Automation Anywhere Reviews

I'm using it for logistics with respect to Fintech, where we are dealing with the brokers.

In the context of the number of FTEs, they used to spend their whole shifts working on repetitive and mundane tasks. Now, they can be utilized for other tasks.

• The most valuable features are Excel operations and PDF for integrations.
• It's very developer-friendly.
• With IQ Bot, we can now include cognitive automation into our process. The cognitive document processing is pretty good with IQ Bot.

An additional feature we would like to see is the inclusion of a particular kind of scripting in the development environment itself.

Out of ten, I would rate the stability at seven. Compared to other tools, like Blue Prism, which have something like sequential flow-levels. With Automation Anywhere, it's something like action levels.

It took us two months to scale from pilot to the number of bots we're currently using.

The technical support is pretty good with Automation Anywhere. If we have any issues, we raise a support ticket and we get it resolved.

Previously I was using a solution in which we did not have a Control Room. With Automation Anywhere, we have a Control Room which is pretty good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.

We measure ROI, but not with the Automation Anywhere tool. We have our own tool for that.

Automation Anywhere saves time and money.

I've taken all the courses at Automation Anywhere University. I have been certified in Automation Anywhere, using their course system.

As a partner, we've been serving a lot of customers with primary use cases in BFSI, healthcare, and oil and gas. 

We have automated some 30 or 40 processes including ERP, Financials, manual data scraping from various websites, offloading data from Excel into an application, etc. We've done quite a few.

It improves productivity, it improves efficiency. But most of our customers are automating processes which were taking way too long for them to execute. In some of these cases, as a result of what we have done, they are saving more than 40 hours per person, for multiple people. That's been great.

Among the most valuable features that we've been able to utilize are the screen scraping and object cloning. These are two features we have used so far. We are also utilizing the API integrations.

We are excited about the solution's cognitive document processing, IQ Bot. That's an interesting one and we have at least a couple of customers who are looking for those features.

There have been a lot of nuances in the technologies that are missing. Being a tech company, where the technology is moving forward, I'm excited to see what is coming in the near future.

At this point in time, the installation is one of the biggest challenges in terms of being on a particular instance.

Also, we've been working very closely with Automation Anywhere on some of the integrations. There are some workarounds we have had to do, but I think in the newest features of version 11.3 there are things like callback, especially for the API integrations. We are looking forward to that.

There is room for improvement in that it is still on Windows and there is no self-service. Even though the product is easy to use, there are some challenges when we move across different environments; there's a lot of setup needed.

There is room for improvement in the stability of this product.

In terms of scalability, we haven't been in a situation where it has been a challenge for us. We've been able to scale to what we need. Having said that, we haven't deployed thousands of bots yet, but for the bots we have done we've been doing great.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we're currently using, took us between eight and 12 weeks.

Technical support is pretty good. They are reachable and they've been able to solve the problems.

We work exclusively with Automation Anywhere.

The setup has been okay. We haven't seen many challenges.

We do automation ROI using three dimensions:

• absolute time-savings
• efficiency improvement 
• reduction in manual labor.

In some cases, we see savings on the order of $100,000 and, in the newer processes that we are trying to do, it may be up to $1,000,000.

The cost is anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000.

I invested a lot of time in evaluating the different vendors but because of our relationship with Automation Anywhere, it was a clear winner.

My advice is to go for Automation Anywhere.

In terms of the bot creation process, it depends on what you're trying to do. The simple bots are easy, the complex bots have their challenges. The biggest challenge is when the settings change between environments. That's when we have faced a lot of challenges with things as simple as screen resolution.

I've taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and they have been pretty good. It's been really impressive.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at about seven out of ten.

The primary use case is for a number of different transaction-based systems that the company has.

• We are able to create robotic tasks in a short time.
• Automation Anywhere receives high marks for its ease of use.
• It is able to integrate well with other applications.

A lot of the features that I want to see going forward will be included in the next release.

We have been a little frustrated by the frequency of cache releases.

It has been reliable.

It took a few months for us to scale from pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using.

Their customer support is fantastic.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have saved time and money using this solution.

Annual licensing costs would be about $100,000.

We also evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath. We chose Automation Anywhere because it was the market leader and their user interface is better.

Go for it. The product is easy to use.

For our bot creation process, we get somebody from the business unit to walk us through their process. We usually record that session, then we determine how to create the bot from there.

The Automation Anywhere University courses are very good.

The primary use case is to free up people to do more cognitive tasks, taking those repetitive tasks and doing those for them.

We have quite a few good use cases going on, such as:

• We have a credit card deactivation process, where we determine someone is leaving the company, then we run different reports. Then, it deactivates their credit card, so they are unable to use it anymore. This saves us in extra expenses, e.g., if they were to make charges after they left the company. 
• We have saved a lot of money on taxes based on the stuff that we run. 

We have a plethora of good use cases saving good, hard dollars.

The client and the way the code is laid out are very nice for developers. 

The interface is a lot better than a lot of other tools which are out there.

It is pretty easy for developers to use. I have trained quite a few people, and everyone seems to pick it up pretty well.

In the debugging mode, it writes all the logs to text files, but it doesn't ever clean them up. We had one that got to 200K, and it bogged our whole machine down. We couldn't figure out what was going on until we found out that we had a 200K file sitting out there. We would like some sort of maintenance on the log files going forward. 

We have seen some inconsistencies with stuff, environmentally.

The company started the pilot a year and a half ago. That phase was probably six or seven months. Then, it took a little over a year to get it up and running. We also did an upgrade to the newest version, and that took some time. Overall, it took about a year to scale up our bots.

This solution was brand-new. This was our first run on RPA.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was just a normal on-premise setup for three environments.

We used a consulting firm for the deployment. They were good. 

Currently, we are not looking to eliminate people. We are looking to save time or generate revenue. Cost avoidance is pretty big for us.

We have 10 licenses right now.

It is pretty easy to use. Personally, I do a lot of development, so I like the line-by-line code versus some of the other solutions, like Blue Prism or UiPath, which have a more drag and drop workflow. 

Give it a try. It lives up to what it says it can do, for the most part. It really does help free up stuff. Just make sure you pick the right processes. A lot of the issues that people have with it are with not selecting the right processes for what the tool can do.

We have had some success integrating this solution with other applications. We have also had some failures. We had some issues integrating it with SAP, but we started using MetaBots to do that, which seems to work really well. It does seem to work pretty well with most applications that we have integrated it with.

The bot creation process is good. It is pretty simple to understand. If anything, the Control Room is the most confusing part, but it is still pretty simple. 

I have not taken courses on the Automation Anywhere University, but I have been using this solution for a long time. So, I would be the right clientele for the University.

We haven't really done anything with the cognitive document processing nor Citrix.

My primary use case was for a project in Brazil, where we managed to download and extract all the invoices which were pending for my company and inputted them in our system. The tool works very well.

We are automatizing redundant activities, releasing employees to do value-added activities. 

The Control Room is a good feature.

I would like more integration around main applications, e.g., SAP.

Automation Anywhere has to keep their RPA tool connected to everything to maintain it in the RPA market.

So far, the stability is not good. We are trying to improve this because we are facing a lot of instability issues. We are now getting some support from the CSM. We are hoping that he will save us from this issue.

It took us three months to scale from pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. We started by experimenting with a very low number on the license: two Bot Runners and five Bot Creators. Now, we have 60 Bot Runners and 35 Bot Creators. We are improving as we are seeing new opportunities.

The technical support has been good. They have been working closely with us. However, at the beginning, their support was splotchy. Now, we are working on specific issues together, and they are getting more involved when looking at the problem as a whole.

This was our first RPA solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. However, integrating the application was not easy. The first setup was very easy, but building the infrastructure to support the application was complex. I am unsure if the problem was my company or the application, since my company has a lot of bureaucracy when raising new VMs and installing new applications. There are a lot of problems regarding security, which is stopping us to move forward and becoming agile.

We used Ernst & Young for the deployment, and our experience with them was good.

We have saved money with the solution.

This tools allows us to remove two FTEs from repetitive tasks to work on other things.

Annually, we are paying almost one million reais.

We looked at UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. We chose Automation Anywhere because it is easy to implement and a good UI, which is different from its competitors.

I recommend trying the tool.

We have a few attended automation bots, which are working well. They work better than the unattended automation. It is an evolutionary process.

We are doing the Automation Anywhere University now for our business, which helps with the ease of use. Our business users don't have development skills, and we are hoping that this resolves that. We have taken two courses, so far. We are now examining the collective results of the participants.

We have not used the Bot Store.

Right now, we have two business units which use it for automation, mostly for:

• Back office
• Shared services automation
• Accounts payable
• Accounts receivable
• Most finance functions.

We have two different business units which have already begun their journey. One has been doing it for two years, and another one for one year. We have another two business units which will be beginning their journeys this Summer. Certainly, the value of it has been proven already in the business units which have already started their journeys. They have seen the value in terms of automating some of their redundant, important processes. This has allowed some of their users to move onto more value-added activities.

The most valuable feature is that it is intuitive. It is designed so business users can use it with a drag and drop functionality to develop automation of business processes. Since they are the experts on business processes, there are probably the best ones to create the automation.

They designed the bot creation process where we can drag and drop and all of the commands are available to us on the left side of the screen, but in some ways, it can be overwhelming. There is a lot at a developer's fingertips to do their development process.

I would like the ability to extract the code. You can go line by line, then open up each line of code and dig into the details, but it would be nice to extract all of the lines of code and all of the details into a document so we could read through everything. Right now, there is no way to really consume all of the code at once, except line by line, which can be fairly time consuming if we don't really know what we are looking for.

As we deploy more solutions and take advantage of some of the features, like the Credential Vault, where we are introducing new administrative processes, we continue to have to go in and change passwords on a monthly basis. Tools that would make these administrative tasks more streamlined is an area where Automation Anywhere could really add value.

I love the new features that they're offering and the direction that they're going. We've tried to deploy some of them. Sometimes, we're running into some bugs in different things, so they haven't worked out all of the kinks yet. Hopefully, they can get some of these things resolved and continue introducing new features like they have been.

Our first business unit who started their journey two years ago went from one bot initially to about 55 over a two-year period. Typically, they were averaging a new bot about every two to three weeks. That was with a team of five to six people sort of dedicated to the process. We have had consistent growth with our numbers over that time.

We have been pleased with the technical support. Their response times, capabilities, and patience when working with us, taking the time to understand the issues, and helping us to resolve them. This has improved over time. We are encouraging our users to use them as a resource when they do have questions or problems.

I was involved in setting up our upgraded environment for the new version. The documentation that they provided us was very thorough. We chose to go back to our integrator (our consulting company) to help us build our new environment, just so we would have ready resources available if we ran into questions. However, in this situation, we were able, from start to finish, to build the new environment without many problems, by just following the documentation.

We did initially use an integrator (consulting company) to do our training. That was a very important part of the process, and it helped us be successful.

Automation Anywhere is a great tool. I have been in IT for 30 years, and am amazed at how far we have come with technology and tools to help us do our jobs. The ease of use and the power which the product offers you in a matter of minutes, if not just an hour, and what you can create with it.

It integrations really well with other applications, as long as you have access from the same computer which you're running the software on to your other systems. Then, it can interact with those other systems just as if you were any user who is on that same computer. From this aspect, it is more powerful than other tools which I am familiar with.

We are just starting to look into the solution's cognitive document processing by doing a proof of concept.

Early on, I did try a few of the Automation Anywhere University courses, mainly to get familiar with what was available, so I could guide others to the website for training. At this point, there hadn't been much there that I needed for myself. However, we have looked at the courses, and we are encouraging a lot of our business users to take advantage of the tools.

The important thing about any RPA tool is it has to be a collaborative effort between IT and the business. It needs to be driven by the business, or it won't be successful. An important overall goal or strategy to have as you start your journey: Have good buy-in and ownership from the business. They have to want to do this and take advantage of this new tool.

We use it enterprise-wide for HR, IT, and in the front-end of our transfer agency. The bot helps organizes certain HR classes, letting the organization know when classes have not been completed. We have uploaded certain fund model data to third-party portals. We can set up new accounts in less than a week, where it use to take months.

At a very high level, because of how we've implemented it and how we work with our business partners, they are now looking for ways to help do the automation. Additionally, we've adopted a bit of a federated model, where once we start working with business partners, we start training them on how to use the tool. Therefore, the tool has more of a widespread use around the organization, helping people rethink their jobs.

It integrates with different types of applications, so we can automate our business partners' redundant, repetitive tasks.

It is very simple to use. We have people that we trained who had absolutely no development background at all and are now using RPA. They are using it and developing their own solutions. 

We've had people who already had a development background. They self-trained and got certified in about three days, so it's pretty easy to use.

While the Automation Anywhere University is good, the estimates of the time that it takes to complete it are a little low, especially when you start watching all the videos thoroughly. One of the courses that they said would take six or eight hours was closer to 16 to 20 hours.

I noticed that from version 10.5 to 11.3 the number of clicks to start a bot through the Control Room and Schedule Manager have increased. In certain cases, I would like to see that become simpler, faster, and easier.

I would love to be able to schedule things based on business case. Right now, the Schedule Manager is either once a day or pick days of the week with times. However, in the financial industry, I sometimes need to run something on the third business day of every month. At the moment, I don't really have a way to set that up in the Schedule Manager. 

I would like to see some improvement in error handling. That would be great. Sometimes, the errors that you get back are awfully generic. It is like you have to do a lot of research to figure out what the issue is.

I would love to see a little smoother integration with some different types of platforms, technologies, and user interfaces. 

The stability is getting better. We had some issues, especially because when we went onto version 11.2, there were some scheduling issues. So, very recently, we upgraded to version 11.3.1.2, and it seems to be a lot better.

The scalability is good. It is very easy to scale. It doesn't take us hardly any time at all if we need to spin up a new Control Room or Bot Runner. The slowest part is probably on our end, getting the hardware.

It took us two years to scale from pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. I wasn't involved in the early days of the PoC. I came into the group a little later after that, but now, we use a federated model. We were sort of the center of excellence for it, working with our business partners. In a number of cases, our business partners are now developing their own bots. We have developed some, where the business partners didn't have much of an interest to doing the development. They wanted to be involved in the creation, so they understood it, but they didn't want to do any of the coding in the background, so we do it for them. We do all the production support.

I like to go by actual executions, not number of bots, because we have some bots that need to be executed multiple times during the day. Last time I looked, we were well over a 100 different executions in a week.

The technical support is great. I have worked with a couple of different people who have been absolutely phenomenal, helpful, and have solved so many of our problems.

When I have a serious production support issue, if I need to escalate it, I usually receive a lot of good help from some great people to get our problem resolved. Sometimes, it takes a while, but I get it. Everyone's environment is different, and it's hard to know everything about how everyone has their architecture setup.

They've started up a user community recently. I haven't investigated that much. I really want to do that, but I always thought that a user community where the users of the product always get together, talk, sort of brainstorm, and come up with other suggestions for the tool would be great. However, I believe that has just been started. I just haven't had a chance to go look at it yet.

We weren't using a different solution before this. Automation Anywhere was our first RPA tool. 

We wanted to remove a lot of the drudgery out of people's lives. Someone copying files from one platform to another or taking data and manually entering it from one system to another was not a good value savings. A human should be doing stuff that is more creative and requires human thought process. We wanted to enable our organization to improve overall. So, we figured an RPA solution was a good way to start on that journey.

When we went to version 11.2, which we set up brand new, if I had to do that myself, it would have been a bit complicated. I worked with an installation specialist from Automation who was awesome. He made it very simple. We had some of our own server and DBA personnel on the line, and he documented everything for us. At the end of the day, I had all of the information that I never had on our original 10.5 environment, which has made it a lot better.

Originally, we used HCL Technologies. At a high level, the original implementation went pretty well. Our problems were other things. We started having more issues around coding and our expectations on thought leadership from the vendor, because they were the ones originally doing the coding. We were the business partners to them. As we began to get certified and do some of the coding, we started to realize that there were things that we just didn't know and had a hard time getting some answers. Then, we ended up starting to work with a different vendor. As far as the systems administration work for Automation Anywhere goes, we took that over, and that's what I do.

For time savings, we do time and motion studies with our business partners, so we truly know how long it takes them to do a process and calculate that in. 

Depending on the area and department, we use different rates of pay to calculate dollar savings. We also break that down, whether it's actual realized dollar savings or just a dollar savings that's not realized to the department. 

There's also risk reduction, which is a lot harder to quantify, so we've taken that to more of a high, medium, and low type of deal, because there's a number of cases where we're eliminating manual keystroke entry. That has created huge risk reduction from our standpoint.

If we count the integrations that we have done with Appian, which is where a lot of our savings is from, we are well over a million dollars in savings. This is from only doing development for about a year and a half.

We have seen a return on investment in a lot of ways. We seen dollar and time savings. There was a department that was going to have to hire somebody to just copy files from one platform to another every day. Because of this automation solution, they didn't have to hire anyone to do that. That was a good cost avoidance there. 

One of the biggest things for us is getting the whole enterprise to start learning about RPA and about different ways to think about how they do processes, whether you can improve a process first manually, then make it automated, or if it's even ready for an automated solution. This type of thinking and mindset throughout our business partners has started to make a lot of improvements throughout the corporation, not just in RPA, but in processes.

We're just starting to renew our license, and we were quoted $115,000 without the IQ Bot. 

The IQ Bot is another $30,000. This is with very limited pages, as we go through our first projects. The majority of the cost was for ten days of onsite training.

The shortlist would have probably been Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, at the time. We went with Automation Anywhere because Blue Prism is really good on the back-end, but that's all that they specialize in. We knew that we had to do a lot of front-end type of RPA work with some third-party vendors, which we weren't going to get API calls to. We had to be able to operate with their graphical user interface. Once we made those realizations, Automation Anywhere became our choice.

Make sure you understand what your needs are:

• Whether it's front-end or back-end?
• What interfaces do you want to use?
• Do you need an IQ Bot or some type of cognitive machine learning tool?

Understand what the different tools from the different vendor do, because they are becoming more similar, but they are still designed for specific areas of a technology, whether it's the back-end, front end, or somewhere in the middle. You need to understand your own needs. Once you understand that, research the various tools thoroughly and make the best choice.

The product functions well. 

The integration with other application works really well. We have used it with Appian more than once, and that integration has been very easy to do.

The cognitive document processing is good. We have done a proof of concept. We just purchased IQ Bot, got it installed, and will be starting our first project soon. One of the things that we did learn is reading the imaging was tough because of the DPI needed for the IQ Bot. It's 300. Most imaging systems don't save them that high. They are at 200 or 250, so we ran into issues there. However, as long as we can get electronic documents, it's been awesome.

I have taken some Automation Anywhere University courses. I took the online classes and got certified in 2018, but there are some other courses that I wanted to take that I saw in there. The content is really good.

The bot creation process is easy. It does require more thought if you truly want to incorporate some good error handling in the process. With some of our bots, this is absolutely critical. We have some bots which have very strict SLAs because we are in the financial industry. It is a bit trickier and requires more thought. You can do it and do it well. It's just that it requires more forethought than a typical user would know.

We don't use Citrix.

The primary use cases are for card and HR automation.

For our interorganizational processes, it has automated some of those processes.

The Bot Store has helped tremendously with accelerating integration from other applications. Especially with Workday, which is one of the main applications that we look to integrate.

It automates forms for our customers and our analysts.

They could improve around continuous integration, e.g., Jenkins and GitHub, stating how you could use those products and integrating them into Automation Anywhere. This is one area that we need to see more improvement on. We had to learn a lot of this on our own, as it is unavailable and not documented. I would like for them to be more verbose in putting this in the documentation.

In the next release, we would like to see more error handling functions for the bots, the ability to kill an errant bot, and have more visibility into a lot of the process flows going on in a more automated fashion.

There is a lot guesswork in areas.

The initial pilot was for two processes, which took us about four months. Then, the other processes were more extensive, so that took longer, only because we needed to do more with the process documentation, not so much in the bot creation. It just depends upon the complexity of the process, but also how well-documented your processes are.

The technical support is good, but I would like to see improvement with the documentation. 

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was complex, only because of the process that was selected. That took us longer than usual, because it had a lot of cognitive decisions in it. Part of our new process is to evaluate if a process should be automated or not, and does it have more repetitive tasks than a lot of decision making. This has greatly increased how we are able to put a process into play for bot creation.

We leveraged a third-party, as far as our bot creation, initially. That is how we did it. We have worked with partners to create bots.

Before the automation, it used to take about two to three hours. Now, with automation, it takes about 40 minutes. We measure ROI with time.

We also evaluated UiPath.

Take into account your processes. As part of the automation journey, don't look at just the technology part. This is where a lot of people make a mistake. They focus so much on the technology that they forget about "process" of RPA. They need to take a longer look at this and break down the process at its task level to see if it is worth going the RPA route. Once you do this, look at the vendors to see which one provides more in the way of bot creation and scalability, especially if you are in a cloud environment. Then, with the continuous integration, you will need to have a lot of this as you are putting things into production from development.

For ease of use, version 11.3 was an improvement compared to version 10.5. I am looking forward to seeing what 2019 provides for developers.

I would rate version 10.5 as a six out of ten and version 11.3 as an eight out of ten. I would rate version 11.3 higher because there have been changes made to how the bot creation is now done, the interfaces, the ability to utilize the VDI environment, and multitenancy.