Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our journey starts from discovering and understanding what process to automate. That's where our deep domain and process expertise come into the picture. We leverage process mining technologies over there, partnerships with Celonis and TimelinePI. We take advantage of that. The journey continues from there to designing and developing automations. Automation Anywhere is the RPA platform we use for creating the bots in automation and along with that we also use many of the technologies including AI and ML. 

Toward this life cycle, we have a very structured approach of governing, monitoring, and tracking. Insights we gain from this governance, we apply towards automation strategy and implementations. We've done this for many clients across the globe. We are happy to share those experiences with some of you as well.

The focus on usability and user experience is bang on. Addressing several personas and making it easy for every persona to adopt and embrace is the spot on focus. That's an area that has a lot more room to improve. In the absence of that, the skills and expertise in the industry are going to struggle and if you need broader adoption, which has maximum potential, the persona-based user experience is a focus and I'd say Automation Anywhere is already working on.

In terms of onboarding, we step back and think about how to leverage this technology. We have created some IP around this and leverage our deep learnings from several implementations. We apply the process and domain expertise and determine which process needs to be automated by leveraging what technology and what ROI will you get out of it.

We leverage the process insights technology, we bring that to the table, we understand what processes need to be automated and we apply the relevant technologies. Automation Anywhere is one of the many we apply in transforming across automating the entire process end to end.

Number one thing when you're trying to automate, you need to start thinking beyond productivity gains and think about other value drivers such as improved business outcomes and superior customer experiences. The creation of a bot is only one half of the journey. The other half of the journey is understanding what to automate, what technologies to use and having a digital workforce and a governance platform around it is the other half of the journey. That's the one big learning for all of us from the many implementations we have done.

I would rate it around eight to nine. We have personally seen the platform really mature from several implementations, from scalability to availability, to API programmability. The vision and the journey Automation Anywhere is on is phenomenal.

We have a lot of use cases, mostly for repetitive processes. We have automated processes for loans, moving money across accounts, and transferring money between our institution to another.

It has helped us look at how our processes are organized.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature.

The object cloning that exists cannot capture 80 percent of the objects that we need it to capture.

We are running the old 10.5 version. Sometimes, we get stuck with it.

With our current version, we are experiencing issues with the access of the Control Room. Therefore, at the moment, we cannot really scale.

The person who is working on our architecture is not always available.

We have only ever used Automation Anywhere.

We are having issues with setting up the newest version. It doesn't install, and there are not a lot of things to do with it.

We used a consulting agency, who did not have good knowledge about the product and bots, such as basic principles of coding and error handling. This was surprising, as these were IT personnel. We felt that sometimes we were training the consultants from the agency on how to implement the product.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Blue Prism also approach us. This was to do the PoC. 

Automation Anywhere was the simplest solution, and it offered us immediate support.

With the current version that we have, I cannot rate the solution more than a six out of a ten.

About a year and a half ago, we started making a business case for the software. We now have 15 bots running.

• It is flexible and user-friendly. The flexibility is awesome.
• It is easy to learn. Coming from a programming background, it is easy to use.
• Its ability to integrate with other solutions is awesome.
• The cognitive document processing is very good.

I would like to see a bot button.

The technical support is very good. We now have a technician on-hand to assist us with issues, instead of reaching out to Automation Anywhere's technical support. 

The cost is affordable, which makes an easy barrier to entry for the RPA market.

We chose Automation Anywhere because it is user-friendly.

I would recommend trying it. Once you see it in action, you will understand its capabilities and how easy it is to use.

The bot creation process is pretty standard. We take an idea for a business process and try to standardize it. We put in development and test it a hundred times before putting in production.

Courses on Automation Anywhere University are very easy to learn. It provides a huge amount of training and learning exercises for you to learn how to use the tool.

I haven't used Citrix yet.

We are automating repetitive, manual processes that don't add value to people's work. Also, we want to improve our risk management through quality and efficiency.

We have an automation that we just put in production where we are doing a double-blind quality review. The bot is comparing the two entries and kicking out a large number of exceptions for human review. We have saved a large number of hours every day by not having humans look at things that match.

The ability to build automation without coding is its most valuable feature.

We have had some quirkiness happen when integrating the Automation Anywhere with other solutions, such as weird Excel issues or temperamental legacy system issues.

Our division took a couple of months to scale up our bots, when we were expecting it to take weeks. However, what we did was fairly complicated.

I have not had a lot of experience with their technical support.

We measure ROI by comparing hours saved to the cost of FTEs.

We have found the product useful. We are using it and have implement it. However, it is not perfect, and we have found that there are some frustrations.

The developers who work for me find the solution fairly easy to use. Though, I do have developers who prefer typing stuff in rather than dragging and dropping. Generally, they picked up the solution quickly.

For the bot creation process, we ask the end user, "Don't tell me how you do something, show me what you do." Then, as IT personnel, we build it.

We have not taken any courses through Automation Anywhere University yet.

The primary use case is to automate business processes for a manufacturing company.

My clients have seen tremendous value when it comes to automating business processes. The robust nature of the application allows them to scale their business processes pretty quickly. They receive the benefits in around a quick 12-week period.

The reporting capabilities are pretty nice. 

The Excel component is valuable, when compared to other tools in the market.

From an ease of use point of view, on a scale of one to ten with ten being really easy, I would rate the tool a six. The interface is not intuitive for business users who are used to seeing the process on a flow chart, like a Visio workflow diagram. This may be because of the nature of the way the interface is structured and the way the functions are built in list type of format. I feel like there is a bit of a learning curve for anyone who is new to the program. As with everything, it takes time and you start to get better at it. 

From pilot to production, we scaled our last bot in about nine weeks. It was a very interesting process because the building deployment can be done pretty quickly, but if you don't narrow down the scope early, you can face a lot of challenges. I don't think this necessarily has to do with the platform. It is more about understanding and narrowing down your scope from the beginning. It's okay to add more functionality later, but that adds delay to your overall timeline. However, being that it's very easy to configure the bot and add components to it, this is one of the benefits of building with Automation Anywhere. You can make changes pretty quickly.

With everything, you will have to be careful and not get caught up always making changes. You have to really narrow the scope down quickly and build it in very small components. Don't build everything end-to-end. Break down your processes, as much as possible, and deploy as little functionality as possible. This makes it way more easy to manage. It is also a much better way to build a bot.

I did attempt to reach out to customer support a few times. I didn't really get any response. 

I would rate them a five out of ten. There is room for improvement.

It does take a lot of space to install. However, you are installing a very powerful application which has very powerful components in it.

Pay attention to what you're doing, and the following:

1. Capabilities that you have in-house.
2. Support down the line. 
3. Handing over your solutions to someone else to pick up. 

You want to have this type of mindset. 

With any tools, you have to ensure you have the right capabilities in-house to be able to help build out and manage any solutions in the future, along with managing your army of bots in deployment. 

It is a good, powerful application. It can fit pretty much any use case, but that is one component to it. The other component is do you have the right in-house skills to help you manage the Automation Anywhere bots?

I took the RPA Advanced course for developers (entry-level) in Automation Anywhere University. I took it a while ago, and I don't know if it's changed now, but it was very informative, detailed, and intuitive. I came from automation tools, so it was a bit easier for me to pick up on the information because of my background. The course was pretty informational. I felt comfortable building an application, building a bot, and putting it into production after the course.

Building a bot can be pretty quick. If you understand what the problem is that the bot is trying to solve, then you can get it done pretty quickly since the process is easy and straightforward. However, if you are coming from other tools or are not an experienced developer, you might face a bit of a challenge in the beginning. Everything will eventually come pretty quickly, as you can build a bot in an hour, or even less than that.

I'm learning how to use the IQ Bot, which is a pretty good component of the application. I can see how it would be a really powerful feature for some of my clients.

I haven't used the Citrix feature yet.

It is our RPA platform. It is the main platform that we use for backups.

It has helped us a lot with our digitized work.

We have automated a lot of the bank's processes.

My team has taken courses through the Automation Anywhere University. The courses have been good. They have helped us, but it could improve some things, like how the courses are designed.

It is pretty stable, but we have experience issues.

We are working on scaling it now.

We use it with more than 17 applications. So, we work it on a very large scale.

The technical support is good. 

It took us two years to scale it from the pilot it to our current number of bots. The process was too much work.

We have saved 53 minutes through automation.

It is a very good product.

There are several features that are very valuable to me, and these are the main reasons I was attracted to it.

1. It has a very wide array of built in functionality. I am able to test against SNMP (v1 and v2), Telnet, SSH, Command Line, Web Browsers (IE, Google, FireFox), email, Microsoft Office, Windows integration, etc… On top of all that I can write other apps in other languages and have Testing Anywhere control them when necessary.
2. The scripting language is easy to learn and very quick to build on.
3. The server side allows for multiple developers to be involved and all their work is saved to a single repository.

We chose this product because we had an extremely aggressive timetable to develop automation from scratch. In a traditional setting it would have taken several developers months to develop a full of suite of tests for just one feature set. Using Testing Anywhere we were able to leverage the built in capabilities such as Telnet and product a quick turnaround in developing a Telnet menu test that took a matter of weeks to develop.

There are a few areas that this product really needs to bring to the next level. First, the server is good but very basic. It does a great job of storing all the test files in a central location for all developers to use. However, it lacks all the standard features a normal “code” repository has such as Check In/Check Out, Branching, Version Control, etc…

Second, the IDE – or development interface is simple and easy to use. But if you come from a coding background such as myself you’ll find that it is a little too simplistic. I've become accustomed to the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE where it is very functional and helpful in developing your code. The Testing Anywhere IDE lacks all the bells and whistles you get in a full features IDE such as Visual Studios.

I have been using this solution for about 1 ½ - 2 years now.

Testing Anywhere offers two licenses for deployment – a runtime license and an EXE license.

The EXE license is such that I can create “executable” files from the developer machine and deploy it. In creating the EXE you include all of your scripts necessary for it to run. However, there is no control on how or when those are created and the file that you created can only be deployed to one system. SO if you wanted to deploy this test file to say 10 test systems you would need 10 licenses.

The runtime license is basically the same as a developers license without the ability to edit. I've come to believe this is very useless as I have to manually put in all my scripts and manually check them every time I run (because there is no way to verify what is running is the latest). One of our tests involved 200 scripts, so this can be a rather tiresome venture. To Testing Anywheres' credit, there is supposedly a different server than I am using, and that allows you to update the scripts on a remote machine but we are not using that nor have I seen it so I cannot comment on its abilities.

We have encountered a few. My company was one of the early users (if not the earliest) of the Testing Anywhere product. I'm told we used the product in ways that was not anticipated and pushed the boundaries of the product and development teams at Testing Anywhere. Because of this we uncovered a number of bugs that we were able to work with the developers at Testing Anywhere to get resolved.

We have run into a few. First, the server we purchased is limited to just a handful of licenses - six I believe. This includes developers and runtimes. This may seem like a lot but if you include all your test machines (the run times) that quickly dissipates. We are currently discussing evaluating the next level of server offered called Test Lab which is supposed to resolve this issue.

I would rate them as 5/10, and only because I have had most of my interaction with technical support and our product manager. I have not had to contact customer support much at all – Which is a good thing!

I would rate them as 8/10. They are always responsive. I am often in contact with someone on their team ensuring that they can re-produce the issues and working with them to find a solution.

I come from a background where we developed all of our test tools internally. I’ve used mainly Visual Studio. The only reason I entertained and then chose this solution was because of the time table and resources made available by my management.

I found the initial setup rather easy and straight forward. I think coming from a programming background made it that much easier but others that I have worked with that did not have a programming background have not had much difficulty either.

This was done through an in-house team.

Yes, we did look into several other options. We looked at an internal team of developers developing in some type programming language. We also looked at Selenium, Squish, and a few others.

If you are looking for a fast solution using minimal resources not requiring an advanced programming skill set this is your product. It’s easy to learn and quick to deploy.

While it has some really great features and is extremely easy to use it is still fairly new to the market and has its bugs. (Not that other solutions do not).

I am using IQ Bots for invoice indexing for many clients.

My primary use case is extracting invoice details from different vendors for validation purposes. We convert CSV files to Excel for formatting and before A2019, I used to do all validations with VBA script. Now, with AA A2019, it validation very easy using Python. It is also very fast and efficient.

I have created Task Bots for many finance-related clients and they are also working very well. Recently, I converted all of my bots to A2019.

Automation Anywhere has improved my organization, OMFYS Tech.

We have implemented many processes in the organisation with RPA, as we had done with HR bots for different HR processes. From these, we made most of the demo videos that we show to our clients. It helps to discover new processess to automate and use in new projects.

The A2019 version is very stable for the processes that we make. On the other platform, we have projects using Java, Oracle, Python, and HTML, where we had automated processes when required.

I found the new feature of integrating Python and HTML the most valuable. Using this, we can get the DOMXPath dynamic for every HTML property.

On the other hand, Python scripting is very helpful nowadays. We just create a Python script and integrate it with the bot, which makes the work very easy and fast.

I like the IQ Bot very much, as most of my projects use it for invoice indexing purposes.

The recorder in the A2019 version is way ahead, as it allows us to use Chrome and other browsers to capture the object properties. 

The UI can be improved a little bit to make it easier for beginners to understand.

There are many commands called Actions that are very good but sometimes, I feel that it should be more comfortable to find and search for specific commands. There should be some type of hint or notification system about what actions are useful, according to the situation or part of the process that it is in while creating the bot.

The speed of the bot processing on a whole can be improved so that the bot can run in less time than the task or processes.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

Stability-wise, it is a ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

I did not use another RPA solution prior to this one. I started my RPA journey with automation anywhere only because it is the best available solution in the market.

This is a value for the money product.

I evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism but neither one had IQ Bot-like features. That's why I rejected them and choose AA.

My advice is not to think too much. Just compare the features then you will get to know why AA is the best solution of all.