Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case is for optimizing processes.

It helps with the speed on improving processes and the results of those processes.

They could improve the learning curve.

The product is scalable.

We are measuring ROI through quality: Reducing errors, saving time, and saving money.

It is a good product.

it's not as complex as running a new computer language, but it is also not as simple as connecting EPL dots. Therefore, it is a medium level of complexity on the learning curve.

My team has taken course on the Automation Anywhere University. Their feedback was good. I have not taken any courses on it.

There are multiple use cases. Primarily, we are looking at finance and accounting. So, we have been deploying bots, specifically in the area of account payable and cash applications.

Bots add a lot of productivity and value to our business, because a robot can work for 24/7. They work a lot better, as compared to a human being, specifically for tasks which are repetitive in nature. Therefore, we are seeing a lot of business value being derived from these bots.

There have been a lot of challenges in terms of interfacing with the customer ERPs. So, we have been building tools and interfaces using bots to write back into these custom ERPs. Specifically, in the area where I work, this has been very helpful.

I have not seen bots working efficiently in the area of reporting.

The time it takes to scale bots depends process to process, how complex the process is and if you're talking about a specific process. It may takes anywhere from around three weeks to 15 weeks, depending upon the complexities, the number of bots which we are deploying, and the problem these bots are solving. 

My team is in touch with the technical support. I don't work directly with them.

Measuring ROI is a combination of multiple factors. It could be saving time, saving money, or getting controls into the systems. It's a combination of all this things.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere, as it is a known, leading solution in the market.

There are a lot of advantages which Automation Anywhere has over a lot of other vendors. Why we chose Automation Anywhere is because of the ease of scripting, the good support that they have, and we can deploy these bots for more customers, whose preference is also Automation Anywhere. 

Another thing that I have seen, with finance and accounting, Automation Anywhere is the better fit, as compared to some of the other vendors in the market.

Because of the ease in which we can deploy bots, along with the savings that it generates for our customers, Automation Anywhere definitely has an edge over other vendors.

When we started around two to two and a half years back, ease of use was a problem at the time. Right now, with the scripts and exposure that we have, I don't see a big challenge going forward.

My team has been trained through the Automation Anywhere University, so we do have a lot of people who have been trained on this tool. The training materials are good. The feedback that I have received on the University has been good, as I have not been personally trained through the University.

We have four core business areas: Energy, financial services, healthcare, and our internal corporate. We're spread pretty evenly across the four areas.

We have automated a lot of processes serving human resources, legal, life sciences, financial services, healthcare (on the payer and provider sides), and IT. We're all over the place.

We're still in the rapid expansion phase. The last six months have really been an explosion, so we're trying to keep everything under wraps and control it.

We are getting massive efficiencies across our back office, internally.

Th Enterprise platform: Automation on a platform, as opposed to scattered automation.

The ease of use is improving for development. We've had a lot of issues with the installation and performance on a variety of computers, onshore and offshore. Our network bounds multiple domains, and we've had issues there, as well. So, we are looking forward to the web-based development versions.

The bot creation process is getting better. The general development process and change management deployment process is moving more towards enterprise-level and catching up with the more mature software industry around it.

So far, the cognitive document processing is not available at the enterprise level. However, this is being worked on by Automation Anywhere.

I would like them to start building continuity between employees and customer contacts.

There are a lot of new features coming with the release of version 11.

The stability is improving.

The technical support is inconsistent. It seems like every time we call, there's someone who has only been with Automation Anywhere for a couple of months. Oftentimes, if you call two different people, you'll get two different answers, back-to-back. What we tend to do is, if we don't get a fix or resolution right away, we'll call back immediately or submit a second ticket immediately, and try to find someone else.

Our business teams pushed for an RPA solution.

We worked with Automation Anywhere on the deployment.

We have saved time and money using this solution. It varies pretty heavily by use case. We have some bots which are saving a week or month of multiple employees' times. We have some bots saving an hour a half during a day of a team of 30 people's times. So, there is some significant savings that we've uncovered.

Our annual license is somewhere in the neighborhood of $115,000.

Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath, and Kryon were on our shortlist. 

At that time, Automation Anywhere was the most responsive to working with us. That actually tipped the scales.

The more you preplan, defining processes and governance upfront, the more successful you will be down the road.

The solution integrates well with others. When it doesn't, it is usually the fault of the other solution.

The courses on Automation University were generally good.

We have not done anything with Citrix automation yet.

We mainly use it for development of finance operations, and it's been performing fairly well for the most part. We have 40 automations going right now and they run daily on the Bot Runner.

We've automated journal entries, bank reconciliations, different claims-accounting - a lot of finance processes. For example, we created a system where accountants can drop in journal entries and the journal entries will be read and posted to our system.

One of the processes we automated was that people who work in treasury would go into their email and download PDFs from their emails over and over. Sometimes there would be 200 or 300 emails that they would have to go through, and they would spend a whole day doing that. Now we have an automation that does it, and it only takes one or two hours, and it frees up their time too.

We have saved time or money using this solution, but I don't know how much. That information is tracked by my manager.

The most valuable feature of the product is the flexibility. There are so many features that you can use to develop; it can hit a lot of use cases.

In terms of the usability, the drag-and-drop, instead of being able to type, makes it hard for somebody with a programming background to get used to it. The drag-and-drop slows down development; I can't just keep my hands on my keyboard, I have to use my mouse as well.

The bot creation process is tedious. The solution has a lot of features, but since you have to drag down a lot of the commands, it can get tedious to use it. You end up having to use the mouse a lot more. You can't do it as fast as if, say, you just typed it out on a keyboard.

Since I do a lot of bot development, I'd like a different way to develop them, other than dragging the commands down. If there were a way to type out the commands, to make it a little bit easier or a little bit faster to create the automation, that would be good.

Integrating this solution with other applications is hit or miss, depending on the application. For some applications it's very easy and then sometimes, for others, it's very difficult. There are occasions when, the first time, the application doesn't work at all, so we have to use commands that are not as consistent.

The stability of the solution is hit or miss. It depends on what you're using it for. Sometimes it's very stable and you'll never have issues, but for some processes it may have issues, and you have to be able to fix them and develop it properly.

What we're trying to figure out right now is how to scale this. That's where the hardware comes in. For the most part, scaling with the application is more a matter of building the infrastructure around it.

To scale from pilot to the point where we are now, where we're developing three or four bots every two weeks, it took us six months. A lot of that was trial and error, creating our standards, and hiring developers to whom we could pass the projects.

Sometimes technical support has been very helpful and they've solved a problem very quickly, while sometimes it takes a month or a few weeks to get a problem solved.

The setup was complex because we didn't want to just start making bots immediately. We needed to build the infrastructure around it so that, in the future, it would be a lot easier for us. Once we had a process for how to build bots, it was a lot easier for us, and we had proper standards.

We used Neuralify. They helped a lot in getting us set up and it's been a good experience working with them.

I'm not 100 percent sure how we measure the ROI of a process we automate because a lot of that is handled by my manager. From what I know, we measure it based on time returned to the employee. Instead of calculating how much time it takes for the automation, we calculate how much time the employee was spending on this task beforehand, and now that we've moved it to an automated process, how much we have saved them.

Overall, I think we have seen ROI, but I don't have specifics.

On the shortlist we had UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. They ended up using Automation Anywhere because it was the most flexible and the easiest to use.

Instead of trying to build a bot immediately, first build the infrastructure for how you want to build the bots. That way, when you scale in the future, it's a lot easier than trying to figure that out after you've already made multiple bots.

I have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University, but for the most part the courses have been very basic. I had prior training, but when taking it again in the University, a lot of it was just going over the basics of Automation Anywhere.

We have use cases in multiple groups: Supply chain, HR, and finance, which has three or four currently identified. We have already implemented a few use cases. E.g., we are automating the entire payment process for accounts receivable.

It helps to improve and optimize processes. It eliminates some of the manual tasks, so we can save costs.

It's eliminating the manual tasks that accounts receivable does.

It was pretty easy to get a new team of developers set up with the tool and using it. 

The bot creation process is reasonable simple. It was very easy for my team to pick up and start doing it.

We are still looking into some of its current capabilities, like IT Bot.

We are in our initial phase with a few bots live. So far, we have no major issues. Keeping our fingers crossed.

The architecture allows us to scale. We are still working to get it to a right level of scalability for our environment.

I haven't heard any complaints from the team about technical support. I haven't interacted directly with the technical support, but the team hasn't complained.

We did not previously use another automation solution. I heard about this solution through conventions. When we were looking at optimizing our processes, we talked to few vendors and eventually selected Automation Anywhere.

We started our evaluation about nine months back. In the last six months, we started the process, and now we have a few bots online.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We had an implementation partner who helped with the deployment.

We measure ROI based on the optimization that we have done and how much cost we can save.

• With the rebate processing automation that we did, it has provided us a savings of around an hour or two a person on a daily basis, which is quite a lot of savings. 
• With our accounts receivable process, we are still in the process of implementing it. Once it will be implemented, we are expecting about 30 to 40 hours a month in time saved.

We had a detailed analysis process on all the capabilities of Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and a third vendor. Based on their scores that they got in each area, we eventually ended up selecting Automation Anywhere.

I would recommend evaluating all the vendors in this category and seeing what best suits your needs before making a selection. 

It was reasonably simple to integrate. This was our first time with it, so we had learned our way through.

The Automation Anywhere University was useful and a good head start for my team. I haven't taken of its courses yet.

We are not using IQ Bot. We are evaluating it, but we haven't made a decision yet.

We don't use Citrix automation.

We have automated transaction processing, especially accounts payable, as well as document handling on the HR side, document-reading capabilities, and the downloading of reports from websites and sharing them with users.

Transaction processing is our primary use case.

We started using Automation Anywhere about 18 months ago and it has definitely increased the speed and reduced the total processing time of our transaction processing. It's pretty good.

It's pretty simple and non-invasive. Those are the key features. And the bot creation process is pretty easy.

OCR capabilities are what we're looking for. We started using IQ Bot but we are not utilizing it to the extent that we would like because of some technical issues. We would like to see some development on that side.

It would also help if they integrated AI and other predictive analytics into this solution.

The stability could be enhanced.

It provides high scalability. You can implement this across any industry, any sector.

It took us about one year to scale from pilot to the number of bots we are currently using.

I think we have gone through UiPath and Blue Prism, besides Automation Anywhere. I wasn't part of this team then, but when I go through the documents I see things related to UiPath and to Blue Prism.

We used an integrator. 

We are focusing on time saved. We have almost 27 use cases in production and, as of now, we have saved almost eight FTEs per annum.

I would definitely recommend Automation Anywhere because it's pretty simple, non-invasive, and easy to handle.

In terms of integrating this solution with other applications, the majority of the ERP vendors are now coming up with built-in robotics. That's something which Automation Anywhere has to look into because currently, with Automation Anywhere, integration is an add-on product. Many other technologies are actually integrating RPA into their products.

I haven't taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University, but my team has. It's pretty simple. It's pretty easy.

I would rate the solution at seven out of ten because of the stability issue. Hopefully they can enhance the product. I heard that in the next release they will have natural language processing, not only for English but for other languages.

The primary intention is to automate business processes where manual work is heavily involved, wherever it is feasible. That is our core objective. We want to free up our time and concentrate on what is very important for the business by moving processes to automation.

We have automated pretty much everything: premium registration, claims processing, underwriting. We have touched upon many processes.

Recently we have implemented one particular RPA function which helped the business to complete a particular renewal within a day, a process which took a month to complete before. They were able to reach out to the customer ahead of time. The customer was surprised to see a quicker response. The automation improved business value.

We use the solution for Citrix automation and the AISense is pretty good. It is very nice to use. It has helped us to resolve many security issues, whatever we have encountered so far. They were nullified when we moved into the Citrix AISense automation. We don't need to worry about any sorts of security vulnerabilities or security access issues. We can do everything in Citrix automation with the use of AISense. Previously it was not possible to do object cloning with Automation Anywhere. When this feature came out it was so nice to be able to use it.

It is very easy to use, very easy to learn. That is the main advantage of this tool. You don't need to have very specialized skills to learn it. It's very easy to use and user-friendly.

It gels with any other application we have. We can take everything from legacy technologies to advanced technologies. You don't feel any difference when using it with any of the applications.

It would be nice to have the IQ Bots integrated with the Enterprise Edition without requiring extra licenses. That would be great.

It is quite stable. Over the last two years we've had around 50 bots and there have not been many issues with Automation Anywhere. We do have problems, but they have been logged with the portal and should be resolved in the next releases. Overall, it is quite stable.

The scalability is good. We started with very few bots and it was quite scalable. We now have about ten Bot Runners.

Technical support has been very good. That is a major advantage of using Automation Anywhere. When you log your particular issue, within the next two to three hours a technical person will be available to walk through the problem, identify and troubleshoot it.

We would like to use the IQ Bot only, for PDF extraction. Currently, we are using PDF data extraction and finding whether the data is present. If we go with the IQ Bots, the main reason will be the capability. At the moment we are having some sort of problem with reading the images. We are using OCR and Python for that right now.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

Currently, we are using it for the labor savings, we are not very particular about what the cost savings are. We look at how much time we are spending on manual efforts and where we can reduce them.

So far we have saved about 15 FTEs in the last one-and-a-half years.

I'm not sure what the monthly licensing cost is, as that is taken care of by another team, but I would say it's around $100,000.

Our shortlist consisted of two products. When we started the journey we evaluated three or four products. We chose Automation Anywhere for two reasons:

• It's easy to learn and
• it's business-user friendly.

Without thinking twice, I would recommend going for Automation Anywhere.

We have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and that was good. It is a good learning platform. We touched almost all the courses. It also has the certification course. It was very good learning there. We even have our business associates logging in to the Automation Anywhere University and learning for themselves, learning about the platform and playing around.

The process to get to our first bot took about one year. 

For our bot creation process, we first have a business meeting to understand what the business processes are doing and we look at the process metrics. We have a spreadsheet to capture the processes for which it's feasible to do automation. Then we look at the suitability of automating a given process and what would be the return on investment if we did the implementation. Once everything has been finalized, we contemplate the development time, do the development, the testing, and then put it into production.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten. Its usability is very good. The problem is that the IQ Bots' capabilities are coming out slowly.

We wanted to have more automation around our customers' processes. We do claim insurance type processing. Therefore, we wanted a process for their first notice of loss and a lot of the government regulations that they have to handle.

We started using the tool in-house to help us deploy a lot of our own internal processes. We also use it to deploy Automation Anywhere bots to set up other virtual machines and deploy software.

We have automated sending out a first notice of loss. We have done some automation of incoming documents, but it has been somewhat hard. Therefore, we are looking at IQ Bot, as a possible solution.

The most valuable features are ease of use and deployment. It has very good ease of use.

It integrates very well with other applications.

I am looking forward to seeing writing on Linux in the web and WorkBatch in the next release.

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

The scalability is very good. I haven't had any issues.

From pilot to our current number of bots, it took about two months.

The technical support is very good.

We chose Automation Anywhere over other solutions due to the ease of deployment. We had also looked at UiPath, but their deployment was more difficult. We have some on-premise clients, so we were going to have to also deploy Automation Anywhere for them in their environment, and we needed something easy to roll out.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller for the deployment.

Our return on investment is high. We have saved primarily time.

If you are looking into Automation Anywhere, get the Community Edition and play with it.

I like the Automation Anywhere University courses.

We are looking at using IQ Bot to digitize documents.