Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case is for the financial services industry where we do tax credit for different departments. We do automation for them. 

If I have to go into an application and download the information to do some cleanup activity, then I have to do that by manually. This might take somewhere around an hour or an hour and a half. By using Automation Anywhere, I'm saving that time. I can use that time for a valuable purpose.

IQ Bot is a valuable feature. It processes unstructured data to structured data. It helps me by making tasks less time consuming. It reduces the effort it takes versus manually.

I would like to have some of the features that I have seen for future releases. I'm using the outdated version, as compared to the current one. That's the reason I'm rating it as a seven out of 10. If I was using the latest version and all its features, then I might rate it a bit higher.

In terms of stability, the tool is stable. I don't see errors occurring during the production or  development stages.

Because I am using an older version, I am rating the scalability as a seven out of 10. I feel a lack of convenience when I try to scale it. When I use an upgrade version of Automation Anywhere and I don't feel this anymore, then I will rate the scalability better.

We have reached out to Automation Anywhere when we deployed our system. I was not able to use a few of the commands and the system was overwriting a set of folders. Then, we got support from the Automation Anywhere tech center.

I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

Automation Anywhere is installed with a VM, then it will be handed over to us. That's how it works.

We have a center of excellence team.

We calculate our ROI as FTE and dollar savings.

It costs up to $1,200 per license.

No other competitors have the cloud-based feature that Automation Anywhere is launching with its A2019 version. I am excited to explore this feature more.

I recommend Automation Anywhere. This product makes my life easier. It has been a very robust product to use in all our segments.

We use it more in finance and HR processes, such as payment processing or validation of data. It is used to validated data from two different systems or putting that data into an application. There are multiple use cases.

It has changed our mindset. People have started to think about automating things and come up with new perspectives, alternatives, or improvements by which automation can be implemented.

• Service
• User experience
• Feature coming out soon in the RPA.

It is user-friendly and quick to complete automation.

There are security certifications on the tool, but there are still places where our organization has highlighted that there needs to be an improvement on data-related encryption. That is something which needs to be changed or improved.

My main worry is about the security. My organization is very concerned about the data. Data in transit is mostly covered through encryption or TLS 1.2, but there are few things which have been identified which need to be improved.

We need a better way of getting upgrades or defect fixes. It is creating problems for us, as we have to go for a completely new version. Maintaining and managing existing bots, then coming up with new ones takes a lot of time. We would rather have a batch fix than an installation to an installation.

It is a stable platform with a few exceptions. Overall, it's a dependable platform which we can use for RPA.

We have faced issues with the upgrade. As an organization, we can't afford to have periodic migrations. Automation Anywhere is often coming out with new releases. If it's a bug fix or a patch update, that is a good thing. However, if it is a complete switchover or an installation, that needs proper planning. Obviously, time is consumed for this.

It has a scope for increasing which is what we are targeting. We are having sessions in our organization where people are coming up with more use cases.

We have been happy with technical support. Whatever the problem, we get a response with the status. Even if the issue is not resolved, we have transparency.

It was complex to begin with because we are all so new to it. Getting the business come up with use cases was initially difficult because everybody was new to it. Over a period of time, we got to know what has to be done.

We initially use EY for the deployment. Our experience was overall good because we were new to this RPA, it was a good learning experience having a COE playbook in place. Our basic baby steps, we did those with them, which helped us grow.

We have seen ROI.

Have your CEO set up a business user to do the automation day in and day out. If a business user is building or developing RPA, he will know the ins and outs of the process better than a coder or third-party.

We have multiple uses for this solution. We are from a biopharmaceutical background. We are the global technology center for AstraZeneca Biopharma and AstraZeneca Oncology. 

We have many use cases, but one of the primary uses is for all of the business processes. We do the automation, we apply the tool and simplify the work. We currently have more than sixty or seventy bots in place, including in HR and in finance.

As an example, one of the cases we were working on is industry best practices and industry innovators. We reduce the time that scientists spend on manual tasks and put them on more value-added work.

Another example is with adverse effects, where people who take medication can have an adverse reaction. If the customer reports their reactions, it gets automated.

We have several teams and we are not centralized, we have democratized it. We have different sequences; they have their development team, and we manage the Centre of Excellence.

The areas that need improvement are the license management, user access permission, user role access management, and technical support.

We have had many challenges in managing the roles through user automation, but we have heard that 2019 has something new, so we will wait and see.

The stability of this solution is good. 

We have had some challenges since 2017. We have had some progress and improvised the platform. Now it is stable.

We are now hosted in the cloud and all of our data is available. It's reliable and secure.

All of our data is retained in-house only to ensure that we are compliant.

Every year we are improving, and the scalability is there to match. Our platform equally matches our skills.

The technical support needs to be improved to provide exclusive support for each customer.

The deployment was easy and straightforward, and the POC was easy to perform.

We had some input from other people during the implementation.

Using this solution has brought a lot of return on investment in terms of saving hours or FTEs. We are utilizing them in more constructive areas.

We spoke with several vendors. We chose Automation Anywhere because it is user-friendly. The interface is easier to use and the partnership is better.

We allow the developer to train themselves right from the university, and they like several things about the Centre of Excellence person.

For anybody who is researching this solution, I suggest that they try it. It is a good platform to start with. If they were to fix the areas that I have mentioned then it would be a perfect solution.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are using this solution to reduce the time and management required for the completion of manual tasks. We are also teaching our students how to create bots for automation.

For example, if you have a simple copy and paste operation to complete in an Excel sheet then it might take one or two minutes. It's small but if you have a large amount of data and the task has to be repeated many times, then it is very helpful to have the bots. Using automation technology in any company is very useful for both customers and the company.  

I use the Control Room and we also write the code.

We have a student database that contains over a thousand students and their results. When a student wants to check their individual mark, they visit the university website and they enter their registration number to check the data.

When we want to get a list of the student marks, all we need is a list of the registration numbers in Excel and our bot will automate the task. With the press of a button, the bot will collect all of the student results and display them. This will take at most one minute, instead of an hour. Within one minute we can view more than one thousand students and their results.

The most valuable features of this solution are its user-friendliness and the flexibility in terms of programming language. We can use any programming language, and I have just started to learn Python. I want to next look at real-time scenarios and see how Python can be used to help write bots. Having no restriction for any single programming language is very useful.

This solution uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help automate tasks. Our analytics people and data scientists are looking forward to seeing how this will help.

It is very difficult to create and automate timetables because they are modal and it would be helpful if the bot could assist us with this.

This is a stable solution and a very strong tool.

This is a scalable solution. 

We do resolve some problems ourselves, but if it is difficult then we approach the technical support for Automation Anywhere. Their response is very good and they are very helpful.

I heard about this particular technology only last year, and then I completed my certification. I'm impressed with automation and bots. When I first heard the term, I thought that the bots were actual robots. Later, I saw that we were writing the programs and creating the bots for these manual and repetitive tasks.

We handle the deployment of this solution ourselves. If there are special requirements then we will ask.

A bot is doing in one hour what it takes ten hours for a person to do. This savings in time is very important for the IT industry. Most of the time being wasted is on simple things, so if the bot is doing then work then it gives more time of other things, such as coding.

We only looked at this solution.

Initially, when I was first trained, I had some difficulty using this solution. However, when I went through all of the training and learned how to write the code, I found it was very easy.

We are training our students in the use of bots for automation. We are teaching students how to create bots, and how to use them so that companies will be prepared. We are trying to create more use cases, or examples, for learning how to code.

Some people are saying that they will lose their jobs because of this solution. A single bot is capable of doing the work of ten people. This is a very strong tool, but the problem relates to any technology. We have to adapt, and we have to understand the technology.

Time is very important. For any work that you are doing, if you finish the work within the time set by the customer then they will be really impressed. When the customer is happy with the company then they will give them more work. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We need to automate business unit solutions in our office. As of now, there are a lot of requirements RPA within our organization with many verticals who require their redundant tasks to get automated. 

It saves manpower, time, and money. E.g., one particular task may require five FTEs to work on it daily doing repetitive work. Using Automation Anywhere, we automate the task and those five FTEs can be saved from doing it.

By automating the process, we are reducing human error.

The IQ Bot is unique. It is not available in another RPA tool that I am aware of, like UiPath or Blue Prism. IQ Bot converts unstructured data to structured data.

You can assign a time to a bot when it should run through the Schedule Manager. This feature is much easier to use in Automation Anywhere. Both UiPath and Blue Prism have their versions of a scheduler which are not as user-friendly. UiPath Orchestrator is a bit complex.

It is easy to use with a drag and drop. All the options are right in front of you. Anybody without an IT or development background can start off with Automation Anywhere.

Security needs improvement. 

I need to understand the migration from desktop to cloud. There are questions around this that I need clarified, like: "How is it going to happen?" Migration is not easy. It will take time. Will the process be smooth? I have a few doubts.

The stability is really good. We have not had any downtime.

Scaling is easy. We can have one Control Room with 10 bots working simultaneously, which is very good.

The technical support has been brilliant. We haven't needed to wait a lot. Anybody from my team, whenever we tried to contact the customer care or technical support, has gotten a reply back probably within one to two hours. So, support has been outstanding from the Automation Anywhere team.

I learned about Automation Anywhere from online searches. I trained myself on it. My organization learned about Automation Anywhere from me.

The setup wasn't easy nor was it difficult. After one or two times, the setup became easier.

I set Automation Anywhere up with the help of Acronotics, who came in to train us and help set up our environment.

We have saved one to two FTEs per year. A bot processes their projects now.

I tried out all the RPA tools and found Automation Anywhere to be the most user-friendly.

Blue Prism is more secure than Automation Anywhere. E.g., Blue Prism has a system that is difficult to penetrate. You can't simply go into their system and make any changes.

Any company looking at starting RPA should look at a user-friendly software. Compared to other RPA tools, I prefer Automation Anywhere.

Whenever I have used Automation Anywhere, it has been brilliant.

There are still so many features that I need to explore in Automation Anywhere.

There are a lot of templates where details come in different formats. There is no way this can be totally automated without the human intervention, but human intervention takes a  long time. We are trying to figure out what software to use, so we can automate the entire process without human intervention and the data transfers without errors. We also need faster processing of the data to happen at a higher level.

We are working with one of the bots where we send claims through WhatsApp. Any user could take a photo in WhatsApp, then send that data to the organization. Now, whenever a photo is takes, different phones have different primary resolutions, and the data being captured is not clear data. At that moment, the data is automated to a very power system which centralizes the process to one point. This is what we are using for the insurance provider. They fill out the claims form and send this information to the organization, then we use automation tools to automate the process and come to a conclusion.

We are using IQ Bot for automation and marketing things.

False positives: We are trying to determine how false positives are generated. This is our key challenge. We are trying to assess how they are reusing the algorithm for automation. 

The technical support needs to be improved. Often, this is the first time people are working with automation. 

I would like to see more marketing automation. I believe more marketing stuff can be automated through bots. Currently, marketing automation is not there. It needs machine learning to automate the process. This is something that I would like to see.

There is a lot of scope for improvement in terms of stability. It is a concern, because right now we are close to 20 to 25 percent false negatives that are coming up. If we can work on standardizing the template for any automation tools, that would be key in working on the stabilizing the software.

Technology for scalability is very powerful because we are using Amazon AWS. 

You can take scalability for granted if your algorithms are properly working.

Technical support needs to be worked on as the turnaround time can be around a week, even though we are just using the solution on a pilot basis. We are working in real-time with realistic data. While the process of a logging a ticket is good, the process from logging a ticket to closure needs faster support time.

The setup and onboarding processes were easy and straightforward. It was very easy to onboard because it was more about the data. We learned how to streamline the process during that time, which was good.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

It is too early to determine ROI.

We are using the trial version. We are still trying to come to a conclusion about purchasing the product, which will take some time.

Their licensing processes are in par with most industry standards.

We looked at a lot of vendors. Automation Anywhere has brand recognition.

Go to conferences to analyze what suits your business. Automation is very important if you want to grow your business to the next level because of the transparency, speed, and scalability for any organization. While there isn't any ready-made solution in the market, consider checking out the closest solutions and modifying them to suit your needs. Then, start using it.

Our primary use is for automation of data management and repetitive tasks.

We used to have a much more labor-intensive means of data management and cleansing which lacked real automation. We would have to manually massage the data in several steps with import and export of data to and from Excel which was not efficient. We have mostly eliminated the unreliable transfer of data via Excel and the potential for human error is greatly reduced by automated processes.

We are using all of the features and all are important and valuable but the automation and flexibility are the things which make the product work as a solution for us. As we can customize the functionality to what we need it makes us more efficient.

They might add some features that competing products already have and do something to help reduce deployment time.

We occasionally have a problem with stability but it may have more to do with what we don't know about the program. I think that it is generally a stable solution. When we have stability issues we check logs to identify the problems and resolve them. These are mostly performance issues. Once it is solved we don't have that stability issue any longer.

I think the scalability of the solution is very good. We don't have any problems enhancing what we do except for the time in programming and troubleshooting.

The technical support is really good actually. When I submit a ticket, within two or three hours I have an answer. So far when I apply the solutions they have worked, so it seems good.

We were using another solution which included manually checking data and Excel and it was apparent we were taking too much time with things that could be automated. When we started using Automation Anywhere we took baby steps to begin to make a difference but it saves time for us and will continue to save more.

The setup is complex because there is a lot of customization. The availability of the deployment was not really fast because of the amount of work we had to do. It is not so difficult but it is time-consuming. It might be an area where the product can improve.

We are doing our own implementations and upgrades, so we are managing it.

After realizing we needed a better solution than what we were doing, we did evaluate other options like Blue Prism. It is not so much that either solution seemed worse more than they are different. We went with Automation Anywhere because it seemed to have more features which we really needed and were looking for.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would give this product a seven. Everything has room for improvement but also I think the product could be a little easier to deploy.

I work with clients who are in banking, the financial sector, and the accounting sector. It mostly involves work with Excel, SAP, and BI. A typical use case starts with downloading data from SAP, manipulating it in Excel, sending relevant emails, and then receiving the responses.

This solution has helped us bring in more clients. We are able to satisfy our clients in ways that we did not think was possible. When we started interacting with our clients, the expectations were pretty low. We were hoping to automate ten processes. Now, with the capability provided by Automation Anywhere and our coding knowledge, we have put everything together and have automated approximately one hundred processes. So, the clients who expected ten and ultimately were given one hundred were pretty happy. The company image has been boosted, as well as the trust and confidence in this solution.

One of the strongest aspects of Automation Anywhere is the ability to have custom MetaBots through images, or through the use of DLLs or APIs. This functionality was introduced in version ten.

This solution is easy to use and easy to learn compared to Blue Prism, UiPath, and others. You don't need to know C# or any other programming language. It is helpful because you can build DLLs, but if you don't then you can still manage. You can use Automation Anywhere from a non-coding background. If somebody is not familiar with RPA then they can still swoop in and get experience by doing automation projects.

They have a good community online with a lot of documentation and videos available. 

I would like to see this solution made to be a little more robust. As a coder, I have written more than one hundred functions and I can do high-level testing, but I can't do the low-level testing of complicated use cases. I think that AA has to look at it from that perspective. Hire a few developers, give them some complex work or use cases, let them work on it, and then check for stability when there are two or three tasks. For example, one task runs, the output goes into another task, one window opens, then another window opens, and you interact with multiple interfaces. This type of testing may be how they'll get to know what is wrong with the application.

I would like to see more Excel functions built-in. Currently, they have forty-five or forty-eight functions supported, but I have written a DLL that includes one-hundred functions. They can do many more than forty-eight, and because we are dealing with accounting and finance, Excel is used a lot. We need Excel and we don't want to always have to depend on a custom-built DLL. When using a DLL, ninety percent of the time it won't be uniform for all of the processes. This means that I have to modify it, rebuild the DLL, and deploy it again. Native support would be much better.

Web automation capability needs to be improved.

I would like to see more features in the next release of this solution, including data tables, spying, and cloning.

IQ Bot is bad and needs a lot of tweaking. It needs to have thrust because right now you use it and it doesn't get off the ground. It just stays there. They made us believe that there is potential, so they have to fulfill it. For example, they speak about this ML component in IQ Bot, but I know that it doesn't exist. There is no ML component there, and I would like to see one kick in when IQ Bot fails to extract data. It should start automatically, and maybe ask us for some guidance at the beginning on how to do the work. With the ML component working, IQ Bot would be very good.

I would rate the stability of this solution somewhere around an eight out of ten. Although it seems to be very stable, perhaps ninety-nine percent of the time, when you need it the most, it stops working. Object cloning, for example, even when you go through DOMXPath, and even if you map the exact path by going through the Object ID, the DOM, you collect the DOM and then you map the exact object, it hangs sometimes.

Scalability is very good, except in the case of IQ Bot.

IQ Bot has problems with respect to scalability. As an example, consider that you want to upload one thousand POs per day. You have two machines, and you want to split the work, but there is a problem. IQ Bot is going to put the output into the same output path, but how do you know which machine has generated this output? How do you map it? This is an inherent flaw that hinders scalability in the long run. IQ Bot doesn't even let you know whether an output has been generated. They have a database, and I built a custom bot to look at their database to find out if the output has been generated, or not. However, people have told me not to touch this database because it is proprietary.

The other point with regards to scalability is that it doesn't just happen out of the box. You do not just add a hundred more machines and have it work in the same manner. You need to use it in tandem with an SQL database, or another application like Tableau. If you do then it will be very strong and very robust. It will be loosely coupled but highly scalable.

I have corresponded with them and I would rate technical support a nine out of ten. I do not want to be too hard on them but what I've noticed is that they will support people, but may not fully understand the technical aspects of the components that they're using in Automation Anywhere. So, if you were to ask them, "How do I get to the Moon?", they would answer, "Just build a rocket". They won't tell me how to build the rocket. If they would connect developers to their own backend engineers then that would be really helpful.

The initial setup of this solution is a little bit complex, but if from the start you know where to go, what to click, and exactly what each button does then it will be very useful. If you have somebody to guide you then it will be much easier.

We implemented this solution ourselves. We developed the Bots like we always do. We uploaded it to a repository and moved it to a production environment that we set up. We then synchronized all of the files that are required to be present in the production environment. Finally, we provided support for a week after the deployment.

We have saved a lot of time and replaced a few FPEs with this solution. It is a one-time investment for a year. You may replace people or alternatively put them elsewhere to work on better activities. This solution saves money for our clients, which is a good thing.

I have seen my colleagues use UiPath and web automation is excellent. I have been involved in hackathons where I have used Automation Anywhere for web automation, and I have struggled. In web automation, if UiPath completes it in ten seconds, then Automation Anywhere will take seventy to eighty seconds for the same task.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.