Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are planning to introduce a bot for every employee in the organization. There are around 9,000 employees in our organization. We are trying to introduce a bot for each one. That's our use case currently. We are working on how to improve their day in, day out life, how to make them work efficiently, removing repetitive tasks from day-to-day work, and give them important tasks/solutions that they are supposed to work for.

A valuable feature of Automation Anywhere for my needs is IQ Bot because it covers most of the semi-structured and structure data. That's where we are struggling a lot. So, IQ Bot is a very good solution to know and bring onboard for the automation of unstructured and semi-structured data.

Another valuable feature in Automation Anywhere is the analytics, like what data is coming, the process, and the number of times it's processed. That information is very powerful in Automation Anywhere.

I am looking for artificial intelligence and machine learning. I hope that they introduce them in A2019. I'm looking forward to what will be there in A2019 because that's the area that we need to go forward. We are looking for Automation Anywhere to put up their efforts to make it easier by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. Along with RPA, this would make our automation journey very easy. We can bring more processes into automation, that's where I am looking for automation to focus on.

It's a very stable, reliable product. We know a lot of use cases for customers that are running successfully. It's a pretty good product and very stable.

It's scalable. The analytics are very powerful. We can give the customer what has happened with the bot, how much time it ran, and how much time is ideal. All this information, we can easily show how successful it is, how much our productivity it is giving to them, and what ROI they're getting at the end of the year. It's pretty easy to go with Automation Anywhere.

We get a lot of support from Automation Anywhere. For any issue, we just call the people, and they're ready to be there. They send up people to our organization to set up and resolve issues. Any sort of glitches which we are facing, we can contact them anytime. They're ready to give us a solution. They even send up people to our premises to look and give the solution for us.

It is very straightforward and easy to install. They are going to introduce version A2019 online without a need to to install. There will be just one click of the URL to start developing within a minute or two, and it will start. There's nothing easier than that.

Money-wise, we get a lot of ROI. Efficiency-wise, it removes all the repetitive tasks from a person. An engineer's job is not to enter the data, check the Excel everyday, and put the data from Excel to somewhere application. If you automate the process and let Automation Anywheret do it everyday, you have a lot of time for more complicated issues. Engineers are meant to resolve issues, not doing the repetitive tasks, like Excel. Efficiency-wise, it is very good. ROI, It's also pretty good.

I can give a 10 (out of 10). It's a perfect product. It's made my life very easy and a lot of people's lives very easy. It removed a lot of people's hectic, repetitive, boring work. You give a lot of free time to people, so they can do some other work which they really want to do. It's a very good product.

I work in the logistics industry.

Right now, we have different processes and use cases that we are using it for. 

1. It is extracting information, partial information, and real information. This is one type of use case. 
2. We also use it for the company accounting related information that we are doing. 
3. We get different types of rates from different windows. We are using it for that process. 

These are the high-level three use cases that we are currently working on.

The valuable features that I see for automation with enterprise RPA are IQ Bot and Bot Insights. If you do anything, Bot Insight will provide the dashboard. It starts from the developer with artificial intelligence and the dashboard, which will provide the visibility of business-level metrics as well as operational-level metrics. Those are the good things I see in automation.

Whatever I was thinking for version 11.3, it's being implemented in the A2019. For example, it is great that the product will be:

• Integrating with cognitive analytics.
• Integrating with Azure.
• I can write scripts. 

In version 11.3, if I want to write a Python script, then I write an ESX file. This is gone in version A2019.

It is a stable product. We do experience some technical issues. However, since they are in our environment, any downtime which occurs will be with our environment, not with Automation Anywhere.

All the RPA solutions should be scalable, but I do see version 11.3 as a scalable solution that was provided. Most on the developer side don't have the knowledge on how to do the queue, as that is case management. Or, the scalability without touching the core. I do see that- So, I am expecting Automation Anywhere to share this type of knowledge with the people, then it will be a real, scalable solution.

I feel great about this conference and the way that people connected each other, from the developer to top management. Within three months, since I started my experience with Automation Anywhere, it has been nice and good.

The installation piece was sort of complicated because we are new to the business. We are new to installing Automation Anywhere services and the services that they are providing. So, we are sort of expected some kind of installation engineer to come onto our premises and provide the support, rather than remotely.

We have IT people. So, if people are coming, IT and the installation engineers sit together and install everything. People are supportive, but IT is in a different location from the installation engineers. Connecting everyone together is sort of hard. However, the installation piece is very straightforward. Though, at the enterprise level, making it work takes a long time.

We have seen ROI on one of the process, but not on the other processes yet.

My experience based on version 11.3, I would rate the product as a six (out of 10). It will go up with A2019.

I'm responsible for the digital practice within the tax business. We are building a lot of our solutions using the Automation Anywhere platforms, both with IQ Bot as well as the regular RPA, in which we offer it to our clients.

I belong to the tax practice. My role is to see how we deploy technology to increase the efficiency of tax departments and help build new revenue streams from technology in the process . We work with our clients offering digital solutions in the tax space. That's really what I do for a living. We have had a lot of success using Automation Anywhere products. We've actually built a few solutions that were done on the EY cloud, which are offered to clients as a managed service.

I'll just talk about one use case using IQ Bot. Interestingly, every time an employee travels in India, the tax that you pay on each invoice, that is an amount that you can claim from the government as a tax credit. To be able to extract that information and put it together into a return can be massive. Because there are large companies where thousands of employees traveling every month and so on, what IQ Bot does using Automation Anywhere, is it reads through multiple sets of invoices, which can be in any format, extract the tax amounts, then it creates the return which is then used to file with the tax authorities. We don't even stop at that. We also compare this data with what is the actual travel that any company has. In many cases, what we've seen, there is a lot of tax where invoices have not been received. We also plug those gaps. There is a lot of value that clients derive using that aspect as well. It's not just about getting your tax right. You need to find where the leakage is and get that back to the company.

 I can tell you what our clients are always looking for. The big challenge with our clients is that while ERPs are only handling 20 to 25 percent of the requirements. There is a lot of unstructured and semi-structured data that exists in the ecosystem which they can't leverage. That's really what they want the bots to do. How can they complement the current IT infrastructure in a good way to be able to get that outcome?

IQ Bots are extremely powerful. We are using them increasingly more where we're about to look through a lot unstructured sources, like PDF documents, scanned images, contracts, etc. We are able to take the data out, then use that toward processing structured data and creating insights for our clients. 

They have done a fairly good job on the RPA space, but more and more, the whole cognitive AI space and machine learning are where I see the industry actually going. I'm sure Automation Anywhere is also focused on that topic, but we would like to see more coming down the pipe, as early as possible.

So far, we haven't had any issues that I want to highlight, so I'm assuming that it's quite stable. It is working as we desire it to work. 

I think we have more than 50 clients who use our solution at this point. So, the scalability of the platform is well proven.

Every client is looking at scalability because they don't want to do just one or two processes. But, you will not be able to realize the value if you just limit yourself to a limited set of processes. So, the scalability is a very important task for clients. But there are certain challenges in scaling up. To be able to identify the right use cases that bring value is huge and very important.

Secondly, the technology infrastructure can be challenging if you scale up because you always have to add new servers to scale. That has always been a challenge. Having said that, I think what we heard today from Neil, there's a cloud version available that will be easily scalable. That is extremely exciting as a developer. That will be able to address a lot of the scalability issues that we've come across from our clients.

We have two models: 

1. With many clients, we actually go and have them implement Automation Anywhere in their own premises.
2. The second model has actually proven more beneficial to lot of our clients. It is where we have set up the bots in our own EY private cloud on Microsoft Azure where we have implemented certain standard tax processes. So, we only get clients to migrate their processes onto our platform. There, we just take out the pain around the whole implementation, because it is not really relevant to our clients. They just start to get outcomes, and don't have to worry about it.

We have developed a very strong capability internally that is proving to be strong differentiator for EY in the market.

the ROI of the automation investment for tax processes is very strong as apart from the process efficiency, there is also a financial aspect of lost tax credit that our solutions help to capture.

 A lot of the clients have some footprint of the other competing RPA vendors who they want to leverage. We often come across those type of situations.

There are some inherent advantages that Automation Anywhere offers. Both in terms of the commercial structure, as well as from a platform perspective, that makes it very compelling for clients to actually look at using Automation Anywhere for tax processes. in our case, in India especially, some of our clients really want to start small. So, they don't want to start with a big bang, like 20 to 25 bots. It is always easiest for them to start with one process and one bot, go with a proof of concept, and gradually scale up. We have a very good arrangement with Automation Anywhere, where we can offer that as a partner pack, where we bundle services and the license for small processes. This makes it quite compelling for clients. 

The way the platform is evolving, we also see some technology advantages using Automation Anywhere, especially if you combine RPA plus IQ Bot along with the Bot Insights platform. That gives it a different shade compared to some of the other existing platform vendors.

I would rate it a six and a half (out of 10).

For us, it was about driving process efficiencies. 

We have an awful lot of processes that need to be completed when we are placing candidates in roles to ensure that the engagement for both the candidate and the client is successful. So, that might include compliance activities, ensuring candidates get paid, and ensuring that work places are safe for people to turn up to so they can go home to their families safe at the end of the day.

There are instances where use cases and opportunities have arisen as a result of having Automation Anywhere and RPA in place that have come about through very casual conversations and have actually resulted in increased revenue opportunities that we didn't realize. Though, those have now proven to be very worthwhile and are something that we hadn't realized could contribute to us, which is making us very happy, obviously.

The ability for it to be able to be scaled rapidly. For us, it has certainly provided a range of flexibility that we hadn't appreciated before we started. This means that in times of high demand for processes to be completed, we're able to quickly scale up on demand. That gives us that additional flexibility without the need to potentially consider contingent labor increases. So, it's sort of a head count avoidance increase. So, that's proved very useful for us.

I sound like a promoter A2019 with the attended bots and some of the new features coming in with the partnership of Microsoft will be a game changer. We work predominantly within an Office 365 environment. I think there are some real opportunities there for us to do things differently.

One area where I think there's an opportunity to do things a lot better is in the analytics function. They do have a concept or product called Bot Insights. It hasn't worked for us. It isn't as plug and play as we were led to believe, which is unfortunate. I can absolutely understand the value, and the demonstrations that I've seen of Bot Insights are sensational. But, we just haven't been able to make it work. We've invested a lot of time and effort trying to make it work to no avail. So, for us, that's one side of it that has been a bit of a disappointment, but not enough to detract from the overall success story of using Automation Anywhere.

This is one of the challenges with the platform. At the moment, we're going through a number of changes with their network and some of our infrastructure. That is impacting the way our platform is running and the stability of it. In the early days, we certainly had some difficulty making sure it was stable and that was impacting the productivity of the automation of the robot.

What makes me very happy is the announcement today of A2019, which is the web-based cloud offering, or basically RPA as a service. This will overcome a lot of the infrastructure challenges that we've been encountering. I am very excited about that because it'll enable us to really drive the benefits that we know RPA can provide.

Technically, we may not get answers the first time but we do get answers eventually. The customer success managers, without them, I do wonder how quickly we might get some of the responses from the technical help desk. I can appreciate the reasons why it takes long. Everyone doesn't know everything, but the fact that we have a customer success manager who has been really critical, a key to our success, has been, and an invaluable resource in helping us drive and get those answers through the help desks.

Could it be improved? Always, yes. But with the customer success manager supporting us, it has been invaluable and certainly something that we can live with.

It's certainly straightforward. For us, it was a bit of a test and learn approach. There are certainly guidelines published by Automation Anywhere for the recommended infrastructure. We found that they weren't completely applicable for us, and we've had to tinker with the infrastructures as we've got along. Without getting into the technicalities of it, the out-of-the-box approach that was suggested to us didn't suit our environment. So, we did need to be a bit more creative about how we did the deploy.

Again, this is why I'm excited for A2019 because I think that we will just overcome all those problems and it will allow us to really drive through and scale a lot quicker. Infrastructure is probably our biggest challenge at the moment.

We have seen ROI factors. I'm not able to quantify them right now. With the number of our bots, we have been able to let go contingent workforce that has been brought into the organization to cover certain operational processing, simply because we needed to supplement that permanent workforce to do those roles.

We've now gotton to the point where we don't need to hire those people or employ those people anymore, so there's cost-saving driven there. Our bots are helping with some increased revenue opportunities by acting on signals from the market for both our clients and candidates. Cumulatively, I think within the first year, I'd be very surprised if we weren't closed to ROI, which is a great story to be able to tell.

There were a number of key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere.

1. I think when we started on Automation, and looking at RPA, we recognized that we didn't know anything. Like the first time, we saw a robot in action was when we had a demo from their sales director. So, in recognition of that, we wanted to make sure that we were going to be working with someone who was able to nurture the relationship, provide deep support to us, be highly flexible, and was patient.
2. We were considering a direct engagement model versus a partner model. We wanted a direct engagement model. This was one of the key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere because they offered that.
3. The concept of the customer success manager was very appealing for reasons that I've mentioned earlier, but they would also support us in nurturing that relationship and helping us drive through our RPA journey.
4. The Bot Store. I love that concept. We've used the Bot Store. It's helped us expedite delivery and achieve benefits. 
5. The plugger, the drag and drop, and the scripting meant we could resource internally a lot quicker because you didn't need that deep level of coding understanding in order for our dev team to be productive as fast as possible. 

Those were some of the key reasons why we went with Automation Anywhere.

I don't want to fan girl it too much, or even fan boy it. But, I'm a massive fan of AA. I've been in technical delivery for about 15 years. There are probably one of the best vendors I've worked with. I'm not giving them a 10 (out of 10) because then they have nowhere to go for improvement, but I certainly would put them as a seven and a half or eight (out of 10). I think the new evolution of the platform with things that I've already talked about will start to nudge it towards that nine (out of 10). They will still not get to a 10 because you know they need opportunities to improve. But, for me, they are a very good partner and a very good vendor to work with.

We have many use cases for this solution. These include use cases from our life science, procurement, and HR departments. More generally, it is used for our regulatory and life science tasks, and some finance as well.

We have a huge roadmap that includes a lot of processes that need to be automated.

For example, some of our processes are related to clinical trials and the drug development process. They include verifying documents and entering a lot of data that has to be processed. The automation reduces the effort and time it takes to complete these processes.

We have a mix of technology in our environment, including legacy systems and new technology.

This solution saves time when completing our pharmaceutical processes, which allows things to progress faster to the FDA.

The IQ Bot is a very good feature.

For our legacy systems, we are finding it very difficult to use the automation. Sometimes, forty percent of our work cannot be processed in an automated fashion. We need to acquire additional automation tools in order to reach one hundred percent automation.

Automation Anywhere says that you can use this tool for any type of application, but there are some for which it is not compatible. In cases where automation is not supported, there should be alternative tools that are inbuilt where they can be used to support or guide the automation forward, giving us one hundred percent automation.

The licensing model has to be changed to perpetual because even when we are not using a license, we are charged for it.

For simple processes, everything works. However, for a complex process with a lot of rules and mappings then we are finding it really difficult.

We are in touch with Automation Anywhere and the partners who can develop the system and increase the speed, or deal with other limitations that we have.

We have more than two hundred and fifty licenses, although they are not all currently in use by the bots.

We have a direct point of contact for technical support, although there are limitations.

In some instances, the technical support is on time, but in other cases it takes longer. When we commit to the customers we cannot give the time, for example, as a two or three-day turnaround.

When the Automation Anywhere team works with our technical team, they don't understand what kind of tools we have within the system in our company, and how that data is going to be interlinked with the other machines. This converting of data on the functionality side is where some of the limitations are.

The initial setup of this solution is easy, although sometimes you have service problems.

For example, we have a server set up as a load balancer, and sometimes these two systems have a problem where the nodes are not synching. I think that it is an issue with Automation Anywhere having a bug in the system. This is a problem when you are selling it to the customer because you have to make sure that it is reliable, and will stay that way for some time. You cannot expect companies to change their products every now and then, or continually upgrade versions. We need things to be stable for at least one or two years at a time.

Automation Anywhere helped us to set up our Center of Excellence (COA), and their partners assisted us with other aspects of the setup.

We have seen ROI but we are not up to the mark.

From the setup, we have spent somewhere between one and two million dollars over the past two years. I would say that our ROI is less than one million dollars. I don't want to say that it is a failure, but I would like to see a better ROI.

Had things gone the way we expected then we would have seen ROI by this time.

The licensing cost is approximately $4,000 USD, which is a seed license. You can have as many licenses as you want but the moment you start using them, they charge for them. For example, if you have purchased two hundred and fifty licenses to use over one thousand machines then at any point, only two hundred and fifty users can log in. 

In 2017 when we decided that we needed RPA, we evaluated several products. We tried Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere, in addition to other automation tools that were on the market. At that time, we found that Automation Anywhere was doing better, and had more features, than all of the others, which is why we chose the product.

An example of the additional features was the support for PDF conversion, Excel data transfer, and the IQ Bot.

We have purchased more licenses than we are currently using, which is why we need to enhance automation.

These days, I think that UiPath is picking up faster and with more relevant features. If they are able to overcome the limitations we have, for example in legacy systems, then it may be a better choice of a system that you can sustain for a long time.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

In Concentrix, my role is as an asset manager. It's very much focused on the RPA practice globally, which is why we come from enablement to delivery and support. End-to-end is something that is managed by me.

One thing I really like about Automation Anywhere is the product has actually taken leaps in the last three years. We started with the conventional RPA type of use cases. But, in the last two years, with the help of IQ Bot, and what I learned today about this Attended Automation 2.0, I think they are addressing vital key challenges that we have faced so far. The description on top of the description is what their model is. They're partnering with us in this journey of transformation. The type of technology advancement that they have done will certainly help us a lot.

They are constantly being in the BPO space and BPO and RPA are something which go hand in hand in technology. It is the right space for the utilization of this technology in the industry. While our customers are also asking for us for this technology benefit for the revenue benefit, productivity benefit, efficiency, etc. In the last two years, we have leveraged it for multiple clients, whether for telecom, healthcare or other spaces, it has been a very strong partnership that has really helped us.

RPA is something which was their best product. It was easy to config, easy to record, and deploy on the floor. With their IQ Bot, I am very much convinced that was the area where we started tapping unconventional use cases, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all those things bundled together. With this cognitive capability, we went from 30 to 40 percent use cases which we are able to address and have leaped over to a wider space of 50 to 60 percent with this cognitive bot.

There are many things which I have liked in the last couple of months that I have seen in Automation Anywhere. Something that really excites me is the new release of Attended Automation 2.2. It's a very lightweight solution. When I'm talking about the automation of the size from 2,000 to 20,000, and everyone is using the attended bot with this scale and thin client model, we can easily deploy and scale it out to the larger corporate size. So, this product is very unique and I have not seen it in any of Automation Anywhere's competitors. They came out with it.

The product is quite stable. I don't know how to code the the other products which we have used. One thing with the bot that we are always with struggling is the memory management. The Automation Anywhere product is quite stable in that perspective. Security and other things are very well managed by Automation Anywhere. The third piece is the architecture is very much centrally governed. This makes this product more robust.

In the last two years, one thing which Automation Anywhere has changed and they actually worked on is the support and enablement part. That will be the key game changer for them. Because if I compare them with other competitors who are in the space of Automation Anywhere, the customer experience (where we are the customer) is there when you need them. The support is available on time. That is where I think Automation Anywhere is wonderful.

It was very straightforward. I don't know if it was because of the training which was given or if it was because of the application itself, but it was very straightforward to start the journey of RPA using Automation Anywhere. Whether it's a complex use case or low complex use case, I think Automation Anywhere does give you that flexibility that you can start your journey seamlessly.

One thing that we are just changing now: When this automation journey started, everyone was talking about ROI. E.g., I'm investing X amount into the technology, and I'm now trying to cannibalize on efficiency. We are not leveraging automation just for cost reduction. The business is now leveraging automation to get it into this space where we were not able to get so far. So, the dimensions of ROI are not only cost reduction. The dimension of all ROI have been changed to scalability, compliance, some other new business go-to market strategies, etc. Those things are very much changed from the way it was here previously.

This is tricky. We all know who is in the quadrant and the leading there. In the last five years, we actually worked closely with them. Everyone does have their own pluses and minuses. But, if I talk about Automation Anywhere, their cognitive bot is one of their unique selling points.

We are able to sell it very easily compared to its competitors. Another piece is the stability part. The third piece is something which is the customer experience: The ease to work with it. The Automation Anywhere, as a partner, is very easy to work with. They are there when you need them, whether you are in the initial journey of automation, you are figuring out what is the right opportunity, or whether you are in the journey of deploying the bot or support. They are there with you at each of those stages.

These things really make them different compared to their competitors. I'm sure if they will continue focusing on these they will be leading in this space.

So far, it's a 10 (out of 10). If there's anything which will change, I will let you know. But so far, the experience with Automation Anywhere in the last two and a half years has been wonderful. My best wishes to the team.

When we started Automation Anywhere, it was a rule-based automation. All the rule-based used cases we could automate. Now, with the upcoming version, it includes AI and Python, so we can go ahead in our roadmap and start automating dynamic used cases too.

We started on the 10.5 version of Automation Anywhere. The Control Room had some limitations. With version 11, they removed all those limitations. In version 11, we do not have the Python support or AI machine learning support. But, with the A2019 version, we will have the AI machine learning libraries in the support. So, we can easily use those libraries now.

The main thing is the simple UI, easy to use commands, and it's very easy to learn compared to other tools in the market.

With the upcoming version, they have addressed all the issues of the clients. They have AI and ML. The GUI is good. The cloud has been included. So, it's promising that they have now included these. We have to see how much we can get used to it.

Version 10.5 has been the most stable version that we have used. With version 11, we are still getting some updates, so it will take some time for version 11 to get stable.

It is scalable. In version 11, scalability has a limit, but with the upcoming version, it will be scalable because it is on the cloud now.

AA has good support. Suppose we have any queries, they are there to help us. They have a support portal where we can raise a request and they will immediately reply on the basis of the priority level that they have set. So, it's very good.

If we go through the client setup, its very easy. But, if we are going through the high availability in the IQ Bot setup, it's a bit complex.

We have more than 50 bots in the company. The FTE and ROI are very good. In the future, we have many projects in pipeline that we are about to implement. So, definitely there is a good ROI and FTE savings for us.

I will rate version 10.5 as a nine (out of 10) and version 11 as an eight (out of 10). Let us wait and see about the upcoming version.

Processes which have a decision making and do not have any required rule-based are considered for automation.

All the features that we have different from each other. Most of the time, we go for object cloning and IQ Bot, which will be used in the coming years. That feature, people are looking forward to, as it will help us read and extract data from unstructured formats.

Although, IQ Bot has data being extracted from it. It can improve with more features, like handwritten copies that are readable. Anyway, the IQ Bot is coming out in a bit, and I'm sure we will go with it.

For most of the cases that we have worked on, the application has been stable. Automating applications has brought a huge change to the automations which we have carried forward.

It depends on the developer and how they have coded it with respect to scalability. However, it has the ability to be scalable.

The main point to go for Automation Anywhere is because we have worked with other tools than Automation Anywhere and the support team which Automation Anywhere has takes time to try understanding the issue, then give the feedback. That is something we learn along with the Automation Anywhere guys. I would go for Automation Anywhere because of the support team.

Version 10 that we had was a little complex to set up. However, version 11 is pretty easy.

We use multiple tools, but most of the time, it is Automation Anywhere which we go for because of our clients who are looking forward to working with Automation Anywhere. It's sort of easy to use. Also with respect to the client as well as the developers, it gives quick results. With other tools, we need to perform a lot of tasks. This tool is a bit quicker. The ROI also comes into picture.

I have in fact told all my friends and colleagues who are in the RPA domain to work with Automation Anywhere because it's easier to run as well as to implement. Overall, the deployment is easier. I mostly prefer Automation Anywhere over the other RPA tools.

I would rate the product a nine to nine point five (out of ten).