Automation Anywhere Reviews

My company' objective in using this tool is to automate every rule-based operation possible. We're looking forward to automating anything that does not need a human to make a judgment call. We have automated most operations in several applications, including mainframe, Linux, web-based URLs, Citrix automation, and in Excel extensively. We have done a variety of projects but we are looking forward to growing more into other areas that we have not yet explored.

The biggest value that I see from the product is the way it works in general. The unattended mode that Automation Anywhere promotes, works great. That is the best thing, I would say. It runs code that performs on a virtual machine unattended. No one gets involved in the triggers because the bot controls the tasks. When you use a person to manually monitor a task, such as getting a quality check done, automating the task to work unattended eliminates all the human effort. It's a solution that is quite simple and straightforward to implement and is available 24/7, 365 days. No disaster recovery is required as the server is always intact because processes run to assure uptime, security, etcetera.

We are aiming to have 100% unattended runs. We don't want attended runs because it increases bandwidth which is not great for support guys and clogs the system. Also, you can have some unattended InfoSec (Information Security) breaches and things. We constantly aim to have the best. At the moment performance is not 100% but I would say it is constantly improving.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to operate by working on AA-level development without all the trouble of having VMs set up, setting up ports for it, having the environment so that the developers can work on it, etcetera. With Automation Anywhere, I don't think we need a technical guy, an IT guy, or specifically a specialist engineer to accomplish things. Automation Anywhere is that good. A layman who has a keen interest or even a little bit of curiosity can learn the product end-to-end, sustain himself if he wants, learn how the VM is developed down by the ports. The product and support make it easy to learn. The knowledge is readily available.

The whole package that Automation Anywhere offers is really good. The variety of commands that it offers made to play well with other integrations. It could be using a C# module, code on JSM, the APIs — I want to use database XM. Ultimately, I want to use anything that makes it friendly for me to accomplish what I need to. That is a help because it often will be something I have already learned, it will be easy to access, easy to build, easy to sustain — as long as the commands work as expected.

Unattended Automation is the best feature for me. Because I use it extensively, it is also one feature I am very familiar with and so it is also one of the areas that I would like to see more improvements on. Any time I speak with people who promote automation and say that it is unattended, they may have a machine perform an operation. Very few understand that each unattended operation packet is unattended at all times. No matter what time of the day, if you just click Run once and it operates to get something done. You don't continuously relaunch it.

In my current role, the only thing that I focus on is how sustainable the code is. It has to run for a long time — years. I am expected to run extensive testing. So, in this position, I'm working on the current stability of all the commands and how that can play into the future. I'm not looking for new features. Really the opportunity for automation is already offering this opportunity to create your own features. Adding new features is almost too much. If I've got enough tools to use, I should learn to utilize them first. Use them and then maybe get something new once I have exhausted the possibilities. There are already enough options that AA provides to use. The commands that it offers out of the box are okay for people to begin to work with it. If you don't know it, all you have to do is ask. 

It is not an end-to-end solution for everything, but it is very good at what it does with allowing automation and freeing up other resources — both human and hardware. It is not an end-to-end solution for everything.

The only area for me that I would consider as an improvement is sustainability in areas I face every day. On CSM (Central Management System), for the most part, it works every time, but those areas exist where it does not perform as expected. For example, we had a problem with our ticketing system. What we do is we have a ticket open so that the issues stay open for a week even if we have it fixed. It is supposed to stay in the system continuously for a week — a hyper-care period — so that the issue stays open and we are sure the issue is fixed. That hyper-care period never seemed to end in the application. The problem was it extends a week, to two weeks, to three weeks, but we did not achieve that four-week period of no error of the full runs for the solution.

We worked at resolving the issue and thought we fixed it permanently. We locked in the solution. We were happy. We almost won. Then in a week, we had a reversion to the same problem without making a change. It was not possible to explain. It is my only concern that some things get handled erroneously or changed. 

Without question, Automation Anywhere is generally a stable product. It's not like I can bank on it always performing. I know a few bots we created are not perfect, but I also know that most of them — 60% of my bots — are good. No one calls me about them from the time they're deployed. I haven't had a single escalation or a single error reported about them. This is great.

I still have the other 40%. I think some things go wrong in situations you face unexpectedly or an error occurs. This is not the way it is supposed to be. It's supposed to be really easy: just plug it in and you have the service. But it doesn't work sometimes.

It is frustrating at times to experience this instability, but we do find a solution and we are working on it to be better. With the new version and features that AA is proposing, it looks promising that we can achieve that goal. It looks like the new version will be really stable compared to the version I am currently in, but I will never be sure until I use those new versions.

Another form of stability is in upgrades. Currently one of the pain-point areas on my to-do list is migration to 11.3.2. We have been working on it for almost a month now. We haven't reached the deployment stage. When I migrated to 10, I had some bots that no longer worked after the upgrade. It was not expected. We got on a call to support to explore the problem and had to resolve them.

Right now, I'm not really sure when to migrate. We have 50 bots and every fortnight, there's a part that goes wrong. If I have to take the action and migrate into a new platform — 11.3 2019 A — there is something of a leap of faith. I'm really not sure that I can take that leap now considering the relative stability that I'm experiencing at the moment.

Working with Automation Anywhere, I have been taking steps to use more of the functionality in the product. In a migration, I will want to use the new version as extensively as I have used the current version. At each step, the newer versions were better than what I have used in the past and I have used version 8, version 9, and now version 10. I've used these three versions and there have been improvements each time. We're seeing improvements to come, which I'm looking forward to exploring. But we have to be sure the migration point is realistic.

A lot of times that I have raised issues with support, the command in question is simply not performing. Object learning may not be working as expected, an action's not executing or it is not connecting to the database at all. The simplest solution is often to copy basic commands and replace them and it works. With the number of calls I made to Automation Anywhere, the guys know me now because I have so many issues. They work with me on it. We try to find solutions. At the end of the day, we find some way or other — a shortcut, say, or copy and paste — and get the code to work. We may not be able to figure out the root cause as an answer so that it doesn't happen again. The bottom line may be that the code might be corrupted, my part of the implementation is corrupted, the ATMX (Automation Anywhere Task Files) part is corrupted, etcetera. But the patches are not a perfect solution when I'm in charge. It's a lot to know a process well enough to fix the root cause of an issue. But these concerns remind me that Automation Anywhere as a tool is great, but there are areas to improve.

Automation Anywhere is definitely scalable in several ways. It's easy and accessible. It's designed the best — almost perfect. It has many more usable components than I was familiar with, and I had so much to learn. Now, with some experience, it is not foreign, and we just don't need to build to get what we want. But to get that you need to start at the design phase, you should not start at development at all. People try — even me — when you're starting, just to aim at building usable components. We can ask a developer to do that, but then the developer will not design to build a reusable component. It will only be specific to his assignment, the development, his process, and he will get it done to complete the job.

Scalability starts with a designer who is the one who makes the call. They need to know what to standardize or how to do things by thinking globally to make sure that a resolution is usable and adaptable if desired. That is the standard we adopted. Other big companies have more bots compared to our 50. They may think what they have is a lot more scalable than it is.

We have ongoing support from AA. I appreciate Automation Anywhere support when I talk to them. There are quite a few hiccups as we go along. At times I don't get straight to the support people when you need them as they are busy supporting other users. But the response has been great.

The setup is a bit complex but it is not so bad if you are a little interested and a little curious in learning about the product. It helps to have a little background knowledge on how it works, what are the features that you need to look for, what logs you need, etcetera.

Some basic guidelines will help you along in the initial setup — a basic brush-up on what to do and expect can suffice. Of course, there is the AA's guide that you can follow if you don't know what to do. Initially, when we didn't know the server, we didn't know what are the application calls were, the documentation did help. It was not that complex to do the installation, but the IT guys did not support it. They were surprised I wanted to learn about everything and work with another product when they had resources to accomplish what was needed.

If you choose to try it out, when you need to know more, ask for help. If you're ready to set up deployment, start from some base and set a restore point.

For those who are considering Automation Anywhere as a solution, I would ask how good their team was already. To take on a new product and take a chance that people will try to enhance their skills by learning it may not be the best course of action. Many will have to learn something new and do better than they did with previous solutions by learning and using AA. If the response is that they have hardcore developers, web designers, C# developers, etcetera. They may be looking for quick resolutions, hardcore development and coding bit. They will want any other product or UI that appears to give you far more than AA. AA does all of that — it is not that it isn't able to do it — but it's easy and it is different. With other solutions, you will need someone with that knowledge and ability to code in a particular language. But AA is a platform that can be used as an opportunity for people to up-skill themselves. That's something that is different compared to any other code.

AA commands are not the same as other languages. It has its own dictionary, its own library, its own way of working. I see that this is the same thing mentioned by others as to what they think about the product. It is possible to learn it by just using the Q&A.

I use it to develop for the HR domain, where I am using Oracle PeopleSoft and Salesforce applications. Mostly, I use the object cloning command and Excel operations. 

I work in a banking company. We use Automation Anywhere for global HR payroll operations and payslip-related automation. We have also automated hedge loans and credit card approvals.

We use versions 10.3 and 11. Compared to 10.3, version 11 is good and easier to automate because they introduced more options. You can also automate complex things. They introduced the Control Room feature too. 

It is installed on-premise at our company.

We are using Automation Anywhere for our leave approval process. We used to have three FTEs on the day shift working on this process. Now, we only have one FTE working on the leave approval process. The bot supports everything else in the process. With this bot, we are saving the cost of two FTEs.

• OCR
• Object cloning
• Excel automation
• Reusable
• Scalability
• Code free

Most back-end operations start with Excel. With Automation Anywhere, we can easily automate the CSV in Excel operations. It is integrated with Microsoft Office 365.

The Control Room feature is very good.

We are using Taskbot for attended automation and unattended automation.

From the Bot Store, we can download bots. We can analyze the code. I have downloaded some bots just for coding standard purposes.

I would like more integration with Microsoft Excel. More screenshots that can be integrated with Excel would help our customers too. It is good that Automation Anywhere is now willing to partner with Microsoft.

I need to be able to work on Citrix with the solution. 

I need cloud-based applications. Now, we are manually running the application.

The stability is good.

The scalability is perfect. It is a reusable product.

We have around 200 bots in the entire company. We have allocated separate systems for these bots. We have almost 350 processors that we have automated using the bots. 

I have not used their technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

For the bot creation process, we have a solution architecture team. They will analyze the process and check for feasibility before proceeding to next level. They'll check whether the process can be automated, then prepare a document which will come to me. Then, I'll try to make the SDLC. I'll check whether the process is possible, then we'll go for development. This is the structure:

1. Analysis and feasibility study.
2. Documents preparation.
3. Development.
4. UAT.
5. Deployment.

There's a process requirement. If I get request today, it will take some two to three months to develop and close the incident.

A cost savings example is processing parental leave applications. The volume per day that one FTE can do is eight or nine applications. When using Automation Anywhere, we can do 15 applications per day. Another thing is the improvement in accuracy and reduction in errors.

I like Automation Anywhere better than UiPath because you can review the drag and drop activity. You can also review the code line by line. 

We are not using any other tools as we are partners with Automation Anywhere.

I used to work on UiPath. Automation Anywhere can easily be adopted and learnt. UiPath requires some programming skills and knowledge. Compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere is easy to learn with its drag and drop commands. In UiPath, the commands were difficult to work with and also architecture. 

Recently, Automation Anywhere introduced its cloud-based Control Room, where you can monitor the bot. Also, Automation Anywhere recently launched a mobile application, which UiPath doesn't have. 

Automation Anywhere has Credential Manager.

You can easily build and deploy the bots with it.

Train more people on a team to understand the tool to build teamwork. Share the development tasks.

Automation Anywhere has plugins for Excel, but we haven't integrated it with Oracle.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. I am certified in Automation Anywhere. I have the Advanced certification and am now doing the Masters certification. The courses were good and helpful for anyone wants to learn about Automation Anywhere. Everything is on the website, e.g., information about installation, configuration, bot development, and bot assessment. 

Automation Anywhere and RPA are not that difficult to learn. It can be learnt and be adopted easily, but you need at minimum practical knowledge. You need to take courses and scenarios. E.g., even if I know about object cloning, I still have to go and work with object cloning to understand the possibilities of object cloning.

We are not using IQ Bot.

Task schedules and runs are good candidates for bot automation.

We wanted to automate as many business processes as possible within the finance organization since the office that we work in today is called the finance transformation office. We transform all the business processes of finance for a better, simpler, scalable finance organization. We are constantly pursuing transformation of the finance organization as far as Cisco's changing dynamic business models. We are a predominantly product-oriented organization. We transformed our business models from products to software and subscription-based business model.

Users can develop for themselves. This is the end stage goal for our organization: To have our finance users developing automation for themselves. Automation Anywhere lets us do that, as users can develop the bots by themselves.

I have taken one of the finance processes, which is completely Excel driven, and consolidated more than 20 Excel files of large volumes of data by drawing pivot tables and all sorts of yield curves on the Excel files. I converted this structured, formulaic process to the bot. There are features within the Automation Anywhere which let you do types of keystrokes, formatting in Excel sheets, etc. The process used to take more than 30 hours for the user to complete on a quarterly basis. With the development of this bot, the bot can run the entire process within an hour and a half. It saves about more than 20 hours of time for the user. This is just one example. There are other bots saving hundreds of productivity hours per quarter. 

It lets users add value with their time other than focusing on downloading Excel files, consolidating, and drawing up formulas. Since everything is structured, these easily are incorporated into the bot's work.

Anybody can develop a bot by themselves. It's not a technical language oriented program. Specific skill sets with language learning skills are not required. Any finance person can get in and develop a bot with a little training on Automation Anywhere. They can go in and develop themselves. 

In the version that we have, there are some challenges with the browser-based applications, the cloning of the objects, and the solution's stability. 

Automation Anywhere must be able to maintain a consistent resolution. 

The latest edition, which is enterprise A2019, has better analytics and the cloud all integrated into the bot framework. 

The client version is getting challenging to use because you have to maintain a lot of infrastructure. You must have the machines to deploy the client. However, you don't need a large infrastructure, if you can do it on the cloud. 

I would like a Bot Store for MetaBots. The MetaBot feature needs to be expanded. E.g., I would like a copy/paste from the top row of Excel where I don't need to write a keystroke. Instead, I could just use MetaBot for this.

We have already launched more than 20 bots live into production. They are up and running. We are doing very well with these. We are in a convenient spot for delivering 50 to 60 more bots in the next couple of quarters.

Because it can accommodate 200 to 300 bots, the scale is not a constraint for us. It is scalable.

The technical support is good. I have contacted technical support of Automation Anywhere quite a few times during the process of developing a bot. Their responses were good and up to the mark. There were very responsive and proactive in resolving issues. They were on top in terms of supporting the features of the applications.

Our finance organization needed to transform itself to meet the changing business models. We established the finance transformation office to meet the entire organization's financing transformation needs. As part of that, we identified a couple of quarters ago that RPA was one of the software solutions which could help us automate several of our business processes. This is apart from the re-engineering and re-architecture that we do to transform our entire business process. Now, there can be some use cases within finance which can be transformed through usage of automation software, like Automation Anywhere.

We have streamlined several activities, cutting down on manual activities. This has happened over the last six to seven years.

I was not part of the setup process.

We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI.

At the end of the day, finance analysts expect faster outcomes while having their manual work taken away. There should be a more diligent way for them to add value and contributing to the organization through analytics and providing valuable insights. This removal of manual work can be done using a bot. That is the goal.

Our enterprise IT team chose Automation Anywhere as our product for doing automation. Automation Anywhere is one of the best, leading automation software tools for developing enterprise automation.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere.

I am excited about the Microsoft partnership that was announced today. Excel is a daily core tool for us. With an automation plugin, this works like a miracle for the finance team. The potential is unlimited, e.g., Office 365 and Internet Explorer will have plugins.

Our primary use for this product is BOE (Bill of Entry affecting imports in India) analysis and processing.

Previously, we were checking the inventory with checklists and two kinds of Excel validations, and sending the mismatches to have them reassessed in a manual process. Before four of us were working on the data reliability, and really three people were completely dedicated to this task full-time. We were repeatedly taking the Excel inventory and the Excel invoices we are getting from the different vendors, and then we would check all the attributes of the data. This would mean we had to review invoice numbers, invoice dates, currency codes — so many little things needed to be validated. The detail also had to be examined like the number of items, the SKU (Stock Keeping Units) numbers and check those against the item names by validating with a checklist.

So after, we created a bot with Automation Anywhere for that issue to speed up processing. Now the automated checking time is reduced to 15 minutes. That's all.

The product has improved our organization cost-wise and bank savings in transactions. Everything has been changed for the better. It is easier to track various domains, various kind of devices, and control recording of all the process. The quality of the results are improved, we spend less time and resources, so the time we save can be spent on other things. This all reduces the time spent on menial activities and reduces the cost of processing. It is very important that we have increased accuracy and control over data errors.

The best part of this solution is that this product has more capabilities than our previous solution with Excel. The error handling and sending mail — all those additional features — give us more control when using Automation Anywhere with less time and effort.

In the future, I think we would like to see more capability for integration and more customization with some features. For example, email records should have their subject like email that's been downloaded. Because it is not doing this, we now need a separate solution for this based on the subject line. Integrations that we'd like to see are that the product is more friendly with languages like Python and JavaScript. These are the type of integration we are expecting. Also, it should be more friendly with Excel commands which it does not seem to agree with or have so that we can customize the output.

The product is not working sometimes with the methods we prefer. If it is going to be a flexible product it should include some more common things. There are so many small issues with the product it is not as good as it could be.

We really have had no stability issues ourselves, or actually there were some minor things. There has been nothing we could not resolve.

As far as scalability, it is one of the most important things for us. We were looking for that only when we went to upgrade our process. We want to automate any of the processes that we can by using Automation Anywhere. It is the whole point for us using the product.

We have never had to call into technical support.

We were not involved in this decision to adopt this product.

For the implementation, almost everything was a little complicated. We faced issues actually but everything was manageable and then we addressed the issues and the initial setup was fully completed.

Mostly the issues had to do with security. The product was new to us and we had to set everything up for the first time so we had to learn about some things, like how to deploy the security features correctly. That is the kind of issue we faced as a learning curve.

During our onboarding, we had some issues and during integrations, we were having various small issues. But the reason for all of that is this was a new technology for us and we had to learn something about it. We learned by working with the product and all the integration issues and security things have all been resolved.

We did not use an external integrator, reseller, or a consultant. We implemented the product ourselves.

Our return on investment is that it costs us less. One of the problems with some licensing is if you have six employees and later 27 people are working, your cost can go up even if nothing extra is used. Now we need one developer's license only. One license and it is covered. There are more problems if you have to purchase one license per user. For example, if five people never work with the product and two of us work daily we are charged for the minutes for the CPU. It is not wasted.

The pricing strategy is one license, one creator. It is more complicated than that depending on the options you choose.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

When we update to the newer version, maybe it will have what we want and it will be better. It could be a ten if it were a perfect partner for us without any errors or had all the features we would like.

This is a very good product, but like managing other software and solutions, issues, bugs, and all various activities, you see the things that could be better. Obviously we think users will be satisfied by your outcome with using Automation Anywhere as we have had success. But right now it is an eight.

We are using it in all departments: management, sales, human resources, IT, and customer service.

These are some of the benefits that we have seen using RPA:

• We saw a 70 percent decrease in manual steps. If something took 10 steps to do, we are doing it in three steps today. 
• We see 100 percent accuracy in whatever we do, which wasn't something we could expect from a human worker. 
• We see a reduction in turnaround times. Something that used to take two hours to do, today takes 20 minutes to do. There is a 40 to 50 percent reduction in whatever is being automated in comparison with a human doing it. 
  

Three features that came up when we chose the product:

1. The user interface.
2. The Bot Store.
3. IQ Bot, which other RPA don't have.

We would like a better coding interface for developers. We would also like to have a user interface which reduces the time to learn the product so more people in the organization can use software, like Automation Anywhere, quickly automating processes.

As an organization, we feel the exception and error handling could be way better.

We would like the software not to change as often. Architectures were radically reinvented without informing the customer. This wasn't something we appreciated. 

Some of the stuff being used internally in the product, like Elasticsearch or open source, did not pass vulnerability ability assessment. This is another issue. 

We hope Automation Anywhere takes internal component security seriously as we are looking forward to the Automation Anyway A2019 launch. We hope it addresses some of these issues with error handling as well as component security.

Scalability works fine. 

One of the key features that we chose, the bot as a service or the BotFarm, when they launched version 11.3, they decided not to have the BotFarm anymore. This put us in a situation because we expected to have bots on demand, just like our cloud software. This would have been cost efficient for us to use. We hope to see this again being realized with A2019. I hope the scalability from an on demand basis improves.

A lot of the technical support is done by my teams. I do not have great visibility. As far as what my team has told me, it was a tedious process before. They have relaunched the entire support portal. It seems to be a lot more user-friendly to log tickets and reach out to people there.

Their customer success team are a great bunch of folks who try to support and get things done for you.

I have personally used RPA before. It is just the buzzword now. 

At the time, we were looking at or looking at replacing our complex, legacy platform which had a lot of steps. Our multiple, previous software tools that had a lot of Python, Perl-based scripting, and Perl website scrapping plugins.

The initial setup was extremely complex. Version 11.3 came with multi-forest Active Directory support and version 11.10 did not have that support. We had multi-forest Active Directory and it took us one month to resolve when we started implementing it. Again, this information wasn't communicated to us.

I hope going forward I see Automation Anywhere being faster, more transparent, and communicating more in advance than right now.

We had a terrible experience with a local integrator. I don't think that they were ready for the integration/deployment process. We spoke to Automation Anywhere who has implemented more stringent partner qualification schemes to take care of this issues.

We have not seen ROI at the present moment.

Our costs are approximately between $5,000 to $10,000 per license.

They have a ridiculously expensive bot licensing structure, especially for the Asian region.

Currently, we use Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath in my organization.

Start small. Conduct proof of concepts, then choose a process with a quick return on investment.

There are product issues. They have a reckless product roadmap. 

We have a lot of business use cases that we are using this tool to automate processes for. These include different business verticals, like credit, fraud, enterprise operations, and marketing. Each team has a separate dedicated RPA (Robotic Process Automation) team of its own.

We primarily automate processes for the banking and financial sectors. This means all credit related stuff, such as loan applications and operations.

I'm working on enterprise operations. We have different business processes that our business folks handle manually and our job is to automate them using RPA and the Automation Anywhere tool.

We are using the tool on-premise.

Automation Anywhere helps improve our organization by allowing us to automate processes that should not be manual. An example which we are working on currently is that we have a business process wherein we get emails from our business customer support providing monthly statements. Currently, we have a dedicated team who are taking the requests, going to our web, downloading the statements, and sending an email.

Because this does not have to be a manual process, we are currently working on automating the entire thing. So we'll be freeing up resources through automation which will save us close to 750k in a year.

The most valuable feature for me in the current tool is the ability to develop the code quickly. This is a feature which is out-of-the-box. It has about 90% of the things that we want, just included — a plug-and-play kind of solution. That helps us in quickly developing bots. It's robustness to access Excel documents is a useful feature because we use Excel a lot. So that kind of gels pretty well with what we need from the tool. So these two features are something which I can consider most valuable.

It is easy to use. You can get up and running using the training. It's pretty easy to get started with the tool. Only our technical team is involved in the development Automation Anywhere and bots, which is the direction our organization has chosen. We don't encourage non-technical team people to deal with it. That's our strategy.

We just did the PoC for IQ Bot, and it went fine. We have quite enough workload to be productive for this quarter, so probably early next year is when we are planning to start using IQ Bot.

One thing that they have to fix is scalability. We are scaling at a fast pace, and they promised us that they would implement multitrigger. If they don't get that enhancement out it is very inconvenient. When we asked when they could deliver the stable version of that feature, they said it would be sometime in August or September. But when I discussed this enhancement with one of the product owners, it doesn't look like they have had that on their development roadmap for even a September or October time frame.

But that's something which we are desperately looking for because we are scaling at a massive level, and without that feature, we are doing a lot of workarounds. It is a wasted effort. It would also be a good addition to the product. I am sure in a lot of organizations, are also facing that need or they'll come eventually to it. We have interacted with our customers and our partners and they agree. Some are already also in the same boat.

We would definitely like to see the Workload Manager (WLM). We thought that we would not need it. We thought that with the WLM feature, they were making a mistake and going nowhere. But right now, first and foremost, it is the most important feature I would like to have. The rest all are secondary for me. There are other organizations desperately waiting for that product. I don't see that the release will be happening soon.

I have using this solution for a year and a half.

The product overall is pretty stable. We do not see any big issues on the stability risk, so it is pretty decent in that way.

As with any other solution, it is evolving. We had our own challenges with the tool, but it is getting more stable as we progress. There is a learning curve.

We are using it on a pretty large scale. We currently have close to 60 bots running in production, but in the coming couple of months, we will scale up close to 120 bots. We have plans to scale up much larger, then eventually move to the cloud. That is in our roadmap.

A big problem that we are facing with the tool is that it is not scalable. For example, we have processes that are going to run for 36, 40 hours. It is running as a single trigger. Currently, Automation Anywhere doesn't support multitrigger. For multitrigger, you develop a solution once and install in multiple machines and run parallel. AA doesn't support this so we had to do workarounds to make that achievable.

We also got a tool from Automation Anywhere that was supposed to fix or patch a problem, but it didn't work. It was a horrible, pathetic product that they brought out when it wasn't ready. We had such a very bad experience using the extra feature. We worked with Automation Anywhere to get it to function. They also said that they don't know that the tool will work if you set it up because someone developed it and he left the organization. That feature is still not there in Automation Anywhere. Even in higher management, they instructed us not to use that feature, even for basic functionality. That's how bad the product was. I just discussed it with one of the product owners about the same, and they also kind of agreed that the solution was brought out prematurely. In all, they wasted our time on something that did not work.

We have tried to use tech support for this product and it was a pain. When we interact with them, we get all the lower level customer tech support. They have no idea how to solve feature problems. We might explain to them that a feature doesn't work right and only after four or five interactions, we asked to be escalated to a person who has good technical knowledge.

A person came on-premises and tried to explain a few things we had trouble with. We were much ahead of where they were because we did all the testing already. We could tell them more about what was working and what is not working than they knew. Again that person agreed that someone did the design and he left the organization. The person who came, who is representing the company didn't have complete knowledge of the product he was sent to fix. He just said to not use that product. Period. It is not the resolution we were hoping for.

We had already decided long before which product we were going to choose to use so we did not actually consider other products and used this first.

We scaled up pretty fast. Initially, it took a couple of months for our pilot, then we were up and running pretty fast.

We follow the same standard methodology which Automation Anywhere recommends for creating bots. When going through the process, we try to optimize it before we start doing development, then making sure the process is suitable for automation. It's a standard process that we follow across the board.

We have a consultant. and a vendor partner who worked on the installation. We are struggling with our vendor partner also. They are not up to the grade when it comes to knowing the product. So we are having a lot of challenges with our vendor partner setup.

Knowing about return on investment is not in the normal scope of what I do. But we have a lot of bots running which are saving time and effort while being more accurate, so I'm sure the company has an ROI.

Automation Anywhere University is pretty good. They make it available free for everyone. You can download and learn from it. The courses are tailor-made. It's pretty decent. One can just go through the courses and start developing bots straightaway.

We have evaluated other products: UiPath and Blue Prism. However, we chose Automation Anywhere for security purposes and the Control Room, so that it can be centrally managed.

Because I have experience with multiple RPA tools at an insurance-based company or a telco, I saw and worked with other tools, like Blue Prism, which are more efficient than Automation Anywhere. But as in financial institutions, like the banking sector, Automation Anywhere and some other products are predominant.

identifying the processes which need automation. If you're just trying to start up with your automation journey, the recommendation would be to identify low complexity fruits first, so everyone can get a taste of what automation can bring to the table. Then try to go for complex things, because if it fails, this will be a big obstacle in your journey. So, take smaller steps, then once everyone gets a taste of what automation can bring, there is no stopping necessary. Start slow, but scale and learn fast.

On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere around six or seven. The reason it is not a higher rating is for one critical thing: as your code gets longer, it is difficult to analyze. It's just lines of code going from top to bottom. It is pretty good at developing the code and does make things faster. But analysis is not effective. If I had to choose between six or seven, I would have to choose the six. 

The important thing for those considering the solution is to analyze what business processes are in place and select a tool appropriate for what needs to be accomplished.

We are not yet integrated with other applications. We are trying to integrate Automation Anywhere with Splunk, which is a dashboard that shows all the information in a dashboard. However, that's in the pipeline for early next year.

We do not use the Bot Store because we don't know the authenticity of the code that is running underneath. As a leading financial institute, we want everything to be transparent. We can't take code built by someone else not knowing where the data will go.

We do not use Citrix automation.

We do not use attended automation.

My advice is to really evaluate your business process before you choose a product.

The primary use case for this solution ranges from the web scraping to working on more complicated applications, which are built in-house. For example, in the case where we would have to get into an application that is not automation-friendly, we would use the OCRs to recognize the fields, insert information into the application then extract some of the information. We also do a little on the database front.

We are a solution provider for a back-end team who works on a different manual task.

We tried the same type of flow automation using a Python and VB application, but we don't have the leverage of OCR which is available from Automation Anywhere. 

Most of the automation that we currently handle is that which has already failed when using the previous versions with the VBAs and Python.

We are using this product on-premise, so we still haven't upgrade to the cloud.

In our organization, we track the number of hours we saved, not work for the customers, but work for ourselves. 

Those numbers were tracked in a tracker called Smartsheet. We saved approximately 10,000 hours of work for ourselves. The numbers are staggering, considering we have only been using Automation Anywhere for a short period of time.

I have not worked with all of the commands offered in this solution, but some of the helpful features are OCR and web scraping. 

The OCR application is excellent and has helped resolve many issues that I had been facing. Also, to some extent, the web scraping is more effective, and the delays are really good.

I am also a programmer with VBA, but I found that I am more comfortable with Automation Anywhere, because it is faster and you get more results within a short period of time. we use the Excel VBA.

Most of the times you find the solution that you are looking for in the Bot Store. You might have to customize here and there. It is a good place to get into because somebody might have the same type of scenario. However, I have not used it extensively.

This solution should be more user-friendly so that our clients can take a bot that we have developed for them, and then run it by themselves. As it is now, we write the VBA code and give it to the user, our client, and then they run the code. However, they do not like this. Having this is the next release would be helpful.

Automation Anywhere is intuitive. Initially, you may struggle a little, but once you get used to it, then it's intuitive and you don't really have to know all the commands beforehand. There is scope for improvement here.

The feature often asked about by the users, the product owners, is that they want to learn more about the bots themselves.

We have not used anything attended. As far as we are aware that feature not available, but it is to be released soon.

Version A2019 is something that could be beneficial to new users. At the same time, I cannot rule out completely that you need to have a very good programming skills. It will be easier if you have some knowledge on the programming front because you might be using a command which is already built-in. Therefore, you should know how the loops works and how the conditions work in order to implement them. If you want to do a bit of deep-diving into automation but you will need a little technical knowledge at this point of time.

We haven't had any issues with stability. The ecosystem provided is great, because we have bot stores that can be downloaded, so we don't have to start from scratch.

Before creating a bot, I can go directly to the bot store to see if the bot is already available. That way, I don't have to waste any time.

Most of the time we built the bots for ourselves. When we purchased the licenses from Automation Anywhere we had them provide us with training. It was approximately a week for the training.

Also, there was another training session for photo documentation purposes.

Automation Anywhere is an excellent example of a solution that scales up. 

When we develop a task we modularise it and upload it into the repository. If another team member is working on another project and they require a section of my bot then it then gets downloaded and modified. Somebody else plugs in the variables, etc. In this way, the scalability is great.

At the moment, there is no setup in place.

We don't have a Citrix environment. It's mostly web-based. We also have in-house built applications that we use for our day in and out operations.

The technical support team has been with me from the beginning of my journey with Automation Anywhere. I was not a good developer initially, so I give them all of the credit.

They have a very good support team. I would advise my colleagues to use the IT help desk as much as they can.

As developers, we have evolved. Initially, at the start of using automation Anywhere we had many struggles. We contacted support for some help and suggestions, and with the help they provided, we are now more comfortable with Automation Anywhere.

There were instances where they couldn't help me, but it was because of the task not being suitable for automation. I understand that there are hindrances in the evolution of a solution, but they helped wherever they could. I would say that in 80% of the cases, they were able to help me.

They need a better community support with online resources. Though, there are good resources in regards to other programming languages, such as Python, VBA, and .NET.

Previously, we had been using VBAs and Python, albeit our use in Python was not extensive.

We chose Automation Anywhere because we heard that you don't need to have expertise in a particular area, and anyone can develop a simple bot in a short time.

We still do not have a setup in place. We do have licenses, but we are trying to have more bot programmer licenses in place. As such, the deployment is still in progress, but from what I understand it is simple and straightforward. I expect that it will be completed within the next week or two.

Most of the team who were working on Automation Anywhere had a little programming background, such as VBA or Java. Initially, we struggled a bit to use the rich commands but Automation Anywhere provided initial training when we got our licenses. Somebody came and gave us training for three to four days. Then, it took about three to four months to transition from the PoC to using the bots.

We handled the implementation ourselves, and have not sought out help from anyone.

When we initially bought the licenses, we had the Automation Anywhere team come down to train us. This lasted for approximately a week. They also visited on another occasion for documentation, but otherwise, we work on our own.

We do a cost-benefit analysis along with a feasibility study. We do this initially when there is a project that is lined up. We look at how many hours the project will take. We also delivery time and its urgency. Even if the project may not save a huge number of hours, we still might pick it up because of the urgency. Sometimes, we also look at it from an error reduction standpoint. There could be a lot of errors coming out because it was manually processed and this may cause the company issues. With Automation Anywhere, we reduce these errors.

I was not involved in the cost or purchasing, but as far as I know, the return is great. There are a couple of projects that we have worked on where we could have saved approximately 4000 hours on just one project that we built in two to three weeks. This is the type of impact this solution has.

We have purchased licenses, but are trying to obtain more bot programmer licenses. That should be happening in the next week.

UiPath was the closest competitor that we were considering. We provided pros and cons for both UiPath and Automation Anywhere. There may have been a cost-benefit analysis done from management, but I was not involved in that area.

We just did a PoC with UiPath. We did not work extensively with it. The product was based more on a workflow model. Automation Anywhere will also have a workflow model with its A2019 version.

We were not compromising on quality for dollar value. If you are looking at it from all aspects then Automation Anywhere is the clear winner.

We can automate anything with Automation Anywhere. Initially, we were skeptical about whether this small project would be automated or not because we were not well acquainted with the Automation Anywhere capabilities. After using the product for a while, we understood its potential, such as the OCR capabilities.

My experience with Automation Anywhere to date has been great, however, there are areas that I have not explored which could be features that should be added or improved upon, such as APIs. I have yet to explore this area of the solution and there may or may not be room for improvement.

We used to use Excel VBAs. However, if you want to manipulate stuff in Excel files, you have to write the back-end code in VBA. This is more effective than writing your code in Automation Anywhere. There are no hiccups in integrating with VBA.

We have completed the 11.2 expert certification in Automation Anywhere University and are in the process of completing 11.3. The University has a lot of stuff in their repository. As a programmer, you might not use all those commands extensively in your development. It's a good place to learn, but I didn't see everything being learned in the University being implemented.

For anybody who is considering this solution, I would start by suggesting that they look at their business requirements. We looked at it from a business standpoint because in our day to day operations, we needed automation. This is how we realized we needed a solution. If you are doing web scraping or another type of mundane task every day then you need Automation Anywhere.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Automation Anywhere for product SLAs on the finance team. We are also using it for a difficult automation project. 

We have automated a lot of processes, e.g., claim processing and payments.

It is currently deployed on-premise.

We are helping to automate some of the manual tasks and help to achieve the SLA.

We have some products, like Clubcard, which is a shopper's card that we're using in the Star Market. We are using Automation Anywhere for that validation, raising requests, tracking the Clubcard, and when users get new Clubcards. All these things are done through Automation Anywhere. We use the API to get the status of card numbers. 

IQ Bot is great. We recently implemented two IQ Bots in our finance sector. Manually, we had one person doing a task that took five minutes minimum. With IQ Bot, we are able to do that one particular task in one and a half minutes. That is a huge time savings.

We have done some Citrix automation with MetaBots for claim processing. We use it for validation. It is working well.

We have a credential manager. We have the ability to store in an encrypted way. Whenever we create any bots, we also have bot IDs. Without the bot ID, we are not going to deploy in production. We have the option for the support team only to get access and share their screen with users. If there is a critical password, the user will only put down the password. If we have the bot ID and password, then our support team can directly get that from the application IT team. That support center of excellence team will put in the ID password and credential and see the bot ID and password.

The API feature is the most valuable feature for some process, especially for the Clubcard. It helps us with validation of databases.

We are able to do a lot of things with MetaBots.

The management works well.

One of the great things about Automation Anywhere is that it is a developer friendly. If someone doesn't know the technology, but is logically strong, they can easily learn the tool. This is very good for us. We can train anyone in a short amount of time. 

If someone is not technical, they can also easily learn the tool. You do not have to write in syntax.

We have a situation where the system is not capturing data properly. It is clicking on the UI but it is not able to expand.

We have trouble with large volumes of data in Excel and are not getting good results. I want all the functionalities that they have in the Excel added to our existing version or an upcoming version of the product, e.g., Macros and VLOOKUP.

We have had connectivity issues, such as the reporting of a bad gateway.

We have integrated Automation Anywhere with our SQL database. I heard in version A2019 that we can easily integrate Python too, which is great news. Up until now, I have not been able to implement Python in our Automation Anywhere task bots. Though, we can integrate with other applications, like artificial intelligence, and this is better.

We have not implemented this tool with our AI. We have AI and IBM Watson. We would like to get information (or services) from the Automation Anywhere team on how to connect and implement the AI, as this is a great thing in the market. I'm looking for what to do.

Sometimes, we are facing issue in unattended. If unattended mode is not working, sometimes it will work in attended mode. However, I don't want anything in attended mode. The process is rule-based and logic-based. We just have to schedule, then if the user wants to run from the Control Room, they can. To run attended mode, we have to login into the VM to start it and human activity is required.

The version we started with is not as stable as the current version. We are trying to move to version 11. We are also in touch with our CSM regarding the A2019 version, which Automation Anywhere should release in the next year

We have 50 bots live in our organization.

We have three environments: staging, pilot, and production. In staging, the developer creates and tests their bot for internal testing. After that, we deploy into the pilot environment. That is hypercare which is for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). It is there that we run the bot in unattended mode for one and a half weeks at least with huge volumes. If we have no issues nor errors, then we create a ticket to deploy into production, our center of excellence. This is what our support team does. They will deploy into the production environments. We keep an eye out for at least 10 to 12 days as hypercare. At 12 days in hypercare mode, if we are not getting errors, then we run it in unattended mode as much as we can.

We are using Automation Anywhere in our business units. We have plans to increase the level of the tool's use.

We are planning to move onto the cloud, but first, we have to see if it will work with our business SLAs. If it is good, we will move over. We need to do a test first to determine whether the bots work well or not, which will take about three to six months. Then, we will make a decision on whether to move over to the cloud, the A2019 version. My team is excited for this version.

We would move over to Microsoft Azure because our company is already using it.

The technical support team is supporting us well.

We needed a support guide from Automation Anywhere for the initial setup because we had standalone and a lot of clusters. We needed help from a support guy during our setup to determine whether to go with a standalone or cluster setup.

For the bot creation process, we first check the requirement. Then, we check with each application, whether it is applicable through the Automation Anywhere tool or not. Some applications, like Oracle, do not work correctly. We make a feasibility report and advise the developer to use certain commands only. We provide a process map, e.g., how to create the bot according to Automation Anywhere guidance and what are the coding standards provided. We deliver everything. Then, the developer will start building our bot.

In our organization, we are focusing on continuous improvement through this tool. We are improving day by day, but not focusing on the elimination of any employees. We are just focusing in our improvements and accuracy in our SLAs. Therefore, there are three things that we are focusing on:

1. Implementing our SLAs on time. 
2. Focusing on accuracy.
3. Focusing on our continuous improvement.

Automation Anywhere is profitable for us. As volumes increase and we have a lot of data, this takes time to complete manually. Bots can complete the work without impacting the business. 

We are saving time. Some processes that have taken 24 hours for our guys to do, now take seven to eight hours for our bots. That's our achievement. It also brings accuracy.

We save money indirectly. We are also improving the accuracy of our SLAs. 

I am using that Automation Anywhere Master Certification for version 11. Recently, this has been updated in Automation Anywhere University. Until this month, it's free to use. There are no charges. That's why I would like to complete it this month.

We are waiting for them to release version A2019 version of Automation Anywhere University.

Use the standard guideline that Automation Anywhere provided. Build a dry model for each bot. This will be useful for debugging. I give these diagrams to my developers.

When automating Citrix, we can install on the client. It can easily access objects, we can click anywhere and it can take data from anywhere.

We have a scenario where one process is working, but in another case, it is not able to capture everything.

This is a good product. This platform is great, but there are a lot of issues to resolve, including the Excel features.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to follow the instructions and the standards that are specified.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.