Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We use it for automating Excel sheets and for uploading some data.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we minimize the manual work and improve workflows. 

The benefits depend on how you use it. When standard automation is not supported, you sometimes need to use robots to eliminate the human interface or human interference in the processes.

We integrated Automation Anywhere with ERP. We had Oracle EBS. There are always challenges, but we can overcome all the challenges. We have the technical expertise to do that. Overall, it works fine. It is good.

Automation Anywhere has saved us time, especially in distributing Excel sheets to multiple users and sending emails. The consolidation of these Excel sheets used to take a lot of time. It would take us a day to consolidate them. In case of errors, it would take one and a half days. With a tool like Automation Anywhere, we can do the consolidation within hours. If we have everything in the portal, it will do that quickly.

I am happy with most of the features. Notifications and triggers are especially good.

You can learn it quickly. All resources are available on the web. It is a matter of time. If you want to learn more, there are enough resources available online. You can log in and learn. 

It is user-friendly as compared to the other products. The time it takes to train non-technical employees varies. Simple training will take a week. 

It is a cloud solution. It is a good platform.

It is constantly improving. It is AI-embedded. They can further improve the AI. It is already at a certain level, but it can be improved.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three to four years.

I have not worked with any other solution. I have a little idea about UiPath, but I have not worked with it. 

It is mostly in the cloud, and it is mostly deployed on the Microsoft cloud. They also have their own cloud.

In terms of maintenance, every software needs to be updated. Before upgrades, you should do stress testing and be aware of the changes. You might have to update the robots as per the changes.

It is subscription-based. They have different schemes. The price depends on how you negotiate with the local partner or local representative in your country.

It is a good product, but it also depends on how you use it. It is all about how you educate and train people. It also depends on your approach and training. 

Automation and AI, especially Generative AI (GenAI), is a trend. Everyone is looking for automation. So far, I have not worked on it. In the future, I might work on such a project.

In the beginning, automation is a bit difficult because you need to understand the requirements and other things, but later on, it gets easier. Once you have a deep understanding of requirements, it is easy to do automation. It is just a tool. Before using it, you need to have a good understanding of the process. You need to understand where the gap is, what you want to do with it, and how Automation Anywhere can help you. 

It takes time to implement automation. For example, if you are using Automation Anywhere OCR, it takes time to understand different kinds of documents or invoices. It will sometimes fail. In one or two cases, it might fail. There might be a failure rate of 2% to 3%. In such scenarios, some users might have a negative impression. You should be able to address such challenges. It is a matter of time. You need to have patience and a little bit of tolerance. It is not perfect. Nothing is perfect in the world. The users need to be educated on it.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten. 

We use Automation Anywhere to automate tasks in our organization.

We needed to connect with multiple bank websites to retrieve payment confirmations. However, banks, being banks, did not provide direct API access or placed significant restrictions on such access. Therefore, we decided to utilize Automation Anywhere to collect the data and integrate it with our automated system.

At the time, all of our automation goals centered on connecting to these sites, which required a great deal of manual effort. Despite the low cost of labor, it was error-prone and highly subjective. As a result, using Automation Anywhere helped us automate this process, eliminating the need for human intervention. We were able to achieve all of our initial objectives using Automation Anywhere.

The learning curve for our non-technical users was a couple of days.

We aim to automate our activities that currently require human intervention, which is susceptible to errors and inconsistencies. This approach is similar to how others have successfully employed AI or RPA tools. Our primary objective is to ensure that our processes are scalable and repeatable.

We successfully integrated Automation Anywhere with our local database. Like any implementation, we faced some challenges with change management, understanding, and other issues, but ultimately, it was a success.

Automation Anywhere helped save the organization time and money.

The overall usefulness of Automation Anywhere is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

The price has room for improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere is scalable, but scaling it can be costly, making it a matter of economic viability for many organizations.

The support is good.

Positive

The implementation was completed by the Automation Anywhere team.

Automation Anywhere is expensive.

We also evaluated UiPath and Selenium, but we ultimately selected Automation Anywhere because they had more experience in this area, which gave us greater confidence that the project would be successful.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten. Automation Anywhere is a versatile and powerful platform, but it exceeded our organization's budget.

Maintenance requires three or four team members because the target systems tend to change.

We use Automation Anywhere for our Finance department.

Automation Anywhere is cost-effective.

The ability of Automation Anywhere to provide automation at scale is quite good.

Automation Anywhere integrates well with APIs, RPA bots, and business applications.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption by over 20 percent.

The customization feature should be made more user-friendly in order to enable the use of external reference components.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

Automation Anywhere is hardly scalable.

We are a partner of Automation Anywhere and find the pricing to be reasonable. There is an additional cost for using OCR.

We evaluated UiPath, but the cost is higher compared to Automation Anywhere.

I give Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

Users of Automation Anywhere should possess programming skills. The learning curve for the solution is straightforward. Training for Automation Anywhere does not exceed two weeks.

If the solution is maintained by the business user, I believe that robot automation processes are better, as they do not require the same skill set.

We use Automation Anywhere in our Finance, Pricing, and Purchasing departments.

Automation Anywhere requires a significant amount of maintenance. The maintenance is performed by me and two of our business partners and requires approximately ten minutes of testing per day to ensure everything is running properly.

Our organization is planning to transition from using Automation Anywhere to Blue Prism Cloud due to our business requirements. I highly recommend Automation Anywhere to other users.

Automation Anywhere is a suitable solution for businesses.

We are a company operating in the banking industry and we use the platform in deploying robotic process automation for executing various functions from customer service management.

The automated processes include ticketing, data extraction and analysis, and business intelligence, among others. It helps us automate our functions and this has brought a positive effect into our workflow and we have been able to grow our productivity.

The platform is versatile and users across the spectrum and in various industries are able to acquire it and use it intuitively.

The platform is easy to deploy and use in every organization and when we acquired it, it brought instant impact and our employees were able to productively integrate it into our workflows.

It has helped us relieve the workload on our human workforce and thus ensures that they remain productive and motivated at all times thus work efficiently.

Brings business process automation and this helps in scaling our operations and ensuring that we are able to work 24/7, thus improving our productivity.

It has brought artificial intelligence and this allows us to improve our planning and decision-making process, ultimately growing our company and the way we execute our workflow.

The starting price, which is a one-off fee is a bit high and this may deter mid and small-sized companies from acquiring and decide to shun the platform. It ought to be broken down into monthly installments, where the billing of using the platform is done monthly. This will increase its absorption in the market.

The vendor should increase the training and other engagements with users before they acquire the platform, as this will simplify its usage further and ensure that there no hindrances in using the platform. 

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past four years.

Customer support is available and this ensures that any user experiencing any challenge in using the platform is helped and becomes able to use the platform in a reliable manner.

It's affordable and this accords all users a chance to use the platform and grow their portfolio and withstand competition in their respective industries and markets over their rivals.

I have worked across many different type of RPA use cases that we have done, starting with finance, manufacturing, and banking. The use cases are tremendous. There are many. 

Thankfully, being a technical person, I've also learnt a lot about business processes. Personally, in my career, I have not just developed my technical expertise, but also using RPA and the Automation Anywhere tool, I have engaged a lot of vision as to how the business and the finances process work across different direct industries so far.

I can talk about a use case that we have submitted. We have a Bot Genius entry that we have where the bot reviews your bot. So, it's a bot on top of a bot to check whether the bot that you have created is up to standards or not. So it is an interesting concept that we try to bring in where we identify pain areas, because a lot of time is been taken up by the reviewer team to identify what's wrong with the code and whether the code is per the coding standards or not. So, we thought of automating and trying removing one layer so a bot can check whether all the coding standards, proper guidelines, and naming conventions of variables are being sorted out. So, we brought along this bot as a finalist to see if it can take home a prize.

We have improved on IQ Bot collectively with the normal Taskbot that we use. How it got started was that we have a lot of scanned documents to input for our solution. So, I used to get a lot of scanned documents, and extracting or reading the data from those has always been a pain area. We always used to bring a manual person in to do it. Once a manual person did that activity, it was brought into Excel where I could run the bot. With the entry of IQ Bot, it now takes care of my scanned documents, which means IQ Bot does the OCR extraction and gives my data to the Automation Anywhere Taskbot. This means no manual intervention and end-to-end bot processing, along with a happy customer at the end of the day. We provide these services to multiple clients, so we have been doing this for all of our clients.

There are many valuable features of Automation Anywhere. It is very easy to work on this automation tool on a day-to-day basis. I've seen that people, even from a non-technical background, can code it swiftly and at ease. 

We have IQ Bot which is very interesting and unique. I really like IQ Bot and the concept of A2019 that we have just seen. I really hope to get to work on that. A2019 seems to be very interesting and easier than what we are doing here now. It is a service available on the cloud, which is even better.

I would like a couple more features where I can talk and the line comes up automatically. I can just put on a mic, like in "Ok Google". With "Ok Google", I can tell it to please open an Excel spreadsheet with the header read. If this is there, then I don't even need to sit on a computer, I can just dictate my commands and it will automatically come up.

Right now, it's more sequential, where it works in a sequential manner. If they have something dynamically, where it run parallels, I'm not sure if it's out there yet, but It would be a plus point if we could have that.

With A2019 will get both options (writing lines of code and dragging and dropping). So far, we are just doing sequential coding. I'm just writing line-by-line code. But, there is a pain area if I want to go back and have to understand where the issue started, it becomes a little cumbersome to identify. That's where A2019 comes into the picture, you can drag and drop start to make a flow. This will be a useful feature.

I've been working with RPA for the last six years, starting with Automation Anywhere.

Over the year, I have seen that Automation Anywhere as a solution that has improved a lot. Wherever we have identified bugs, timely resolution, and the interaction with other applications, we have seen a difference from our original solution where we started off. Now, it's completely dynamic and very stable.

I can introduce IQ Bot. I can introduce my Python script that I'm trying to work on. If I'm not able to make it with an Automation Anywhere, I can go out-of-the-box. I can try to build in my own programming language where I have expertise or I might not, but in this way, I am putting it across different scripting mechanism and running it the same bot. This is something which I think is very good and we can scale again to a different level with different use cases.

The technical support team has been always very helpful. I write to them and they reply back to me usually in an hour or two. That's a good response that I see as compared to other RPA vendors that we work with.

We have clients who have dedicated CSM managers at Automation Anywhere in case something is a very high priority, which is always the case. So, the customer support team is always there to help us out.

One of our primary jobs is to consult our clients. We look at the use case and base it on their use case. We do recommend which tool and special functionalities of the tool that they can go for. There have been many times when we have found the use cases to be very complex and the applications very different and a bit complex, but then we have suggested the Automation Anywhere solution and that has worked as well.

The criteria of deciding whether RPA should be used goes from the old story that your process should be rule-based, input/output should be structured, and it should be logically described. If it falls into these three simple buckets, then RPA is there.

We do have an infrastructure team who supports us with the installation. If you have the basic requirements for the infrastructure, hardware and software, the installation process is pretty smooth. We have user manuals that are pretty well prepared where I can read them, then install it. That's good for the setup or for the person who is installing it from their end. It's sort of easy. You would require a bit expertise from someone at work; a person to help you out.

I have worked on other RPA tools as well. Mentioning some of them: Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism, and AutomationEdge. In day-to-day life, since the RPA has evolved so much, right from the beginning, we had many different tools. We keep fluctuating from one tool to another trying our hands out in other domains as well. However, Automation Anywhere is one of my favorites.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). I will keep one out for my feature to get voice converted into the command.

The primary use case is automation in respect to the financial sector. We have been operating with trades across globe. 

Right now, we have been upgrading to version 11.3.2. Two months prior, we had been using version 10.7.5.

We have automated a few processes, which take four to five hours to do manually. When we automated these processes that time became less than one hour with RPA. This was our goal. We have reduced the time frame.

The best feature is the MetaBot, which we've been integrating and calibrating with a lot of stuff. This has been helpful to us.

I like the object cloning.

The development period is shorter.

It is easy to fix bug issues which you encounter in the post-production process.

MetaBot still needs to be optimized, though Version 11.3 did integrate all the commands into it. We are not able to see all the lines of code which are executed in MetaBot. 

Integrate .NET functionalities instead of installing Visual Studio, which is an additional resource to us.

Needs more Excel features and functionality.

We are moving onto Python machine learning and would like to have additional functionalities to be added, especially to MetaBot. This would help for the use cases that we are working on.

There are some discrepancies in respect to the variable creation of copying and pasting the code. However, in version 11.3, these type of disturbances has been removed.

The stability is up to 90 percent. It's not a meeting 100 percent because we keep on upgrading. Whenever we upgrade, we have to fine tune a few of the products because we have been interacting with some of the older applications and legacy parts. In those cases, it is somewhat failing. 

The application is very stable in respect to automation. I am able to automate the Terminal Emulator, along with the Linux part, of a command prompt, the web application, and even the simplest application. It has been stable. However, in few cases, it has some pitfalls and stability get reduced.

Scalability is up to the mark. We have been building our solution from the low to high level. It is scalable.

Technical support has been a great asset. We have been encountering migration issues associated with database activities due to computer database back-end. We have contacted the technical support with database issues due to object cloning and SAP Objects. They have been helpful.

Their response time is within one to two hours. In some cases, it has dragged on up to six hours. I haven't found it dragging on for one to two days.

We kept on hiring resources to do the same type of operations, which increased our team resources. So, our SLAs were not up to the mark. the client that we were supporting was not satisfied. Therefore, we pushed toward RPA to optimize a few areas, such as onboarding employees, company access, and reading invoices from the PDF files. 

The documentation is very clear in respect to the installation and migration. If there are any bugs or anything goes wrong, the technical support team helps. The installation and setup are very straightforward. It was very easy for us.

We have seen ROI as we keep on increasing bot utilization and building our own solution. We have optimized a few bots and integrated them into our solution. These bots have helped us prioritize our operations.

We are increasing our SME's time. Depending on the bots that we code, we are sometimes increasing or decreasing our developers' time.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is more flexible in development and production. The development timeline is short. 

UiPath has a lot of functionalities, but a lot of those functionalities can be replicated using MetaBot.

Blue Prism uses a workflow functionality, which seems like chaos to me.

I would encourage a developer to learn RPA and enhance their knowledge. If they start with Automation Anywhere, it will be easy to continue learning on the tool. It is harder to transition for another RPA tool to Automation Anywhere.

I'm responsible for the digital practice within the tax business. We are building a lot of our solutions using the Automation Anywhere platforms, both with IQ Bot as well as the regular RPA, in which we offer it to our clients.

I belong to the tax practice. My role is to see how we deploy technology to increase the efficiency of tax departments and help build new revenue streams from technology in the process . We work with our clients offering digital solutions in the tax space. That's really what I do for a living. We have had a lot of success using Automation Anywhere products. We've actually built a few solutions that were done on the EY cloud, which are offered to clients as a managed service.

I'll just talk about one use case using IQ Bot. Interestingly, every time an employee travels in India, the tax that you pay on each invoice, that is an amount that you can claim from the government as a tax credit. To be able to extract that information and put it together into a return can be massive. Because there are large companies where thousands of employees traveling every month and so on, what IQ Bot does using Automation Anywhere, is it reads through multiple sets of invoices, which can be in any format, extract the tax amounts, then it creates the return which is then used to file with the tax authorities. We don't even stop at that. We also compare this data with what is the actual travel that any company has. In many cases, what we've seen, there is a lot of tax where invoices have not been received. We also plug those gaps. There is a lot of value that clients derive using that aspect as well. It's not just about getting your tax right. You need to find where the leakage is and get that back to the company.

 I can tell you what our clients are always looking for. The big challenge with our clients is that while ERPs are only handling 20 to 25 percent of the requirements. There is a lot of unstructured and semi-structured data that exists in the ecosystem which they can't leverage. That's really what they want the bots to do. How can they complement the current IT infrastructure in a good way to be able to get that outcome?

IQ Bots are extremely powerful. We are using them increasingly more where we're about to look through a lot unstructured sources, like PDF documents, scanned images, contracts, etc. We are able to take the data out, then use that toward processing structured data and creating insights for our clients. 

They have done a fairly good job on the RPA space, but more and more, the whole cognitive AI space and machine learning are where I see the industry actually going. I'm sure Automation Anywhere is also focused on that topic, but we would like to see more coming down the pipe, as early as possible.

So far, we haven't had any issues that I want to highlight, so I'm assuming that it's quite stable. It is working as we desire it to work. 

I think we have more than 50 clients who use our solution at this point. So, the scalability of the platform is well proven.

Every client is looking at scalability because they don't want to do just one or two processes. But, you will not be able to realize the value if you just limit yourself to a limited set of processes. So, the scalability is a very important task for clients. But there are certain challenges in scaling up. To be able to identify the right use cases that bring value is huge and very important.

Secondly, the technology infrastructure can be challenging if you scale up because you always have to add new servers to scale. That has always been a challenge. Having said that, I think what we heard today from Neil, there's a cloud version available that will be easily scalable. That is extremely exciting as a developer. That will be able to address a lot of the scalability issues that we've come across from our clients.

We have two models: 

1. With many clients, we actually go and have them implement Automation Anywhere in their own premises.
2. The second model has actually proven more beneficial to lot of our clients. It is where we have set up the bots in our own EY private cloud on Microsoft Azure where we have implemented certain standard tax processes. So, we only get clients to migrate their processes onto our platform. There, we just take out the pain around the whole implementation, because it is not really relevant to our clients. They just start to get outcomes, and don't have to worry about it.

We have developed a very strong capability internally that is proving to be strong differentiator for EY in the market.

the ROI of the automation investment for tax processes is very strong as apart from the process efficiency, there is also a financial aspect of lost tax credit that our solutions help to capture.

 A lot of the clients have some footprint of the other competing RPA vendors who they want to leverage. We often come across those type of situations.

There are some inherent advantages that Automation Anywhere offers. Both in terms of the commercial structure, as well as from a platform perspective, that makes it very compelling for clients to actually look at using Automation Anywhere for tax processes. in our case, in India especially, some of our clients really want to start small. So, they don't want to start with a big bang, like 20 to 25 bots. It is always easiest for them to start with one process and one bot, go with a proof of concept, and gradually scale up. We have a very good arrangement with Automation Anywhere, where we can offer that as a partner pack, where we bundle services and the license for small processes. This makes it quite compelling for clients. 

The way the platform is evolving, we also see some technology advantages using Automation Anywhere, especially if you combine RPA plus IQ Bot along with the Bot Insights platform. That gives it a different shade compared to some of the other existing platform vendors.

I would rate it a six and a half (out of 10).

In Concentrix, my role is as an asset manager. It's very much focused on the RPA practice globally, which is why we come from enablement to delivery and support. End-to-end is something that is managed by me.

One thing I really like about Automation Anywhere is the product has actually taken leaps in the last three years. We started with the conventional RPA type of use cases. But, in the last two years, with the help of IQ Bot, and what I learned today about this Attended Automation 2.0, I think they are addressing vital key challenges that we have faced so far. The description on top of the description is what their model is. They're partnering with us in this journey of transformation. The type of technology advancement that they have done will certainly help us a lot.

They are constantly being in the BPO space and BPO and RPA are something which go hand in hand in technology. It is the right space for the utilization of this technology in the industry. While our customers are also asking for us for this technology benefit for the revenue benefit, productivity benefit, efficiency, etc. In the last two years, we have leveraged it for multiple clients, whether for telecom, healthcare or other spaces, it has been a very strong partnership that has really helped us.

RPA is something which was their best product. It was easy to config, easy to record, and deploy on the floor. With their IQ Bot, I am very much convinced that was the area where we started tapping unconventional use cases, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all those things bundled together. With this cognitive capability, we went from 30 to 40 percent use cases which we are able to address and have leaped over to a wider space of 50 to 60 percent with this cognitive bot.

There are many things which I have liked in the last couple of months that I have seen in Automation Anywhere. Something that really excites me is the new release of Attended Automation 2.2. It's a very lightweight solution. When I'm talking about the automation of the size from 2,000 to 20,000, and everyone is using the attended bot with this scale and thin client model, we can easily deploy and scale it out to the larger corporate size. So, this product is very unique and I have not seen it in any of Automation Anywhere's competitors. They came out with it.

The product is quite stable. I don't know how to code the the other products which we have used. One thing with the bot that we are always with struggling is the memory management. The Automation Anywhere product is quite stable in that perspective. Security and other things are very well managed by Automation Anywhere. The third piece is the architecture is very much centrally governed. This makes this product more robust.

In the last two years, one thing which Automation Anywhere has changed and they actually worked on is the support and enablement part. That will be the key game changer for them. Because if I compare them with other competitors who are in the space of Automation Anywhere, the customer experience (where we are the customer) is there when you need them. The support is available on time. That is where I think Automation Anywhere is wonderful.

It was very straightforward. I don't know if it was because of the training which was given or if it was because of the application itself, but it was very straightforward to start the journey of RPA using Automation Anywhere. Whether it's a complex use case or low complex use case, I think Automation Anywhere does give you that flexibility that you can start your journey seamlessly.

One thing that we are just changing now: When this automation journey started, everyone was talking about ROI. E.g., I'm investing X amount into the technology, and I'm now trying to cannibalize on efficiency. We are not leveraging automation just for cost reduction. The business is now leveraging automation to get it into this space where we were not able to get so far. So, the dimensions of ROI are not only cost reduction. The dimension of all ROI have been changed to scalability, compliance, some other new business go-to market strategies, etc. Those things are very much changed from the way it was here previously.

This is tricky. We all know who is in the quadrant and the leading there. In the last five years, we actually worked closely with them. Everyone does have their own pluses and minuses. But, if I talk about Automation Anywhere, their cognitive bot is one of their unique selling points.

We are able to sell it very easily compared to its competitors. Another piece is the stability part. The third piece is something which is the customer experience: The ease to work with it. The Automation Anywhere, as a partner, is very easy to work with. They are there when you need them, whether you are in the initial journey of automation, you are figuring out what is the right opportunity, or whether you are in the journey of deploying the bot or support. They are there with you at each of those stages.

These things really make them different compared to their competitors. I'm sure if they will continue focusing on these they will be leading in this space.

So far, it's a 10 (out of 10). If there's anything which will change, I will let you know. But so far, the experience with Automation Anywhere in the last two and a half years has been wonderful. My best wishes to the team.