Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

The primary use case is data extraction: How to extract the data and run the components alongside it.

I have been using version 11 Community Edition, which is good. After coming to Bangalore and this morning session, they showed an example of A2019, which is the latest version. That is a game changer. What we did not have in the previous version has included in this version. I had a little preview of all the changes, and I'm pretty impressed by it.

Automation Anywhere has a Bot Store. E.g., you can download the bot from the Bot Store and utilize it's data extraction capabilities. You can extract unstructured data through IQ Bot. Getting unstructured data is not difficult. I once obtained an 84 page PDF file using an IQ Bot. This was just the trial version, and it was really good. I was able to get all the circuit IDs and properties that wanted in a simple CSV format. I had not seen anything like this before. When compared to other platforms, such as UiPath, they don't have these capabilities right now. They have activities like PDF extraction, but that's not good enough. That is a reason I'm referring Automation Anywhere as a game changer.

I would like more cognitive abilities, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. E.g., if I see you, your facial recognition has to be there. If I send your picture, it should tell me your name, where you are from, and when I met you because we forget people. It should have these type of capabilities. 

Stability is a key factor. It is pretty stable. After they launch the cloud version, whether you are in my country or I'm in your country, it won't matter. You can access it anywhere. You won't need a version to download or install. 

Right now, I have it on my laptop, but when it is on the cloud, it will be more stable. Anybody will be able to access it. That's the beauty of it.

The scalability is pretty impressive. You can scale it from one computer to hundreds of computers. You don't even need Citrix. Once it is on the cloud, you can access it from anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere technical support is pretty good. I would rate them as an eight out of 10. I'm giving them an eight out of 10 because this community is still developing right now. I will not say it's fully developed. We are in a market where other contenders are also there. It is a very neck and neck competition between UiPath, Blue Prism. and Automation Anywhere. Between them, somebody is good at some things, and somebody is good at others. That is why I cannot give the support a 10 out of 10. However, because of this product's features, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a 10 out of 10.

My sales team did the decision-making. We are in negotiations for some other clients, as well.

Our previous programs have run successfully with it.

I've used UiPath as a developer. Now, I'm using Automation Anywhere as well. When I compare both, the biggest point is cognitive abilities. The IQ Bot is the best in class. You won't find that even in UiPath. 

All the available versions of competing automation tools are available, UiPath or Automation Anywhere. Download them and think about it, then decide for yourself. 

Cost cutting is the primary reason to look at getting an RPA solution. Humans are not intended to do just manual work. If I give that manual work of 14 minutes, 30 minutes. or one hour to some bot, and it can do the work without any problems. That time is now yours, and you can do something else. You can build relationships, you can have a friendship with somebody, or you can do something nice. This is what we humans were intended to do.

I'm certified in a UiPath, and now I'm going to gain my certification in Automation Anywhere.

My primary use case is collecting data from the latest sources, whether it be a spreadsheet or PDF. 

I have used Automation Anywhere in my current and previous organizations.

In my current company, we have been successful with pushing the solution through and getting management buy-in. 

In my previous organization, we started with version 7.0. We saw cost savings by automating some critical processes. In addition, the manpower was able to do high level work instead of mundane work. 

In my current organization, we are seeing great results, especially with the financial and civil processes.

It extracts what the IQ Bot does, converting it and ensuring the entire process right from the input to the output and is fully automated. It is digitizing a particular process, which is really great.

if Automation Anywhere could bring in object recognition, it would be a game changer. Today, we have a lot of video analytics. People talk about video analytics since I come from the consumer background. We are looking into the latest technologies of facial recognition from an audit proxy, e.g., counting the movement of the products from the counter versus the billing application. I have brought up this inquiry at my last three Imagine sessions but I am not getting an answer. Maybe the demand in the market is less. but people now are looking for this type of solution where Automation Anywhere can bring in some cognitive inbuilt. 

It would be great if video analytics could be brought in as a third-party product integration or on the Automation Anywhere platform. I would like the video analytics to be integrated within the next two years. Right now, most people are using third-party tools. Video can be translated into an image and information can be picked up from that, then translated into meaningful insights to make decisions.

Getting buy-in was a major challenge because of the various people not aware of the technologies moving and getting buy-in from top management is a challenge. 

A major issue is getting the in-house team trained. I would like to have a better way of managing the teams. The more your in-house team is trained, you're less dependent on your partners or solution providers, thereby scaling up the confidence of doing it in-house. I just visited a booth now on the training part to see what can be achieved so I can go back and tell my team what Automation Anywhere is providing in terms of training.

There are hiccups in the production tool. I would rate the accuracy level at 95 to 97 percent. 

Compared to the earlier versions, compliance, deliverables and other tools in the market, nobody can touch Automation Anywhere.

In terms of scalability, you have to leap frog forward. Overall, you need to work at achieving a digital workforce to scale the entire landscape of the organization by having them look to the future. It is not only the RPA part, but also you have to adopt AI and ML type technologies which can holistically cover the entire aspects and take the organization to the scalable level.

The response from the technical support is really good. 

I just met the account manager and he was thrilled to see me.

We had a technical evaluation team, which I was part of since I had earlier worked with Automation Anywhere and had a sense of it. We had been evaluating its competitors, but Automation Anywhere's stability and ease of use was great. My past experience with the solution allowed me in my current organization to make the right decision.

The initial setup is not complex. It is pretty simple. We started with small processes. then we moved onto complex types of environments. The implementation in terms of technicalities, it was not complex. In terms of getting into the nitty-gritties of what, where, when, and how it would come all together, that is the challenging part. It is the understanding the entire process of transforming the requirements into something technical. 

We used Ernest & Young for the deployment. They are one of the good partners in terms of understanding the internal processes. The consultation is great. They are with us day in and day out. They are helping us to try and transform the business.

In my current organization, we have yet to see results because we are going with a small launch with two Bot Runners and one Bot Creator. We need to asses the right approach, selection processes, choosing what to automate and what not to automate, and what would be the scale of automation. That is where a lot of hard work is required going ahead to see the results coming in the next financial year.

in my previous organization, I could see a lot of cost savings and returns from automating processes. 

More than 40 to 50 percent of the IT budget will be for the cost of automation projects in the coming years since these projects enhance operations add value.

We also considered Blue Prism, but they have nowhere near Automation Anywhere's success story in the span of just eight to nine years.

In the initial days of 2012, I visited an Automation Anywhere manager in a very small office in India. There were only about ten people operating from that region. Back then, they didn't have partners like EY. Today, they have all the Fortune companies working with Automation Anywhere, even Microsoft has joined hands with them. 

It has been a good experience working with Automation Anywhere, which started small. We were directly coordinating on simple tasks, like, "Hey this is not working. Fix it now." There were no partners in-between. 

This is the right platform and choice. Today, every business needs to be at this pace and cannot ignore automation. You have to be in the race if you really want your company to get to the next level and be at par with competitors. Bring your business to the table by getting it automated by using the right tools, like Automation Anywhere, and the right partner.

The solution delivers value.

Going forward, we are looking to add more value, then plan for a better foundation using the automation platform by making a COE team and installing the newest version of Automation Anywhere.

We use it for backoffice processes. We are part of a shared service, so we do billing, credit, collections, and those types of processes.

We have done close to 50 projects in the last three years. AA improves our speed as far as moving files goes. It also helps in getting people prepared to work on a daily basis. We have a lot of jobs that run at night so that when people come in in the morning, everything's ready to go for them.

For example, we have two very separate systems which need to talk to each other. It sounds very simple, but we have a job that takes a file from one system and loads it into another. But it has to do that close to 1,500 times in the middle of the night. It's a job that used to be done manually by 150 people in 150 different markets. Now, it's something that's done during the night, and when they come in it's all completed. So it was a very simple task, but there was a lot of volume. It has saved everybody a lot of time and it has saved a huge amount of manpower. It saves us thousands of hours a month.

It's also very useful as far as interacting with employees. Employees can kick off jobs on an as-needed basis rather than scheduling them. It's always very helpful to have a tool that's interactive with the employees.

One of the most valuable features is object cloning, the ability to get into websites and do things faster.

I also like its usability. It's pretty easy to learn, pretty quick to get things taken care of with it. Our average developer is up within 30 days. We have our own training program. We don't use anything from AA for training. We've been doing it long enough that we created our own.

In addition, the user interface is easy to use. It's fairly user-friendly when you don't know anything about it and open it up for the first time.

The scheduling is a little difficult at times. Rather than setting up individual instances, it would be really nice if we had the ability to set repetitive jobs easily. Right now, if you want a job to run every 15 minutes, you have to schedule it a lot of times. I'd rather have the ability to just say 'run every 15 minutes.'

There could be some improvements made in the Control Room. I really like the concept of the application that they've got, so you can now access the Control Room from a mobile device, but there's only a lot of potential, there's not a lot of functionality there yet. That would be a great place for it to be able to expand, so you could have full functionality of the Control Room through a mobile device.

And in general, I would like to the solution to get into more machine-learning/AI. I know that the IQ Bots are looking to go there, but there's definitely a lot more potential there as well.

We haven't had any problems with the actual application going down. We really haven't had any issues. We have issues with third-party products going up and down, but we've never had AA just stop.

We're a small user, so we haven't had any problem with scalability. We've talked to a lot of people who have used it on a much larger scale. For us, it's very easy to add TaskBots. We're more than satisfied with the scalability.

We're always looking for expansion of the solution within our company. We use most of the commands available. There are very few that aren't applicable to what we're doing. We're always trying to get the solution into other departments within the organization itself. We use it a lot within the shared services, the area which we own. But outside of the company, we have several projects that are not within the shared service and we're always looking to talk to the other departments and get them involved.

We have 25 bots, meaning 25 licenses. Our core team that does development has four people plus a project manager.

Tech support has greatly improved. Three years ago we didn't necessarily have the best experience, but over the years they've gotten better.

As a side note, we go through a third-party first, through ISG. That's through how our service model works. Then ISG gets AA involved if they can't answer the question. We don't necessarily directly contact AA. Most of it's through the third-party provider, and then AA eventually.

ISG is great. We really haven't had a lot of problems. When we implemented version 11.3, we went so quickly - we went with it right when it came out - that there were a few questions that ISG wasn't aware of yet because it was so new. We went to AA through ISG and they were able to answer the questions right away. But for the most part, ISG is very on top of it, and we don't need to engage AA.

This is our first go in the RPA world. We had an internal resource, somebody within the company who had seen Automation Anywhere used in other companies. That person introduced us to the concept and, from there, we did some research and saw that that's where the market was going.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I did it myself and I'm not an IT guy, so it wasn't super-difficult. It took me a couple of hours, including configuration. Our IT team set up the actual virtual machines themselves, but the installation was done completely by me.

Our implementation strategy was that we started super-small. At that time, we started with five bots and the Control Room. It wasn't overly difficult. I just followed the documentation provided to install the service and configure everything.

Our initial project had to have an ROI, and that's why we started small. We have never not had a yearly ROI. We've always greatly exceeded the cost of, or the investment in, the tool. In terms of how much it's saving us, I don't want to be quoted on the exact amount, but it's more than millions of dollars a year.

We purchased AA through ISG and have done both annual renewals and a multi-year renewal, the latter recently. It has been very easy to add bots on an as-needed basis.

There are no additional costs from Automation Anywhere, but there is obviously the infrastructure costs for the VMs.

We definitely evaluated lots of different options at the time. Of course, it came down to Blue Prism or to AA. We went with AA because of the feature set, the way that the development was laid out. And support was also a factor. We were much more interested in States-side support.

Any company in today's environment would be foolish not to implement RPA. There are definitely different types of use cases where you could spread it out amongst the organizations and let them do their own thing. We have chosen to keep it centralized and have been pretty successful in doing it. But everybody should be using an RPA in some capacity.

I would absolutely recommend specifically Automation Anywhere.

Our experience with the solution has been a ten out of ten. I can't speak to the other tools because we haven't used them, but we're very satisfied with what we have.

My primary use cases are where I'm dealing with a lot of raw data extraction and transformation so that the data can be used by other systems.

An example would be getting the data out of PDF files, transforming it from semi-structured to structured and putting it into an extra-stable system like Excel or a CSV so that it can be used by other systems.

A lot of clients I work with have legacy systems and a lot of API access is not available. Some of the systems might be running off a server located somewhere else, while some would be running on a mainframe and I'm actually restricted to working with the screen. So these clients have a very good use case. If I'm working with the screens, Automation Anywhere really does help me because it gives me the control over the screens. If you are not looking at integrating legacy software, Automation Anywhere gets the job done. But if you need integration then you start looking for other RPA tools.

It definitely saves time and effort. Improving the workflow, that's not something Automation Anywhere provides. That's a different challenge altogether - to do a business process improvement so that automation gives you even more value. That type of process works in combination with Automation Anywhere, but it's not a part of Automation Anywhere. So the process improvement is separate. We optimize the process and then we run it through Automation Anywhere.

You can probably use any similar tools. But Automation Anywhere is one tool that actually gives me automation capability right at the start, without worrying about process improvement in the first place. I can just act like how another person would. Whereas if I do a little bit of process optimization, I can use another tool also. If I get access to APIs, I might use Blue Prism. If I get access to web elements, I go the way of UiPath. If it is a human-mimicking behavior, that's where I use Automation Anywhere.

What I like about Automation Anywhere is the object cloning and the way you can move the mouse and either go to a particular point or go to an element. That's very easy and intuitive in Automation Anywhere.

It gets the job done in terms of getting the data out of the pages. Although I have other tools, I still have this habit of going through the clicks. If you're going through the clicks, Automation Anywhere is the best.

Let's say you are on a website. You move the mouse around. You click on certain places. Automation Anywhere is better at that because you can adjust the screen directly or you can adjust the element. Whereas in, let's say, UiPath, it's a little bit complicated on the inside because there isn't a direct command for that. I have to go to a web scraper. In Automation Anywhere, I have the direct command to move my mouse. If I need to mimic a human behavior, I will use Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is troublesome for some people because of the way it is organized. It's organized as an encrypted script, which gets run via a domain-specific language which the user sees. 

There's a loss of overhead on the computing resources in Automation Anywhere. If you have an encrypted bot, the Automation Anywhere software has to read it first, decrypt it, and run it. So there is a potential that, if the logic of the bot isn't good enough, a lot of CPU and memory overload will happen. This is something that Automation Anywhere should look at because it takes a lot of computing resources. I have seen CPUs running at 100 percent.

In terms of additional features, if I am dealing with a dynamic workflow where the workflow might change based on the input parameters, then Automation Anywhere doesn't help me because the code is pretty much fixed. When I need those types of workflows I go to UiPath.

It's highly stable. I'm pretty happy with Automation Anywhere. I'm pretty happy with the security of the bot. Once you make a bot, if you don't have access to Automation Anywhere, you really can't mess with the bot. I'm pretty happy with the stability. 

The only problem I have is that it takes a lot of memory and CPU usage for Automation Anywhere to do its internal encrypting and decrypting.

I'm not yet happy with the scalability of Automation Anywhere. Scalability is good up to about 100 bots. Beyond that, I need to spread it into multiple sites, which means there is additional licensing cost.

I would give Automation Anywhere's technical support about three-and-a-half out of five. They do have a lot of information published, but the response times aren't great within India, where we are located. I can't say anything about support in other markets.

One thing they need to improve on is the way they have been putting out so many terminologies in the market: IQ Bots, MetaBots. They need to define them properly, in simple terms. If I go to my client and say "IQ Bot" or "MetaBot," they don't understand anything. It falls back on us to figure out whether these types of things will be useful for our process or not.

Regarding their support, when they bring in these features, like IQ Bot and MetaBot, there isn't a lot of documentation that comes with them, which can cause confusion in the client's mind as well as the developer's mind. Even Automation Anywhere's guys aren't really clear on IQ Bots, MetaBots, and things within Automation Anywhere because, when we ask, they just give us the definition. That's not very helpful.

It's pretty straightforward in terms of setting it up. It's not a lot of work, as compared to what you would do in Blue Prism, or even in or WorkFusion. I would say UiPath is the easiest to install and configure, while Automation Anywhere would be number two. Blue Prism would be way down because it's difficult installing and configuring it.

It doesn't take much time to deploy Automation Anywhere. We have built a script. We just run the script and within three or four minutes we are done. We don't really install Automation Anywhere by running it and then monitoring it, rather the script automatically installs it. That script lightens our load; we automate our own jobs as well.

In terms of implementation strategy, we have a set of requirements for the client's environment and hardware. For the environment, we need to look at the .NET framework, which version, the directory structure, folder structure, paths. And there are multiple items to be checked out regarding the hardware: We need to look at the RAM, the hard disk space, the connectivity. There's a lot of checking which must be done, but we do that through the script itself.

We have all the environments set up in one local place and once the script runs it goes and installs all the required software components. The .NET framework will be installed, the run-time engine will be installed, Automation Anywhere will be installed, and the policies will be set automatically for at least the end user, so that we can go and create more users.

Once we have the hardware, and once we are ready to install the environment, it takes us about 15 to 20 minutes.

For deployment of Automation Anywhere, we don't need a lot of staff. But when we are deploying the bots, we generally have an experienced guy who will look at the deployment of the bots within the Control Room. That's a different scenario altogether.

We don't require a lot of people for maintenance. What we do is, we transfer some of the load to the client's staff, in terms of monitoring and scheduling. Of course, we have one person keeping an eye on the entire thing. We have one person on a chargeable basis per client location. And this person also doesn't have a lot of work, so sometimes this person moves among the sites if there is no problem at all with the installation.

Companies now are not willing to put a large investment up front into these tools, unless the service provider that is developing the bots can assure that the bot will be successful and there will be certain savings. Clients are actually talking to the service providers first, rather than the RPA Software Vendors. It used to be that Automation Anywhere would go to the customer, convince them and sell them five licenses, and then the client would go out and start hunting for Automation Anywhere service providers or resources. The whole model has now changed 180 degrees. Now the clients are more interested in talking to consultants and trying to figure out which tool would be good, how many licenses they would need, what the scalability roadmap is, what will they be doing again in six months, 12 months, two years, etc.

It's hard to get a clear picture of the financial value that it can bring. For example, when we go in, we look at a process and we look at the value that automating the process can bring in, but there are other aspects which we look at, which are a kind of "chain effect." If I automate this, what else will break in the whole chain of processes? When there are processes A, B, and C, if I automate B, either A or C or both will feel the heat from this automation effort. If A and C are not conducive to screen-based automation, then I am in a fix because I can automate B using Automation Anywhere, but for A and C, I might need to use something else.

That type of analysis is now coming into the picture. Earlier, it was: Pick a process, automate it, feel the benefit, and then go for another. That is one reason why now we can also recommend hybrid models where multiple tools could be used via a single interface. We have to build the interface to Automation Anywhere and UiPath, or Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism to get the job done. That becomes an additional cost to the client.

If you look at the capital expenditure, Automation Anywhere is number two to UiPath. But if you take a long-term view, on a scalable model of a large number of bots coming out, it slowly goes on to become the costliest tool. There is something they can do about that.

I did a cost comparison on short-term basis, long-term basis, CapEx versus OpEx, and Automation Anywhere is the costliest. Surprisingly, Blue Prism becomes the cheapest, if you look at the long-term view.

That's because of the licensing terms, the pricing policy, and the engagement models. Blue Prism doesn't want you to buy just one license. They want you to sign up for the long-term, for at least a minimum block of ten licenses. Automation Anywhere can give you a single license, so the capital expenditure is low. But as you go on, the OpEx, the regular increase in the number of licenses and the price per, starts to add up.

The capital expenditure goes out right at the point of buying the tool. For Automation Anywhere, I would need to spend $20,000. UiPath can give me something for $6,000, while Blue Prism will come in at $300,000. If I'm just experimenting, or I don't have a need for a large number of bots, or I can optimize my design to run bots sequentially on the same machine, Automation Anywhere vs UiPath is quite comparable.

Every tool has its own drawbacks. Blue Prism would probably be an eight out of ten, but the nearest comparable tool to Automation Anywhere would be Softomotive WinAutomation. They both work on the same principles, although the internal storage is different. WinAutomation also works on a domain-specific language system, and I would rate it a little notch higher than Automation Anywhere and give it a seven-and-a-half out of ten, but they are all in the same category. I don't really see any of them getting a ten, on my scale, right now.

UiPath can do wonders, but the technology is old. If I want to do machine-learning, I can't do it with UiPath. I would have to create another "open UiPath" for myself to be able to use machine-learning and artificial intelligence libraries which are there in the market, because I can't use them with UiPath. That's where UiPath also loses a couple of points.

It's a very dynamic market and everyday new tricks are being discovered. My advice would be: Look at your process. If your process is screen-based, doesn't have a lot of things to do with APIs, go for Automation Anywhere. If somebody's looking specifically to implement Automation Anywhere, irrespective of what process they're automating, I would probably call it a bad move.

Role-wise, we follow our own system. We have a solution designer and we have an architect. These two guys work hand-in-hand, from solution design to a technical architecture of the Automation Anywhere bot. Then we have developers who develop the system. And we have the leads, of course, who are managers. They are senior staff who understand how the bot code is to be published and released into the Control Room. Most of the time, it's the solution designer and the architects who are critical for us, rather than the developers. The development part is easier than the design part. Designing automation takes a lot out of us.

In our organization we have 42 people, and most of these are multi-skilled on multiple tools. We do only specialized stuff, so some 20 of them would have been working on Automation Anywhere at some point. We use multiple tools. We are tool agnostic. We figure out which tool to use and go with that tool.

We don't have plans to push future usage of Automation Anywhere, most importantly because of extensibility of the tool: I can't extend it. So we created a workflow tool for ourselves similar to UiPath, but it's open to extensions. I don't see a lot of projects happening on Automation Anywhere for us unless the customer asks for it. In the Asia-Pacific market, it's either UiPath or Automation Anywhere. If they don't have a tool then, of course, we'll have to look at the type of project and recommend a tool.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at seven out of ten. The architecture is great. It's only the way they have tried to protect their own bots that is causing them to cannibalize themselves. Otherwise, it is great software. It works on a domain-specific language. You really don't need to understand .NET or Visual Basic or C# to work with it. The domain-specific language is more like English. They have done a great job making something, but there is a big scope for improvement if they want to really unsettle the other guys.

In my opinion, instead of sitting in their offices and not conversing with people out there, there are a lot of things Automation Anywhere can do if it listens to the people who are actually evaluating it, using it, and are happy or unhappy with it. I don't really see a mechanism where Automation Anywhere can be seen listening to this feedback. Secondly, they should be more open about their roadmap and where they are going with Automation Anywhere. What I want them to do is to make some more noise about their plans, rather than their current situation, because customers are not looking to buy Automation Anywhere for the next three years. They're looking to buy it so that if their processes change or if Automation Anywhere changes, it can still be usable for their organizations.

I can't keep on changing tools. Let's say I use Automation Anywhere where it's obvious and then it becomes unsuitable, so I have to change to another tool. That rarely happens because the users are familiar with it and change is the biggest barrier. People don't want to change. And the cost of training is actually more than the cost of the Automation Anywhere tool itself. You need to train different people with different skills, not only in Automation Anywhere but for every tool. You need different skills and different people to actually make the whole thing work.

We use Automation Anywhere in a DevOps environment. 

Automation Anywhere helps us resolve some friction between IT needs and business requirements. In an agile environment, the first questions are always: How much money do you have? What is your budget? Automation Anywhere or any other RPA solution can help you achieve your goals within budget constraints by lowering operational costs. It increases productivity and reduces errors.

I like Automation Anywhere's cloud-based nature. You don't need any on-prem infrastructure to host it. If you have suitable infrastructure, you can easily integrate it with Automation Anywhere. The learning curve is reasonable. Automation Anywhere has a user-friendly environment, but digesting all the platform's features takes significant time. 

It's challenging to train users on Automation Anywhere. There should be more organized training sessions. I prefer interactive classes to one-on-one training. You can create super users and organize conferences or workshops where users can learn from experts. Maybe you only have a few of these super users in your organization, so that's why you need to have workshops on a weekly basis. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for three to five years. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of ten for stability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support seven out of ten.

Neutral

I previously used UiPath at a past job but switched when I started work at my current company. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of ten. 

We started out with accounts payable, and now, we're starting to do more vertical revenue cycle management in healthcare. We're starting to use it for other things.

We're on version 11, but we're moving to 2019 or 360. We're in the process of migrating right now.

We were able to replace a lot of the manual and data entry workload that our accounts payable clerks were doing. We had 18 accounts payable clerks, most of them are still there with us, and the work that was done before by this original group can now be done by four people.

The ease of use in getting started is probably the big thing. They had a lot of references that we were able to check. It is a well-known player, and being able to get up and running quickly was the big thing.

Migration is probably our biggest challenge. When we were trying to do the migration to the new version, it was a little bit painful. We didn't have that many bots, and I can't imagine the level of effort that some of the bigger customers have to put in for that. The product is stable, but moving from one release to the other was the issue.

We also had difficulty with some of the documents that we were trying to automate. IQ Bot or intelligent document processing doesn't have all the features and functions that we were originally told it had. They need to improve that. It had some limitations, and we've had to add other products to the mix just because they weren't able to deliver some of the things that we were told that they could deliver upfront. 

They've been talking about task mining for a while. They don't have a good tool out there to evaluate the current processes and come up with a plan. It is a trial and error process where you have to sit down and go through what different people are doing, for how much time they're doing it, etc. There isn't a good systematic way of capturing that information. There are other products such as Kryon, and there is a new product called Soroco that we're looking at, that would let us evaluate the task that could be automated. So, it is not really process automation; it is task automation. You don't really see end to end when you're doing these projects. You don't just decide to automate the whole process. You select the tasks that you are going to automate, but you don't really know the effect that particular automation is going to have on another task. You don't have the big picture. It would be very helpful if both UiPath and Automation Anywhere provide a center of excellence that you could run on your systems so that the people who are running things come back and say that:

• Here is the task that we should be automating.
• Here is the time that we are taking to do it now.
• Here is what the benefit is going to be. 

All these are manual today. You're looking at what other companies are doing and hoping that you're going to get an ROI, but you don't really know until you start the project, and by then, it is too late. You've already spent the money on the software, the bot, the integration, the services, etc. At the end of the day, you're thinking if you would get the ROI. You have to measure it to see if you're going to get it after you've already spent the money. It would be really nice to have something that you could run upfront to know about the automation tasks that are costing you money today and where you should focus your efforts on automating.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

It is pretty stable, but moving to the new release has been a major pain. 

Its scalability is great. It is for sure built for enterprises.

We have six to eight people who are doing validation now and are actually using the product for validation. They are accounts payable clerks and healthcare revenue cycle management folks. 

It is being used extensively in the finance back office, and the idea is to bring it more to the front office for customer onboarding and things of that nature. We haven't done a lot of that, but that's in the plans. We are trying to figure out the next processes to automate.

It is good. 

We didn't use any solution previously. We did add UiPath to another area of the business, so we did bring on another vendor just to see what the differences were and how easy it was to use compared to the other one. We haven't really said we were going down one path as a company. We didn't want to put all eggs in one basket, so we decided to do one project with Automation Anywhere and one project with UiPath and compare the two.

UiPath has a little bit better document management. They have some process mining that we've started to use. Pricing is roughly about the same. There is not too much of a difference. I haven't seen too much significant difference between the two products.

It was pretty straightforward. We originally thought we could do it with internal resources, but we had to bring a third party in to do it. So, it is straightforward if you have experience and training. Our tech team can do it now. 

We started out with a simple invoicing, and the bulk of it took about three weeks or so. Testing everything probably took closer to six weeks. We finally got it going in two months.

When we first started, we thought we could have more of our team doing it, but we had to bring a third party in to do the bot building and all that. It was a reseller, and they had technical people. Our experience with them was good. They were a little expensive, but it was good.

For its deployment and maintenance, we have about three people. We have created a small center of excellence team with three, or sometimes four, people. We have a business analyst. We have two developers, and we have somebody from finance on that team who is putting a lot of hours into that piece. We're truly trying to figure out the next processes to automate.

For accounts payable, we saw a return in about five months from the time we started. There was a significant reduction in the number of hours that invoicing was taking. We went from 18 people to 4 people. We didn't let all those people go, but we did let a few people go, or we moved them into different job functions. 

We're paying a monthly subscription fee for the bot and for services. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee.

I would advise looking at other companies to know what they're doing. I would also advise putting a complete plan in place so that all bot management needs are considered upfront. It is helpful to put a roadmap in place and have a center of excellence or something like that to make sure that the processes that you're going to implement have an ROI. You can validate the effort upfront by using process mining or other tools and evaluate what the effort is now and what the savings are going to be upfront. 

We did a couple of projects that we thought were going to have significant ROI, but they didn't. It was more of an internal process that we had to fix. It wasn't so much about automation; it was about the way we were doing business. We weren't following processes, procedures, and things like that, and that was what was causing the issue. We had automated a bad process, so it didn't have the return that we thought it was going to have. We had to do some procedures. We had to change some things internally.

I would rate it a seven out of 10. It's a good product. It does what it's supposed to do.

We use AA for automating ServiceNow tickets in Caterpillar.

We get tickets for the configuration requests. Using AA, we auto-download the excel attached to it and do all the necessary cleanup and conversions. 

The entire process in steps as mentioned below:

1. A ServiceNow ticket is created by the client that needs a configuration request related to Caterpillar machines.

These machines are called lane 2 and lane 3 because they are manual configurations

2. Once we get the configuration we then try to match the configuration with all the parts and whether the configuration would be possible or not.

For that, we use SOAP where all our latest data is loaded.

This data is compared with the Excel sheet that client sends us.

The cleanup is done in Automation Anywhere, compared to end to end, and then output is thrown out. This output is then given back to the clients in the form of a ticket attachment to let them know if the configuration of the machine that they have requested is possible or not.

Automation Anywhere has saved us a lot of time, money & efforts by automating our ServiceNow tickets.

We expect to save more time by expanding to other verticals very soon. The other verticals include sending automated replies to the executives using the Power BI dashboards through alerts. We have not yet explored this aspect completely but sooner or later we have a lot of BI needs that will be catered by Automation Anywhere.

In the past, we have also done PoCs for the client that helped the executives run automated scripts every Monday using pre-built SQL commands in the data warehouse.

• Create automation tasks like recording keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.
• Distribute tasks to multiple computers.

Also, the document management processes that IQ Bot gives has very good functionality of how you can actually take unstructured data and make sense out of it, connecting inferences, then making the data available to the user. So, IQ Bot is one of the best tools that I can think of in that aspect. This solves the problem of various document structures, document formats, etc.

Hoping to see AA get more robust with time.

Handwritten documents are still a drawback to read.

Regarding the UI, once you're on some of the screens there are fixed dialogues, they are a set size, so there's a lot of horizontal scrolls and vertical scrolls. If I want to do something that is purely business-related and is somewhat complex to write or is nuanced, I sometimes have trouble implementing that inside of the Automation Anywhere script. I feel limited at times with some of the looping and some of the branching and some of the ways to make procedure calls when I have a complex business issue.

Also, there's a loss of overhead of the computing resources in Automation Anywhere. If you have an encrypted bot, the Automation Anywhere software has to read it first, decrypt it, and run it. So there is a potential that, if the logic of the bot isn't good enough, a lot of CPU and memory overload will happen. This is something that Automation Anywhere should look at because it takes a lot of computing resources. I have seen CPUs running at 100%.

I have been using AA for three years. 

Very good.

Very good.

Very good.

We have only used AA as AA has a partnership with Deloitte and Deloitte promotes using AA. 

We have liked AA very much.

The setup was straighforward.

In-house.

We have seen at least 30 % savings in time and 12% saving in costs.

We are not into advisory. We only use the tool.

We are waiting to see AA progress further with more robust solutions.

We have many use cases for this solution. These include use cases from our life science, procurement, and HR departments. More generally, it is used for our regulatory and life science tasks, and some finance as well.

We have a huge roadmap that includes a lot of processes that need to be automated.

For example, some of our processes are related to clinical trials and the drug development process. They include verifying documents and entering a lot of data that has to be processed. The automation reduces the effort and time it takes to complete these processes.

We have a mix of technology in our environment, including legacy systems and new technology.

This solution saves time when completing our pharmaceutical processes, which allows things to progress faster to the FDA.

The IQ Bot is a very good feature.

For our legacy systems, we are finding it very difficult to use the automation. Sometimes, forty percent of our work cannot be processed in an automated fashion. We need to acquire additional automation tools in order to reach one hundred percent automation.

Automation Anywhere says that you can use this tool for any type of application, but there are some for which it is not compatible. In cases where automation is not supported, there should be alternative tools that are inbuilt where they can be used to support or guide the automation forward, giving us one hundred percent automation.

The licensing model has to be changed to perpetual because even when we are not using a license, we are charged for it.

For simple processes, everything works. However, for a complex process with a lot of rules and mappings then we are finding it really difficult.

We are in touch with Automation Anywhere and the partners who can develop the system and increase the speed, or deal with other limitations that we have.

We have more than two hundred and fifty licenses, although they are not all currently in use by the bots.

We have a direct point of contact for technical support, although there are limitations.

In some instances, the technical support is on time, but in other cases it takes longer. When we commit to the customers we cannot give the time, for example, as a two or three-day turnaround.

When the Automation Anywhere team works with our technical team, they don't understand what kind of tools we have within the system in our company, and how that data is going to be interlinked with the other machines. This converting of data on the functionality side is where some of the limitations are.

The initial setup of this solution is easy, although sometimes you have service problems.

For example, we have a server set up as a load balancer, and sometimes these two systems have a problem where the nodes are not synching. I think that it is an issue with Automation Anywhere having a bug in the system. This is a problem when you are selling it to the customer because you have to make sure that it is reliable, and will stay that way for some time. You cannot expect companies to change their products every now and then, or continually upgrade versions. We need things to be stable for at least one or two years at a time.

Automation Anywhere helped us to set up our Center of Excellence (COA), and their partners assisted us with other aspects of the setup.

We have seen ROI but we are not up to the mark.

From the setup, we have spent somewhere between one and two million dollars over the past two years. I would say that our ROI is less than one million dollars. I don't want to say that it is a failure, but I would like to see a better ROI.

Had things gone the way we expected then we would have seen ROI by this time.

The licensing cost is approximately $4,000 USD, which is a seed license. You can have as many licenses as you want but the moment you start using them, they charge for them. For example, if you have purchased two hundred and fifty licenses to use over one thousand machines then at any point, only two hundred and fifty users can log in. 

In 2017 when we decided that we needed RPA, we evaluated several products. We tried Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere, in addition to other automation tools that were on the market. At that time, we found that Automation Anywhere was doing better, and had more features, than all of the others, which is why we chose the product.

An example of the additional features was the support for PDF conversion, Excel data transfer, and the IQ Bot.

We have purchased more licenses than we are currently using, which is why we need to enhance automation.

These days, I think that UiPath is picking up faster and with more relevant features. If they are able to overcome the limitations we have, for example in legacy systems, then it may be a better choice of a system that you can sustain for a long time.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.