Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are using Automation Anywhere to automation some of our menial processes.

We have automated our pricing update and audit functions that we do as an operations team.

Our organization used to have a process which took five business days to do: our monthly pricing update. This was a very manual process. Our very first bot built was to automate this process. Now, the bot runs in the background every month and the process takes less than a day to run.

It is easy to use and learn.

Working with the Automation Anywhere servers and domains have proven to be difficult. We are trying to get more licenses and servers set up, so we can run multiple scenarios simultaneously. 

I am excited for the web browser Automation Anywhere. This will be helpful for us because the solution is limited to our team at the moment. A web browser solution would allow us to expand it to different teams.

I haven't really had to work with the Automation Anywhere technical support. I mostly use my in-house technical support.

Their previous process was terrible, so they started looking at automation as a solution.

While the initial setup is fine, the servers have caused us a few headaches.

Our first bot was complicated, and probably not the best thing to start with. However, as we learned from that experience and more of Automation Anywhere's features, we can now push bots out fairly quickly. The process is a lot smoother. Our infrastructure and design have improved tremendously.

We deployed the solution with our in-house team.

We were spending 50 to 70 hours a month doing manual processes and possibly making errors. Introducing bots has saved us on hours and eliminated of errors (as bots don't make them). We have not had an accuracy issue since introducing bots.

In terms of monetary savings, we automated a bot in three days that has saved us $30,000 in costs.

A lot of companies are putting a lot of effort into increasing and improving their front office processes.

It is a great resources right now. I am really looking forward to ramping up for my second year of going into automation.

Our primary use case is to improve cost savings or FTE usage through automation.

The product is still new for us, but we are already starting to think about different ways to deploy things to development.

The product is easy to use. It is a good tool for developers and business users.

Getting the bot design into the developer's hands is taking longer than we initially anticipated.

I like the ability to grant specific permissions to specific users and want to see this rolled out in future versions.

We have only deployed this solution for three months.

We have three bots in production. We are currently working on scaling up to 30 bots.

The technical support could be better, especially with their responds. They always caring through with their timing though.

We started looking at solutions that would make the process faster without redesigning it.

The initial setup was not complex, but we did need assistance to get it up and running.

To deploy our initial three bots, we used a partner (Accenture). Now, we are doing our own development.

We measure ROI by evaluating the entire process: 

• How long does it take to run everything? 
• How many FTEs are running the process? 
• What are the savings from a quality standpoint?
• What processes are now able to be run over the weekend without someone monitoring them over the weekend?
• What are the penalty if something is not automated?

We also looked at Blue Prism.

Start with a good integrator. That is what we did.

It is a good tool for RPA focused development.

We have been able to integrate the tool with other software. So far, we had no issues.

I have taken one course through Automation Anywhere University. It was not a bad experience. I am planning to take more courses in the future. However, the courses are very long.

We have several use cases for Automation Anywhere:

• Grab data from one site to another.
• We run all cache processes through it.
• We can get more information using IQ Bots.

The platform is easy to use, especially for business users.

I would like to see web and cloud-based platforms for future releases.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

While it depends on the customer, it generally takes about two to two and a half months to scale up bots for production.

We are the integrator for deployment.

We have saved time and money using the solution.

Licensing costs range from $50,000 to $200,000.

There are five to six competitors in this market.

Make a list of all your processes before starting, then decide on two or three processes that you want to automate.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. The new learning course model is more inviting and easier to use.

As a solution, RPA integrates well with other solutions.

It is very easy for us to work with the Citrix applications.

We spend less time preparing data.

I would like to have the ability to schedule bots by whichever one is available.

The stability is good. I haven't had any major issues.

The stability has been good, so far.

It took us four months to scale up to our current number of bots.

The technical support is good. I have only used it once.

This was the first time using an RPA solution. Automation Anywhere was our first choice.

The initial setup was straightforward. We have a center of excellence that does a lot of this stuff.

We have saved time.

Take a look at RPA in general.

We want to automate our business processes.

It eliminates redundant work from our offshore team to free up FTEs.

The speed of the delivery is its most valuable feature.

The solution doesn't offer all the capabilities that we need, so we have to use it in conjunction with other software.

The bot creation process is a little tricky, since our company is not setup to accommodate a bot. Therefore, it has been a bit tricky and time consuming. However, we are getting there.

I would like to see more capabilities in the next release.

We started with a complex process, so it has taken us over a year to scale our bots.

The technical support has been a little slow to respond to our inquiries.

We used a combination of employees and consultants for our deployment.

We measure ROI through our FTE savings.

Discuss the solution with other companies before purchasing. 

Learn from their website what other people have already developed.

We are headed towards integrating the solution with other software.

The cognitive document processing is new for our company.

I started, but didn't finish Automation University University. I have taken more classes with Automation Anywhere vendors.

We use it for financial back-office functions, things like fee information, balance information, and account aggregation information.

It has been able to save us time in our processes from hours to minutes. Something that might have taken anywhere from two to eight hours now takes 20 minutes.

The general features, that we can automate a task that takes hours into minutes, are valuable. But as far as an individual product feature goes, there isn't anything more specific.

Operationally, there's room for improvement, especially in the area of high-availability and deployment.

In high-availability, we have two Control Rooms acting as a cluster so if one fails the other one will take over. But that's not our environment operationally, and the latest information we have is that they identified another product bug.

We have come through a number of issues with them and they've been very good at fixing them, but we've gone through four different patches to get things working, and currently, we're not working in a clustered environment.

We have had it in production since January of 2019, five months ago. We had it in beta for two months before that. We actually onboarded the product in September of 2018. That was when we started with the product but it was all PoC.

We're not really there yet, in terms of scaling, but based on the high-availability issue, right now I'm not too confident. From everything I've heard, though, it seems like people are running hundreds of processes on a Control Room, but we haven't really done enough to know about scalability.

Technical support is the one thing that has been fantastic. Initially, when we had all these issues, we had some issues trying to get to the right people. But since we escalated and got the right people involved, they've been fantastic. They've had people come out to our site. We submit tickets and let them know the error and they see and pretty much turn them around right away. Unfortunately we do have a number of issues, but support has been really great.

We haven't used any other RPA product.

In the initial setup, we had difficulty in our environment. We actually had to have them come onsite for two days to get us deployed, and even then it took another month before we were finally operational. I think our environment was a factor, but we also did find product failures.

We installed it but it was not operational. Everything from the way things were configured to our license not being set up accurately was an issue. So we had configuration setups such that we couldn't process and it took a while to get that figured out. To be honest, one of the issues was that it was around the holidays and the right people weren't available to help us out. It took us a week-and-a-half just to resolve the fact that there was a button that had to be un-clicked.

And we've been continuing to have issues along the way. They had actually settled down quite a bit until we hit this high-availability issue.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we used a development partner, professional services, that had knowledge of Automation Anywhere. This is a brand-new program for us, our first foray into RPA, so we had a professional services partner who took us all the way from business process through implementation. We don't have technical resources here who did the implementation. We totally relied on them, initially.

Our strategy was to have an experienced professional services partner help us get onboarded and develop bots for us as a PoC. Then, after the PoC and we declared complete, we would move them into production. Our longer-term strategy would be to start building some in-house talent that could do some of the bots as well.

The partner we used was independent of Automation Anywhere. They did a really good job in the upfront work, telling us what RPA can provide and about the process for determining if something should be automated or not. 

Where we struggled a bit is when it came to implementing. We implemented what the business did but we didn't implement what was needed from an operational point of view. In other words, what happens when there's an issue? What happens when there's a scenario that the bot can't handle? How will people get notified? Things like that weren't factored in initially. Some of that might have been because it was a pilot, but ultimately the vendor said, "Yeah, we're going to productionize this." But we've had delays in getting our bots into production because that aspect of usability wasn't factored in.

We're in the process of trying to get our last bot into production, and then we'll start trying, in 2019, to develop some more bots. But it has delayed our bot development. We're tracking about two months behind what we expected.

Our biggest lesson learned is that we need to factor in usability right from the beginning, not only that the business does these ten steps, but what happens if those steps fail?

It's too early for a return on investment.

On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are about $80,000. We bought a package and when we tried to get this high-availability to work we bought some extra Bot Runners. I know that if we buy IQ Bot there's an additional cost for that but we haven't gotten there yet.

We evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath. We chose Automation Anywhere - both our technology and business sides, as a partnership - because the business and technology agreed with them. They felt that it was something they could more easily understand with some of their tech-savvy people. They felt they would ultimately be able to use the product, once it got rolled out. Whereas, with some of the other products, they didn't feel they were as easy to adopt.

Make sure that you not only look at what the business needs are, but how the business will use the product when it becomes operational. It's relatively easy to get a bot developed to do what the business wants, as long as they have a good process laid out. But what is more difficult is that when you go into production you have to understand how you can schedule it if it's attended. Our three bots are unattended. You have to understand the scheduling aspect, you have to understand what happens if it's not happy path and there's an issue. Who does it go to? How is it going to get monitored? And you have to understand how your infrastructure is supported. Our infrastructure is kind of complex which is, I think, why we're running into some of the issues we are.

The users of Automation Anywhere in our company are all business users who support our clients in the back-office, whether that's trying to do fee calculations or account calculations. We only have three bots and the number of business users is probably less than 20, in total, who will be using it once we go live. It may be more as we get further along but right now it's less than 20, probably closer to 15.

We're trying to get it out to different departments, so ultimately there could be 50 users, maybe even 100, but that's more long-term. We might get up to 20, but I think that's as far as we'll get this year, unless we start having a lot better success.

Part of our problem is that for maintenance we require at least two people. Deployment is actually pretty straightforward, but we need about two people for that as well. The people involved would be CM, configuration management, our technology architect, our operations infrastructure, and our database team.

We have been creating a lot of bots for the finance department. At this time, we are trying to use the TaskBots and MetaBots, not IQ Bots. 

As of now, we have automated processes from the finance, accounting, treasury, and tax departments.

An example of how it has saved time: I know 10 to 12 accountants who were doing a lot of day-to-day manual tasks. Once we implemented the Automation Anywhere into my company, we freed up a lot of their time, so they could work on other processes. 

I like the OCR feature, where we can capture information from PDFs.

The commands provides by Automation Anywhere make the tool easy to use.

I know Automation Anywhere is available for front-end applications, but I don't know how it deals with the back-end. If they are sending technology which comes through to the back-end, that would be a big evolution in the industry.

Citrix is only in the development stage. Automation Anywhere could put some time into improving this more.

The stability is good.

We started with zero bots. In our first cycle, we developed around eight bots. In our second cycle, we created around five or six bots. Now, we are on our third bot cycle.

The technical support is good. They try to get back to us within one to two days. Once they do respond, everything is good.

The initial setup was complex.

Initially, we used an implementer for the deployment. Now, we do everything on our own.

We measure ROI by how much we are saving for our internal people.

Compared to the other competitors' tools that I have been experienced with for bot creation, Automation Anywhere is user-friendly.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. They are simple and detailed. The courses include videos and quiz questions.

We want to learn more about IQ Bots going forward.

We have automated some fund management and fund reconciliation processes, which has been done successfully. The tool has been performing well. 

In our fund management and fund reconciliation process, we had a lot of headcount. Automation has significantly reduced our FTE count, investing that IT personnel into other work. Also, the quality of the work has slightly improved.

Our development time has been reduced because the solution is very user-friendly. You don't have to know a lot of things. It has an IDE with drag and drops, in addition to workflow development. This gives developers an edge to write code quickly.

I am a developer with nine years of experience in full-stack development. I have found this tool strikingly different, compared to the other tools, in terms of ease to use. Anybody can be taught it, and it has a very small learning curve.

Automation Anywhere has some limitation with its integrations. You can build your logic with MetaBots and .NET components, e.g., if something is not gathered by Automation Anywhere or built into functionality, you can write a MetaBot. A MetaBot is like an external component. You can write it through C# or .NET code, and make a DLL, and import it. This is not open to all data types or EXE functionalities which can be written through C#. You have to define your variable types, matching them with Automation Anywhere existing variable types. Because of the knowledge required, I cannot let another person, who doesn't know Automation Anywhere, build my external DLL code.

They are already addressing some concerns that I have been having, like having cascaded code blocks, which is very helpful for developers to use when finding and debunking codes. Until now, we haven't had collapsible cascaded code sections in Automation Anywhere. This is not typical, as any IDE will usually have it, on any language.

The current interface for business users is not intuitive, as it is a code-based view. A business user wanting to develop a process may find the interface a bit elusive. Automation Anywhere is now working on a process flow view with a drop and drop, which should be better for business users.

There is not much guidance for implementing DevOps, like continuous development. Nowadays, the technology has come for the deployment part, it should be part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD). 

With Jenkins or TeamCity, there is a job, and I want to see them have integration with Automation Anywhere, so we can directly code check-in, run, test, and deploy. Now, we are doing this manually for deployment, but I want to see a DevOps job instead.

The product has been in production for six months.

We had couple of Windows' tools that we automated. The stability is remarkably good. 

In some cases with RPA web development, where we had to integrate with some websites, there were some problems in terms of reliability or stability. The issue is not constant. Different browsers, like IE, work well, where others, like Chrome, don't work well. With legacy websites, based on old technology, it also does not work well. 

The scalability is fine. You can create small, repeatable tasks. You can expand through different bots. So, you don't have to recreate the same stuff. Automation Anywhere provides the facility so you can reuse components to make a scalable solution.

We are improving scalability on a daily basis, as RPA is new to us. Our code is now more scalable and reusable than we developed our basic structure. Going forward, if we have to create a new bot with any given scenario, it will take 20 to 40 percent less time to create. This is because we have already made the scalable, reusable components.

In terms of accessibility, the Automation Anywhere technical support is the best. Out of all the RPA tools that I have used, their support forum is more agile and responsive. For any issue, we just have to create a ticket and a technical person will get assigned in no time. They are the best in terms of responsiveness, but I have mixed feelings about the quality of those responses. I feel sometimes to support their fast responses that they probably compromise their quality.

We used to get a lot of emails from the original fund management users (the consumers) asking about their estimated stock prices: monthly and biweekly. This information comes through a lot of emails. We had to read those email, classify and categorize them, then go into a different portal to get some more data, and finally, send them a result in an Excel format.

We used a consultant, and the deployment was very smooth. We have been maintaining three environments: development, UAT, and production. The deployment procedure is pretty simple. We just have to export from one to another environment where the dependency is just a package file. 

We are thinking of implementing Bot Insight and the CoE dashboard to calculate our ROI, since our bots are not analytics-based. We are just using our bots as a bot. They are not integrated with any analytics. I know that they have a CoE dashboard, where you can define parameters to automatically calculate ROI. At the moment, we are manually calculating our effort savings.

I don't agree with the IQ Bot licensing costs, which depends on the consumption of the document rather than per bot or user. This is confusing for me, because most of the cases for us in a possible future scenario, there would be a lot of invalid data to be scanned to get to real data. E.g., we would have to supply approximately 100 pages of scanned data to extract two pages of original data. In these type of cases, the IQ Bot might be a costly venture.

The company also looked at UiPath. From my understanding, Automation Anywhere was chosen for ease of use and licensing.

The IQ Bot seems interesting in the terms of populating semi-structured data and gathering intelligence of its own. Though, I haven't implemented in my project yet.

I didn't know Automation Anywhere seven to eight months back. All my learning came from the Automation Anywhere University. Though, I have experience in other RPA tools, the courses are really helpful, as they helped me to gather the knowledge needed to implement and master the product. Right now, I'm applying the information to my domain and company.

I haven't used it in a Citrix environment.

I very excited to see the next version of this product.