Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are usually asked by clients to introduce the topic of RPA and bring it to life for them. We explore what the value proposition of adopting a new technology is for them. We typically enter the discussion with an agnostic view of tools, help them understand what the differences are between tools and capabilities, and then synthesize a business case for adoption of those tools.

The perfect example that I have is where we're able to address an audit finding for a client. They had a situation where they had to show a tangible and very scalable solution to an internal audit as part of a finding that they had in the payroll area. In that situation, we created a database for them that worked alongside Automation Anywhere to conduct the validation and checks that were required to appease and provide comfort to the internal audit, while accomplishing savings in the form of error omissions.

We automated processes within: finance, accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoicing, validation, HR, payroll, onboarding, candidate screening, and IT from a provisioning perspective.

The value of RPA in general is the ability to actually emulate human behavior and transactions. The value of Automation Anywhere, specifically, lies in the ease of use that it has as a platform and the ability of individuals to learn relatively fast. There is a very accelerated learning curve on the platform.

The IQ Bot is a tremendous product. The more we can make the IQ Bot intuitive, as an application, and start connecting it to real-life examples, the more value it's going to bring to clients.

The human training area is still something that needs to be improved. It's not so much the actual technology learning, but rather how you bring this to life with all the peripheral competencies that are needed for it. Incorporating some of the Lean Six Sigma type of principles into the process optimization, as well as the change management, would make it a much more comprehensive solution than what it is today.

I think the tool has come a long way. We've had situations where it wasn't working well with Java in the past, then Citrix environments, etc. Every new release is better than the last one. They are listening to the customers and they definitely integrate the solutions to their product very fast.

I think it's a very scalable application as well, but I think the scalability is not just tied to the technology itself, it's also the organizational appetite to go fast and go the right way forward. The huge component of that is talent, and I think Automation Anywhere, with the internal consultants that they make available to clients on occasion, does accelerate the adoption.

From a pilot to scale, I would say the couple of clients that I've actually worked with took about six months to one year to get to what we would consider a repurchase point, but I wouldn't necessarily call that scale. The model that we bring forward to clients, at least in the past, was one where we actually teach them how to fish versus fishing for them, so we're not necessarily there to see them all the way through scale. We're there to see them through stability.

I think the technical support team is very responsive. This is probably one of the differentiators that Automation Anywhere has in comparison to some of their peers.

I had other platforms that we did the proof of concepts for, but they didn't go anywhere. I think part of the reason why they didn't go anywhere is because they were not scalable.

The initial setup, at times, has been a little undefined, in terms of requirements, just because people don't know the process, nor what they're going to need, as a result of putting something into production. On the other hand, I think those were growing pains that we experienced probably two or three years ago less than we experience today.

ROI is often associated with FTE, or full-time employees, but we are now increasingly finding that we could acheive ROI in different ways, not just as cost elimination. It could be cost avoidance or revenue acceleration. The ROI actually differs by use case, but in most situations, we're able to accomplish sufficient ROI to justify scaling the solution.

On average, the return that I've seen is about three dollars for every dollar spent on RPA.

Time-wise, I would say you're still bound to the pace of the systems that you are applying RPA to, so you're not getting an acceleration to the systems themselves, but you do get the ability to process transactions in those systems faster, because a bot tends to transact things a little faster than we do.

I've seen the price vary by opportunity cost, in essence, for Automation Anywhere. If they think that the client is going to scale and adopt a tool, the price could change. There is variability based on how quickly and how substantially you want to invest in it.

I think the Bot Store is actually growing. It's still in development. It's an idea in development in my mind. I think there is definitely repurpose-ability of bots that are being made available in the store, but it's not by any means, in my mind at least, something that you would actually take and put into production without making it specific to your organization and use case.

Regarding front office automation, I haven't actually been part of those discussions, but I know, as an organization, we definitely assist with front office automation. I would say the principles that dictate what you do in front office govern the ideas and how we bring this to life in the middle as well as the back office for us.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as nine out of ten.

My advice is not to lead with the tool selection. Lead with the process optimization and then understand fully what the tools actually have as an offering, and make sure that the way that the tool is deploying its learning is aligned to your organizational capabilities.

We have many solutions, like Data Rebate, for example. We need to compare this information, regardless of the information that we save in the Experian databases, against information in government websites, in order to ensure that everything is up to date. The information of the company address, for example, took around 47 minutes to compare, while using RPA it now takes around 10 minutes for each one.

Automation Anywhere has improved our company a lot, because we are currently trying to leverage automation in different departments to allow employees to work where more human intervention is needed. The SLA of some tasks that we need to deliver to some clients has improved greatly. The productivity has increased a lot in my organization.

Interaction with websites is the feature most valuable to us. Most of the systems are web-based, so using a very accurate web-based identification like objects, extracting information from tables inside websites, and checking websites differences using MetaBots is very helpful with Internet Explorer. This allows us to separate the functionality by using an object where we store all the assets, or screenshots of the webpages, instead of changing the logic of a website. It's very useful.

Ease of use of this solution depends on how complete you want to go. From my perspective as a system engineer, the curve was very, very low because you have a lot of understanding about technology. On the other hand, we have examples of people that the curve was a little bit high, but coaching them to improve their knowledge about Automation Anywhere and how friendly the interface is right now is very useful.

MetaBots and Control Room may have some room for improvement.

The bot store has a large amount of pre-designed bots. I made some tests related to language, browser scene, and image recognition. It was very nice.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as seven out of ten. There are a lot of things that need to be improved, especially related to the Control Room, but you can develop and scale with this tool very, very fast.

Our use case is mainly finance related. We've used Automation Anywhere to automate a couple of applications with respect to statement analysis and daily manual processes. 

We check if the process is automate-able, meaning there is no human interaction needed, no judgments to be made, etc. If the process is a candidate, we then move forward and start automating. We also look into the systems involved, because some systems have restrictions with respect to automation.

Overall, we've saved a lot of time. There's a recent process that we automated, which saves around 200 to 300 hours each month, depending on the number of accounts that come in.

Automate Anywhere can just mimic what a human does. That is the overall feature I can talk about. With respect to specific features, my main focus is with IQ bots, because they can learn by themselves, which is very helpful in a finance background where we're looking at statements and the like. There's a little bit of coding that you need to do and then you can just start teaching it.

This solution is very easy to use since it's a pseudo-code based language rather than workflows. It's very easy to analyze, especially when it comes to getting back to your code, making changes, or resolving an issue. It's not only the development that you need to look into. You also need to look into the maintenance point of view. You need a little bit of a technological background, but that's really just an add on. Even if you don't have it, you can really mimic a manual process that you're doing for simple use cases, so it really helps.

One aspect of the solution that needs improvement is with respect to its stability. There are a lot of issues in the tool. There are a lot of breakdowns. We report these issues to Automation Anywhere and they come back with a fix, but it takes some time. At least the fact that we know those errors up front really helps us to design the code. However, with respect to some features, we've finished designing and then we realize that it's not going to work, so all our effort goes wasted.

Stability has yet to get there. There are issues with the tool such as breaking down. When we have the bots run on our local system together, we might need to restart on the second or third day. There are a few limitations, which I'm sure they'll overcome with time, but until then, we have to modify our code to withstand that drawback.

If you have coding background, it's very simple. There will be no effort at all. For a non technical background person, it might seem a little complicated at the start, but with all the drop-downs and pulls for loops and ifs, it gets really easy.

The course is wonderful. The module is really amazing. I tell my peers to take the course. Certification I wouldn't emphasize as much, because the questions asked in the certification versus the module do not sync with each other very well. However, if you finish the module, when you get a use case up front, you will know what feature is best to use. After doing the course, I know all the easiest ways to do stuff. So this course will really help a person.

Our journey starts from discovering and understanding what process to automate. That's where our deep domain and process expertise come into the picture. We leverage process mining technologies over there, partnerships with Celonis and TimelinePI. We take advantage of that. The journey continues from there to designing and developing automations. Automation Anywhere is the RPA platform we use for creating the bots in automation and along with that we also use many of the technologies including AI and ML. 

Toward this life cycle, we have a very structured approach of governing, monitoring, and tracking. Insights we gain from this governance, we apply towards automation strategy and implementations. We've done this for many clients across the globe. We are happy to share those experiences with some of you as well.

The focus on usability and user experience is bang on. Addressing several personas and making it easy for every persona to adopt and embrace is the spot on focus. That's an area that has a lot more room to improve. In the absence of that, the skills and expertise in the industry are going to struggle and if you need broader adoption, which has maximum potential, the persona-based user experience is a focus and I'd say Automation Anywhere is already working on.

In terms of onboarding, we step back and think about how to leverage this technology. We have created some IP around this and leverage our deep learnings from several implementations. We apply the process and domain expertise and determine which process needs to be automated by leveraging what technology and what ROI will you get out of it.

We leverage the process insights technology, we bring that to the table, we understand what processes need to be automated and we apply the relevant technologies. Automation Anywhere is one of the many we apply in transforming across automating the entire process end to end.

Number one thing when you're trying to automate, you need to start thinking beyond productivity gains and think about other value drivers such as improved business outcomes and superior customer experiences. The creation of a bot is only one half of the journey. The other half of the journey is understanding what to automate, what technologies to use and having a digital workforce and a governance platform around it is the other half of the journey. That's the one big learning for all of us from the many implementations we have done.

I would rate it around eight to nine. We have personally seen the platform really mature from several implementations, from scalability to availability, to API programmability. The vision and the journey Automation Anywhere is on is phenomenal.

Our primary use cases are mainly around finance and accounting, so invoice processing, AP processing, those sorts of use cases. It's a quite wide use case but that's where we focus.

We work in the business process outsourcing arena, it has improved our organization mainly around freeing up people to do other things and that can be quite large numbers. It can be in the high tens, even hundreds of people that can be freed up to do other work.

The main processes that we have automated with this solution are order to cash, procure to pay and record to report. 

For us, it's about replacing repetitive dull tasks with technology, allowing users to be able to do more interesting aspects of their work that hold the most value. 

We work both attended and unattended bots amongst other automation so we very much look at the use case and see what's the best approach. Most of our solutions are a combination of the two.

We're in a digital world where everything's evolving. AI is coming out, so just looking at keeping moving, introducing new innovations into the product, nothing specific. The Automation Anywhere teams seem to know what the customers want.

Stability is good. I liken it to driving a Ferrari. If you drive a Ferrari down the freeway in second gear, it won't be very smooth and reliable, but if you know how to drive it properly, then you'll have a nice comfortable ride.

Scalability is about the right approach. It's not just about the technology, it's about the people, understanding the processes, putting everything in place to make sure you monitor and govern your bots. Scalability is not a problem as long as you're approaching it correctly.

We can scale from the bots to the pilot to the bots we're using very quickly. It can be a handful of weeks. Depends on the complexity of the process. We like to get things out there quickly because if it's going to take six months, then the business is going to go off and do other things. Our target is to get it done in a number of weeks.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a great environment to use.

Our ROI is around productivity savings, agile headcount savings, but we also look at things like improvement in net promoter scores. Customer satisfaction is very important as well. There's no point necessarily just saving money if your customers aren't going to be any happier.

We have saved both time and money.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10.

You can automate the wrong process and you won't get any value. Make sure it's the right process and make sure it's a good process. Re-engineer, if you need to first.

We use it for automating manual processes that are done by people now, data-entry type tasks.

We're using it to process line items in invoices. We get the invoices via Excel and we have to validate the accuracy of the line item charges. We get them once every two weeks and there are about 30,000 to 40,000 line items, and each one has to be validated. With a person doing it, it would cost more money than it would save to catch the defects. But to have a bot do it is much better because a person can only sample a certain amount. Now, we can have the bot check all of them.

There are a lot of valuable features. It's a very complex piece of software. One of the most valuable features is the different possibilities it gives you to manipulate the interface screens that you're working with. It's helpful to have a certain solution already baked into the environment. 

You really need a four-hour conversation about specific features because there are a million moving parts inside of the software. It's not that one feature is so helpful, and that I decided to purchase it over something else because of that.

Having some more pre-mapping and pre-setup analysis of what you're going to be doing with it would be helpful.

The stability is good. The only issues we've had with the product have been responded to pretty quickly. We've also had some infrastructure issues on our side. But on the Automation Anywhere side, it's been pretty good.

So far, it's scalable.

We have four developers doing the developing in Automation Anywhere. We set it up so that things are triggered automatically by somebody putting a file in a folder. Right now, we have seven bots in production for seven departments.

The four developers handle deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We're looking to increase usage of the solution. We're doing a workshop in a few weeks to bring a lot of our managers in to get them thinking about things that exist in their areas that can be automated.

Technical support, so far, has been pretty good. We haven't had any major issues and the ones we did have were answered pretty quickly.

This is a brand-new implementation. We didn't have a previous solution.

The setup was a pretty complex undertaking. We're a global company. We have our virtual IT management done in Switzerland, while our hardware is in New Jersey. So to get the different stakeholders of Automation Anywhere within our company working together to iron out the Control Room stuff and the virtual side of things, as well as the on-prem software side of things - to have it all connecting properly - was a pretty complex implementation.

The setup of just the developer environment and the actual Bot Runners took about three weeks. As far as building the bots goes, we haven't scaled as far as we can, yet.

We didn't really have a deployment strategy, per se. We just followed the action items that we were given to do by Automation Anywhere. We're still working on how to implement it across our organization. We have Automation Anywhere coming in with some Professional Services people in a few weeks. We still have to work on getting things moving with the managers, teaching them what are good processes to automate, etc.

We deployed ourselves. We own a technology company, so we had that benefit.

So far, we haven't seen return on investment, but I think we're getting there.

Yearly, our licensing costs are about $90,000 to $100,000. There will be additional licensing costs when we add more Bot Runners to our infrastructure.

We evaluated UiPath. We went with Automation Anywhere primarily because of the bot analytics, called Bot Insight. The analytics capability was a big one. UiPath didn't have the kind of functionality we were looking for in analytics.

Definitely do a very thorough infrastructure assessment first and make sure you're all set up there. Do some testing of the solution on any proprietary software that only exists inside of your company. Have a good understanding of what you're looking to automate. Don't just take a manager's word for it, but really look at it yourself to make sure that the process doesn't have any decisions that have to be made by a person or that there aren't some small things there that might stop you from automating.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at eight out of ten. It would have been good if they had helped us be a little bit more realistic about feasibility. If they had asked us for some examples of processes that we're looking at automating and had pre-tested some of those, it would have been helpful. The expectations of what we thought was possible, versus what appears to be possible, were a little bit off. They should investigate, early on, exactly what you're trying to do to make sure it's a good fit and set expectations.

We automate a lot of front office use cases.

I would like to see integration better integration with Excel and SAP.

Product support for our customers needs improvement. They should increase the support personnel.

We worked closely with Automation Anywhere's customer success manager.

We have saved 60 to 70 percent on operations.

We only deal in annual licenses. There are no pay-as-you-go licenses.

We would like them to change the license model of charging per bot.

We take all the product features and operational needs into consideration before recommending a vendor to a client.

Before implementing it, figure out how the RPA product will make an impact in your company.

Using the Automation Anywhere University, you can go and train yourself to be an expert in the tool.

The IQ Bot is the most valuable feature and a significant market differentiator. 

While you don't a coding skill set as a business user, you do need to have some knowledge before using the product.

We would like Automation Anywhere to have a way to run a capacity check on machines and show us what is available.

In the past, the solution has been unreliable. Now, it has become reliable in terms of the issues that we are seeing. Now, it is stable with no major issues.

Scalability has been a pain point. The scalability is there, but there are ongoing operational issues with it.

The technical support needs to do a better job of triaging tickets and updating critical people at companies.

The setup is straightforward. Automation Anywhere provides customer success managers to help with the setup.

I am an RPA consultant who does deployments.

Whatever you automate, it is important to identify what you want to do after your journey.

Attended automation is okay.