Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use for the product is to automate business processes. Mostly this means financial processing. We have a lot of use cases in finance. For finance alone, we have 30+ bots in production. Other bots are for a variety of other business uses like the supply chain, networks, and business processes. We have 400+ bots in production as of now, all together. 

We have automated business processes, like finance, supply chain, network systems, and payment systems.

We are using it on-premise and migrating it to the cloud at the end of the year.

The product has improved our organization by allowing us to better use our resources. We can have a strategy implemented using bots and make better use of our time instead of spending it on repetitive tasks or tasks the bots can do more efficiently.

The most valuable thing about using this product is that we are able to use the time that we spent doing manual processing for other progressive purposes. The bots we implement free up our time. The second best part is that we don't need to see the automated processes happening.

We have business user utilizing the bots who don't have any technical expertise. We trained them, and they're able to do a couple of minimal bots which are required for them.

For us at this point, I don't think the product needs more features. There is already a new release coming up with a bundle of new features which we will have access to and have to learn. As a user and developer, I only look at stability. That's it. I want the most stable environment — a stable version of the product — where I can close my eyes and sleep and the bots run and do their jobs.

The basic system is very ease to use, but the difficulty comes when we make changes. For example, any change in the name, even if we have wild characters in place, the bot fails to identify the filename. It identifies the same filename in non-prod, and it does not identify the file in production.

We need a more reliable tool. Sometimes, the same check (a 70 percent scan) identifies numbers, and sometimes it does not identify the numbers. We are not sure why it is behaving weird.

We don't use the Bot Store because it is not legal for us to use.

I have been using it for almost two years now.

On a scale of one to ten, I can rate the stability between seven and eight. We have found that sometimes a little change in the environment brings down an application or a bot stops working. We are working on that issue. Stability improved from three out-of-ten to between seven and eight. We hope to bring that stability up to at least a nine.

The solution is very easy, but the tool behaves weird sometimes, environment to environment. It is not as robust as it has been designed. The smallest changes will bring down the bot. It's not capable of environment to environment changes. We have to make sure that the bot is running in each environment. 

Be a little patient while developing because the tool behaves weird. Even 11.3 is not behaving well. Once it starts working, it will work.

As of now, we are migrating from a Micron database. Once we have completed that, we believe the scalability will be a cakewalk.

We have almost 500 bots spread across different portfolios. They are scheduled and running on daily basis.

We did not integrated this solution with any other applications. This is running as a standalone thing in our environment.

We are in different time zones, but we still get a response from technical support when we call. On a scale of one to ten, I can say tech support is an eight. The thing that would make support a ten is that we get a solution on the fly when we contact a person in support. Sometimes they provide us some other solution that we already know or a workaround. We don't need alternatives, we need solutions that work.

The login mechanism seems to be only understood by the AA guys. We raised a ticket since we don't understand the login mechanisms most of the time.

Initially, we did the certification program from Automation Anywhere University. It could be better than what it is. It might have been upgraded recently. We took it more than one and a half years back. The ease of doing the course could have been better. You need access to a system when going through the course and completing it. There was no simulation. We were in the initial stages of procuring the systems, so it was a little tough for us to complete the courses too.

I was not involved in the decision to move to Automation Anywhere. It was a big decision handed down from the top management.

The initial setup was complex. Because we are in the finance industry, the initial strategy had to take a lot of data into account which needs not to be secured and not exposed to the outside world. So we struggled a little with how that has to be implemented. For example, passwords are critical data. We came up with a cyber bot at that point in time to deal with the potential password issues. 

The business team has a lot of doubts about how Automation Anywhere is being implemented and the processes it affects.  Because of this, it was really a huge effort to make them understand what we are doing. Any time we would have to make changes to infrastructure, even a small change on the infrastructure side could make an application unstable or make a bot come down.

We have got to put in more hours at this point to make the implementation stable and further deployment possible.

Bot creation process:

1. We have a PDD document available once the use case is identified. 
2. Once the PDD is available, if it is a legal/security issue, then we go for the next stage: development. 
3. We develop the SDD. 
4. Based on the SDD, the bot is developed. 
5. Once it is all developed and the UAT testing is done, we'll show it again to the legal/security.
6. Then we go for the approval across the business teams. There will be lot of approvals required. 
7. Once it is approved, then it goes to production. 

We'll create a bot ID in-between once the use case is good.

Based on the complexity of the bots, it takes six to 16 weeks for us to create bots (pilot to completion).

Initially we did use a consultant to get going with the implementation. It was a small group of guys who were also in India who we had come to work with us. Our experience with them was good.

When all the big problems were solved and there was nothing immediate on the plate to resolve, we were able to make out what we needed to do and judge the steps to take ourselves. So we slowly got away from support from the implementation group. 

We are able now to rely on the support that we are getting from Automate Anywhere technical support.

We just started looking at the fruits of our labors to understand the return on investment so we do not have a clear picture of the actual value yet.

We are not converting to a dollar amount. We are saving time. Last year, we save around 50,000 hours.

For Runner we paid around five-thousand dollars and for Creator we paid around three-thousand dollars.

The cost depends on the environment of an organization. I don't have the exact figures, but these are the production figures provided to me. 

We don't have a license for cognitive document processing yet. We are identifying the use cases for it.

We also evaluated UiPath, and for the attended bots right now, we'll be using UiPath, not Automation Anywhere. When we evaluated Automation Anywhere, it did not reach the same level as UiPath for management on attended mode, e.g., a huge number of licenses on attended mode.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a seven. Because we did not explore any other RPA tool as of now, and we are exploring UI parts without knowing more, it is hard to compare. 

The only thing that keeps me from rating it higher independently is the stability. Maybe it's stable in some other companies, but somehow we don't seem to share that stability in our environment. Because we have virtual machines that have to be up and running all the time and they are mostly Windows-based, Windows may also one of the reasons why stability is not so good. I don't blame the automation tool directly, but it could be more robust.

As far as giving advice to people considering the product, I say to give it time and learn to use it because it is the best. If the process is clean, we can automate to any extent.

The primary use case is for the financial services industry where we do tax credit for different departments. We do automation for them. 

If I have to go into an application and download the information to do some cleanup activity, then I have to do that by manually. This might take somewhere around an hour or an hour and a half. By using Automation Anywhere, I'm saving that time. I can use that time for a valuable purpose.

IQ Bot is a valuable feature. It processes unstructured data to structured data. It helps me by making tasks less time consuming. It reduces the effort it takes versus manually.

I would like to have some of the features that I have seen for future releases. I'm using the outdated version, as compared to the current one. That's the reason I'm rating it as a seven out of 10. If I was using the latest version and all its features, then I might rate it a bit higher.

In terms of stability, the tool is stable. I don't see errors occurring during the production or  development stages.

Because I am using an older version, I am rating the scalability as a seven out of 10. I feel a lack of convenience when I try to scale it. When I use an upgrade version of Automation Anywhere and I don't feel this anymore, then I will rate the scalability better.

We have reached out to Automation Anywhere when we deployed our system. I was not able to use a few of the commands and the system was overwriting a set of folders. Then, we got support from the Automation Anywhere tech center.

I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

Automation Anywhere is installed with a VM, then it will be handed over to us. That's how it works.

We have a center of excellence team.

We calculate our ROI as FTE and dollar savings.

It costs up to $1,200 per license.

No other competitors have the cloud-based feature that Automation Anywhere is launching with its A2019 version. I am excited to explore this feature more.

I recommend Automation Anywhere. This product makes my life easier. It has been a very robust product to use in all our segments.

The primary use case is for day-to-day activities. We are also automating the activities that the SMEs are doing.

We are an agriculture-based company. We have automated finance, HR and MDM for B2B. We have automated more than 300 processors within a year and a half. 

Human errors have been rectified due to bot usage.

• We can easily use the drag and drop.
• We can connect to the OCR capabilities. 
• We use the MetaBot and IQ Bot. 

We could use more accuracy with IQ Bot.

We want to automate fully with Citrix. However, we are only able to do this at 70 to 80 percent.

The stability is good. We have not had any downtime.

Everyone uses it.

The technical support is great and responsive. Whatever issues we face in the production or our environment, the support team will help us within a short amount time. This is helpful to us when automating all our processes.

Last week we had some issues with our current version, the technical support rectified the issues with a day.

We went with RPA to reduce human errors.

It's easy to set up.

We install the Automation Anywhere Control Room and VMWare on our clients' machines.

Our customers have seen ROI.

Customers chose Automation Anywhere because it is good to use. Security-wise, it matches the competition in the market.

I would definitely recommend Automation Anywhere. From a technical perspective, developers can easily create bots and get things done with this tool.

Day-to-day, the Automation Anywhere improvements have been good.

We use it more in finance and HR processes, such as payment processing or validation of data. It is used to validated data from two different systems or putting that data into an application. There are multiple use cases.

It has changed our mindset. People have started to think about automating things and come up with new perspectives, alternatives, or improvements by which automation can be implemented.

• Service
• User experience
• Feature coming out soon in the RPA.

It is user-friendly and quick to complete automation.

There are security certifications on the tool, but there are still places where our organization has highlighted that there needs to be an improvement on data-related encryption. That is something which needs to be changed or improved.

My main worry is about the security. My organization is very concerned about the data. Data in transit is mostly covered through encryption or TLS 1.2, but there are few things which have been identified which need to be improved.

We need a better way of getting upgrades or defect fixes. It is creating problems for us, as we have to go for a completely new version. Maintaining and managing existing bots, then coming up with new ones takes a lot of time. We would rather have a batch fix than an installation to an installation.

It is a stable platform with a few exceptions. Overall, it's a dependable platform which we can use for RPA.

We have faced issues with the upgrade. As an organization, we can't afford to have periodic migrations. Automation Anywhere is often coming out with new releases. If it's a bug fix or a patch update, that is a good thing. However, if it is a complete switchover or an installation, that needs proper planning. Obviously, time is consumed for this.

It has a scope for increasing which is what we are targeting. We are having sessions in our organization where people are coming up with more use cases.

We have been happy with technical support. Whatever the problem, we get a response with the status. Even if the issue is not resolved, we have transparency.

It was complex to begin with because we are all so new to it. Getting the business come up with use cases was initially difficult because everybody was new to it. Over a period of time, we got to know what has to be done.

We initially use EY for the deployment. Our experience was overall good because we were new to this RPA, it was a good learning experience having a COE playbook in place. Our basic baby steps, we did those with them, which helped us grow.

We have seen ROI.

Have your CEO set up a business user to do the automation day in and day out. If a business user is building or developing RPA, he will know the ins and outs of the process better than a coder or third-party.

There is not one specific use case in the sense of what we use the product for. In the broader scope, it would be automation. But right now we have several applications. We started our journey with the tool in 2017, and we have automated several processes in finance, IT, and engineering. 

In finance, for example, we have automated cash application, billing processes, reporting, payment processing, and we are using IQ Bots to automate our invoice processing. We completed the pilot, which provided us with phenomenal results. So we tested with a small entity with 30000 invoices and around 300 suppliers with a high level of success.

The character extraction capability of IQ Bot is much, much better than the other OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engines that you have in the market today. So we are completely pleased with that, and we are planning to upscale our invoice automation processing.

Today while we look at the opportunities in front of us, our customers are expecting us to be more productive and execute with greater speed to be relevant and competitive in the market. The expectation as far as the accuracy is really very high, and we need to be compliant. We have experienced that the more manual and hands-on that we are that there is a higher risk of being non-compliant.

There are skilled companies who are spending more time on transactional activities. For example in the engineering field, there are engineers who are spending time on transactional activities and there are finance guys who are spending time on transactional activities that could be automated. 

We can use intelligent automation with great value in helping these people upskill themselves into newer areas of analytics, new roles in reporting, and project accounting in finance. We're trying to eliminate these transactional activities, be faster over time. We started by looking at specific activities and we looked at the processes. Now, we are looking at a complete value chain. When you look at the complete value chain, that's when you actually begin driving positive change in business results. That is our projected approach for the next couple of years. We'll be looking at the complete value chain and see how bots can help us make our process more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the IQ Bot's ability to extract information accurately. It can do things like process table-level information, line-item level information, etcetera, and the accuracy is really very high. All of our users are accountants rather than programmers or anybody with an IT background. The accounting people can easily learn Automation Anywhere. We tried a few other tools but our folks were more comfortable using Automation Anywhere. They felt that it is easy to learn, and it was easy to train them as to how to use it.

In the next release, I think it has to be more compatible when deployed with the Citrix environment. That's one bottleneck that we have seen. Technically when we used the IQ Bots, we couldn't work directly through the Citrix environment. With our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) setup, we needed to access it through the Citrix environment. Because we were not able to do that, we had to have a workaround. We are currently working with Automation Anywhere to have that fixed. They have given us confidence that it can be done.

When looking at stability, we have to remain ready for any surprise even if we have not experienced any stability issues. We don't know what that kind of surprise will be, but we have backup plans in place.

In case the tool fails, we may not be as fast as the bots, but we have a BCP (Business Continuity Plan) but we know we can't be specific on what challenges will come, because we don't know.

In two years, I think once in one process where a bank changed its user interface on the bank website, a bot failed. We had to go and correct it. It was a fairly quick fix because to create it doesn't take much time. Changes like this are not predictable.

If you look at our shared services, we are growing and we need to keep our costs flat. This means I cannot hire more people. This need for greater efficiency is made up by what I have been able to gain out of the automation. We are actually using automation to move more processes into our shared services. Ours is a private business and we create big cement plants. One project could last for five years. When we land a big deal our volume spikes. It's a very cyclical business. It has been very easy for us to deploy scalable solutions now.

The company is very service friendly and willing to work with us when we need it. I would give them high marks for attention to customer service.

Our decision to go with an RPA solution was one that I made. One of the reasons I was hired into this organization was to drive automation. There was a specific goal for that which I was tasked with.

When looking at other options in the market Automation Anywhere seemed to be the company for us for a couple of reasons. One is that when we had our first engagement with Automation Anywhere we felt that they were very customer-focused. We did not see that with the other service providers. They really came prepared when they first met with us. They had all their books, IT, operations, delivery plans and such, so they were able to answer all our questions. They were very flexible in meeting our requirements and needs.

They were willing to go out of their way to support us and to ensure that we would succeed in the journey. Some of the service providers even refused to create POC's for us. But Automation Anywhere said they would and they went ahead and created them.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward and easy.

We did not use any consultants for our deployment. We worked directly with Automation Anywhere. Our belief is that we know our business better than anybody so we opted for maximum direct involvement.

Before deciding to go with Automation Anywhere we looked at other products for comparison like UiPath. We looked at the desktop automation tool, I currently don't even remember their name. The choice seemed obvious from the first impressions.

If I have any advice to give to people who are considering this product as a solution to their automation needs, I would say don't waste time thinking too much about adopting it and just go ahead and start.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

If you look at the first year we had the product, we had a 6% efficiency gain. This year we are looking at 10% in finance and 12% in IT. The more we discover ways to use it, the more efficient we will become.

Our primary use case for this solution is in finance. We have a lot of things that we are trying to automate, including performing operations in Excel.

We are using IQ Bot for one of our use cases.

I am currently trying to prioritize use cases to fit different scenarios and make the best use of this solution.

The most valuable feature in this solution is the IQ Bot. We are also able to perform many types of operations.

We would like to see the scalability improve from a local perspective.

This is a stable solution. We do see downtime, but it has more to do with the operating system and the servers. From an application perspective, the downtime is close to nil.

This solution has scalability. We have more than forty bots running.

From a technical perspective, their support is pretty good. We get a ticket after submitting a request for help.

We have a high-availability setup, so it was not a straightforward one. 

We performed the implementation, although we had to contact Automation Anywhere for assistance during the installation.

The initial numbers look good, so I think that we will see ROI over time.

For anybody who is considering an RPA solution, I would suggest exploring the limits. Compare products and decide, but try this one out.

We are excited to try a cloud version of this solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use this for customer data management.

We use this tool to help perform transformations on our data.

This solution has helped our customers to work with large data. They want to perform data transformations to assist them in making decisions. Our customers are very happy with this tool.

The most valuable feature is the ability to transform data into clusters.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see a plug-and-play tool for NLP programming.

This solution needs to have more support for big data, including decision-making abilities.

The stability of this solution has improved. We have less than one percent downtime in a day, so it is stable.

This solution scales based on licenses and the number of processes. The bots, themselves, are very mature and can scale. The bots are plug-and-play.

We don't have very many issues so we have rarely used technical support. I would say that my experience with them has been satisfactory. 

We had a lot of manual processes that we wanted to automate. We also had a lot of industry-specific automation tools, but we were not doing bot development. 

I was not involved in the initial setup of this solution, but I have been responsible for some of the updates. The update process is not complex. 

We used a local company to assist us with the implementation of this solution. 

I have seen customers save resources by using this tool. One of them replaced two hundred users with automation.

The licensing fees are approximately $10,000 USD for between five and ten users.

We were already familiar with this solution because we had recommended it for customers in past project proposals. We had also helped them with implementation.

We are having a very good experience with this product. It has capabilities for artificial intelligence, analytical programming, and machine learning. Once you understand your data, you can understand your customer.

In the long run, we see that Automation Anywhere will have a very good place in the market. Data is very important, and we feel that this tool will be a market leader.

This solution is very mature compared to some of the others in the market.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution primarily for financial use cases.

We have a bot that monitors quotes and budgets for products that are in their lifecycle or have expired. All of the concerns for finance are automated.

In the finance department, this solution has saved us a lot of money. Employees that were working on manual tasks are now doing things that are more productive.

This solution is easy to use and understand, even for a non-technical person.

Better support for Excel is needed because there are a lot of limitations and we are having issues with it. We do a lot of Excel work, and if we could use it as a database then it would help a lot.

We have had some issues in terms of stability. It is related to certain commands and VMware, and depending on the machine that we are logging into, the bot fails. 

This is a scalable solution. We initially implemented small projects and then expanded them to a bigger level.

The support for this solution is quite good.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.

This solution has some drawbacks, but it is easy to implement and easy to use.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.