Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

We have done a few use cases for the business, IT, and financials. The primary use case is for the business client.

It has provided our organization a lot of benefits. We have reduced our headcount, approximately 200 to 300 employees, by eliminating manual, repetitive work. It provides profit to the business. 

It is also good to incorporate new technology into our business and systems.

The MetaBot is a valuable feature.

We can integration with other APIs, which is a good thing. This helps us with our database integration. For example, we have done an SAP integration, which is great, since SAP has a lot of manual work.

IQ Bot is great for invoices. It helps a lot for retail and on the SAP side.

Ease of use:

• For developers, the Control Room components are very popular. They are easy to use, along with the Repository Manager, Schedule Manager, and maintenance of the bots.
• For people from nontechnical backgrounds, the product is simple from them to use. Everyone can learn it. It takes about two weeks on the tool.

With Citrix, we need a dedicated server to work with it. This has become complicated, as it is not easy to pull all the systems together into one place. It would be better if the Automation Anywhere team could make this easy and simple.

We would like to see AI incorporated into the tool. With the cognitive capabilities, they need to be improved to handle unstructured data.

The screen scrapping needs to be improved.

Some of the commands, like object cloning and OCR, are not so reliable when we are automating five to ten websites into the same task. Also, when we autofill fields, the comments are not so reliable.

We have built many bots. It is good to use the best practices when developing them. For example, we add logs and error handling to each bot, so if it is not working, then we can see why. This helps our developers a lot.

It took us two to three months to scale up from our pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. What took time was our business people needed to be educated on bots and their capabilities.

I have faced some of the problems with the Automation Anywhere tool. The technical support is quick and very responsive. They make sure the problem is completely resolved, which is good.

We implemented it in-house.

Go directly to the Automation Anywhere University site. There is some hands-on usage for the tool, and you can also download a trial there.

I have taken some classes from the Automation Anywhere University. I did three types of certifications, as well. The Automation Anywhere University site provides a lot of information, along with certifications. It gives an overview of what is the tool is and how the developers can code the product, which is a good thing.

We're using Automation Anywhere to automate and schedule some processes. 

Many tasks take a long time for a person to do them. Automation Anywhere enables us to do those jobs in less time. Our overall automation consumption has increased by about 80 percent since we started using AA. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to use, even if you lack technical skills. People without deep technical expertise can easily develop scenarios.

Automation Anywhere could add a few technical features to the UI and some better reporting or validation about whether processes are running successfully. 

We have used Automation Anywhere for only two weeks. 

We haven't used the solution for very long, but it seems stable so far. 

I rate Automation Anywhere eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support eight out of 10. 

Positive

I was around for the deployment, but I didn't set Automation Anywhere up. The deployment only required one engineer and took a day to complete. The solution hasn't required any maintenance in the short time that we've used it. 

Automation Anywhere is a subscription-based service. I think the price is reasonable. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of 10. It's a good tool that supports a lot of scenarios, and it can save you time and money. In some cases, you can use API integration, but RPA makes more sense for other tasks because you don't need to develop anything. 

We are a distributor of Automation Anywhere in Malaysia, and our focus is on solving business problems related to accounting, reporting, network operation centers, and first-level troubleshooting.

We deploy the solution on both AWS and Google Public Cloud.

Since we are the distributors of the solution, the improvements provided by Automation Anywhere vary for each of our customers.

The drag-and-drop feature is valuable.

Once we deliver to the customer, and they see the code, they can truly understand it without needing programming knowledge. As customers don't want to rely on vendors constantly.

The analytical dashboard in the Control Room could use some improvement. Currently, it's quite basic, which can pose a challenge when customers require more advanced features. Of course, different customers will have varying needs and expectations, so there's no one-size-fits-all solution. However, I believe it would be helpful if our team could have more flexibility in developing a more sophisticated analytical bot to meet these diverse demands.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We use the solution in multiple locations.

The technical support is good.

Positive

I previously used UiPath and WinAutomation by Softmotive but Automation Anywhere is easier to use.

The return on investment that our customers experience with Automation Anywhere typically revolves around the saved processing time and reduced headcount.

Although the initial implementation cost of Automation Anywhere is relatively high compared to other options, its annual subscription cost is lower than UiPath's, which has the opposite pricing structure.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend Automation Anywhere to others.

We have been using RPA for the past seven years and have dealt with a lot of other RPA vendors. We have many use cases across all of the verticals like technology, HR, Finance, Mortgage, Insurance, etc.

The current one, on which we are focusing is Mortgage use cases. We have proven experience in all of the verticals with different use cases. Especially when it comes to the environment, there are no restrictions in that regard because it's all based on the client's requirements and their expectations as well. There are a few clients that came with a Citrix gateway, others use the VDI based approach, and still, others bring their own operating systems.

One thing that I want to highlight AA for is their security standards. It's an easy win situation when we present this to our clients. The CyberArk integration and setup are really amazing and it helps us to win deals for new projects.

Especially on the Cognitive capabilities, AA enables us to adopt third-party extensions and products, which is very useful to accommodate more use cases and push the RPA practice to the next level.

The most valuable features are the IQ Bot and Process Discovery.

1. IQ Bot - In earlier days, everyone started with RPA by mimicking the users' actions and achieved some automation expectations. But nowadays, apart from the basic action, there is a need for intelligence like Machine earning, Deep learning, and Artificial Intelligence. The IQ Bot accommodates such expectations. There are a lot of pre-trained workflows available and a lot of capabilities to involve users to train the model.
   
2. Process Discovery - The next trend is Process discovery and it involves automating the identification of process requirements for activities and then automatically developing the workflow.

The dedicated BPM from AA should help to cover more use cases. I would strongly say that AA should have a more advanced BPM tool to support the process/use cases attempted in the project. Instead of depending on other open-source BPM products, AA should provide their own BPM for attended automations.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Stability-wise, this product is excellent.

The scalability of AA is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

We have more than seven years of experience in RPA and with different vendors and a lot of different tools. We used the same approach but the recent updates and growth of AA have helped us decide to make use of it

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented in-house, with the help of vendor support documents.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Automation Anywhere is that 

It's not always necessary to tie up or utilize unattended bots or achieve 100 % automation. A lot of opportunities are there with the ratio of 80:20 (80% automation and 20% manual intervention) or 70:30.