Automation Anywhere Reviews

We mainly use it for development of finance operations, and it's been performing fairly well for the most part. We have 40 automations going right now and they run daily on the Bot Runner.

We've automated journal entries, bank reconciliations, different claims-accounting - a lot of finance processes. For example, we created a system where accountants can drop in journal entries and the journal entries will be read and posted to our system.

One of the processes we automated was that people who work in treasury would go into their email and download PDFs from their emails over and over. Sometimes there would be 200 or 300 emails that they would have to go through, and they would spend a whole day doing that. Now we have an automation that does it, and it only takes one or two hours, and it frees up their time too.

We have saved time or money using this solution, but I don't know how much. That information is tracked by my manager.

The most valuable feature of the product is the flexibility. There are so many features that you can use to develop; it can hit a lot of use cases.

In terms of the usability, the drag-and-drop, instead of being able to type, makes it hard for somebody with a programming background to get used to it. The drag-and-drop slows down development; I can't just keep my hands on my keyboard, I have to use my mouse as well.

The bot creation process is tedious. The solution has a lot of features, but since you have to drag down a lot of the commands, it can get tedious to use it. You end up having to use the mouse a lot more. You can't do it as fast as if, say, you just typed it out on a keyboard.

Since I do a lot of bot development, I'd like a different way to develop them, other than dragging the commands down. If there were a way to type out the commands, to make it a little bit easier or a little bit faster to create the automation, that would be good.

Integrating this solution with other applications is hit or miss, depending on the application. For some applications it's very easy and then sometimes, for others, it's very difficult. There are occasions when, the first time, the application doesn't work at all, so we have to use commands that are not as consistent.

The stability of the solution is hit or miss. It depends on what you're using it for. Sometimes it's very stable and you'll never have issues, but for some processes it may have issues, and you have to be able to fix them and develop it properly.

What we're trying to figure out right now is how to scale this. That's where the hardware comes in. For the most part, scaling with the application is more a matter of building the infrastructure around it.

To scale from pilot to the point where we are now, where we're developing three or four bots every two weeks, it took us six months. A lot of that was trial and error, creating our standards, and hiring developers to whom we could pass the projects.

Sometimes technical support has been very helpful and they've solved a problem very quickly, while sometimes it takes a month or a few weeks to get a problem solved.

The setup was complex because we didn't want to just start making bots immediately. We needed to build the infrastructure around it so that, in the future, it would be a lot easier for us. Once we had a process for how to build bots, it was a lot easier for us, and we had proper standards.

We used Neuralify. They helped a lot in getting us set up and it's been a good experience working with them.

I'm not 100 percent sure how we measure the ROI of a process we automate because a lot of that is handled by my manager. From what I know, we measure it based on time returned to the employee. Instead of calculating how much time it takes for the automation, we calculate how much time the employee was spending on this task beforehand, and now that we've moved it to an automated process, how much we have saved them.

Overall, I think we have seen ROI, but I don't have specifics.

On the shortlist we had UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. They ended up using Automation Anywhere because it was the most flexible and the easiest to use.

Instead of trying to build a bot immediately, first build the infrastructure for how you want to build the bots. That way, when you scale in the future, it's a lot easier than trying to figure that out after you've already made multiple bots.

I have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University, but for the most part the courses have been very basic. I had prior training, but when taking it again in the University, a lot of it was just going over the basics of Automation Anywhere.

We have use cases in multiple groups: Supply chain, HR, and finance, which has three or four currently identified. We have already implemented a few use cases. E.g., we are automating the entire payment process for accounts receivable.

It helps to improve and optimize processes. It eliminates some of the manual tasks, so we can save costs.

It's eliminating the manual tasks that accounts receivable does.

It was pretty easy to get a new team of developers set up with the tool and using it. 

The bot creation process is reasonable simple. It was very easy for my team to pick up and start doing it.

We are still looking into some of its current capabilities, like IT Bot.

We are in our initial phase with a few bots live. So far, we have no major issues. Keeping our fingers crossed.

The architecture allows us to scale. We are still working to get it to a right level of scalability for our environment.

I haven't heard any complaints from the team about technical support. I haven't interacted directly with the technical support, but the team hasn't complained.

We did not previously use another automation solution. I heard about this solution through conventions. When we were looking at optimizing our processes, we talked to few vendors and eventually selected Automation Anywhere.

We started our evaluation about nine months back. In the last six months, we started the process, and now we have a few bots online.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We had an implementation partner who helped with the deployment.

We measure ROI based on the optimization that we have done and how much cost we can save.

• With the rebate processing automation that we did, it has provided us a savings of around an hour or two a person on a daily basis, which is quite a lot of savings. 
• With our accounts receivable process, we are still in the process of implementing it. Once it will be implemented, we are expecting about 30 to 40 hours a month in time saved.

We had a detailed analysis process on all the capabilities of Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and a third vendor. Based on their scores that they got in each area, we eventually ended up selecting Automation Anywhere.

I would recommend evaluating all the vendors in this category and seeing what best suits your needs before making a selection. 

It was reasonably simple to integrate. This was our first time with it, so we had learned our way through.

The Automation Anywhere University was useful and a good head start for my team. I haven't taken of its courses yet.

We are not using IQ Bot. We are evaluating it, but we haven't made a decision yet.

We don't use Citrix automation.

We have automated transaction processing, especially accounts payable, as well as document handling on the HR side, document-reading capabilities, and the downloading of reports from websites and sharing them with users.

Transaction processing is our primary use case.

We started using Automation Anywhere about 18 months ago and it has definitely increased the speed and reduced the total processing time of our transaction processing. It's pretty good.

It's pretty simple and non-invasive. Those are the key features. And the bot creation process is pretty easy.

OCR capabilities are what we're looking for. We started using IQ Bot but we are not utilizing it to the extent that we would like because of some technical issues. We would like to see some development on that side.

It would also help if they integrated AI and other predictive analytics into this solution.

The stability could be enhanced.

It provides high scalability. You can implement this across any industry, any sector.

It took us about one year to scale from pilot to the number of bots we are currently using.

I think we have gone through UiPath and Blue Prism, besides Automation Anywhere. I wasn't part of this team then, but when I go through the documents I see things related to UiPath and to Blue Prism.

We used an integrator. 

We are focusing on time saved. We have almost 27 use cases in production and, as of now, we have saved almost eight FTEs per annum.

I would definitely recommend Automation Anywhere because it's pretty simple, non-invasive, and easy to handle.

In terms of integrating this solution with other applications, the majority of the ERP vendors are now coming up with built-in robotics. That's something which Automation Anywhere has to look into because currently, with Automation Anywhere, integration is an add-on product. Many other technologies are actually integrating RPA into their products.

I haven't taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University, but my team has. It's pretty simple. It's pretty easy.

I would rate the solution at seven out of ten because of the stability issue. Hopefully they can enhance the product. I heard that in the next release they will have natural language processing, not only for English but for other languages.

The primary intention is to automate business processes where manual work is heavily involved, wherever it is feasible. That is our core objective. We want to free up our time and concentrate on what is very important for the business by moving processes to automation.

We have automated pretty much everything: premium registration, claims processing, underwriting. We have touched upon many processes.

Recently we have implemented one particular RPA function which helped the business to complete a particular renewal within a day, a process which took a month to complete before. They were able to reach out to the customer ahead of time. The customer was surprised to see a quicker response. The automation improved business value.

We use the solution for Citrix automation and the AISense is pretty good. It is very nice to use. It has helped us to resolve many security issues, whatever we have encountered so far. They were nullified when we moved into the Citrix AISense automation. We don't need to worry about any sorts of security vulnerabilities or security access issues. We can do everything in Citrix automation with the use of AISense. Previously it was not possible to do object cloning with Automation Anywhere. When this feature came out it was so nice to be able to use it.

It is very easy to use, very easy to learn. That is the main advantage of this tool. You don't need to have very specialized skills to learn it. It's very easy to use and user-friendly.

It gels with any other application we have. We can take everything from legacy technologies to advanced technologies. You don't feel any difference when using it with any of the applications.

It would be nice to have the IQ Bots integrated with the Enterprise Edition without requiring extra licenses. That would be great.

It is quite stable. Over the last two years we've had around 50 bots and there have not been many issues with Automation Anywhere. We do have problems, but they have been logged with the portal and should be resolved in the next releases. Overall, it is quite stable.

The scalability is good. We started with very few bots and it was quite scalable. We now have about ten Bot Runners.

Technical support has been very good. That is a major advantage of using Automation Anywhere. When you log your particular issue, within the next two to three hours a technical person will be available to walk through the problem, identify and troubleshoot it.

We would like to use the IQ Bot only, for PDF extraction. Currently, we are using PDF data extraction and finding whether the data is present. If we go with the IQ Bots, the main reason will be the capability. At the moment we are having some sort of problem with reading the images. We are using OCR and Python for that right now.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

Currently, we are using it for the labor savings, we are not very particular about what the cost savings are. We look at how much time we are spending on manual efforts and where we can reduce them.

So far we have saved about 15 FTEs in the last one-and-a-half years.

I'm not sure what the monthly licensing cost is, as that is taken care of by another team, but I would say it's around $100,000.

Our shortlist consisted of two products. When we started the journey we evaluated three or four products. We chose Automation Anywhere for two reasons:

• It's easy to learn and
• it's business-user friendly.

Without thinking twice, I would recommend going for Automation Anywhere.

We have taken courses at the Automation Anywhere University and that was good. It is a good learning platform. We touched almost all the courses. It also has the certification course. It was very good learning there. We even have our business associates logging in to the Automation Anywhere University and learning for themselves, learning about the platform and playing around.

The process to get to our first bot took about one year. 

For our bot creation process, we first have a business meeting to understand what the business processes are doing and we look at the process metrics. We have a spreadsheet to capture the processes for which it's feasible to do automation. Then we look at the suitability of automating a given process and what would be the return on investment if we did the implementation. Once everything has been finalized, we contemplate the development time, do the development, the testing, and then put it into production.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten. Its usability is very good. The problem is that the IQ Bots' capabilities are coming out slowly.

We wanted to have more automation around our customers' processes. We do claim insurance type processing. Therefore, we wanted a process for their first notice of loss and a lot of the government regulations that they have to handle.

We started using the tool in-house to help us deploy a lot of our own internal processes. We also use it to deploy Automation Anywhere bots to set up other virtual machines and deploy software.

We have automated sending out a first notice of loss. We have done some automation of incoming documents, but it has been somewhat hard. Therefore, we are looking at IQ Bot, as a possible solution.

The most valuable features are ease of use and deployment. It has very good ease of use.

It integrates very well with other applications.

I am looking forward to seeing writing on Linux in the web and WorkBatch in the next release.

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

The scalability is very good. I haven't had any issues.

From pilot to our current number of bots, it took about two months.

The technical support is very good.

We chose Automation Anywhere over other solutions due to the ease of deployment. We had also looked at UiPath, but their deployment was more difficult. We have some on-premise clients, so we were going to have to also deploy Automation Anywhere for them in their environment, and we needed something easy to roll out.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller for the deployment.

Our return on investment is high. We have saved primarily time.

If you are looking into Automation Anywhere, get the Community Edition and play with it.

I like the Automation Anywhere University courses.

We are looking at using IQ Bot to digitize documents.

We have done a few use cases for the business, IT, and financials. The primary use case is for the business client.

It has provided our organization a lot of benefits. We have reduced our headcount, approximately 200 to 300 employees, by eliminating manual, repetitive work. It provides profit to the business. 

It is also good to incorporate new technology into our business and systems.

The MetaBot is a valuable feature.

We can integration with other APIs, which is a good thing. This helps us with our database integration. For example, we have done an SAP integration, which is great, since SAP has a lot of manual work.

IQ Bot is great for invoices. It helps a lot for retail and on the SAP side.

Ease of use:

• For developers, the Control Room components are very popular. They are easy to use, along with the Repository Manager, Schedule Manager, and maintenance of the bots.
• For people from nontechnical backgrounds, the product is simple from them to use. Everyone can learn it. It takes about two weeks on the tool.

With Citrix, we need a dedicated server to work with it. This has become complicated, as it is not easy to pull all the systems together into one place. It would be better if the Automation Anywhere team could make this easy and simple.

We would like to see AI incorporated into the tool. With the cognitive capabilities, they need to be improved to handle unstructured data.

The screen scrapping needs to be improved.

Some of the commands, like object cloning and OCR, are not so reliable when we are automating five to ten websites into the same task. Also, when we autofill fields, the comments are not so reliable.

We have built many bots. It is good to use the best practices when developing them. For example, we add logs and error handling to each bot, so if it is not working, then we can see why. This helps our developers a lot.

It took us two to three months to scale up from our pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. What took time was our business people needed to be educated on bots and their capabilities.

I have faced some of the problems with the Automation Anywhere tool. The technical support is quick and very responsive. They make sure the problem is completely resolved, which is good.

We implemented it in-house.

Go directly to the Automation Anywhere University site. There is some hands-on usage for the tool, and you can also download a trial there.

I have taken some classes from the Automation Anywhere University. I did three types of certifications, as well. The Automation Anywhere University site provides a lot of information, along with certifications. It gives an overview of what is the tool is and how the developers can code the product, which is a good thing.

Our primary use case is to automate manual tasks to free up space for more value-added tasks.

Our first automation removed manual work from employees, so they are now able to more quickly product quality work.

The flexibility which has been built into it.

The support and user community need improvement. For example, it would be nice to have a place for those who create bots to have a place to share information and success stories.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

We're in the process of scaling currently. We started off with two pilot automations, then we needed an engagement strategy to get people excited about it and get their ideas. Then, we needed to prioritize those ideas and go deeper into the processes. But, we plan to start on the next phase soon.

The technical support is good. You create ticket on the website, then hear back from someone. I do wish they were a bit quicker with a solution.

It was a bit complex. You can contact support, and they will help you through it.

We measure our ROI as time savings per month returned back to the business. We are currently saving about 150 hours per month.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Blue Prism. 

We chose Automation Anywhere because of its user-friendly interface. It is a well put together solution.

We don't currently use attended automation.

In our company, if you look at the SAP security area, there are a lot of user requests. There's a confusion around the rules. With Automation Anywhere, we can increase the automation capabilities and automate all the user-provisioning in that area.

It's definitely useful. I went through the enterprise client and the Control Room and using it, a lot of processes can be automated. The SAP integrations look to be very useful. We have a big SAP shop, so a lot of processes can be automated using that integration.

There are three parts to the savings: 

1. the number of hours saved
2. the dollar amount saved
3. how streamlined the process is.

A manual process can be one where an email is sent and then another email is sent to get the approval, and they have to wait one or two weeks until that email comes back. That full manual process can take three weeks while the automated task takes about 30 minutes.

Ease of use is one thing that definitely first comes to mind when I think of Automation Anywhere. The tools are built in a fairly straightforward way. The documentation is really good and a Knowledge Base is available on every topic.

The bot creation process is very straightforward compared to other tools I have used. ServiceNow has a workflow which is a drag-and-drop activity itself, and then you configure it. Here they are going in that direction too: flow, design. It's really good.

The number of activities available to automate is amazing. There are 500-plus so there are a lot of possibilities with that. I can automate a lot of processes.

I would like to see more bots available right out-of-the-box in the SAP area. For example, if you take the overall OTC in our organization, we have to contact 15 teams. Even if we provide one big bot for the OTC, it won't work. It will not be used by one person. So if there could be more specific bots out-of-the-box, that would be really helpful. 

An example would be a credit check. There might be one there but I'm just giving an example where it would be specifically targeting a single process. 

More Meta Bots would also be good because they are reusable. If we had more of them that would make it faster for whomever is working on them and make the process more seamless. They would be able to build the bots very fast.

As of now, we have one or two instances of Automation Anywhere, so I'm not yet able to comment on its stability. Once we install it in production, with multiple processes running, multiple bots running, we'll have to see how it performs overall, how scalable it is.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we're currently using went pretty quickly. I have talked to other teammates who are working on Automation Anywhere and developing the bots. I've heard really good feedback on that. It's within weeks, and sometimes days, depending on the complexity.

Doing a simple password reset went really fast. If they are doing something on an OTC process or a P2P process or integrating with SAP, it will be a long process. First, you have to get approval from all the business owners and understand the process. That takes time. But the technical aspect - once you have everything in place and you know what you are going to do - the coding itself, is pretty fast.

I have not yet had to contact technical support.

In terms of switching to a new solution, as a company, if we grow out of a solution or it's not at a level that will help us with all scenarios within the company, then they will usually look to change.

There are many factors they look at, such as return on investment and cost. They will look at all the parameters, but the main parameter will be that it should be very useful to all the different teams. It also needs to be scalable since we have about 50,000 employees.

The setup was straightforward.

We managed it ourselves.

You will usually see return on investment easily see because of the depth of things you can automate with it is huge.

My way measuring ROI of an automated process is that first, even before starting any automation, I will see what the input is for the process, how the process works, what the output from the process is, and I'll measure how much time it takes, end-to-end in the manual process.

There will be some initial investment ahead of time and, after that, everything is a return on investment. Based on the number of minutes it takes manually, versus automation, the reduced amount of time will be the savings that I calculate, per request. I'll put a dollar amount to it based on who the user is. If they are, for example, paid $50 per hour, and the automation saves 40 minutes, that's a savings of $33 per request.

Every time we do an automation, we definitely note how many requests it processes. For example, in ServiceNow we count every automation request that goes through, without manual intervention. It writes to a table and we go there and run a report on the table. Straight away, I know my return on investment from that part of the automation.

As you understand more and apply the tool to the processes, you will start to leverage the tool more quickly. 

I have looked at other tools, like UiPath. While I have not completely tested them, Automation Anywhere definitely has ease of use and a strong community available.

I have taken the developer courses and done certification in the Automation Anywhere University. It's really good and helpful and I was able to grasp things quickly by using it. I installed the Community Edition on my laptop and started using it straight away. It's very good.

I would rate the product at nine out of ten because of the number of uses. We have automated 30 to 40 processes. Those kinds of things have been very easy to automate using Automation Anywhere. We didn't need any other platforms. We were able to straight-out build all the bots. 

As I said, there could be more on the SAP integration side. Also, knowledge of the actual process of automating is not readily available outside. If they could build up their Knowledge Base more that would be helpful. That's where the real investment for the company is, not in automating the IT team's requirements. For example, if I automate an application for my IT team, that's one thing, but if I automate a business process and I'm able to provide them analysis and provide a report on something that the business really needs, that will help to deliver on the business side. There's a difference.