Automation Anywhere Reviews

As a partner, we can use RPA in many sectors including financial services and banks, technology and software, in communications, government, hospitality, and human resources.

I have recently done two projects with Automation Anywhere, one for a large car manufacturer and the other for a bank.

For the car manufacturer, we used it to copy and paste data from Excel sheets, with user entries according to customer. This process helped secure the digital workplace with verification and to integrate legacy systems with new applications. There was also a daily report on this automation.

In the other project, we took data from a CSV file and validated it according to business rules and we then copied from the CSV and pasted it into another application. There, again, it was with specific customer data. We were able to implement data migration between banking applications and customer account management applications.

In simple language, we can automate any business process and it works for our customers the way they want it to.

Using Automation Anywhere, the work gets completed in half the time. Using particular types of software, there can be problems in creating solutions and it will take a lot of time to solve the problems. By using automation, the hard work is done by robots rather than by people. It won't take as much time.

If it takes a long time for a person to complete a project and, instead, the hard work is done by the computer, the robots, that is beneficial for companies.

• The ability to use previous integrations is valuable.
• With Automation Anywhere you can read and extract CSV data easily. You don't need multiple commands to read it.
• The user interface is good. Whatever I've done, the user interface has been very good.

Reliability and error handling should be improved.

One to three years.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is good. I haven't had any issues when it comes to stability, so far.

If a company is getting work done by robots, work that is otherwise hard to get done, then Automation Anywhere is definitely a good investment for them.

Compared to other tools like NICE and Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is the only tool that gets your work completed in half the time. No other tools do that. In my opinion, this is what makes Automation Anywhere the best tool.

I haven't done projects on NICE yet, but I did the training for NICE as well as for Automation Anywhere. NICE has good things in it, but in my opinion, with NICE it will take more time to complete tasks compared to Automation Anywhere. There is a difference.

For what I have used Automation Anywhere for so far, the two projects I have done, it has been completely good for me. This is the best tool I have seen.

The first project took about eight months and the other about six to seven months. There were four people working on each project, all together. They were all RPA developers. In total there are eight to ten of us working on Automation Anywhere.

Automation is happening a lot in the financial and banking service areas. There are many applications which a bank cannot manage by itself and we use automation to help manage customers' accounts. But these days, automation is happening everywhere. It is used in every company. Automation is an important process and people will see it more and more going into the future as well.

There is scope in the future for increased usage of Automation Anywhere in the banking sector.

In the future, as technology increases day-by-day, Automation Anywhere will definitely add new technology. There are already benefits but they will increase as the technology develops and people will benefit more and more.

The tool is used to automate any business process. Some examples are:

• If you want to download some data from a website or push some data onto a website.
• If you work with an Excel application and want to automate it, or any Windows-based application, you can automate it as long as you know what the business process is.
• If a person is doing a day-to-day activity and you want to automate that activity, you can use the Automation Anywhere tool to do it.

I have worked with the Windows, Excel, and web applications, along with some SAP automation and how to automate that SAP data. I use Automation Anywhere to determine automation for how to:

• Distribute the process. 
• Schedule the process. 
• Run the process. 
• Design the process.
• Distribute the data for 1000 to 10,000 data points (in Excel).

I have automated the invoicing in a finance department, where the finance department wanted to automate the invoicing process. They wanted to do the following:

• Invoice the data.
• Create the invoice.
• Mail the invoice.
• Download the invoice data.

If you have 10 operators currently performing these activities everyday, then you automate the process, by removing the 10 operators and having only one operator required, this will decrease costs. It will also increase the efficiency of your company.

In the automatic invoicing system, we created a file which pushes onto a shared folder. The bot will pick up the file automatically from the shared folder and process the invoice. Therefore, if tomorrow, another bot were to be created, we could just create a file and copy it to the shared folder, then it would pick up the file and process the invoice.

I utilize all the commands provided by Automation Anywhere, such as all the recorders. I use these commands to develop my processes and bots.

Automation Anywhere has a drag and drop process.

Automation Anywhere needs to improve Excel and its commands. In Excel, if you want to add a sheet, you cannot add a sheet. There is no command for adding a sheet. Also, if you want to rename something in Excel, you cannot rename it. You always must keep a list that you can rename through your keyboard, but there is no specific command in Automation Anywhere. 

The email automation command also needs to be improved. The email automation command sometimes is not working properly. When you connect the mail server, it is not being done properly.

The OCR feature is not that reliable.

With the PDF command, you can only read structured data. If your data is in an unstructured format, there is no command for it in Automation Anywhere. Then, people need to use Python coding if their data is in unstructured format. Therefore, Automation Anywhere needs to improve in the PDF area.

I have been using the product for the last two years.

I didn't have any stability issues. 

I haven't found any scalability issues with it. If the volume increases tomorrow, another bot can be added from the Control Room.

I worked with a single deployment model, which didn't have a load balancer requirement. Higher availability deployments require load balancers.

I haven't dealt with Automation Anywhere's technical support.

For the implementation, you just follow the proper process on how to deploy the proper hardware configuration on the production environment. The process does not take that much time as you push files to the Control Room, then from the Control Room, you can download the client. It does depend on how many bots you are implementing and how you are scheduling them.

Automation Anywhere is deployed from a deployment guideline in a step-by-step process. Automation Anywhere provides some deployment guidelines, which can be referred to.

Only one person is required for deployment: the Control Room administrator.

The number of people required for monitoring the solution depends on the amount of bots deployed.

It saves time and money. If a bot does the same work as nine out of 10 people, then you are saving money through wages. Also, a bot will work all hours without interruption, whereas FTEs may need time off or vacation. 

I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator. 

The Automation Anywhere automation tool is user-friendly, especially compared to UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere's deployment is also easy compared to other RPA tools.

The solution is good for people who want to do their job quickly without any delay or problems. 

The future of IT will require every organization to need automation.

The Control Room is good in version 11, as compared to the previous versions of the Control Room.

The primary use case is for ticket creation. They send in an email, then based on the priority, it creates a different ticket in Jira as well as the ticketing tool. In the end, they must consolidate all the tickets, whatever it has created, and sends that information in an Excel sheet to the stakeholders.

This was for an internal PoC.

It was a value-add for the organization. For each ticket, they would have to create a ticket for each of the three portals. However, after the PoC was done, then they would send a mail to a board, which will now send out the ticket number.

By using SNMP configurations and Excel, I was able to read the mail. I used this functionality to categorize the fabric, then I used this information to correlate the value to Jira along with Excel.

They must create the same ticket in three portals. Instead of that, they are now sending the mail to support. Support needs to take that mail and each bot needs to check the inbox. It will take that mail and categorize the subject, then prioritize it. We will take that description, paste it, and create a new ticket on these reporting tools.

The UI is very user-friendly, even for someone who doesn't have much coding knowledge. They can easily pick it up. Or, get training for two weeks, then pick it up. Someone from a coding background can pick it up easily too.

The MetaBots and IQ Bots are advanced tools for the market.

The functionalities and UI could be improved.

We have HTML mode and Windows mode, but Automation Anywhere is limited in this. It would be better if they were able to provide different specification modes.

I used Automation Anywhere for three months at work about a year ago.

The version that I used (10.3) was not that stable. It easily crashed in-between processes. 

In later versions, they have come out with better updates with things like MetaBot. I feel that version 11 is a robust solution.

The scalability is really good. 

The technical support team was very good to work with, as they were knowledgeable and provided good explanations. They were quite responsive.

The initial channel setup for was quite easy. However, we had to configure the control room. With that, we had to be very careful.

It took me half a day to deploy. I installed the SQL Server, the control room, etc.

The control room access gives the ability to create different roles, which helps when purchasing additional licensing.

Their overall pricing falls in the middle of the market. Cost-wise, Automation Anywhere is quite expensive because of their analytics, IQ Bots, and MetaBots. For a standalone machine, the pricing is okay. When adding in the licensing for IQ Bots (or MetaBots), it can become quite costly.

They recently launched a Community Edition, which is okay, but they should have done this a long time ago.

It is a very handy product.

As of now, Automation Anywhere has a very good place in the market.

We use this solution for automating business tasks in certain areas of the organization (so far). This involves creating bots to handle mundane tasks, so employees can be freed to work on other tasks that require higher thinking skills. We installed the product locally with the vendor's help.

The Automation Anywhere software has improved our organization by moving us into the RPA climate and allowing us to save on our overhead. By using bots, we have virtual workers that work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, all without taking a salary.

So far, we have found Customization and Ease of Use to be the most valuable features. We are also working on scalability now (within our bots), so other business areas can use the same bots that were already created. At the same time, we will be continuing to build other bots.

I would like to see a built-in read-only role for the control room so that the bot creators can log in and monitor the production environment without any auditing concerns. Currently, our development team cannot log into the production control room, due to audit concerns, and it would be beneficial to see the bots running, confirm the schedules, etc.

So far, it has been stable for the past nine months, which also included an upgrade to the client and control room.

We are currently scaling our bots and as a platform, it is very scalable.

All of the times that I contacted technical support were pleasant. Tickets were assigned quickly and resolved. We even have a customer liason weekly tagup call with the vendor to help with anything that may arise.

Previously, we didn’t use this type of product. We needed to lower our overhead costs.

This initial setup was straightforward. The documentation that was provided was thorough.

Our in-house team was used, along with the vendor's documentation and installation guides. Overall, it worked well.

Being one of the Bot Creators, I wasn't included in the breakdown, makeup, or negotiation of pricing or licensing. I only know the total cost.

We only installed the evaluation version of Automation Anywhere, and our Proof of Concept was successful.

Don’t employ all non-technical employees to create bots. Use software engineers. In our environment, we use REST, API, and SOAP, which may be daunting to non-technical folks.

Our primary use for this solution is the building of a digital workforce by implementing Robotic Process Automation to improve our operational efficiency. It is also intended to create capacity for our staff to focus on client-servicing matters, which are areas that require decision-making processes.

We have implemented two processes to date, for our Hong Kong office and Japanese office. The process automated for Hong Kong is for Company Secretarial business. The process automated for Japan is for Payroll business. Repetitive mundane tasks are now being executed by the robotic processes.

I mostly use the Control Room to monitor and manage bot runs. Since we can register multiple bot runners in one control room, and we can easily monitor and re-run bots when necessary, it is convenient for me. I would like to find out more about the dashboards and what they actually mean.

I have noticed that after the bots have been delivered to run in a production environment, there are issues in terms of quality and performance. For example, if the government website takes too long to respond, or there is an apostrophe in names, then these exceptions are not handled in the bot. I would like to see a higher quality in the final bots that are delivered to production.

The primary use case for bringing in Automation Anywhere was to make sure that we take away the work which our resources don't want to do, they don't like to do, or they find that there is something more meaningful and useful they can use their time for. That was our primary factor. 

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the unattended mode bots, because we don't need to go and look at what they're doing. They just go by themselves. That's the state we need to get to, but we are currently attended. Based on the projects or PoCs that we have done, we've got a last transmission program coming in, which is exciting.

The bot insides should come in the same package versus having it as a different bundle by itself. If we could have this product come with all the inside solutions altogether, that would help.

I was talking the other day in a session that when we go into this, how do we ensure that the right security policies are in place? Because now, we are talking about people accessing these bots from anywhere outside of the restricted access zone. So, that is where we should put focus on, because it takes only somebody to snatch the phone and start breaching. Therefore, that is where we should put the focus on.

We started off with the 10.5 version, where we didn't find any major hiccups. Then, we upgraded to version 11.3, which we find more useful. I think version 11.3 is the way to go.

As with every solution or a product, it goes through that journey. I think the RPA for Automation Anywhere is going through that journey. I can see the stability improvements from 10.3 to 10.5 to 11.3. From this conference, I could see the end-to-end governance coming into play. So, stability-wise, they are getting there. I'm not saying that it's fully stabilized. But, it's working for us, and the path is on the right track.

We started off with this showcase piece. Now, we are going into details regarding how we can scale. Can we scale it horizontally? Can we just start putting VMs on it? So, these are the factors that we are assessing right now, but we feel that it is scalable.

We wanted to be able to kick-start this journey, so we brought in an automation team, as this is where the whole industry is moving with our clients. From here, we will have success stories year after year.

We did not use a previous solution. We were trying to shop around and see what was best for us. Automation Anywhere was always promising and the use cases that we saw were interesting. So, we said, "We'll start with that." It works well so far.

The initial setup wasn't complex, but it wasn't straightforward. It was somewhere in the middle.

We didn't go Big Bang on thinking how much money that we were going to save. I wanted to make sure that could we show improvements in the efficiency, in terms of headcount. Ultimately, it comes boiled down to cost, but then if I can get one headcount reduced from the team, and be able to utilize that to somebody else, that would be a winning situation for my client and me.

We measure the ROI through FTE. Of course, there is a dollar value associated with it.

We have started to see the ROI. We are starting to see the following:

• Activities in which resources in my team would have taken four to five hours are now done in 30 minutes. 
• Some of the weekend monitoring
• Some of the weekend missing report generations
• Monday monitoring of a heavy load system. 

These are things that we are already starting to see where the time taken to do a task has been drastically reduced. So, we are seeing the performance improvement as a result.

I have nothing specific regarding the Automation Anywhere University. But, we have taken some of the online courses available and done a few sessions, which has been a wonderful deal.

I am putting it somewhere between a seven and eight (out of ten). That is what I'll rate it, because as I said, the stability and governance are on that path. As we get there, I'm sure it'll make it to a ten. So far. the journey is on the right track.

For somebody searching for a solution, it primarily concerns the use case. But if this is what they are looking for, I will definitely advise.

My primary use case with my current customer is automating various business processes used by a large financial institution.

Automation Anywhere is not necessarily a new technology, but what it does is it enables people who have a non-technical background to take advantage of the value of automated tools. When you look at businesses in the past, you had to have a really high level of programming skills to be able to even think about automating things. But with Automation Anywhere, you can actually teach somebody how to automate a business case in one day. So, to see people with no interest in coding get excited about automating things, that's huge. For a tool that can be fun to use and make people's job better on day one, that is the most valuable feature.

My impression of the Bot Store is good. It is a really smart offering. A lot of the time customers need the same things, and there's not necessarily a lot of logic in reinventing the wheel. When you take the Bot Store, you allow people to share knowledge, you allow best practices to be immediately adopted by users, and you can share good knowledge, saving a lot of time for customers. It's a really good thing.

A useful feature of Automation Anywhere, which is on the way, is the ability to use inline code for both Python and VBScript. The reason that this is so useful is a lot of the time people who are doing RPA are people with technical backgrounds who have been developers. Although, Automation Anywhere is very powerful, sometimes what you need to do is a very specific task which is accomplished more efficiently with code. So, I'm really excited that this feature is coming soon.

Another feature that would be cool to see in Automation Anywhere is more use of artificial intelligence. Right now, RPA is basically limited to a bot which is simply following the instructions that it was given. However, what would be really useful is if a bot was able to more flexibly respond to issues. For example, sometimes there are erroneous errors and pop ups. With good code, you can certainly build your bots to be able to handle that. However, it does take time and a bit of technical know-how to be able to do that. But because a lot of those technical challenges tend to be pretty similar, I would like to see Automation Anywhere include more robustness into the way that errors are handled.

The biggest area of improvement with Automation Anywhere is on the enablement side. A lot of the times, people have the capabilities with the tool, and it's all there, but it's not necessarily so easy to see that roadmap to RPA success. This is very new technology, and there's not a pre-walked path to success. It's unique to every organization, but there are certain commonalities. What Automation Anywhere could do to improve the solution is help customers understand what the tool is really capable of. Walk customers through what changes are needed both organizationally and in terms of infrastructure to really see success with RPA.

I've seen customers who have the licenses. They have the know-how. They have all the pieces from Automation Anywhere to achieve success. But, where they fell short was there maybe wasn't necessarily commitment from the right stakeholders within the organization or maybe there were other forces which were holding things back. What they needed was vision for it:

• How can they operate efficiently? 
• How should it work? 
• How should it look? 
• What roles are needed? 

These are the areas where I've seen customers struggle, and somewhere where Automation Anywhere could really improve.

One of the best things about the stability of Automation Anywhere is that when you have an automation, even if the product changes, there are so many tools built into Automation Anywhere that allow you to take those little problems and spot an issue immediately. You can see the health of your bots at all times. The dashboards and analytics provided by Automation Anywhere allow you to have an overall picture of exactly what's happening with your bots. Even if something changes, because things will always break, when that happens you're able to spot it immediately. You know exactly what happened and can have it changed that day, and it's back in functional production. If you weren't able to spot those problems so easily, you wouldn't be able to scale. However, because of the tools provided in the Control Room and other features with the analytics that Automation Anywhere has, it is very easy to scale automation using Automation Anywhere.

I have a very positive impression of the scalability of Automation Anywhere. The Control Room enables you to take an automation that was built once and have it be deployed in a very effective way.

Customers who I've worked with in the past have told me that they chose Automation Anywhere because of the Bot Games. The great thing about Bot Games is it gives people a chance to really experience RPA. It's one thing to hear about what the tools are capable of, but when you actually get there on the ground and you see what these things can do, that's how you get customer buy-in. That is how you get the people on top and the people on the bottom all to agree that this is a product that we can really use and can add value to our organization today.

The installation and setup of Automation Anywhere are quite simple. Most of the time that I've worked with customers setting up Automation Anywhere, it's gone off without a hitch. It's pretty much as simple as once your infrastructure is in place, you install the client and Control Room, then you can be ready to go building users and getting your automation started very quickly.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven.

We are an IT services firm. We use it for simple processes, but also for complex. We usually take up simple processes for manual tasks, which are easy to automate.

We have mostly done financial services: finance and accounting processes. That has been for the most part. We have also used it in HR and recruitment to find resumes online, and in other processes.

Its ease of deployment is the most valuable feature. We have found with many customers that it's quite easy to deploy. The other valuable feature, which is not from a technology perspective, is how Automation Anywhere collaborates with us. So, it has made our journey much easier than with other partners that we have.

Room for improvement is more on the IQ Bot side: How quickly we can adopt and deploy it? 

Another area which I feel would help is how the business can adopt it:

• Is it easier for the business to make changes to the tool once it's deployed? 
• How can the business take up roles in the man-machine continuum? 
• How can the business and machine work together, and how does the role change for the business stakeholder. 

It's more on the change management side, but includes all of the tool enabler.

It has been quite good in terms of making changes. As we are working on the process, it's much easier to make changes.

In terms of scaling up, we have not had issues with bots which are in production. In UAT, there have been scaling issues. But in production, as long as a solution is good, then it works.

It was a strategy from our company. We were looking to reduce the cost of operations for our existing clients. We were looking at different ways in which we could reduce our business, in a way, by reducing costs and get more business from the same clients. So this is where we started, by looking at automation as a major thing for Hexaware itself. It starts from our visions, which aligns very well with what Automation Anywhere provides, as a platform. That is where we started, then we have obviously grown and been able to automate many processes, which helped us to get many deals where we are upfront and able to tell clients how much optimization is possible. This is sort of my role, to showcase to the clients how much automation is feasible, in a particular process. We are quite good at that and have been able to do multiple engagements in this space.

We have automated one process, which was running with 109 people. We reduced it down to 69 with automation.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and World Fusion, and we struggled. Initially, we worked with other firms, but we have seen a great synergy with how Automation Anywhere integrates with our team and how we are getting support from Automation Anywhere. When we are going to a client with Automation Anywhere, it's much easier. That collaboration with their support team, and their advice to us, is extremely good. That's why we end up referring Automation Anywhere.

I would like to use IQ Bot a little bit more and understand more about what is offered, as to what features are there. One of the key challenges that we have had, in implementation, is for complex processes, especially where the input is not standardized. So, IQ Bot seems to be a good tool to use there. Hopefully, it will address everything, but mostly on that.

I would rate the product around eight to eight and a half. Mainly, because there is always room for improvement, and we're happy with the tool. There are areas which we need to understand more, as well, like IQ Bot for instance. We did one engagement with IQ Bot, but we need to mature ourselves into how we can utilize it. As the product matures, I'm sure it will be easier for us.

My advice will be to get a partner who is wiling to work with you and is willing to collaborate. This will make your life easier in the automation journey. There will be initial hiccups when you are getting into this journey, and that's just part of any journey. You need to look internally as to how you can improve, and work with a strong team, to deploy the solution.