Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use the platform to help our customers by building automation solutions in order to solve their business problems. The use cases include AP processing, form data extraction, data collection, and Excel reporting.

We use a combination of RPA and IQ Bot to deal with semi-structured or unstructured data, such as documents and images. We also use Bot Insights for business process analytics and bot operation health checks.

The platform is deployed using an on-premise configuration and connected to multiple bot runners, running in virtualized environments. 

We found that RPA with additional AI capabilities, such as machine learning and Computer Vision, can enable the organization to augment existing business operations by creating efficiencies and improving the accuracy of data to be processed, without changing too much of the existing system.

This will reduce the change cost and help business units to elevate their existing teams, processes, and systems so that they can focus on higher-value tasks that require creativity to perform.

The handwriting recognition capability in IQ Bot is particularly interesting, as we can see a high level of accuracy in extracting handwritten texts. 

The IQ Bot component has enabled the business to quickly identify the different documents and provide the ability to integrate with in-house or external AI functions. This enables us to extend the initial document extraction facility to transform the information into key decision-making attributes. The document training facility has made it easy to identify select-extract the components on the documents and it is also capable to recognize handwriting context with the help of pre-configured Azure AI services. 

The improvements that we could see would be the increased stability of each A2019 releases and reduce the likely impact on existing features. We are also looking to see improvements in the upgrade and bot deployment processes to make them easier and less interaction with back end servers. 

We are also to see more features to be added to seamlessly transition between human and bot tasks in the long-running process. We are also keen to see the new AARI feature develop into a voice-enabled command activation to run the bot process. 

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than a year, ever since its release in 2019. 

The A2019 in early releases had been quite unstable to our experience. However, since A2019.14 there seem to be improvements in this area and so far we haven’t seen any major issues that impact the existing features we are using. For any of the new features, we suggest to always check on the release notes and understand the limitations of the features before using them in your solution. 

The technical support team has been prompt and helpful in addressing issues coming out of the platform. There is a limitation in having multiple admin accounts to view the same ticket information but we were told that a new improved system will be implemented to address this limitation. 

We use a process-based workflow automation solution and we actually still use them to deal with long-running processes as they have more extensive features to deal with workflow-based problems. However, we see RPA can help in complementing the process by automating the mundane tasks of the process and getting greater efficiency for the business as well as reducing the likelihood of human errors. 

The installation is quite straightforward as they provide us with an installer package that guides you through using wizards. But the pre and post-installation process can be quite complex and laborious depending on what features you need to enable. In some cases, these feature configurations require the underlying services to be restarted from the server backend. When using virtualized environments in the cloud connecting on an internal network domain, there would be extra care needed on the network configurations to ensure communication channels between the machines are properly connected.

We deployed in-house. 

You need to be mindful about the initial server costs if you go with an on-premise deployment model as the specification can surprise some of your stakeholders. For licensing, always try to get through reselling partners for getting more customized and better prices.

We observed all major players in the RPA space such as UiPath, BluePrism, and WorkFusion. There are also some companies that operate in a specific market that we looked at.  

Earlier, our payroll process required a lot of human intervention or human dependency as we have Biometric Application and Payroll Application separately. To complete the payroll, we first need to manually fetch the attendance from the Biometric application and manually upload it to the Payroll Application.

We have used it for an HR use case, wherein the BOT automatically fetched attendance from a Biometric application and it uploads it in the Payroll system, and calculates payroll automatically. It also sends emails to all respective employees with their respective payslips. 

It has saved our HR department time since this process automatically happens without anybody's intervention. Our HR department is able to devote their time to more productive work or activities. It has also saved a lot of costs since every employee in the HR department is involved in the attendance and payroll process. Second, the process is now no more human dependent.

Earlier, we used to all work manually and the chances of errors were higher since it was a sensitive process as it involves finance. However, this tool has helped us to automate our payroll process.

The most useful features of this tool are that this tool has less coding activity as compared to other tools, it has drag menus. Most Excel/VBA coding is automated in the AA tool, since, in Excel or VBA we need to do manual coding.

The following features are very valuable to us :

• Web Recorder
• Smart Recorder
• Work Bench Command Library
• Object Cloning Command
• Business Analytics
• Meta bot Designer
• File or Folder Command
• Error Handling Command
• Control Room Administrator
• Integrating PDF Using the PDF Command

As long as we are using this tool, it includes all features required from a process automation perspective. As of now, we are not looking for any additional features. 

However in IQ Bot if the following features can be added then I would be very grateful: The recognition of Voice /Audio

As of now IQ Bot only takes/fetches the record of the places that we have marked. e.g. Invoices fields that are dynamic in nature are very difficult to fetch the data from the scan copy. If this feature gets added, it will save a lot of time for developers.

We have been using AA 2019 for the last year and we have been using Version-11 for the last three years. 

It is an absolutely stable tool.

It is very scalable.

Support is good. We received timely support from AA.

No, we did not use a different solution, since we were doing the process manually.

The setup is straightforward.

It was implemented by our internal team members.

It has saved us a lot of time and money.

It is a very effective tool since it requires less coding and one can easily get trained on this tool with little knowledge of coding.

No, we have not evaluated any other tools.

I am a platform architect for the RPA so I deal with all 3 major RPA vendors. I build the Infra for all big setups. I have immense experience plan, design, and building the setup on cloud, on-prem and with different configurations.

I implemented AA in different environments, the AA installation is the smoothest compared to other RPA software installs.

Migration is a little challenging since it requires direct integration with DB, credential vault and all that. Since multiple credentials are involved, it is a challenge to get all the credentials, it should be easier if only the control room credential was required. Versioning migration is still a challenge.

My company uses AA extensively for internal BPO work as well as we refer and deploy it to the customer as a RPaaS model. It helps in increasing productivity, reducing the cost of the whole operation. It makes fewer errors and in the COVID situation proves to be a reliable workhorse.

We implemented a lot of new environments recently. v10 expiry and COVID situation accelerated the implementations. Compared to older days now all implementation of infra bot happened pretty quickly.

Bot with Citrix integration may require a lot of improvement but having any extra feature really helps in complex implementation.

The cloud templates for implementation helped greatly and it helps us in pushing the software fast.

• The OCR integration came a long way. They have intelligence inbuilt into it.
• Ease of deploying and the KB article really help people to just read and deploy different 3rd part components as well(svn, DB, LB, etc) .
• Nowadays, the screen scraping techniques evolved in RPA and it is good to see they are in play which was not the case couple of years ago.
• HBC is most suitable for COVID times. 
• The RPaas offering will help customer to use it for less number of bots.
• AD security group integration is a good feature
  
• AI sense is good too.
  

They need to concentrate lot on a nonpersistent RPA model. Integrate IQ bot with AA instead of making it as a separate component, since nowadays intelligent bots need to be integrated into RPA core. Instead of bot agents getting installed on the machines, concentrate on making it independent of the system and only as a plugin in the browser.

It doesn't have an independent small install for developers and always requires to be fully installed.

Bringing a DevOps model for bot implementation integrated through private bot store might be a good idea to improve the tool.

I being using it since couple of years, i am impressed by the transformation from v10 to v11 and v11 to A2019. 

The solution is pretty stable, we didn't face many issues. Once the instalation is done the control room core architecture wont face many issues.there are quick fixes like service restart if anything goes off. but most of the time we hear AA support suggesting us to reinstall with the new version of software for performance issues, but with my experiance i hardly see that making huge differnce in fixing the actual issue.

 Monitoring can be done through email alerts for the core infrastructure. Issues mainly in HA(High Availability) with cluster sync issues still not monitored at the dashboard level, which might be a concern if the cluster goes out of sync. At the bot implementation lot of things are dependent on the way we code so it's additional work for the developer to get the code keeping in mind all the events which might happen. I would have been impressed if the solution had framework at the control room level to keep track of the overal execution and transactions, hope they can bring that feature in future releases

We never faced any issues with scalability for AA. sometime it takes high CPU on CR, but that is expected. one of the frequent questions we encouter with HA setups is the single point failure of repository storages, i understand that this needs to be taken care by storage fault tolerance, however most organization might not use cloud for RPA and if we are doing on prem install they might not have a high resillenace storage. SQL availability group still needs a SQL expert to get that right and DR solution totally depends on the underlaying infra we work on (there may be lot of alternative solution and its a big discussion to be honest :-)   )

Hence HA and DR solution really require a expert like us who have extensive knowledge on RPA, cloud, infra, windows and SQL  

They offer excellent customer service. No complaints except that every time they ask for a software upgrade as soon as they hear about an issue, which is not actually a good solution. Otherwise, they have very good knowledge of most of the issues. 

We keep switching between RPA software for a number of reasons. We prefer AA for the following reasons:

• Low cost for run licenses compare to other RPA solutions
• A high number of certified developers help in bring efficient automation compared to others, they in turn promote the RPA software that they know of.
• Easy to program, no prior experience of programming required.
• Easy to use compared to other RPA.

The initial setup was straightforward, even a complex setup can be set up in 20 mins if you have all prerequisites.setup can be complex if there is a HA , DR implementation, as a architects we need to factor in lot of variables. some are target application access,  MFA for the application or windows authentication, credential management, data accessibility, network reachability , underlaying hardware, PaaS offering in cloud(depends on the cloud) , VDI or VM template to choose (Makes huge difference in performance and costing), citrix or native application . Overall simple install, but huge planning to figure out the overall feasibility and effectiveness of implementation

We implemented in-house. I implement it within Accenture and for customers as well. I rate my self pretty high for implementation. I have solid experiance (AA master) as well as cloud certification. I have 12 years experiance in infra, so expect a good solid backgroup on both AA and infra.

ROI is important for the business case. ROI is good if you are going for long run, year on year. i never stayed on a project till we start getting the actual values, i see nowadays ROI is shrinking due to RPA vendors raising thier license costs , additional cost added to get the complex RPA solutions to be implemented

The setup cost for AA is always fixed since the configuration won't change much for the different number of bots, the license cost is lower in AA,

We usually evaluate Blue Prism and UiPath along with AA for implementation. We decide based on the requirements.

In the digitization space, Automation Anywhere has some of the new bots, which are really good. This is making the invoice digitization as a use case quite helpful. The user interface is very interactive and easy to use. At the same time, for giving results, it looks very impressive. That is the use case that we are working on currently. That is one of the best use cases that I have dealt with from Automation Anywhere.

I think most of the keystroke level activities that users used to do in probably the last five years is now taken care completely by Automation Anywhere and similar RPA providers. They are now getting into the next segment of AI. I deal personally with a lot of AI tools in my company, which has got a lot of use cases in this industry. I see Automation Anywhere now getting into this particular segment, and it's very good for the industry

The Bot Store is something very impressive because it is one place where you find a lot of free bots that you can test and try different bots. At the same time, you have developers who can create different bots and put them into that marketplace so multiple people can use those bots. It is a win-win situation both for the developers, Automation Anywhere, and even the customers.

Some things that I do not see as of today are interactive chat or video interface. These are things that I will look for in future. I saw something like picture recognition, but something like a video or voice recognition is something that I'm looking for in the Automation Anywhere platform as an end user and even as a reseller.

5 years

Stability is great from what I hear from the users. As I'm the sales division, I get this feedback from my operations team. Even the technology support that Automation Anywhere provides is very good. At the same time, they have a lot of good B2B services at very low costs which helps in the end-to-end development, deployment, and successful implementations.

Scalability is one of the best things about most of the RPA bots. Once you create one, scalability is just about multiplying them. We've not had challenges with scalability, given we provide the right infrastructure.

As mentioned above this support has been good and we always look forward for continued support here

As a service provider company we have worked in alternate service provider. This is client specific

Straight forward

We are the vendor team here

6 Months to 1.6 years depending on the process we looking to automate

may not be able to comment here.

UI path and AA are the ones on top when we compare

I would surely rate it as a 10 (out of 10). There are other RPA providers as well in this good range, but I think AA is in the top three. I would rate it ten along with another competitor as well who's doing well for us.

If you are new to automation, do try Automation Anywhere or a similar partner. Once you do that, then there's a lot more in the market to explore, e.g., you have the big players, like IBM Watson, Azzure, AWS etc. and one place stop will be a company like Wipro which can help you chose a mix. If you're not started anywhere, then I would recommend to start with Automation Anywhere for RPA.

I use automation for finance. For example, SAP, Oracle, and other applications. In the past nine months, I have automated approximately thirty-five hundred hours. Next year we expect to reach at least eighty-five hundred hours.

All of my leaders are pushing us to use automation because they're thinking that other companies are ahead of us. I am looking forward to working on the IQ Bot to see how it might make my life easier.

Recently, the auditors were looking for a tool to assist them with checking incidents. For the American region, there were between twenty-seven and thirty thousand incidents, which as a human we cannot search manually. For each one, they have to check what the incident is, and verify whether they have the proper data. Because the audit was only going to run for one or two months, they wanted the results in ten days. I spent about one and a half days building a bot and started running it. The bot was moved to production, and within seven days, I was able to get all of the details in Excel format to them. They can filter it, see whatever fields are empty, and they can do the audit. They got one hundred percent sampling, which they were happy about. Our plan now is to sell the Bot to the project owners so that instead of having the auditor catch problems, they can run it every month and see what improvements they need and where it is lagging. The bot will educate the team.

The MetaBot is a very good feature that allows me to do things that were not available in earlier versions. I can now run multiple commands, instead of just one.

It is easy to develop using this solution, and it doesn't take much technical skill. It is very easy to integrate any of the macros or DB scripts. It is easy to find people who can work with this solution, unlike Blue Prism, where it is hard to get candidates.

I would like to have the MetaBot screen name title dynamic instead of static. This would allow us to use wild card entries and make our lives much easier. As it is now, we cannot automate using MetaBot because the screen name changes. The only way it can be done is to use multiple MetaBots.

We are having a problem when trying to automate the opening of very large Excel files. One example is our 70MB Excel file, which normally takes approximately twenty minutes to open. Automation Anywhere crashes before it opens, so we moved it to Instaknow-ACE, which is another RPA tool. It imports the Excel file, creates its own database, and then you perform whatever operation you want. After this, it generates the output result without crashing. If this were fixed in Automation Anywhere then it would be a large benefit because we are in a phase of moving away from smaller automation. We are doing a lot with bigger data, and most of it is still in Excel files instead of a database. It isn't the fault of Automation Anywhere because it is Excel that is crashing, but we need to have a feature where Automation Anywhere can import Excel files directly.

The stability of this solution needs to be improved.

The OCR capability needs to be improved to be made more accurate.

Compared to earlier versions it's a lot more stable, but it still needs a lot of improvement in terms of the OCR. We are getting more OCR projects where we have to scan and get data from contracts and give it to the auditors, or other people. The data includes things like region and the product that was ordered. It is very difficult for me to scan because I can't tell customers that it isn't accurate. Sometimes, it will read the letter "I" as the number one, which is one of the issues we are facing. The upper management thinks that everything is ok, but as a developer, I know that there is a problem. If you were to come to me and ask for an OCR to be done, I could only guarantee you about eighty percent accuracy. If I tell the customer that there might be twenty percent errors, they may not be happy.

Scalability is very good. Compared to others, Automation Anywhere is on top.

We have more than eight hundred developers in our company, and most do not have a technical background.

I do not deal with technical support directly. We have a COE who deal with technical support, and my team speaks with them. If there is a problem that they cannot fix then they go to Automation Anywhere.

Our COE took care of the implementation of this solution.

What it takes a human ten hours to do, automation should complete it in one hour. In the past ten months, I have saved the work of two people. People are happy with the results.

We are still in the procurement process for IQ Bot, but I am looking forward to seeing how it is going to help me.

My advice for anybody who is considering RPA is to use Automation Anywhere because it is easier. You can learn it, but if you go for other solutions then it will be more difficult. Not all of the people in our company are from a technical background. Many are BCOM graduates and analysts, but they are being trained in using this solution.

This is a good solution, but it still needs improvement and there is a long way to go. Artificial Intelligence still needs to be added.

If they allow the direct import of data from Excel, improve the OCR, and allow variables to be used in the MetaBot start screen, then this solution would be perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Primary use case is automating data entry functions for accounting and general entry. That has been our primary use case. Since we've started, we have create about five bots (of which three work).

We're too new. We haven't really begun to invest in the option of having automation. I'm hoping at least in the accounting area, people are inquiring about the tool now that they are seeing results.

Of the bots which work, they have automated three of the most time consuming tasks and completely freed up one person to do real work.

Anything that can be done to simplify the solution. I would love to see it where anybody who can run Excel will be able to create bots. Right now, I am watching everyone around me struggle with the tool. I do think the tool is getting there.

From an IT perspective, we had too many issues and headaches.

From an IT perspective, the migration is still very complicated, getting everything set up and running. Security was an issue for us, as well. Developers had to come through our firewalls to develop bots, internally. However, they were coming through a Citrix platform, so there were breakpoints in things they were trying to automate, file servers they were trying to get to, and FTPs that they couldn't get through. 

I understand the next version will have support for Citrix, which might solve some of our problems.

So far, the stability has not been great. We had a lot of migration issues before we got up and running. We will wait and see if this continues with the next version that is being installed. However, once something is up and running, the issues do not persist.

We are only running three bots, so we haven't had to worry about scalability yet. We built the tool to handle about 30 bots. So far, we haven't had any problems with scalability.

It took about six months to scale from the pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using, but the majority of those months were wasted on our upgrade issue.

We went through an Automation Anywhere partner, who handled all the technical support. So, we didn't go the Automation Anywhere technical support directly, except on occasion. We got through all our issues, eventually.

We were not previously automated in any way.

The initial setup was complex.

The IT team wasn't involved directly at the start, so the business sort of started it on their own. Then, the product over came to IT, and we were blindsided by the requests. That was when it became complicated.

We used consultants to build our bots. We are still in the learning process.

We used KPMG for the deployment. They obviously knew the product very well and were also surprised about the migration issues, but they got us through the deployment.

We are measuring our ROI in terms of power saved.

Start simple. There is no reason to jump in with complicated bots. Find simple, small processes that need automating.

The software is there, and it does what it needs to do. The tool can grow and become huge, if it is not already. I hope that we got on early enough that we can keep building on our success.

We have gotten around to looking at the Bot Store yet.

Our use cases for this solution are all related to Telecommunication Companies (Telcos) because these are our prime customers. We also use this solution to automate the support system.

Some examples of use cases are service creation, service deletion, getting complaint details, ticket booking, and ticket updates. We have created unattended bots to handle these processes.

We have found that the automation bots we have developed give great savings in terms of higher productivity and efficiency. We are able to provide value-added to our customers because these processes were done manually, not automatically. It has improved our customer satisfaction.

This most valuable features of this solution are the drag-and-drop interface, and it is easy to code.

We have begun using the IQ Bot, and while we are not using as much of the document analysis functionality, I'm sure that we will be using these features for automating more processes for our customers.

Change management can be an issue because as applications change, the bots need to be modified.

There are some business areas for which this tool is not capable of doing, such as in the areas of graphically-based input. The image capturing of the network management systems is not up to date for all of our customers' processes. We are seeking some kind of improvement in this light. We have use cases that the tool does not currently support, and we will be able to do many more if this capability is also covered.

Technical support for this solution could be improved if they categorized according to severity. At the highest degree of severity, one dedicated person should work to resolve it as early as possible.

It would be helpful to have a repository of use cases that are created by different customers. They could be accessed from the Bot Store. For us, it would help if we had access to use cases specifically for Telcos.

We have a lot of problems installing for some customers. In particular, if it is a distributed environment then we face challenges. For example, the database should be installed in a network other than where the control is installed. It can be very time-consuming, and support for these situations is very important.

The stability of the bots is generally good. Sometimes, the applications get changed for business reasons, so we have to recapture the data that was used to develop the bot. For this reason, we do sill have some challenges.

I don't think that we will have any challenges with scalability. We started in a small way and I'm sure when we really require it, we will be able to scale.

Technical support for this solution is good, and they have provided us with resolutions to our problems. We are partners, so naturally, our support systems are connected.

Normally we need to wait for a message from the technical support team, and then we have to capture screenshots and do some monitoring. We also need to do some analysis. This makes for a huge gap in resolving an issue.

We do have a customer with a technical issue that was taking quite a long time because of their Oracle integration. There was a very long gap in time before resolution, so the customer was a little bit unhappy about it. They have to be able to foresee these types of use cases and ensure that they have a stable tool that is able to cater to my new ones.

There are some complexities with the initial setup of this solution. Most of our installations are done in our client's network environment, and there are challenges because there are two or three parties involved. Our IT team, the customer's IT team, and Automation Anywhere are involved. With the different stakeholders, we have to ensure that all of them are in sync and able to complete the installation on time.

We have seen ROI. In fact, before starting automation we performed an initial feasibility analysis which resulted in our proceeding with the implementation. Most of our deployments see ROI between six and nine months.

I will be focusing more on the artificial intelligence and analytics part of this tool that they are bringing in.

For anybody considering this type of solution, I would first suggest that they look at what kinds of processes they are trying to automate, and then look at the right tool. It depends a lot on what the process is. For standard ones, this is a mature tool so they can use it. However, for a very mixed set of processes then you look at the specific tools for those types of automation.

This solution is good, but there are still more features to add. There are some use cases that I cannot handle, otherwise, the solution would be perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our workforce has limited capacity. By adding this solution, we can increase the amount of work coming in without adding to our workforce.

For the finance team, they have custom themes for classification of engineering parts. This was one of our largest scaled automation projects. The process was that an engineer would do: 

• A wheel comes in, and they want to classify it. They need to do the research to classify it. 
• They pull up the data from different tools. E.g., they pull up a drawing with specifications of it. 

A bot will now do this research instead. We have realize around 20,000 hours savings on this project.

• Ease of use
• Scalable
• Intuitive
• Integrates easily with different systems.

It enables our employees to do more high valued work, increasing employee morale.

We would like to have more ease of use for the operations team.

There are still bugs in it. We are waiting to get to the newest version to resolve our bug issues. We just upgraded from version 10 to 11.3 this week. 

We would like to have quicker turnaround times.

Stability depends on how a company is connected to the system or program.

Automation Anywhere has new features coming out every year with their interface. 

If we find bugs or issues, we have conversations with our customer success manager about them. 

It is very scalable.

We have the solution implemented in North America and Asia. We are looking to expand the solution going forward by implementing it in South America.

The customer service is very good. We are in regular communications with our customer success managers who handle our technical support. They are knowledgeable technically.

The initial setup was a simple process. 

We deployed it in-house.

We have seen ROI.