Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use it for our product setup and rating products on our website.

We take raw data and manipulate it, then we feed the information to the bot. The rest of the process is automated using the bot.

We have seen increased productivity. What use to take about two days to finish with laymen doing computer work, a bot can finish it within a seven to eight hour time frame. That means we are removing a lot of man-hours.

Automation is less time consuming and very quick.

The features are pretty easy to use, like the drag and drop feature. It is easy and understand, even a layman knows how the application works. All the basic stuff can be done by anybody.

I want the tool to be more stabilized. After three or four hours, the navigation keeps changing. We will be running error handling for 8,000 process and the system will fail. We need it to be more stable.

I would like a detailed description of all the features in a PDF explaining their significance and what they do.

Stability-wise, we have found that it works pretty well. At this stage, it can work around 24 hours. However, the system does malfunction. We need to have a bot ready to back up another bot and spin up the data in case of a failure.

We need the solution to run without errors before we can scale more.

The initial setup was straightforward. Our processes are not largely complex, so we understood the background of how it was being set up.

We used a consultant. They came in and helped us with the setup of the products.

Automation Anywhere is user-friendly.

The primary use case is to automate complex processes without using a development team.

We have had a lot of issues using Automation Anywhere and find ourselves stuck. We have an open ticket and are still working with them to resolve this. 

We got the solution because of its ease of use with the API call, avoiding the use of developers.

It is a difficult solution to use for back-end processes.

We can automate easily, but we have to use more functions. We would like to see more GUI-based automation instead.

They do not include the basic functionality of column headers in Excel worksheets. This is missing, and we need it.

We cannot currently copy data and send it on an email.

The technical support is good. When we open tickets, we immediately receive a response. 

In some cases, we make suggestions, and they tell us that they can't make the fix. This is okay, too.

The initial setup was easy. First, we create a bot. Then, we send the business an approval. Once they have verified everything, then we need to open a ticket. Finally, the bot is deployed to production.

We deployed in-house.

We are using Bot Insight to measure our ROI.

We are not receiving the right information about their features, e.g. Automation Anywhere University, or anything that they are selling. They need to improve their documentation.

Search all industry-designed RPA tools and choose the best one for your process.

I completed my advanced certification through Automation Anywhere University. While the courses are good, what you learn in the courses and what is in the real world are two different things. The documentation in the University does not have the proper documentation and cannot provide help, when necessary.

We have a lot of systems filled with documents and PDFs, such as finance, accounts payable, and operations.

We just started and have only implemented one bot.

I would like to have a cloud-based version with support.

It took us three months to scale up our first bot.

The technical support is very good. We are very happy with them. It takes them time, but they do get results.

We were not using another solution prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup of the software takes time.

We deployed the solution in-house.

We save only time, not money. We save 30 minutes every day using this solution.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

The IQ Bot is a very nice concept, and it will be very successful.

Primary use case would be order-scheduling for us. What we do is we take internal orders and we schedule them with our customers. There is a lot of data that we're managing both in our systems and in our customers' systems.

The looping functions definitely save us time. What Automation Anywhere has done is free up more time for our staff. They're able to handle exceptions in our processes instead of having to do the mundane, repetitive tasks they were doing previously.

The object looping functions are definitely very useful, especially when there are repetitive processes. We can design one path and have it do it multiple times until all the data's completed.

There are two big pain points for me. One is communication of all known bugs and the issues with the current versions that users that might be on. A heads-up of known issues would be a nice-to-have. If we're spinning our wheels, and we have that piece of information, it would make it a lot easier to either justify an upgrade or a process change here, to handle that particular bug or issue, given that it's a system-wide known issue.

The second thing is that we have a lot of use cases that depend on certain Java applets, and currently we're not able to leverage the Object Cloning that would speed up our automation designing. So we have to revert to more image recognition-type of designing, and it just takes a long time to get that bot built. We have one, solely web-based use case, and we can deploy those kinds of use cases fairly quickly and then make modifications on the fly with them. But when we have these other use cases that leverage image recognition, it makes it difficult to be agile and to do updates or edits fairly quickly.

Those are the two biggest pain points and opportunities. I have raised these issues with Automation Anywhere and they've mentioned that the automation piece is something that they're currently unable to do, but it's somewhere on the roadmap to deploy. We just haven't received the date for when it will be.

It's mostly stable. Sometimes we do notice that our Automation Anywhere services get disconnected. That happens, maybe, once every three weeks. When the service is disconnected, you can't run any automations on that particular environment. So someone has to go in there and reinitialize those. But for the most part, it's pretty good.

From the current setup that we have, I'm not sure how much we can scale up. We had an initial PoC and our first go-live was less than a year ago, so we haven't had those discussions on what it would take to either increase by one or two servers or 20 servers, or what that would look like.

Technical support is pretty great. Sometimes, I feel that their office hours are not in line with our office hours, so getting a response can take either half a day or a few hours. With production outages, we can become dead in the water.

Once we do have someone on and responding to our tickets, they're pretty knowledgeable. If a ticket has not been routed to the correct technical support group, it gets routed fairly quickly and addressed. Their knowledge is pretty good.

The only times that I would have negative feedback about support are when we go through most troubleshooting techniques or steps that a technical support agent would walk me through and, at the end, the problem is deemed a bug. That's when I would feel like we were spinning our wheels. I know that those are the necessary steps to identify it's an actual bug and not some sort of configuration or update that we needed.

Our current customer success manager is fairly good. He's always on top of our tickets and if I ever raise a question to him, he's definitely very helpful. I do feel like we're being taken care of.

Sometimes we used simple data loaders or macros from Excel, but nothing more advanced. Our organization began to look at something like this solution because, from a resource standpoint, there was a need to expend more on the workforce. Not having to expand our workforce even more was preferable, if we could carry out these repetitive tasks through an automation. We definitely wanted to leverage that instead of adding more people.

The initial setup was pretty simple. We got the minimum requirements for all of our environments, and we had a technician, a technical expert from Automation Anywhere, who walked us through the setup. That was actually the easiest part.

From a software installation standpoint, it was roughly a couple of hours. But from the infrastructure side, there were some setups on our end that we needed to carry out. That took a little while longer.

Three people were required for the deployment. One to coordinate resources, another from our side, and one technical expert from the Automation Anywhere side. In terms of people involved in managing the solution, for the entire software, we have roughly one stakeholder for each department that we have automations in. The solution affects many people, but the number of people who are actually involved in designing and maintaining it, is between five and ten.

We have seen a return on investment. Every time we have these processes running, it's definitely helping out on that front.

There were a few top candidates out there. We had demos and we went through the entire vetting process. The standout qualities of Automation Anywhere were the ease of automation and that it is an intuitive tool. After a simple walkthrough, a couple of hours, you would be able to hit the ground running.

Definitely take an inventory of all the systems that you have plans to carry out the automations in and ensure that the software is compatible with them. You definitely want to have use of that automation. As I mentioned, a few our use cases have to leverage image recognition, and that isn't really all that flexible. It just increases our automation time. 

Every customer will receive a demo of how easy it is to create an automation through a web browser, but it's really all those other applications that a company may have that bring the most value. You want to make sure that you take that inventory and that Automation Anywhere gives you a thumbs up that they can automate fairly easily.

We're trying to leverage the analytics module. Right now, when we carry out a process, we'll have records of all the orders that were processed but they're all in separate spreadsheets. It's a painstaking task to consolidate all that information to get an idea of how much work we actually did. I know there's an analytics module which we haven't been able to leverage yet, and that's one of the reasons we want to upgrade to version 13.

Any increase in usage will depend on ROI and justifying it. We've had some initial requirements but we haven't ironed out many concrete details.

I would definitely rate the software a nine out of ten. If it covered all use cases and all software, if it was that easy to automate, I'd give it a ten. But since there are some applications that are not as compatible as others, there's some room for improvement there.

Accounts payable is our primary focuses for automation, and we are looking forward to this report. Thanks.

We are in the early stages and need to see how it goes for future bot building especially Bot Store today.

• Very comprehensive with different platforms especially SAP and Oracle EBS. 
• The digital worker is interesting.

I am interested in discovery, and what this means for companies like mine. I think the pricing model should be more flexible.

Right now, we have about 15 to 18 use cases, from finance to project management assistance and business operations.

We are in the journey of fully embracing digital transformation, but still far from goal.

Even though we are saving some work hours, we face a new problem that is sort of a backwards problem: Now, we have the risk a person who used to do the job in eight hours taking six hours to produce the same amount of output, instead of producing more or working on new tasks.

It automates the simple, mundane tasks that people hate to do. This is pretty much the same with other RPA software. One differentiation point that we assumed against other competitive products was the ease of implementation, which we haven’t really validated. We have seen other tools, but we did not do any heavy investigation into what the reality was. So far, we are happy, or at least okay, with the way things work.

In terms of features to add, they seem to have good grip on the future to come, for example, they already have incorporated cognitive technology called IQ Bot which translates semi-structured data into structured data.  We have not tried it yet though.Working with this vendor can sometimes be challenging because their service quality on simple business operations like invoicing could be bad. I have received wrong invoices several times. Maybe this is a problem only with their new branch offices.

We’re having a problem with the maintenance. Failure reasons may vary, but a typical one is the timing difference of interacting systems. Sometimes, the interacting systems don’t respond fast enough to what the robot expects. If something is not good, it fails. We had to go through a large optimization phase where we had to find the right timing of how long the robot should wait. If you ask a person from Automation Anywhere, probably the right way to cope with this is to wait for a window to transition before moving on to next step, which you don’t want to do for every single step because that would put additional coding on our software. Therefore, that is a difficulty that we are having. When I discussed it with an Automation Anywhere representative, he said it is quite unusual having to spend so many resources on maintenance and troubleshooting. His recommendation was that they could do a code review for us, which is nice and hopefully it works. 

We are just in the path. This year, we are trying to do ten times more than last year. We are trying to do about 100 automated processes this year. I have confidence that the solution is able to cater our needs.

We just started using their technical support. Up until now, we were working only through our IT partner. The technical support that we have received so far has been accurate and fast.

We were not involved, so I’m not sure. I heard that it was fairly easy. 

We are right in the process of it. We are leaving it to the external IT partner who we used because they are the ones who programmed the previous bots. They would do the best job for migration.  

It is negative right now. What we are expecting, for one bot creation, is a six-month turnaround for getting ROI, but that is only the developer man-hour versus actual time saved. If we include all the licenses and launch activities that we have done, we are far from getting a ROI. It will probably take another one to two.

Before we did the actual implementation, we ran some PoCs with a consulting firm and they recommended Automation Anywhere, which matches our business model and the way we wanted to progress. 

It is not so much about the tool. It’s probably not even about the company, Automation Anywhere. It’s more of the internal issues that a colleague would encounter. There is only so little that can be solved by RPA. The real solution is in the BPR and other transformations that they need to go through. If they are expecting this to be a silver bullet for something, it’s not. They need to go through the due diligence of automating the right processes right.

We use this solution for all the business processes and mainly to integrate with Excel files, our database, and our ERP.

We basically process data that are in form of Excel, PDF, or CSV formatted files. We also interact with information that is stored in our database.

Generally, we automate a lot of processes that are repetitive and time-consuming. We work mainly with processing data, thus reducing the time needed to do the process manually. The workforce is also reduced for completing simple tasks like logging in to a forum, as well as complicated tasks like banking or finance. All of these all possible.

Automation Anywhere has helped us in many ways and is one of the best RPA tools. AA has helped us to spend less time on repetitive tasks by automating them.

The two most important aspects are saving time and saving effort by our workforce. Repetitive work and rule-based tasks are the areas that are being replaced by bots.

The tutorials that are available from Automation Anywhere are very helpful for newbies to learn the platform and get going with the tool.

It is very difficult to pin down one valuable feature because each and every one of them is valuable in its own way.

I find that IQ Bot is the most amazing feature, as it helps us to work more efficiently with business documents.

Object Cloning is another good feature that helps us to save time.

Metabot is another valuable feature that exists in AA.

PDF integration is another important feature that avoids using IQ bots, and using the OCR helps us to extract text from an image.

I have had some difficulty with OCR extraction, which could be a little better.

Automation Anywhere is not fully compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer while working with web extraction.

Maybe there could be more options added for PDF integration.

Having a few practical use cases added to online learning would be helpful for newbies.

Other than these,  I don't see other difficulties. In terms of extra features, they are adding them day by day to make for the smoother automation of processes.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for the past seven months.

Our primary use has been to automate a few mundane tasks in the organization, which really helped us in this COVID situation. As most of the people are WFH and we were not able to connect to each and every individual, it helped to ease everyone's tasks and ensure they were completed on time and without errors.

Because of this, our customers are happy and our vendors were able to help us in terms of meeting our customer satisfaction and not compromising on anything. This has become the new normal for us and we have started adapting to it.

Human hours are saved and are utilized in other tasks. Since we all are in a critical situation, our office was shut down temporarily and functioning over the cloud. Employees were facing several problems like network issues and we couldn't arrange things for them, so we ended up taking their tasks and start automating them.

This ensures that they were utilized in customer satisfaction roles and that the issues were not left unattended.

A few reports and emails were automated to communicate with customers because our US server was offline.

The most valuable feature is recording in the Control Room, as it allows me to chose what I want to have recorded, ensuring that I get the right thing on time.

All of the options are available in the control room and with the search capability, even a person who is not from a computer background can easily create bots.

Certain areas of the user interface require improvement. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to drag and drop the required field but it would much better if we had voice commands so that I save time instead of using my mouse and keypad.

It would be better if it were digitally designed so that users can feel the live experience as if looking at the exact interface, rather than the logo.

Replacing the list of search options with voice commands for each item would be great.

I would like like to see changes made to the appearance of the control room. Although we all love the brownish dark mode, it would be better designed with white and orange instead of the dark brown colour on the left side of the panel.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.