Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use it for the mail merge process, specifically for renewals. Each month, it could be a tedious process to check all the documents and PDFs for each iteration. The creation of a bot for these task leads to better than expected results.

We can use the current manuals to make sure the bots are working at 100 percent before the next release.

It is user-friendly. Everything is under a single dashboard. 

We can access it anywhere. E.g., I can access dashboard from my Control Room on my mobile app using Automation Anywhere. 

From a QA and development perspective, we would like to communicate with the tech support through email and have that put in the dashboard. This would let us better track the ticket and make it easier for us to communicate with Automation Anywhere.

They recently integrate Oracle and SQL. I would like to have more integration and feature going forward.

The stability is good. 

The scalability is good.

Automation Anywhere team is ready to support us if we encounter any issues.

We recently encountered some issues in the navigation controls that our dashboards were unable to change. So, we contacted the Automation Anywhere team and they helped us to get it rectified.

It is easy to set up. You can do it from anywhere using the Control Room. It is not a tedious process. 

I am used to these types of setups as an SQL engineer.

We save time with the solution, so we have more time to reuse and spend on our clients. 

Talk to your manager and try to procure an automation license for training. This will allow you to train people, so you can move to automation.

If we try to use another product, there are additional product costs. Automation Anywhere uses a single dashboard that you can access anywhere. It also provides more insights versus other products, which is an advantage of using Automation Anywhere.

I have recently gone through the Automation Anywhere training to receive some certifications.

We started with finance use cases. Some of our biggest success stories have been with collection correspondence strategy around AR and the cash application. We also focus a lot on the financial close process to the month-end processes. These are the biggest areas of focus. We are starting to look at AP in finance. Beyond finance, we're also trying to look at the sales processes. 

Finance was sort of a pilot. We are now looking at sales processes starting from the customer order handling to services, and how we can enrich the experience. Our goal is to enhance the customer experience.

We have a suite of technology products. Most of the time, there is communication between various products. We get a number of emails from our customers that we send out. E.g., our system is based on some criteria that sends emails out to customers. Therefore, there is a lot of user interface level interaction. However, we always look at the problem statement and work through that.

We are a B2B company. We have a lot of communication with our customers in terms of collection correspondence, such as payment reminders. We started with the problem: Should we be a company focused on heavily calling as all companies traditionally are? Or, change that using Automation Anywhere, but how do we communicate with customer using the tool as it is more interactive and individual-driven. We created personalized emails using a digital correspondence strategy. This is an areas where we have delivered results. 

It is easy to code. While you have developers, somebody with a development or workflow mindset can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere by understanding how to put a process in a workflow. If you have that, then you can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere. Even a non-IT or business user can just look at the bot language and understand what the bot is doing, and that's the easy part. This is an interesting part of the product that we are trying to capitalize on.

They consistently endeavor to improve the customer experience. Customer success is their motto. The organization clearly knows who they are and what they stand for. 

We are one of the smaller startups in the area so we experience a lot of issues. Most of the issues have been: 

• How do you build up your platforms? 
• Automation Anywhere is more geared toward how humans work, and a bot works differently.

These are the specific challenges that we have seen.

Some small issues:

• A bot will be working and the the screen will lock out.
• The app has a password change policy every few days.
• One day, there will be a message box saying that the application is down or not available on a weekend. The instructions will say read the information and click, "Okay." But a bot doesn't understand the instructions because it is not the IQ system.
  

There are a lot of initiatives going on. E.g., there is one for the Excel part where they are building a plugin in Excel. Those type of plugins would help if they were built in various applications for integration across applications. I would like more plugins overall. It would be nice to have a plugin for all applications, like PowerPoint or any PDF to text converter, to make the tool easier to work with.

On the user side, we have seen issues with user training.

The product still requires programming knowledge. We would like it to become easy enough to use where anyone in the organization can utilize the tool and use the bots. The usability should be at the same level as a Microsoft Suite product. This is on Automation Anywhere's roadmap to evolve toward this.

It is an evolving platform, but it's fairly stable.

They have frequent upgrades. 

Scalability is dependent on the organization and customer size, but it's a stable platform.

We have not faced issues as we have scaled up.

They have a good 24/7 support system. Even if there is an issue, we are able to solve it.

The ticketing system: You create a ticket and can get support 24/7. That's already a big thing for us. We have had good reviews on it.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. Automation Anywhere did a lot of hand-holding through it

We used Automation Anywhere as our initial service provider.

Our return on investment has more been based on improving things which we could not do earlier. There were some aspects of processes which we had to outsource because we were not able to do these in-house. Our return on investment is based on bringing these outsourced services and processes back in-house. In addition, ROI is based on doing things to improve the customer experience.

We have also seen ROI based on employee experience. Quantification is not easy. We cannot quantify it, but we have millennials coming into the workforce who don't want to do "boring" activities. If you tell them that the organizations has a digital workforce concept, this is a driver for them to think that the organization is the way that it should be. This is bigger than dollars when quantifying value.

Automation Anywhere presented a pitch for the IT solutions that we have. 

We considered the top three vendors. We chose Automation Anywhere because of the customer engagement drives and their integrated services team. The other vendors didn't have this. Automation Anywhere's service team stands out.

If you're starting out and a smaller organization, their arrangement of products helps. Product-wise, there are some pluses and minus in everything

Think of what is the best fit for your organization in terms of a technology platform. Also, have goals in mind, like improving the customer experience, not reducing the FTEs in your organization.

Going forward, there will be new releases on the cloud. 

We use this solution for building RPA to automate business & finance processes.

By automating processes we give back valuable hours to business stakeholders, which can be spent on value-adding activities instead of repetitive tasks.

The total package is valuable for us as an organization.

I would like to see them expand the service catalog with RCA add-ons to the current RPA package.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We evaluated both UiPath and Blue Prism before choosing this solution.

My advice for anybody implementing this solution is to set up from the start with large scale in mind.

We use the product for our automation use cases. We provide it to our customers to automate invoices with IQ Bot and other things.

Helps our clients focus on their work instead of repetitive tasks.

The best part of Automation Anywhere is IQ Bot for its OCR techniques. 

Bot Insights is also a very good product feature.

I would like OCR for video and text using the IQ Bot. It should also be available in an email tag format.

I am waiting for them to add Java code.

The stability of the production part is good.

Scalability is good. There is no question about its scalability.

I have found some problems, but the support is very fast. However, sometimes I feel like I need more guidance. E.g., when providing the answer regarding the login for SAP automation, give an answer that I can explain to my customers.

The implementation process is complex, as there is integration with other applications. We need to understand the other applications' requirements. It requires us to convert their business logic into automation. That is where the complexity is.

We are the implementation partner. 

My clients have seen ROI. What would take them two to three days in work is now taking them two to three hours.

We are restricted to use one license on one PC. However, if my license is not working, I want to be able to use it somewhere else. This would be a nice improvement to the licensing, as other competitors in the market have better licensing terms.

Create automation with automation with Automation Anywhere. 

We are a research-based company using cognitive automation. 

Our use cases are:

1. Security.
2. Card protection and banking. 
3. Traffic management. 

All these applications require cognitive automation. 

We are here to explore how Automation Anywhere supports cognitive automation.

One of our security applications requires a lot of newer features in terms of recognizing a lot of objects that affect security, whether we are talking about the security of a building or of an enterprise. Integration automation is now building on growth, e.g., I can upload Microsoft and Azure integrations. This will help us in order to scale up the machine learning aspect, which is required in the applications which we are developing.

The tool is developing well and has become more web-based. We require a web-based tool approach because of our clients whom we expect will utilize web-based applications. We see Automation Anywhere is moving into a web-based tool application development. This will help us reach out to our clients.

While I am happy with the stability, it could use improvement.

We have found that the passwords are not very stable in terms of their accuracy. We could only get 70 percent accuracy in these cases. Our clients require more accurate results. We are working toward this.

We are looking into other applications and how they can be integrated, e.g., Google Analytics and Azure AI. Instead of developing from scratch within Automation Anywhere, we want to bring out these advanced capabilities from other platforms and integrate them into our platform requirements.

Integration with a lot of existing platforms is going to be a game changer. We already see Automation Anywhere tied up with SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and Microsoft. We expect that it will be tied up Google Cloud going forward. These type of improvements will increase the adoption rate of the tool and we can have a lot more use cases because a lot of companies they have already invested in ERP.

There are good tools which are in the development stage. Recently, there was an issue of stability. We see that there has been a lot of effort from Automation Anywhere experts and R&D, where they have been trying to stabilize every version they are bringing out. There is room for improvement as Automation Anywhere works to stabilize the solution.

The clients whom we are approaching and want to get onboard have a huge application requirement. So, we are requiring that these applications are well suited for the Automation Anywhere product. We feel that there is a lack of trained professionals in the market. Therefore, we have a branch where we can train people, so they can scale up into our application's deployment.

They help support our large number of clients. So far, they have been okay. Going forward, we will require a lot more support from Automation Anywhere.

Our onboarding process was pretty good. We got access to all software that we needed to learn and utilize. The Automation Anywhere University is really good. In our business, the person who was onboarding us helped us to understand how to create a center of excellence and what verticals we needed to improve. So, the support was there. We are gradually becoming a center of excellence ourselves.

We have in-house experts who are learning the solution then deploying it. We are looking for partners to deploy the tool for new projects as we learn how to better deploy it.

Our clients are seeing an economic downturn. In any economic downturn, margins are a great challenge. As a company, we can bring out profitability by automating a lot of processes on our clients' side. We always recommend to our clients is they can save as much as 25 percent of their CAPEX in the first year, then by second year, they should be able to save up to 50 percent of their OPEX. This can bring them huge profitability.

UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were our three focus areas. We started first with Automation Anywhere. We will definitely explore the other vendors as well, but It is very tough to become an expert of all three platforms.

I happened to go through the available documents on Automation Anywhere's website. I found there is a lot of effort from the company to create an ecosystem of experts. They want a lot of experts to get trained. There is a lot of support on the certification side. So, we thought that it was a good company to start with.

Have a very robust feasibility check of what you want to do. It is very important that you understand your requirements: 

• Why do you require RPA? 
• What will be the return of the investment? 
• What will be the time consumption? 
• Do you need to outsource the entire RPA or develop in-house expertise?

Understand the tool better, then the deployment becomes easier.

The tool is good. I feel that there is a lot of scope for improvement. We have found there is already an R&D effort to build up Automation Anywhere. There are new tools which will soon be integrated into the present setup. It becomes better at every stage.

We are trying to automate a few of the processes that we did manually. Product setup is an important aspect, as we are using bots to do the setup for us. We used to do the setup manually about three to four months back. 

We used to set up 150 to 250 products in a week. That has come down to a day. 

I initiate the bot, then I go home. So, it's working 24 hours. I am restricted to working nine hours. Time is something that we are saving. We are becoming more efficient and our partners are happy. They can send us workloads. Then, we can just kick it off, go home, and by the time we are back, it is done. I send an e-mail saying, "Whatever you've sent over is done." 

Efficiency is something that has increased a lot. Productivity has increased a lot too.

Object cloning is one of the main features that are using. We are very happy with it. as It has enabled us to capture a lot of things on screen and use them. 

We want it to work with more APIs. It needs to integrate with multiple APIs. That would be something that I would like going forward.

Currently, it does not work that well with legacy tools.

It is a bit wonky with HTML when I'm working with it. There are times when it's not able to detect the technology that we are using. I don't know whether it's an Automation Anywhere issue or an internal issue. I want it to work smoothly with more technologies.

Our tool is a bit slow, as it's a legacy tool. Automation Anywhere is having a some issues when running back. This is one of the things that we are not happy with. We need to upgrade our systems for Automation Anywhere to work better.

As of now, we have it limited to one process. However, we can scale the solution. It can cascade onto multiple processes, so that is a positive note for scalability.

We are just in the initial phases. I personally have created about three to four bots. 

We have not contacted the technical support because we have not had issues.

My manager works our customer success manager.

Automation Anywhere is our first introduction to automation. I'm pretty happy with it. I did ask people who had come from Automation Anywhere about UiPath to get a clear idea about it. I think UX is one of the strongest points for Automation Anywhere which can attract competence to your workbench and work. That's what we have been told. 

I still need to experiment a lot with it. Whatever I've done so far. it's been at an 80 to 85 percent success rate.

I've not had the chance to work with UiPath.

We want to do more Automation Anywhere certifications and learn more about them. We did not get that information from our account team, which could be improved.

We use this solution for updating manual tasks such as downloading, processing, and uploading.

An example of this is manual posting, where the customer is asking for money to be posted. For example, let's say that some extra money is posted by mistake. That has to be reconciled and be pushed back to the actual owner.

Another example is bank transfer, where the customer is requesting money to be transferred from one bank to our bank. We generally interact with the customer and the bank, and there are several transactions that need to be completed. We now have this as a Complete Conditional Automation, where depending on the status, one of several sub-processes will be triggered and completed.

This solution has helped us in several ways, the first of which is scheduling processes.

There are many processes that need to be run during office hours, which is fine, but there are many that can be run outside of office hours. By taking care of these processes outside of office hours, it improves our efficiency. Also, if the bot were only being used for eight hours out of a possible twenty-four hours then the cost-per-hour is higher.

The recording feature accelerates the timeline of your implementation. It means that it takes you less time with lesser investment. The resource cost becomes less and brings your break-even point closer.

The most valuable feature is the recording feature. If you compare to a solution like Blue Prism, in that case, you need to build everything from scratch. Here, you record everything and then it is easy for you to build the automation. There is a skeleton in place, and you just have to build from there.

The scheduler is a really helpful feature for us because there was a time when people used to do attended automation, and they needed to run the software. This lets us schedule it to run at any time.

I would like to leverage the AI component without the requirement to know a coding language, such as Python.

This solution is pretty stable. We only had issues with the previous version.  We don't have any malfunctions so far, although, with the older version, we faced some object de-capturing issues. We had captured where it was supposed to hit, and it was hitting elsewhere. With the new version, so far so good.

Considering the automation that we have done, we have not been required to scale.

Technical support for this solution is excellent. They organize video chats and were able to guide us initially when it was installed. They gave good training to people and helped with some development activities. They are also fast in responding to issues.

We have used Blue Prism and there are some differences between the two solutions. The first is that Automation Anywhere provides you free training, and Blue Prism does not. You have to take the time to attend class, and you have to pay for the software to do some hands-on. Even then, you don't know if you will get the latest version. On the other hand, with Automation Anywhere, you have the Community Edition. This is good enough for a beginner to learn on.

The recording feature in Automation Anywhere helps a lot because you don't have to build everything from scratch, brick-by-brick.

Finally, Automation Anywhere is evolving faster than Blue Prism.

I was not there when the solution was initially set up, but I assisted with the upgrade.

There was a misunderstanding between the infrastructure team, our team, and the Automation Anywhere team, which was a major issue. It was unclear how the servers were going to be set up and who was going to install. Nobody knew what the requirements were, and as a result, things took longer than they should have.

We recently upgraded versions from 10.5 to 11.3.2, and the newer version is better. The major issue we used to face is an auto-login failure. It caused a lot of havoc with the customers because some process that had to run in the morning before we came into the office had not run. However, with this new version, that problem has been solved. There were also a few applications that were not previously compatible, and we were told that they would be with this new version. So far, the ones we have checked are now compatible. 

One example of these is Phoebus. There are some legacy banking applications that we are moving to Phoebus, so this has to be compatible because our future automation depends on that.

I am looking forward to using the AI in this new version. I want to see how user-friendly it is, without much knowledge of Python or another coding language. I saw a video and it seems to have become very user-friendly, with a step-by-step guide. I want to see how easy it is to leverage that power without needing to know how to code.

For anybody who is researching RPA solutions, I would definitely tell them to go with the top players in the market. These are UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. Then, you do your cost analysis and figure out who is giving you the best price. Then you analyze the service to figure out who is providing the best service. Finally, you can compare.

I recommend Automation Anywhere considering my experience with their service. Once you buy the product, the product may be good. But, if the service is not good then you may suffer. If you have a problem and you do not have service for three days, then how much business have you lost in that time? So, service matters a lot after you purchase the product. That is how you choose the solution, rather than by cost alone.

In our experience, Automation Anywhere is great, but I am expecting more in the AI and with the IQ Bot.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for quality and GXP.

We are a pharmaceutical company and have marketed products that are about to be shipped into the market. Part of our process is a compliance check of those products. We have specifications ready, and we have the parameters with which it has been manufactured, and we have to compare those to ensure that they match. This compliance check is what we have automated using this solution.

The operational side of our business has become more civilized since we implemented this solution.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that the code can be made as complex as necessary because our processes are not simple.

This solution can be moved easily between platforms. We work on SAP as well as many other internal platforms, and this solution can very easily be moved between them.

There should be a meeting between the Automation Anywhere team and the end-users to understand whether the process can be made to work on the first attempt. This would save a lot of time, especially in cases where it doesn't work in the end. This introductory meeting would include what the processes are and what platforms are compatible with Automation Anywhere. 

I would say the product is stable, although sometimes we have connection issues and control room issues. Some of these issues are internal. Overall, the product is fine.

We had had issues with scalability. Recently, we had a use case which we were working on, but we could not do it because Automation Anywhere could not connect to the system. It was an older system, and perhaps the newer systems are more compatible with this solution. We have seen a few companies that use downgraded systems, and that is where we see that Automation Anywhere does not work. 

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten.

Usually, we have a very good response from technical support. However, we did have a case that we wanted to be resolved as soon as possible, and it took a very, very long time. Probably more than a month. They gave us a lot of solutions but nothing worked. Ultimately, it was our team who actually found a resolution for it. 

I think that the initial setup of this solution is good. Because we are a pharmaceutical company, it is a lengthy process because we have a lot of GXP, compliance issues, and quality issues. That considered, it did not take a very long time for deployment.

We have just deployed and are still in the validation process, so we have not seen a return on investment yet. It will take a little more time to see ROI. 

This solution costs approximately $3,500 USD per license. For a large company, this cost would not matter, although if I had a very small organization and I wanted to automate a small process then this would be a bit costly.

We looked into UiPath, but we felt that Automation Anywhere was the choice for us.

Initially, we actually wanted to use both. We looked into both but there are a lot of systems and a lot of complex steps to follow. The developers suggested that Automation Anywhere was a better processor to develop the code because when we wanted to look into the errors or when we have any issues it is easier to look into the Automation Anywhere line than UiPath.

This is definitely a solution that I recommend, but there are a few things that you need to look into. We actually started with a process and ended up thinking that it would not work. You have to ensure that the proper groundwork is done in order to understand whether the process can actually work. It will be possible to find solutions in any case, but it may take a very long time. The longer it takes to automate, the longer ROI will take.

I have been using this solution for a while now, and I think that it is a very good platform. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.