Automation Anywhere Reviews

Being a bank, we have a lot of processes which we have automated. I am a Project Manager for HR functions. The majority of my processes are in terms of income and skills processing. Those are all automated.

We were one of the few to start up this journey with Automation Anywhere. Interestingly, the majority of our processes were determined to be boring. People did not find them to be very interesting. Those processes have been automated. Being a bank, we have some sensitive processes which we cannot automate. Those processes have been given to human intellectuals. Otherwise, the majority of our processes are automated.

It has boosted our processing time by seven times. Typically, something that has taken eight to 10 minutes now can be done in two to three minutes. So, we have seen some value-add there. 

Resources are being processed earlier and involved in a different type of a governing kind of role. This sort of builds a layer for them to move and scale up. The solution is fast and easy to deploy. Our use cases lasts for two to three sprints and we can churn out solutions very fast.

We do not have a server type of an environment. We use a desktop version of Automation Anywhere which is easily customizable and quickly built-in. We do not have to go through major security iOS applications, etc. These are all enterprise applications that we have onboarded. Each of our functions take their responsibility of building their bot and deploying it. 

It is fast and reliable. 

Older versions of Automation Anywhere required specific skill sets to use it. It is no longer like that.

The version A2019 GUI allows you to drop and drop.

As far as version 10.1 is concerned, we have been using it for the last two years. It is okay. As an organization, we look forward to next version. However, being a bank, we have certain processes that we have to follow. We are happy with the version that we are using and haven't experience downtime.

We have been looking at processes which can easily transition into a large scale environment, where you can have cloud or hybrid model. However, being a bank, some of our processes are critical and we would like to hold those on-premise. This limits us with our usage of Automation Anywhere.

The support that we receive from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We have specific customer success managers as a platinum partner. We have support extended to us when we have any type of concerns and issues. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. It didn't really affect our processes at any levels, which really helped. The process was fast and easy.

The support team kept our team calm.

We have an in-house Automation Anywhere team who supports us.

It saves us man-hours, headcount, and processing time.

We have automated the equivalent headcount of 500 FTEs since we started. Those people haven't been laid off. They are just doing different types of work activities.

We did not evaluate other vendors beside Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere was a pioneer in the market at the time that we were evaluating vendors. It was a good match.

Explore the new version A2019 that is coming out. It is user-friendly and can be onboarded quickly.

I would love to use the next version A2019 that is coming out.

The primary use case is for generating letters. Most of the use cases are HR-based.

The company we work for is the Mahindra Group. When an employee requests letters, they go through the HR department instead of requesting the letter from the bot, Genie, that is already in place. Going through the HR Department creates a manual process across the group.

We have completed a POC directly from Genie. We implemented the RPA so that once the request is received from the employee, the letter is generated and sent to the person through email.

This reduces the tedious manual work required.

With the completed POC, we have an RPA that we have showcased. When you request a letter directly from Genie, within a minute or two you will receive an email with an attachment of your requested letter.

This solution allows for the letter generation to take place within seconds, improving the experience for the employees. When they request something, they've got it.

Generating the letters through Genie is an extremely valuable feature.

This solution reduced the manual work that is required by the HR department.

This solution is easy to use and generates a quick response.

Looking at the POC's requirements and use cases, our customers are asking us for the OCRing of handwritten documents. This is a feature we would like to see included in the next release.

We would like a web-based product for implementation in the cloud.

The licensing needs to be made simpler or shortened. You need to be able to bundle the licenses for clients. Instead of asking for three licenses, which sometimes causes the customer to panic, I would like to have one bundle with three licenses contained within it. It is essentially the same thing but would make more sense to the customer. It is just a different mindset.

I am not able to comment much in terms of stability because we have only completed a POC.

This solution will tremendously reduce the cost in terms of manual work that HR is doing.

The licensing needs to be made simpler or shortened.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to explore it. Try out the solution and its capabilities. Until you do so, you won't know exactly what it is capable of. To now, I have not even explored it one-hundred percent.

We are looking for a web-based product because most of the things we do, and most of the products that we work with, are on the cloud. Once we get a web-based system, we will have more interest and we will be more confident about it. We understand that the web-based system will be released soon.

The product is good, no doubt about it, but we need the OCR for handwritten documents, the web-based solution, and the licensing has to be improved.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Primary use case is automating data entry functions for accounting and general entry. That has been our primary use case. Since we've started, we have create about five bots (of which three work).

We're too new. We haven't really begun to invest in the option of having automation. I'm hoping at least in the accounting area, people are inquiring about the tool now that they are seeing results.

Of the bots which work, they have automated three of the most time consuming tasks and completely freed up one person to do real work.

Anything that can be done to simplify the solution. I would love to see it where anybody who can run Excel will be able to create bots. Right now, I am watching everyone around me struggle with the tool. I do think the tool is getting there.

From an IT perspective, we had too many issues and headaches.

From an IT perspective, the migration is still very complicated, getting everything set up and running. Security was an issue for us, as well. Developers had to come through our firewalls to develop bots, internally. However, they were coming through a Citrix platform, so there were breakpoints in things they were trying to automate, file servers they were trying to get to, and FTPs that they couldn't get through. 

I understand the next version will have support for Citrix, which might solve some of our problems.

So far, the stability has not been great. We had a lot of migration issues before we got up and running. We will wait and see if this continues with the next version that is being installed. However, once something is up and running, the issues do not persist.

We are only running three bots, so we haven't had to worry about scalability yet. We built the tool to handle about 30 bots. So far, we haven't had any problems with scalability.

It took about six months to scale from the pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using, but the majority of those months were wasted on our upgrade issue.

We went through an Automation Anywhere partner, who handled all the technical support. So, we didn't go the Automation Anywhere technical support directly, except on occasion. We got through all our issues, eventually.

We were not previously automated in any way.

The initial setup was complex.

The IT team wasn't involved directly at the start, so the business sort of started it on their own. Then, the product over came to IT, and we were blindsided by the requests. That was when it became complicated.

We used consultants to build our bots. We are still in the learning process.

We used KPMG for the deployment. They obviously knew the product very well and were also surprised about the migration issues, but they got us through the deployment.

We are measuring our ROI in terms of power saved.

Start simple. There is no reason to jump in with complicated bots. Find simple, small processes that need automating.

The software is there, and it does what it needs to do. The tool can grow and become huge, if it is not already. I hope that we got on early enough that we can keep building on our success.

We have gotten around to looking at the Bot Store yet.

The primary use case would be to do automated processing using Excel with an application, even SAP. We use it for extracting data tables, clicking on data, recording records, and extracting the records table. We use it for all the Excel operations. 

We updated Automation Anywhere already to version A2019 with all the Excel operations.

It has reduced the number of full-time employees. 

The Excel operations are very good. Even in the MetaBot, they have included all the commands. Because of security, we automate our processes in MetaBot. 

IQ Bot is good compared to the other tools available in the market.

The dashboard and Control Room are very good compared to the market.

They are launching cloud into the market, which is very good.

They need to improve the OCR engine which is not up to the market.

We still cannot use IQ Bot with our documents.  

They have to work on the OCR and object cloning features.

However, I have not used version A2019 and cannot comment on the latest Automation Anywhere updates.

I would rate the stability as an eight out of 10.  There is an issue with the object cloning in Excel. OCR is also not that stable. Image recognition works fine, but not all the time.

Scalability is very good.

It is easy to set up.

The licensing costs are a bit high, but the profits are very good. 

I have worked on Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. The user interface of Automation is good and helpful. 

I have gone through the online training.

We have multiple uses for this solution. We are from a biopharmaceutical background. We are the global technology center for AstraZeneca Biopharma and AstraZeneca Oncology. 

We have many use cases, but one of the primary uses is for all of the business processes. We do the automation, we apply the tool and simplify the work. We currently have more than sixty or seventy bots in place, including in HR and in finance.

As an example, one of the cases we were working on is industry best practices and industry innovators. We reduce the time that scientists spend on manual tasks and put them on more value-added work.

Another example is with adverse effects, where people who take medication can have an adverse reaction. If the customer reports their reactions, it gets automated.

We have several teams and we are not centralized, we have democratized it. We have different sequences; they have their development team, and we manage the Centre of Excellence.

The areas that need improvement are the license management, user access permission, user role access management, and technical support.

We have had many challenges in managing the roles through user automation, but we have heard that 2019 has something new, so we will wait and see.

The stability of this solution is good. 

We have had some challenges since 2017. We have had some progress and improvised the platform. Now it is stable.

We are now hosted in the cloud and all of our data is available. It's reliable and secure.

All of our data is retained in-house only to ensure that we are compliant.

Every year we are improving, and the scalability is there to match. Our platform equally matches our skills.

The technical support needs to be improved to provide exclusive support for each customer.

The deployment was easy and straightforward, and the POC was easy to perform.

We had some input from other people during the implementation.

Using this solution has brought a lot of return on investment in terms of saving hours or FTEs. We are utilizing them in more constructive areas.

We spoke with several vendors. We chose Automation Anywhere because it is user-friendly. The interface is easier to use and the partnership is better.

We allow the developer to train themselves right from the university, and they like several things about the Centre of Excellence person.

For anybody who is researching this solution, I suggest that they try it. It is a good platform to start with. If they were to fix the areas that I have mentioned then it would be a perfect solution.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are working on implementing automation for a financial use case. Every time somebody travels they have a lot of receipts and they come in different formats. We would like to automate the processing of these receipts. We have a team in the US who have implemented this, and we would like to do the same thing here in India.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the automation of manual tasks, which save us time.

I really like the Automation Anywhere University website because it has a lot of good documents that you can read to learn about the solution.

I would like this solution to be supported on a Mac. Right now, we are using a VM with Automation Anywhere installed inside it, but it would be nice if the solution could be used on macOS.

I would like to see instructional videos on how to use this solution.

We still only have a small group working with this solution, but until now, everything is working fine.

This solution is scalable.

We have not used technical support for this solution.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Our US company does a lot of traveling and they are always dealing with receipts. It is a small finance group, yet they were doing a lot of manual work. They have to check for things like a matching date and the correct amount. From there, we understood that we need to do something automated. One of our colleagues from the US attended an Automation Anywhere conference and then they implemented this solution after that.

The initial setup of this solution is very easy.

We have an in-house team who took care of the implementation.

We have a developer license for this solution.

We have tried UiPath but this solution was selected.

This solution did not take us long to learn how to use. We found the guidelines at automationanywhereuniversity.com and started using it.

At this time we use the MetaBot but not the IQ Bot.

This is a solution that I recommended to a friend of mine at another company. They are using Blue Prism, but after telling them about the Automation Anywhere University they started viewing the documents. They are now doing a POC with this solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I belong to the learning and development department, and this solution is part of our capability. We do not have only a single use case. We work on POCs for SMEs, handling the automation of modules such as Vendor Master and journal entries.

In the projects that we are getting, we have been using Automation Anywhere for things like automating Excel. This is a solution that was recommended to us, and we have a roadmap for our resources to scale up and work on that. I see our work with SMEs as a collaboration with Automation Anywhere.

The cognitive automation gives us an edge towards intelligence using IQ Bot, and this allows us to integrate and give a combined solution to a customer.

It is really helpful that this solution is deployed in the cloud.

The integration of IQ Bot, Bot Insight, and other products should be flawless, and the execution should be seamless, so this needs to be improved.

The vendor should make recommendations based on our customer's requirements so that they can make the right choice.

Automation Anywhere will sometimes announce releases or updates in their roadmap, and we wait for them, but they do not happen on time or at all. This happened, for example, when we had an issue with IQ Bot. We ended up waiting for two more months.

The stability of this solution is good. I don't see any issues with the product itself, although when we were integrating, there were a few issues that have since been phased out.

It is on a case-by-case basis, where we found that some things were not working smoothly. As soon as you start integrating other products, using them hand-in-hand, there are issues. Automation Anywhere was there with us to understand and resolve the issues. I had to go myself to identify and understand them, and it was a long process, but it was sorted out.

This is a scalable solution that is robust and will help to take us forward.

Technical support is very good, and we are getting what we require. Initially, it wasn't that great at the start of the year. We had a discussion with them and came up with a communication plan. Since then, it has helped us out and we are happy with that.

The initial setup of this solution is simple. We had the required support and the materials were all delivered, so we were able to do it easily. 

The deployment was performed by our in-house team, and we have control rooms to monitor the bots.

We have seen ROI with this solution in terms of automating manual processes, resulting in FTE benefits.

We purchased the commercial version with the license.

Compared to UiPath, this is a robust tool.

We considered both UiPath and Blue Prism, and I feel that Automation Anywhere is still leading. It is more stable and more structured. They also have the support staff.

This is a stable solution and a product that you can go for.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using this solution to reduce the time and management required for the completion of manual tasks. We are also teaching our students how to create bots for automation.

For example, if you have a simple copy and paste operation to complete in an Excel sheet then it might take one or two minutes. It's small but if you have a large amount of data and the task has to be repeated many times, then it is very helpful to have the bots. Using automation technology in any company is very useful for both customers and the company.  

I use the Control Room and we also write the code.

We have a student database that contains over a thousand students and their results. When a student wants to check their individual mark, they visit the university website and they enter their registration number to check the data.

When we want to get a list of the student marks, all we need is a list of the registration numbers in Excel and our bot will automate the task. With the press of a button, the bot will collect all of the student results and display them. This will take at most one minute, instead of an hour. Within one minute we can view more than one thousand students and their results.

The most valuable features of this solution are its user-friendliness and the flexibility in terms of programming language. We can use any programming language, and I have just started to learn Python. I want to next look at real-time scenarios and see how Python can be used to help write bots. Having no restriction for any single programming language is very useful.

This solution uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help automate tasks. Our analytics people and data scientists are looking forward to seeing how this will help.

It is very difficult to create and automate timetables because they are modal and it would be helpful if the bot could assist us with this.

This is a stable solution and a very strong tool.

This is a scalable solution. 

We do resolve some problems ourselves, but if it is difficult then we approach the technical support for Automation Anywhere. Their response is very good and they are very helpful.

I heard about this particular technology only last year, and then I completed my certification. I'm impressed with automation and bots. When I first heard the term, I thought that the bots were actual robots. Later, I saw that we were writing the programs and creating the bots for these manual and repetitive tasks.

We handle the deployment of this solution ourselves. If there are special requirements then we will ask.

A bot is doing in one hour what it takes ten hours for a person to do. This savings in time is very important for the IT industry. Most of the time being wasted is on simple things, so if the bot is doing then work then it gives more time of other things, such as coding.

We only looked at this solution.

Initially, when I was first trained, I had some difficulty using this solution. However, when I went through all of the training and learned how to write the code, I found it was very easy.

We are training our students in the use of bots for automation. We are teaching students how to create bots, and how to use them so that companies will be prepared. We are trying to create more use cases, or examples, for learning how to code.

Some people are saying that they will lose their jobs because of this solution. A single bot is capable of doing the work of ten people. This is a very strong tool, but the problem relates to any technology. We have to adapt, and we have to understand the technology.

Time is very important. For any work that you are doing, if you finish the work within the time set by the customer then they will be really impressed. When the customer is happy with the company then they will give them more work. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.