Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our workforce has limited capacity. By adding this solution, we can increase the amount of work coming in without adding to our workforce.

For the finance team, they have custom themes for classification of engineering parts. This was one of our largest scaled automation projects. The process was that an engineer would do: 

• A wheel comes in, and they want to classify it. They need to do the research to classify it. 
• They pull up the data from different tools. E.g., they pull up a drawing with specifications of it. 

A bot will now do this research instead. We have realize around 20,000 hours savings on this project.

• Ease of use
• Scalable
• Intuitive
• Integrates easily with different systems.

It enables our employees to do more high valued work, increasing employee morale.

We would like to have more ease of use for the operations team.

There are still bugs in it. We are waiting to get to the newest version to resolve our bug issues. We just upgraded from version 10 to 11.3 this week. 

We would like to have quicker turnaround times.

Stability depends on how a company is connected to the system or program.

Automation Anywhere has new features coming out every year with their interface. 

If we find bugs or issues, we have conversations with our customer success manager about them. 

It is very scalable.

We have the solution implemented in North America and Asia. We are looking to expand the solution going forward by implementing it in South America.

The customer service is very good. We are in regular communications with our customer success managers who handle our technical support. They are knowledgeable technically.

The initial setup was a simple process. 

We deployed it in-house.

We have seen ROI.

We're using it across a number of departments. So far we have implementations for finance and cost-control, as well as operational and logistics uses.

Our deployment is a hybrid solution. We have an on-premise component and some portions are in Azure.

We've implemented a few solutions that are helping us out in a couple of different dimensions. One of the big ones for us is cost-control. We've been able to identify certain billing errors and to dispute them or avoid overpaying in certain instances. It's helping us to improve both the visibility of the accuracy of the invoices we're receiving, as well as any instances where there might be disputed amounts. It's also allowed us, for certain tasks that have previously been repetitive or manual-data-entry heavy, to centralize and then automate them and reduce the number of actual employees we need on those mundane tasks. It's been very helpful for that.

The core functionality, the ability to automate these tasks and to interact, both with our own in-house software solutions as well as with our customers' and vendors' solutions and portals, has been incredibly valuable for us.

We're also beginning to dip our toes in the water with the IQ Bots, to do some OCR and some machine-learning. So far that is looking like it will be very valuable to us as well.

One thing about it that we have not found to be exceptionally useful are the built-in bot analytics, the Bot Insights. From our own extensive experimentation, as well as from what we've understood from other people using this solution, we've been able to come up with better solutions using our own in-house analytics and our own systems than through theirs.

Also, we're seemingly plagued with certain technological issues or bugs. In particular, at the moment, we're in the middle of a pretty serious issue that's blocking our further development. We have been working with the Automation Anywhere support team on it, but it's been dragging on for a while now and we still haven't received a solution from them yet. We're hoping to get that resolved and move forward. 

There's definitely some funkiness or some jankiness, sometimes, with working with them.

The stability has been mixed. In fairness, it's hard to say how much of that is issues with the solution itself, versus any issues that we may have had in the setup and integrating it into our own systems. It's definitely taken us a while to get to a point where we're comfortable with it being able to run consistently and smoothly. We've made a lot of progress in that regard and we're seeing a lot of improvements as well.

Our issues tend to be more on the development side. We've had pretty decent success once the solutions are fully developed and deployed, as far as stability is concerned. But, we have definitely encountered a lot of issues and hiccups along the road, while developing.

It seems pretty scalable. We're looking into scaling up in the near term. The pool seems pretty scalable and good to us from what we've seen so far.

We currently have six or seven processes that we've automated using Automation Anywhere and we're looking to increase that number quite a lot here in the U.S. We have a prioritized list of another 50 or so tasks that we'd like to try to automate with the solution. In addition, we're working to generate interest among some of our other agencies and countries worldwide, in using it.

Their technical support is good. Any issues that we've raised, they've gotten right back to us and helped come up with solutions. It has taken longer than we would have liked for some of our thornier problems to reach a resolution. At the moment we're a little stuck, based on a problem that we're having, although tech support has been responsive and has worked closely with us to try to come up with a solution.

This is the first RPA solution that we have used.

The initial setup was definitely complex. It took us and our IT teams quite some time to get everything set up the way we needed it, with our three environments. Part of that was getting the Control Room installed and set up, as well as making sure that the client was running properly on all of our machines. It definitely took us some time to get that all running smoothly, a few months to get everything deployed.

We're a global company and our U.S. offices have been running this as a pilot for global. We've been sitting with different departments and stakeholders to try and understand what processes might be right for automation and for this kind of solution. We've been compiling that list, prioritizing, and trying to get the buy-in of the people who will be most impacted by it. We've also been trying to get some early, big wins as far as ROI is concerned, and as far as demonstrating the value of the technology, so that we can continue to roll out more, here in the U.S. and, hopefully, more broadly later on.

It has all been done in-house.

We are definitely seeing positive ROI on this, between some cost reductions as well as some FTE replacement for the more repetitive or mundane tasks.

Licensing is done on a yearly basis. There are some additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. There are a couple of add-ons we've looked at: The IQ Bot for OCR and machine-learning were add-ons, as well as the Bot Insights - the analytics.

We got The Bot Insights rolled in immediately, on a trial basis. The Meta Bots, if not immediately, we had added on very early on. The IQ Bot is something that we've been looking into recently. We have not yet purchased that license. We have run a PoC with it and are looking into adding that on.

We did evaluate other options but I wasn't directly involved in the initial screening process. I do know that we examined three or four other solutions before settling on Automation Anywhere.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that nothing is as easy as it seems it should be.

One of the things a number of people are looking for out of an automation solution is a reduction in FTEs. I know Automation Anywhere would prefer we not describe its usefulness in those terms, but I know that's something that a lot of people are into. While it certainly can achieve that, the estimates going in tend to be very high and the reality is that you're not really hitting those numbers. So be very conservative when you evaluate it. It has absolutely been worth it for us and has provided us with good value. But the optimism going in - and I've heard this from other people we've met at the Imagine events, etc. - is over-optimistic and the actual numbers are less than what is estimated. Being realistic about that is very important.

Also, if you're using any kind of custom, in-house software, seeing how it interacts with that is important. It can be a little persnickety about interacting correctly, especially if it's an older, legacy system. It runs very smoothly across many different types of software and modern interfaces. But it can be a little challenging working with something that's a little older or more specialized and customized.

Currently, we have five to ten users, ranging from very much involved to just being onboard or peripherally involved. We have a number of developers directly using the technology, as well as project managers. Those are the people who are directly involved. The number is much larger if you include the business users who are impacted by the solution, impacted by the bots that we've created and their results. I would estimate, roughly, 50 users are benefiting from it right now.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, we're getting back to that five to ten people. We have four or five developers who are developing new bots. We have three IT people who are involved very directly in maintaining our servers and the virtual machines that we're running these on, as well as providing technical support for the overall infrastructure and setup. Those are the people who are directly involved at the nuts-and-bolts level.

It's been very helpful. In many ways it's doing what it says it can do. It's automating processes, it's got some good settings for controlling, running, monitoring, and maintaining that. On the other hand, our experience in actually developing with it and making the bots has been rockier than we would like. Also, the setup - getting the infrastructure and the installs set up properly - and updating, when updates roll out, are a bit complex.

We use it for back-office administrative business processes, within order-to-cash. We have an end-to-end process automation that supports customer billings. We also have task-based automations that process either customer credit memos, or credit and re-bills, working within SAP.

We started with the solution on-prem and we have shifted to an AWS cloud environment.

It has allowed us to establish more reliable business processes, when transacting in our enterprise systems. It has improved the reliability of our monthly billing processes that, in the past, was dependent on manual, nine-to-five types of activities. We can now schedule those activities, process 24 hours a day, and then we review exceptions. I would emphasize and underscore the reliability aspect and the ability to process 24/7.

It is highly reliable, both from an uptime perspective and regarding data-quality and input into the systems. It's doing the same thing, every time, with 100 percent accuracy.

To put it in terms of hours, we are approaching 10,000-plus hours of capacity on an annual basis.

There aren't any features that are specifically valuable. We are not using IQ Bots.

On the cognitive side, some of their competitors, when we were originally shopping, were a little more advanced in that space. Making use of probabilistic outcomes and presenting them to a business user is a feature that, at the time of our evaluation, did not feel like a strong, mature solution for Automation Anywhere. Nevertheless, they won our business. That is one feature where I feel they are trying to make investments to address those gaps.

The platform has been very stable. There have been a few Control Room issues when adding new VMs, but overall it's very reliable. I'm pleased with the performance so far.

We are pleased with Automation Anywhere's ability to scale. We are convinced that it is a platform that we can scale, and we are convinced that it can function and operate within our environment.

We have six-plus use cases in production today. But those business processes are very complex. They are touching many systems. Our definition of a bot is a business process, not a task. Some companies call a bot a task. We don't do that, we call it a business process. We have six business processes that are running, which are very complex in nature. 

Regarding the scalability of a single business process, we have found that to be very easy. We have found Automation Anywhere to be very friendly when it comes to that. We add capacity in the form a virtual machine and a license to scale and meet the needs of the business.

We have not dealt directly with Automation Anywhere's tech support. Historically, they've been pretty good. I'm relaying that from my systems integrator and my helpdesk support. I always ask if they are getting what they need when they need it and the answer is yes. I'm pleased with the feedback I'm hearing.

The original setup was easy. What was difficult was adding licenses. I went a month where I was paying for licenses that I couldn't use, for various reasons. That was painful.

I'm not familiar with how long it took to stand up the environments. It was pretty simple from a PoC point of view, with the free trial licenses that were made available to us by AA in conjunction with their preferred systems integrator. That was fairly painless. Standing up the production environment was relatively painless as well. We had no problems whatsoever there. However, as we scale and add licenses, we have challenges.

Based on our use cases, we have seen a return on our initial investment for the PoC, and we are continuing to leverage the platform as we scale.

Price is where I'm least satisfied. Other vendors are more willing to offer discounts.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and WorkFusion. Those were the vendors that were strongly considered when we were evaluating Automation Anywhere's capabilities. There was a laundry-list of others, prior to those, which we evaluated from a market-research point of view.

We valued the market presence of Automation Anywhere. We valued the ease of use, when we were thinking about scaling out to the business. The recording feature, while not a developer tool - it is a tool for a business user who may not possess the thought process of a developer - we valued that in our evaluation. Those were the two major factors. 

And at the time, the commercial terms as well, the one-year commitment, was appealing to us when we were shopping the solution. We didn't want to sign a multi-year deal on a technology platform that wasn't proven out to our business. That was another factor which gave us comfort as part of the decision-making process.

At the start, I advise picking a portfolio of use cases to start with. Some will over-perform and others will not. Think of it in terms of a portfolio approach to sell the concept to your organization. My second area of advice would be: Do not automate systems that you do not own or control, unless you are willing to accept the degree of maintenance associated with that automation.

The biggest lesson I've learned so far from using it is that it's not as easy as the salespeople say. The biggest challenge is that not all automations are created equal. To give you some context, there are automations that I still don't have in production which have taken me over half-a-year to build. You talk to a sales guy and he says, "Hey, you can build an automation and be up in two weeks." Yes, but will that automation add a drop of value to the business? Probably not. The challenges are around stabilizing our complex automations.

Anything Google-related is challenging. I didn't really receive any help from our systems integrator or from AA when it came to the Google platform. We paid, extensively, to learn the hard way.

As part of our CoE, we rely on a third-party for development and maintenance of our automations. That means we have no users of the solution in our organization. The third-party has access to Bot Creators, they have access to our development environment and Control Room. They promote code to production and maintain the automations.

We have plans to increase our usage of the solution in the future. It is our intention to build an internal capability, over time. The processes we are looking to automate are more within order-cash and back-office. We have some administrative, travel, maintenance. Our IT ticketing system spawns maintenance; there's also account-creation and maintenance. That's an area of focus for us. And we're exploring reporting capabilities which are on the simple side. That's the area where we're targeting internal development and building an internal competency. It's what we characterize as simple automation use cases.

Overall, Automation anywhere is pretty good. It's not perfect but it's up there. I don't have a point of reference, other examples, but I think it's pretty good at what it does.

As a partner, we can use RPA in many sectors including financial services and banks, technology and software, in communications, government, hospitality, and human resources.

I have recently done two projects with Automation Anywhere, one for a large car manufacturer and the other for a bank.

For the car manufacturer, we used it to copy and paste data from Excel sheets, with user entries according to customer. This process helped secure the digital workplace with verification and to integrate legacy systems with new applications. There was also a daily report on this automation.

In the other project, we took data from a CSV file and validated it according to business rules and we then copied from the CSV and pasted it into another application. There, again, it was with specific customer data. We were able to implement data migration between banking applications and customer account management applications.

In simple language, we can automate any business process and it works for our customers the way they want it to.

Using Automation Anywhere, the work gets completed in half the time. Using particular types of software, there can be problems in creating solutions and it will take a lot of time to solve the problems. By using automation, the hard work is done by robots rather than by people. It won't take as much time.

If it takes a long time for a person to complete a project and, instead, the hard work is done by the computer, the robots, that is beneficial for companies.

• The ability to use previous integrations is valuable.
• With Automation Anywhere you can read and extract CSV data easily. You don't need multiple commands to read it.
• The user interface is good. Whatever I've done, the user interface has been very good.

Reliability and error handling should be improved.

One to three years.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is good. I haven't had any issues when it comes to stability, so far.

If a company is getting work done by robots, work that is otherwise hard to get done, then Automation Anywhere is definitely a good investment for them.

Compared to other tools like NICE and Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is the only tool that gets your work completed in half the time. No other tools do that. In my opinion, this is what makes Automation Anywhere the best tool.

I haven't done projects on NICE yet, but I did the training for NICE as well as for Automation Anywhere. NICE has good things in it, but in my opinion, with NICE it will take more time to complete tasks compared to Automation Anywhere. There is a difference.

For what I have used Automation Anywhere for so far, the two projects I have done, it has been completely good for me. This is the best tool I have seen.

The first project took about eight months and the other about six to seven months. There were four people working on each project, all together. They were all RPA developers. In total there are eight to ten of us working on Automation Anywhere.

Automation is happening a lot in the financial and banking service areas. There are many applications which a bank cannot manage by itself and we use automation to help manage customers' accounts. But these days, automation is happening everywhere. It is used in every company. Automation is an important process and people will see it more and more going into the future as well.

There is scope in the future for increased usage of Automation Anywhere in the banking sector.

In the future, as technology increases day-by-day, Automation Anywhere will definitely add new technology. There are already benefits but they will increase as the technology develops and people will benefit more and more.

The tool is used to automate any business process. Some examples are:

• If you want to download some data from a website or push some data onto a website.
• If you work with an Excel application and want to automate it, or any Windows-based application, you can automate it as long as you know what the business process is.
• If a person is doing a day-to-day activity and you want to automate that activity, you can use the Automation Anywhere tool to do it.

I have worked with the Windows, Excel, and web applications, along with some SAP automation and how to automate that SAP data. I use Automation Anywhere to determine automation for how to:

• Distribute the process. 
• Schedule the process. 
• Run the process. 
• Design the process.
• Distribute the data for 1000 to 10,000 data points (in Excel).

I have automated the invoicing in a finance department, where the finance department wanted to automate the invoicing process. They wanted to do the following:

• Invoice the data.
• Create the invoice.
• Mail the invoice.
• Download the invoice data.

If you have 10 operators currently performing these activities everyday, then you automate the process, by removing the 10 operators and having only one operator required, this will decrease costs. It will also increase the efficiency of your company.

In the automatic invoicing system, we created a file which pushes onto a shared folder. The bot will pick up the file automatically from the shared folder and process the invoice. Therefore, if tomorrow, another bot were to be created, we could just create a file and copy it to the shared folder, then it would pick up the file and process the invoice.

I utilize all the commands provided by Automation Anywhere, such as all the recorders. I use these commands to develop my processes and bots.

Automation Anywhere has a drag and drop process.

Automation Anywhere needs to improve Excel and its commands. In Excel, if you want to add a sheet, you cannot add a sheet. There is no command for adding a sheet. Also, if you want to rename something in Excel, you cannot rename it. You always must keep a list that you can rename through your keyboard, but there is no specific command in Automation Anywhere. 

The email automation command also needs to be improved. The email automation command sometimes is not working properly. When you connect the mail server, it is not being done properly.

The OCR feature is not that reliable.

With the PDF command, you can only read structured data. If your data is in an unstructured format, there is no command for it in Automation Anywhere. Then, people need to use Python coding if their data is in unstructured format. Therefore, Automation Anywhere needs to improve in the PDF area.

I have been using the product for the last two years.

I didn't have any stability issues. 

I haven't found any scalability issues with it. If the volume increases tomorrow, another bot can be added from the Control Room.

I worked with a single deployment model, which didn't have a load balancer requirement. Higher availability deployments require load balancers.

I haven't dealt with Automation Anywhere's technical support.

For the implementation, you just follow the proper process on how to deploy the proper hardware configuration on the production environment. The process does not take that much time as you push files to the Control Room, then from the Control Room, you can download the client. It does depend on how many bots you are implementing and how you are scheduling them.

Automation Anywhere is deployed from a deployment guideline in a step-by-step process. Automation Anywhere provides some deployment guidelines, which can be referred to.

Only one person is required for deployment: the Control Room administrator.

The number of people required for monitoring the solution depends on the amount of bots deployed.

It saves time and money. If a bot does the same work as nine out of 10 people, then you are saving money through wages. Also, a bot will work all hours without interruption, whereas FTEs may need time off or vacation. 

I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator. 

The Automation Anywhere automation tool is user-friendly, especially compared to UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere's deployment is also easy compared to other RPA tools.

The solution is good for people who want to do their job quickly without any delay or problems. 

The future of IT will require every organization to need automation.

The Control Room is good in version 11, as compared to the previous versions of the Control Room.

The primary use case is for ticket creation. They send in an email, then based on the priority, it creates a different ticket in Jira as well as the ticketing tool. In the end, they must consolidate all the tickets, whatever it has created, and sends that information in an Excel sheet to the stakeholders.

This was for an internal PoC.

It was a value-add for the organization. For each ticket, they would have to create a ticket for each of the three portals. However, after the PoC was done, then they would send a mail to a board, which will now send out the ticket number.

By using SNMP configurations and Excel, I was able to read the mail. I used this functionality to categorize the fabric, then I used this information to correlate the value to Jira along with Excel.

They must create the same ticket in three portals. Instead of that, they are now sending the mail to support. Support needs to take that mail and each bot needs to check the inbox. It will take that mail and categorize the subject, then prioritize it. We will take that description, paste it, and create a new ticket on these reporting tools.

The UI is very user-friendly, even for someone who doesn't have much coding knowledge. They can easily pick it up. Or, get training for two weeks, then pick it up. Someone from a coding background can pick it up easily too.

The MetaBots and IQ Bots are advanced tools for the market.

The functionalities and UI could be improved.

We have HTML mode and Windows mode, but Automation Anywhere is limited in this. It would be better if they were able to provide different specification modes.

I used Automation Anywhere for three months at work about a year ago.

The version that I used (10.3) was not that stable. It easily crashed in-between processes. 

In later versions, they have come out with better updates with things like MetaBot. I feel that version 11 is a robust solution.

The scalability is really good. 

The technical support team was very good to work with, as they were knowledgeable and provided good explanations. They were quite responsive.

The initial channel setup for was quite easy. However, we had to configure the control room. With that, we had to be very careful.

It took me half a day to deploy. I installed the SQL Server, the control room, etc.

The control room access gives the ability to create different roles, which helps when purchasing additional licensing.

Their overall pricing falls in the middle of the market. Cost-wise, Automation Anywhere is quite expensive because of their analytics, IQ Bots, and MetaBots. For a standalone machine, the pricing is okay. When adding in the licensing for IQ Bots (or MetaBots), it can become quite costly.

They recently launched a Community Edition, which is okay, but they should have done this a long time ago.

It is a very handy product.

As of now, Automation Anywhere has a very good place in the market.

We use this solution for automating business tasks in certain areas of the organization (so far). This involves creating bots to handle mundane tasks, so employees can be freed to work on other tasks that require higher thinking skills. We installed the product locally with the vendor's help.

The Automation Anywhere software has improved our organization by moving us into the RPA climate and allowing us to save on our overhead. By using bots, we have virtual workers that work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, all without taking a salary.

So far, we have found Customization and Ease of Use to be the most valuable features. We are also working on scalability now (within our bots), so other business areas can use the same bots that were already created. At the same time, we will be continuing to build other bots.

I would like to see a built-in read-only role for the control room so that the bot creators can log in and monitor the production environment without any auditing concerns. Currently, our development team cannot log into the production control room, due to audit concerns, and it would be beneficial to see the bots running, confirm the schedules, etc.

So far, it has been stable for the past nine months, which also included an upgrade to the client and control room.

We are currently scaling our bots and as a platform, it is very scalable.

All of the times that I contacted technical support were pleasant. Tickets were assigned quickly and resolved. We even have a customer liason weekly tagup call with the vendor to help with anything that may arise.

Previously, we didn’t use this type of product. We needed to lower our overhead costs.

This initial setup was straightforward. The documentation that was provided was thorough.

Our in-house team was used, along with the vendor's documentation and installation guides. Overall, it worked well.

Being one of the Bot Creators, I wasn't included in the breakdown, makeup, or negotiation of pricing or licensing. I only know the total cost.

We only installed the evaluation version of Automation Anywhere, and our Proof of Concept was successful.

Don’t employ all non-technical employees to create bots. Use software engineers. In our environment, we use REST, API, and SOAP, which may be daunting to non-technical folks.

Our primary use for this solution is the building of a digital workforce by implementing Robotic Process Automation to improve our operational efficiency. It is also intended to create capacity for our staff to focus on client-servicing matters, which are areas that require decision-making processes.

We have implemented two processes to date, for our Hong Kong office and Japanese office. The process automated for Hong Kong is for Company Secretarial business. The process automated for Japan is for Payroll business. Repetitive mundane tasks are now being executed by the robotic processes.

I mostly use the Control Room to monitor and manage bot runs. Since we can register multiple bot runners in one control room, and we can easily monitor and re-run bots when necessary, it is convenient for me. I would like to find out more about the dashboards and what they actually mean.

I have noticed that after the bots have been delivered to run in a production environment, there are issues in terms of quality and performance. For example, if the government website takes too long to respond, or there is an apostrophe in names, then these exceptions are not handled in the bot. I would like to see a higher quality in the final bots that are delivered to production.