Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are working with our clients using this solution. Often, they are automating some of their retail and marketing processes, including the generation of bills and statements in finance.

Our clients are using a hybrid cloud, with their own VM environment.

One of the recent projects that I worked on was for a complex financial process in a bank. It involved automating several manual processes. The data had to be retrieved from SAP by means of a file and then imported into an Excel worksheet. My suggestion included implementing an SQL server and then automating the process using this solution. Instead of the series of manual tasks, they now only have to verify the final result, and it makes life much easier.

We are assisting our clients by improving the way they do things. This is a great platform, and we are implementing the logic into the bots that they are using to automate.

The user interface and tools are good.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see more OCR agents included.

My customers would like to use the IQ Bot without having to invest more money in purchasing another license. If it is not possible to include IQ Bot in the basic package then, at least, the OCR features and the TaskBot can be enhanced. This would allow us to include small-scale industry, as well as large organizations.

There is an issue with security where users can see the values in the credential vault. Because of this, we don't see the point in creating values inside the vault.

This system should be able to handle situations with very there are very large volumes of data in Excel.

Stability depends on your skillset, and how you have written the code in terms of logic and handling errors. If you have built the code properly, in a systematic way as it requires, then it will definitely be stable. If instead you randomly do things that you needed to be done today, I don't think the stability of the bot will be very good.

Stability is good now, although we have had problems in the past. For example, when we were processing very large amounts of data in Excel, Automation Anywhere failed. The volume was in the millions of rows of data.

The scalability of this solution is good compared to others.

We have not used technical support for this solution.

In addition to this solution, I have good knowledge of Blue Prism and UiPath.

Initially, I found the setup of this solution to be complex.

Before getting started we had to install the SQL server and perform the migration. Then, it involved user accounts. You have to create a new user and add the details, which is quite complex. Then, whenever you are installing the Enterprise Edition, you have to perform setup that includes the IIS settings. Overall, it was quite hectic, and some of the people were not able to do it.

The implementation of this solution is something that we assist our clients with, but it depends on the situation. Different organizations have different ways of implementing. For the most part, I create the packages and give my work to the COA teams, and they finish it themselves. When they are not able to do that, we help them further.

We are using MetaBots as well as TaskBots.

There are lots of features that are still not there in version 11. I know that version 12 is coming, but I do not know much about it.

This is a solution that I recommend. We began with the free license, but if you are going to use Automation Anywhere then you have to purchase the license. It's an investment. With UiPath, the development license is free, so it depends on the situation. In general, if the client is ready for automation then I suggest this solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is working with different applications, like Excel and SAP. We get the data and reports, then produce results with Automation Anywhere. For IQ Bots, we're still working on it for data extraction.

I think version 11.3 is good, but I am looking forward to working with version A2019.

The drag and drop is valuable because you can easily read the commands and know what a particular line of code is doing. 

The error handling and troubleshooting are very good. It is easy for a developer to know what happened in any particular line of code.

I would like Automation Anywhere to integrate with Google activities, like Google Sheets. While this should be available in A2019, I would like it to be scaled more.

Version A2019 will have better error handling. They are also adding Python script.

I would like them to add dictionaries to it.

From variable to variable, it is giving me blank code. We have seen this in the IQ Bot, but not in the main code.

Sometimes, I have to restart the automation services to make them work properly.

The scalability is good. We have five bots that we are currently scaling. 

We are looking to invest more in Automation Anywhere.

We contact Automation Anywhere's technical support via email. I would like the support to be faster. Their response time is one to two days. Their customer care could be faster.

Our IT did the initial deployment.

We measure our success with our customers' happiness.

We have seen some return from the product.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere. You can test the tool before purchasing it.

Primarily, we have it deployed across multiple verticals in finance and are looking to expand that to other areas, like engineering and supply chain within the organization.

We use the RPA solution and are looking to explore the IQ Bots.

In finance, it has helped us deliver on productivity and provided us with FTE savings. It does improve transaction accuracy as well. In these ways, it has really helped us.

The ease of use and its ability to change the code when something in the main process or core process changes. The ease of use is really good. 

We have some ERPs tools which are not compatible with Automation Anywhere because they are legacy systems. We find that Automation Anywhere does not work with these at times. Just enabling the usability of Automation Anywhere on some of these legacy ERPs would help us, as we struggle regularly with this issue.

It has been pretty stable.

It is pretty scalable within the functions that we have deployed. We have increased the number of transactions compared to what we started off with. We see its usability across functions as well. We can use the same bot across other functions if you have capacity.

The customer service that they provide is good. They have good turnaround time with fast responses whenever there is an issue. They give us the right solution.

We set up all three of our use cases, which were simple, medium, and complex.

We have seen ROI. Our business cases only get approved if there is an ROI.

We evaluated the UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and WorkFusion. We evaluated them before latching onto Automation Anywhere.

We chose Automation Anywhere based on its simplicity of the usage, its ability to interact on our transactions and processes. Those were the two primary drivers that helped us decide.

Streamline your processes and simplify them, then bring in RPA as a solution.

We have an ITMS Service Desk that has a lot of tickets coming to it. As an enterprise, there are too many applications there, which are being used by employees. This service desk enables them to address all the issues which they are facing, whether it is on the application, infrastructure, etc. There is a group who manages all these tickets coming through ServiceNow. These numbers are huge. To manage these services or change requests, we use Automation Anywhere when it is not possible to use either an API or do scripting.

My company is using the latest version.

I have one application that does not publish any APIs. However, there is one activity where every employee needs to be registered in that particular application. Now, we use Automation Anywhere for this. So, we get the data from the source data using the front-end of that application through the Automation Anywhere script. Then, we do registration of the employees into that application. Previously, this was being done by people on our service desk. Now, we are using Automation Anywhere to do this activity. This has saved a lot of time. 

Just for this use case, we had around 300 tickets coming in every month. We went live last month and the tickets went down to around 80 as of August 20th. While it might touch around 100, over a period of around six months it will become zero because we have not removed all the legacy data. We are just doing it from the go date of when we went live. The target is that it will be zero after three months. So, it's working well.

A work in progress is a request which came in from employees using ServiceNow to create a VPN account for them. Today, this is a manual process where the service desk people have to raise a ticket to another team who create the VPN account for the employees. This is why we are currently automating this process.

I like that it can login to any system as a robot and do the work that humans can.

Automation Anywhere is unable to connect to the database directly. What we are doing now is directly writing the PL/SQL scripts and trying to push the data from the database into Automation Anywhere. This feature is available in UiPath, but not in Automation Anywhere.

I am unaware if Automation Anywhere is able to read unstructured data, build some intelligence around it, and then push it into the application. We do have some requirements in our organization where invoices are scanned, and based on the data, hard copies of the data are fed into some applications. Today, we are using different tools for these features, but if it is available in the tool, then that would be good.

We are a midsize company in the Indian market running one or two bots. 

From a scalability perspective, I don't think there will be any issues. It is pretty good.

Support-wise, it is great. 

We installed this on a cloud infrastructure and had a lot of challenges. However, there was a dedicated support person who was helping us to do the installation.

The initial setup was definitely complex. Layman people cannot do it. People with a bit of knowledge need some help from Automation Anywhere.

It took a month and a half to do the basic installation of this software along with some internal processes related to our firewalls.

We had a dedicated person from Automation Anywhere who was supporting us at the time of the initial installation.

While our Automation Anywhere's implementation is in a premature stage, it has really decrease the workload on our service desk. We are looking to decrease the ticket counts too. I definitely see this solution helping us in the future.

Our tickets have decreased. We have more than 40 uses cases. We definitely see some ROI in the future from this product.

In the Indian market, I feel that for mid-size companies, such as ourselves, that having multiple bots costs a lot. If Automation Anywhere wants to expand in the Indian market, they will need to look at their pricing.

One of the major reasons that we went for Automation Anywhere was a global MSA, which our company has with Automation Anywhere. They wanted us to use this particular tool for our end customers too. 

I am part of an internal CIO team, where our customers are our employees. However, as an organization, we had a global agreement with Automation Anywhere where they wanted to deliver this tool to the end customer as part of their solutions. Because of that agreement, we went with Automation Anywhere.

My team (who uses both Automation Anywhere and UiPath) says that UiPath has better modules and functionality than Automation Anywhere.

I'm seeing some results in the use case for whatever we are trying to automate. So, it has been really helpful.

Don't use an RPA tool for any problem statement. I've seen people use any RPA tool available for their problem statement just to say that they are using some type of RPA. E.g., We had a use case where we had to read information from an Excel table and generate a report, so people started using Automation Anywhere. However, it would have been better in this scenario to use Power BI by creating scripts.

We use this solution for automating tasks such as:

• Manual journal entries on monthly closing
• Travel and expense claims processing
• Net sales monthly closing checks
• Logistics master data maintenance for every new shipment
• Vendor creation on master data for every new demand
• Order confirmation reminders automated for vendors 

We are just using it as one of the automation technologies. The major automation has already happened over SAP on the backend since the whole company globally runs on a single ERP. However, where conventional methods or basic solutions don't work, it definitely helps to use AA software.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the SMART Recorder.

The overall developer client has an easy-to-use UI.

The Control Room, scheduling features, and client repository are really good features that make day-to-day bot development and enhancement quite quick and easy.

The PDF Integration feature is also quite helpful, as well as the Send email command that helps us skip a lot of Outlook-based steps that are not necessary.

More support required to be embedded in the SMART Recorder for SAP objects.

IQ Bot should be available embedded as a feature on the developer client and not as a separate product.

Some NLP AI is required to work in combination with RPA, especially for reading unstructured emails. 

This solution is quite stable. We get one or two tickets in the whole year due to any downtime and that is never due to AA.

AA is the easiest and the best when it comes to scalability.

Technical support for this solution is the quickest and the best. I always get a response within the same day and their support matches our SLAs.

It was a little complex due to the IIS Manager and a lot of other features but with version 11 and beyond it is much easier to install and configure.

We performed the implementation in-house.

While calculating the setup cost you should account for the server, virtual machines, product licenses, maintenance costs, and running costs.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

Be careful with the installation of this solution. It is better to do it with support from the vendor at first.

We use this solution to automate the following task:

• Open MS-Excel-File from Folder
• Update the data with keystroke-command
• Wait for calculation of the result
• Save the file
• Loop the command above for each file in the folder
• Send email-notification to the task owner
• Send Quality Check to task owner (.pdf-command)
  
• Error handling (where applicable)

This solution gives us greater employee satisfaction because manual recurring work has been reduced. We also have a savings of manpower, independently of office-hours thanks to bot scheduling.

We redesigned tasks before the implementation of bots, and have higher stability through standardized Bot Runner.

We find several functions valuable, including:

• The Files/Folder command makes it easy to work off each file in a folder. I don't know how else to do this command.
• The Variable Operation makes it easy to work with variables. The system variables catalogue is helpful.
• The Send eMail Command helps with the flow of information.

In the Microsoft Excel features, it needs a command to wait for a calculation to complete.

In Microsoft Excel, why isn't it possible to share a session in different tasks? It's complicated to program all of the commands in the same tasks (loss of overview).

The Filter function only supports four commands (Mouse/Key/Delay).

In the Optical Overview for the Loop command, an if/else would be helpful.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

It takes a lot of effort to build up the internal infrastructure/topics like Virtual Machine/Security/development-Governance/Usecase-Management.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

In our banking center, we are using Automation Anywhere for loan settlements, credit card transactions, and reconciliation forms. It has been easy to use.

I like working with most of the commands in Automation Anywhere, such as object cloning commands.  I like MetaBot for automating Citrix.

They need to improve the speed. It runs too slowly.

There are some setup limitations:

• There is no direct passing mechanism to manipulate adjacent data and send it back to the server. 
• There is not one task that lets you debug everything.

Version 11.3 already has a lot of things that we want: quickness, ease, bigger, and more functions.

It is 90 percent stable. 

10 percent is due to network issues, slow performance of the application, or failed bots. These happen infrequently though. We implemented some fallback mechanisms around the network issues.

Scalability is fantastic. We can build anything out of the application. Though in some places, there are limitations. Fixing those would be good.

We are deployed in five different regions.

We are using the technical support. They are fantastic, but sometimes we aren't getting the expected outcome that we want from the tech support team. We would like to see this improve.

The initial setup is not that complex. We just download the software. Anyone can go and download it. It can be downloaded with two-way server. Then, the next step is to get a license for development and other things. Once development is done and it has been move to product, the client can use it.

I would recommend using this product. It is very useful. We can automate anything through it. There is much flexibility. It provides a robust mechanism, which is good.

We look at process which are feasible for automation on a case-by-case basis.

Our use case is spread across multiple areas: 

1. We are using it in finance: automating the month-end process. 
2. There are a lot of review processes that happen every week. We are in the middle of that.
3. We have a product lifecycle management process that when we close the books on a product, information needs to go into multiple systems. We have another bot in system for this.

These are the three things that we have in production right now.

A project that we automated: A person used to spend about eight to twelve hours every week to finish the process. The bot finishes it in half an hour. Now, the person just reviews it, then passes along the information. This has helped our organization because originally EMEA and APAC would not receive the files the same day that they were processed. But because the bot only takes a half an hour, everyone can now receive the files on the same day.

We know the process. It doesn't deviate.

Speed: A process that would take two days for a person every month to do is now completed within two hours.

Right now, the audit trail sits in file systems. I would prefer it to be in a database where it is queryable and searchable. 

Another major downside is an upgrade. If I have to switch over from single sign-on to non-single sign-on, etc., then it's a complete reinstall. When I do a complete reinstall, I lose a lot of information because it's a new instance. I'm not able to bring information from the old instance and my metrics are all gone. I basically have to reset the whole infrastructure. I would like to see an option to switch over to single sign-on post-installation. It should not have to be a reinstall. It should be part of the installation or configuration.

I wanted to see a cloud version and mobile app but those will be available in the A2019 version.

I would like the bots to be more automatic without having to check emails, which is how we have our tool setup. Going forward, the bots should be more interactive.

So far, the stability has been pretty good.

We did have some issues when our database server sort of crashed. A lot of processes went uncommitted, so we had to engage the Automation Anywhere support team. They came in to clean up the database and bring the server back up. Otherwise, we have seen pretty good stability.

So far, the technical support has been really helpful. We were even able to engage the customer success team when we needed them. They have helped us solve our problems, which is very good.

We had a major issue when it came to single sign-on. We couldn't get it working. There was a bug in Automation Anywhere that eventually got solved just a few weeks back. However, we have not implemented it. We have had hiccups with the single sign-on, but otherwise it was a smooth setup. We are not using single sign-on because of this bug.

We used our implementation partner for the deployment and implementing the bots. Our experience with them was good. Most of them are good developers. They have been able to solve a lot of issues and build a lot of processes.

We have seen ROI on two out of our three bot processes. We see ROI from hours returned back to us.

It is a lot easier to debug Automation Anywhere than UiPath because of the code. Our clients like Automation Anywhere which is another reason that we picked it.

Automate several smaller processes within departments. Show the benefit there before implementing an end-to-end solution. This will get people excited about the solution and kick start the process.

We got our workloads for issues and our bugs fixed, which is why I rated the product a 10 out of 10.