Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We did the PoC in 2016. It was mainly in the services process. We were more focused on the company billings, where there were multiple subprocesses and sub business units. We have did the complete landscape of more than 15,000 FTEs. We are talking around 153 different work types. As the main lead, I was to provide the real-time support to the customers who needs us to fill out required details. That was a completely repetitive task. We decided to conduct a PoC on that, which we did.

If we talk about the automation RPA. it definitely has worked very well for us. I'm talking about giving good savings, about more than 180 FTE savings, after implementing more than 200 plus bots. It has worked well. As an organization, it has supported us very well, and also for our customers.

Our task was very repetitive in nature. We had to fill information from Excel to some application. That was quite repetitive and the volume was also very high. Initially, we did the PoC from that process, which was easy to implement. Because it was a first for us, it was very easy to implement. That has provided good savings for us, where we have implemented 13 bots with the reduction of 16 FTEs.

There were also some tasks where we needed a cognitive approach or an OCR solution. There were some scanned documents in a PDF format. We were in the initial stages and struggled at that time. I'm talking about in 2018. We struggled to get them into the structure format.

In the current stage, there are lots of opportunities in terms of claims, insurance, and banking where we need AI and cognitive solutions to automate unstructured documents. That is a need of ours. Automation Anywhere should improve in this field so they can provide support for artificial intelligence and cognitive solutions.

Initial days, we struggled. When we started the automation for six weeks, the solution design was put on hold because of the system capability. But, they provided us good support and upgraded their systems, and now, it works smoothly.

If you ask me to rate the technical support from one to five, I will rate them a four. I will say that the technical support is good. If it is required that they provide their resources, they will send their resources to your organization to support you in terms of development and technical support. 

I have experience with UiPath too. If we talk about Automation Anywhere and UiPath, it's a completely different experience. Our work now is more for the claims and payroll processes where thought and human intervention are involved to process transactions.

This is now a completely different experience. Initially, it was a very repetitive task. Now, manual intervention is required. We have to go and read through documents. We have to read through histories. In terms of that, I can rate equally Automation Anywhere and UiPath. However, if we talk about artificial intelligence in 2019 and what Automation Anywhere is coming out with, it is great then.

The initial setup was not that great. The road was very up and down. We struggled. A lot of the features were not compatible with applications which we are using. That was the reason. This was the initial days, we are talking about 2016 to 2017. The buzz was not as much as we are having now. 

From that time until now, Automation Anywhere has upgraded their systems. They are at a good pace now. But, at the initial stage, we struggled in terms of getting things sorted. We also needed support, so the Automation Anywhere team sent some support to us who helped the developers in terms of coding and finding solutions.

Some of the features were not very well identified at that time. The Automation Anywhere team provided the support for that. Initially, it was like a rollercoaster for us.

If we talk about time, normally bots take more time than users. The benefit is the bots can work 24/7, if your application supports. With the solutions that we have now, we can have attended and unattended bots.

There are savings in terms of ROI, but It's not only about savings. It's about the customer experience nowadays. If we talk about the customer experience, your experience will be improved. There will be a lot of reversals which happen when you are processing transactions manually. When you are implementing the RPA, you eliminate those reversals. You deliver the product right the first time. That is more important in terms of keeping your organization having consistent growth. That is a very important thing. 

You will see savings, not in the same year, but in the coming years. In two to three years, you will definitely save money.

Automation Anywhere works very well. When you have a large number of accounts, have to automate, and the task that is repetitive, you can use Automation Anywhere. The features work very well.

I will rate it an eight (out of 10). We had that experience where we struggled to have the structured format of scanned documents and PDF formats. There, we struggled a lot. That is the reason for the rating. The rest, I think is perfect. The services are fine. Automation Anywhere services are good. It is easy to implement. The best thing: It's simple and easy to implement.

We generally do stuff to automate websites and SAP that we have in our company.

It has helped us to save a lot of FTEs for our solutions that we have provided to our companies. Suppose a job which was done by a group of eight to nine people on a daily basis for 24 hours was taking a lot of time, so we created a bot with Automation Anywhere. It was done with a bot working 24/7. It reduced the numbers of guys required to do that process.

The cognitive solutions that it provides.

The feature to automate the use case by simply extracting data, putting it into SAP, and automating the data. This is mostly website based, which is pretty easy for us to work on.

I would like to see some more with the Excel commands that they have. Also, with the cognitive, that is coming up we need to see what else they have, e.g., some SAP features to enhance the product more.

It is moving to a stable version right now. Version 10.5 was more stable and version 11.3 is having some glitches. But, we are moving to a newer version. Let's see what that brings to the table.

Technical support could be much better with the responses which we get. Also, guys come to our company and help us whenever we have some big challenges, so it is quite good. However, it could be done in a better way.

Now, it is a big complex to download the product and install it, then again to install the patches. So, it takes a lot of time to download it. But, the newest version that they are coming out with is web-based so it will be quicker on the cloud. As the CEO said, "Booking an Uber takes more time than downloading Automation Anywhere and even making the first bot."

It has provided us ROI.

It is a bit close, but I feel UiPath has an edge over Automation Anywhere.

I would rate the product a proud seven (out of 10). It could be improved more. With the newest version, we need to check the product. I am giving it a seven (out of 10) as a developer and because I'm using it daily.

I lead the automation team in UI. In the UI, we automate mostly PDF and shared devices, then most web applications. For large volumes, we mostly automate PDFs.

I have enjoyed using all the features of this tool, not just one feature, e.g., object cloning, Excel automation, and the web recorder. 

The tool is very easy to use and mostly user-friendly. I like that when using it I don't need much expertise.

With the IQ Bots that use AI, I want to see more features using that type of machine learning and artificial intelligence in their products.

It is a very scalable product. With the market, every time and every day, we can scale it.

It is very easy to interact with the support team for Automation Anywhere whenever it's required. Sometimes, if the training is required, they would visit our premises. We can also visit their premises. In terms of training and product support, if you have any challenges as a developer, they help all the time. It is very easy to connect with them.

It is very straightforward.

I have seen a huge difference in how it is improving products.

I use them mostly. I would recommend it to all my friends and team. I encourage team member to use it, even those who are not from a technical background. They can also move to Automation Anywhere, use, and can learn from it. If they go to use Automation Anywhere University and other training tools, the training materials are available for them. So, it's very easy to learn as well. Different platforms and technology members have also moved to use the RPA platform, and are now using the Automation Anywhere tool.

I'd give it a nine point two out of 10. There is still a way to go for Automation Anywhere where we can see improvement. Mostly, we want to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning. Now, I can see only this mostly in the IQ Bot where we construct the data from PDFs. I also want to see more features where we can use the artificial intelligence in automating tasks as well.

Being a bank, we have a lot of processes which we have automated. I am a Project Manager for HR functions. The majority of my processes are in terms of income and skills processing. Those are all automated.

We were one of the few to start up this journey with Automation Anywhere. Interestingly, the majority of our processes were determined to be boring. People did not find them to be very interesting. Those processes have been automated. Being a bank, we have some sensitive processes which we cannot automate. Those processes have been given to human intellectuals. Otherwise, the majority of our processes are automated.

It has boosted our processing time by seven times. Typically, something that has taken eight to 10 minutes now can be done in two to three minutes. So, we have seen some value-add there. 

Resources are being processed earlier and involved in a different type of a governing kind of role. This sort of builds a layer for them to move and scale up. The solution is fast and easy to deploy. Our use cases lasts for two to three sprints and we can churn out solutions very fast.

We do not have a server type of an environment. We use a desktop version of Automation Anywhere which is easily customizable and quickly built-in. We do not have to go through major security iOS applications, etc. These are all enterprise applications that we have onboarded. Each of our functions take their responsibility of building their bot and deploying it. 

It is fast and reliable. 

Older versions of Automation Anywhere required specific skill sets to use it. It is no longer like that.

The version A2019 GUI allows you to drop and drop.

As far as version 10.1 is concerned, we have been using it for the last two years. It is okay. As an organization, we look forward to next version. However, being a bank, we have certain processes that we have to follow. We are happy with the version that we are using and haven't experience downtime.

We have been looking at processes which can easily transition into a large scale environment, where you can have cloud or hybrid model. However, being a bank, some of our processes are critical and we would like to hold those on-premise. This limits us with our usage of Automation Anywhere.

The support that we receive from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We have specific customer success managers as a platinum partner. We have support extended to us when we have any type of concerns and issues. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. It didn't really affect our processes at any levels, which really helped. The process was fast and easy.

The support team kept our team calm.

We have an in-house Automation Anywhere team who supports us.

It saves us man-hours, headcount, and processing time.

We have automated the equivalent headcount of 500 FTEs since we started. Those people haven't been laid off. They are just doing different types of work activities.

We did not evaluate other vendors beside Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere was a pioneer in the market at the time that we were evaluating vendors. It was a good match.

Explore the new version A2019 that is coming out. It is user-friendly and can be onboarded quickly.

I would love to use the next version A2019 that is coming out.

Our primary use for this solution is mainly to support our email vertical, so it helps automate the management of financial, commercial and operations between our multiple domains using logistics and libraries and data points.

We just use it to get data from different sources and massage some data with some specific protocol. After that, we simply have to put back the data. It is a system for data treatment and to notify the proper business handler.

The product has helped our organization tool-wise to expand capabilities and offerings. To keep it short and simple, I'd say there are useful features that will definitely help us as we do more development in the near future.

The most valuable feature is that we can automate data manipulations. We can save IP's, we can save time, we can use manual reports. The main benefit of this tool is that it is a robust solution.

The feature I think that helps most is the ability to integrate. There is SAP integrations, SAP application integration, web application integrations, and email integrations. We have multiple features — there are a lot of features. They are also very good features which enable us to do many things.

What may be able to be improved is that sometimes there'll be a connection that is not from our clients and servers and that's a situation they may want to address. The solution for that may need to be built differently based on the needs from organization to organization. In that case, it is not particularly or specifically about the tool. It is just something I could see they might help enable.

That the product is now available as a cloud-based solution is a good feature that they added. So with that and new features already coming out, I don't have a lot of suggestions. I will have to work on this new version, then let's see if there's something I think they need to add.

There are a number of current tools which can be improved because they have many limitations. Like some better controls in emails, and better support for features in Excel and PDF. Especially things like that which I need more than new features.

I'll be enabling the current features, but I'll have to see them and what they do before I can feedback more.

The product is not totally stable. I feel like it could be improved on in that way. It's just stable, not very stable, and that's the difference.

The problem is mainly handling enterprise data. There can be connections which are not the nature you would expect. It is not from the client or the server but something else. There can be performance issues.

Scalability is a trend we are experiencing in IT. We have to have a scope for a project and we have to create a scope again in the future millennia. So I'm waiting just to see the functionality of the additional features in this package.

We have never had to use the technical support as we were able to work with and implement the product. We act as consultants and supply technical support to clients.

I do not think it is straightforward to start working with this product. It's a little complex to start out working in the database. After this when you gain a little experience with the product, then you will understand it and be able to smooth out your processes and how you approach development and it will be easier.

We are a consulting organization, so we have experience with this product now. We have started up administration for the solution for many other clients. We did not use an external reseller or integrator and did everything in-house or ourselves. So we have worked it both ways: we did our own deployment and then we did deployments for other organizations.

Right now we are just mainly focusing on our internal development with our workforce only.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

Now they have a nice tool that is mostly stable with most of the features I could want being covered in the functionality of the product. More features are coming soon with this release so that's why I rated it an eight. The product right now will probably be better with the release.

I think it would be very difficult to consider the product a nine or a ten. To reach that level and to connect with innovations in the technology that are coming is very hard to anticipate and solve. There is always a limitation to what they can develop at once, so they will delay some work.

If I'm talking to a user who is not comfortable with automation tools, I recommend that they try the Automation Anywhere tool only. It's very easy to learn and easy to implement. It is not something you are making a sacrifice to use. It is a good tool.

We wanted to automate as many business processes as possible within the finance organization since the office that we work in today is called the finance transformation office. We transform all the business processes of finance for a better, simpler, scalable finance organization. We are constantly pursuing transformation of the finance organization as far as Cisco's changing dynamic business models. We are a predominantly product-oriented organization. We transformed our business models from products to software and subscription-based business model.

Users can develop for themselves. This is the end stage goal for our organization: To have our finance users developing automation for themselves. Automation Anywhere lets us do that, as users can develop the bots by themselves.

I have taken one of the finance processes, which is completely Excel driven, and consolidated more than 20 Excel files of large volumes of data by drawing pivot tables and all sorts of yield curves on the Excel files. I converted this structured, formulaic process to the bot. There are features within the Automation Anywhere which let you do types of keystrokes, formatting in Excel sheets, etc. The process used to take more than 30 hours for the user to complete on a quarterly basis. With the development of this bot, the bot can run the entire process within an hour and a half. It saves about more than 20 hours of time for the user. This is just one example. There are other bots saving hundreds of productivity hours per quarter. 

It lets users add value with their time other than focusing on downloading Excel files, consolidating, and drawing up formulas. Since everything is structured, these easily are incorporated into the bot's work.

Anybody can develop a bot by themselves. It's not a technical language oriented program. Specific skill sets with language learning skills are not required. Any finance person can get in and develop a bot with a little training on Automation Anywhere. They can go in and develop themselves. 

In the version that we have, there are some challenges with the browser-based applications, the cloning of the objects, and the solution's stability. 

Automation Anywhere must be able to maintain a consistent resolution. 

The latest edition, which is enterprise A2019, has better analytics and the cloud all integrated into the bot framework. 

The client version is getting challenging to use because you have to maintain a lot of infrastructure. You must have the machines to deploy the client. However, you don't need a large infrastructure, if you can do it on the cloud. 

I would like a Bot Store for MetaBots. The MetaBot feature needs to be expanded. E.g., I would like a copy/paste from the top row of Excel where I don't need to write a keystroke. Instead, I could just use MetaBot for this.

We have already launched more than 20 bots live into production. They are up and running. We are doing very well with these. We are in a convenient spot for delivering 50 to 60 more bots in the next couple of quarters.

Because it can accommodate 200 to 300 bots, the scale is not a constraint for us. It is scalable.

The technical support is good. I have contacted technical support of Automation Anywhere quite a few times during the process of developing a bot. Their responses were good and up to the mark. There were very responsive and proactive in resolving issues. They were on top in terms of supporting the features of the applications.

Our finance organization needed to transform itself to meet the changing business models. We established the finance transformation office to meet the entire organization's financing transformation needs. As part of that, we identified a couple of quarters ago that RPA was one of the software solutions which could help us automate several of our business processes. This is apart from the re-engineering and re-architecture that we do to transform our entire business process. Now, there can be some use cases within finance which can be transformed through usage of automation software, like Automation Anywhere.

We have streamlined several activities, cutting down on manual activities. This has happened over the last six to seven years.

I was not part of the setup process.

We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI.

At the end of the day, finance analysts expect faster outcomes while having their manual work taken away. There should be a more diligent way for them to add value and contributing to the organization through analytics and providing valuable insights. This removal of manual work can be done using a bot. That is the goal.

Our enterprise IT team chose Automation Anywhere as our product for doing automation. Automation Anywhere is one of the best, leading automation software tools for developing enterprise automation.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere.

I am excited about the Microsoft partnership that was announced today. Excel is a daily core tool for us. With an automation plugin, this works like a miracle for the finance team. The potential is unlimited, e.g., Office 365 and Internet Explorer will have plugins.

We have an ITMS Service Desk that has a lot of tickets coming to it. As an enterprise, there are too many applications there, which are being used by employees. This service desk enables them to address all the issues which they are facing, whether it is on the application, infrastructure, etc. There is a group who manages all these tickets coming through ServiceNow. These numbers are huge. To manage these services or change requests, we use Automation Anywhere when it is not possible to use either an API or do scripting.

My company is using the latest version.

I have one application that does not publish any APIs. However, there is one activity where every employee needs to be registered in that particular application. Now, we use Automation Anywhere for this. So, we get the data from the source data using the front-end of that application through the Automation Anywhere script. Then, we do registration of the employees into that application. Previously, this was being done by people on our service desk. Now, we are using Automation Anywhere to do this activity. This has saved a lot of time. 

Just for this use case, we had around 300 tickets coming in every month. We went live last month and the tickets went down to around 80 as of August 20th. While it might touch around 100, over a period of around six months it will become zero because we have not removed all the legacy data. We are just doing it from the go date of when we went live. The target is that it will be zero after three months. So, it's working well.

A work in progress is a request which came in from employees using ServiceNow to create a VPN account for them. Today, this is a manual process where the service desk people have to raise a ticket to another team who create the VPN account for the employees. This is why we are currently automating this process.

I like that it can login to any system as a robot and do the work that humans can.

Automation Anywhere is unable to connect to the database directly. What we are doing now is directly writing the PL/SQL scripts and trying to push the data from the database into Automation Anywhere. This feature is available in UiPath, but not in Automation Anywhere.

I am unaware if Automation Anywhere is able to read unstructured data, build some intelligence around it, and then push it into the application. We do have some requirements in our organization where invoices are scanned, and based on the data, hard copies of the data are fed into some applications. Today, we are using different tools for these features, but if it is available in the tool, then that would be good.

We are a midsize company in the Indian market running one or two bots. 

From a scalability perspective, I don't think there will be any issues. It is pretty good.

Support-wise, it is great. 

We installed this on a cloud infrastructure and had a lot of challenges. However, there was a dedicated support person who was helping us to do the installation.

The initial setup was definitely complex. Layman people cannot do it. People with a bit of knowledge need some help from Automation Anywhere.

It took a month and a half to do the basic installation of this software along with some internal processes related to our firewalls.

We had a dedicated person from Automation Anywhere who was supporting us at the time of the initial installation.

While our Automation Anywhere's implementation is in a premature stage, it has really decrease the workload on our service desk. We are looking to decrease the ticket counts too. I definitely see this solution helping us in the future.

Our tickets have decreased. We have more than 40 uses cases. We definitely see some ROI in the future from this product.

In the Indian market, I feel that for mid-size companies, such as ourselves, that having multiple bots costs a lot. If Automation Anywhere wants to expand in the Indian market, they will need to look at their pricing.

One of the major reasons that we went for Automation Anywhere was a global MSA, which our company has with Automation Anywhere. They wanted us to use this particular tool for our end customers too. 

I am part of an internal CIO team, where our customers are our employees. However, as an organization, we had a global agreement with Automation Anywhere where they wanted to deliver this tool to the end customer as part of their solutions. Because of that agreement, we went with Automation Anywhere.

My team (who uses both Automation Anywhere and UiPath) says that UiPath has better modules and functionality than Automation Anywhere.

I'm seeing some results in the use case for whatever we are trying to automate. So, it has been really helpful.

Don't use an RPA tool for any problem statement. I've seen people use any RPA tool available for their problem statement just to say that they are using some type of RPA. E.g., We had a use case where we had to read information from an Excel table and generate a report, so people started using Automation Anywhere. However, it would have been better in this scenario to use Power BI by creating scripts.

We use it for back-office administrative business processes, within order-to-cash. We have an end-to-end process automation that supports customer billings. We also have task-based automations that process either customer credit memos, or credit and re-bills, working within SAP.

We started with the solution on-prem and we have shifted to an AWS cloud environment.

It has allowed us to establish more reliable business processes, when transacting in our enterprise systems. It has improved the reliability of our monthly billing processes that, in the past, was dependent on manual, nine-to-five types of activities. We can now schedule those activities, process 24 hours a day, and then we review exceptions. I would emphasize and underscore the reliability aspect and the ability to process 24/7.

It is highly reliable, both from an uptime perspective and regarding data-quality and input into the systems. It's doing the same thing, every time, with 100 percent accuracy.

To put it in terms of hours, we are approaching 10,000-plus hours of capacity on an annual basis.

There aren't any features that are specifically valuable. We are not using IQ Bots.

On the cognitive side, some of their competitors, when we were originally shopping, were a little more advanced in that space. Making use of probabilistic outcomes and presenting them to a business user is a feature that, at the time of our evaluation, did not feel like a strong, mature solution for Automation Anywhere. Nevertheless, they won our business. That is one feature where I feel they are trying to make investments to address those gaps.

The platform has been very stable. There have been a few Control Room issues when adding new VMs, but overall it's very reliable. I'm pleased with the performance so far.

We are pleased with Automation Anywhere's ability to scale. We are convinced that it is a platform that we can scale, and we are convinced that it can function and operate within our environment.

We have six-plus use cases in production today. But those business processes are very complex. They are touching many systems. Our definition of a bot is a business process, not a task. Some companies call a bot a task. We don't do that, we call it a business process. We have six business processes that are running, which are very complex in nature. 

Regarding the scalability of a single business process, we have found that to be very easy. We have found Automation Anywhere to be very friendly when it comes to that. We add capacity in the form a virtual machine and a license to scale and meet the needs of the business.

We have not dealt directly with Automation Anywhere's tech support. Historically, they've been pretty good. I'm relaying that from my systems integrator and my helpdesk support. I always ask if they are getting what they need when they need it and the answer is yes. I'm pleased with the feedback I'm hearing.

The original setup was easy. What was difficult was adding licenses. I went a month where I was paying for licenses that I couldn't use, for various reasons. That was painful.

I'm not familiar with how long it took to stand up the environments. It was pretty simple from a PoC point of view, with the free trial licenses that were made available to us by AA in conjunction with their preferred systems integrator. That was fairly painless. Standing up the production environment was relatively painless as well. We had no problems whatsoever there. However, as we scale and add licenses, we have challenges.

Based on our use cases, we have seen a return on our initial investment for the PoC, and we are continuing to leverage the platform as we scale.

Price is where I'm least satisfied. Other vendors are more willing to offer discounts.

We looked at Blue Prism, UiPath, and WorkFusion. Those were the vendors that were strongly considered when we were evaluating Automation Anywhere's capabilities. There was a laundry-list of others, prior to those, which we evaluated from a market-research point of view.

We valued the market presence of Automation Anywhere. We valued the ease of use, when we were thinking about scaling out to the business. The recording feature, while not a developer tool - it is a tool for a business user who may not possess the thought process of a developer - we valued that in our evaluation. Those were the two major factors. 

And at the time, the commercial terms as well, the one-year commitment, was appealing to us when we were shopping the solution. We didn't want to sign a multi-year deal on a technology platform that wasn't proven out to our business. That was another factor which gave us comfort as part of the decision-making process.

At the start, I advise picking a portfolio of use cases to start with. Some will over-perform and others will not. Think of it in terms of a portfolio approach to sell the concept to your organization. My second area of advice would be: Do not automate systems that you do not own or control, unless you are willing to accept the degree of maintenance associated with that automation.

The biggest lesson I've learned so far from using it is that it's not as easy as the salespeople say. The biggest challenge is that not all automations are created equal. To give you some context, there are automations that I still don't have in production which have taken me over half-a-year to build. You talk to a sales guy and he says, "Hey, you can build an automation and be up in two weeks." Yes, but will that automation add a drop of value to the business? Probably not. The challenges are around stabilizing our complex automations.

Anything Google-related is challenging. I didn't really receive any help from our systems integrator or from AA when it came to the Google platform. We paid, extensively, to learn the hard way.

As part of our CoE, we rely on a third-party for development and maintenance of our automations. That means we have no users of the solution in our organization. The third-party has access to Bot Creators, they have access to our development environment and Control Room. They promote code to production and maintain the automations.

We have plans to increase our usage of the solution in the future. It is our intention to build an internal capability, over time. The processes we are looking to automate are more within order-cash and back-office. We have some administrative, travel, maintenance. Our IT ticketing system spawns maintenance; there's also account-creation and maintenance. That's an area of focus for us. And we're exploring reporting capabilities which are on the simple side. That's the area where we're targeting internal development and building an internal competency. It's what we characterize as simple automation use cases.

Overall, Automation anywhere is pretty good. It's not perfect but it's up there. I don't have a point of reference, other examples, but I think it's pretty good at what it does.