Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case is automation in respect to the financial sector. We have been operating with trades across globe. 

Right now, we have been upgrading to version 11.3.2. Two months prior, we had been using version 10.7.5.

We have automated a few processes, which take four to five hours to do manually. When we automated these processes that time became less than one hour with RPA. This was our goal. We have reduced the time frame.

The best feature is the MetaBot, which we've been integrating and calibrating with a lot of stuff. This has been helpful to us.

I like the object cloning.

The development period is shorter.

It is easy to fix bug issues which you encounter in the post-production process.

MetaBot still needs to be optimized, though Version 11.3 did integrate all the commands into it. We are not able to see all the lines of code which are executed in MetaBot. 

Integrate .NET functionalities instead of installing Visual Studio, which is an additional resource to us.

Needs more Excel features and functionality.

We are moving onto Python machine learning and would like to have additional functionalities to be added, especially to MetaBot. This would help for the use cases that we are working on.

There are some discrepancies in respect to the variable creation of copying and pasting the code. However, in version 11.3, these type of disturbances has been removed.

The stability is up to 90 percent. It's not a meeting 100 percent because we keep on upgrading. Whenever we upgrade, we have to fine tune a few of the products because we have been interacting with some of the older applications and legacy parts. In those cases, it is somewhat failing. 

The application is very stable in respect to automation. I am able to automate the Terminal Emulator, along with the Linux part, of a command prompt, the web application, and even the simplest application. It has been stable. However, in few cases, it has some pitfalls and stability get reduced.

Scalability is up to the mark. We have been building our solution from the low to high level. It is scalable.

Technical support has been a great asset. We have been encountering migration issues associated with database activities due to computer database back-end. We have contacted the technical support with database issues due to object cloning and SAP Objects. They have been helpful.

Their response time is within one to two hours. In some cases, it has dragged on up to six hours. I haven't found it dragging on for one to two days.

We kept on hiring resources to do the same type of operations, which increased our team resources. So, our SLAs were not up to the mark. the client that we were supporting was not satisfied. Therefore, we pushed toward RPA to optimize a few areas, such as onboarding employees, company access, and reading invoices from the PDF files. 

The documentation is very clear in respect to the installation and migration. If there are any bugs or anything goes wrong, the technical support team helps. The installation and setup are very straightforward. It was very easy for us.

We have seen ROI as we keep on increasing bot utilization and building our own solution. We have optimized a few bots and integrated them into our solution. These bots have helped us prioritize our operations.

We are increasing our SME's time. Depending on the bots that we code, we are sometimes increasing or decreasing our developers' time.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is more flexible in development and production. The development timeline is short. 

UiPath has a lot of functionalities, but a lot of those functionalities can be replicated using MetaBot.

Blue Prism uses a workflow functionality, which seems like chaos to me.

I would encourage a developer to learn RPA and enhance their knowledge. If they start with Automation Anywhere, it will be easy to continue learning on the tool. It is harder to transition for another RPA tool to Automation Anywhere.

From started working on Automation Anywhere platform, primarily worked on contact center and telecommunication sectors. Now exploring our RPA solution/expertise towards different different sectors such as insurance, medical, transport, education and so on.

With the help of automation anywhere platforms/tools we have done few projects for our existing clients and internal as well. Overall it is a good product which we can use to automation many repetitive tasks or known tasks. Also it has capability to automate complex and unstructured or semi structured datas. 

It has IQ Bot, Meta  bot and bot insight features/products which are a good advantages over all other RPA platforms. Also AA is providing self learning platform where we can up our RPA skills and do develop/hands on practice on the both community (on premise and cloud) editions.

Currently I am using AAEC 11.3.4 and A2019 version. Both are stable and have all the required features. If I will find anything which has to be focus on definitely recommend to AA team.

From 2018, I am working on automation anywhere platforms.

Same I would give 8 out of 10 scale rate.

I will give 8 out of 10 scale rate.

Yes, we had a good experience with customer/technical support team but few more improvement requirements from AA team.

I started with Automation anywhere platform only later I tried other RPA platforms such as UiPath, Nice, Workfusion. But compare to Automation Anywhere I didn't find any other RPA platforms as a competitor. It's a best and easy to learn.

It was very easy and anyone can do it. If they are doing for lab or personal setup. For the client AA teams are helping.

We have implemented through vendor and in-house team.

ROI is good and impressive after using automation anywhere RPA platform.

Pricing is average and less than blue prism. But one thing I would like to add that post 1+ years completion only we can expect ROI because after taking license and putting RPA solutions into production will take lots of efforts and time. Thus in one or below one year time period we can't expect good ROI.

Having said that I found few bugs in the 11.3.1.2 version and later upgraded into 11.3.4 version we didn't find any issue and for other suggested parts they already resolve/added features in the A2019 cloud edition. 

In the A2019 community edition, while running its taking time to run RPA bots and having few bugs related to IQ Bot server connectivity and other things. But they will solve it soon as expected. 

Also in A2019 they should make one separate page or redirected into separate page where we can easily develop RPA bots because in CR webpage my bot section we are not getting enough space to develop resulting its taking time to create bot. Because many developers working on system with screen resolution 1366*768. It will be better if they can add one separate windows/page for RPA bot development in the CR webpage.

I am using this tool to automate one process in a Citrix environment. The process is used to launch one website from which data is captured. After this, another application is opened and the data is pasted into it. The result is our final structured data.

Using Automation Anywhere saves us time, money, and eliminates errors. When the same process is done by humans there are a lot of errors that require us to doublecheck and cross-reference all of the work.

The most valuable feature is the screen recorder, which helps to automate processes easily.

There are a lot of other helpful features such as schedulers and triggers to do things like sending emails after a task is completed. 

MetaBots and IQ Bots are also good features.

There are a lot of options and commands, making this a flexible tool.

We need more commands for PDF integration to make it more flexible.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past three years.

Automation Anywhere is the leading RPA tool in the present market.

We primarily use this solution to automate manual processes of limited or negligible value in terms of up-skilling personnel.

AA has indirectly helped in re-engineering processes, which has made them more robust and efficient. Hence, this has helped the business immensely.

The most valuable features of this solution are its scalability, security using the credential vault, and ease of use for business.

A Cloud-based version of this solution would reduce dependence on architecture.

Better use case management to prevent each development from scratch would be an improvement.

We normally use automation to interact with SAP applications. Our platform is entirely built on SAP. We are mainly a manufacturing company. We interact with SAP and do a lot of things, like invoicing, entering the value in SAP, and so on and so forth.

The ease of access and deployment are the most valuable features. With SAP, moving from production test to production is very difficult, it takes too long and too much testing. If there's an error or any change in the system, you will have to go through a huge process which takes around one to two months. However, in Automation Anywhere, if you want to do a small or a medium-level change, you can ask the developer to work on it. E.g., one or two weeks is hardly enough for us to develop and deploy it again. So, it sources and is much faster. I believe the security is a very important matter in terms of our company, so that is also an aspect where Automation Anywhere shines.

From an SAP point of view, we have in-built features. They have integrated everything together, so it's much easier for us to use that.

We have in-house, a few variables, which we use from technical perspectives. We don't have them in Automation Anywhere, but they introduced them yesterday. I had a word with an Executive Officer, and he told me that they took all this into consideration and developed it. 

It depends on how you develop it predominantly. Because it's not judged just by saying that it's not stable or anything like that, it's how you develop a framework and how you do it. That's how. From my experience, we have a good number of developers. On my team's, we have around five to six members who are working on this process. We have created a framework in such a way that we don't miss anything. For the past one to one and a half years, we haven't had any post-production issues. The amount of human errors that have occurred have been reduced to around 15 to 20 per person.

It's a scalable product and process. We've been using it for a long time. There are few products in the market, out of which we chose Automation Anywhere because it suits our company very well. We have a scope of expanding the process and bring new teams in to be involved in this as well.

We have 24/7 support. We usually talk to the representative and get a lot of information. We share our knowledge. 

One of the most important things, which I found interesting at this conference, is even high-level executive people come to us and they ask for feedback, e.g., the drawbacks faced while using this product? They're getting in all the knowledge and feedback, then they're implementing it. The most important thing is they're implementing what, as a developer, we wanted include to make our lives easier and for the business to be satisfied.

The initial setup was straightforward. The new version of A2019, which they have introduced, is much easier than what we are doing now. It's all cloud-based and very easy to install. The whole experience is better.

I have experience working with UiPath as well. The one thing is the customer involvement and experience is much better with Automation Anywhere. The feedback which we give and the response time from the Automation team is much quicker. We had some negative feedback and some suggestions to Automation Anywhere team, which they took into consideration. It's like a people's software, where they listen to developers and improve on it. That's the reason why my organization and I are using Automation Anywhere.

I'll say that it is perfect; 10 out of 10. Because we had some drawbacks in Automation Anywhere, which they fixed and developed, taking into consideration the feedback from a huge community of developers. To consider every piece of feedback and work on that, it's a really tedious task. They worked on that and proved that they can do it again.

We did the PoC in 2016. It was mainly in the services process. We were more focused on the company billings, where there were multiple subprocesses and sub business units. We have did the complete landscape of more than 15,000 FTEs. We are talking around 153 different work types. As the main lead, I was to provide the real-time support to the customers who needs us to fill out required details. That was a completely repetitive task. We decided to conduct a PoC on that, which we did.

If we talk about the automation RPA. it definitely has worked very well for us. I'm talking about giving good savings, about more than 180 FTE savings, after implementing more than 200 plus bots. It has worked well. As an organization, it has supported us very well, and also for our customers.

Our task was very repetitive in nature. We had to fill information from Excel to some application. That was quite repetitive and the volume was also very high. Initially, we did the PoC from that process, which was easy to implement. Because it was a first for us, it was very easy to implement. That has provided good savings for us, where we have implemented 13 bots with the reduction of 16 FTEs.

There were also some tasks where we needed a cognitive approach or an OCR solution. There were some scanned documents in a PDF format. We were in the initial stages and struggled at that time. I'm talking about in 2018. We struggled to get them into the structure format.

In the current stage, there are lots of opportunities in terms of claims, insurance, and banking where we need AI and cognitive solutions to automate unstructured documents. That is a need of ours. Automation Anywhere should improve in this field so they can provide support for artificial intelligence and cognitive solutions.

Initial days, we struggled. When we started the automation for six weeks, the solution design was put on hold because of the system capability. But, they provided us good support and upgraded their systems, and now, it works smoothly.

If you ask me to rate the technical support from one to five, I will rate them a four. I will say that the technical support is good. If it is required that they provide their resources, they will send their resources to your organization to support you in terms of development and technical support. 

I have experience with UiPath too. If we talk about Automation Anywhere and UiPath, it's a completely different experience. Our work now is more for the claims and payroll processes where thought and human intervention are involved to process transactions.

This is now a completely different experience. Initially, it was a very repetitive task. Now, manual intervention is required. We have to go and read through documents. We have to read through histories. In terms of that, I can rate equally Automation Anywhere and UiPath. However, if we talk about artificial intelligence in 2019 and what Automation Anywhere is coming out with, it is great then.

The initial setup was not that great. The road was very up and down. We struggled. A lot of the features were not compatible with applications which we are using. That was the reason. This was the initial days, we are talking about 2016 to 2017. The buzz was not as much as we are having now. 

From that time until now, Automation Anywhere has upgraded their systems. They are at a good pace now. But, at the initial stage, we struggled in terms of getting things sorted. We also needed support, so the Automation Anywhere team sent some support to us who helped the developers in terms of coding and finding solutions.

Some of the features were not very well identified at that time. The Automation Anywhere team provided the support for that. Initially, it was like a rollercoaster for us.

If we talk about time, normally bots take more time than users. The benefit is the bots can work 24/7, if your application supports. With the solutions that we have now, we can have attended and unattended bots.

There are savings in terms of ROI, but It's not only about savings. It's about the customer experience nowadays. If we talk about the customer experience, your experience will be improved. There will be a lot of reversals which happen when you are processing transactions manually. When you are implementing the RPA, you eliminate those reversals. You deliver the product right the first time. That is more important in terms of keeping your organization having consistent growth. That is a very important thing. 

You will see savings, not in the same year, but in the coming years. In two to three years, you will definitely save money.

Automation Anywhere works very well. When you have a large number of accounts, have to automate, and the task that is repetitive, you can use Automation Anywhere. The features work very well.

I will rate it an eight (out of 10). We had that experience where we struggled to have the structured format of scanned documents and PDF formats. There, we struggled a lot. That is the reason for the rating. The rest, I think is perfect. The services are fine. Automation Anywhere services are good. It is easy to implement. The best thing: It's simple and easy to implement.

When we started using Automation Anywhere, it was the elimination of mundane tasks, to free up employees who were doing repetitive tasks, and to ensure they could do better quality work. So, we started off with the finance department, where we permitted our accounts payable, as in the billing process. Now, we have slowly moved on to other departments, like HR, quality, and projects.

Since our implementation, I can vouch for the fact that it is very easy to use. You do not need to know a lot of coding, even the business users, who have virtually no idea of coding, can easily operate it. They can run their bots and have the analysis ready for higher management. This is something which provides a great ease of use, and also in part why it is scalable.

Initially, once you have set up the solution and the implementation is done, then it doesn't take too long to scale up bots from one to a 100. Other than that, the professional services team (the customer support team and customer service manager) is committed to your success. This is a good sign, as they help us to achieve our business goals.

If it is in the cloud, then you have a lot of scope of doing it even faster because you spend a lot of time in installation of virtual machines (VMs) alone. So, they are coming out with that, which is good. 

I believe that if there is some functional expertise within the organization, this helps in improving the process timelines even more because our current architects are totally IT-based. If they have some functionalities, that would help in automating processes faster. If we want automate some Automation Anywhere processes, we have to do it from scratch. If they are already there, we can use and scale them, then when can customize them. This is something worth thinking about.

As of now, we have not seen any major problems. It's quite a stable product. It's reliable also because we have seen quite good straight-through processing. 

We quickly moved from one bot to 15 to 20 bots in about two or three months. I've seen other companies do even better and go to around 500 to 600 bots. So, scalability is something which is pro for Automation Anywhere always.

I would break it down to two separate departments:

1. The Professional Services, who help us in automating the processes, have been quite phenomenal. The support that has been given, not only automating, but also re-engineering of the processes for the better has been great. 
2. Technical support is quite proactive. They have bettered their customer support portal. They made it better.

So, we have not faced any issues as of now in this regard.

The initial setup was quite complex. We have faced an issue. During the initial implementation stages, it took longer than we expected. It affected our timelines to a certain extent. Once that was done, it was quite seamless. I think now that they are coming out with a cloud solution, this will help a lot in reducing the implementation duration. It will help future clients get results even sooner.

As it has been a good experience until now. The product is good and helps in solving business problems. Because of the ease of use, I would definitely give it around an eight point five (out of 10). So, eight point five (out of 10) would be my number.

We have quite a few use cases that we have built. Not one, but many. I see a lot of value in the cognitive part of it: the IQ Bot. In the traditional RPA market, people have been doing it for a very long time now.

There's one use case that we did it for a U.S. organization for their accounts payable process. That's the biggest use case that we did. We took that and showcased it to all our customers, so they could get confidence. By doing that, we got three to four more leads out of it, increasing the business. That's a huge use case where we showcase the capabilities of IQ and its strongest aspects.

The cognitive is where everyone is heading to in the RPA platform. What really helps RPA to grow is the cognitive part of it. That's where the product is really good. Initially, it started out as RPA, but now there is a cognitive aspect to it. That's a key value to it.

An interesting thing: If you look at AA, the OCR capability is actually from a third-party. They don't have their own OCR in there. They use ABBYY or Tesseract. They should have their own engine built-in with their own IP. It increases the value rather than trying to use a third-party solution. That's where I see a lot of value.

As a product, it's been always very stable. The only thing that we wanted was it to be on the cloud. We saw at Imagine yesterday that now it's on cloud and will be more stable and accessible. People can start building bots in the click of a second. That's the good part. It's more stable now because it's on the cloud.

I don't think there were any challenges. Everybody who wants to do RPA can start very small. They do a PoC, build a few bots, and then they scale up. I don't see a challenge as long as you have the right people doing what they are trying to do. A lot of use cases in our organization are only two to three bots initially, and now, they have 40 to 50 bots. So, I don't think there is an issue in terms of scalability at all.

Technical support needs to be much faster. I also had the project delivery. I had six clients whom I looked after. Whenever we got stuck, it was all about sprinting. There was a two or three week sprint. Within that, if you just wait for two to three days, it doesn't make sense. The support needs to implode, because I was just talking to a customer now who came directly and asked us, "Can you give us a dedicated support team?" It's feedback from our customer that support takes too long.

It's just the time; the pure amount of time. Imagine processing 5,000 to 6,000 documents, how much time does that take if a person does it? It saves on the quality of work, because the quality can be bad when somebody's doing it. If a bot does the work, it's faster and comes with good quality. These are two important things along with the cost saving in the long run. That's where the value is.

I would rate it between a seven and eight (out of ten), which is good. I want it to improve on the support. They really need to improve on the support model. Also, the cognitive bit needs to be enhanced. I know that there are other products on the market who do much better than the product that we have. A lot of work can still go into it. One thing, it still cannot do is cursive writing. IQ Bots still cannot read cursive writing. That's where a lot of development effort can go into it and make it a great product.