Automation Anywhere Reviews

We use it for every aspect of our company: Financials, purchasing, HR, etc. 

It has taken a lot of manual Excel manipulation that we have previously did, and removed that work away from people who did that for ten hours a day, five days a week. We now have a robot doing this manual work, allowing us to refocus those our resources into more value-add activities, simplifying our landscape.

The flexibility: If there is anything the tool cannot do, we have the ability to make a MetaBot to achieve that functionality. The overall flexibility of the tool makes it very useful for us in our landscape.

We have integrated it with everything from standard off-the-shelf products, like SAP and Oracle, to custom apps that we built within our landscape. The integration to other applications is very good and easy.

I would like more integration into the entire Microsoft Suite of products, not just Excel. Companies use all of Microsoft products at the same time, and being good at just one Microsoft tool is a limiting factor. Being able to use Microsoft Excel, Access, and Outlook together and have them integrated (as standard) into the tool would be very useful, especially when you go into attended automation.

They keep rolling out more features in selected areas. They should broaden their scope.

We intentionally took a long time to scale up to our current number of bots because we focused on using large processes, instead of small ones. For us to grow to scale, it took us about a year and a half. However, we have been focusing on processes with tens of FTEs per year, instead of about processes that are one to two hours per day.

The technical support is good. Whenever we have issues with the product, the support team gets back to us normally within half a day, or sometimes even sooner, with direct answers of how we can solve our issues. If they don't have documentation for it, they have somebody call us, and we have the issue resolved in a day or two.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was in-house.

We did the deployment in-house.

Do your homework on your use cases. Knowing which use cases are really good for RPA is crucial in getting the program started. If you don't have your use cases identified, or have your functional processes identified, that want to automate, then it makes the scaling aspects more challenging.

I am RPA professionally certified through Automation Anywhere and have taken multiple classes through the Automation Anywhere University. The courses are good. They are just like any other online training courses, which I have taken through other vendors, like Microsoft or SAP. It is on par with those vendors who have been doing this for a long time.

As long as a person has a semi-technical mindset, the product is very simple to use. Even for the traditional business user, with just a little training, we are able to bring them up to speed on how to use the tool fairly easily. The tool is very good, as far as ease of use.

As long as you have a technical mindset or are able to think in a certain manner, the creation of a bot is very intuitive, especially since the tool is drag and drop. For example, I am able to take any of the commands that I need and put them in the right sequence of orders. This makes it very intuitive to create a bot from start to finish.

We are evaluating the cognitive document processing as something to use in the future, but are not currently using it.

I have worked for two companies in the past who have used Automation Anywhere. Both primary use cases have fallen under finance and accounting, with a lot of finance and accounting based functions primarily for data processing: 

• Extracting data from different systems.
• Aggregating data.
• Doing analysis on data.
• Porting data into other systems.
• Doing accounting based functions, such as reconciliations and transaction uploads.

• At the most granular level, automating people's daily tasks has been helpful by freeing them up to do higher value-add activities, which is definitely beneficial. 
• On a larger scale, the tool is improving processes overall by making systems and processes more stable. It returns hours, time, and money back to the business.

• From a developer perspective, the user interface is user-friendly and easy to use. 
• From the admin side, the Control Room is simple to use. There is a lot of functionality with a lot of analytics and oversight that you can draw from just simple web pages. It is definitely the most useful.

Integrating this solution with other application has been good for the most part. A lot of the issues that I have are related to the actual applications than with Automation Anywhere. Any additional functionality which comes out in regards to integrating it better with more widely used applications, like Salesforce, Oracle, or Workday, is definitely beneficial and helpful at the end of the day.

I have been hearing great stuff in terms of upping the product's cognitive game. Anything that can be done to work with unstructured data sets would be helpful, like increasing the subjectivity of bots, and moving away from solely rules based processes to anything which actually requires subjective judgment. If Automation Anywhere could code that into the bot design and framework, having it sort of act like a human, that would be helpful. 

Anything that can be done to increase the stability from a system standpoint in regards to large-scale systems, which are being used by a number of applications, e.g., Salesforce or Workday. This would help us, as well.

Automation Anywhere should work to continue maintaining its ease of use.

One to three years.

My current and previous companies have had stability issues. 

I started on version 11 of Automation Anywhere, then when I joined a new company, they used version 10. Therefore, I have seen both versions. With version 11, some of the development stuff was a bit clunky in terms of the tasks that we were performing. They didn't perform as expected, or perform properly, when we were developing the bot. Then, once we deployed it into production, the bot would run for a specific process and work properly about 10 times, but on the eleventh time, it would break. It was always random. Nothing had changed at all, in regards to our system, architecture, or infrastructure.

On version 10, things had been a bit more stable. We made sure that we build code which effectively captures all use cases and exceptions, but stability is key. When you're building automated solutions using bots, people are already skeptical and hesitant to adopt them. Anything you can do to improve the stability is definitely helpful. Ultimately, it depends on what your goal with RPA is. If you're using RPA as a stop-gap to build large-scale system integrations, then it's very helpful. If you're using it as a be all, end all, then stability is your number one concern. 

The product is definitely scalable. A lot of it will depend solely on the architecture of the organization who is implementing it. If you are using on-premise servers, it is much harder to scale up versus if you are using cloud-based architecture. Automation Anywhere provides the tools and expertise to make it scalable.

At the previous company that I was with, we had a pilot in September 2017 with approximately 20 bots. Then, in production, it took nine to ten months. With the organization that I'm currently with their process took a little longer, but they were standing up their COE initially. So, they went from pilot to about 30 bots in production. This took roughly a year and a half to two years. 

With regards to process, there is a lot involved. If you want to have a successful RPA and Automation Anywhere implementation at the ground level, you need to lay the foundation and the framework. Therefore, you need to build your center of excellence, and make sure you have dedicated people who will focus on whatever their role is: People related to support, governance, development, architecture, oversight (who will work with your security teams to get your reviews done), and IT personnel (who will provision servers and licenses and do Control Room administration). There is a lot involved to take it from inception to a successful program. 

The technical support has been helpful from what I've used. Initially, when we were exploring solutions and using Automation Anywhere, as a vendor, their technical support seemed to be lacking a bit. It seems like in the last few months or year, they have been stepping up their game, in this regard. They are very prompt to follow up with issues and want to make sure issues are thoroughly resolved before they close tickets and move on, which has been helpful.

At both companies, we never used a different solution before Automation Anywhere. 

We had individuals working at the companies who spent years going to school, but could not necessarily download reports nor input data into spreadsheets, and this was something that could be easily automated. We wanted to free up users and people to perform higher value-add activities, exercising analytical and critical thinking, as opposed to being cogs in the machine.

Certain aspects of the initial setup were complex, but that's a given when you're talking about technical architecture and getting the infrastructure you need in place for a successful rollout. Though, some aspects of the initial setup were simpler. 

The simpler aspects are designating roles for people based on what it is they want to provide to the center of excellence for RPA and how they see their fit in the organization. The more complex piece of it is working with all the stakeholders, internally and externally, to get all the infrastructure in place that you need in order to develop, deploy, test, and run bots in production. 

For deployment, at the first company that I worked for, that was all in-house, as we were deploying our own bots. The architecture, development, and deployment were all in-house. 

At the company that I currently work for, we have a managed services company who does development for us, and we still handle deployments. It is more like a segregation of duties, where we handle the full deployment on the end once code is ready for production.

We have seen ROI, otherwise we would have stopped using the product.

At a base level, for ROI, we equate a dollar value out to the process owner, or the business user, and multiply that out by the number of hours being saved. However, that is really base level. There are other factors involved that will help:

• If you reduce the number of errors.
• If it's related to month-end or quarter-end close for a business cycle. 
• When automating a base level process, that saves time, but it doesn't always account for the additional time given back to the user to perform another higher value-added task, as well.

On the shortlist were some of the largest players in the industry: Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. This was in 2017, when I was involved with the PoC. We chose Automation Anywhere because of ease of use and overall functionality. I think the cost was also a big factor, but I don't have much insight into it.

People seem to be a bit skeptical about the cognitive document processing. I don't know if they see the power that IQ Bot provides relative to other world leading software products, such as ABBYY, which is another big OCR technology that I have used. If Automation Anywhere is stepping up its game in the cognitive aspect, this will help guide adoption in the future.

Consider all relevant factors before making a decision on a provider. Don't just randomly decide to choose one provider over another. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you are trying to achieve by implementing an RPA solution, what you're looking for in an RPA service provider, and who is willing to best address that and meet the needs of what it is you're hoping to achieve. You should consider RPA as a solution, and there are a whole host of other automation software solutions across the spectrum, as well, which are relevant for different things, but RPA has its place in any organization. Just know exactly what it is you are hoping to achieve. Based on that, you'll be able to find the best provider for you.

For developers, it's relatively easy to use. I know some developers are hesitant to use it because they come from traditional technical backgrounds. The product is counter-intuitive to everything that they have studied. If they studied computer science, they're really reticent towards something that can just automate what they learned. For someone with a nontechnical background, it's relatively easy to use and easy to build tests out. It takes a bit of effort to master and build sustainable solutions, but it is easy to use from a development perspective.

I have not been able to take courses in Automation Anywhere University for the new platform. I started using Automation Anywhere back in 2017, and the Automation Anywhere University wasn't available. There was another platform, at that time. We did the online training center for it, and it had eight different sections. Back then, it was a little clunky. You had to go through one section and complete it before moving on another. From what I've heard about Automation Anywhere University, it's much better and more functional. I haven't had the opportunity to use it yet, since I haven't really needed to use it. However, I do plan on exploring it in the future.

I don't use Citrix automation.

We have developed apps for accounts payable (finance) to do three-way match.

We are making less mistakes and have more metrics available to understand what our problems are. Now, we can do root cause analysis and have less noise in the system during the process.

The solution has removed humans making errors while increasing our time savings. We now have a lot of more efficiencies in our process.

Our first bot took ten weeks to create. It took six months to create the number of bots that we are currently using.

I have take basic courses at Automation Anywhere University, because I an not actually a programmer. I just needed to know the high level of the product. The Automation Anywhere University was very good.

The setup was straightforward. Understanding what we wanted to do the tool, that was more complex.

We used Thirdware for the deployment.

Automation Anywhere was the only vendor because we were told by our private equity company that was who we were using. However, Automation Anywhere is the industry leader, so it was an easy choice. So, we didn't argue too much with the selection by them, and we did not actually go through a selection process ourselves.

We use a different solution for cognitive document processing, not Automation Anywhere, but we are rethinking this.

No tool will ever fix your company. It is always about the stability of processes, understanding your scope, and what your problems are. This tool is a great tool to help with that once processes are stable. It will always be dependent upon people. Make sure you program the bot to help people, not what you think it needs to be. There will be a lot of meetings, scope developments, and data review, which will need to happen first. Then, if you get good with that, then the tool's going to be excellent.

So far, everything has been good with the solution. It is a great tool.

The integration works very well. We have integrated it with four other software tools.

From a developer perspective, the solution is very simple. Our end users don't really see it. They just see the end result.

Our primary use case is the insurance of clients.

The solution has improved our organization through its integration with other products. We can integrate multiple platforms through the use of Automation Anywhere via the use of third-party APIs, so there is no human intervention at all. Everything happens on the back-end.

Automation Anywhere is excellent for integrating with other solutions. It provides the ability to leverage the APIs of third-party solutions. We use some of the already built-in MetaBots to then scrape the data and manipulate independent data that we need in order to integrate with other third-party solutions.

• IQ Bot
• Cognitive automation: The ability for the product to learn based on corrections made, such as exceptions and the way those exceptions are handled. Then, these are taken into consideration for future exceptions of similar type (autocorrecting).

I would like to have a bot as a service platform on AA Cloud. This would minimize the installation process, and we wouldn't need to have all the hardware to support the platform in-house.

We have worked on several different projects, so far. From prototypes to production, on average, scaling our bots takes somewhere from three to six weeks.

The technical support is great.

The Automation Anywhere University is very good. I liked the courses and the videos, which were included. I found it to be very intuitive and educational. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The videos on the Automation Anywhere University are extremely helpful during this process.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

We are currently measuring ROI based on cost, labor and time to market metrics.

UiPath and WorkFusion were also on our shortlist. We selected Automation Anywhere based on the product's ease of use, functionality, development environment, and workbench. This product surpassed what these other competitors had to offer.

In addition, we have a market which allows us to get products developed in timely fashion. This is beneficial to partners and clients, alike.

Automation Anywhere is one of the products which allows you to leverage the power of RPA digital workforce technology is a timely and scaled approach. Compared to other RPA solutions on the market I have worked with, AA surpasses its competitors by far.

The growth of Automation Anywhere product's stability, functionality, and technical advancements demonstrates the company is dedicated to its product, clients, and partners. It is evident that the product will only get better.

The ease of use for developers utilizing this solution is excellent. I’ve abandoned the use of WorkFusion from our practice due to its limitations. Automation Anywhere, in particular, allows us to extend the functionality of the platform by writing our own DLLs, so we are able to easily integrate it into any RPA process that we may be developing. At the same time, the ability for us to use other users' bots downloaded from the Bot Store has added a huge amount of value to the product and our ability to get to market quickly.

I don't use Citrix.

Our primary use case for it was financial back-end operations. We dabble in Automation Anywhere. We don't use it.

We have an old ERP which required human interactions because of the lack of a system. For example, we were copying and pasting from an invoice to a spreadsheet, and then from the spreadsheet, we would run a macro that would plug it into our ERP. What we did is have the robotics read an invoice and plug it directly into our ERP, avoiding the extra steps, let alone a human doing it. We placed a robot and technology in place of a human. It saved about an hour-and-a-half a day. We measure in FTEs and we measured the savings as 20 percent of an FTE.

In Automation Anywhere we liked 

• the drag-and-drop 
• easily stitching the recording of mouse control and keyboard controls. 

They were not unique but they were user-friendly. 

For developers to pick up a new tool, you need something user-friendly where it's easy to create reusable snippets of code and use them in another process down the road. I would rate the ease of use at eight out of ten.

It was very stable. We didn't have any issues with it and, if there were, they wouldn't have been Automation Anywhere's problem. They most likely would have been our infrastructure.

We didn't have to scale too far, so we didn't experience its scalability.

We didn't use Automation Anywhere's technical support, even for deployment. We read and learned what we needed to know. We got on their support site, got their documentation, took the requirements, how to deploy, and what the right architecture was. We scaled based on what we thought we would use it for. My guys like to learn, they like to try, and I allow them to dig a hole and fall into it and then fix it later. They just didn't fall into a hole.

The documentation was good enough for us to read. Granted we're technical people, but it was good enough to read and take actions based on the content. It was really good.

Setting up Automation Anywhere was fairly straightforward. I personally did it. I had my team behind me. They set up the IIS side and the SQL side. But for installation of the product, I did it myself because I wanted to know. I'd still like to learn, even though I don't do the work.

To install here, on-prem, at the server level, only took two people a couple of hours; perhaps a total of eight man-hours.

Our implementation strategy was, "Let's try it." We had an objective to save FTEs as well as to introduce technology to get around our lack of a decent ERP. It was a matter of picking among the big three, and some third-world country type of RPA as well, and seeing which one hit the button. We figured out what the requirements were, and we have a pretty hefty on-prem hosting, so we spun up some servers and installed it.

After deploying, our developers then took control. We had a team of three developers. In terms of maintenance, we usually set up our environment where we install updates monthly. That should take a couple of hours per server. I don't recall Automation Anywhere standing out as a "problem child." So maintenance on the infrastructure side might be about two hours a month.

We couldn't put the math together. When we decided to actually procure and get the quotes, they gave us free trials for a while and extended them for months. But when it came down to it, we couldn't do ROI because our company outsources to India. Our employees are in India, and in India, $250,000 goes a very long way. We just couldn't make up the money fast enough.

Cost is the biggest area in need of improvement for Automation Anywhere. Annually it's $250,000. That's what deterred us right away. We stopped using it as a primary solution because of the costs.  We did not apply hardware to that, because we've already got the cost baked into our infrastructure. Otherwise, there would have been hardware costs on top of that. If we really took a full, all-in cost for Automation Anywhere, it would have been much higher. But we don't do it that way.

There are three big, heavy-hitters in RPA, with Automation Anywhere probably being the premier, followed by Blue Prism, and then UiPath. Of those three, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are very expensive, but the accomplishments are the same. UiPath is pretty affordable as a buy-in, with the accomplishments being the same.

Overall, each has its own uniqueness, strengths, and weaknesses, but when it comes to looking at it on the financial side, Automation Anywhere is probably one of the most expensive to have an all on-prem solution. We're all about on-prem. It was very expensive to stand that up.

We went with UiPath.

In terms of differences between Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath from a functional standpoint, there really weren't any. They all do the same thing. It's coding in .NET, coding in Java. They all have their strengths. Automation Anywhere stood out because of its high cost. 

When we put them side-by-side, everything we could accomplish in UiPath, we could accomplish in Automation Anywhere. Each one is making its own jumps. For example, when we were evaluating them, UiPath was making leaps in OCR and reading natural language, and Automation Anywhere was taking a back seat in that. But Automation Anywhere was advancing in its process improvements. Now, they're doing it the other way around, and Automation Anywhere is jumping forward ahead of UiPath. So they play this game, but either one is equally good.

My advice would be "due diligence." Make sure you read, and make sure you engage the Automation Anywhere team and the support. We didn't, but we didn't have to. But do due diligence based on cost, and scale, and really what you're going to do.

RPA is the hot word right now. Everybody wants to do RPA. But what we did is just put it into our arsenal of other tools. It's not the golden bullet. It's not the one that is the end-all. It's just one of the tools in the arsenal that IT has. That's why we chose not to spend $250,000 and, instead, to spend much less. Sometimes RPA is the answer. At other times it's system integration, and at other times it's just raw development. That's what I even tell our customers. That's our toolkit. Our arsenal is developer's RPA, and we use a third-party integration tool as well.

Just the developers were using it in our organization. They tout it as it's user-friendly: Give it to a user and they can do it. But we didn't discover that at all. We couldn't just hand it to a user, so our developers were taking the processes and applying them with development code behind them. Automation Anywhere has "record-the-screen," but when our users were doing it, they would move an icon and it wasn't smart enough to find the icon that had moved.

In terms of extent of use, it was used daily for some of our daily processes. The finance process I talked about earlier is one example. We automated that and that robot ran on a daily basis. As for increasing our usage of RPA in general, we scaled up pretty quickly. Internally, we have four or five robots running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Accounts payable is our primary focuses for automation, and we are looking forward to this report. Thanks.

We are in the early stages and need to see how it goes for future bot building especially Bot Store today.

• Very comprehensive with different platforms especially SAP and Oracle EBS. 
• The digital worker is interesting.

I am interested in discovery, and what this means for companies like mine. I think the pricing model should be more flexible.

This solution was originally introduced to help operations reduce manual tasks. After seeing positive results, we have now implemented this RPA solution in IT.

We have been able to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks completed by operations, allowing individuals to move onto tasks which cannot yet be automated.

Currently, under Automation Anywhere, we only use the Bot Runners and Bot Creators. This ensures we can automate processes without the need for manual interaction.

I would like to see more stability around scheduling a bot to run headless. I believe version 11 may be more stable and have less issues when trying to run headless.

It is more stable now than it was three years ago. So far, I have no major concerns and am looking forward to upgrading to version 11 in Q3.

As we have a small number of bits in production on version 10.5.4, we found it easy to scale. Version 11 will provide a load balancer, making it easier for us to run a pool of VMs to complete a task.

We mostly use it for operations right now. We are looking at possible IT RPA use cases.

The tech support has improved over the years. I believe the tech support to be sufficient right now.

I wasn't part of the original PoC team who completed the initial setup. 

After joining the team, we engaged in two upgrades to deal with stability issues. We found this a painful process as we were early adopters. This meant that the install wasn't stable. To resolve this, we decided on an approach where we would only upgrade to a major release six months after its release.

The deployment is quick. You could complete this in a weekend. Realistically, you need a week to prep and another week to triage unexpected issues.

Our implementation strategy has been to upgrade development, confirm everything functions as expected, and only then upgrade production.

We have a team of six, which consists of developers, a tech lead, and manager. We have set up a run support team to handle maintenance and bot stability issues. Their role is to get the bots back up and running in the event of an issue.

It is expensive. Automation Anywhere has reduced the price slightly, as we have grown. However, the price is still excessive enough that we are engaged in PoCs on other tools.

I wasn't part of the initial conversations, though I believe we proceeded with the number product in the market.

As a total package, this is probably the easiest solution to start with. Even if you add something that you will not need, e.g., Bot Insight won't be required until you have more than 50 bots in production. Even then, see if you can develop this through in-house metrics.

Generally, it is used in the banking and financial domains for Oracle and Java-based systems. We also use Automation Anywhere for integration where a third-party tool has to be triggered.

The are many features and we can do many things with it. They've now included the code so we can add some additional code. That's good.

I'd like to see the OCR feature be perfected. Today we get an accuracy ratio from OCR of around 40 percent to 50 percent only. Better OCR would be very useful in the industry because most of the documents in the banking sector are scanned and hand-written and they want to compare them with other documents.

I would also like to see them provide more support: profile documents and guidance. It would also help to have use-case demos available publicly, not on the Automation Anywhere website. Overall, better promotion of the solution would be good for Automation Anywhere.

Stability depends on the local system. It is good. But when we switch the system, when we go to Citrix or we jump to RDP, the modern stuff, it breaks sometimes.

Comparing Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I would go for Blue Prism's stability. It is very stable. Once the coding is done, meaning all the flowcharts are designed, it will work, it will not break. But sometimes, Automation Anywhere fails. It doesn't take the values from the input at times.

The scalability is good.

Automation Anywhere's technical support is good. They provide it via email. There are no issues with it. They have opened their offices for technical support in India. Usually, within 24 hours, we get a resolution via a reply to our email: "This is the issue, and this is the solution," or, "This is the way to do it." It usually doesn't take longer than that.

The setup is usually straightforward, not complex. If you're doing a basic installation, it takes around one hour. If you're installing MetaBots or any plugins, it will take some more time.

The team we work on develops on the weekend. We have Control Room access so we deploy from there. It doesn't require a team though, an individual person who is working on a given project can also install it.

We don't see ROI immediately. It takes from six or seven months to one year to get the ROI from what we develop. The client needs to trust the RPA solution. Once they trust it, the process, etc., they have more confidence and say, "Okay, you can do automate these other things as well." Build a client's confidence takes time.

But at the end of the day or, really, the end of the year, we can see that the ROI is there. There are benefits and they can see the benefits.

Licensing is not done by us but by the server team. They provide the infra and they manage the installation and licensing because licensing is very costly. It's a very confidential thing. They cannot share the license with everyone.

If I compare it with Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is cheaper. Blue Prism is very costly. Automation Anywhere's pricing follows the market, not less and not more.

It's important that all processes are documented properly.

In terms of maintenance, our policy is that we do two weeks of hyper-care. After two weeks it's over to the client and they maintain it from there on. But for those two weeks initially, if there are any errors we will change the code and deliver it. But the maintenance is good. We don't need to modify many things.