Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

I have automated HR, hotel, and some IT processes. I have also automated processes in SAP.

Automation Anywhere drastically reduces manual work for employees. 

A process that I automated was taking data from one of website and matching/reconciling it with bank statements. I used Automation Anywhere to place the data from our website and compare that with the bank statement. Most of the bank statements were in PDF format. I extradited the data from the PDF format and copied that to an SCS Suite file. From there, I started comparing the values and reconciling them.

Object learning is a one of the best things that can be found in Automation Anywhere. 

Image recognition is pretty good for our Citrix environment.

The new thing is the IQ Bot, where it gets data from unstructured data.

Citrix should be more stable. 

MetaBot helps getting data from SAP, but we still have some cases where we cannot fetch data from SAP. They should improve this.

They could add more commands that we can find in other tools. In emails that we have to download, we cannot read the MS docs. There is another type of procedure that we have to follow to find these things and download them. We are doing most of these things in a MetaBot format. For SAP and Excel, we are also using MetaBots. These commands need to be improved, especially in Excel because they are only a limited number of commands for Excel. Other tools have very good Excel commands, but Automation Anywhere lags here. 

The stability is good.

It has very good scalability. We can implement across all domains.

We have deployed bots in very few cases internally, like five to six bots. We mostly deploy bots for clients and their purposes. In these cases, we have deployed more than 500 bots from our ASD to the client.

I would rate the technical support as a six out of ten. They are combining the tech support and forums into one portal. However, we have had delays in some of their response times. Their responses have been good, though.

The technical support helps us with a bunch of our clients. We get queries from our clients, then we try to solve them. If we are stuck on some issues, then we will contact the help desk. It is there that we will get help from the tech support. 

For version 11.3, I am good for the tech support, but they are ending the support for version 10.

The initial setup was good.

We deployed it in-house. We have good technical support team for installation, etc.

I am not sure about the costs, but two Bot Runners and four Bot Creators may cost approximately 1CR.

For the beginners, it is an easy tool compared to other tools in market. Users can understand the line by line code and code it easily. There is no syntax or anything else. They can easily drag and drop, executing the bot directly.

We use this solution for automating business tasks in certain areas of the organization (so far). This involves creating bots to handle mundane tasks, so employees can be freed to work on other tasks that require higher thinking skills. We installed the product locally with the vendor's help.

The Automation Anywhere software has improved our organization by moving us into the RPA climate and allowing us to save on our overhead. By using bots, we have virtual workers that work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, all without taking a salary.

So far, we have found Customization and Ease of Use to be the most valuable features. We are also working on scalability now (within our bots), so other business areas can use the same bots that were already created. At the same time, we will be continuing to build other bots.

I would like to see a built-in read-only role for the control room so that the bot creators can log in and monitor the production environment without any auditing concerns. Currently, our development team cannot log into the production control room, due to audit concerns, and it would be beneficial to see the bots running, confirm the schedules, etc.

So far, it has been stable for the past nine months, which also included an upgrade to the client and control room.

We are currently scaling our bots and as a platform, it is very scalable.

All of the times that I contacted technical support were pleasant. Tickets were assigned quickly and resolved. We even have a customer liason weekly tagup call with the vendor to help with anything that may arise.

Previously, we didn’t use this type of product. We needed to lower our overhead costs.

This initial setup was straightforward. The documentation that was provided was thorough.

Our in-house team was used, along with the vendor's documentation and installation guides. Overall, it worked well.

Being one of the Bot Creators, I wasn't included in the breakdown, makeup, or negotiation of pricing or licensing. I only know the total cost.

We only installed the evaluation version of Automation Anywhere, and our Proof of Concept was successful.

Don’t employ all non-technical employees to create bots. Use software engineers. In our environment, we use REST, API, and SOAP, which may be daunting to non-technical folks.

My primary use case with my current customer is automating various business processes used by a large financial institution.

Automation Anywhere is not necessarily a new technology, but what it does is it enables people who have a non-technical background to take advantage of the value of automated tools. When you look at businesses in the past, you had to have a really high level of programming skills to be able to even think about automating things. But with Automation Anywhere, you can actually teach somebody how to automate a business case in one day. So, to see people with no interest in coding get excited about automating things, that's huge. For a tool that can be fun to use and make people's job better on day one, that is the most valuable feature.

My impression of the Bot Store is good. It is a really smart offering. A lot of the time customers need the same things, and there's not necessarily a lot of logic in reinventing the wheel. When you take the Bot Store, you allow people to share knowledge, you allow best practices to be immediately adopted by users, and you can share good knowledge, saving a lot of time for customers. It's a really good thing.

A useful feature of Automation Anywhere, which is on the way, is the ability to use inline code for both Python and VBScript. The reason that this is so useful is a lot of the time people who are doing RPA are people with technical backgrounds who have been developers. Although, Automation Anywhere is very powerful, sometimes what you need to do is a very specific task which is accomplished more efficiently with code. So, I'm really excited that this feature is coming soon.

Another feature that would be cool to see in Automation Anywhere is more use of artificial intelligence. Right now, RPA is basically limited to a bot which is simply following the instructions that it was given. However, what would be really useful is if a bot was able to more flexibly respond to issues. For example, sometimes there are erroneous errors and pop ups. With good code, you can certainly build your bots to be able to handle that. However, it does take time and a bit of technical know-how to be able to do that. But because a lot of those technical challenges tend to be pretty similar, I would like to see Automation Anywhere include more robustness into the way that errors are handled.

The biggest area of improvement with Automation Anywhere is on the enablement side. A lot of the times, people have the capabilities with the tool, and it's all there, but it's not necessarily so easy to see that roadmap to RPA success. This is very new technology, and there's not a pre-walked path to success. It's unique to every organization, but there are certain commonalities. What Automation Anywhere could do to improve the solution is help customers understand what the tool is really capable of. Walk customers through what changes are needed both organizationally and in terms of infrastructure to really see success with RPA.

I've seen customers who have the licenses. They have the know-how. They have all the pieces from Automation Anywhere to achieve success. But, where they fell short was there maybe wasn't necessarily commitment from the right stakeholders within the organization or maybe there were other forces which were holding things back. What they needed was vision for it:

• How can they operate efficiently? 
• How should it work? 
• How should it look? 
• What roles are needed? 

These are the areas where I've seen customers struggle, and somewhere where Automation Anywhere could really improve.

One of the best things about the stability of Automation Anywhere is that when you have an automation, even if the product changes, there are so many tools built into Automation Anywhere that allow you to take those little problems and spot an issue immediately. You can see the health of your bots at all times. The dashboards and analytics provided by Automation Anywhere allow you to have an overall picture of exactly what's happening with your bots. Even if something changes, because things will always break, when that happens you're able to spot it immediately. You know exactly what happened and can have it changed that day, and it's back in functional production. If you weren't able to spot those problems so easily, you wouldn't be able to scale. However, because of the tools provided in the Control Room and other features with the analytics that Automation Anywhere has, it is very easy to scale automation using Automation Anywhere.

I have a very positive impression of the scalability of Automation Anywhere. The Control Room enables you to take an automation that was built once and have it be deployed in a very effective way.

Customers who I've worked with in the past have told me that they chose Automation Anywhere because of the Bot Games. The great thing about Bot Games is it gives people a chance to really experience RPA. It's one thing to hear about what the tools are capable of, but when you actually get there on the ground and you see what these things can do, that's how you get customer buy-in. That is how you get the people on top and the people on the bottom all to agree that this is a product that we can really use and can add value to our organization today.

The installation and setup of Automation Anywhere are quite simple. Most of the time that I've worked with customers setting up Automation Anywhere, it's gone off without a hitch. It's pretty much as simple as once your infrastructure is in place, you install the client and Control Room, then you can be ready to go building users and getting your automation started very quickly.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven.

We are using it to automate company processes all across our firm: finance, legal, compliance, and customer client account servicing.

We have the ability now to surveil all our employees for political contributions. This would previously take 40,000 hours for a human to do. By combining Automation Anywhere and Appian together, we have been able to build a bot that works with Appian workflows to manage all our employees.

The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages. I have been able to be a developer with Automation Anywhere without knowing the technical background. I am a business user, and not needing the technical knowledge to use the system has been useful for me.

The bot creation process is straightforward in some ways and complicated in others. You can get your initial stuff laid out really quick, but then putting in your exception handling is more time consuming. It is awesome because it takes two hours to get things initially done. However, then it takes another two months to work through everything else, such as infrastructure and moving from development to QA to production. 

When I change the name of a variable in the Variable Manager, I would really like it to change in the code. We just added coding standards where I had to spend hours going through and recoding existing bots, because anything needing a change had to match our coding standards, and that now includes variable names. I just spend two days renaming variables in a bot. While it should have been superfast in the Variable Manager, I had to go through every single line of code, rename all of them, and inevitability, I will miss one. If I have already assigned a variable do something, it makes sense that if I change the name of the variable, then it should change in the code.

We have had so many stability issues.

We had quite a few issues when we upgraded from version 10.5 to 11.2. We were struggling with those issues, only to find out that version 11.2 has known problems. We should have gone straight to version 11.3. Now, we are upgrading again.

We have had so many production support issues. In version 10.5, we lost the ability to run unattended bots. Our Control Room could no longer unlock our Bot Runner machines, and Zendesk could not help us. So, we spent two month babysitting every single bot that ran. Then, when we upgraded to version 11.2, we found out schedules vanish from the Control Room, which resulted in us babysitting the bots for another two months.

The technical support is not great. We have had issues where they close our tickets when we don't respond to their email within eight hours, but they email us on a Friday night.

I had two days where I was out of the office, and they closed tickets on me. This has happened to my co-workers, as well. This has been frustrating.

I really struggle with the support team and informing them of endemic issues. They try and explain it away, but I know enough to be aware that there is a bigger issues, such as what we experienced with versions 10.5 and 11.2 causing us to babysit bots.

Not having the support has been problematic for me.

We used a third-party vendor for the deployment. With our initial vendor, we were led to believe that they were experts. We have since come to realize this was not the case. We have changed vendors and reprogrammed our bots from the initial vendor. We are much happier with our current vendor. 

We measure ROI through a combination of hours saved, errors avoided, and quality of life, which are bots based on processes which humans can do quickly but hate doing them. We have a couple bots built around quality of life.

I would encourage anyone looking for an RPA solution to look around at other solutions in the market.

The ability to integrate the solution with other applications is hit or miss. We have a lot of homegrown applications, and sometimes those don't work. Mostly, they work well with websites until they change the websites.

We have done a proof of concept of the IQ Bot. We struggled with it because we have sales spreadsheet that go across more than one page, and IQ Bot cannot follow it across more than one page. Also, the dp1 requirements were too high for most of our use cases.

We don't use Citrix automation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The primary use case is process automation. We have automated our reconciliation process.

So far, it has performed okay.

We have automated our processes.

The most valuable feature is its Excel integration.

We have business users who are developing bots using this solution.

It does not easily integrate with customized solutions.

I would like to see more Excel functionality, especially around the copy and paste functions. A lot of our business users utilize the copy/paste special values. We are currently not getting any formatting, etc. It is just a raw data set. To fix this, there are some workarounds that Automation Anywhere needs to build into the app. This would make it a lot easier for us.

Automation Anywhere should better vet their partners and resellers for their packs.

It is pretty stable. Once the upgrades were put in for the latest release, it has been running pretty smoothly in our environment. The key things that Automation Anywhere needs to address is the changes which are in the Microsoft environment going forward and how they are going to address not having Explorer there.

The scalability is pretty easy. It is pretty intuitive for any IT person to scale their environment.

Automation Anywhere technical support has been great. Some of their partner support is less than to be desired.

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. There was no need for a reseller or partner to do anything, if they were just going to click the "Next" button.

From pilot to production, we did a three bot pilot, but we did not put those bots into production. We pretty much cut down that environment and started everything back up from scratch. 

Now, we have those three bots out in production. They are programmed to be easier and more affordable. Then, we have the rest of our processes that we have identified to take to production for automation that seem pretty easy for the next stage.

We purchased a partner pack. I would not recommend it. The Automation Anywhere support is far superior.

With the bots that we have in production, we have two of them that are time savers. We have a third bot which takes longer being automated than it did with the human process.

At the moment, it is about even time. We are not using it as a money saver.

Start slow. Ensure you have enough processes in the pipeline to keep moving forward. There will be a hurdle to get over, and once you get over that hurdle (learning curve), it will be a lot easier going down that slope.

Attended automation is great. Unattended automation is a bit of a struggle.

We use it for robotic process automation.

Several manual/repetitive/time-consuming processes were automated, giving back time to the process owner. In addition, for most of them, the process follows a single standard and additional controls were created.

• Easy to learn
• Easy to replicate knowledge

There are general performance issues which are probably being addressed in the latest versions. To clarify, we currently we don’t have any issues, but during our implementation we had cases for which we needed to open tickets with the AA helpdesk.

The stability is very good.

Scaling is a big job, but it is completely scalable. A whole new team/department needs to be created in order to develop and monitor robotic process automation.

Technical support is very good, quick, and effective.

The initial setup was very complex. We had several issues when trying to connect the different components, due to our firewalls. They were eventually solved by our internal IT and the AA technical team.

Deployment took three months.

Our implementation strategy was teamwork among our IT, the end users, and the software provider's technical team.

Pricing is too high for small-scale groups. The Control Room yearly fee is high, making it difficult to break even.

A case study was developed. We evaluated Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism as an alternative. I wasn't part of the business case, so I did not make the final call as to why we went with AA over Blue Prism.

Put together a solid strategy to develop and maintain automations. Also, work closely with internal controls and internal auditing.

In our organization, we have four developers using it. In terms of how extensively the solution is being used, we have automated 24 macro processes and many more are in the pipeline.

We are a service department which handles toys and games. Currently, we are at the phase of selecting a representative from HR, Administrative, Accounting, and IT to develop our day-to-day operations. We have not implemented the solution yet. 

We have done the RPA for the tasks. We have developed it, but haven’t reached the stage of implementation yet. The PoC is done, and now, we are in the development.

Automation can reduce tasks and actual working hours. It ensures accuracy. Humans errors are inevitable when humans do tasks, so this issue will disappear. 

We looked into three vendors originally, but we thought that a control room, or the control feature, would be the most important aspect. It is why we chose this vendor. 

Yes, the support from Automation Anywhere has room for improvement. Because we have contracts with Deloitte, and now that Automation Anywhere has its Japan office, things would be smoother if we could pose questions directly to their Japan office regarding “Bottasan” and FAQs.

As far as stability is concerned, it is fairly stable. However, it does stop occasionally, so there is some instability. 

We only have four machines for the development and actual work. Once we are done with the development, we will implement it in groups. At this point, we don’t know about its scalability yet.

We are getting technical support as a consulting service. Automation Anywhere Japan is doing the technical part of “Bottason” for us. We are receiving our support as such, but as far as the daily incremental technical issues, we ask Deloitte for help.

We received the manual, so our IT department set it up. I believe it was relatively easy.

We haven’t seen any returns yet.

I would rate this product as a five out of ten. It is partly because our process has not progressed much, and also what I said about the support. We get the support from the company we have a contract with, but I would like to see more worth in the new Automation Anywhere Japan.

It’s good as an RPA company. For an organization who is looking to do some business renovation, the solution can work well depending on its purpose and usage. You can also expect good scalability. However, I wouldn’t recommend it to those who just want to increase their number of bots.

Foreign Language: (Japanese)

この製品を主にどのように使用していますか？また、パフォーマンスはどうですか？

我々の会社自体が、グループのシェアードサービス部門を担当しています。

人事、総務、経理、ITとあり、それぞれの部門から代表者を選んで、それぞれの部門の業務を実際、AAで開発をしているという段階です。ただ、まだ実装はしていないです。

業務自体の開発はAAでしてるんですけど、実装には至ってないですね。

POCが終わって、開発を貯めてるということですね。

からの感想でもいいんですが、当ソリューションのどんな機能に最も価値があると思われましたか？ 

製品を選ぶ時にもともと3社ほど対象にしていました。将来の開発、実装を見据えた中でやっぱりコントロールルームというか統制機能ですよね、そこが重要になってくると考え、選択しました。。

どのようなメリットがあるとお感じですか？特に御社の業務処理がどう改善できるとお考えですか？

自動化によって業務短縮ができること、時間的には拘束が減るっていうのと、あとは正確性のところです。業務を人がやるとどうしてもミスが出てしまうところは、その辺はなくなってくるかなと思います。

当ソリューションの安定性に関して、どのような印象をお持ちですか？

安定的だとは思います。たまには、止まったりっていうところがあったりするので、その辺で一部不安定なところがあるかなと思っています。

当ソリューションの拡張性に関してはまだ印象はおありでないですね？

今はまだです。開発機で4台とか、実機で4台なので、もう少し自分たちの業務がきっちり開発出来てからグループ内で展開しようと思っています。今の段階では見えてないですね、そこまで。

テクニカルサポートを利用したことはありますか？ある場合は、サポートをどのように評価しますか？

テクニカルサポートという…そうですね、コンサルティングは受けてます。テクニカルなところでもAutomation Anywhereジャパンから”ボッタソン”を提供頂いたりしています。

そういうサポートを受けてますが、日々の細かいテクニカルなことは、パートナー企業に訊いていますね。

初期セットアップには御社も関わってされましたか？セットアップは簡単、それとも複雑でしたか？どういった意味で簡単、あるいは複雑でしたか？

セットアップは一応マニュアルを貰って、弊社のITがセットアップをしたというところで、そうですね、比較的簡単な方だったと思います。

たまに止まるという安全性では改善が必要かと思いますが、将来他にも改善して欲しい点や欲しい機能などはありますか？

そうですね、Automation Anywhereからのサポートという所で、契約しているパートナー企業がありますが、－今AAジャパンが出来たので、そこでも”ボッタソン”以外の質問とかFAQとかそういうのは受けてもらえるとより、スムーズに運用できると思っています。直取引ではありませんが、我々は将来、AAの台数拡大したいという思い、目的はAAジャパンとも一緒だと思いますので。

ここまでで投資対効果っていうのはどうでしょう？

投資対効果はほぼないですね。残念ながら。

ベンダーをお選びになる際、最も重要だと思われる条件は何ですか？

今はやっぱり運用と育成の所ですかね。運用体制を我々できっちりやらないといけないのですけど、そこに関わって来るガイドラインとかも紐づいて来ると思いますし、あとは育成のところもどんどん数を増やしていかないといけないかなと思いますので。

他のベンダーは検討されましたか？最終的に当ソリューションを選択した理由は何ですか？

やっぱりコントロール機能というか、統制機能というか、そこが将来的に重要になってくるかなと思ったので、そこでAAが一番しっかりしていたと考えたからです。

このソリューションに1から10の評価（10＝最高）を付けるとしたら、どのように評価しますか？

5自分達がなかなか進めてないというのがあるんですけど、サポートの所ですかね。今は契約先とはあるんですけど、Automation Anywhereジャパンができたことによるメリットを強調したい。

このソリューションあるいは同様なソリューションを探している、同社あるいは他社の同僚の方に、どんなアドバイスをなさいますか？

RPAの企業としては非常にいいと思ってるんですけど、あとその目的というか、使い道とで業務改革を伴うような企業であれば、非常に有効性もあるだろうし、将来的な拡張性も期待できると思います。ただ単に、ボットを一杯作りたいという所に対しては勧められないかなと。