Automation Anywhere Reviews

Today, we use Automation Anywhere to build out the capacity within our organization. We use it to help us figure out opportunities, then remove some of the busy/transactional work, which employees don't want to be doing.

From an organizational perspective, it has improved how we work and determine, "Is there a better way to do things?" and, "How can we challenge the status quo?" This builds a continuous improvement mindset throughout our organization. This is in addition to some of the tangible benefits of taking monotonous work off people's plates, creating capacity, and cost reductions.

Ease of use is a valuable feature.

The ability to scale is probably the number one reason that we chose Automation Anywhere. We are able to build automation fairly quickly, and they are fairly scalable. 

We can rinse and repeat a lots of swap-out pieces, as necessary.

Once we got the tool going and were fairly familiar with it, we were able to scale the solution. Our developers love it. It is fairly simple to use. Sometimes, we are able to even bring people on fairly quickly, like interns, and have them use the software. Then, we are able to see some real benefit out of it fairly quickly.

At pilot, we had around four bots. Today, we have 85 bots, and that is over 12 to 13 months.

Every tool has challenges. With Automation Anywhere, it took us a bit of time to stand it up initially. We tried to do it in a virtual environment, which caused us a bit of headache. It could have been smoother in this aspect.

Originally, when we started our process of standing up our center of excellence (CoE), we used ISG to help build the scale, increase the number of bots, and help deliver use cases for our work.

When we measure ROI, we look at four buckets:

1. Capacity creation
2. Cost avoidance
3. Cost reduction
4. Increased accuracy and reduction of errors. 

We have a calculator that we created. We have some inputs, then based on what we realize, we receive an output or number stating, "This is the benefit that the automation gave us."

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. The reason that we chose Automation Anywhere was its ease-of-use and some of its market capabilities. We were also familiar with the tool from an outsource service provider.

Give the tool a try. Get the business onboard. Build some quick, easy bots at first. Then, you will be able to see the capabilities of the tool quickly.

Our bot creation process is fairly robust. We have a centralized model with a good process from beginning to end, which involves engaging our business partners, documenting the as-is, looking at the future state, then coding the automation. We leverage Automation Anywhere, as a tool in our tool belt, and one that we've enjoyed adding because it increases our capability to change processes going forward.

Automation Anywhere integrates pretty well with the other applications that we use. We like to go the API route through Automation Anywhere, but we are always looking at customer web portals or the portals of our suppliers, as we have pretty good integration capabilities.

We are looking forward to using the bot monitoring capabilities in version 11.

We haven't used the cognitive document processing capabilities of Automation Anywhere.

I have not taken any Automation Anywhere University courses.

We primarily use it for finance and marketing applications in our company, since we do a lot of our back office tasks at our company. We have automated in marketing, finance, our commercial organization, and are moving into HR.

The tool performs very well.

We are using it to backfill a lot of our resources who are retiring, so we are hiring less people as we go.

The object cloning is its most valuable feature.

It is easy for business users to utilize, who don't have IT skills.

We would like to have collapsible code loops.

It would be nice to upload a project, instead of individual files, so we can look at file and versions changes.

We would like to have more features inline with our traditional IDE, like what is in Visual Studio.

It scales pretty well as long as you have enough developers to scale it with you.

We can scale the bots in about a year. When we started, we went from a pilot of about 14 bots, which all got stripped away. Then, we ended up implementing 30 different bots about a year later.

I don't use the technical support a lot. It feels like a lot of time that they will ask us to check the user manual. When we eventually just tell them, "No, we want to set up a call." Then, they are usually pretty helpful on the call.

This is our first RPA solution. We haven't previously used another solution. Our strategy group and IT department were the ones who decided to use Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was complex. However, Automation Anywhere came onsite and helped us with our architecture, then it was fine.

We used a reseller for the deployment. We really enjoyed working with them.

We evaluate ROI as time savings and resource costs not needed resulting from deployed automation.

We save approximately 10,000 hours per year.

We also looked at Blue Prism and UiPath, but Automation Anywhere was more secure.

Ensure that IT is invested. Don't expect your business to carry the load.

We like the idea behind the Bot Store, but we haven't really adopted the Bot Store yet.

As part of our retail banking group, we are using Automation Anywhere for various processes within it. In addition, we are using it for our risk and compliance teams for money laundering investigations and fraud investigations.

We are using it primarily to remove out the human element of various processes.

It gives us the capability of leveraging our investments in different applications. I can use Automation Anywhere to tie a number of applications or processes together, without having to do in-depth coding to automate something.

It's been pretty good at integrating with our other applications and tools that we're using.

We started out with three production bots last year. From the time that we were deploying them into production to being able to use them in a production mode, it took somewhere between four to six months.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

One of the things that we did was purchase the solution originally through IBM, as they had an value-added layer on top of it. Once we had another group come on, they purchased additional bots directly from Automation Anywhere, and they wouldn't integrate well. We had to uninstall the solution that we had purchased from IBM and reinstall those bots to move forward. 

Now, we purchase our bots directly from Automation Anywhere, because this other layer from IBM put us behind, and I don't know if IBM has resolve this issue or not. It was a bit disturbing and surprising, that during the sales cycle, we were told by Automation Anywhere that this layer/enrichment was not seamless to the upgrade process.

We did use an integrator, Cognizant, for the deployment. 

It frees individuals up from mundane tasks so they can concentrate on being more active and creative other things that they need to do. There are two use cases that we have around for this: 

1. We receive benefit and reduce tying up of valued resources. 
2. For processes which are executed less frequently. E.g., there may be monthly processes with one to two people, and instead of relying on those individuals to run those processes, I can automate them. Then, I can get more consistent results when relying on a process which is manually driven.

• Pega seems a lot more hands-on with technical capabilities. They also seemed like if I wanted a steak, I had to buy the entire cow, then eat it.
• UiPath seems to be more of a recording type application, and if I want to change something, I have to do a rerecording.
• With Blue Prism, it is like they wouldn't really engage except through a third-party partner, which was sort of a turnoff.
• Automation Anywhere is in the middle ground. It allows me to easily drag and drop things into the development platform. I can also do recordings. However, if I'm having issues, I can dig down into the flow of the code, if necessary.

Take a good long look at the processes that you are trying to automate. Look at the talent pool that you have to develop the bots. Do you want to become a development shop? Or, do you want some of the capability to be put in the hands of business users? In our case, we wanted that mix of technical and business users having capabilities around this application. Some of the other products didn't offer that. This was one of the things that we drew us to Automation Anywhere.

We have some of our developers taking courses around Automation Anywhere University.

I have implemented it for multiple use cases. 

One of the use cases that it was implemented for is filling out timesheets from the managers. There are certain managers who have to allocate hours to multiple employees, around 40 to 45 employees. Each month, they decided how much time that they will allocate to each of resource. Using a robot, they can automatically fill in the timesheet on Zoho, which is the timesheet system that the company uses.

Another use case was that we used to have certain lists of vendors who billed every month. They had a specific format to their invoices. Using bots to read through those invoices, we were able to pick up relevant data and enter it into the finance systems.

It has improved the efficiency and reliability of the data in the systems. A user is always going to make errors. By adopting robots, we are able to have more accurate processes, plus time is saved.

It saves time for the people who operate it. This particular bot is an attended automation bot, and before running the bot, the manager tweaks some of the values which are important. Overall, this will save the managers time during their processes and create value.

It is not always required to have a technical background. It is not necessary to know programming languages. This makes it easier for a business user to create his own bots.

It is pretty stable on a day-by-day basis. It is much better than when I started working on RPA solutions three years ago.

Manually, I have worked on adding/scaling bots, but I need to work on cloud availability, possibly discussing scaling with cloud providers, like AWS.

For different processes, the scaling time period is different. For some processes, we could develop bots in two weeks, then go to production with one or two bots. For other processes, it could take three months or more. It varies based on the process.

We did not use another solution previously.

The setup process is not easy compared to the competition, and this can be a barrier to entry.

We implemented it ourselves.

The time savings depends on the process. By using a bot, we have saved 40 to 70 percent. If the process uses unattended automation, it saves a lot of time.

Currently, I don't think that we have saved money with this solution.

When I started working on it, it was difficult to obtain a trial version (barrier to entry). Now, they have a Community Edition, which may make it easy to get started.

We looked into UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. Our client was interested in Automation Anywhere.

UiPath has an easier setup process.

I recently took a look at the Bot Store, and it's a good initiative. I haven't started using it. I downloaded a couple of the bots, and hopefully soon, I will try to use some of them in a production environment.

The real beauty of robotic automation is when it is running from the back-end (unattended).

We're an insurance company and we use it to automate what would normally be done person-to-person by hand. We're gluing together the applications, going from one to the other to collect information to process them.

I can't speak for the bigger picture, but we have had a great deal of success with gluing together some of the old applications. They were built, isolated, and somewhat siloed. We have this one where you go to get this information, and we've got that one where you go to get the rest of the information. Now, rather than the team going and collecting all of that information, we can have the bots do it, and that has been fantastic.

We've had a number of processes plugged into this that have become the daily job schedule. There was a ridiculous amount of old work: Request this report, download the PDF, grab the numbers off of it and entering them. Having the automated system, while I can't put numbers on it yet, it's very easy to sell the value of the product.

I really like the way the bots are built, being able to take some old, clumsy screen that someone built and put your keystrokes and your information onto it. It's fairly simple as well.

I would describe bot creation with the word "exciting." We've had a couple of team members who have been working on projects who say, "Let me do it!" They're familiar with the product and they're very comfortable with the building process.

I also very much like the integration of this solution with other applications. We have some old web applications that we've been using, and we've been writing some of our own DLLs to integrate with it. It has worked really well. We're able to have the bots take over what would have been a lot of training and a lot of meticulous work.

I love the XML feature behind the scenes.

If there were one thing I could ask for it would be a text-based language. Right now it's proprietary, so you always have to go through the tool, even for things like basic compares. What we're trying to do is spin up other teams to get them using more and more of it. That would help, the basic .NET for basic tasks. The language itself has been working well. They should just keep doing what they're doing.

We just got onto Windows 10 and that has gone absolutely flawlessly. Not only has it been working well, but we're seeing a huge performance upgrade. They are running considerably faster. I'd give a thumbs up on the stability.

Scaling has gone remarkably well too, the ability to literally just spin up another bot. We have a collection and we'll add a couple more and no big deal happens to the scheduler. It has worked well.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we’re currently using has taken about two years. We did a lot of experimenting before we committed to it, but once we got through a couple of those experimentation projects, we were able to form a team, figure out exactly what we were going to have to accomplish from a business point of view, and dive in. After those couple of pilots, it took about a year from when we initially startied playing with it. There was a little bit of getting our feet wet, feeling comfortable with it. But now, we have several teams and it's working great.

I have not personally had to call much, I'm not part of the team that would do that, but they've been fairly responsive. We've found one or two problems that we had to come up with workarounds for and they did that fairly quickly. Then the permanent solutions came along fairly well. We have a very good relationship with them; being able to call and get that help right away.

It was really straightforward and made sense to me. Put it this way: I have always been able to see where the product is going. It seems somewhat impressive the way it's designed, and that's why it made sense. Some of it might have been due to the fact that I took the classes at Automation Anywhere University. I got to talk to the developers, so I could see exactly what they were thinking, and it made sense.

The nice part about being on the software development side is that we have don't have to deal with licenses etc. I've had to in the past. Put it this way: It becomes easier and easier to sell when they can see what we're doing.

I was brought in right as our pilot was getting ramped up, so they had already made the decision. I did hear about the other ones but I don't know exactly what the decision process was.

The biggest advice I could give is to just be patient. There's a lot to learn and you really don't know, at first, exactly how you go about it, how does this happen?

I started approximately two years ago, and having seen improvements to the software, I'm so excited right now about finding out where they're going. I've seen a great deal of the investment in the product as they develop it. so I'm fairly excited to be using it.

Sadly, I have not gotten into much of the solution’s cognitive document processing (IQ Bot) yet. It's a matter of learning more about it and then taking the next step. It's a matter of finding out what else we can do and we can start developing that.

I took a few courses at Automation Anywhere University when we first started. The more people that we've had on Automation Anywhere, we've found it's been working extremely well. It seems as though we're able to get them up to speed relatively quickly.

Right now, I would rate Automation Anywhere at about eight out of ten because it's obvious there have been huge improvements and it's nice for us to work with. There extra two points would come from the improvements that we're looking for: simple things like the programming interface, they could clean that up. And the compare windows are small, it would be nice if those were bigger. There are always refinements they can make. And we've seen some already. It has become faster, cleaner to use.

The primary use case is to automate business processes for a manufacturing company.

My clients have seen tremendous value when it comes to automating business processes. The robust nature of the application allows them to scale their business processes pretty quickly. They receive the benefits in around a quick 12-week period.

The reporting capabilities are pretty nice. 

The Excel component is valuable, when compared to other tools in the market.

From an ease of use point of view, on a scale of one to ten with ten being really easy, I would rate the tool a six. The interface is not intuitive for business users who are used to seeing the process on a flow chart, like a Visio workflow diagram. This may be because of the nature of the way the interface is structured and the way the functions are built in list type of format. I feel like there is a bit of a learning curve for anyone who is new to the program. As with everything, it takes time and you start to get better at it. 

From pilot to production, we scaled our last bot in about nine weeks. It was a very interesting process because the building deployment can be done pretty quickly, but if you don't narrow down the scope early, you can face a lot of challenges. I don't think this necessarily has to do with the platform. It is more about understanding and narrowing down your scope from the beginning. It's okay to add more functionality later, but that adds delay to your overall timeline. However, being that it's very easy to configure the bot and add components to it, this is one of the benefits of building with Automation Anywhere. You can make changes pretty quickly.

With everything, you will have to be careful and not get caught up always making changes. You have to really narrow the scope down quickly and build it in very small components. Don't build everything end-to-end. Break down your processes, as much as possible, and deploy as little functionality as possible. This makes it way more easy to manage. It is also a much better way to build a bot.

I did attempt to reach out to customer support a few times. I didn't really get any response. 

I would rate them a five out of ten. There is room for improvement.

It does take a lot of space to install. However, you are installing a very powerful application which has very powerful components in it.

Pay attention to what you're doing, and the following:

1. Capabilities that you have in-house.
2. Support down the line. 
3. Handing over your solutions to someone else to pick up. 

You want to have this type of mindset. 

With any tools, you have to ensure you have the right capabilities in-house to be able to help build out and manage any solutions in the future, along with managing your army of bots in deployment. 

It is a good, powerful application. It can fit pretty much any use case, but that is one component to it. The other component is do you have the right in-house skills to help you manage the Automation Anywhere bots?

I took the RPA Advanced course for developers (entry-level) in Automation Anywhere University. I took it a while ago, and I don't know if it's changed now, but it was very informative, detailed, and intuitive. I came from automation tools, so it was a bit easier for me to pick up on the information because of my background. The course was pretty informational. I felt comfortable building an application, building a bot, and putting it into production after the course.

Building a bot can be pretty quick. If you understand what the problem is that the bot is trying to solve, then you can get it done pretty quickly since the process is easy and straightforward. However, if you are coming from other tools or are not an experienced developer, you might face a bit of a challenge in the beginning. Everything will eventually come pretty quickly, as you can build a bot in an hour, or even less than that.

I'm learning how to use the IQ Bot, which is a pretty good component of the application. I can see how it would be a really powerful feature for some of my clients.

I haven't used the Citrix feature yet.

Primary use case would be order-scheduling for us. What we do is we take internal orders and we schedule them with our customers. There is a lot of data that we're managing both in our systems and in our customers' systems.

The looping functions definitely save us time. What Automation Anywhere has done is free up more time for our staff. They're able to handle exceptions in our processes instead of having to do the mundane, repetitive tasks they were doing previously.

The object looping functions are definitely very useful, especially when there are repetitive processes. We can design one path and have it do it multiple times until all the data's completed.

There are two big pain points for me. One is communication of all known bugs and the issues with the current versions that users that might be on. A heads-up of known issues would be a nice-to-have. If we're spinning our wheels, and we have that piece of information, it would make it a lot easier to either justify an upgrade or a process change here, to handle that particular bug or issue, given that it's a system-wide known issue.

The second thing is that we have a lot of use cases that depend on certain Java applets, and currently we're not able to leverage the Object Cloning that would speed up our automation designing. So we have to revert to more image recognition-type of designing, and it just takes a long time to get that bot built. We have one, solely web-based use case, and we can deploy those kinds of use cases fairly quickly and then make modifications on the fly with them. But when we have these other use cases that leverage image recognition, it makes it difficult to be agile and to do updates or edits fairly quickly.

Those are the two biggest pain points and opportunities. I have raised these issues with Automation Anywhere and they've mentioned that the automation piece is something that they're currently unable to do, but it's somewhere on the roadmap to deploy. We just haven't received the date for when it will be.

It's mostly stable. Sometimes we do notice that our Automation Anywhere services get disconnected. That happens, maybe, once every three weeks. When the service is disconnected, you can't run any automations on that particular environment. So someone has to go in there and reinitialize those. But for the most part, it's pretty good.

From the current setup that we have, I'm not sure how much we can scale up. We had an initial PoC and our first go-live was less than a year ago, so we haven't had those discussions on what it would take to either increase by one or two servers or 20 servers, or what that would look like.

Technical support is pretty great. Sometimes, I feel that their office hours are not in line with our office hours, so getting a response can take either half a day or a few hours. With production outages, we can become dead in the water.

Once we do have someone on and responding to our tickets, they're pretty knowledgeable. If a ticket has not been routed to the correct technical support group, it gets routed fairly quickly and addressed. Their knowledge is pretty good.

The only times that I would have negative feedback about support are when we go through most troubleshooting techniques or steps that a technical support agent would walk me through and, at the end, the problem is deemed a bug. That's when I would feel like we were spinning our wheels. I know that those are the necessary steps to identify it's an actual bug and not some sort of configuration or update that we needed.

Our current customer success manager is fairly good. He's always on top of our tickets and if I ever raise a question to him, he's definitely very helpful. I do feel like we're being taken care of.

Sometimes we used simple data loaders or macros from Excel, but nothing more advanced. Our organization began to look at something like this solution because, from a resource standpoint, there was a need to expend more on the workforce. Not having to expand our workforce even more was preferable, if we could carry out these repetitive tasks through an automation. We definitely wanted to leverage that instead of adding more people.

The initial setup was pretty simple. We got the minimum requirements for all of our environments, and we had a technician, a technical expert from Automation Anywhere, who walked us through the setup. That was actually the easiest part.

From a software installation standpoint, it was roughly a couple of hours. But from the infrastructure side, there were some setups on our end that we needed to carry out. That took a little while longer.

Three people were required for the deployment. One to coordinate resources, another from our side, and one technical expert from the Automation Anywhere side. In terms of people involved in managing the solution, for the entire software, we have roughly one stakeholder for each department that we have automations in. The solution affects many people, but the number of people who are actually involved in designing and maintaining it, is between five and ten.

We have seen a return on investment. Every time we have these processes running, it's definitely helping out on that front.

There were a few top candidates out there. We had demos and we went through the entire vetting process. The standout qualities of Automation Anywhere were the ease of automation and that it is an intuitive tool. After a simple walkthrough, a couple of hours, you would be able to hit the ground running.

Definitely take an inventory of all the systems that you have plans to carry out the automations in and ensure that the software is compatible with them. You definitely want to have use of that automation. As I mentioned, a few our use cases have to leverage image recognition, and that isn't really all that flexible. It just increases our automation time. 

Every customer will receive a demo of how easy it is to create an automation through a web browser, but it's really all those other applications that a company may have that bring the most value. You want to make sure that you take that inventory and that Automation Anywhere gives you a thumbs up that they can automate fairly easily.

We're trying to leverage the analytics module. Right now, when we carry out a process, we'll have records of all the orders that were processed but they're all in separate spreadsheets. It's a painstaking task to consolidate all that information to get an idea of how much work we actually did. I know there's an analytics module which we haven't been able to leverage yet, and that's one of the reasons we want to upgrade to version 13.

Any increase in usage will depend on ROI and justifying it. We've had some initial requirements but we haven't ironed out many concrete details.

I would definitely rate the software a nine out of ten. If it covered all use cases and all software, if it was that easy to automate, I'd give it a ten. But since there are some applications that are not as compatible as others, there's some room for improvement there.

We use it for finance, and it performs very well.

We have automated every finance-based operation, from collections to invoice processing. We have also worked to implement the solution with customer service, operations, and IT.

It has streamlined many manual processes, eliminating errors and inefficiencies. It has also allowed us to introduce metrics, so we can generate operational reports and improve our overall business.

• Its large command set
• MetaBots and IQ Bots are great features, which have been improving.
• The Bot Store, with its extensive number of MetaBots, has been very helpful.

I have been very impressed with the Bot Store. We have used several MetaBots already, which has saved us many weeks of development.

We have been able to implement several bots from non-developers in the finance department. They were able to implement solutions for existing business processes with no technical programming background.

• The development environment needs to be improved. 
• Making edits across files is hard. 
• Not being able to resize Windows has proven challenging.
  

We have seen vast improvement in version 11. We are still hoping to see improvements in its ability to have the client answer automatically and reconnect when Windows updates are applied. 

I would like to see improvement in its scalability. While workload management is a nice feature, from a practical usage and client usage standpoint, we would like to see improvement.

We usually start a pilot automation with a single Bot Runner. Then, based on volume, we will increase it to two. Afterwards, we'll increase exponentially from there based on volume. 

I've received different levels of support from Automation Anywhere. It has thoroughly improved, and I have seen quicker turnaround times from my questions.

We switched to this solution because our previous solution needed to be updated.

The installation of version 11 is fairly straightforward. I do like the new server architecture based on Java, as it is very straightforward.

We are an integrator and consultant company. We work with clients to do the deployment.

We initially started with a number of full-time employees (FTEs) who we can now reassign. 

For example, with the collections process, millions of dollars might be gained by a company, because now the automation can handle the collection of unpaid bills. Previously, it was too much for human workers to handle.

Time and monetary savings can range from 20 to 90 percent.

Costs varies per client.

The other vendors that clients wanted to review have been UiPath and Blue Prism. In some cases, those vendors were selected.

We have used Automation Anywhere for both attended and unattended automation.