can be utilized for some other productive work.

While many of the bots are scheduled, reports are automatically generated on time and there is nothing to worry about regarding the time constraints.

There are many valuable features in this product. The OCR for character recognition has helped a lot during the invoice processing and billing, as there are some parts of the documents which are handwritten.

The scheduling of bots is also very important. No matter where you are, you need not be physically present for running the bot at that particular time.

Error handling plays an important role when you schedule a bot because if you are not physically present and something happens, you need to know what has gone wrong. 

We do not have a precise area that needs improvement, but sometimes while running bots that traverse through different websites, the screen hangs or takes time to fully load. This in turn increases the wait time. So, if possible, having saved a screen while the earlier bot runs and comparing that saved screen with the current bot run, so as to get an idea if the screen has been fully loaded or not, would be great. 

Though we can make this happen by adding extra logic to the bot, this would increase the bot size for every new website search.  

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than two years.

In 2018-2019 it was AA v10.7 and then in 2019-2020, it was updated to AA v11.3.

Nothing as such, as Automation Anywhere keeps on upgrading which in turn makes it easier and efficient to develop bots from the prior version.