Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

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.

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.