Automation Anywhere Reviews

We have a lot of systems filled with documents and PDFs, such as finance, accounts payable, and operations.

We just started and have only implemented one bot.

I would like to have a cloud-based version with support.

It took us three months to scale up our first bot.

The technical support is very good. We are very happy with them. It takes them time, but they do get results.

We were not using another solution prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup of the software takes time.

We deployed the solution in-house.

We save only time, not money. We save 30 minutes every day using this solution.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

The IQ Bot is a very nice concept, and it will be very successful.

We are using it to automate company processes all across our firm: finance, legal, compliance, and customer client account servicing.

We have the ability now to surveil all our employees for political contributions. This would previously take 40,000 hours for a human to do. By combining Automation Anywhere and Appian together, we have been able to build a bot that works with Appian workflows to manage all our employees.

The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages. I have been able to be a developer with Automation Anywhere without knowing the technical background. I am a business user, and not needing the technical knowledge to use the system has been useful for me.

The bot creation process is straightforward in some ways and complicated in others. You can get your initial stuff laid out really quick, but then putting in your exception handling is more time consuming. It is awesome because it takes two hours to get things initially done. However, then it takes another two months to work through everything else, such as infrastructure and moving from development to QA to production. 

When I change the name of a variable in the Variable Manager, I would really like it to change in the code. We just added coding standards where I had to spend hours going through and recoding existing bots, because anything needing a change had to match our coding standards, and that now includes variable names. I just spend two days renaming variables in a bot. While it should have been superfast in the Variable Manager, I had to go through every single line of code, rename all of them, and inevitability, I will miss one. If I have already assigned a variable do something, it makes sense that if I change the name of the variable, then it should change in the code.

We have had so many stability issues.

We had quite a few issues when we upgraded from version 10.5 to 11.2. We were struggling with those issues, only to find out that version 11.2 has known problems. We should have gone straight to version 11.3. Now, we are upgrading again.

We have had so many production support issues. In version 10.5, we lost the ability to run unattended bots. Our Control Room could no longer unlock our Bot Runner machines, and Zendesk could not help us. So, we spent two month babysitting every single bot that ran. Then, when we upgraded to version 11.2, we found out schedules vanish from the Control Room, which resulted in us babysitting the bots for another two months.

The technical support is not great. We have had issues where they close our tickets when we don't respond to their email within eight hours, but they email us on a Friday night.

I had two days where I was out of the office, and they closed tickets on me. This has happened to my co-workers, as well. This has been frustrating.

I really struggle with the support team and informing them of endemic issues. They try and explain it away, but I know enough to be aware that there is a bigger issues, such as what we experienced with versions 10.5 and 11.2 causing us to babysit bots.

Not having the support has been problematic for me.

We used a third-party vendor for the deployment. With our initial vendor, we were led to believe that they were experts. We have since come to realize this was not the case. We have changed vendors and reprogrammed our bots from the initial vendor. We are much happier with our current vendor. 

We measure ROI through a combination of hours saved, errors avoided, and quality of life, which are bots based on processes which humans can do quickly but hate doing them. We have a couple bots built around quality of life.

I would encourage anyone looking for an RPA solution to look around at other solutions in the market.

The ability to integrate the solution with other applications is hit or miss. We have a lot of homegrown applications, and sometimes those don't work. Mostly, they work well with websites until they change the websites.

We have done a proof of concept of the IQ Bot. We struggled with it because we have sales spreadsheet that go across more than one page, and IQ Bot cannot follow it across more than one page. Also, the dp1 requirements were too high for most of our use cases.

We don't use Citrix automation.

We use it to automate IT processes.

We would like it to be more user-friendly.

The scalability is good.

It took us a year and a half to scale from our pilot to the current number of bots that we have.

We measure ROI by number of man-hours saved.

We also looked at Blue Prism.

Start small. Pilot it for a couple of processes. 

About a year and a half ago, we started making a business case for the software. We now have 15 bots running.

• It is flexible and user-friendly. The flexibility is awesome.
• It is easy to learn. Coming from a programming background, it is easy to use.
• Its ability to integrate with other solutions is awesome.
• The cognitive document processing is very good.

I would like to see a bot button.

The technical support is very good. We now have a technician on-hand to assist us with issues, instead of reaching out to Automation Anywhere's technical support. 

The cost is affordable, which makes an easy barrier to entry for the RPA market.

We chose Automation Anywhere because it is user-friendly.

I would recommend trying it. Once you see it in action, you will understand its capabilities and how easy it is to use.

The bot creation process is pretty standard. We take an idea for a business process and try to standardize it. We put in development and test it a hundred times before putting in production.

Courses on Automation Anywhere University are very easy to learn. It provides a huge amount of training and learning exercises for you to learn how to use the tool.

I haven't used Citrix yet.

We are using it to automate tasks.

We have one bot in production. It performs okay.

Unattended use is its most valuable feature.

I would like better support for migration objects.

We have problems getting the bot to run in our non-production environment. It took a long time to get the bot to run in our production environment.

The technical support is mediocre. The support is sometimes really good, and sometimes it is really bad.

The setup was very difficult. It recognizes the correct fields that you put into it, but it resulted in complex scripts.

We did the deployment in-house.

I don't think that we have seen ROI yet.

Know what you are getting into and do your research.

Attended automation is okay. We had some challenges around testing.

I am using it with my work on our disaster recovery process. It has been performing well, so far.

It is easy and simple to use with its drag and drop functionality.

The bot creation is easy, as you automate the steps exactly as you perform them.

The product is still lacking some features. However, I know that Automation Anywhere is continually improving it.

The stability is alright. I have had a couple of crashes and issues. Overall, it does seem pretty stable. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are measuring our ROI through time savings. We haven't done metrics for money yet.

This solution is a more robust, better product than the other solutions that we evaluated.

It is a great solution. We have had a lot of business users come in and use it, being successful with it.

We have used some of the IQ Bots, but we haven't used them too extensively.

We save about three hours a week using this solution.

Our first use case was to program a bot which could do the work of approximate 30 people, taking around half a year to implement. We did that bot around a year ago. This bot was the best case scenario for Automation Anywhere, making it the perfect application for RPA in our corporation.

Automation Anywhere can work with very old applications. For example, we had one application about to collapse and were able to capture all its information before the collapse happened.

The most valuable feature is its easy to use. For developers, the solution is super easy. I just learned the new Workbench editor, which is even better. In the version that we have now, we normally use a few TaskBots and a lot of MetaBots, so we can integrate DLLs and further enhance the bots that we have. It is very impressive.

The bot creation process is simple and useful. Whatever you need to do, it is there. If there is something else, there are the MetaBot functions.

It has been challenging integrating Automation Anywhere with other solutions, due to all of the controls, as we are a bank. 

We are really excited to have Python run directly from the bots. This would be a massive upgrade, as we could integrate AI even further with the solution. 

There is room for improvement in AI, but they are working on it.

They can work more on integrating the code. I would like to see more similar examples where we don't have to create the code in the bot, but can create the code in the Workbench.

The technical support is great, but I would like them to be faster with their response times. Sometimes, we have to contact them multiple time on the same ticket to receive a response.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, especially as a PoC. With the controls, it could be a bit more complex.

We have a third-party who manages our IT. They did an IaaS, then we did everything else.

We also evaluated UiPath and Automation Anywhere. 

We chose Automation Anywhere, as it was the more complete, simpler application.

Do a very simple automation of an application entry, like registration. Then, you will see how fast the application is and will start using it right away.

Every time a new employee starts with us, we start them on the Automation Anywhere University, "Hello Bot: Introduction to RPA" course.

While the cognitive document processing is very impressive, we sadly don't have it right now. We are working on acquiring it.

We don't use Citrix. We use Azure for every deployment. Azure has worked very well and is scalable.

We are automating repetitive, manual processes that don't add value to people's work. Also, we want to improve our risk management through quality and efficiency.

We have an automation that we just put in production where we are doing a double-blind quality review. The bot is comparing the two entries and kicking out a large number of exceptions for human review. We have saved a large number of hours every day by not having humans look at things that match.

The ability to build automation without coding is its most valuable feature.

We have had some quirkiness happen when integrating the Automation Anywhere with other solutions, such as weird Excel issues or temperamental legacy system issues.

Our division took a couple of months to scale up our bots, when we were expecting it to take weeks. However, what we did was fairly complicated.

I have not had a lot of experience with their technical support.

We measure ROI by comparing hours saved to the cost of FTEs.

We have found the product useful. We are using it and have implement it. However, it is not perfect, and we have found that there are some frustrations.

The developers who work for me find the solution fairly easy to use. Though, I do have developers who prefer typing stuff in rather than dragging and dropping. Generally, they picked up the solution quickly.

For the bot creation process, we ask the end user, "Don't tell me how you do something, show me what you do." Then, as IT personnel, we build it.

We have not taken any courses through Automation Anywhere University yet.