Automation Anywhere Reviews

In the digitization space, Automation Anywhere has some of the new bots, which are really good. This is making the invoice digitization as a use case quite helpful. The user interface is very interactive and easy to use. At the same time, for giving results, it looks very impressive. That is the use case that we are working on currently. That is one of the best use cases that I have dealt with from Automation Anywhere.

I think most of the keystroke level activities that users used to do in probably the last five years is now taken care completely by Automation Anywhere and similar RPA providers. They are now getting into the next segment of AI. I deal personally with a lot of AI tools in my company, which has got a lot of use cases in this industry. I see Automation Anywhere now getting into this particular segment, and it's very good for the industry

The Bot Store is something very impressive because it is one place where you find a lot of free bots that you can test and try different bots. At the same time, you have developers who can create different bots and put them into that marketplace so multiple people can use those bots. It is a win-win situation both for the developers, Automation Anywhere, and even the customers.

Some things that I do not see as of today are interactive chat or video interface. These are things that I will look for in future. I saw something like picture recognition, but something like a video or voice recognition is something that I'm looking for in the Automation Anywhere platform as an end user and even as a reseller.

5 years

Stability is great from what I hear from the users. As I'm the sales division, I get this feedback from my operations team. Even the technology support that Automation Anywhere provides is very good. At the same time, they have a lot of good B2B services at very low costs which helps in the end-to-end development, deployment, and successful implementations.

Scalability is one of the best things about most of the RPA bots. Once you create one, scalability is just about multiplying them. We've not had challenges with scalability, given we provide the right infrastructure.

As mentioned above this support has been good and we always look forward for continued support here

As a service provider company we have worked in alternate service provider. This is client specific

Straight forward

We are the vendor team here

6 Months to 1.6 years depending on the process we looking to automate

may not be able to comment here.

UI path and AA are the ones on top when we compare

I would surely rate it as a 10 (out of 10). There are other RPA providers as well in this good range, but I think AA is in the top three. I would rate it ten along with another competitor as well who's doing well for us.

If you are new to automation, do try Automation Anywhere or a similar partner. Once you do that, then there's a lot more in the market to explore, e.g., you have the big players, like IBM Watson, Azzure, AWS etc. and one place stop will be a company like Wipro which can help you chose a mix. If you're not started anywhere, then I would recommend to start with Automation Anywhere for RPA.

We use it to automate repetitive tasks. When an employee logs into an organization and their work is mundane (doing a repetitive task), I personally feel that it will take a toll on their motivation. We have to do something better as human and it should be more creative. Any repetitive task has to be automated. This improves the morale of employees and will bring out a lot of creativity in them to make more decisions. This is how people start to innovate and how companies grow.

There was a particular use case where we had to automate a customer's email. This customer had a couple of customers to whom they have been writing for intern management. We needed to monitor the intern management emails and pick up the right keywords from the emails, automatically go to the CRM tool, and book a ticket for them. Then, we had to go back to the customer with the acknowledgement email. It was quite interesting.

Initially, there were some hiccups. They were not able to automate the regular chain of automation because of multiple API issues. Then, they thought RPA wold be a better solution and approached us. One of the interesting things was the data that they prepared for us was unstructured. Handling RP unstructured data was a bit hard, but we were using Automation Anywhere. We were able to find the right hot words because they were following certain patterns. We were able to find those patterns within emails.

Bot Insights is the most valuable feature. We don't have to struggle with generating metrics around how the bots are performing. This information coming out of Automation Anywhere is useful to us because of the way the metrics are generated. It inspires confidence in our customers. 

Version 11 is a bit heavy. At times, it takes a toll on the computing resources. It consumes a lot for computing power. We have seen multiple instances where computers or the client has crashed because of this particular problem. Automation Anywhere can improve this a lot. However, the A2019 version will be a lot lighter because it is all web-based. In the future, we expect to see lighter version, but for now, it is okay.

The features around holding and handling Excel data need to be improved. They need to be able to handle data tables, data variable, and Excel numbers.

They need more scripting integration.

It is pretty stable. The error handing features are pretty good. 

Scalability is awesome and on par, but they could do better.

The technical support has been brilliant and good. They have been quick to respond with the right answers, as much as possible.

Our customers get to know about RPA through multiple channels. They are looking to join the race. 

The push for RPA is usually from bottom to top in a company. Someone does research on RPA then needs to convince management. Afterward, they will contact us to run automation scenarios for them.

It is not a one click installation. We need to need to install the SQL Server, then we need to connect them all. This is where I think a normal agent wouldn't be able to do that. We need to deploy senior engineers to do this since it is slightly difficult. We had to train our IT guys on this.

Compared to the competitors who have a fast, swift installation, Automation Anywhere's installation is hard and needs work.

Our customers have better use of their manual resources. 

Costs savings have been seen by employing bots for multiple shifts instead of people. Bots are also more stable.

Automation Anywhere has better brand and marketing than its competitors. They have a lot of success stories from top level people from around the world, which is encouraging.

Go through the Automation Anywhere training modules to understand the tool. Developers should go through the developer training module while business analysts should go through the business training module. This will give you an idea of what Automation Anywhere can do and what it can't do.

We did the PoC in 2016. It was mainly in the services process. We were more focused on the company billings, where there were multiple subprocesses and sub business units. We have did the complete landscape of more than 15,000 FTEs. We are talking around 153 different work types. As the main lead, I was to provide the real-time support to the customers who needs us to fill out required details. That was a completely repetitive task. We decided to conduct a PoC on that, which we did.

If we talk about the automation RPA. it definitely has worked very well for us. I'm talking about giving good savings, about more than 180 FTE savings, after implementing more than 200 plus bots. It has worked well. As an organization, it has supported us very well, and also for our customers.

Our task was very repetitive in nature. We had to fill information from Excel to some application. That was quite repetitive and the volume was also very high. Initially, we did the PoC from that process, which was easy to implement. Because it was a first for us, it was very easy to implement. That has provided good savings for us, where we have implemented 13 bots with the reduction of 16 FTEs.

There were also some tasks where we needed a cognitive approach or an OCR solution. There were some scanned documents in a PDF format. We were in the initial stages and struggled at that time. I'm talking about in 2018. We struggled to get them into the structure format.

In the current stage, there are lots of opportunities in terms of claims, insurance, and banking where we need AI and cognitive solutions to automate unstructured documents. That is a need of ours. Automation Anywhere should improve in this field so they can provide support for artificial intelligence and cognitive solutions.

Initial days, we struggled. When we started the automation for six weeks, the solution design was put on hold because of the system capability. But, they provided us good support and upgraded their systems, and now, it works smoothly.

If you ask me to rate the technical support from one to five, I will rate them a four. I will say that the technical support is good. If it is required that they provide their resources, they will send their resources to your organization to support you in terms of development and technical support. 

I have experience with UiPath too. If we talk about Automation Anywhere and UiPath, it's a completely different experience. Our work now is more for the claims and payroll processes where thought and human intervention are involved to process transactions.

This is now a completely different experience. Initially, it was a very repetitive task. Now, manual intervention is required. We have to go and read through documents. We have to read through histories. In terms of that, I can rate equally Automation Anywhere and UiPath. However, if we talk about artificial intelligence in 2019 and what Automation Anywhere is coming out with, it is great then.

The initial setup was not that great. The road was very up and down. We struggled. A lot of the features were not compatible with applications which we are using. That was the reason. This was the initial days, we are talking about 2016 to 2017. The buzz was not as much as we are having now. 

From that time until now, Automation Anywhere has upgraded their systems. They are at a good pace now. But, at the initial stage, we struggled in terms of getting things sorted. We also needed support, so the Automation Anywhere team sent some support to us who helped the developers in terms of coding and finding solutions.

Some of the features were not very well identified at that time. The Automation Anywhere team provided the support for that. Initially, it was like a rollercoaster for us.

If we talk about time, normally bots take more time than users. The benefit is the bots can work 24/7, if your application supports. With the solutions that we have now, we can have attended and unattended bots.

There are savings in terms of ROI, but It's not only about savings. It's about the customer experience nowadays. If we talk about the customer experience, your experience will be improved. There will be a lot of reversals which happen when you are processing transactions manually. When you are implementing the RPA, you eliminate those reversals. You deliver the product right the first time. That is more important in terms of keeping your organization having consistent growth. That is a very important thing. 

You will see savings, not in the same year, but in the coming years. In two to three years, you will definitely save money.

Automation Anywhere works very well. When you have a large number of accounts, have to automate, and the task that is repetitive, you can use Automation Anywhere. The features work very well.

I will rate it an eight (out of 10). We had that experience where we struggled to have the structured format of scanned documents and PDF formats. There, we struggled a lot. That is the reason for the rating. The rest, I think is perfect. The services are fine. Automation Anywhere services are good. It is easy to implement. The best thing: It's simple and easy to implement.

When we started using Automation Anywhere, it was the elimination of mundane tasks, to free up employees who were doing repetitive tasks, and to ensure they could do better quality work. So, we started off with the finance department, where we permitted our accounts payable, as in the billing process. Now, we have slowly moved on to other departments, like HR, quality, and projects.

Since our implementation, I can vouch for the fact that it is very easy to use. You do not need to know a lot of coding, even the business users, who have virtually no idea of coding, can easily operate it. They can run their bots and have the analysis ready for higher management. This is something which provides a great ease of use, and also in part why it is scalable.

Initially, once you have set up the solution and the implementation is done, then it doesn't take too long to scale up bots from one to a 100. Other than that, the professional services team (the customer support team and customer service manager) is committed to your success. This is a good sign, as they help us to achieve our business goals.

If it is in the cloud, then you have a lot of scope of doing it even faster because you spend a lot of time in installation of virtual machines (VMs) alone. So, they are coming out with that, which is good. 

I believe that if there is some functional expertise within the organization, this helps in improving the process timelines even more because our current architects are totally IT-based. If they have some functionalities, that would help in automating processes faster. If we want automate some Automation Anywhere processes, we have to do it from scratch. If they are already there, we can use and scale them, then when can customize them. This is something worth thinking about.

As of now, we have not seen any major problems. It's quite a stable product. It's reliable also because we have seen quite good straight-through processing. 

We quickly moved from one bot to 15 to 20 bots in about two or three months. I've seen other companies do even better and go to around 500 to 600 bots. So, scalability is something which is pro for Automation Anywhere always.

I would break it down to two separate departments:

1. The Professional Services, who help us in automating the processes, have been quite phenomenal. The support that has been given, not only automating, but also re-engineering of the processes for the better has been great. 
2. Technical support is quite proactive. They have bettered their customer support portal. They made it better.

So, we have not faced any issues as of now in this regard.

The initial setup was quite complex. We have faced an issue. During the initial implementation stages, it took longer than we expected. It affected our timelines to a certain extent. Once that was done, it was quite seamless. I think now that they are coming out with a cloud solution, this will help a lot in reducing the implementation duration. It will help future clients get results even sooner.

As it has been a good experience until now. The product is good and helps in solving business problems. Because of the ease of use, I would definitely give it around an eight point five (out of 10). So, eight point five (out of 10) would be my number.

I have had an opportunity to work on Automation Anywhere a lot. I have worked from version 8 of Automation Anywhere through versions 9, 10, now 11, and they are going to launch a new platform A2019. I have also worked on other modules of Automation Anywhere, like IQ Bots, MetaBots, Bot Insights. 

There was a process that we built as a reusable process that can be reused. It was a use case used by multiple companies, which can be used by multiple companies. We built it to be reusable so it can be just plugged and played. If you are a vendor or want to purchase that product from us, we can configure that product very quickly and give it to you. That was the use case which started a big change. It was a finance and accounting process.

This helped my organization, because if I want to build that solution from scratch, it would take almost ten to twelve weeks for the development. But if I have a reusable solution for that part and a company needs it, I can just customize it and give to that company within two weeks time. So, I save ten weeks of development time. It only requires customization of two weeks so my company gets good profit and the end customer is satisfied with the work that we have given them. It's a win-win situation for both of us.

The best part about Automation Anywhere is the easy to use UI. It's very user-friendly. You have everything that you want in front of your eyes. You just have to drag and drop, then build your logic accordingly. That's the biggest changing factor compared to other tools.

I would like to have reading from a handwritten text, which they are bringing in the next version. That will be a good thing.

The older versions, like version 8 and 9, were not very stable. With the changes that they have brought into the picture, it's now a very good tool and much stabler.

Scalability is easy with Automation Anywhere if you are on a cloud platform. 

They have a built-in feature for queuing so you can scale your product. It's a workload management feature so if you have fewer volumes than you can run on one or two bots. If you have a larger volume, then you can scale up to any number of bots. Scaling up or down works in real-time.

Their support team is very good.

It depends on how professional you are. If you are good, pro user, it will be easy for you. Even if you are a new user, there is an express version of installation that you can use and install it very quickly. If you are a pro user, you can always go with the custom mode and the installation is still very easy.

I have worked on other tools as well. I have worked on UiPath, Blue Prism, and Pega Robotic Process Automation.

I would like to give a nine (out of 10) to Automation Anywhere.

They are doing a great job. I don't think there is an area where they need to improve because they are doing a great job and improving themselves.

I have overall 10 to 12 years of experience in RPA. I started RPA doing VBA. That seemed like I needed coding, and for coding alone, I wasted more time. I came to know Automation Anywhere, which is a product that automates RPA processes in an easy manner. 

I was interested to learn it. I had an opportunity to attend training for Automation Anywhere for almost one month. I started with version 10.5. It was really interesting.

From the beginning, before I interacted with Automation Anywhere, I thought that I would also need to code something using the details, then it will take more time. That is not the case. If I want to automate something, I can easily drag and drop. There is any function that I need for a business case or some critical thing that I need to automate, then we can create a condition, have a API, use Excel automation, or do everything together. 

Most companies in the industry are facing the task of automating unstructured data or repetitive tasks. It's too difficult to use some of the other RPA tools, VBA, Java, .NET, etc. So, when I try to automate something using Automation Anywhere and I want to consolidate something when there are a hundred Excels in the folder, I can easily use my files and folder option. I can put in a condition without a need to code. I can just drag and drop. I can open Excel, select all those things, and put it altogether, then send it to my client. So, it's very easy to interact with Automation Anywhere.

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the value of feature lessons, like I had a session for A2019. I attended a session for 2019, which is very impressive. It's weightless. There isn't another system that I have found like this in version 11.3. Every system is busy. With the new version, I can easily open my browser and navigate. I can automate it wherever it is, and that's really interesting.

I face little challenges when I move code to production. In Automation Anywhere 11.3, when the bot is running until it loops 24/7 in my development and UAT environment, we don't have our antivirus on it. When it comes over to production, there is an antivirus running on it. However, we don't know what time it will be scheduled. My client is taking care of that. So, when I raise a ticket with Automation Anywhere, they share some suggested documents to exclude those lists from antivirus. When I approach my client, they want to exclude those things because they are treating them as maybe not secure.

What I am suggesting, when using A2019, if there are any additional features to exclude those antivirus scans until after my task is completed, then the antivirus can start scheduling. Then, I can easily tell the client that the priority are running and the Automation Anywhere scans can wait until after the release.

I had a chance in Intellect Design Arena to go from installation to deployment. This was the first process with RPA in Intellect Design Arena, so people were thinking it's the first project that we have with Automation Anywhere. However, we are very experienced and can automate nearly anything.

It's obviously reliable. It has a reusable component. If you compare some of the other RPA tool, they are more difficult to explain. We need to create one solution design with a low level and high level each for everything. When it comes to Automation Anywhere, and someone has joined, they can easily understand the way of the coding. When you see the code of the structure that we do, it's really impressive and anyone can easily understand it.

Their guys will take maximum only two hours to solve the biggest problems. If I need any clarification, I will raise a ticket. However, their people won't message me when replying back, "Are you checking this setting?" Their people will call me and ask, "How can I help you? This is the issue. Have you followed the steps by testing or calling it something different." Instead of sending a mail and wasting time, their people will directly call me and ask, which is the best thing with the Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is easy. As a first step, it will ask for the location. As a second step, if you want to add an SSL certificate or database. There are just four steps of installation. It's very usable. Anybody can easily install Automation Anywhere, if they want.

I have used UiPath and a basic version of Blue Prism. 

When I compare it with other RPA tools, Automation Anywhere seems pretty good. It's a user-friendly tool. Anyone can easily understand it. If there is an error, you can easily debug it from the developer level. In Automation Anywhere, the error handling happens in the easiest way. In case of an error, we send an email. It's not too difficult code to understand. There's only beginning and ending error handling, which is easy to understand. 

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

It has made our life easier during the interim process with what we do in the banking sectors.

I'm in the banking sector, so there will be some data to be extracted from web applications that I have worked on and SAP automation suite too. There was an interim process where we extracted the data using Automation Anywhere. It is quite easy. Before, there was about four to five resources to extract it. Now, with automation, this has helped us reduce the time to two to three minutes, then the work will be done. That is one thing. The SAP automation suite is a very good platform to automate the things.

The best part is I'm a developer. I can automate end-to-end processes and use the automation in every process. That is the best thing.

It is much easier for Excel automations, getting data from their web applications, and extracting data and validating it, then sending it to clients' mail and giving it all the stakeholders as well. That is the interim process that we need to have done, which is the best part. It can done with time-savings, good accuracy of the data extracted, and endurance.

As for the stability of the product, we can use it in any use cases or to automate anything, like manufacturing or for the banking sector. We can automate all things. The stability is quite good. It is easy to use and user-friendly. You can automate whatever you do manually and day-to-day things work. We can automate repetitive tasks as well.

We can handle it if it crashes. We handle it by logic using exception handling. I am using 11.10. I've used Automation Anywhere version 10 to its current version. There are many commands that I have used. Before, there were only so many commands, like MetaBot, where we used to have only four or five commands. Now, it is entirely different to use. In the newer version, there are third-party things, and MetaBots. It's quite easy to automate things and get all the work done in a fraction of a second. It's helpful and makes our life easy.

The IQ Bot is pretty good. We can run maximum 150 documents, save them, and automate that process. That's quite good for me.

I have asked many questions of the technical support team. They replied to me with very good answers. When I'm stuck in any part of the coding, then I'll go and ask them. They have given me very nice support. It's pretty good how they are ready and they have supported me when I've asked questions in a call.

I was not involved in the decision to bring in Automation Anywhere to the company.

One to 10, I can give it a nine. We still have to use it and it's not being urgently used. After using it, we can tell how it is being used and how we can make use of it.

They have pretty good commands which we have used. We will be getting everything in one web server, where can use MetaBot and also IQ Bot. They are providing an all in one application. So, it is quite good.

We are planning to introduce a bot for every employee in the organization. There are around 9,000 employees in our organization. We are trying to introduce a bot for each one. That's our use case currently. We are working on how to improve their day in, day out life, how to make them work efficiently, removing repetitive tasks from day-to-day work, and give them important tasks/solutions that they are supposed to work for.

A valuable feature of Automation Anywhere for my needs is IQ Bot because it covers most of the semi-structured and structure data. That's where we are struggling a lot. So, IQ Bot is a very good solution to know and bring onboard for the automation of unstructured and semi-structured data.

Another valuable feature in Automation Anywhere is the analytics, like what data is coming, the process, and the number of times it's processed. That information is very powerful in Automation Anywhere.

I am looking for artificial intelligence and machine learning. I hope that they introduce them in A2019. I'm looking forward to what will be there in A2019 because that's the area that we need to go forward. We are looking for Automation Anywhere to put up their efforts to make it easier by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. Along with RPA, this would make our automation journey very easy. We can bring more processes into automation, that's where I am looking for automation to focus on.

It's a very stable, reliable product. We know a lot of use cases for customers that are running successfully. It's a pretty good product and very stable.

It's scalable. The analytics are very powerful. We can give the customer what has happened with the bot, how much time it ran, and how much time is ideal. All this information, we can easily show how successful it is, how much our productivity it is giving to them, and what ROI they're getting at the end of the year. It's pretty easy to go with Automation Anywhere.

We get a lot of support from Automation Anywhere. For any issue, we just call the people, and they're ready to be there. They send up people to our organization to set up and resolve issues. Any sort of glitches which we are facing, we can contact them anytime. They're ready to give us a solution. They even send up people to our premises to look and give the solution for us.

It is very straightforward and easy to install. They are going to introduce version A2019 online without a need to to install. There will be just one click of the URL to start developing within a minute or two, and it will start. There's nothing easier than that.

Money-wise, we get a lot of ROI. Efficiency-wise, it removes all the repetitive tasks from a person. An engineer's job is not to enter the data, check the Excel everyday, and put the data from Excel to somewhere application. If you automate the process and let Automation Anywheret do it everyday, you have a lot of time for more complicated issues. Engineers are meant to resolve issues, not doing the repetitive tasks, like Excel. Efficiency-wise, it is very good. ROI, It's also pretty good.

I can give a 10 (out of 10). It's a perfect product. It's made my life very easy and a lot of people's lives very easy. It removed a lot of people's hectic, repetitive, boring work. You give a lot of free time to people, so they can do some other work which they really want to do. It's a very good product.