Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are currently working on a vendor bill reconciliation process. It is in production now. We are also working on an incident management process for customer service. Within the customer services, there are four or five different processes that we are working on. All of them are incident management but for different categories at different levels. The next use case that we will be working on is bank reconciliation, and then we are planning to expand into HR for onboarding and recruitment. These are unattended robots. 

We are able to integrate it with other products through APIs, which we may not have thought about. For example, there are some in-house solutions that we have for which we have built APIs, and we're able to integrate those APIs with Automation Anywhere. We didn't expect that we'll be working on that but it happened.

The ease of use for the end user and the very low complexity in trying to build a bot are the big factors for us. We are able to work on a project, identify a use case, come up with a design spec, and execute and build a bot within a span of six to eight weeks. In nine to ten weeks, we are able to go live, which reduced complexity. Once we go live, the user interface and the user experience are extremely good.

Their bot runners could be made to handle multiple payloads at the same time because if I want to run multiple parallel operations, the number of bot runners that I have to buy just keeps increasing. It is adding to the cost. However, there is a possibility that we don't need that many bot runners, and we can run multiple operations in a bot runner. This would be a great addition to have.

I have been using this solution for six months.

You get what you paid for. What it says on the tin is what you'll get inside. As a customer, you will not be disappointed. If you're thinking that you want to build rockets using Automation Anywhere, then you will be disappointed. As long as you know your business needs, the automation that you want to focus on, and you understand the product's functionalities in a good way, you will not be disappointed.

Scalability depends on how many parallel processes you want to run. A bot runner basically runs a bot. How many bots can it run? How many of these need to run in serial? How many of these need to run in parallel? This information will determine how much you have to scale. Now, if you're willing to pay a lot of money and have multiple bot runners, that means for each and every bot runner, you can have multiple processes running at the same time. So, if you are willing to pay, yes, you can scale. It depends on your budget. The product works whether you're on 1 bot or 20 bots. The product just goes off and does its thing. That's not a problem.

If it is 1 bot that you're running once a day at 10:00 in the morning, then you need one bot runner. If you have 20 processes that you're automating and these 20 things have to run throughout the day at different points in time at 10:00, 12:00, or 2:00, you can still run them with one bot runner. In those use cases, scalability is not a problem. Scalability becomes an issue when you have multiple processes. If a reconciliation process needs to run along with the general ledger balancing, month-end closing, and everything else, and all of them need to run at the same time, then you're looking at about 10 bot runners running 10 different bots at the same time. If you're willing to pay, you can get what you want, but it becomes a very expensive affair.

We have 15 to 20 people who are touching the application for various purposes. We have business analysts, developers, testers, and the external implementation team. We also have business users.

I have used both UiPath and BluePrism in my previous organizations. Automation Anywhere gives me the flexibility for both on-prem and SaaS, and the difference is not huge for me in terms of performance, security, and all that stuff. It gives me the flexibility, but honestly, on paper, all these three products pretty much do the same. There is a plus or minus 5% difference here or there, but you'll not go wrong with any of these products.

The initial setup was very straightforward. There are specific things that they ask in terms of the environments that we need to build in our typical Windows server, that is, what kind of memory and what kind of processing capability we require. I can't talk from the SaaS perspective because we have an on-prem deployment, but giving on-prem equipment based on the defined specs is pretty much child's play. There is nothing complex about it. It is very easy for developers who understand the platform. You can quickly roll out something and get it live, but you need to understand a lot of logic and the complexity behind the applications such as ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce, etc. 

We started off with an implementation partner, and our experience with them was good. They had about three people in their team, and we had our business people who were giving the requirements. We also had our technology people who were basically acting as the bridge between our business people and their developers.

We are expecting a significant ROI by the end of the year. 

From a business angle, understand what is it that you need. Where do you see inefficiencies? If you're going to fix inefficiencies that are going to be fixed as part of a larger company-wide transformation program, then use the transformation program and fix those inefficiencies as part of the existing solution. If you think that that larger transformation program is not going to touch some places or if that larger transformation program will touch some of these inefficient areas but not in the near future, and you want some immediate wins, then going in for an RPA tool is a good decision.

At the end of the day, the business needs to be aligned with why you're making the decision, and where and what is your priority? What is your sense of urgency with respect to the places where you're implementing it. For example, in my office, we are working on customer service. There is a massive transformation program going on right now, but that transformation program is touching sales, marketing, finance, and all those areas. It is not touching customer service at all, but customer service has its own inefficiencies. So, we introduced automation in customer service because it's not being touched by the transformation program, and we don't want to keep waiting to gain the ROI of whatever we can get or the reduced cost we'll get from customer service. For example, if I'm going to implement a massive cloud ERP like Oracle or SAP, then I will fix the process as part of that cloud ERP implementation and not wait for a bot to be developed.

From a technical perspective or an integration perspective, use an API to directly communicate between the apps, if you can. You don't need a bot or an RPA to do what an API can do.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution in my environment is to use bots to extract the important logistical information from each of the customer Microsoft Excel sheets. Next, the information is transferred, to be entered into the government official logistics documentation.

Prior to submitting the data to the company warehouse management system, it is checked and balanced. The same needs to be done before submission to the official government website.

It helps my organization to further improve the management and assigning of tasks to its human resources.

Through the use of Automation Anywhere bots, no longer do the staff in my organization need to carry out the task of transferring data from Excel sheets to our data or the government website. Thus, as all of these processes are being automated, this manpower can now be shifted to be used in other areas that can be beneficial to the company.

The most valuable feature is IQ Bot, as it allowed us to train it to extract important logistical information from customer PDF documents, irrespective of the format. This is valuable because not all PDF sheets have the same format. Many customers tend to use various formats to represent their data. Hence, with IQ bot, even with the wide variety of different PDF formats, the bots would still able to help us extract what we needed.

I hope that Automation Anywhere can further optimize its bots to help automate tasks with Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft PowerPoint documents because, in most organizations, there is a lot of reporting required. Hence, it would be great and more cost and time-efficient if there is a way to automate everyday tasks such as Microsoft Word Report Generation and Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation Generation.

Further, I would also recommend that Automation Anywhere assist users with automating tasks such as the monthly payment of essential services. For example, automating payment of utilities like the water bill or electricity bill, online.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic, as the bots can be run on multiple machines at the same time.

The customer service is fantastic and they always provide reliable feedback and help.

We did not use another RPA product prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have an in-house developer as well as a vendor team. The vendor team has a high level of expertise.

The ROI in terms of finance cannot be disclosed due to company policy but the bots have made the everyday process of extracting logistics information from customer Excel sheets or PDF files much more efficient and faster than the traditional manual method.

I advise others that even as of right now, the setup cost and licensing cost to automate bots on Automation Anywhere is steep but it is worth the investment!

We considered other Robotic Process Automation tools such as UiPath and Blue Prism.

Our primary use case is for building Solutions involving RPA bots. We have implemented two standalone infrastructures each with A2019.16 Control rooms. 

Multiple Developers are working using the tools and commands in A2019 to create bots that will be deployed for clients to address their business requirements.

The infrastructure is running on the private cloud . 

The control room is running on the latest Windows server and the latest Windows SQL server is running the control room database.

Developers use VMware Virtual desktops to execute their bots. Chrome and IE browsers used by the developers.

Clients approach us to implement Automation Anywhere for three main reasons:

1: FTE reduction
2: Improving AHT 
3: Quick implementation and getting started on their RPA journey.

We have seen AA bringing immense value to the clients once operational. Bot deployment is easy and controlling Access is easy with RBAC with the recent additions. User groups and user management is on par with tools like Blue Prism & UiPath.

From a development perspective, the web-based approach is easy to deploy. The downside is that it is difficult to troubleshoot as logging on to the clients has been reduced.

It's comparatively easy to find developers who are accustomed to working with AA compared to other RPA tools.  

A2019 Control room

1: Single installer for all components and it installs all pre-requisites- Makes life easier as only admin access is required from the IT team to complete the installation
2:RBAC - Each component access can be controlled via Custom roles. I have created roles for developers, schedulers, admin, testers are all in a single control room.
3: Inbuilt credential vault with encryption is easy to implement and manage.
4:Recently included features of adding Security groups from the Active Directory is a lifesaver for the Control room administrator. Users are managed at the AD level with no overhead tasks of CR admin managing users.

A2019 Bot Agent

1: Easily installed but requires admin rights. 
2: It can be installed on a server now as the option to add multiple users is enabled in bot agent installer files

Verbose logging of bot compiling and deployment from the control room. Events occurring during compiling, pre-processing the bots should be logged in the control room or bot launcher logs.

Exported bots packages are not updated. Each package must be validated independently upon being exported from one control room to another.

Moving away from Client-server architecture to web-based deployment compromised developer experience of app reliability offered by 11.3.X flavors.

Desktop app experience >>> Web experience. Developers are not pleased. 

I have been using A2019 for 4 months.

Stick to long term releases.

Easily scalable on-premises.

Customer support is excellent and have helped on multiple occasions.Raising a ticket through through partner/support portal is very easy. Frontline engineers are quick to respond and access the issue mentioned in the ticket.

In my experience , most of the cases are resolved by frontline team and rarely get to involve their escalation team. Case resolution time differ vastly based on the complexity of the issue being reported and availability of the support engineer. 

Getting quick support/response is difficult and most of the calls are pre-scheduled. Categorizing a support ticket is crucial to get right resources for the issue. You will not like a platform engineer supporting a bot development issue and vice versa.

Enhancement requests via support requests are time consuming and might not see daylight till next minor/major upgrade.  

knowledge base articles available for troubleshooting known issues can be improved. Articles are not sorted properly and finding the correct KB for a known issue takes lot of time and effort.

UiPath, we switched due to organizational use.

Simple installation.

In-house.

Setup: A2019 is very easy. A single installer does it all.

Cost: Cheaper compared to Blue Prism and UiPath Orchestrator.

Licensing: Floating licensing 

We evaluated Blue Prism but it had a high cost.

Too frequent updates and major changes in each update is frustrating.

Our primary use case is automation development supporting internal business operations at KPMG. We have 100+ live automations, with v10 and v11 deployments.

Using this solution has freed internal operations employees to do more "human value-add" work by removing mundane manual tasks. It has improved the quality of these tasks through automation and enabled us to do things we couldn't have previously done due to time and cost.

The most valuable feature so far is Task bot deployment. We hope to expand to IQ Bot this year.

Automation Anywhere's interaction with Excel is a key benefit.

Currently, Automation Anywhere's debugging functionality is minimal.  Most notable is that it works on only the top-level task (not on sub-tasks called by the top-level task).  This limits its practical usefulness.  Increasing the robustness of the debugging functionality would be very helpful.

Additionally, implmentation of a "global" variable concept (variables shared across tasks) would be very useful.  AA's variable mapping between tasks is cumbersome.  

We have been using Automation Anywhere for three and a half years.

Our case was downloading the invoices from an Oracle Application.

It involved web and desktop applications and the setup was done in a Citrix, where the AA tool and required applications were installed in a secure environment.

Using Object Cloning for a web application, we extract a record of a company code for which all the invoices need to be extracted, based on month and year. When the company codes are available then all the invoices were extracted, applying the proper logic in the Oracle environment (Similar to SAP).

Proper logging and exceptional handling were supported.

Testing was done in the Dev and Test Environment and finally deployed to PROD.

The Bot was scheduled as per the customer requirements in the Control Room, to be executed as per the demand.

It has improved a lot by automating repetitive steps and hence saving a lot of quality time. 

It's very easy to use and all of the employees can easily get involved in the process, whether they are a developer, support, or have an HR background.

Almost all the easy and complex processes can be automated.

For each employee, the tool is useful if they have some redundant or repetitive tasks to perform on a daily or weekly basis, such as timesheet submission or shift allowance extra. It's a BOT BUDDY, as it is called in our organization.

It's very fast and takes no time to execute a lengthy process.

It's secure; all of the passwords and UN are secured.

The tool is simple and easy to debug and run.

The Automation Anywhere University is vast and we can easily get support from other community members.

Free certification and tutorial videos are readily available and are free of cost.

The Control room is valuable, as we can schedule the bot at any time and give access to anyone from anywhere.

The Recorder feature helps to automate without any effort and is very robust and precise.

The automation is very fast and in no time, it executes the process and hence increases the SLA by a vast margin as compared to other RPA tools.

IQ Bot is a very high niche tool and reads any kind of scanned copy and gives the output with more than 95% precision. It's very simple and supports Python and NLP for adding extra features.

Metabot helps to make reusable components and can be used as a function wherever needed.

It supports Dlls, VBScript, Python script, and macros.

Bot Insight helps to get the analytics in a more enhanced and visually attractive way.

The simplicity of the tool is a plus point, as it does not require one to be from coding background to work on it.

I would like the AA tool to be more proficient and a single entity tool that does not require DLLs or some script to be written separately where it is not capable. It should have more commands, which should remove the dependency on MetaBots or other scripts so that everything is available in the tool itself. This would save time.

All the time working on the tool requires internet connectivity, and it will be great if we can work offline. Offline development would be helpful.

More features like AI and ML should be included, as well as additional features to automate Citrix applications and mainframe applications.

I would like to see more Excel commands available.

Introduction to dictionaries and other data types should be included.

I would like to have a ready-made framework available so that less time is spent to develop the whole framework for the processes.

In terms of robustness, the bot should be efficient enough to deal with the code breakdowns. This could be done with more exception handling features and a ready-made framework.

More tutorials with complex scenarios and ILT training would be an improvement.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The product is very stable and runs without delay, failures, or system hangs.

Logs are maintained both locally and at the server level.

The client and server connection is smooth.

Scalability is wonderful for AA, we can easily add the extra robots as per the transaction load without impacting the process.

The customer support and technical support are very helpful and service is available 24/7,  around the clock.

Communication is very good and their knowledge of the tool is in-depth.

Support teams are pro-active and they have a vast network of partners.

We did not use a different RPA solution before this one.

The initial setup was easy, as per the guidelines shared by AA, including the minimum system requirements such as OS level, RAM requirement, SQL Server, and .NET requirement. This information was shared via the documentation.

When finding any problem, their support team is very fast and cooperative in helping to resolve the issue ASAP.

Our company directly consulted with the Automation Product teams for RPA implementation and COE implementation in our organization.

ROI is high; usually, one process automation is equivalent to three FTEs in our organization.

It's cheapest among the competition, although bargaining is a must.

Different licenses are for Bot Runner and Bot Creator, which saves on the cost.

We evaluated UiPath and Automation Edge.

We found AA to be the best among the others in terms of pricing, licensing, support, and tool capability.

We use automation for a tax invoice process, finance process, and human resource process.

In the tax process, it collects all tax invoices from a folder, then AA reads a QR code on the document to confirm, then extracts it to an Excel sheet for the success process and failed process.

For finance, AA calculates the tax type on each project. After that, AA inputs the data into the ERP system for further processing.

For the HR department, AA will shortlist the candidates on the portal. It will then send an email to qualified candidates to follow further instructions for testing. Then, AA will collect the results of the test and send them to the HR staff to process further.

On the tax, finance, and HR processes, AA will automate collecting documents, then extract them into an Excel file, and also do the confirmation using a QR code. In the past, these processes were completed by three or four staff over one to two days. Using automation, these processes are completed in between one and two hours, using one robot. With these savings in time, the staff can do more in other areas. 

These advantages improve staff productivity and creativity. It also means that they do not need more overtime. As a result, it will impact positively on the company overall. 

It's a cloud-based solution, so we do not need any on-premises server. Having a cloud-based deployment provides more flexibility because we just need an internet connection for connecting the agent into the AA cloud.

For a few workflow processes that need credentials, AA provides more security for this. Their encryption is to ensure that our credentials are always secure and cannot be accessed by unauthorized people.

The dashboard can be accessed by several roles. User monitoring, for example, can view the dashboard, watch how many robots have failed, and other stats, but they cannot change how the robot works.

For the short term, in this pandemic era, they should have a feature to write and save directly into Word documents, Office 365, or Google Docs. As it is now, it can only save to Excel files.

In the long term, in the cloud era, it would be great if they had an API or connection into other cloud services, such as SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS. This would mean that their automation ecosystem would be more complex, helping to improve our productivity and creativity.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about a year.

Stability-wise, this is a good product.

The scalability is good.

We have not yet tried to contact technical support.

Before AA, all of our processes were done manually.

The initial setup is straightforward, as this is a cloud-based deployment.

We implemented using an in-house team.

Our ROI is approximately USD $40k to $50k.

The cost of this solution is a little bit high, but it is worth the price.

We evaluated UiPath before choosing Automation Anywhere.

So far, all the features and services match today's technology, and we expect it will remain current for at least the next two to three years. I hope that they keep this great work on RPA.

Automate Business processes pertaining to various business units. We used Automation Anywhere Control room and different versions of AA 10.x and AA 11.x to deliver Robotic Process Automation Solutions for different clients. Automation Anywhere helped multiple clients to save a lot of data entry time and have automated almost every repetitive task. AA control room helped to manage the operations of both Attended and UnAttended automations and have helped a continuous run of the bots saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Automation Anywhere helped our organization to get our training and implementation needs successful by providing both community edition and partner edition. Automation Anywhere seamlessly handed off exceptions to employees from Automation Anywhere bots. It helped to better manage  Automation Anywhere bot capacity, as well as to reuse and repurpose the bots in the cloud. 

It helped in Monitoring Automation Anywhere bot progress and report on bot usage and value in the form of Insights provided instant details of the savings and work in detailed analytical charts.

A 2019 dual-mode is very useful and the Control room type of setup for use of A2019 Client is very useful as it eliminates disconnection issues. Also, the broad range of Commands and elimination of the need for Metabots is also very helpful in Automating the increased number of variable types cover an expanded range of web and window components. 

Bot insights and IQ bots are both valuable features if implemented in a cost-effective way for larger enterprises, Bot insights provide analytical details of the ROI that is generated by running bots and IQ bots help to automate document processing in an intelligent way minimizing the cost of document processing and hence saving a lot of employee time and money for any enterprise with a large volume of pdf data.

Version A2019, the Number data type variables should be available to display in "Message Box" command. This will help in debugging. At the present, a type conversion is needed to display it in the message box. There should be an efficient way to integrate AA 11.x. meta bots into AA2019.

Also, the Master certification should be provided free of cost for partners. More practical samples and examples of bots using new features in A2019 should be available in people Documentation. A2019 presentation material for proposing A2019 as an RPA choice should be provided to partners.

I have been using AA for six years.

Excellent

Straight Forward

7

We used AA for all of our healthcare clients for multiple use cases. We have automated most manual steps of Claim Adjudication, Claim Pre-Work Validation, Overpayment Recovery, Triaging, Quoting Census, etc.

In the front office side, we have automated Provider Calls as attended solution which helps Agents to take calls hassle-free while Bots gather the required information from multiple applications. We have automated KFI process where AA OCR identifies the CMS1500 form run it through IQ BOT and further post it on the target application.  

By automating most of our LOB's on the healthcare side and putting it on production, we have saved millions of dollars and were also able to achieve FTE benefits. It has improved our quality, AHT, and was also able to achieve target TAT and SLA. 

We have successfully processed 10 million claims through unattended BOTs. We also saw significant improvement in Agent performance for provider calls where we deployed attended Bots. Overall, Automation Anywhere has been great for us and helped us in generating revenue as well. We had recognized by Automation Anywhere as Innovation Partner of the Year - 2020 in Payer Segment which helps us in selling our solutions to new healthcare clients.   

There are many features of Automation Anywhere that were found to be most valuable like WLM, PDF integration, Advanced Excel Commands, Terminal Emulator and its commands, Interactive Forms building features of A2019 which helped us in developing UI for our front office automation and integrate it with multiple rest APIs. The new features which were introduced in A2019 like Data Table, custom DLL, IBM Watson Speech to Text, IQ BOT, Document Extractor has been impressive. The option to use the Python Script has been very helpful.

We noticed slowness in a few of the commands like Object Cloning, Web Recorders, etc. on which Automation Anywhere can work to make it more robust. There are improvements required in the WLM solution provided by AA, which can make it a more robust queuing system and the system should retry by itself in case of failure due to system error. There should be the option of selecting credentials by passing variables and not just limit it to selection. Retry mechanism should be included in Enterprise 11.x version which helps developers to reduce the number of lines of code.

I have been using AA for 4.5 years.

Whatever product they launch they make sure that it is 99.9% stable. The stability of this solution is pretty high.

It is scalable for sure and has the capability of becoming the world's number one RPA tool.

It was nice interacting with CS/tech support. Most of the time they resolves issues within 24 hours.

Before AA, we tried a few other RPA tools but those have few challenges in terms of security and interaction feasibility after the AA worked for us nicely.

The initial setup is straightforward and does not necessarily requires technical knowledge.

In our case it was both. The level of expertise was 9 out of 10

We saved millions of dollars and had FTE benefits.

The licensing model and cost are very impressive. Now, you do not have to worry about infra setup cost like Server, Database as it comes free of cost with the A2019 cloud version.

We evaluated BP, UiPath, Pega,  etc.

One word for Automation Anywhere keeps shining and helps your customers/partners to automate & gain more.