Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

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.

It is primarily used for accounting apps. So far, it has been okay. It's for a small implementation.

We have automated account reconciliations.

The most valuable feature is its ease of development.

It's pretty easy for people who don't have a tech background to use. It is one of the easiest tools for them to use. We are using it for scripting, and it is end user based with screen captures. It is a bit easier to use than any of the other tools out there.

There are a few things that could be done better, so we can monitor properly. They need to improve in terms of development and enhancements. We need to get the right feature sets in place as an enterprise.

We would like to use Citrix going forward. We use Bot Runners to scale up, and it gets to be expensive. Using Citrix, it can mitigate costs.

We went through the documentation, it looks pretty easy to scale.

It took six months to scale from pilot to our current number of bots.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The document was good. Everything went as expected.

The deployment was done in-house.

We don't have an ROI in any of our processes. We are just trying it out now to see if it works.

We haven't had any savings yet. We have been putting more time in than saving time at this point.

Our annual licensing costs are around $100,000 a year.

We chose Automation Anywhere through a process of elimination. We evaluated all the RPA products out there and decided on Automation Anywhere mainly based on ease of use.

We also looked at Blue Prism.

We looked at the Bot Store initially and didn't find much. We looked a year ago, so maybe we will take a look again.

I don't have much experience with attended automation.

We are automating internal processes, mostly at the task level. We are going in and looking for manual work which can be reduced through the use of automation.

Primarily, we have automated finance and cost control related expenses.

We are still in the proof of concept and pilot stages.

We have had some moderate, qualified success, so far. We are just starting out, but we have been able to take an accounting task and clear a very large backlog. Therefore, being completely up-to-date of the task since implementing a bot on it.

The ability to automate low decision, highly repetitive tasks and clear large backlogs of tasks that we could not do with our human staff.

We have had some difficulty with ease of use. As far as getting the overall architecture setup, we had a lot of difficulties ensuring the control room was installed correctly and that we were setting up our runner machines correctly, as well. Some of that was due to our own IT not being fully up-to-date on the process and being properly informed. We also just found the install procedures somewhat cumbersome to use. In addition, we have had some difficulties getting it to interact in predictable ways with our in-house software.

We would like a smoother process for moving bots and tasks between the different development environments, from development to testing to production. We find this to be pretty cumbersome to work through.

We have had some issues with stability. However, we think this is as much on our end as on Automation Anywhere's side. They have been very helpful with their customer service on resolving these issues.

The initial setup is complex.

We are doing everything in-house.

We look at ROI in a couple of different ways: FTE reduction, hours saved of human work, or errors caught. We are also looking at finding errors in our invoicing for our accounts payable team to be able to reduce those errors.

We spoke with a number of vendors.

Look into what the requirements are from an IT standpoint and involve the IT team in ensuring that the installation and setup are handled smoothly. Make sure that the IT team is onboard and invested in a way that makes them a close partner in the automation process.

The bot creation process is pretty user friendly for a lot of tasks, such as the object cloning. I know a number of our developers have felt that it is a bit cumbersome with its logic and variable manipulation. A lot of us want to be able to start typing in directly rather than having to click and drag things, but as far as the core automation functionality, we found that pretty easy to use.

We have not used the IQ Bot.

I have not taken any course on Automation Anywhere University.