Automation Anywhere Reviews

We spend less time preparing data.

I would like to have the ability to schedule bots by whichever one is available.

The stability is good. I haven't had any major issues.

The stability has been good, so far.

It took us four months to scale up to our current number of bots.

The technical support is good. I have only used it once.

This was the first time using an RPA solution. Automation Anywhere was our first choice.

The initial setup was straightforward. We have a center of excellence that does a lot of this stuff.

We have saved time.

Take a look at RPA in general.

We want to automate our business processes.

It eliminates redundant work from our offshore team to free up FTEs.

The speed of the delivery is its most valuable feature.

The solution doesn't offer all the capabilities that we need, so we have to use it in conjunction with other software.

The bot creation process is a little tricky, since our company is not setup to accommodate a bot. Therefore, it has been a bit tricky and time consuming. However, we are getting there.

I would like to see more capabilities in the next release.

We started with a complex process, so it has taken us over a year to scale our bots.

The technical support has been a little slow to respond to our inquiries.

We used a combination of employees and consultants for our deployment.

We measure ROI through our FTE savings.

Discuss the solution with other companies before purchasing. 

Learn from their website what other people have already developed.

We are headed towards integrating the solution with other software.

The cognitive document processing is new for our company.

I started, but didn't finish Automation University University. I have taken more classes with Automation Anywhere vendors.

We use it for financial back-office functions, things like fee information, balance information, and account aggregation information.

It has been able to save us time in our processes from hours to minutes. Something that might have taken anywhere from two to eight hours now takes 20 minutes.

The general features, that we can automate a task that takes hours into minutes, are valuable. But as far as an individual product feature goes, there isn't anything more specific.

Operationally, there's room for improvement, especially in the area of high-availability and deployment.

In high-availability, we have two Control Rooms acting as a cluster so if one fails the other one will take over. But that's not our environment operationally, and the latest information we have is that they identified another product bug.

We have come through a number of issues with them and they've been very good at fixing them, but we've gone through four different patches to get things working, and currently, we're not working in a clustered environment.

We have had it in production since January of 2019, five months ago. We had it in beta for two months before that. We actually onboarded the product in September of 2018. That was when we started with the product but it was all PoC.

We're not really there yet, in terms of scaling, but based on the high-availability issue, right now I'm not too confident. From everything I've heard, though, it seems like people are running hundreds of processes on a Control Room, but we haven't really done enough to know about scalability.

Technical support is the one thing that has been fantastic. Initially, when we had all these issues, we had some issues trying to get to the right people. But since we escalated and got the right people involved, they've been fantastic. They've had people come out to our site. We submit tickets and let them know the error and they see and pretty much turn them around right away. Unfortunately we do have a number of issues, but support has been really great.

We haven't used any other RPA product.

In the initial setup, we had difficulty in our environment. We actually had to have them come onsite for two days to get us deployed, and even then it took another month before we were finally operational. I think our environment was a factor, but we also did find product failures.

We installed it but it was not operational. Everything from the way things were configured to our license not being set up accurately was an issue. So we had configuration setups such that we couldn't process and it took a while to get that figured out. To be honest, one of the issues was that it was around the holidays and the right people weren't available to help us out. It took us a week-and-a-half just to resolve the fact that there was a button that had to be un-clicked.

And we've been continuing to have issues along the way. They had actually settled down quite a bit until we hit this high-availability issue.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we used a development partner, professional services, that had knowledge of Automation Anywhere. This is a brand-new program for us, our first foray into RPA, so we had a professional services partner who took us all the way from business process through implementation. We don't have technical resources here who did the implementation. We totally relied on them, initially.

Our strategy was to have an experienced professional services partner help us get onboarded and develop bots for us as a PoC. Then, after the PoC and we declared complete, we would move them into production. Our longer-term strategy would be to start building some in-house talent that could do some of the bots as well.

The partner we used was independent of Automation Anywhere. They did a really good job in the upfront work, telling us what RPA can provide and about the process for determining if something should be automated or not. 

Where we struggled a bit is when it came to implementing. We implemented what the business did but we didn't implement what was needed from an operational point of view. In other words, what happens when there's an issue? What happens when there's a scenario that the bot can't handle? How will people get notified? Things like that weren't factored in initially. Some of that might have been because it was a pilot, but ultimately the vendor said, "Yeah, we're going to productionize this." But we've had delays in getting our bots into production because that aspect of usability wasn't factored in.

We're in the process of trying to get our last bot into production, and then we'll start trying, in 2019, to develop some more bots. But it has delayed our bot development. We're tracking about two months behind what we expected.

Our biggest lesson learned is that we need to factor in usability right from the beginning, not only that the business does these ten steps, but what happens if those steps fail?

It's too early for a return on investment.

On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are about $80,000. We bought a package and when we tried to get this high-availability to work we bought some extra Bot Runners. I know that if we buy IQ Bot there's an additional cost for that but we haven't gotten there yet.

We evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath. We chose Automation Anywhere - both our technology and business sides, as a partnership - because the business and technology agreed with them. They felt that it was something they could more easily understand with some of their tech-savvy people. They felt they would ultimately be able to use the product, once it got rolled out. Whereas, with some of the other products, they didn't feel they were as easy to adopt.

Make sure that you not only look at what the business needs are, but how the business will use the product when it becomes operational. It's relatively easy to get a bot developed to do what the business wants, as long as they have a good process laid out. But what is more difficult is that when you go into production you have to understand how you can schedule it if it's attended. Our three bots are unattended. You have to understand the scheduling aspect, you have to understand what happens if it's not happy path and there's an issue. Who does it go to? How is it going to get monitored? And you have to understand how your infrastructure is supported. Our infrastructure is kind of complex which is, I think, why we're running into some of the issues we are.

The users of Automation Anywhere in our company are all business users who support our clients in the back-office, whether that's trying to do fee calculations or account calculations. We only have three bots and the number of business users is probably less than 20, in total, who will be using it once we go live. It may be more as we get further along but right now it's less than 20, probably closer to 15.

We're trying to get it out to different departments, so ultimately there could be 50 users, maybe even 100, but that's more long-term. We might get up to 20, but I think that's as far as we'll get this year, unless we start having a lot better success.

Part of our problem is that for maintenance we require at least two people. Deployment is actually pretty straightforward, but we need about two people for that as well. The people involved would be CM, configuration management, our technology architect, our operations infrastructure, and our database team.

We have been creating a lot of bots for the finance department. At this time, we are trying to use the TaskBots and MetaBots, not IQ Bots. 

As of now, we have automated processes from the finance, accounting, treasury, and tax departments.

An example of how it has saved time: I know 10 to 12 accountants who were doing a lot of day-to-day manual tasks. Once we implemented the Automation Anywhere into my company, we freed up a lot of their time, so they could work on other processes. 

I like the OCR feature, where we can capture information from PDFs.

The commands provides by Automation Anywhere make the tool easy to use.

I know Automation Anywhere is available for front-end applications, but I don't know how it deals with the back-end. If they are sending technology which comes through to the back-end, that would be a big evolution in the industry.

Citrix is only in the development stage. Automation Anywhere could put some time into improving this more.

The stability is good.

We started with zero bots. In our first cycle, we developed around eight bots. In our second cycle, we created around five or six bots. Now, we are on our third bot cycle.

The technical support is good. They try to get back to us within one to two days. Once they do respond, everything is good.

The initial setup was complex.

Initially, we used an implementer for the deployment. Now, we do everything on our own.

We measure ROI by how much we are saving for our internal people.

Compared to the other competitors' tools that I have been experienced with for bot creation, Automation Anywhere is user-friendly.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. They are simple and detailed. The courses include videos and quiz questions.

We want to learn more about IQ Bots going forward.

We have automated some fund management and fund reconciliation processes, which has been done successfully. The tool has been performing well. 

In our fund management and fund reconciliation process, we had a lot of headcount. Automation has significantly reduced our FTE count, investing that IT personnel into other work. Also, the quality of the work has slightly improved.

Our development time has been reduced because the solution is very user-friendly. You don't have to know a lot of things. It has an IDE with drag and drops, in addition to workflow development. This gives developers an edge to write code quickly.

I am a developer with nine years of experience in full-stack development. I have found this tool strikingly different, compared to the other tools, in terms of ease to use. Anybody can be taught it, and it has a very small learning curve.

Automation Anywhere has some limitation with its integrations. You can build your logic with MetaBots and .NET components, e.g., if something is not gathered by Automation Anywhere or built into functionality, you can write a MetaBot. A MetaBot is like an external component. You can write it through C# or .NET code, and make a DLL, and import it. This is not open to all data types or EXE functionalities which can be written through C#. You have to define your variable types, matching them with Automation Anywhere existing variable types. Because of the knowledge required, I cannot let another person, who doesn't know Automation Anywhere, build my external DLL code.

They are already addressing some concerns that I have been having, like having cascaded code blocks, which is very helpful for developers to use when finding and debunking codes. Until now, we haven't had collapsible cascaded code sections in Automation Anywhere. This is not typical, as any IDE will usually have it, on any language.

The current interface for business users is not intuitive, as it is a code-based view. A business user wanting to develop a process may find the interface a bit elusive. Automation Anywhere is now working on a process flow view with a drop and drop, which should be better for business users.

There is not much guidance for implementing DevOps, like continuous development. Nowadays, the technology has come for the deployment part, it should be part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD). 

With Jenkins or TeamCity, there is a job, and I want to see them have integration with Automation Anywhere, so we can directly code check-in, run, test, and deploy. Now, we are doing this manually for deployment, but I want to see a DevOps job instead.

The product has been in production for six months.

We had couple of Windows' tools that we automated. The stability is remarkably good. 

In some cases with RPA web development, where we had to integrate with some websites, there were some problems in terms of reliability or stability. The issue is not constant. Different browsers, like IE, work well, where others, like Chrome, don't work well. With legacy websites, based on old technology, it also does not work well. 

The scalability is fine. You can create small, repeatable tasks. You can expand through different bots. So, you don't have to recreate the same stuff. Automation Anywhere provides the facility so you can reuse components to make a scalable solution.

We are improving scalability on a daily basis, as RPA is new to us. Our code is now more scalable and reusable than we developed our basic structure. Going forward, if we have to create a new bot with any given scenario, it will take 20 to 40 percent less time to create. This is because we have already made the scalable, reusable components.

In terms of accessibility, the Automation Anywhere technical support is the best. Out of all the RPA tools that I have used, their support forum is more agile and responsive. For any issue, we just have to create a ticket and a technical person will get assigned in no time. They are the best in terms of responsiveness, but I have mixed feelings about the quality of those responses. I feel sometimes to support their fast responses that they probably compromise their quality.

We used to get a lot of emails from the original fund management users (the consumers) asking about their estimated stock prices: monthly and biweekly. This information comes through a lot of emails. We had to read those email, classify and categorize them, then go into a different portal to get some more data, and finally, send them a result in an Excel format.

We used a consultant, and the deployment was very smooth. We have been maintaining three environments: development, UAT, and production. The deployment procedure is pretty simple. We just have to export from one to another environment where the dependency is just a package file. 

We are thinking of implementing Bot Insight and the CoE dashboard to calculate our ROI, since our bots are not analytics-based. We are just using our bots as a bot. They are not integrated with any analytics. I know that they have a CoE dashboard, where you can define parameters to automatically calculate ROI. At the moment, we are manually calculating our effort savings.

I don't agree with the IQ Bot licensing costs, which depends on the consumption of the document rather than per bot or user. This is confusing for me, because most of the cases for us in a possible future scenario, there would be a lot of invalid data to be scanned to get to real data. E.g., we would have to supply approximately 100 pages of scanned data to extract two pages of original data. In these type of cases, the IQ Bot might be a costly venture.

The company also looked at UiPath. From my understanding, Automation Anywhere was chosen for ease of use and licensing.

The IQ Bot seems interesting in the terms of populating semi-structured data and gathering intelligence of its own. Though, I haven't implemented in my project yet.

I didn't know Automation Anywhere seven to eight months back. All my learning came from the Automation Anywhere University. Though, I have experience in other RPA tools, the courses are really helpful, as they helped me to gather the knowledge needed to implement and master the product. Right now, I'm applying the information to my domain and company.

I haven't used it in a Citrix environment.

I very excited to see the next version of this product.

Today, we use Automation Anywhere to build out the capacity within our organization. We use it to help us figure out opportunities, then remove some of the busy/transactional work, which employees don't want to be doing.

From an organizational perspective, it has improved how we work and determine, "Is there a better way to do things?" and, "How can we challenge the status quo?" This builds a continuous improvement mindset throughout our organization. This is in addition to some of the tangible benefits of taking monotonous work off people's plates, creating capacity, and cost reductions.

Ease of use is a valuable feature.

The ability to scale is probably the number one reason that we chose Automation Anywhere. We are able to build automation fairly quickly, and they are fairly scalable. 

We can rinse and repeat a lots of swap-out pieces, as necessary.

Once we got the tool going and were fairly familiar with it, we were able to scale the solution. Our developers love it. It is fairly simple to use. Sometimes, we are able to even bring people on fairly quickly, like interns, and have them use the software. Then, we are able to see some real benefit out of it fairly quickly.

At pilot, we had around four bots. Today, we have 85 bots, and that is over 12 to 13 months.

Every tool has challenges. With Automation Anywhere, it took us a bit of time to stand it up initially. We tried to do it in a virtual environment, which caused us a bit of headache. It could have been smoother in this aspect.

Originally, when we started our process of standing up our center of excellence (CoE), we used ISG to help build the scale, increase the number of bots, and help deliver use cases for our work.

When we measure ROI, we look at four buckets:

1. Capacity creation
2. Cost avoidance
3. Cost reduction
4. Increased accuracy and reduction of errors. 

We have a calculator that we created. We have some inputs, then based on what we realize, we receive an output or number stating, "This is the benefit that the automation gave us."

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. The reason that we chose Automation Anywhere was its ease-of-use and some of its market capabilities. We were also familiar with the tool from an outsource service provider.

Give the tool a try. Get the business onboard. Build some quick, easy bots at first. Then, you will be able to see the capabilities of the tool quickly.

Our bot creation process is fairly robust. We have a centralized model with a good process from beginning to end, which involves engaging our business partners, documenting the as-is, looking at the future state, then coding the automation. We leverage Automation Anywhere, as a tool in our tool belt, and one that we've enjoyed adding because it increases our capability to change processes going forward.

Automation Anywhere integrates pretty well with the other applications that we use. We like to go the API route through Automation Anywhere, but we are always looking at customer web portals or the portals of our suppliers, as we have pretty good integration capabilities.

We are looking forward to using the bot monitoring capabilities in version 11.

We haven't used the cognitive document processing capabilities of Automation Anywhere.

I have not taken any Automation Anywhere University courses.

We primarily use it for finance and marketing applications in our company, since we do a lot of our back office tasks at our company. We have automated in marketing, finance, our commercial organization, and are moving into HR.

The tool performs very well.

We are using it to backfill a lot of our resources who are retiring, so we are hiring less people as we go.

The object cloning is its most valuable feature.

It is easy for business users to utilize, who don't have IT skills.

We would like to have collapsible code loops.

It would be nice to upload a project, instead of individual files, so we can look at file and versions changes.

We would like to have more features inline with our traditional IDE, like what is in Visual Studio.

It scales pretty well as long as you have enough developers to scale it with you.

We can scale the bots in about a year. When we started, we went from a pilot of about 14 bots, which all got stripped away. Then, we ended up implementing 30 different bots about a year later.

I don't use the technical support a lot. It feels like a lot of time that they will ask us to check the user manual. When we eventually just tell them, "No, we want to set up a call." Then, they are usually pretty helpful on the call.

This is our first RPA solution. We haven't previously used another solution. Our strategy group and IT department were the ones who decided to use Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was complex. However, Automation Anywhere came onsite and helped us with our architecture, then it was fine.

We used a reseller for the deployment. We really enjoyed working with them.

We evaluate ROI as time savings and resource costs not needed resulting from deployed automation.

We save approximately 10,000 hours per year.

We also looked at Blue Prism and UiPath, but Automation Anywhere was more secure.

Ensure that IT is invested. Don't expect your business to carry the load.

We like the idea behind the Bot Store, but we haven't really adopted the Bot Store yet.

As part of our retail banking group, we are using Automation Anywhere for various processes within it. In addition, we are using it for our risk and compliance teams for money laundering investigations and fraud investigations.

We are using it primarily to remove out the human element of various processes.

It gives us the capability of leveraging our investments in different applications. I can use Automation Anywhere to tie a number of applications or processes together, without having to do in-depth coding to automate something.

It's been pretty good at integrating with our other applications and tools that we're using.

We started out with three production bots last year. From the time that we were deploying them into production to being able to use them in a production mode, it took somewhere between four to six months.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

One of the things that we did was purchase the solution originally through IBM, as they had an value-added layer on top of it. Once we had another group come on, they purchased additional bots directly from Automation Anywhere, and they wouldn't integrate well. We had to uninstall the solution that we had purchased from IBM and reinstall those bots to move forward. 

Now, we purchase our bots directly from Automation Anywhere, because this other layer from IBM put us behind, and I don't know if IBM has resolve this issue or not. It was a bit disturbing and surprising, that during the sales cycle, we were told by Automation Anywhere that this layer/enrichment was not seamless to the upgrade process.

We did use an integrator, Cognizant, for the deployment. 

It frees individuals up from mundane tasks so they can concentrate on being more active and creative other things that they need to do. There are two use cases that we have around for this: 

1. We receive benefit and reduce tying up of valued resources. 
2. For processes which are executed less frequently. E.g., there may be monthly processes with one to two people, and instead of relying on those individuals to run those processes, I can automate them. Then, I can get more consistent results when relying on a process which is manually driven.

• Pega seems a lot more hands-on with technical capabilities. They also seemed like if I wanted a steak, I had to buy the entire cow, then eat it.
• UiPath seems to be more of a recording type application, and if I want to change something, I have to do a rerecording.
• With Blue Prism, it is like they wouldn't really engage except through a third-party partner, which was sort of a turnoff.
• Automation Anywhere is in the middle ground. It allows me to easily drag and drop things into the development platform. I can also do recordings. However, if I'm having issues, I can dig down into the flow of the code, if necessary.

Take a good long look at the processes that you are trying to automate. Look at the talent pool that you have to develop the bots. Do you want to become a development shop? Or, do you want some of the capability to be put in the hands of business users? In our case, we wanted that mix of technical and business users having capabilities around this application. Some of the other products didn't offer that. This was one of the things that we drew us to Automation Anywhere.

We have some of our developers taking courses around Automation Anywhere University.