Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our use case is spread across multiple areas: 

1. We are using it in finance: automating the month-end process. 
2. There are a lot of review processes that happen every week. We are in the middle of that.
3. We have a product lifecycle management process that when we close the books on a product, information needs to go into multiple systems. We have another bot in system for this.

These are the three things that we have in production right now.

A project that we automated: A person used to spend about eight to twelve hours every week to finish the process. The bot finishes it in half an hour. Now, the person just reviews it, then passes along the information. This has helped our organization because originally EMEA and APAC would not receive the files the same day that they were processed. But because the bot only takes a half an hour, everyone can now receive the files on the same day.

We know the process. It doesn't deviate.

Speed: A process that would take two days for a person every month to do is now completed within two hours.

Right now, the audit trail sits in file systems. I would prefer it to be in a database where it is queryable and searchable. 

Another major downside is an upgrade. If I have to switch over from single sign-on to non-single sign-on, etc., then it's a complete reinstall. When I do a complete reinstall, I lose a lot of information because it's a new instance. I'm not able to bring information from the old instance and my metrics are all gone. I basically have to reset the whole infrastructure. I would like to see an option to switch over to single sign-on post-installation. It should not have to be a reinstall. It should be part of the installation or configuration.

I wanted to see a cloud version and mobile app but those will be available in the A2019 version.

I would like the bots to be more automatic without having to check emails, which is how we have our tool setup. Going forward, the bots should be more interactive.

So far, the stability has been pretty good.

We did have some issues when our database server sort of crashed. A lot of processes went uncommitted, so we had to engage the Automation Anywhere support team. They came in to clean up the database and bring the server back up. Otherwise, we have seen pretty good stability.

So far, the technical support has been really helpful. We were even able to engage the customer success team when we needed them. They have helped us solve our problems, which is very good.

We had a major issue when it came to single sign-on. We couldn't get it working. There was a bug in Automation Anywhere that eventually got solved just a few weeks back. However, we have not implemented it. We have had hiccups with the single sign-on, but otherwise it was a smooth setup. We are not using single sign-on because of this bug.

We used our implementation partner for the deployment and implementing the bots. Our experience with them was good. Most of them are good developers. They have been able to solve a lot of issues and build a lot of processes.

We have seen ROI on two out of our three bot processes. We see ROI from hours returned back to us.

It is a lot easier to debug Automation Anywhere than UiPath because of the code. Our clients like Automation Anywhere which is another reason that we picked it.

Automate several smaller processes within departments. Show the benefit there before implementing an end-to-end solution. This will get people excited about the solution and kick start the process.

We got our workloads for issues and our bugs fixed, which is why I rated the product a 10 out of 10.

We are a research-based company using cognitive automation. 

Our use cases are:

1. Security.
2. Card protection and banking. 
3. Traffic management. 

All these applications require cognitive automation. 

We are here to explore how Automation Anywhere supports cognitive automation.

One of our security applications requires a lot of newer features in terms of recognizing a lot of objects that affect security, whether we are talking about the security of a building or of an enterprise. Integration automation is now building on growth, e.g., I can upload Microsoft and Azure integrations. This will help us in order to scale up the machine learning aspect, which is required in the applications which we are developing.

The tool is developing well and has become more web-based. We require a web-based tool approach because of our clients whom we expect will utilize web-based applications. We see Automation Anywhere is moving into a web-based tool application development. This will help us reach out to our clients.

While I am happy with the stability, it could use improvement.

We have found that the passwords are not very stable in terms of their accuracy. We could only get 70 percent accuracy in these cases. Our clients require more accurate results. We are working toward this.

We are looking into other applications and how they can be integrated, e.g., Google Analytics and Azure AI. Instead of developing from scratch within Automation Anywhere, we want to bring out these advanced capabilities from other platforms and integrate them into our platform requirements.

Integration with a lot of existing platforms is going to be a game changer. We already see Automation Anywhere tied up with SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and Microsoft. We expect that it will be tied up Google Cloud going forward. These type of improvements will increase the adoption rate of the tool and we can have a lot more use cases because a lot of companies they have already invested in ERP.

There are good tools which are in the development stage. Recently, there was an issue of stability. We see that there has been a lot of effort from Automation Anywhere experts and R&D, where they have been trying to stabilize every version they are bringing out. There is room for improvement as Automation Anywhere works to stabilize the solution.

The clients whom we are approaching and want to get onboard have a huge application requirement. So, we are requiring that these applications are well suited for the Automation Anywhere product. We feel that there is a lack of trained professionals in the market. Therefore, we have a branch where we can train people, so they can scale up into our application's deployment.

They help support our large number of clients. So far, they have been okay. Going forward, we will require a lot more support from Automation Anywhere.

Our onboarding process was pretty good. We got access to all software that we needed to learn and utilize. The Automation Anywhere University is really good. In our business, the person who was onboarding us helped us to understand how to create a center of excellence and what verticals we needed to improve. So, the support was there. We are gradually becoming a center of excellence ourselves.

We have in-house experts who are learning the solution then deploying it. We are looking for partners to deploy the tool for new projects as we learn how to better deploy it.

Our clients are seeing an economic downturn. In any economic downturn, margins are a great challenge. As a company, we can bring out profitability by automating a lot of processes on our clients' side. We always recommend to our clients is they can save as much as 25 percent of their CAPEX in the first year, then by second year, they should be able to save up to 50 percent of their OPEX. This can bring them huge profitability.

UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were our three focus areas. We started first with Automation Anywhere. We will definitely explore the other vendors as well, but It is very tough to become an expert of all three platforms.

I happened to go through the available documents on Automation Anywhere's website. I found there is a lot of effort from the company to create an ecosystem of experts. They want a lot of experts to get trained. There is a lot of support on the certification side. So, we thought that it was a good company to start with.

Have a very robust feasibility check of what you want to do. It is very important that you understand your requirements: 

• Why do you require RPA? 
• What will be the return of the investment? 
• What will be the time consumption? 
• Do you need to outsource the entire RPA or develop in-house expertise?

Understand the tool better, then the deployment becomes easier.

The tool is good. I feel that there is a lot of scope for improvement. We have found there is already an R&D effort to build up Automation Anywhere. There are new tools which will soon be integrated into the present setup. It becomes better at every stage.

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.

As a partner, we can use RPA in many sectors including financial services and banks, technology and software, in communications, government, hospitality, and human resources.

I have recently done two projects with Automation Anywhere, one for a large car manufacturer and the other for a bank.

For the car manufacturer, we used it to copy and paste data from Excel sheets, with user entries according to customer. This process helped secure the digital workplace with verification and to integrate legacy systems with new applications. There was also a daily report on this automation.

In the other project, we took data from a CSV file and validated it according to business rules and we then copied from the CSV and pasted it into another application. There, again, it was with specific customer data. We were able to implement data migration between banking applications and customer account management applications.

In simple language, we can automate any business process and it works for our customers the way they want it to.

Using Automation Anywhere, the work gets completed in half the time. Using particular types of software, there can be problems in creating solutions and it will take a lot of time to solve the problems. By using automation, the hard work is done by robots rather than by people. It won't take as much time.

If it takes a long time for a person to complete a project and, instead, the hard work is done by the computer, the robots, that is beneficial for companies.

• The ability to use previous integrations is valuable.
• With Automation Anywhere you can read and extract CSV data easily. You don't need multiple commands to read it.
• The user interface is good. Whatever I've done, the user interface has been very good.

Reliability and error handling should be improved.

One to three years.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is good. I haven't had any issues when it comes to stability, so far.

If a company is getting work done by robots, work that is otherwise hard to get done, then Automation Anywhere is definitely a good investment for them.

Compared to other tools like NICE and Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is the only tool that gets your work completed in half the time. No other tools do that. In my opinion, this is what makes Automation Anywhere the best tool.

I haven't done projects on NICE yet, but I did the training for NICE as well as for Automation Anywhere. NICE has good things in it, but in my opinion, with NICE it will take more time to complete tasks compared to Automation Anywhere. There is a difference.

For what I have used Automation Anywhere for so far, the two projects I have done, it has been completely good for me. This is the best tool I have seen.

The first project took about eight months and the other about six to seven months. There were four people working on each project, all together. They were all RPA developers. In total there are eight to ten of us working on Automation Anywhere.

Automation is happening a lot in the financial and banking service areas. There are many applications which a bank cannot manage by itself and we use automation to help manage customers' accounts. But these days, automation is happening everywhere. It is used in every company. Automation is an important process and people will see it more and more going into the future as well.

There is scope in the future for increased usage of Automation Anywhere in the banking sector.

In the future, as technology increases day-by-day, Automation Anywhere will definitely add new technology. There are already benefits but they will increase as the technology develops and people will benefit more and more.

The primary use case for bringing in Automation Anywhere was to make sure that we take away the work which our resources don't want to do, they don't like to do, or they find that there is something more meaningful and useful they can use their time for. That was our primary factor. 

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode bots, because we don't need to go and look at what they're doing. They just go by themselves. That's the state we need to get to, but we are currently attended. Based on the projects or PoCs that we have done, we've got a last transmission program coming in, which is exciting.

The bot insides should come in the same package versus having it as a different bundle by itself. If we could have this product come with all the inside solutions altogether, that would help.

I was talking the other day in a session that when we go into this, how do we ensure that the right security policies are in place? Because now, we are talking about people accessing these bots from anywhere outside of the restricted access zone. So, that is where we should put focus on, because it takes only somebody to snatch the phone and start breaching. Therefore, that is where we should put the focus on.

We started off with the 10.5 version, where we didn't find any major hiccups. Then, we upgraded to version 11.3, which we find more useful. I think version 11.3 is the way to go.

As with every solution or a product, it goes through that journey. I think the RPA for Automation Anywhere is going through that journey. I can see the stability improvements from 10.3 to 10.5 to 11.3. From this conference, I could see the end-to-end governance coming into play. So, stability-wise, they are getting there. I'm not saying that it's fully stabilized. But, it's working for us, and the path is on the right track.

We started off with this showcase piece. Now, we are going into details regarding how we can scale. Can we scale it horizontally? Can we just start putting VMs on it? So, these are the factors that we are assessing right now, but we feel that it is scalable.

We wanted to be able to kick-start this journey, so we brought in an automation team, as this is where the whole industry is moving with our clients. From here, we will have success stories year after year.

We did not use a previous solution. We were trying to shop around and see what was best for us. Automation Anywhere was always promising and the use cases that we saw were interesting. So, we said, "We'll start with that." It works well so far.

The initial setup wasn't complex, but it wasn't straightforward. It was somewhere in the middle.

We didn't go Big Bang on thinking how much money that we were going to save. I wanted to make sure that could we show improvements in the efficiency, in terms of headcount. Ultimately, it comes boiled down to cost, but then if I can get one headcount reduced from the team, and be able to utilize that to somebody else, that would be a winning situation for my client and me.

We measure the ROI through FTE. Of course, there is a dollar value associated with it.

We have started to see the ROI. We are starting to see the following:

• Activities in which resources in my team would have taken four to five hours are now done in 30 minutes. 
• Some of the weekend monitoring
• Some of the weekend missing report generations
• Monday monitoring of a heavy load system. 

These are things that we are already starting to see where the time taken to do a task has been drastically reduced. So, we are seeing the performance improvement as a result.

I have nothing specific regarding the Automation Anywhere University. But, we have taken some of the online courses available and done a few sessions, which has been a wonderful deal.

I am putting it somewhere between a seven and eight (out of ten). That is what I'll rate it, because as I said, the stability and governance are on that path. As we get there, I'm sure it'll make it to a ten. So far. the journey is on the right track.

For somebody searching for a solution, it primarily concerns the use case. But if this is what they are looking for, I will definitely advise.

I use this solution to script and update website data and work with databases such as SQL. We also use IQ Bot extensively to script data from PDF files.

AA has improved our efficiency and saved on manual hours because no manual interaction is required.

The most valuable feature is the task bots because we found that cognitive functionality can be improvised.

An area for improvement would be that, once the code goes beyond 1,000 lines, it becomes really tough for a programmer to keep track of what is happening with the variables. I think they should add some kind of inbuilt modularization to help programmers keep track of what is happening.

I've been using this solution for two-and-a-half years, and we switched to A360 a couple of months ago.

There are some bugs in the system, but AA's stability is improving day by day.

I think scaling from small to medium automation works well, but if building out very big applications, sometimes the code can be too lengthy and uncontrollable.

AA's technical support can vary - most of the time, it's good, but sometimes it's tough to get your issue addressed.

I implemented using an in-house team, with support available from AA if required.

We evaluated UiPath.

I'd rate this product as eight out of ten.

We mainly use it for Financial Documents processing to conduct payments to registered Vendors. Invoice reception via a central mailbox on the server; Extraction of said PDF invoices via the IQ Bot cognitive platform using the ABBY OCR, as it is by far the most effective for our processing requirement; Consolidation of each individually extracted file into a central Batch processing file; Upload of central batch processing file into a stand-alone approval system, developed on IBM Xpages; Approval of uploaded files, from a central batch file, for payment; Upload of each invoice record in a third-party processing system such as Sage Evolution / SAP. Payment is done via a batch file generated by a third-party payment application.

AA has enabled faster processing of a series of manual operations and/or procedures. Cognitive capabilities are severely reduced or highly inaccurate, the Cognitive platform requires major attention regarding how data is captured, retained for future extractions as well as how these extractions are validated. There is a somewhat problematic functionality for various commands within AA, these commands do not have a consistent functionality one execution within some external third-party software such as Sage Evolution, XBRL for CaseWare, and CaseClient.

The MetaBots are by far the most effective system within AA. Due to the fact that no scripting is required and only the passing of variables or values to get a definite result. IQ Bot with the ABBY OCR is a powerful component to do multiple extractions in the shortest possible timeframe in comparison to human execution of similarly identified tasks or operations. 

The Recorder functionality is extremely useful and relatively straightforward enough to use, albeit a bit restrictive in its functionality.

IQ Bot requires a significant improvement for its data detection and data retention, mainly from the previously trained documents: regarding the document's format, layout, data contained within the document, the type of data that needs to be extracted. Object cloning commands require a significant improvement in its functionality. It is far too inconsistent with execution within the same application. Plugins for web browsers should be a single plugin that allows for the connectivity and functionality of both the v11/v12 and A2019 software, or at best, allows for both the A2019 and v11/v12 plugins to run on the same client browser simultaneously.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for roughly two years.

The current solution is not very stable due to multiple developers working on the initial development, it would be far more efficient if a small group of developers had worked on this specific project.
The solution should be more stable with a limited number of developers working on the current project. The current project would become more accurate and efficient if the functionality of the current commands could be updated to function more effectively and not stop working on a bi-weekly basis. Soe days the commands work without any problems and some days these same commands stop working and breaks the current processing cycle.

Scalability in our current solution is low but has massive room for growth.

The technical is relatively fast to respond and guidance offered is oftentimes sufficient. Time-zone difference is a major issue as this delays the response from an available technician. No guaranteed solution for cases raised, oftentimes workarounds are the only suggested action with multiple of those resulting in no success on the issue raised.

No previous solution used, as a manual process previously.

The initial setup was extremely complex as no assistance or guidance could be found online for my system.

The setup was done through an in-house team consisting of the current developer and a single IT technician.

Know ahead of time what capabilities you are going to require and plan accordingly to determine the total number of user licenses and development licenses required.

Other options were considered such as Blue Prism and Ui Path, but the capabilities of AA far surpass those platforms based on cost.

Documentation online is severely lacking, have commented on this before in support cases. The online documentation is far too generic, with no linking to relevant or in-depth forums on similar topics.

We are proposing a documentation solution like archived files, payroll, and integrating data between Excel forms and CRM/SAP.

We have a solution for how to digitize archived files into PDFs and distribute them to a dedicated folder. We use Excel forms to manipulate data, then the physical data will be scanned and contains the date, which will be input by the user manually. After that, the bot will execute the process for distributing the file, and finally, will send a report to the user.

We use analytics as part of the result.

We are not the end-user. Rather, we are helping users to get the best solution out of their business process. Mostly, we are learning from webinars or the AA YouTube channel.

We know that many things can be solved by using RPA, but the con is that the branding image of AA in Indonesia is low. We have to compete with UiPath on a line per line basis, so it will be not easy to persuade users to use AA.

I hope we can get more support for AA to expand in the Indonesian Market.

There are many features that are valuable including Whatsapp messages, OCR, and image recognization, but I have not tried all of them.

My opinion is that we need to have a video or tutorial on how to implement these features, as well as seeing what results to expect. We are having difficulty explaining RPA to users if we have to. The competitors can present the features more interactively using video, which is better than a PowerPoint presentation. Having this would make it easier to sell to the user, because the market in Indonesia prefers to see the demo/result, as opposed to learning the technical aspects first.

Similarly, they would prefer to see a success story and case study, instead of listening to a text presentation. I think we need to create an interactive presentation that is more creative and gives more proof of results for the process, and lesser in terms of technical description.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for seven months.

I have experience with traditional RPA.

IQ Bot is useful but the price is not friendly. Many users are interested to try it, but the cost is not a good deal when you consider ROI.

The price between distributor and partner is different, especially in terms of the discount. We cannot lock the discount from partner to distribution, so we still have a different price. 

We have evaluated other products but we need more time to see the results of our automated processes.

I would love Automation Anywhere to expand the market in Indonesia but I need more support. This is not only from a technical perspective, but business development assistance is needed to grow the market in this region.