Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We typically use Automation Anywhere for backend operations and financial processes, such as APR.

The biggest benefit of Automation Anywhere is that it makes our processes error-free. Accuracy is how you build efficiency within the system and increase productivity.

Document automation, one of Automation Anywhere's core features, is excellent. All the other features are also useful, and their cloud solution is pretty seamless. 

Automation Anywhere is relatively accessible to non-technical business users. It's about 60:40. Around 60 percent of the solution is intuitive, but you still need to do some work to learn the platform. The company offers strong learning resources. Most people can easily learn Automation Anywhere in a couple of months using tutorials.  

Automation Anywhere works with POST and REST APIs, so it's easy to integrate with any platform or application. Automation Anywhere is applicable to any industry or department where there are large volumes of processes that are straightforward and require no manual human intervention. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for nearly four years.

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10 for scalability. We usually optimize one or two processes until we can achieve an ROI and scale them up for the entire organization.

I rate Automation Anywhere support 10 out of 10. They have a solid team to address any issues or glitches as they arise. 

Positive

We typically deploy to Automation Anywhere's public cloud. We haven't used the private cloud option because it's expensive. I'm the project delivery manager, so I was involved in the deployment. It doesn't require any infrastructure because it's in the cloud. 

The deployment time depends on the complexity of the processes. Simple processes can be configured in a couple of weeks, but complex projects might take up to three months. 

The number of people involved also depends on the client's needs and the licenses purchased. You need a developer license for each engineer. Automation Anywhere licensing is based on the individual users, not the partners. For example, let's say a project will take one engineer three months, but the client wants it done in 45 days. You would need to double the number of engineers and pay for an additional license. 

Automation solutions require some maintenance and change management because no process remains constant. You will need to update and optimize the bot as the process mechanism changes. 

We have seen an ROI. It's hard to give a solid metric because every organization has a different way of calculating it and it varies between processes. However, I can say that Automation Anywhere reduces costs while increasing productivity and accuracy. By automating repetitive tasks, we can shift our human employees to more productive work that requires imagination and creativity. 

Automation Anywhere is expensive. They should consider lowering the price to make Automation Anywhere more affordable to SMEs, which comprise a huge segment. The license is annual, not monthly. You need to pay for some of the advanced features, such as document automation, which doesn't come with the base package.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. RPA can be integrated with API and integrated on top of any application. However, it's always better to go with API if you have that option. It's steadier, more scalable, and more robust. The best part about RPA is you can create a hybrid model, so you can use API when available or RPA when that isn't the case. 

Our primary use cases for Automation Anywhere (AA) are billing, email automation, and ticketing.

Most of the features of Automation Anywhere (AA) are good, but one big feature which I really like is its OCR (optical character recognition) feature.

Another important feature of this solution is how it handles variables, e.g. my engineers don't need to have complete programming expertise, and they don't need to declare variables and get variables captured on the fly.

I also find the accuracy rate of this solution valuable, and I like that it performs better after implementation. Most of the features of this solution are amazing.

Multiple things still need to be improved in Automation Anywhere (AA), and the key thing is its error handling command, though it has come a long way from the previous version. This solution still has a lot to improve on error handling, especially when compared to other platforms that are doing very well.

Another area for improvement is its file handling. Automation Anywhere (AA) now supports automating file-related operations, but that still needs to be improved. We can directly import and do the script, e.g. the script feature is new and is found in the latest version, but still needs a lot of improvement.

An additional feature I'd like to see in this solution is more scripting integration. Integration needs to be fluid, e.g. integration of different items are in the latest version, but it always comes with limitations.

If a more fluid integration can be built into Automation Anywhere (AA), I can go and unpack a project file, open it, then from there, I'll know that we need to extract the data. Currently, the native RPA takes a whole lot of time to open a particular file, then read the data. It's always easier to utilize the data frame, read and slice the data, then take what's next. In that note, we can enable the RPA within itself, e.g. in-house data solution that can be integrated, making it a better solution. There is an integration feature in Automation Anywhere (AA), but it's not that fluid, and it's not easy to integrate. We always have to build something outside and integrate the whole process, and this needs to be improved.

I have experience with Automation Anywhere (AA) within the last 12 months, and I've been leading projects in a product manager capacity. I've worked with this solution for three years, using the previous generation and the latest generation, e.g. the 2019 version. I handled the implementation of the previous version and the transition and migration to the 2019 network.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has a lot of stability issues. It needs a lot of maintenance. If it runs 24/7 in the server, it's fine, but on the development machines or the VM (virtual machines), it isn't. We really need someone to attend to it, e.g. that person has to monitor the VM, then if an issue starts from the control room, we need to identify what's going on, then we may need to do something to the machine, or to the application. This is a problem in the previous version and the current version, and this solution hangs at times, for no reason at all.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is scalable, but we have not tried to scale it to a larger instance. The implementations we currently have are on-premises, and our costs are limited. We test if this solution works fine for the demos with clients we have worked with, but on the production side, we haven't tried to scale it for more than 20 or 30, and that's the limit we have.

I've contacted and escalated to the technical support team for this solution multiple times. I would rate them 3.5 out of five. They are quick to give support, but it could vary. Their second level technical support are good, but their first level technical support require a lot more insight into the tool and how they're handling issues.

The initial setup for Automation Anywhere (AA) was straightforward, but the current deployments we are working on are a bit complicated because these are switch solutions, and they are not straightforward.

We have multiple systems communicating with each other, e.g. the SaaS systems we need to interface with, then we have other data that we need to introduce to these systems. Because Automation Anywhere (AA) is an on-premises platform, we are looking into whether implementing or deploying it will be safe, but I believe it is safe. In most cases, when it comes to switch solutions where you want to switch your RPA on top of other automation or other technologies, it can be complicated, depending on the technology you're with. It can be complicated when you want to integrate with other systems.

We're paying for a yearly package for Automation Anywhere (AA). It's not a standard license. It's a license package, e.g. it comes with the fee for automation, or the license for the product, and anything beyond that, we pay a base fee, and whether we utilize it or not, it's paid for, and it has to be allocated. That's the current deal we have. What would be better is for them to have different packages for different types of organization.

As Automation Anywhere (AA) is an RPA platform, we have development users and end users, e.g. we have 14 developers who are working on it, and they are direct developers, then we have six citizen developers from the business side, who are certified and are using this product.

Automation Anywhere (AA) always requires maintenance, so we always need maintenance engineers to monitor the application around the clock. Because of cost implications, most clients don't use cloud solution assets, e.g. they use on-premises, which means a lot of maintenance is required.

My advice for people who want to start working with Automation Anywhere (AA) is to get a certification first, and then they also need to determine their purpose, e.g. what kind of case they want to work with. When their certification is ready, they still need to keep learning, especially when they run into issues. They should always get in touch with the forum, or they should get whatever knowledge or information they can take from their certifiers, or whatever organization they got their certification from. There is a learning curve, and it can either be quick to learn, or hard to learn.

I would rate Automation Anywhere (AA) an eight out of ten.

1. Attended automation - contact center automation, assist agents in navigating through the right process - Guided assist on-screen navigation for call center agents

2. Workforce reporting automation, we extract reports on agent availability and different AUX codes and report to leadership.

3. Plot agent time between multiple applications.

4. Real-time alerts to agents on their AHT & after call work beyond the threshold.

5. Real-time reporting on beyond threshold cases to leads.

6. Processing tickets between CRM & client applications.

1. Helped agents process tickets with minimal errors.

2. Improved AHT as they are able to close the tickets faster.

3. Improved overall SLAs by reducing aging (We use a bot to send alerts on emails & chats to agents who take a long time to close cases)

4. Reduce missed calls we pole the reports and send alerts to TL's on abandon calls in realtime

5. Biggest challenge in attended automation, every time the agent has to log in to control room and execute bot for most of the agents this is a time-consuming activity plus they are not tech-savvy

6. The agent should be able to just click on the UI and the bot should automatically login to the control room and execute the bot.

1. Screen recorder

2. AI capture

3, Ability to create custom forms and trigger another application

4. Ability to run the bot from the cloud without installing the software on our machine

5. AI sense can detect many pages inside the Citrix environment

6. I think the Citrix RDA should be universal for All Citrix environments

7. The A2019 UI layout is more user friendly

8. The recording feature where you can record multiple screens at the same time

9. MS excel functionality has lot of features in the current versions

1. for attended automation, the agent should be able to execute the bot without logging into the control room and triggering the bot

2. There are limited features to automation MS word & PowerPoint will look for more in those areas

3. Include Gsuite based automation

4. limitation on .csv based automation

5. Automations on iframes

6. We want to have greater control on deciding when we want to upgrade to a newer version.

7. Smooth upgrade with no production disruptions

8. ability to manage bots across control rooms

9. Ability to generate reports without using bot insight

I have been using AA for two years. 

It's a stable solution, 10 on 10.

I would give a 10 on 10.

9 on 10.

We started with A2019.

Straightforward for unattended, for attended, it took few rounds of fails as our environment is highly restrictive

Vendor team, 7 out of 10.

1.5

Very flexible.

A2019 has many rough edges from a developer point of view and post upgrades, these needs to be smoothened out.

Being a QA analyst, I am involved in testing my application's stability on a daily basis. A2019 helped me in automating the repetitive process that I have been doing every day.

Once I get familiarized with A2019, I am planning to discuss with my teammates how to implement it into our project for all of the new requirements.

Our primary use cases are smoke testing of the applications, sending email for reports, stability testing, API testing for REST services, database testing, and pulling data from Excel and using it in applications.

A2019 has significantly helped us in reducing the overall time that we have spent on our application manually. Going forward, we have also planned to implement the IQ Bot feature that we are still exploring.

Tasks or activities that were taking almost six hours a day have been reduced drastically to 30 minutes, which saves time as well as business costs.

Smoke testing of the application is performed.

Sending reports and sending emails is easy.

I have found the below items most valuable:

1. The ability to find objects easily through the 'Capture' option saves your time most significantly.
   
2. The ability to run only a particular step, instead of running it from scratch.
   
3. The ability to debug.
   
4. Given that A2019 is a web application, it saves space in a significant manner.
   
5. It is user-friendly and anyone can learn easily.
6. No coding knowledge needed.
7. The flow chart view of the steps is very easy to understand.
   
8. The free learning course provided helped me a lot. I was able to better understand and also practice on my own.

I would like to have on-call customer care support so that if the user gets stuck anywhere, he/she can get the issue clarified.

Additional details or support can be provided for IQ Bots.

The Help menu/description can be provided while hovering over actions so that it can help us better to know them.

The Variable feature can be improved, as there is no single place to handle all your variables.

Sometimes, while recording, the screen hangs and we are not able to perform any actions during that time.

Also, the support should be more user-friendly, as we are not getting any support online.

I have been using A2019 for more than five months.

This product is extremely stable.

Scalability is very good.

I was using Selenium but because it involved too much coding, I switched to A2019.

The initial setup is very easy.

I implemented it on my own.

The cost can be reduced a little for users.

I did not evaluate other options before switching to Automation Anywhere.

The platform is amazing. One of the things that we were worried about when we initially started looking into RPA was having the right people to be able to cope. The advantage of Automation Anywhere is that you don't necessarily have to come from a programming background. It's very easy to pick up. Within the team, we were able to train people within a very short period of time and start our process in as little as two months.

For now, because we just started using Automation Anywhere recently, it's probably a little difficult for me to answer that (room for improvement). But from the feedback that I've received from the team, it is a great tool. We're definitely looking forward to using it more in the future.

Because we are very new to our process, so we're still sort of working through it. One of the features that I just learned about in this particular conference yesterday was about the Enterprise addition that they're just coming out with. I think in about six or seven days. So, that's very exciting because I don't particularly come from a programming background. I think it'll be really easy for us to continue to do more RPA-related processes, and not necessarily have to worry about having the right programmer on the team, or programmers, for that matter.

For the enterprise, we've been using Automation ( /categories/security-orchestration-automation-and-response-soar ) Anywhere for a few years. In my specific team, we've been using the platform for about eight months now.

It was very easy. The Automation Anywhere community is extremely helpful with answering any questions that we had throughout the process, or any sort of concerns that we had. So, it really wasn't difficult at all.

I would highly recommend it. If RPA is something that they're doing for the first time, Automation Anywhere is definitely one of the best in the industry that they should stick to.

I would definitely give it a ten (out of ten).

For us, it was about driving process efficiencies. 

We have an awful lot of processes that need to be completed when we are placing candidates in roles to ensure that the engagement for both the candidate and the client is successful. So, that might include compliance activities, ensuring candidates get paid, and ensuring that work places are safe for people to turn up to so they can go home to their families safe at the end of the day.

There are instances where use cases and opportunities have arisen as a result of having Automation Anywhere and RPA in place that have come about through very casual conversations and have actually resulted in increased revenue opportunities that we didn't realize. Though, those have now proven to be very worthwhile and are something that we hadn't realized could contribute to us, which is making us very happy, obviously.

The ability for it to be able to be scaled rapidly. For us, it has certainly provided a range of flexibility that we hadn't appreciated before we started. This means that in times of high demand for processes to be completed, we're able to quickly scale up on demand. That gives us that additional flexibility without the need to potentially consider contingent labor increases. So, it's sort of a head count avoidance increase. So, that's proved very useful for us.

I sound like a promoter A2019 with the attended bots and some of the new features coming in with the partnership of Microsoft will be a game changer. We work predominantly within an Office 365 environment. I think there are some real opportunities there for us to do things differently.

One area where I think there's an opportunity to do things a lot better is in the analytics function. They do have a concept or product called Bot Insights. It hasn't worked for us. It isn't as plug and play as we were led to believe, which is unfortunate. I can absolutely understand the value, and the demonstrations that I've seen of Bot Insights are sensational. But, we just haven't been able to make it work. We've invested a lot of time and effort trying to make it work to no avail. So, for us, that's one side of it that has been a bit of a disappointment, but not enough to detract from the overall success story of using Automation Anywhere.

This is one of the challenges with the platform. At the moment, we're going through a number of changes with their network and some of our infrastructure. That is impacting the way our platform is running and the stability of it. In the early days, we certainly had some difficulty making sure it was stable and that was impacting the productivity of the automation of the robot.

What makes me very happy is the announcement today of A2019, which is the web-based cloud offering, or basically RPA as a service. This will overcome a lot of the infrastructure challenges that we've been encountering. I am very excited about that because it'll enable us to really drive the benefits that we know RPA can provide.

Technically, we may not get answers the first time but we do get answers eventually. The customer success managers, without them, I do wonder how quickly we might get some of the responses from the technical help desk. I can appreciate the reasons why it takes long. Everyone doesn't know everything, but the fact that we have a customer success manager who has been really critical, a key to our success, has been, and an invaluable resource in helping us drive and get those answers through the help desks.

Could it be improved? Always, yes. But with the customer success manager supporting us, it has been invaluable and certainly something that we can live with.

It's certainly straightforward. For us, it was a bit of a test and learn approach. There are certainly guidelines published by Automation Anywhere for the recommended infrastructure. We found that they weren't completely applicable for us, and we've had to tinker with the infrastructures as we've got along. Without getting into the technicalities of it, the out-of-the-box approach that was suggested to us didn't suit our environment. So, we did need to be a bit more creative about how we did the deploy.

Again, this is why I'm excited for A2019 because I think that we will just overcome all those problems and it will allow us to really drive through and scale a lot quicker. Infrastructure is probably our biggest challenge at the moment.

We have seen ROI factors. I'm not able to quantify them right now. With the number of our bots, we have been able to let go contingent workforce that has been brought into the organization to cover certain operational processing, simply because we needed to supplement that permanent workforce to do those roles.

We've now gotton to the point where we don't need to hire those people or employ those people anymore, so there's cost-saving driven there. Our bots are helping with some increased revenue opportunities by acting on signals from the market for both our clients and candidates. Cumulatively, I think within the first year, I'd be very surprised if we weren't closed to ROI, which is a great story to be able to tell.

There were a number of key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere.

1. I think when we started on Automation, and looking at RPA, we recognized that we didn't know anything. Like the first time, we saw a robot in action was when we had a demo from their sales director. So, in recognition of that, we wanted to make sure that we were going to be working with someone who was able to nurture the relationship, provide deep support to us, be highly flexible, and was patient.
2. We were considering a direct engagement model versus a partner model. We wanted a direct engagement model. This was one of the key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere because they offered that.
3. The concept of the customer success manager was very appealing for reasons that I've mentioned earlier, but they would also support us in nurturing that relationship and helping us drive through our RPA journey.
4. The Bot Store. I love that concept. We've used the Bot Store. It's helped us expedite delivery and achieve benefits. 
5. The plugger, the drag and drop, and the scripting meant we could resource internally a lot quicker because you didn't need that deep level of coding understanding in order for our dev team to be productive as fast as possible. 

Those were some of the key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere.

I don't want to fan girl it too much, or even fan boy it. But, I'm a massive fan of AA. I've been in technical delivery for about 15 years. There are probably one of the best vendors I've worked with. I'm not giving them a 10 (out of 10) because then they have nowhere to go for improvement, but I certainly would put them as a seven and a half or eight (out of 10). I think the new evolution of the platform with things that I've already talked about will start to nudge it towards that nine (out of 10). They will still not get to a 10 because you know they need opportunities to improve. But, for me, they are a very good partner and a very good vendor to work with.

We are currently using it for a lot of projects, like repetitive or manual tasks. We are building bots to free human beings from boring jobs/tasks. We are working daily on Automation Anywhere to automate our processes.

We are using it on-premise. We are not using cloud for deployment. As of now, we are running it on our client machines. We develop automation on our desktops, then deploy our automation on our physical desktop using Automation Anywhere.

We have automated web scripting, downloading documents from particular websites, scraping data from websites, and extracting the data from PDF files. We are also updating the application with some user inputs. E.g., if you have an Excel sheet to update into a particular application, we can use Automation Anywhere tool and automate the process.

We have built some Java applications in Automation Anywhere. I have also coded macros and Python scripts to include in our Automation Anywhere tool.

The Automation Anywhere tool is very handy to use since I have some programming background, like I previously worked on Java. It's very easy to use Automation Anywhere because there is not much of coding involved. We just need to drag and drop the commands, then we can do the job.

Automation Anywhere is good for integrating other programming languages and other tools. The ease of use is very good, as we can directly code other programming languages, like Java or JavaScript, into our application and get output.

I have done work using a VPN, connecting via a remote desktop. The good thing about Automation Anywhere is if a client works without Internet, e.g., if we deploy on a client mission and the network is off, then a bot will still run offline.

If we want to read a scanned PDF, we use IQ Bot. Using the cognitive detail of IQ Bot and some machine learning abilities, we can train the IQ Bot to process all scanned PDF documents and give the results in an Excel file. This is a very good feature introduced by Automation Anywhere. IQ Bot is doing well.

The Bot Store is like a marketplace for bot developers. We already have some utility bots that are simple bots from there. We can download the bots from the Bot Store and use them in our current process. That's very helpful for the bot developers, especially for beginners who have just started with Automation Anywhere developing bots. There are a lot of bots deployed in the Bot Store. If you find any interesting bots, we can also upload bots to the Bot Store, making them available for everyone to download and use.

With attended automation, we need human intervention to provide input for bots. We make sure files are presented in a particular folder to pick up those files and feed it to the bot. Attended automation sometimes might go into exceptions, thus we need to monitor it in-between, then check whether it is working properly. This way, we ensure the bot is working properly.

Currently, I have developed between 20 to 25 bots. From when I started, we have deployed as a team between 30 to 40 bots. Their status is as fully running on our client machines.

We collaborate as a team if any face roadblocks or issues, discussing among our colleagues. Then, we involve the Automation Anywhere support team. They are very good. We can raise a ticket and get knowledge from their team. They help us resolve any issues.

The bot creation workflow is pretty simple. We check for feasibility, and if it is feasible, then we go about creating bots for the task. We have some measurements for ROI. We check the return on Investment to determine if it's feasible or not. We check the typical measurements, then go for Bot creation. After creating the bot, we don't have a production environment after creating the bot. We just deploy and run that bot.

If the process is huge and involves 10 to 20 steps, then it might take from creation to production three to four weeks of time. If it is a simple bot, it involves just launching a website and scraping data from the PDF, then putting it in Excel. For that type of bot, we can build it in one week and deploy it in seven to 10 days.

The return of investment on Automation Anywhere very good because I have automated some processes, like scraping the data from websites and updating some applications, and if we deployed full-time employees on these tasks, it would take more than a year and a half. However, if we automate the process and deploy a bot, it can be completed in just a month of time. The ROI is very good because the output is very accurate and the speed is very fast.

Our company is investing a lot of money in Automation Anywhere. They have saved money wherever humans are working. They invest a lot of money in FTEs and other logistics, so the money saving is very pretty good with Automation Anywhere. While I don't know the exact figure, the tool is saving us millions of dollars as well as saving about 40,000 hours in the last year. 

Currently, we are using attended automation. We do have unattended bots but are in the process of procuring some other licenses. In future, we will make a few bots unattended as well.

I did the Advanced Certification on Automation Anywhere University. I have also done IQ Bot learning. I am currently doing a Masters Certification. The courses are very clear. Any user can understand the content. If you are a beginner, go with Automation Anywhere. If you have some basic programming knowledge, that is enough. You can easily learn Automation Anywhere. It is not a big deal, and you can learn with the certification.

If a person doesn't have a programming background or skills, they can use Automation Anywhere and build bots. It's not a big deal. It's easy for business users to use. You just need some basic programming skills, like Ethernet and loops. 

I heard from Automation Anywhere that version A2019 will be released in either November or December. It is completely cloud-based and contains two IDs. One ID is a flowchart diagram and another ID has some commands. Therefore, any business user who has some basic knowledge can develop bots as well.

Version A2019 will be adding a lot of new features.

I haven't had a chance to work on Citrix automation.

We have ITMS (IT Service Management) and there are a lot of support tickets which are coming into that service site. As an enterprise application, there are too many tickets to handle live. This system is being used by service desk employees to enable them to address all the issues that customers are facing which they are tasked to resolve. 

Because the number of tickets is huge, managing those services and change requests is complicated to handle manually. We use Automation Anywhere now to process these tasks wherever it is not necessary to use the API to process the handling of requests.

If, for example, I have an application which does not have an API, but there is one activity where a user may need to be registered in that particular application for it to function, we use Automation Anywhere for that to supply the access. We get the data from the source data and use an Automation Anywhere bot to do the registration of the user into that application. This was being done by the service desk manually in previous instances, now it is automated using Automation Anywhere.

We have had about 300+ live tickets at the end of every month before using Automation Anywhere. We just went live last month using Automation Anywhere bots to take care of processing some issues. The total number of tickets that remain live has come down to around 80 as of the end of this month. It might touch around a hundred at peak times right now. But over a short period of time, maybe around six months, these unresolved issues could become zero at the end of the month. We are just evaluating the numbers from the date when we went live, so it is not so accurate. Definitely, the goal is that the count will become zero, and that is the target. It seems to be working well so far.

The other use cases that we have are open-ended right now. There are a lot of potential uses. For example, if a request comes into the service now to create a VPN account, we can automate that using Automation Anywhere. That work is in progress. Today that is a manual task where the service desk people raise another ticket to another team who will go there and create the VPN accounts. 

We are in the process of identifying certain processes that can be automated through a bot, as there are other services for internal support functions, like HR or IT. We are trying to take some of those services to automate them. In terms of the extensiveness, we have just started with that. We have around 10 new sketches that we have automated right now but we have around 13 to 14 sketches that we wanted to automate through this process.

We are using the on-premise deployment model.

As far as how the product has helped us improve our organization, we may be a bit premature to just to say that it has already decreased the workload. But looking into the decrease in the ticket counts, it suggests that it is helping process customer service requests and that it definitely is going to help us more in the future as we utilize the solution better.

There is one user registration process in one application where there is no API which has been published by that framework. This is a very proprietary in one application by a third-party. So, there was a help desk, and whenever a call went to the help desk, they had a front-end where they created these user registrations. Now, this is completely automated for all employees who are onboarded. We receive the data, it is put it into Excel, and from Excel, it will update it into the particular tool where the registration happens.

On the service desk, they are using ServiceNow with a VPN connection. Now, they are logging using Automation Anywhere as a bot, which logs into a ServiceNow. It will then take that VPN request and create it on the server.

To be very honest, I've not had the opportunity to go through all the features of Automation Anywhere. This feature where it can use a bot to go between a user and into other systems as a robot and do that work is very valuable. It can do whatever humans can do and still provide a level of security. That model is a good one. 

Developers don't have any challenges using it. We are still in the early stages of use, but it is working well. It is very easy to use for our developers.

One of the challenges that I think should be resolved — from what my team was telling me — is that Automation Anywhere is not able to connect to a database directly. I have not evaluated this myself. There may be good security reasons for this, but it should be possible.

For example, generally what we do now is to write scripts to push the data from the database and into the automation event. The direct access feature — which is not available according to my team — could solve the issue with the scripts. There's room for improvement in making more flexible solutions.

As of now, because I have not used the new version very extensively, I don't have any reference to say what features should be added to the next release of the product. My one thought is that I don't know about the possibility of reading from unstructured data and if Automation Anywhere has any features to access unstructured data sources. It would be good if it can read the data and build some intelligence over that to push data to the right application. We do have some requirements from clients in other organizations where invoices will come in to be scanned. Based on the analysis of the data, copies of the data can be sent to different, appropriate applications. We are using different tools to do this now. If this kind of feature for reading unstructured data is there, then it will be easier to incorporate in processes. That is good to add if it is not there already. 

There can be some options to connect to the database directly where we should be able to add some data. 

There was a limitation where we were supposed to login remotely to one server and carry out some actions. That integration was not possible.

In the Indian market, there are a lot of other service companies like us. In the market, there are other products competing with Automation Anywhere like UiPath. My team has technical experts in their technology and these experts also work with Automation Anywhere. When they are comparing the products, they say that the modules or the functionality in UiPath can do a better job overall compared to Automation Anywhere.

From a stability perspective, we run into an interesting issue. Somewhere in the licensing — especially for the Indian market — there should be some different pricing packages. For mid-size companies like us in our market situation, having multiple bots really costs a lot as a percentage of revenue. Instead of adding costs, we are trying to run with one or two bots which run about seven processes in all. It may not be the most efficient or optimal way to get the most from the product. From the cost perspective in the Indian market, if you want to grab the majority of the potential users, you will want to be considerate on the pricing side. A lower price may bring greater market share, user familiarity, and recognition.

Otherwise, stability seems to be good.

From the scalability standpoint, I don't think there will be any issues except for the increased costs which could prohibit some companies on a limited budget from scaling. So technically it is pretty good, but there may be some restrictions or interference in budget or integrations.

We are using one or two bots that are running continuously.

Support wise, I think the company is doing great. When we hired support staff to help us with the installation the support was very good.

Right now, we are just at the beginning of our implementation as far as what we envision it will be in the future. So far the support that we are getting is normal support. It is just okay. When we place a ticket, there is nothing bad, but also there is nothing extraordinary about the support like we were getting during implementation. What we receive now is just a normal support experience compared to the specialist who was very good.

We have not taken Automation Anywhere University courses.

One of the major reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere is that our company could have a global MSA (Master Service Agreement), where we could use this particular tool for our end customers also. As an organization, we had a global implementation with Automation Anywhere where the clients wanted to deliver this solution to the end customer also as part of their solutions. That's why — because that option was there — we just went with Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup for the program was not straightforward. It was definitely complex. As a layman who is unfamiliar with the product, I do not think people can implement it easily. Even people with a little bit of knowledge about the type of robotic engineering and applications are going to go through some challenges where they need help from Automation Anywhere.

So far in this installation, we have had to integrate with some internal processes. Also, we needed to incorporate solutions for the respective firewall openings to the internet. It has taken almost one-and-a-half months to do the basic installation of the software. It is not like pushing a button.

We initially deployed everything on server. However, the permission required Excel to also be a part of our process to be automated. So, we received some complaints on it this. This particular thing cannot be deployed on the server because of the license that we were holding. What I came to know is this feature is not available.

We hired a dedicated person from Automation Anywhere who supported us at the time of the initial installation. Because we were installing this on the cloud infrastructure, we had to go through a lot of challenges. Because we had a dedicated person helping us to do this insulation, it saved us a lot of trouble, experimentation, and effort.

We are still in the process of deploying and evaluating both the solutions and the benefits. However, I definitely think we will see a return on investment. Looking into the number of tickets and seeing that they have decreased now because of some implementation of the solutions we intend to deploy is a good sign. We have around 40+ such use cases that we still need to deploy. Definitely, we are going to see some ROI using this product. It will develop more over time.

In one of the use cases, we use to have around 300 tickets per month which has been reduced to almost zero now.

We evaluated Softomotive and UiPath. 

With Softmotive, the performance was a concerned. It was breaking in many places. That is what we observed. 

With UiPath, it was good. It has got a lot of integrations and can directly talk to the database as well. All those details are there. 

The major reason that we selected Automation Anywhere was the licensing model.

The primary advice which I would give to someone considering automation tools, in general, is don't just go for any RPA tool (Robotic Process Automation). You want to be sure that the tool you choose will solve some issues and resolve your problems. I've seen people just take any RPA tool just to say that they are using some RPA. It is not a status symbol, it is a tool for business. You need to define the problem and that RPA is the way to go to resolve the issue and improve business function.

If there is a process which cannot be completely automated using any scripts, and human intervention is very much required, consider going for this solution.

I will give an example. There was one use case where we had to read information from an Excel table and generate a report out of that. People might decide they need to start using Automation Anywhere or some RPA tool for this solution. But reading an Excel file is not really a commonly necessary use case for any of the RPA tools. Basically it can be taken care of in programming scripts or some small database script application. An easy solution would have given the proper output with less effort and they would still get what they were expecting as users. The point is to evaluate the problem and how complex it is before going to purchase any RPA tool which may be unnecessary. If it can be done through something else, it may be a more efficient process. 

Business users are not using the tool. They are just using the direct outcome.

We have not used IQ Bots, but might in the future.

We have not used the Bot Store. I would like to explore that in the future.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight. It is an eight because I'm seeing some results in the use case even early on whatever we are trying to automate. It has really helped our process so far and we will expand on that.