Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are automating repetitive, manual processes that don't add value to people's work. Also, we want to improve our risk management through quality and efficiency.

We have an automation that we just put in production where we are doing a double-blind quality review. The bot is comparing the two entries and kicking out a large number of exceptions for human review. We have saved a large number of hours every day by not having humans look at things that match.

The ability to build automation without coding is its most valuable feature.

We have had some quirkiness happen when integrating the Automation Anywhere with other solutions, such as weird Excel issues or temperamental legacy system issues.

Our division took a couple of months to scale up our bots, when we were expecting it to take weeks. However, what we did was fairly complicated.

I have not had a lot of experience with their technical support.

We measure ROI by comparing hours saved to the cost of FTEs.

We have found the product useful. We are using it and have implement it. However, it is not perfect, and we have found that there are some frustrations.

The developers who work for me find the solution fairly easy to use. Though, I do have developers who prefer typing stuff in rather than dragging and dropping. Generally, they picked up the solution quickly.

For the bot creation process, we ask the end user, "Don't tell me how you do something, show me what you do." Then, as IT personnel, we build it.

We have not taken any courses through Automation Anywhere University yet.

We are using Automation Anywhere to automation some of our menial processes.

We have automated our pricing update and audit functions that we do as an operations team.

Our organization used to have a process which took five business days to do: our monthly pricing update. This was a very manual process. Our very first bot built was to automate this process. Now, the bot runs in the background every month and the process takes less than a day to run.

It is easy to use and learn.

Working with the Automation Anywhere servers and domains have proven to be difficult. We are trying to get more licenses and servers set up, so we can run multiple scenarios simultaneously. 

I am excited for the web browser Automation Anywhere. This will be helpful for us because the solution is limited to our team at the moment. A web browser solution would allow us to expand it to different teams.

I haven't really had to work with the Automation Anywhere technical support. I mostly use my in-house technical support.

Their previous process was terrible, so they started looking at automation as a solution.

While the initial setup is fine, the servers have caused us a few headaches.

Our first bot was complicated, and probably not the best thing to start with. However, as we learned from that experience and more of Automation Anywhere's features, we can now push bots out fairly quickly. The process is a lot smoother. Our infrastructure and design have improved tremendously.

We deployed the solution with our in-house team.

We were spending 50 to 70 hours a month doing manual processes and possibly making errors. Introducing bots has saved us on hours and eliminated of errors (as bots don't make them). We have not had an accuracy issue since introducing bots.

In terms of monetary savings, we automated a bot in three days that has saved us $30,000 in costs.

A lot of companies are putting a lot of effort into increasing and improving their front office processes.

It is a great resources right now. I am really looking forward to ramping up for my second year of going into automation.

Our primary use case is to improve cost savings or FTE usage through automation.

The product is still new for us, but we are already starting to think about different ways to deploy things to development.

The product is easy to use. It is a good tool for developers and business users.

Getting the bot design into the developer's hands is taking longer than we initially anticipated.

I like the ability to grant specific permissions to specific users and want to see this rolled out in future versions.

We have only deployed this solution for three months.

We have three bots in production. We are currently working on scaling up to 30 bots.

The technical support could be better, especially with their responds. They always caring through with their timing though.

We started looking at solutions that would make the process faster without redesigning it.

The initial setup was not complex, but we did need assistance to get it up and running.

To deploy our initial three bots, we used a partner (Accenture). Now, we are doing our own development.

We measure ROI by evaluating the entire process: 

• How long does it take to run everything? 
• How many FTEs are running the process? 
• What are the savings from a quality standpoint?
• What processes are now able to be run over the weekend without someone monitoring them over the weekend?
• What are the penalty if something is not automated?

We also looked at Blue Prism.

Start with a good integrator. That is what we did.

It is a good tool for RPA focused development.

We have been able to integrate the tool with other software. So far, we had no issues.

I have taken one course through Automation Anywhere University. It was not a bad experience. I am planning to take more courses in the future. However, the courses are very long.

We have several use cases for Automation Anywhere:

• Grab data from one site to another.
• We run all cache processes through it.
• We can get more information using IQ Bots.

The platform is easy to use, especially for business users.

I would like to see web and cloud-based platforms for future releases.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

While it depends on the customer, it generally takes about two to two and a half months to scale up bots for production.

We are the integrator for deployment.

We have saved time and money using the solution.

Licensing costs range from $50,000 to $200,000.

There are five to six competitors in this market.

Make a list of all your processes before starting, then decide on two or three processes that you want to automate.

I have taken Automation Anywhere University courses. The new learning course model is more inviting and easier to use.

As a solution, RPA integrates well with other solutions.

It is very easy for us to work with the Citrix applications.

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.