Automation Anywhere Reviews

We automate bots for our clients. We identify processes that our client need to automate. If we see that Automation Anywhere is the best platform for them, then we recommend it, and help them to implement some bots.

I work with South American clients.

The Control Room for the bots and its ability to connect bots with APIs are the most valuable features.

From my developer's point of view, the tool is pretty strong. Our developers are happy with the features that Automation Anywhere has.

Our developers are looking forward to code versioning.

I would like to see GitHub or GitLab integration in the next version.

It would be nice to have more screen scraping features for legacy systems. This needs improvement, because it doesn't work very well at the moment.

I would also like to see cloud capabilities, but they announced that is coming.

It took one to one and a years to scale to our current number of bots.

I have seen that the South American support is not as good as it should be. I would recommend them offering onsite support after the initial support. 

They offer onsite support at the beginning, and this works well. Once this team leaves, the client is not enabled to work with the product. During the second and third stages of the setup, the client then has to hire a partner to help them resolve issues and put things into production. 

We don't feel Automation Anywhere was there for our clients after the initial setup.

We measure ROI by saved time, FTEs reduced, and number of errors reduced.

Once the license is sold, the support could improve.

The main players in the market do pretty much the same thing.

Don't choose the platform first. Identify what you are trying to solve. Look out for the type of support that you will have in your region (local support). Assess the local support.

The developers have to love it, or they are not going to use it.

For some legacy systems, integration with other solutions is not as easy as it sounds. For standard integrations with other solutions, Automation Anywhere is alright.

I haven't used the cognitive document processing features.

The primary use case is from a compliance and regulatory standpoint.

We have been able to reduce our number of FTEs.

The ease of use is its most valuable feature.

While the ease of use for non-tech users is good, it could be improved.

I would like to see extensive OCR capabilities in the next release. That is a must.

They need to make the solution more robust.

The solution has been pretty stable.

It is pretty scalable, but it does depend on how you develop the bot.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup is a little complex. For a person with a technical background, it is doable.

We have received 70 percent optimization using this solution.

I would recommend this solution. 

Look at the solution's capabilities and compare it to what your automation needs are.

It is leading the market from the automation standpoint.

The primary use case is for automating our mortgage and loan origination processes. 

We brought onshore a lot of what we were doing offshore, saving our company close to $20 million.

Centralized automation is its most valuable feature.

The bot creation process is relatively simple.

It is reasonably useful for developers. It can be a challenge for a developer, as it limits what they can do.

I would like centralized orchestration and better exception handling in the next release.

Because of the stability of the application and how it interacts with some of our legacy applications, it does cause difficulties.

The stability of the solution is getting better. We have had some issues with the Control Room stability, which makes it harder for us to manage the bots. This is in recent versions.

We are scaling up, but I don't think that we are scaling correctly.

The technical support is solid. They are pretty responsive.

The setup is mostly straightforward.

We used Ernest & Young for the deployment. They helped us get a lot of the work done.

We measure ROI through time and labor savings (FTEs). 

We save time through our reduction in cycle time: 30 to 35 days.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

Have your business plan well-developed.

The solution is reasonably wide open, so it integrates quite well with other solutions.

The IQ Bots are of limited use to us right now.

We don't use AISense, and the version of the application that we use isn't capable with Citrix.

We have a lot of systems filled with documents and PDFs, such as finance, accounts payable, and operations.

We just started and have only implemented one bot.

I would like to have a cloud-based version with support.

It took us three months to scale up our first bot.

The technical support is very good. We are very happy with them. It takes them time, but they do get results.

We were not using another solution prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup of the software takes time.

We deployed the solution in-house.

We save only time, not money. We save 30 minutes every day using this solution.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

The IQ Bot is a very nice concept, and it will be very successful.

We are using it to automate company processes all across our firm: finance, legal, compliance, and customer client account servicing.

We have the ability now to surveil all our employees for political contributions. This would previously take 40,000 hours for a human to do. By combining Automation Anywhere and Appian together, we have been able to build a bot that works with Appian workflows to manage all our employees.

The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages. I have been able to be a developer with Automation Anywhere without knowing the technical background. I am a business user, and not needing the technical knowledge to use the system has been useful for me.

The bot creation process is straightforward in some ways and complicated in others. You can get your initial stuff laid out really quick, but then putting in your exception handling is more time consuming. It is awesome because it takes two hours to get things initially done. However, then it takes another two months to work through everything else, such as infrastructure and moving from development to QA to production. 

When I change the name of a variable in the Variable Manager, I would really like it to change in the code. We just added coding standards where I had to spend hours going through and recoding existing bots, because anything needing a change had to match our coding standards, and that now includes variable names. I just spend two days renaming variables in a bot. While it should have been superfast in the Variable Manager, I had to go through every single line of code, rename all of them, and inevitability, I will miss one. If I have already assigned a variable do something, it makes sense that if I change the name of the variable, then it should change in the code.

We have had so many stability issues.

We had quite a few issues when we upgraded from version 10.5 to 11.2. We were struggling with those issues, only to find out that version 11.2 has known problems. We should have gone straight to version 11.3. Now, we are upgrading again.

We have had so many production support issues. In version 10.5, we lost the ability to run unattended bots. Our Control Room could no longer unlock our Bot Runner machines, and Zendesk could not help us. So, we spent two month babysitting every single bot that ran. Then, when we upgraded to version 11.2, we found out schedules vanish from the Control Room, which resulted in us babysitting the bots for another two months.

The technical support is not great. We have had issues where they close our tickets when we don't respond to their email within eight hours, but they email us on a Friday night.

I had two days where I was out of the office, and they closed tickets on me. This has happened to my co-workers, as well. This has been frustrating.

I really struggle with the support team and informing them of endemic issues. They try and explain it away, but I know enough to be aware that there is a bigger issues, such as what we experienced with versions 10.5 and 11.2 causing us to babysit bots.

Not having the support has been problematic for me.

We used a third-party vendor for the deployment. With our initial vendor, we were led to believe that they were experts. We have since come to realize this was not the case. We have changed vendors and reprogrammed our bots from the initial vendor. We are much happier with our current vendor. 

We measure ROI through a combination of hours saved, errors avoided, and quality of life, which are bots based on processes which humans can do quickly but hate doing them. We have a couple bots built around quality of life.

I would encourage anyone looking for an RPA solution to look around at other solutions in the market.

The ability to integrate the solution with other applications is hit or miss. We have a lot of homegrown applications, and sometimes those don't work. Mostly, they work well with websites until they change the websites.

We have done a proof of concept of the IQ Bot. We struggled with it because we have sales spreadsheet that go across more than one page, and IQ Bot cannot follow it across more than one page. Also, the dp1 requirements were too high for most of our use cases.

We don't use Citrix automation.

We use it to automate IT processes.

We would like it to be more user-friendly.

The scalability is good.

It took us a year and a half to scale from our pilot to the current number of bots that we have.

We measure ROI by number of man-hours saved.

We also looked at Blue Prism.

Start small. Pilot it for a couple of processes. 

About a year and a half ago, we started making a business case for the software. We now have 15 bots running.

• It is flexible and user-friendly. The flexibility is awesome.
• It is easy to learn. Coming from a programming background, it is easy to use.
• Its ability to integrate with other solutions is awesome.
• The cognitive document processing is very good.

I would like to see a bot button.

The technical support is very good. We now have a technician on-hand to assist us with issues, instead of reaching out to Automation Anywhere's technical support. 

The cost is affordable, which makes an easy barrier to entry for the RPA market.

We chose Automation Anywhere because it is user-friendly.

I would recommend trying it. Once you see it in action, you will understand its capabilities and how easy it is to use.

The bot creation process is pretty standard. We take an idea for a business process and try to standardize it. We put in development and test it a hundred times before putting in production.

Courses on Automation Anywhere University are very easy to learn. It provides a huge amount of training and learning exercises for you to learn how to use the tool.

I haven't used Citrix yet.

We are using it to automate tasks.

We have one bot in production. It performs okay.

Unattended use is its most valuable feature.

I would like better support for migration objects.

We have problems getting the bot to run in our non-production environment. It took a long time to get the bot to run in our production environment.

The technical support is mediocre. The support is sometimes really good, and sometimes it is really bad.

The setup was very difficult. It recognizes the correct fields that you put into it, but it resulted in complex scripts.

We did the deployment in-house.

I don't think that we have seen ROI yet.

Know what you are getting into and do your research.

Attended automation is okay. We had some challenges around testing.