Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are in services. We are consultants and we use these automation tools to automate processes for clients. I'm not using it for my own organization, however, I'm using it for clients' organizations.

Use cases are largely cross-business process automation, back office automation. It could be used in finance or accounting. It could be in underwriting, if it's an insurance client, for claims processing.

We have done automation largely in the lending space, including wealth management and customer onboarding. 

The solution helps with reducing operational costs, which can be reduced by up to 30% to 40% in savings in terms of operational cost. That's your basic benefit, which is delivered quite well.

It's usually the RPA functionality that I prefer, which is more widely used. They also have an IQ Bot for document processing, which is a bit of advanced OCR. That's not used as frequently as their RPA tool.

The stability is good.

As it is on the cloud, it's quite scalable. 

Their OCR is a bit expensive, meaning the IQ Bot. There are a lot of customers who don't want to use it due to the price tag. Maybe if they price it more aggressively, it could be widely used as well. Otherwise, it has pretty much industry-leading functionalities, similar to any other RPA tool. 

In general, their roadmap is well defined and we are pleased with its offering. 

I've used the solution for about two years. 

The solution is pretty stable. It's good. Whenever there are issues, there are frequent platform upgrades provided by the vendors. It's very stable.

The scalability is great as it is on the cloud. It can be scaled up pretty fast.

On average, I would say, per company that we've seen, there are close to 50 to 100, users - depending on the size of the organization. If it's a small bank, they have somewhere around 20 to 30 users, however, if it's a large company, it's closer to 100 to 200 users. We work with the solution on a daily basis.

We tend to contact technical support once a month. We deal with them pretty regularly. 

I'm also familiar with UiPath. UiPath and Automation Anywhere are often used in many organizations. UiPath can be on-prem or on the cloud, however, AA is basically now on the cloud. 

What we've largely seen is clients more using VBA or .NET-based automation solutions. Before moving into these platforms, either an Automation Anywhere or UiPath was used.

The initial setup is pretty simple and if any issues are noted, the vendor can assist.

The platform can be set up in two to three months. I have not seen clients directly start on the cloud version. Usually, people have had on-prem which they have migrated to the cloud. Basically, the on-prem setup took two to three months. Maybe if there are new clients who are starting directly with cloud, it could be lesser, maybe a month or so. 

From then on, subsequent automation of processes can take anywhere between two to four months, depending on the complexity. If you have a simple business process, for example, invoice processing or claims payment, that can take one to two months. If you have something more complex, that can take anywhere between two to three months.

In terms of the amount of maintenance, it depends on how many processes have been automated. Usually for a small-scale setup, if there are 50 bots or there are 50 automation, there could be maybe 5 FTEs required to maintain it. If the operations are large, with thousands of bots, the team size can vary anywhere between 30 to 50 FTEs. The larger the operations are and the larger number of processes that have been automated, the bigger the support team requirements are. On average, 1% should be able to support 6 to maybe 10 automations.

There's support from the vendor, so I don't see a major challenge in setting this up.

While the RPA is still competitively priced, usually IQ Bot is expensive. That's what we have seen.

For the OCR, my understanding is that it's a one-time cost. I've seen instances where it's $15,000 or so and on top of that there is some cost on every document processed or maybe a bunch of documents. Per every 1,000 documents processed there is a cost that is recurring. That said, the initial one-time cost is quite high.

We are AA partners. 

I would recommend the solution based on its scalability and stability. 

Generally, people who adopt these tools do a tool assessment between multiple vendors. Usually, we have seen that it's either UiPath or Automation Anywhere that is shortlisted. These two seem to be the most preferred options.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

1. Attended automation - contact center automation, assist agents in navigating through the right process - Guided assist on-screen navigation for call center agents

2. Workforce reporting automation, we extract reports on agent availability and different AUX codes and report to leadership.

3. Plot agent time between multiple applications.

4. Real-time alerts to agents on their AHT & after call work beyond the threshold.

5. Real-time reporting on beyond threshold cases to leads.

6. Processing tickets between CRM & client applications.

1. Helped agents process tickets with minimal errors.

2. Improved AHT as they are able to close the tickets faster.

3. Improved overall SLAs by reducing aging (We use a bot to send alerts on emails & chats to agents who take a long time to close cases)

4. Reduce missed calls we pole the reports and send alerts to TL's on abandon calls in realtime

5. Biggest challenge in attended automation, every time the agent has to log in to control room and execute bot for most of the agents this is a time-consuming activity plus they are not tech-savvy

6. The agent should be able to just click on the UI and the bot should automatically login to the control room and execute the bot.

1. Screen recorder

2. AI capture

3, Ability to create custom forms and trigger another application

4. Ability to run the bot from the cloud without installing the software on our machine

5. AI sense can detect many pages inside the Citrix environment

6. I think the Citrix RDA should be universal for All Citrix environments

7. The A2019 UI layout is more user friendly

8. The recording feature where you can record multiple screens at the same time

9. MS excel functionality has lot of features in the current versions

1. for attended automation, the agent should be able to execute the bot without logging into the control room and triggering the bot

2. There are limited features to automation MS word & PowerPoint will look for more in those areas

3. Include Gsuite based automation

4. limitation on .csv based automation

5. Automations on iframes

6. We want to have greater control on deciding when we want to upgrade to a newer version.

7. Smooth upgrade with no production disruptions

8. ability to manage bots across control rooms

9. Ability to generate reports without using bot insight

I have been using AA for two years. 

It's a stable solution, 10 on 10.

I would give a 10 on 10.

9 on 10.

We started with A2019.

Straightforward for unattended, for attended, it took few rounds of fails as our environment is highly restrictive

Vendor team, 7 out of 10.

1.5

Very flexible.

A2019 has many rough edges from a developer point of view and post upgrades, these needs to be smoothened out.

We were looking to replace employees with a robot for repetitive and tedious tasks, to save time.

Automation Anywhere is saving hours and hours of employees' time. We can do the same tasks with fewer employees. 

We have increased the automation of processes in our organization. It is really obvious how automation has improved the performance of our processes. We have two tracks of automation. We do traditional automation using application management and integration, and that is done by a big team. But we can compare our small RPA automation team to that big team. Both are increasing automation in our organization, each accounting for about 50 percent of our automation.

There is definitely another business benefit from using it: Processes have been re-engineered after being reviewed.

There are ready plugins and connectors to integrate with APIs for common systems like Oracle or Microsoft.

There could be improvement in the reporting and insights into the ROI. The ROI tool that shows the performance and the return on investment is not very accurate. I have developed my own tool to do that instead of using the native tool that comes with Automation Anywhere.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

It is a stable product.

The system can be expanded easily if you scale up the team or the process itself. It's the perfect product for that. It's definitely scalable.

We didn't have a previous solution.

There were some difficulties regarding the connection of the servers and performance issues, but we overcame them by reading about the product and seeing how things can be done. We also opened tickets with Automation Anywhere but it took them a long time to respond. There was a ticket that never closed during six months. But with an upgrade to the new release, it disappeared automatically.

Automation Anywhere has a learning curve, but it's not that hard and it's not very easy. Someone without tech skills can learn it by taking courses. When you try, you get into some problems, but in the end, it's nice and not hard. I haven't tried training non-tech people to use it, but in general, it may take people without a tech background about three months to learn it.

From time to time we need to do some maintenance of the infrastructure servers and make sure that the CPU and memory utilization is optimized. Occasionally, we need to increase the memory. There are two or three people involved in the maintenance from our organization's application support team.

The solution is quite expensive. Not every organization can consider this option. That's one reason they might go with real integration via API.

There are additional support costs. We didn't buy the support because we have a capable team that is doing the job.

We have seen options from the competitors, and we decide to go with this one. There were many aspects to our decision, but the main ones were the cost of the solution and the support available in our country.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere as a serious option. You will find it easy to use, overall, making it a very good choice.

When it comes to deciding between an API integration and RPA, integration is the best option, not automation. If API integration is available and ready to use, it's better to go with that option. However, sometimes, based on my experience, there are cases where you don't have control of those things and you have to think of other solutions. For us, the alternative was automation using RPA. But when an API integration is possible, I prefer to go with that option, rather than going with the RPA. When that is not possible or easy to do, we go with RPA.

We have used it for many projects and many different types of companies. For example, we have used it to solve problems that companies have with backups, as well as issues of integration with legacy systems. We also use it for human resources and suppliers.

With Automation Anywhere, we can digitize a process, optimize it, and reduce the cost and the time that process takes. It has also reduced failures in processes.

We have used it to increase automation by 100 percent.

The development tools are very good. It's very user-friendly and easy to develop and deploy with Automation Anywhere. Ordinary people, within a few weeks, can develop a bot using the tool. It's very easy for business users, who don't have technical skills, to use.

The learning curve is low. Within two months, non-technical people can be trained to use it.

Administration of the environment of the solution is also a valuable aspect. Scheduling the bots and the Control Room are very good.

Another element that is easy is the integration of RPA bots, APIs, business applications, and documents.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

It has good stability. It's a 10 out of 10.

The platform gives you an environment that you can easily scale within your company. The scalability is a nine out of 10.

Their technical support is good, but it could be better.

Positive

I have not used another RPA solution.

ROI is very good. We measure processes that we automate and calculate the reduced cost.

It's the best RPA tool, but the pricing could be improved.

Whether to use an API integration or an RPA solution depends on the use case. If there is a possibility of using an API integration, it could be better because the integration can be more secure. But if you have a legacy system where API integration is not possible you can use Automation Anywhere. It also depends on the expectations of the customer. Sometimes, the implementation via Automation Anywhere can be faster. If the customer doesn't have a lot of time and you need to deliver the solution, RPA could be the best solution.

And Automation Anywhere doesn't require any maintenance.

Automation Anywhere is one of the best tools on the market. It's a little expensive but if you implement it in your company, you should see return on investment.

We're using Automation Anywhere (AA) for the financial departments of a lot of civil engineering companies here in Greece. There's also one pharmaceutical company that uses it in their financial department.

I find Automation Anywhere (AA) to be really fast on the development side. They are also using a good engine. They have an efficient and intelligent system, e.g. it's IBM's, so it's one of the best. The connectors in Automation Anywhere (AA) are also good, and they're working fine. These are all the features I found most valuable in the tool.

One area for improvement in Automation Anywhere (AA) is its monitoring system. It's not that good.

The scalability of the tool also needs improvement, because when you set up another machine to run the process, the system would become full.

We've been using Automation Anywhere (AA) for three years.

My impression on the stability of Automation Anywhere (AA) is that there's still room for improvement there. A lot of times during the day, one or two out of 20 cases lose their elements, or lose a window, and that should be improved.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere (AA) needs to be improved.

Setting up Automation Anywhere (AA) was not that hard, but I can't say that it was easy. I don't know if I did something wrong in the configuration when I first installed the tool. You have to configure the database yourself, and I believe that the tool should configure itself.

Licensing for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid on a yearly basis. Out of all the RPA tools, it has the most value for money, e.g. what you pay is what you get.

On a scale of one to five, with one being cheap and five being expensive, I'm rating the price of Automation Anywhere (AA) a three. It's not as expensive, but it's not that cheap, too. If you'll use it long term, then it's better, but the company that you're selling it to, they have to trust you, and you should also have knowledge about the sales.

We're now using version 16 of Automation Anywhere (AA), and that is the latest version. Previously, I was able to use version 11.

I have not contacted the technical support team for Automation Anywhere (AA), because we are partners with IBM who are partners of Automation Anywhere (AA), so I'm working with IBM and talking with IBM support, instead of the support team for the tool.

If somebody wanted to use Automation Anywhere (AA) for the first time, the advice I would give that person is that it's the only tool that's easy to learn in terms of how to develop, but you have to read the manual about the monitoring system and the control room, especially about the control room, because it's really complicated. I found the control room complicated.

Overall, I'm rating Automation Anywhere (AA) eight out of ten. I'm giving it an eight, just because of the cases that you are losing according to the spying or monitoring system. You're losing a lot, and your customer is not really happy about that.

I've used Automation Anywhere RPA as one of the RPA platforms to automate business processes within the company. It started as attended automation initially and then moved to unattended mode. We're using the on-prem version with Runners on virtual desktop. 

We have used/are using the AA360 Platform for automating the business processes in HR, Finance, and telecom operations.  

IQBOT is also used for purchase order processing to capture the semi-structured data and process it in ERPs to achieve straight-through processing of these documents.

Implementation of Automation Anywhere (AA) allows us to automate business processes and has brought productivity gains, error reduction, and speed of execution in multiple HR and Finance operations. 

This automation has also helped in achieving better compliance and standardization of the processes. A number of processes were able to be digitalized 100% without much human interaction required. The only exceptions are managed by humans although the RPA bots are doing the majority of the work. 

Implementation of IQBOT has helped in capturing the semi-structure data from pdfs and doing the straight-through processing of these documents.

Web-based ID for development is helping developers to use any machine (laptop, VDI, etc.) to access the environment and develop it.

Enabling collaborative development where multiple developers can work together is great.

The flow view is helping us to view the overall flow of the activities and is helping the functional review faster without jumping to the code level, ensuring all the exceptions are handled accordingly and there are no exceptions that are not handled.

The addition of multiple drag and drop functions in the development of IDE helps ease the development work.

Queue management is still missing from the latest version which is a barrier to using the platform to start implementing complex cases where you have parent and child transactions going through multiple stages.

Without queue management, it is not possible to manage the multiple-step work item processing. For example, task automation instead of process automation is where hands-off is required in between the workflow steps.  

Simplification in managing multiple environments for dev, test, and production would be useful.

There needs to be more stability in the platforms.

I've been using Autoamtion anywhere for the last five years. I've used a different version and now have migrated to AA 360 for the last year.

The stability is an improvement area for the product. We still have issues sometimes where bots hang up.

It's a scalable solution. We didn't face any issue in that regard.

There is good technical support available from the AA team.

Positive

We started with AA for more attended automation.

The setup is a bit complex and was done by the AA team.

We implemented the solution using an internal team and external partner.

We say an ROI after six to nine months.

The solution is cost-effective in comparison to others. However, you need to pay for the control room for each environment. You also need developer licenses and even runners are required for test and pre-production environments.

We evaluated UiPath.

Parts of Automation Anywhere (AA) that we are using include IQ BOT, RPA products, and a human in the loop attended Bots as well.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is useful for our customers.

Automation Anywhere IQ Bot is very strong in comparison to other vendors because Automation introduced this intelligent document processing product a long time ago, which is one of its unique features. 

When compared to UiPath and Blue Prism, the rest of the products are the same. They are distinct in comparison to the IQ Bot, but other than that, they share many of the same features as other products.

Automation Anywhere has a uniqueness with respect to the IQ Bot.

There is room for improvement; with the overall architecture as it is tightly coupled. Everything is coupled with the Control Room of the overall product architecture.

When I look at the UiPath product, where they have a mostly combined architecture and development environments. It should be more loosely coupled, but both products have advantages and disadvantages. 

The overall product in Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to improve a little bit on the overall architecture side.

Integrations should be included with the analytics platforms and third-party SAP, enterprise-level applications, as well as if there are any built-in connectors where you can connect with the ERPs to automate the required teams. 

There are ready-made connectors available, which will help to democratize automation across the enterprise with various customers across the globe.

They should include integration with not only analytics but also analytics and enterprise applications, as well as advanced AI/ML features. It's not just about the IdP; some AI/ML features should be available. Aside from computer vision, NLP, NLU, and NLG, as well as a variety of other advanced features, should be included.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere (AA) for six years.

For the last two years, Automation Anywhere (AA) has been deployed on the cloud, and prior to that, it was on-premises.

There are several versions of Automation Anywhere. They have version 11, as well as Automation 360 and Enterprise 360.

Version 11 is considered stable. You will also notice that Automation 360 is attempting to stabilize the overall product.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere's cloud version is excellent, but the on-premise version is a waste of time and money.

I'm familiar with both Automation Anywhere (AA) and UiPath.

Initial setup, after cloud, is fine. It was complicated earlier, but it's fine now. When you sign up for a cloud subscription, then it's plug and play, but it's a little more complicated in the case of on-premises.

I compared Automation Anywhere to UiPath and Blue Prism.

We are resale local partners.

I would rate Automation Anywhere (AA) an eight out of ten.

Here's a use case of Automation Anywhere (AA): In a bank, you have an account opening process. The customers go into the bank, then apply for account opening. They will go to a portal, fill out the form, then put their documents. All the data that had been entered and all the documents that are being uploaded will go into a document repository.

With Automation Anywhere (AA), you have a data capture solution that extracts the data, and will put the data extracted into a case management solution, instead of having somebody just taking data and doing manual data entry into the CRM platform or core banking platform. This solution can take the data extracted from the upload, log into the CRM platform, and key in the data one after the other, in that same order on the CRM or the core banking platform, instead of having a human doing that repetitive task of data entry. You can use this RPA solution to handle the document repository, extract the data from it, log into the CRM portal automatically, then key in the data as an automated data entry into the CRM.

There are other competitive solutions, e.g. Blue Prism and IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and those are very good ones, but if you asked me, Automation Anywhere (AA) really, really stands out.

One of the things I like about this solution is its functionality. It's highly functional, aside from it being stable and scalable.

I also like that the Automation Anywhere (AA) team is always innovating, e.g. they're always coming up with new features that would speak to various operational use cases.

Improving on the ease of use and user experience of Automation Anywhere (AA) could help.

We've been providing Automation Anywhere (AA) to our customers for 10 years now.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is a stable solution.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is scalable. It's one of the best you can have in the market.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has very good technical support.

Installing Automation Anywhere (AA) is not a complicated process. How long the installation takes will depend on the client environment. For the cloud version of this solution, you just need to configure it to the use cases of the customers. For the on-premises version, you have to set it up within the client data center environment, and even that doesn't take time. Installation is straightforward.

Our customers pay for the Automation Anywhere (AA) license yearly, for the cloud version.

We were able to evaluate Blue Prism and IBM RPA.

We currently have three customers using Automation Anywhere (AA). We have three people handling the deployment and maintenance of this solution: the system administrator, the developer, and the solution architect.

The advice I would give to other people who want to start using Automation Anywhere (AA) is that the most important thing is for them to understand their use cases before even embarking on the journey, so they can be sure their use cases are RPA related and can be taken cared of by this solution. Automation Anywhere (AA) cannot cater to all automation use cases, as it's mainly focused on clearly defined manual repetitive tasks.

The customers can decide whether they want to have this solution deployed on cloud or on-premises.

I'll give Automation Anywhere (AA) a rating of eight out of ten.