Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are using it to automate company processes all across our firm: finance, legal, compliance, and customer client account servicing.

We have the ability now to surveil all our employees for political contributions. This would previously take 40,000 hours for a human to do. By combining Automation Anywhere and Appian together, we have been able to build a bot that works with Appian workflows to manage all our employees.

The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages. I have been able to be a developer with Automation Anywhere without knowing the technical background. I am a business user, and not needing the technical knowledge to use the system has been useful for me.

The bot creation process is straightforward in some ways and complicated in others. You can get your initial stuff laid out really quick, but then putting in your exception handling is more time consuming. It is awesome because it takes two hours to get things initially done. However, then it takes another two months to work through everything else, such as infrastructure and moving from development to QA to production. 

When I change the name of a variable in the Variable Manager, I would really like it to change in the code. We just added coding standards where I had to spend hours going through and recoding existing bots, because anything needing a change had to match our coding standards, and that now includes variable names. I just spend two days renaming variables in a bot. While it should have been superfast in the Variable Manager, I had to go through every single line of code, rename all of them, and inevitability, I will miss one. If I have already assigned a variable do something, it makes sense that if I change the name of the variable, then it should change in the code.

We have had so many stability issues.

We had quite a few issues when we upgraded from version 10.5 to 11.2. We were struggling with those issues, only to find out that version 11.2 has known problems. We should have gone straight to version 11.3. Now, we are upgrading again.

We have had so many production support issues. In version 10.5, we lost the ability to run unattended bots. Our Control Room could no longer unlock our Bot Runner machines, and Zendesk could not help us. So, we spent two month babysitting every single bot that ran. Then, when we upgraded to version 11.2, we found out schedules vanish from the Control Room, which resulted in us babysitting the bots for another two months.

The technical support is not great. We have had issues where they close our tickets when we don't respond to their email within eight hours, but they email us on a Friday night.

I had two days where I was out of the office, and they closed tickets on me. This has happened to my co-workers, as well. This has been frustrating.

I really struggle with the support team and informing them of endemic issues. They try and explain it away, but I know enough to be aware that there is a bigger issues, such as what we experienced with versions 10.5 and 11.2 causing us to babysit bots.

Not having the support has been problematic for me.

We used a third-party vendor for the deployment. With our initial vendor, we were led to believe that they were experts. We have since come to realize this was not the case. We have changed vendors and reprogrammed our bots from the initial vendor. We are much happier with our current vendor. 

We measure ROI through a combination of hours saved, errors avoided, and quality of life, which are bots based on processes which humans can do quickly but hate doing them. We have a couple bots built around quality of life.

I would encourage anyone looking for an RPA solution to look around at other solutions in the market.

The ability to integrate the solution with other applications is hit or miss. We have a lot of homegrown applications, and sometimes those don't work. Mostly, they work well with websites until they change the websites.

We have done a proof of concept of the IQ Bot. We struggled with it because we have sales spreadsheet that go across more than one page, and IQ Bot cannot follow it across more than one page. Also, the dp1 requirements were too high for most of our use cases.

We don't use Citrix automation.

We have automated some fund management and fund reconciliation processes, which has been done successfully. The tool has been performing well. 

In our fund management and fund reconciliation process, we had a lot of headcount. Automation has significantly reduced our FTE count, investing that IT personnel into other work. Also, the quality of the work has slightly improved.

Our development time has been reduced because the solution is very user-friendly. You don't have to know a lot of things. It has an IDE with drag and drops, in addition to workflow development. This gives developers an edge to write code quickly.

I am a developer with nine years of experience in full-stack development. I have found this tool strikingly different, compared to the other tools, in terms of ease to use. Anybody can be taught it, and it has a very small learning curve.

Automation Anywhere has some limitation with its integrations. You can build your logic with MetaBots and .NET components, e.g., if something is not gathered by Automation Anywhere or built into functionality, you can write a MetaBot. A MetaBot is like an external component. You can write it through C# or .NET code, and make a DLL, and import it. This is not open to all data types or EXE functionalities which can be written through C#. You have to define your variable types, matching them with Automation Anywhere existing variable types. Because of the knowledge required, I cannot let another person, who doesn't know Automation Anywhere, build my external DLL code.

They are already addressing some concerns that I have been having, like having cascaded code blocks, which is very helpful for developers to use when finding and debunking codes. Until now, we haven't had collapsible cascaded code sections in Automation Anywhere. This is not typical, as any IDE will usually have it, on any language.

The current interface for business users is not intuitive, as it is a code-based view. A business user wanting to develop a process may find the interface a bit elusive. Automation Anywhere is now working on a process flow view with a drop and drop, which should be better for business users.

There is not much guidance for implementing DevOps, like continuous development. Nowadays, the technology has come for the deployment part, it should be part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD). 

With Jenkins or TeamCity, there is a job, and I want to see them have integration with Automation Anywhere, so we can directly code check-in, run, test, and deploy. Now, we are doing this manually for deployment, but I want to see a DevOps job instead.

We had couple of Windows' tools that we automated. The stability is remarkably good. 

In some cases with RPA web development, where we had to integrate with some websites, there were some problems in terms of reliability or stability. The issue is not constant. Different browsers, like IE, work well, where others, like Chrome, don't work well. With legacy websites, based on old technology, it also does not work well. 

The scalability is fine. You can create small, repeatable tasks. You can expand through different bots. So, you don't have to recreate the same stuff. Automation Anywhere provides the facility so you can reuse components to make a scalable solution.

We are improving scalability on a daily basis, as RPA is new to us. Our code is now more scalable and reusable than we developed our basic structure. Going forward, if we have to create a new bot with any given scenario, it will take 20 to 40 percent less time to create. This is because we have already made the scalable, reusable components.

In terms of accessibility, the Automation Anywhere technical support is the best. Out of all the RPA tools that I have used, their support forum is more agile and responsive. For any issue, we just have to create a ticket and a technical person will get assigned in no time. They are the best in terms of responsiveness, but I have mixed feelings about the quality of those responses. I feel sometimes to support their fast responses that they probably compromise their quality.

We used to get a lot of emails from the original fund management users (the consumers) asking about their estimated stock prices: monthly and biweekly. This information comes through a lot of emails. We had to read those email, classify and categorize them, then go into a different portal to get some more data, and finally, send them a result in an Excel format.

We used a consultant, and the deployment was very smooth. We have been maintaining three environments: development, UAT, and production. The deployment procedure is pretty simple. We just have to export from one to another environment where the dependency is just a package file. 

We are thinking of implementing Bot Insight and the CoE dashboard to calculate our ROI, since our bots are not analytics-based. We are just using our bots as a bot. They are not integrated with any analytics. I know that they have a CoE dashboard, where you can define parameters to automatically calculate ROI. At the moment, we are manually calculating our effort savings.

I don't agree with the IQ Bot licensing costs, which depends on the consumption of the document rather than per bot or user. This is confusing for me, because most of the cases for us in a possible future scenario, there would be a lot of invalid data to be scanned to get to real data. E.g., we would have to supply approximately 100 pages of scanned data to extract two pages of original data. In these type of cases, the IQ Bot might be a costly venture.

The company also looked at UiPath. From my understanding, Automation Anywhere was chosen for ease of use and licensing.

The IQ Bot seems interesting in the terms of populating semi-structured data and gathering intelligence of its own. Though, I haven't implemented in my project yet.

I didn't know Automation Anywhere seven to eight months back. All my learning came from the Automation Anywhere University. Though, I have experience in other RPA tools, the courses are really helpful, as they helped me to gather the knowledge needed to implement and master the product. Right now, I'm applying the information to my domain and company.

I haven't used it in a Citrix environment.

I very excited to see the next version of this product.

The primary use case is within anti-money-laundering: To take alerted cases and gather artifacts on multiple websites or applications, and then to consolidate those into a single file, in this case in OneNote, and provide that to the investigation team.

Primarily, this was all being outsourced because it's a lot of very tedious researching and collecting of the artifacts and consolidating them. Once that consolidation is done, those artifacts can be handed off in a structured format to another team which actually looks at the alerted information, at the details, to see whether it justifies the alert. They can make a decision based on the artifacts at that point.

In addition, with the solution going out there and being visible, we've had interest from the insurance side that wants to jump in. They've got several use cases that they would like to do. The capital markets group has use cases they would like to get involved, and the bank itself has use cases that it is just beginning now. It has ramped up a team already and they're going to start wanting to jump in too. Even groups like DevOps and some other groups that are more cost centers are wanting to jump in. Anything they can do to lower their costs helps out the bottom-line dollar for the whole company.

Looking at a company like ours, with so many different departments and processes and policies, and so many manual tasks, the use cases that we can have for both attended and unattended bots are pretty much countless.

There was a large number of individuals who were doing the data collection and artifacts collection, and they were actually a third-party. The solution improves our situation in terms of time, money, and resources. Plus, when you're dealing with a bank's information, there are additional complications of privacy concerns. If we can keep that in-house and have a bot or automated code take care of it, then there are fewer human eyes on the private information as well. It's a resource saver, it's a money saver, and it helps us with security, keeping more human eyes away from private or touchy information.

Its integration with source control is very refreshing. There could be a little bit more maturity around how to do some of the features, but not having to go outside the app, not having a separate set of procedures, allows you to check in and check out right from within the app. You can make edits and uploads and undo your checkouts. That integration is very nice.

It really does have a great dashboard. It has Bot Insight, it has MetaBots, and IQ Bots. It has so many features where it can read a file and loop.

Regarding the integration with source control, when there's a large number of operations the bulk operations need a little bit more maturity.

Also, regarding the UI, once you're in some of the screens there are fixed dialogues. They are a set size, so there's a lot of horizontal scrolls and vertical scrolls. Those are things that can be addressed in the future. The integration and having it inside the applications are far more important than these pesky complaints. But I get to a lot of scrollbars when I'm reading code. Sometimes I have to keep scrolling and moving up and down and it's a bit of a nuisance because I'm focusing more on navigating than on the actual logic that I'm trying to read through. A little bit more friendliness in the UI would help.

I came from OpenSpan and Pega and it's a different approach as far as the coding goes. One thing I feel limited in, in Automation Anywhere, is that sometimes they give these wonderful screens where you can do conditional loops or branching with the "If" statements and they'll have these built-in features for if a window exists or if a folder exists or if a process is running. But if I want to do something that is more purely business-related and is somewhat complex to write or is nuanced, I sometimes have trouble implementing that inside of the Automation Anywhere script. I feel limited at times with some of the looping and some of the branching and some of the ways to make procedure calls when I have a complex business issue. 

Where it's really great, where it's very simple, is for me to see if a window exists, to see if a process is running or if I'm waiting for a window to close. On the flip side, let's say we're in capital markets and they have a complex business rule for some of the analysis. I don't know how well the product would handle that case. I can't say that it can, I can't say that it can't, I just have concerns of how that would be done, at this point.

Coming from a couple of years of using a competitor, I do know exactly how I would do that in the other code and I do know it can handle it. One thing I can say is, even with that concern, I do know we can add scripts for JavaScript and Visual Basic scripts, so if we need to extend the product, we do have that option. I would like to see some other languages like Java or C# added to that as well, but I have questions about that. I may be able to do that through a MetaBot so that's a question I would have to ask support about, but I'm not there yet. Whatever limitations are there, I think we can still extend outside of the product.

If we're talking about the Control Room, those services stay up. We have them on a Windows Server, and I haven't seen it have an issue standing up, other than when we have some code that has gone rogue. When doing development and there has been a mistake in the code, we've had to redo the server a couple of times. Given that, I would say the stability is an eight out of ten.

We've had to change our configuration a couple of times. I'm only saying eight because I know there are scenarios that we haven't come up against and when we write code there are going to be times where Windows or the server has to be rebooted.

We did have one issue where it kept disconnecting in development but that appeared to be a VPN issue and we got help from Automation Anywhere on that.

Overall, it's very solid. I don't know that I could give a perfect score to any software out there.

The scalability is limited more by our money and our hardware than anything. The scalability really depends on how much RAM and how much network bandwidth we can do, how many servers we can apply. I know we can just keep adding to the cluster and I know clients could keep popping up. Since we're at the forefront of this, it has not been an issue. 

However, I do know that, within a year, when we start having multiple clients running and we have multiple developers in there, I may have a different response. But, again, I think we would just have to add more Control Room servers and more resources to the servers. We haven't hit a scalability limit issue yet.

The technical support has been very prompt. They've been very willing to help out and, in almost all cases, they've been able to provide an answer or solution relatively quickly. If anything, we have been the bottleneck because they have been more responsive and quicker than we were able to implement. They may want us to make a change or tweak, give us an answer within an hour, and we have to get permission or approvals to make that change in the environment it's in.

I think that's another huge plus for Automation Anywhere: their customer service and their customer relationship.

Our company didn't have any RPA enterprise-capable tools. I don't know what motivated them to learn about it. It may have come down from the executive level saying, "We want RPA, go figure out what it is." That's when they went and looked it up and started researching. They did like their competitive analysis of all the RPA software tools and platforms that were out there. They narrowed that down to ten, then to 5, and then there were three that they ended up with and did a matrix comparison. The matrix included risk, ROI, and cost and they came up with a weighted system. Automation Anywhere came out on top.

The initial setup is a complex process that they make very straightforward. Their installation is very quick. It was relatively painless. Any pain that we experienced was on our side because we had to make sure we had the right permissions or direct privileges, or that we had a firewall that was configured properly. We had a relatively complex site where we had clustered Control Rooms and we're using load-balancing. Within a day or so, we definitely have it standing up and, typically, within the same day, we have it configured. That's assuming we don't come into any complications on our side where we have to go ask for permission to get access to something or for a new certification. Overall, their installation is fantastic.

It took about two days to stand it up, to configure it, and then to smoke-test it, and make it productive.

The setup was prior to my coming aboard, by a couple of months. Our company had talked with IBM and Automation Anywhere, so the strategy was definitely to go through the documentation and to have an Automation Anywhere expert help with the development environment. After having meetings and reading the documentation, they had a hand-holding approach in development. Then they documented the steps. They went into the next environment, ran through their documentation, updating it because there were some changes in the clustering as well and the load balancing. They got that standing up and documented that. By that time, they felt comfortable in production. They were able to go through and repeat the steps without having to go back to Automation Anywhere or IBM for support.

We had to repeat the process here about two months ago and set up a new model and set up a new production environment and some more servers. That's where I get the couple-of-days timeline from. I was following their documentation with our internal guy who did it. Obviously, we had some guys that do database, some guys that do the Windows Servers, and then, myself; I was doing the actual client side. We're all on the phone at the same time taking care of it and it's less than a day.

In terms of the very initial setup, starting from the planning stage, I wasn't here at that time. I would say that it was about four to six weeks, but that's mainly because they had other stuff that was going on, so they were just having the weekly meetings until they got ready to try it. I do know they started talking in May and by the end of July, they had it done, but there were gaps where they weren't working on it in there.

The actual length of time may be about a week because we have to do a change request. We have to go through a procedure where we get approval from the business managers and the lines of business saying, "Okay, we're ready to go live. We're going to go ahead and push this into production," and we need to do backups and have a contingency plan. We then have a meeting and make sure everybody is okay with the current test results. Once all that's done, we can deploy in one night, have it smoke-tested, and have it running the next day.

For the actual deployment steps, you really only need one person but, typically, we will have the developer, a business person to do a smoke test, a Windows person and a database person; four people, only because we have separate roles here. Technically, it only takes one person, but developers don't have any permissions. But we need a developer in case something goes awry to help out the build person who's pushing it. If there's something they can't do, then they need the Windows person to handle any kind of Windows services. And if there's a database issue, you need a database person to run a script. Four would be max, but that's actually very typical in a lot of corporate deployments.

We're just getting into production right now and we're handling the first wave of production issues for getting it into production. Unfortunately, we got our code from a vendor that was helping out initially. Even though I've been here six months, I just got my hands on that code a couple of months ago, so we're having to do some cleanup.

We're really hoping by the end of next month or the month after to get a good idea of metrics on what our performance is, how fast we can work, the ROI, and the offset. We're almost there, but it's a little premature to determine ROI.

Regarding areas for ROI with this solution, the first one is that we will be able to terminate a contract for doing all this work that is going to be replaced with the bots. That immediately means lower legal costs, less overhead, less money that needs to be paid out. It's two or three bots that will be replacing multiple people. That's the initial type of ROI we can see.

It's a scale game, as well. The same code that we're doing is very applicable to a couple of other groups within compliance, within audits, which will be collecting very similar type of information from a couple of different apps. The ROI there is going to only increase because we'll have this reusable code that we can extend to other groups very quickly. I think that's why they chose this particular path. So hopefully, we'll be able to scale this ROI tremendously in the next 12 months.

Policies and procedures always change. The question is, can we be nimble enough? Can we build a platform that is solid enough, and have a pool that is talented enough to be able to produce bots in a cheap enough fashion to realize that ROI? So far, I don't see anything that would restrict that or cause that not to happen.

Automation Anywhere's pricing is competitive. That's obviously something that attracted our company to it. They're very well priced. I can't speak to let's say UiPath or Blue Prism. I do know Pega vs Automation Anywhere is somewhat comparable, but Pega also requires a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience to get up and running. There's a bigger upfront cost to get Pega and they also want to push their case management, so even if you go RPA, they're going to want to get you to do the case management side of things as well.

The shortlist was Pega's RPA and UiPath. Blue Prism was in the top-ten but they were not in the shortlist because they never responded to calls. It was felt that if they couldn't respond to the sales calls how could they go forward?

Do your homework, talk with the team, get your questions, read through the documentation, and then decide on your platforms and make sure you really focus in on whether you need clustering and the load-balancing because those are going to make a big difference in your costs, your platform, and scalability. Get that worked out first.

Then pick a use case that is very quick and simple where you don't care about the ROI but what you want to do is make sure that you're testing your environment, that all your environments work, that you can do source control, that you can promote, that you can unit-test, that you can do regular tests, that you can do deployments. You can solve all those problems without the headaches of trying to figure out how to keep the business happy, how to keep the cost down, and just focus on making your environment solid.

Hopefully, that use case is something small enough that you can do within a month or two. Once it's deployed you can see how to support it, how you test it. Then you have time to focus on your standards. What are your programming standards? What are your deployment standards? What are your guidelines for coming up with change requests? Those things, ultimately, regardless of the code, are always going to be your success and failure points.

Bottom line, when you get down to it: The coding is not going to be the bottleneck anymore, it's going to be your procedures and policies around it, your project management. Focus on that.

Automation Anywhere has made it very easy for you to install, they've got the tools to make it very simple for you to create a quick, small application and to get out there. Again, forget the ROI the first time. Get it working, get everything panned out, and then, once you feel comfortable, pick a medium case or even an easy case but one that has a high ROI. Pick something that is very repeatable but that, if you can get a bot to do it, it saves you a lot of money. That would be your next use case. And that could even be your first one if you can't find something small and simple. Once you get the experience, you get it under your belt, move on to your more mature use cases.

The tool is flexible. The tool is very easy to pick up. I am concerned with some later cases though. When we get into some complex business logic or processes, I'm not sure how it's going to handle heavier business rules, so we'll have to wait till we get to that point and we'll have to hope that our customer relationship with Automation Anywhere will help us with more complex or tricky resources.

In our organization there are 16 of us using Automation Anywhere, and we'll be at 20 by the end of January. We'll see where that number goes. And that's only been the last six months. That's a big number to put on there, where we have a bunch of stuff going on and are trying to keep it in control and figure out our center of excellence and our standards and our practices. I know the other companies may go in and throw big numbers at it but we're at 20 and that number is only expected to keep growing. That's going to be limited by how many projects can be done, how much money there is for those projects, and how many people as resources we can find. Right now, our users are developers, testers, administrators, and we have a couple of project managers who have a limited administration view into it.

Maintenance depends on the bot itself. Initially, whenever we start with a bot, we always have one person dedicated to it. Depending on the what was found, one person for maintenance is usually fine and that usually dwindles. You'll typically end up with one person who has multiple bots or automations that they are maintaining, as time goes on. If anything, it's less than one person needed for maintenance.

Overall, I would rate it at eight out of ten. It's a very simple interface. It's a very straightforward approach. You can very quickly get in and get some proofs of concept going. It has logging and some reporting. Some of the things against it are when I compare it to where I came from before and some of the features that OpenSpan had. For a developer doing coding and debugging - developing the code for reusability and debugging the code - OpenSpan had some advantages that you can't easily overcome in Automation Anywhere. That would be the two points off in my rating of Automation Anywhere, not that I would give OpenSpan a ten either. I would probably give that an eight as well, for different reasons.

I basically develop automations and also configure and create new scripts. I do user testing and separate testing as well.

We use it for legacy applications. We can automate legacy applications well, even with complexity.

It's very easy to use. It helps streamline manual processes. Manual work can cost the company a lot of money, but with an automation, work can be just a click of a button. That, and the work is more accurate and happens much faster. Any manual processes can be automated.

While it does use AI, we don't use it too much. We're looking at it. However, it's not something we prioritize.

I like that we can customize almost anything. You can create workflows fairly easily.

Even if users do not have technical skills, they can still use Automation Anywhere. It's not hard to learn.

I did training over one or two weeks. However, I did find some of the training challenging, specifically in areas where I didn't have any background. That said, I'm using it with legacy applications, which makes some things more complex. For most users, it would be very easy to get going. 

We did see near immediate results once we started using Automation Anywhere. Within a week or two, once we started testing it, we could see how useful it was. 

It's saved us time and money so far. We were able to do reports both before and after running Automation Anywhere and could compare the results and we were able to see that we did actually record savings on both counts. 

The scripting can be a bit difficult. 

I've used the solution for the past three years. 

The stability is very good. That said, it's not 100% stable. Sometimes it does crash.

I've never contacted technical support. 

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. Our team did not find it to be difficult. our deployment team was pretty small. We only had four or five people working on it. It was easy to upgrade as well. There is some maintenance needed, including the need to take logs. However, it doesn't take too much time. 

The price is a bit higher than other options. 

We did look at other options; however, we needed something that could handle legacy automation, and Automation Anywhere made the most sense. 

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

New users should be knowledgeable enough to write scripts, as that's the main issue. However, it's a good solution for automating small processes.

We use Automation Anywhere in a DevOps environment. 

Automation Anywhere helps us resolve some friction between IT needs and business requirements. In an agile environment, the first questions are always: How much money do you have? What is your budget? Automation Anywhere or any other RPA solution can help you achieve your goals within budget constraints by lowering operational costs. It increases productivity and reduces errors.

I like Automation Anywhere's cloud-based nature. You don't need any on-prem infrastructure to host it. If you have suitable infrastructure, you can easily integrate it with Automation Anywhere. The learning curve is reasonable. Automation Anywhere has a user-friendly environment, but digesting all the platform's features takes significant time. 

It's challenging to train users on Automation Anywhere. There should be more organized training sessions. I prefer interactive classes to one-on-one training. You can create super users and organize conferences or workshops where users can learn from experts. Maybe you only have a few of these super users in your organization, so that's why you need to have workshops on a weekly basis. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for three to five years. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of ten for stability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support seven out of ten.

Neutral

I previously used UiPath at a past job but switched when I started work at my current company. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of ten. 

We use Automation Anywhere to process data entry from our government website.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to reduce human effort and cut costs.

Automation Anywhere offers a complete solution, encompassing both development tools and a control room for managing automation.

Automation Anywhere's front end is designed to be user-friendly for non-technical individuals, while the back end remains under the management of IT.

Several of our projects incorporate generative AI, and while we are new to this field, it has proven beneficial thus far.

The integration of APIs in Automation Anywhere is easy and works well.

We integrated Automation Anywhere with some of the business applications which was straightforward.

Automation Anywhere has helped save time.

The license cost is high and needs improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for over two years.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

Automation Anywhere is scalable.

The technical support is good. The few times I called them they were able to promptly address my issues.

Positive

We switched from Automation Anywhere to Power Automate because of the price and more functionality with other Microsoft products.

We were not able to migrate from Automation Anywhere to Power Automate. We had to recreate everything from scratch.

I prefer Automation Anywhere to Power Automate because it offers a more comprehensive set of features, performs reliably, and provides deeper insights.

The licensing cost for Automation Anywhere is high.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

While Automation Anywhere offers training and community versions for learning and experimentation, it is not user-friendly for non-technical users.

No maintenance is required.

As our business is a mortgage company that provides loans to borrowers, we use Automation Anywhere to automate business processes to help the end users process loans faster. 

The application's response time is slow when using your desktop and trying to process an application. However, when you apply automation, it can work overnight. You don't need to sit at a desk and watch what's happening. It's all automated. 

Prior to implementation, everything was manual. You couldn't inject other software, like APIs. However, with AA, you can bring in any number of tools that connect right into Automation Anywhere. This makes everything move faster. You save a lot of time and cost involved in processing the applications.

The recent update that included code analysis was very helpful. Previously, we had to go line by line. Now, inside the tool, it shows you which lines are hard-coded. 

We've saved a lot of time. How much time we save depends on the process. It's likely at least 50%. Sometimes, it's up to 70%.

We've saved on costs by about 30%.

It's reduced human error. Using Automation Anywhere, we can eliminate a lot of human error by adding exceptions and identifying what's going on quite easily.

For users who don't have technical skills, it's not that complicated. It defines what every command does. It may take a few months to understand the process; however, going through the documentation and using the community versions and forums will make it easier to learn. You can find answers to any aspect you want to understand. 

We did a POC with the automation copilot. It met some of our expectations. For some of the use cases, it will help in the future. 

The copilot's ability to integrate with our day-to-day is fine. It helps employees working with it. It helps them to make things faster. You just have to provide some information, and the background bots will run. It might help increase productivity in the future if we implement it at the enterprise level. Outside of the POC, it looks like it might help with productivity. 

The solution integrates well with other applications and third-party tools. 

There are great tools inside Automation Anywhere. 

With the automation copilot, if I have any internal tool or application and I want to pass on variables, I don't have it. Maybe the team can work on it to make it more efficient to make it work better across all automations.

I've been using the solution for four or more years. I started with version 10.x.

In the past two to three months, the support has gotten far better. Previously, we didn't have a live agent or live support, and now we do. It's great to have. They can respond immediately, and you can continue with what you are doing. You don't have to wait for support at all. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

I was involved in the initial deployment. It took a couple of months.

It's relatively easy to upgrade. It depends on the organization. You need to add more variables and define the standards. However, it's not too complex. 

There is some maintenance needed. When you upgrade versions, devices may be disconnected. Sometimes you need to go and check if the device deployment is happening or not, or a deployment may fail. We have about two people handling the maintenance of the solution. You simply need to ensure the bots are deploying on the right schedules and check errors or disconnects. In some cases, you may need to redeploy the bot. The time spent maintaining bots maybe three to four hours per day per person. 

We also explored Microsoft's Power Automate. However, it wasn't as mature or up to an enterprise level at the time. Automation Anywhere had good standards and excellent support, in terms of architecture, design, and user interface, we chose Automation Anywhere. It also has good community support. Previously, we used to raise a ticket. Now, it's amazing - when you ask a question, people respond to it live. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We use it in the healthcare domain and automate legacy systems to reduce processing time.

We have given services to clients and automated processes with 30 to 40 bots and their ROI has increased a lot. The turnaround for tasks done by bots is very quick, and, even on weekends, bots are running.

The integration abilities of Automation Anywhere are valuable and so is document processing. 

It is also easy to design and implement, even for business users who don't have technical skills. A little bit of training is required, about five to seven days, and then they can start. The learning curve is low.

The document processing, OCR, needs to be more accurate. Sometimes, when you try it on documents, it keeps on failing and goes to a different queue. It needs to mature.

I would also like to see the solution include generative AI functionality because that would provide a lot of features.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for about six years.

The stability is quite good. There are no major problems there.

The technical support from Automation Anywhere is good. I worked with the Automation Anywhere platform for a long time, and it improved a lot. 

For example, I worked on a migration project and there were some infrastructure issues and dependencies, things that were very hard to catch. The response time of the Automation Anywhere support team was slow. But now, their support has matured a lot.

Positive

It takes 30 minutes to an hour for the initial deployment of the platform.

In health care, providers need to follow up after every visit within 10 days, 15 days, 20 days, 30 days. There are different frequencies with which they need to go back to the patient and come up with personalized communication. For that reason, we have created about 10 bots that have saved our clients a lot of time on operations.

When you compare the cost of Automation Anywhere with UiPath and Blue Prism, those others are much less. Licensing-wise, UiPath wins the deal.

I started off using Automation Anywhere and, since then, I have also used UiPath. The reason is due to the cost. Automation Anywhere's licensing costs and package costs are very high. Most of our clients are being forced to move to UiPath because of that.

Another thing is that switching between versions of Automation Anywhere, for example, from Enterprise A2019.11 to the latest version, is a headache.

From the time of deployment, it takes between 15 days and one month to automate a process. There is a center of excellence for each client. They set the standards and deployment and release procedures. And they have quality assurance procedures as well, before pushing something to production.

Deployment is straightforward because the development is on the cloud, so it's a smooth process of moving from development to UAT, and from UAT to production takes little time.

While deploying, we test the solution. We have a sanity checklist in which we will ensure all the prerequisites are covered and code-based code reviews are done. We run all the test cases and make sure everything is working fine before pushing to production. After pushing to production, we will run smoke tests with dummy data for a production sanity check. We'll ensure proper functionality and, otherwise, we have a rollback procedure.

Bot maintenance includes monitoring in case there are any failures. We have a monitoring team that monitors all 150 or 200 bots. If there is a failure, communication will come from the bot and the monitoring team will create a ticket and a developer will work on it. We have two people dedicated to this task. The amount of time they spend depends on the frequency that bots run. Some bots run every half an hour and others run once a day or once a week.

Regarding using an API integration instead of RPA, if you have a system where you can expose API services, that would be great. But when it comes to legacy systems, like mainframes, you can't expose an API. In that situation, naturally, RPA is the solution.

Overall, I recommend Automation Anywhere. Technically and feature-wise, and in terms of its stability, everything is fine. If they could just make the migration process from one version to another version very smooth, that would be great. And I am not satisfied with the document understanding and OCR. That should be improved.