Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We use Automation Anywhere for our Finance department.

Automation Anywhere is cost-effective.

The ability of Automation Anywhere to provide automation at scale is quite good.

Automation Anywhere integrates well with APIs, RPA bots, and business applications.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption by over 20 percent.

The customization feature should be made more user-friendly in order to enable the use of external reference components.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

Automation Anywhere is hardly scalable.

We are a partner of Automation Anywhere and find the pricing to be reasonable. There is an additional cost for using OCR.

We evaluated UiPath, but the cost is higher compared to Automation Anywhere.

I give Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

Users of Automation Anywhere should possess programming skills. The learning curve for the solution is straightforward. Training for Automation Anywhere does not exceed two weeks.

If the solution is maintained by the business user, I believe that robot automation processes are better, as they do not require the same skill set.

We use Automation Anywhere in our Finance, Pricing, and Purchasing departments.

Automation Anywhere requires a significant amount of maintenance. The maintenance is performed by me and two of our business partners and requires approximately ten minutes of testing per day to ensure everything is running properly.

Our organization is planning to transition from using Automation Anywhere to Blue Prism Cloud due to our business requirements. I highly recommend Automation Anywhere to other users.

Automation Anywhere is a suitable solution for businesses.

We are a company operating in the banking industry and we use the platform in deploying robotic process automation for executing various functions from customer service management.

The automated processes include ticketing, data extraction and analysis, and business intelligence, among others. It helps us automate our functions and this has brought a positive effect into our workflow and we have been able to grow our productivity.

The platform is versatile and users across the spectrum and in various industries are able to acquire it and use it intuitively.

The platform is easy to deploy and use in every organization and when we acquired it, it brought instant impact and our employees were able to productively integrate it into our workflows.

It has helped us relieve the workload on our human workforce and thus ensures that they remain productive and motivated at all times thus work efficiently.

Brings business process automation and this helps in scaling our operations and ensuring that we are able to work 24/7, thus improving our productivity.

It has brought artificial intelligence and this allows us to improve our planning and decision-making process, ultimately growing our company and the way we execute our workflow.

The starting price, which is a one-off fee is a bit high and this may deter mid and small-sized companies from acquiring and decide to shun the platform. It ought to be broken down into monthly installments, where the billing of using the platform is done monthly. This will increase its absorption in the market.

The vendor should increase the training and other engagements with users before they acquire the platform, as this will simplify its usage further and ensure that there no hindrances in using the platform. 

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past four years.

Customer support is available and this ensures that any user experiencing any challenge in using the platform is helped and becomes able to use the platform in a reliable manner.

It's affordable and this accords all users a chance to use the platform and grow their portfolio and withstand competition in their respective industries and markets over their rivals.

I have worked across many different type of RPA use cases that we have done, starting with finance, manufacturing, and banking. The use cases are tremendous. There are many. 

Thankfully, being a technical person, I've also learnt a lot about business processes. Personally, in my career, I have not just developed my technical expertise, but also using RPA and the Automation Anywhere tool, I have engaged a lot of vision as to how the business and the finances process work across different direct industries so far.

I can talk about a use case that we have submitted. We have a Bot Genius entry that we have where the bot reviews your bot. So, it's a bot on top of a bot to check whether the bot that you have created is up to standards or not. So it is an interesting concept that we try to bring in where we identify pain areas, because a lot of time is been taken up by the reviewer team to identify what's wrong with the code and whether the code is per the coding standards or not. So, we thought of automating and trying removing one layer so a bot can check whether all the coding standards, proper guidelines, and naming conventions of variables are being sorted out. So, we brought along this bot as a finalist to see if it can take home a prize.

We have improved on IQ Bot collectively with the normal Taskbot that we use. How it got started was that we have a lot of scanned documents to input for our solution. So, I used to get a lot of scanned documents, and extracting or reading the data from those has always been a pain area. We always used to bring a manual person in to do it. Once a manual person did that activity, it was brought into Excel where I could run the bot. With the entry of IQ Bot, it now takes care of my scanned documents, which means IQ Bot does the OCR extraction and gives my data to the Automation Anywhere Taskbot. This means no manual intervention and end-to-end bot processing, along with a happy customer at the end of the day. We provide these services to multiple clients, so we have been doing this for all of our clients.

There are many valuable features of Automation Anywhere. It is very easy to work on this automation tool on a day-to-day basis. I've seen that people, even from a non-technical background, can code it swiftly and at ease. 

We have IQ Bot which is very interesting and unique. I really like IQ Bot and the concept of A2019 that we have just seen. I really hope to get to work on that. A2019 seems to be very interesting and easier than what we are doing here now. It is a service available on the cloud, which is even better.

I would like a couple more features where I can talk and the line comes up automatically. I can just put on a mic, like in "Ok Google". With "Ok Google", I can tell it to please open an Excel spreadsheet with the header read. If this is there, then I don't even need to sit on a computer, I can just dictate my commands and it will automatically come up.

Right now, it's more sequential, where it works in a sequential manner. If they have something dynamically, where it run parallels, I'm not sure if it's out there yet, but It would be a plus point if we could have that.

With A2019 will get both options (writing lines of code and dragging and dropping). So far, we are just doing sequential coding. I'm just writing line-by-line code. But, there is a pain area if I want to go back and have to understand where the issue started, it becomes a little cumbersome to identify. That's where A2019 comes into the picture, you can drag and drop start to make a flow. This will be a useful feature.

I've been working with RPA for the last six years, starting with Automation Anywhere.

Over the year, I have seen that Automation Anywhere as a solution that has improved a lot. Wherever we have identified bugs, timely resolution, and the interaction with other applications, we have seen a difference from our original solution where we started off. Now, it's completely dynamic and very stable.

I can introduce IQ Bot. I can introduce my Python script that I'm trying to work on. If I'm not able to make it with an Automation Anywhere, I can go out-of-the-box. I can try to build in my own programming language where I have expertise or I might not, but in this way, I am putting it across different scripting mechanism and running it the same bot. This is something which I think is very good and we can scale again to a different level with different use cases.

The technical support team has been always very helpful. I write to them and they reply back to me usually in an hour or two. That's a good response that I see as compared to other RPA vendors that we work with.

We have clients who have dedicated CSM managers at Automation Anywhere in case something is a very high priority, which is always the case. So, the customer support team is always there to help us out.

One of our primary jobs is to consult our clients. We look at the use case and base it on their use case. We do recommend which tool and special functionalities of the tool that they can go for. There have been many times when we have found the use cases to be very complex and the applications very different and a bit complex, but then we have suggested the Automation Anywhere solution and that has worked as well.

The criteria of deciding whether RPA should be used goes from the old story that your process should be rule-based, input/output should be structured, and it should be logically described. If it falls into these three simple buckets, then RPA is there.

We do have an infrastructure team who supports us with the installation. If you have the basic requirements for the infrastructure, hardware and software, the installation process is pretty smooth. We have user manuals that are pretty well prepared where I can read them, then install it. That's good for the setup or for the person who is installing it from their end. It's sort of easy. You would require a bit expertise from someone at work; a person to help you out.

I have worked on other RPA tools as well. Mentioning some of them: Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism, and AutomationEdge. In day-to-day life, since the RPA has evolved so much, right from the beginning, we had many different tools. We keep fluctuating from one tool to another trying our hands out in other domains as well. However, Automation Anywhere is one of my favorites.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). I will keep one out for my feature to get voice converted into the command.

The primary use case is automation in respect to the financial sector. We have been operating with trades across globe. 

Right now, we have been upgrading to version 11.3.2. Two months prior, we had been using version 10.7.5.

We have automated a few processes, which take four to five hours to do manually. When we automated these processes that time became less than one hour with RPA. This was our goal. We have reduced the time frame.

The best feature is the MetaBot, which we've been integrating and calibrating with a lot of stuff. This has been helpful to us.

I like the object cloning.

The development period is shorter.

It is easy to fix bug issues which you encounter in the post-production process.

MetaBot still needs to be optimized, though Version 11.3 did integrate all the commands into it. We are not able to see all the lines of code which are executed in MetaBot. 

Integrate .NET functionalities instead of installing Visual Studio, which is an additional resource to us.

Needs more Excel features and functionality.

We are moving onto Python machine learning and would like to have additional functionalities to be added, especially to MetaBot. This would help for the use cases that we are working on.

There are some discrepancies in respect to the variable creation of copying and pasting the code. However, in version 11.3, these type of disturbances has been removed.

The stability is up to 90 percent. It's not a meeting 100 percent because we keep on upgrading. Whenever we upgrade, we have to fine tune a few of the products because we have been interacting with some of the older applications and legacy parts. In those cases, it is somewhat failing. 

The application is very stable in respect to automation. I am able to automate the Terminal Emulator, along with the Linux part, of a command prompt, the web application, and even the simplest application. It has been stable. However, in few cases, it has some pitfalls and stability get reduced.

Scalability is up to the mark. We have been building our solution from the low to high level. It is scalable.

Technical support has been a great asset. We have been encountering migration issues associated with database activities due to computer database back-end. We have contacted the technical support with database issues due to object cloning and SAP Objects. They have been helpful.

Their response time is within one to two hours. In some cases, it has dragged on up to six hours. I haven't found it dragging on for one to two days.

We kept on hiring resources to do the same type of operations, which increased our team resources. So, our SLAs were not up to the mark. the client that we were supporting was not satisfied. Therefore, we pushed toward RPA to optimize a few areas, such as onboarding employees, company access, and reading invoices from the PDF files. 

The documentation is very clear in respect to the installation and migration. If there are any bugs or anything goes wrong, the technical support team helps. The installation and setup are very straightforward. It was very easy for us.

We have seen ROI as we keep on increasing bot utilization and building our own solution. We have optimized a few bots and integrated them into our solution. These bots have helped us prioritize our operations.

We are increasing our SME's time. Depending on the bots that we code, we are sometimes increasing or decreasing our developers' time.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is more flexible in development and production. The development timeline is short. 

UiPath has a lot of functionalities, but a lot of those functionalities can be replicated using MetaBot.

Blue Prism uses a workflow functionality, which seems like chaos to me.

I would encourage a developer to learn RPA and enhance their knowledge. If they start with Automation Anywhere, it will be easy to continue learning on the tool. It is harder to transition for another RPA tool to Automation Anywhere.

I'm responsible for the digital practice within the tax business. We are building a lot of our solutions using the Automation Anywhere platforms, both with IQ Bot as well as the regular RPA, in which we offer it to our clients.

I belong to the tax practice. My role is to see how we deploy technology to increase the efficiency of tax departments and help build new revenue streams from technology in the process . We work with our clients offering digital solutions in the tax space. That's really what I do for a living. We have had a lot of success using Automation Anywhere products. We've actually built a few solutions that were done on the EY cloud, which are offered to clients as a managed service.

I'll just talk about one use case using IQ Bot. Interestingly, every time an employee travels in India, the tax that you pay on each invoice, that is an amount that you can claim from the government as a tax credit. To be able to extract that information and put it together into a return can be massive. Because there are large companies where thousands of employees traveling every month and so on, what IQ Bot does using Automation Anywhere, is it reads through multiple sets of invoices, which can be in any format, extract the tax amounts, then it creates the return which is then used to file with the tax authorities. We don't even stop at that. We also compare this data with what is the actual travel that any company has. In many cases, what we've seen, there is a lot of tax where invoices have not been received. We also plug those gaps. There is a lot of value that clients derive using that aspect as well. It's not just about getting your tax right. You need to find where the leakage is and get that back to the company.

 I can tell you what our clients are always looking for. The big challenge with our clients is that while ERPs are only handling 20 to 25 percent of the requirements. There is a lot of unstructured and semi-structured data that exists in the ecosystem which they can't leverage. That's really what they want the bots to do. How can they complement the current IT infrastructure in a good way to be able to get that outcome?

IQ Bots are extremely powerful. We are using them increasingly more where we're about to look through a lot unstructured sources, like PDF documents, scanned images, contracts, etc. We are able to take the data out, then use that toward processing structured data and creating insights for our clients. 

They have done a fairly good job on the RPA space, but more and more, the whole cognitive AI space and machine learning are where I see the industry actually going. I'm sure Automation Anywhere is also focused on that topic, but we would like to see more coming down the pipe, as early as possible.

So far, we haven't had any issues that I want to highlight, so I'm assuming that it's quite stable. It is working as we desire it to work. 

I think we have more than 50 clients who use our solution at this point. So, the scalability of the platform is well proven.

Every client is looking at scalability because they don't want to do just one or two processes. But, you will not be able to realize the value if you just limit yourself to a limited set of processes. So, the scalability is a very important task for clients. But there are certain challenges in scaling up. To be able to identify the right use cases that bring value is huge and very important.

Secondly, the technology infrastructure can be challenging if you scale up because you always have to add new servers to scale. That has always been a challenge. Having said that, I think what we heard today from Neil, there's a cloud version available that will be easily scalable. That is extremely exciting as a developer. That will be able to address a lot of the scalability issues that we've come across from our clients.

We have two models: 

1. With many clients, we actually go and have them implement Automation Anywhere in their own premises.
2. The second model has actually proven more beneficial to lot of our clients. It is where we have set up the bots in our own EY private cloud on Microsoft Azure where we have implemented certain standard tax processes. So, we only get clients to migrate their processes onto our platform. There, we just take out the pain around the whole implementation, because it is not really relevant to our clients. They just start to get outcomes, and don't have to worry about it.

We have developed a very strong capability internally that is proving to be strong differentiator for EY in the market.

the ROI of the automation investment for tax processes is very strong as apart from the process efficiency, there is also a financial aspect of lost tax credit that our solutions help to capture.

 A lot of the clients have some footprint of the other competing RPA vendors who they want to leverage. We often come across those type of situations.

There are some inherent advantages that Automation Anywhere offers. Both in terms of the commercial structure, as well as from a platform perspective, that makes it very compelling for clients to actually look at using Automation Anywhere for tax processes. in our case, in India especially, some of our clients really want to start small. So, they don't want to start with a big bang, like 20 to 25 bots. It is always easiest for them to start with one process and one bot, go with a proof of concept, and gradually scale up. We have a very good arrangement with Automation Anywhere, where we can offer that as a partner pack, where we bundle services and the license for small processes. This makes it quite compelling for clients. 

The way the platform is evolving, we also see some technology advantages using Automation Anywhere, especially if you combine RPA plus IQ Bot along with the Bot Insights platform. That gives it a different shade compared to some of the other existing platform vendors.

I would rate it a six and a half (out of 10).

In Concentrix, my role is as an asset manager. It's very much focused on the RPA practice globally, which is why we come from enablement to delivery and support. End-to-end is something that is managed by me.

One thing I really like about Automation Anywhere is the product has actually taken leaps in the last three years. We started with the conventional RPA type of use cases. But, in the last two years, with the help of IQ Bot, and what I learned today about this Attended Automation 2.0, I think they are addressing vital key challenges that we have faced so far. The description on top of the description is what their model is. They're partnering with us in this journey of transformation. The type of technology advancement that they have done will certainly help us a lot.

They are constantly being in the BPO space and BPO and RPA are something which go hand in hand in technology. It is the right space for the utilization of this technology in the industry. While our customers are also asking for us for this technology benefit for the revenue benefit, productivity benefit, efficiency, etc. In the last two years, we have leveraged it for multiple clients, whether for telecom, healthcare or other spaces, it has been a very strong partnership that has really helped us.

RPA is something which was their best product. It was easy to config, easy to record, and deploy on the floor. With their IQ Bot, I am very much convinced that was the area where we started tapping unconventional use cases, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all those things bundled together. With this cognitive capability, we went from 30 to 40 percent use cases which we are able to address and have leaped over to a wider space of 50 to 60 percent with this cognitive bot.

There are many things which I have liked in the last couple of months that I have seen in Automation Anywhere. Something that really excites me is the new release of Attended Automation 2.2. It's a very lightweight solution. When I'm talking about the automation of the size from 2,000 to 20,000, and everyone is using the attended bot with this scale and thin client model, we can easily deploy and scale it out to the larger corporate size. So, this product is very unique and I have not seen it in any of Automation Anywhere's competitors. They came out with it.

The product is quite stable. I don't know how to code the the other products which we have used. One thing with the bot that we are always with struggling is the memory management. The Automation Anywhere product is quite stable in that perspective. Security and other things are very well managed by Automation Anywhere. The third piece is the architecture is very much centrally governed. This makes this product more robust.

In the last two years, one thing which Automation Anywhere has changed and they actually worked on is the support and enablement part. That will be the key game changer for them. Because if I compare them with other competitors who are in the space of Automation Anywhere, the customer experience (where we are the customer) is there when you need them. The support is available on time. That is where I think Automation Anywhere is wonderful.

It was very straightforward. I don't know if it was because of the training which was given or if it was because of the application itself, but it was very straightforward to start the journey of RPA using Automation Anywhere. Whether it's a complex use case or low complex use case, I think Automation Anywhere does give you that flexibility that you can start your journey seamlessly.

One thing that we are just changing now: When this automation journey started, everyone was talking about ROI. E.g., I'm investing X amount into the technology, and I'm now trying to cannibalize on efficiency. We are not leveraging automation just for cost reduction. The business is now leveraging automation to get it into this space where we were not able to get so far. So, the dimensions of ROI are not only cost reduction. The dimension of all ROI have been changed to scalability, compliance, some other new business go-to market strategies, etc. Those things are very much changed from the way it was here previously.

This is tricky. We all know who is in the quadrant and the leading there. In the last five years, we actually worked closely with them. Everyone does have their own pluses and minuses. But, if I talk about Automation Anywhere, their cognitive bot is one of their unique selling points.

We are able to sell it very easily compared to its competitors. Another piece is the stability part. The third piece is something which is the customer experience: The ease to work with it. The Automation Anywhere, as a partner, is very easy to work with. They are there when you need them, whether you are in the initial journey of automation, you are figuring out what is the right opportunity, or whether you are in the journey of deploying the bot or support. They are there with you at each of those stages.

These things really make them different compared to their competitors. I'm sure if they will continue focusing on these they will be leading in this space.

So far, it's a 10 (out of 10). If there's anything which will change, I will let you know. But so far, the experience with Automation Anywhere in the last two and a half years has been wonderful. My best wishes to the team.

Most of our use cases have to do with Excel reconciliations, data entry or capturing data and entering it into a different portal or reconciling into Excel.

We have a lot of clients who have to track Excel work, or there may be data validation or reconciliation's to be done. In alignment with our primary use and because we are an audit firm, our primary purpose is basically to compare entered data and do data matching or verification. It is best for us to get quick output, and Automation Anywhere has been withstanding our benchmarks for performance. Whenever we have a goal or deadline to meet demands from clients in doing volume processing, it helps us to meet all those projections. We prefer the tool, and we are Automation Anywhere partners. 

The time from the installation to the execution of deployment is not very long, so it is a better solution for us than something else which would not allow us to provide results as quickly.

The most valuable feature would be that it is easy to use. Second, we have flexibility in terms of scalability on our support systems. The functionality of the product enables us in terms of the type of projects we can take and helps in advancing our business prospects.

Alert transition is happening in the Python space and on the front lines of AI and with other tools. You have the opportunity to use different data blending tools and data manipulation tools. It would be good if Automation Anywhere could make more plugins available to use with a greater variety of tools and additional options. I think it would be a better product if it had a greater capability for integration.

Stability-wise and from a security standpoint as well, the tool is very robust. I feel Automation Anywhere is better compared to other automation tools.

This product scales easily. You can just plug-and-play with whatever components you want to use. You can just add in things easily and you can scale it up.

Whenever we are stuck at any point where we don't know something about a feature, we just reach out to the support team. Their ability and knowledge have been very helpful to us.

I was not involved in the decision to adopt Automation Anywhere as that decision was made before I was part of the company. I came in during a phase where we were scaling up on the new deployment. They made the change to Automation Anywhere to more actively adopt the possibilities of automation.

One thing that's very good about the setup is that it is one-click. You just have to click to start the installation and then you configure everything as you go through the installation. One of the best parts of using the product for us is that it is easy to install and configure which fits in our business model.

We are resellers as well as implementation partners and channel partners. So we have been through and are involved in all the phases of implementation and deployment. We are the vendor team.

We have been able to witness a return on the investment. We have had clients where their scope was very broad and we have helped them reach their goals. The ROI that we see is not an instantaneous one because it occurs over time while you build out processes. Here and there you have greater success and the target for return on investment is made up over time.

As far as costs, it depends on your use. We started with a basic department pack, which is over 10K. The additional costs depend on the scale of the engagement and how it pans out. We customize to our needs on the go.

I have worked with Automation Anywhere on nine versions, including the 10.3 and 10.7 versions. It has been improving all along as they make further releases.

Considering that experience, on a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere somewhere around 8.5. It is one of the market leaders in their market segment. They have obviously proven their success and adaptability to the market enough to be very good at what they do. But I am scoring in terms of flexibility and in being more open-ended towards developer plans and preferences. In order to score nine or ten, they still need to provide more flexibility and integration with other tools and options.

My advice to people who are considering Automation Anywhere as a solution, is that you have to approach a decision from the point of view of what you want to accomplish. You can just go out and pick up a tool, but you have to actually dig into it and work on it. Automation Anywhere is a very good tool because it helps you along the process. The kind of support that you get from the community, as well as the partner enablement team, is encouraging. You can take it step-by-step. There will be some handholding from Automation Anywhere team. Our status as members of the customer success team is in the future. That kind of support and community helps new partners, existing partner, or those who are looking forward to becoming a partner.

We use this solution to assist us in the collection of data. We have patients who fill out an application that contains information based on the affliction that they have. For example, a migraine patient or a diabetic patient will have different sorts of information contained in the application.

It starts with them giving us information. There are no regulations that govern the format of what they give us. Based on what they give us, we provide them with our application. Our overall goal is to give them a better quality of life.

We use MetaBots to ensure that the data goes into the proper channel and in the proper pattern.

Before we implemented this solution, we had to manually deal with a lot of emails. People would send us unstructured data in the form of Notepad or Wordpad. We spent a lot of time manually entering the information.

With Automation Anywhere, what used to take us two days now takes us twenty minutes.

The most valuable feature of this solution is automation using MetaBots.

We would like to see support for macOS, rather than just Windows machines.

Whenever you start Automation Anywhere it opens the IE browser to notify you. It would be really great if you had the option to not open IE when it starts.

If you want to use Chrome then there are three or four additional steps that need to be completed.

This solution is pretty stable.

Scalability is good, although it would be better if they supported more than just Windows machines.

The technical support for this solution is pretty good. The turnaround time is good, as well as the response. The technical support people are well trained and we appreciate it.

We have in-house people who have been trained and handle this for us.

We have certainly seen ROI when it now only takes twenty minutes to perform a job that use to take us two days.

I am involved in making the decision as to whether we use Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism in our upcoming projects.

For each of our projects, we do a POC that lasts three months for each of the tools. Out of that, we come up with the best solution that we can offer for a particular project.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to first identify all of the use cases around your project. If you don't do your due diligence then I don't recommend this solution. You need to have the use cases identified.

We wanted to use IQ Bot to assist with unstructured data, but we were not able to do it. Our next step is to create a workload to handle our information processing.

This solution saves us time but there are some things that make it clumsy for the end-users. When we have to tell them that there is no macOS version then we put our heads down and tell them that we have to wait for that. Also, if you want to use Chrome then there are three or four additional steps that need to be done.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.