Automation Anywhere Reviews

I have done a lot of use cases. Recently, I have done SAP automation. I worked with MS Excel, a web application, a Windows application, and a mainframe application. We automated three to four applications at once. We automated them in a row where one application's output would be input for another application.

I have done development and production support. I have helped organizations with integration.

The Visual Studio development for the basic version, which they launched long back, that's amazingly good. It has a good design, which is better than Blue Prism and somewhat better than UiPath.

They have good people.

Citrix automation is unstable. It is failing on a frequent basis. With the bot, they claim a lot of things, but it is not the real picture. It is not as powerful as they claim. It is not up to the mark.

Once I'm friendly with a tool, then I'll start checking the stability and power of it. It is not there with Automation Anywhere.

The management people don't know the technicalities. The actual tool is not as powerful as they claim. They are pitching the IQ Bot, but it's not as powerful or as fruitful in real world scenarios as it should be.

The user analytics are not analytics.

Their Community Edition is awful. Every second day, it will fail. It will become corrupt.

Stability depends on your use case and what type application you are automating.

Stability is good, RPA is a emerging field, so you can't expect a lot of stability. You develop things and the maintenance is there. 

Stability depends on the applications being developed. E.g., if it's a Windows application, they are already stable. Doing automation is not a big thing, but doing automation with little maintenance, that is a big thing.

Scalabilty is good.

The technical support is good. 

Their marketing team is good.

The initial setup is good.

I am the person with does the integration. I am developer. I can develop an application in three weeks (done and dusted). After moving it to production, there are a lot of challenges. Then, I am spending three hours of my bandwidth being occupied every day with maintenance.

RPA implementation will be always fruitful. Return on investment will be always higher than the input costs.

Automation Anywhere is a bit more expensive. This is one of the things that we face when we talk to small start ups in Bangalore. They want to do an RPA implementation, but don't have the money. UiPath is the answer.

We have done a lot of complex automation using different RPA tools: Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Blue Prism.

UiPath is a bit better. UiPath is a bit strong in fewer areas, such as Citrix automation. Citrix automation is like a thin client automation. For applications not present on your local machine and in the cloud, UiPath is more powerful. With RPA, you can automate things. Howe, are those automations stable? That is another question. In order to stabilize automation of thin client, UiPath is more powerful. There are few other features which are better than Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

UiPath has amazing scalability, while Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are good.

UI Path is leading the market. There is no doubt about it. They have their own challenges. They aren't flawless. 

UiPath Visual Studio is not good. It is messy. Automation Anywhere Visual Studio integration is smooth and user-friendly. 

Automation Anywhere is good in some parts with their Smart Recorder that they they are launching in A2019, that is there but yes they are leading. They are putting in real hard work and emerging. They are in second place as of now in the RPA world.

We are an Automation Anywhere partner and we use it in the finance domain, in areas like B2B or B2C, etc. We also use it in HR and other domains for our clients. We have used it for vendor-invoice processing and recruitment. Those are our two major use cases as of now.

We have automated the recruitment and onboarding process for one of our clients. In that scenario, it has saved a lot of time. A process that used to take seven to ten days has now been reduced to half an hour. It has created a lot of efficiency.

It has also helped in terms of security because of all the off-boarding processes that we have automated. If an employee leaves, all his security access, email IDs, etc., are disabled on that same day. That person no longer has access to work on the company's domain.

IQ Bot is one of the most valuable features because it helps in processing different formats from different vendors.

As of now, it's only available on Windows machines. I would love if it were to also be available for Mac machines. That is something which is lacking as of now.

A cloud version was also missing, but now, with the new A2019 version, that's coming.

When I compare Automation Anywhere with the competition, some of the competitors have ready-made, off-the-shelf modules. For example, UiPath integrates with Windows AD. That is missing as of now in Automation Anywhere. If that became available it would also be great.

Stability-wise, it's a fine product. We haven't faced any major challenges up until now.

Scalability is also great. You automate one process and replicate it again and again.

For example, one of our clients has global operations. What we automated in one country, we were able to implement around the globe. We were also able to just keep on adding on new virtual machines in a given location, to have more and more processes automated. 

It's easy to scale.

Technical support is great. We have raised multiple queries over time and the results have been really good. The responses have been really good and fast. The feedback I have heard is that they get back to us same-day or, if not, the next day.

We had a good due-diligence process before we finalized. We compared different aspects like security, reliability, and compliance. AA scored high on the compliance front, so that's why we went with it.

The initial setup is straightforward. I don't see any complexity involved.

We have seen ROI in areas I mentioned earlier like time savings. We have seen good results.

The product starts at $10,000 and then it's up to you regarding how much you can consume. Comparatively speaking, the costs are higher for Automation Anywhere.

It's a good product. Compared to the competition, you can do multiple processes with one license. So there are a lot of savings in terms of license costs. It's easy to use and has good, UI-based interaction. It's easy to deploy as well. Clients can also train their own staff to do easy implementations, so they can save costs there as well.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at eight out of ten. There is always scope for improvement. There are a few ready-made things that they need to incorporate.

I use automation for finance. For example, SAP, Oracle, and other applications. In the past nine months, I have automated approximately thirty-five hundred hours. Next year we expect to reach at least eighty-five hundred hours.

All of my leaders are pushing us to use automation because they're thinking that other companies are ahead of us. I am looking forward to working on the IQ Bot to see how it might make my life easier.

Recently, the auditors were looking for a tool to assist them with checking incidents. For the American region, there were between twenty-seven and thirty thousand incidents, which as a human we cannot search manually. For each one, they have to check what the incident is, and verify whether they have the proper data. Because the audit was only going to run for one or two months, they wanted the results in ten days. I spent about one and a half days building a bot and started running it. The bot was moved to production, and within seven days, I was able to get all of the details in Excel format to them. They can filter it, see whatever fields are empty, and they can do the audit. They got one hundred percent sampling, which they were happy about. Our plan now is to sell the Bot to the project owners so that instead of having the auditor catch problems, they can run it every month and see what improvements they need and where it is lagging. The bot will educate the team.

The MetaBot is a very good feature that allows me to do things that were not available in earlier versions. I can now run multiple commands, instead of just one.

It is easy to develop using this solution, and it doesn't take much technical skill. It is very easy to integrate any of the macros or DB scripts. It is easy to find people who can work with this solution, unlike Blue Prism, where it is hard to get candidates.

I would like to have the MetaBot screen name title dynamic instead of static. This would allow us to use wild card entries and make our lives much easier. As it is now, we cannot automate using MetaBot because the screen name changes. The only way it can be done is to use multiple MetaBots.

We are having a problem when trying to automate the opening of very large Excel files. One example is our 70MB Excel file, which normally takes approximately twenty minutes to open. Automation Anywhere crashes before it opens, so we moved it to Instaknow-ACE, which is another RPA tool. It imports the Excel file, creates its own database, and then you perform whatever operation you want. After this, it generates the output result without crashing. If this were fixed in Automation Anywhere then it would be a large benefit because we are in a phase of moving away from smaller automation. We are doing a lot with bigger data, and most of it is still in Excel files instead of a database. It isn't the fault of Automation Anywhere because it is Excel that is crashing, but we need to have a feature where Automation Anywhere can import Excel files directly.

The stability of this solution needs to be improved.

The OCR capability needs to be improved to be made more accurate.

Compared to earlier versions it's a lot more stable, but it still needs a lot of improvement in terms of the OCR. We are getting more OCR projects where we have to scan and get data from contracts and give it to the auditors, or other people. The data includes things like region and the product that was ordered. It is very difficult for me to scan because I can't tell customers that it isn't accurate. Sometimes, it will read the letter "I" as the number one, which is one of the issues we are facing. The upper management thinks that everything is ok, but as a developer, I know that there is a problem. If you were to come to me and ask for an OCR to be done, I could only guarantee you about eighty percent accuracy. If I tell the customer that there might be twenty percent errors, they may not be happy.

Scalability is very good. Compared to others, Automation Anywhere is on top.

We have more than eight hundred developers in our company, and most do not have a technical background.

I do not deal with technical support directly. We have a COE who deal with technical support, and my team speaks with them. If there is a problem that they cannot fix then they go to Automation Anywhere.

Our COE took care of the implementation of this solution.

What it takes a human ten hours to do, automation should complete it in one hour. In the past ten months, I have saved the work of two people. People are happy with the results.

We are still in the procurement process for IQ Bot, but I am looking forward to seeing how it is going to help me.

My advice for anybody who is considering RPA is to use Automation Anywhere because it is easier. You can learn it, but if you go for other solutions then it will be more difficult. Not all of the people in our company are from a technical background. Many are BCOM graduates and analysts, but they are being trained in using this solution.

This is a good solution, but it still needs improvement and there is a long way to go. Artificial Intelligence still needs to be added.

If they allow the direct import of data from Excel, improve the OCR, and allow variables to be used in the MetaBot start screen, then this solution would be perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for automating our business processes that make up our daily operations.

We have a set of steps that we follow for each of our processes. We devise inputs for these steps and then prepare them for automation. The automation then completes and publishes the results.

The automation that we have run on a daily basis helps us by saving a lot of time.

We have a process where we sell products, and using this solution means that we don't need to dedicate somebody to get this work done. Once we get the input file and prepare it, we run the automation. It completes overnight, and the next morning the results are available.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use. It has drag-and-drop features, which makes it very fast for us to gather the required data.

I would like to be able to look at the steps that are completed as a process is running.

It would be helpful if we could start running a process from a particular step.

In the drag-and-drop interface, it would be helpful to have interactive hints, or notes, about what is happening and what the different choices are. This would make it easier to learn.

With respect to stability, we haven't had any issues from what we have heard.

The scalability of this solution is really high. You don't think of it as a process, but rather, part of a process. Once you automate the individual parts, you tie everything together.

We have not used technical support for this solution.

We had different people come in and set up the process for us, initially. After that, I started putting in the automation myself, and it is becoming faster and pretty easy for me.

For anybody who is implementing this solution, I recommend they get help from Automation Anywhere to help understand the best way to do their automation. This will help with the development of the bots. This is what we did, and we now have a framework for building the rest of our processes.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and we use this solution to help our customers with internal processes. For example, we help them with the automation of information processing tools.

From a manageability perspective, this solution is very good. It's just understandable, and this has helped a lot.

The most valuable feature of this solution is drag-and-drop. You don't need to be a coding genius to create a bot. It has a simple interface.

From what I have seen with the IQ Bot, it is very impressive and I think it is going to solve a lot of problems that we face right now.

The cost of this solution can be improved. We have written applications that do the same thing as Automation Anywhere, but for less cost.

When it comes to stability, there are a lot of dependencies. The bot, itself, I would say has always been good for us. The only problems that we have had are when the tools change, the bot has to be enhanced. That is something that is unavoidable.

Compared to other RPA tools, I think Automation Anywhere is very scalable.

For example, we have written simple applications where they do one thing today, but tomorrow they may add something else to it. They're developing an additional, or expanded version of the bot, and it is always simple. In this way, the scalability is pretty good.

The only problem we've had is when we need to expand the userbase. This is because of the ports attached to it.

We do reach out to Automation Anywhere technical support and it definitely helps.

In the beginning, it was a little bit complex and difficult for us to understand how to get things running. We reached out to technical support for help.

Initially, we had planned on going simple. Then, we wanted to be centralized and have a cloud-based environment, which is where we were facing a lot of challenges. One of the challenges was DB connectivity for accessing SAP, which was a security issue. We also had some trouble automating web pages.

Initially, we did see ROI. The problem is that we could not re-use those licenses. One license is not going to be running for twenty-four hours. We considered planning and scheduling to make the best of this, but its split across multiple teams, so there are multiple license requirements. Not everything has huge savings attached.

I have worked with other RPA solutions, such as UiPath.

We are looking forward to having the capability of building the IQ Bots the way we want, using Python scripts. With our scripting, we can fill in the gaps and improve accuracy.

My advice to anybody who is researching RPA solutions is to consider several things. I can see that the path that Automation Anywhere has right now is going to take it to the highest levels. My suggestion is that if you have a lot of coding or scripting experience then I would recommend UiPath. It has its own plusses and minuses, as with every tool.

Instead, if you're looking for someone that can you you build a bot within a short time, who doesn't know any coding or have a background in programming, then I recommend Automation Anywhere. You cut out the cost of developers, but you add to your cost in terms of licenses.

Also, for manageability, Automation Anywhere is the best choice.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use case is to automate any type of process, mostly for payments, wealth management, and loans.

The bots replicate human behavior in front of a computer.

We are automating all our mundane processes, making people more creative.

• The most valuable feature is its Control Room.
• It is a user-friendly tool for developers and easy to learn.
• The product is easy to integrate.
• As a tool, IQ Bot is easy to use, powerful, and very competitive compared to others.

I would like a better code migration solution, because this is something that we do a lot.

It is a complex solution to make stable.

It is a powerful tool for scaling that sometimes makes the process seamless.

It took one year to scale to the amount of bots that we are currently using.

The technical support is very helpful. We have almost 24/7 support. We also have a representative who works closely with us to make sure everything get resolved as quickly as possible.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was complex.

The first time, we used an integrator for deployment. They were good, but we don't work with them anymore. Now, we work with Automation Anywhere.

We measure our ROI by the money that we save.

Our annual licensing costs are about $500,000.

We did not consider another vendor.

It is a great company with a great product and support. You should consider this tool if you want something powerful and user-oriented.

While I haven't taken any courses through Automation Anywhere University yet, my team has.

Our primary use for the product is to automate business processes. Mostly this means financial processing. We have a lot of use cases in finance. For finance alone, we have 30+ bots in production. Other bots are for a variety of other business uses like the supply chain, networks, and business processes. We have 400+ bots in production as of now, all together. 

We have automated business processes, like finance, supply chain, network systems, and payment systems.

We are using it on-premise and migrating it to the cloud at the end of the year.

The product has improved our organization by allowing us to better use our resources. We can have a strategy implemented using bots and make better use of our time instead of spending it on repetitive tasks or tasks the bots can do more efficiently.

The most valuable thing about using this product is that we are able to use the time that we spent doing manual processing for other progressive purposes. The bots we implement free up our time. The second best part is that we don't need to see the automated processes happening.

We have business user utilizing the bots who don't have any technical expertise. We trained them, and they're able to do a couple of minimal bots which are required for them.

For us at this point, I don't think the product needs more features. There is already a new release coming up with a bundle of new features which we will have access to and have to learn. As a user and developer, I only look at stability. That's it. I want the most stable environment — a stable version of the product — where I can close my eyes and sleep and the bots run and do their jobs.

The basic system is very ease to use, but the difficulty comes when we make changes. For example, any change in the name, even if we have wild characters in place, the bot fails to identify the filename. It identifies the same filename in non-prod, and it does not identify the file in production.

We need a more reliable tool. Sometimes, the same check (a 70 percent scan) identifies numbers, and sometimes it does not identify the numbers. We are not sure why it is behaving weird.

We don't use the Bot Store because it is not legal for us to use.

I have been using it for almost two years now.

On a scale of one to ten, I can rate the stability between seven and eight. We have found that sometimes a little change in the environment brings down an application or a bot stops working. We are working on that issue. Stability improved from three out-of-ten to between seven and eight. We hope to bring that stability up to at least a nine.

The solution is very easy, but the tool behaves weird sometimes, environment to environment. It is not as robust as it has been designed. The smallest changes will bring down the bot. It's not capable of environment to environment changes. We have to make sure that the bot is running in each environment. 

Be a little patient while developing because the tool behaves weird. Even 11.3 is not behaving well. Once it starts working, it will work.

As of now, we are migrating from a Micron database. Once we have completed that, we believe the scalability will be a cakewalk.

We have almost 500 bots spread across different portfolios. They are scheduled and running on daily basis.

We did not integrated this solution with any other applications. This is running as a standalone thing in our environment.

We are in different time zones, but we still get a response from technical support when we call. On a scale of one to ten, I can say tech support is an eight. The thing that would make support a ten is that we get a solution on the fly when we contact a person in support. Sometimes they provide us some other solution that we already know or a workaround. We don't need alternatives, we need solutions that work.

The login mechanism seems to be only understood by the AA guys. We raised a ticket since we don't understand the login mechanisms most of the time.

Initially, we did the certification program from Automation Anywhere University. It could be better than what it is. It might have been upgraded recently. We took it more than one and a half years back. The ease of doing the course could have been better. You need access to a system when going through the course and completing it. There was no simulation. We were in the initial stages of procuring the systems, so it was a little tough for us to complete the courses too.

I was not involved in the decision to move to Automation Anywhere. It was a big decision handed down from the top management.

The initial setup was complex. Because we are in the finance industry, the initial strategy had to take a lot of data into account which needs not to be secured and not exposed to the outside world. So we struggled a little with how that has to be implemented. For example, passwords are critical data. We came up with a cyber bot at that point in time to deal with the potential password issues. 

The business team has a lot of doubts about how Automation Anywhere is being implemented and the processes it affects.  Because of this, it was really a huge effort to make them understand what we are doing. Any time we would have to make changes to infrastructure, even a small change on the infrastructure side could make an application unstable or make a bot come down.

We have got to put in more hours at this point to make the implementation stable and further deployment possible.

Bot creation process:

1. We have a PDD document available once the use case is identified. 
2. Once the PDD is available, if it is a legal/security issue, then we go for the next stage: development. 
3. We develop the SDD. 
4. Based on the SDD, the bot is developed. 
5. Once it is all developed and the UAT testing is done, we'll show it again to the legal/security.
6. Then we go for the approval across the business teams. There will be lot of approvals required. 
7. Once it is approved, then it goes to production. 

We'll create a bot ID in-between once the use case is good.

Based on the complexity of the bots, it takes six to 16 weeks for us to create bots (pilot to completion).

Initially we did use a consultant to get going with the implementation. It was a small group of guys who were also in India who we had come to work with us. Our experience with them was good.

When all the big problems were solved and there was nothing immediate on the plate to resolve, we were able to make out what we needed to do and judge the steps to take ourselves. So we slowly got away from support from the implementation group. 

We are able now to rely on the support that we are getting from Automate Anywhere technical support.

We just started looking at the fruits of our labors to understand the return on investment so we do not have a clear picture of the actual value yet.

We are not converting to a dollar amount. We are saving time. Last year, we save around 50,000 hours.

For Runner we paid around five-thousand dollars and for Creator we paid around three-thousand dollars.

The cost depends on the environment of an organization. I don't have the exact figures, but these are the production figures provided to me. 

We don't have a license for cognitive document processing yet. We are identifying the use cases for it.

We also evaluated UiPath, and for the attended bots right now, we'll be using UiPath, not Automation Anywhere. When we evaluated Automation Anywhere, it did not reach the same level as UiPath for management on attended mode, e.g., a huge number of licenses on attended mode.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a seven. Because we did not explore any other RPA tool as of now, and we are exploring UI parts without knowing more, it is hard to compare. 

The only thing that keeps me from rating it higher independently is the stability. Maybe it's stable in some other companies, but somehow we don't seem to share that stability in our environment. Because we have virtual machines that have to be up and running all the time and they are mostly Windows-based, Windows may also one of the reasons why stability is not so good. I don't blame the automation tool directly, but it could be more robust.

As far as giving advice to people considering the product, I say to give it time and learn to use it because it is the best. If the process is clean, we can automate to any extent.

The primary use case is for day-to-day activities. We are also automating the activities that the SMEs are doing.

We are an agriculture-based company. We have automated finance, HR and MDM for B2B. We have automated more than 300 processors within a year and a half. 

Human errors have been rectified due to bot usage.

• We can easily use the drag and drop.
• We can connect to the OCR capabilities. 
• We use the MetaBot and IQ Bot. 

We could use more accuracy with IQ Bot.

We want to automate fully with Citrix. However, we are only able to do this at 70 to 80 percent.

The stability is good. We have not had any downtime.

Everyone uses it.

The technical support is great and responsive. Whatever issues we face in the production or our environment, the support team will help us within a short amount time. This is helpful to us when automating all our processes.

Last week we had some issues with our current version, the technical support rectified the issues with a day.

We went with RPA to reduce human errors.

It's easy to set up.

We install the Automation Anywhere Control Room and VMWare on our clients' machines.

Our customers have seen ROI.

Customers chose Automation Anywhere because it is good to use. Security-wise, it matches the competition in the market.

I would definitely recommend Automation Anywhere. From a technical perspective, developers can easily create bots and get things done with this tool.

Day-to-day, the Automation Anywhere improvements have been good.