Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are currently working on a vendor bill reconciliation process. It is in production now. We are also working on an incident management process for customer service. Within the customer services, there are four or five different processes that we are working on. All of them are incident management but for different categories at different levels. The next use case that we will be working on is bank reconciliation, and then we are planning to expand into HR for onboarding and recruitment. These are unattended robots. 

We are able to integrate it with other products through APIs, which we may not have thought about. For example, there are some in-house solutions that we have for which we have built APIs, and we're able to integrate those APIs with Automation Anywhere. We didn't expect that we'll be working on that but it happened.

The ease of use for the end user and the very low complexity in trying to build a bot are the big factors for us. We are able to work on a project, identify a use case, come up with a design spec, and execute and build a bot within a span of six to eight weeks. In nine to ten weeks, we are able to go live, which reduced complexity. Once we go live, the user interface and the user experience are extremely good.

Their bot runners could be made to handle multiple payloads at the same time because if I want to run multiple parallel operations, the number of bot runners that I have to buy just keeps increasing. It is adding to the cost. However, there is a possibility that we don't need that many bot runners, and we can run multiple operations in a bot runner. This would be a great addition to have.

I have been using this solution for six months.

You get what you paid for. What it says on the tin is what you'll get inside. As a customer, you will not be disappointed. If you're thinking that you want to build rockets using Automation Anywhere, then you will be disappointed. As long as you know your business needs, the automation that you want to focus on, and you understand the product's functionalities in a good way, you will not be disappointed.

Scalability depends on how many parallel processes you want to run. A bot runner basically runs a bot. How many bots can it run? How many of these need to run in serial? How many of these need to run in parallel? This information will determine how much you have to scale. Now, if you're willing to pay a lot of money and have multiple bot runners, that means for each and every bot runner, you can have multiple processes running at the same time. So, if you are willing to pay, yes, you can scale. It depends on your budget. The product works whether you're on 1 bot or 20 bots. The product just goes off and does its thing. That's not a problem.

If it is 1 bot that you're running once a day at 10:00 in the morning, then you need one bot runner. If you have 20 processes that you're automating and these 20 things have to run throughout the day at different points in time at 10:00, 12:00, or 2:00, you can still run them with one bot runner. In those use cases, scalability is not a problem. Scalability becomes an issue when you have multiple processes. If a reconciliation process needs to run along with the general ledger balancing, month-end closing, and everything else, and all of them need to run at the same time, then you're looking at about 10 bot runners running 10 different bots at the same time. If you're willing to pay, you can get what you want, but it becomes a very expensive affair.

We have 15 to 20 people who are touching the application for various purposes. We have business analysts, developers, testers, and the external implementation team. We also have business users.

I have used both UiPath and BluePrism in my previous organizations. Automation Anywhere gives me the flexibility for both on-prem and SaaS, and the difference is not huge for me in terms of performance, security, and all that stuff. It gives me the flexibility, but honestly, on paper, all these three products pretty much do the same. There is a plus or minus 5% difference here or there, but you'll not go wrong with any of these products.

The initial setup was very straightforward. There are specific things that they ask in terms of the environments that we need to build in our typical Windows server, that is, what kind of memory and what kind of processing capability we require. I can't talk from the SaaS perspective because we have an on-prem deployment, but giving on-prem equipment based on the defined specs is pretty much child's play. There is nothing complex about it. It is very easy for developers who understand the platform. You can quickly roll out something and get it live, but you need to understand a lot of logic and the complexity behind the applications such as ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce, etc. 

We started off with an implementation partner, and our experience with them was good. They had about three people in their team, and we had our business people who were giving the requirements. We also had our technology people who were basically acting as the bridge between our business people and their developers.

We are expecting a significant ROI by the end of the year. 

From a business angle, understand what is it that you need. Where do you see inefficiencies? If you're going to fix inefficiencies that are going to be fixed as part of a larger company-wide transformation program, then use the transformation program and fix those inefficiencies as part of the existing solution. If you think that that larger transformation program is not going to touch some places or if that larger transformation program will touch some of these inefficient areas but not in the near future, and you want some immediate wins, then going in for an RPA tool is a good decision.

At the end of the day, the business needs to be aligned with why you're making the decision, and where and what is your priority? What is your sense of urgency with respect to the places where you're implementing it. For example, in my office, we are working on customer service. There is a massive transformation program going on right now, but that transformation program is touching sales, marketing, finance, and all those areas. It is not touching customer service at all, but customer service has its own inefficiencies. So, we introduced automation in customer service because it's not being touched by the transformation program, and we don't want to keep waiting to gain the ROI of whatever we can get or the reduced cost we'll get from customer service. For example, if I'm going to implement a massive cloud ERP like Oracle or SAP, then I will fix the process as part of that cloud ERP implementation and not wait for a bot to be developed.

From a technical perspective or an integration perspective, use an API to directly communicate between the apps, if you can. You don't need a bot or an RPA to do what an API can do.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for building Solutions involving RPA bots. We have implemented two standalone infrastructures each with A2019.16 Control rooms. 

Multiple Developers are working using the tools and commands in A2019 to create bots that will be deployed for clients to address their business requirements.

The infrastructure is running on the private cloud . 

The control room is running on the latest Windows server and the latest Windows SQL server is running the control room database.

Developers use VMware Virtual desktops to execute their bots. Chrome and IE browsers used by the developers.

Clients approach us to implement Automation Anywhere for three main reasons:

1: FTE reduction
2: Improving AHT 
3: Quick implementation and getting started on their RPA journey.

We have seen AA bringing immense value to the clients once operational. Bot deployment is easy and controlling Access is easy with RBAC with the recent additions. User groups and user management is on par with tools like Blue Prism & UiPath.

From a development perspective, the web-based approach is easy to deploy. The downside is that it is difficult to troubleshoot as logging on to the clients has been reduced.

It's comparatively easy to find developers who are accustomed to working with AA compared to other RPA tools.  

A2019 Control room

1: Single installer for all components and it installs all pre-requisites- Makes life easier as only admin access is required from the IT team to complete the installation
2:RBAC - Each component access can be controlled via Custom roles. I have created roles for developers, schedulers, admin, testers are all in a single control room.
3: Inbuilt credential vault with encryption is easy to implement and manage.
4:Recently included features of adding Security groups from the Active Directory is a lifesaver for the Control room administrator. Users are managed at the AD level with no overhead tasks of CR admin managing users.

A2019 Bot Agent

1: Easily installed but requires admin rights. 
2: It can be installed on a server now as the option to add multiple users is enabled in bot agent installer files

Verbose logging of bot compiling and deployment from the control room. Events occurring during compiling, pre-processing the bots should be logged in the control room or bot launcher logs.

Exported bots packages are not updated. Each package must be validated independently upon being exported from one control room to another.

Moving away from Client-server architecture to web-based deployment compromised developer experience of app reliability offered by 11.3.X flavors.

Desktop app experience >>> Web experience. Developers are not pleased. 

I have been using A2019 for 4 months.

Stick to long term releases.

Easily scalable on-premises.

Customer support is excellent and have helped on multiple occasions.Raising a ticket through through partner/support portal is very easy. Frontline engineers are quick to respond and access the issue mentioned in the ticket.

In my experience , most of the cases are resolved by frontline team and rarely get to involve their escalation team. Case resolution time differ vastly based on the complexity of the issue being reported and availability of the support engineer. 

Getting quick support/response is difficult and most of the calls are pre-scheduled. Categorizing a support ticket is crucial to get right resources for the issue. You will not like a platform engineer supporting a bot development issue and vice versa.

Enhancement requests via support requests are time consuming and might not see daylight till next minor/major upgrade.  

knowledge base articles available for troubleshooting known issues can be improved. Articles are not sorted properly and finding the correct KB for a known issue takes lot of time and effort.

UiPath, we switched due to organizational use.

Simple installation.

In-house.

Setup: A2019 is very easy. A single installer does it all.

Cost: Cheaper compared to Blue Prism and UiPath Orchestrator.

Licensing: Floating licensing 

We evaluated Blue Prism but it had a high cost.

Too frequent updates and major changes in each update is frustrating.

Our case was downloading the invoices from an Oracle Application.

It involved web and desktop applications and the setup was done in a Citrix, where the AA tool and required applications were installed in a secure environment.

Using Object Cloning for a web application, we extract a record of a company code for which all the invoices need to be extracted, based on month and year. When the company codes are available then all the invoices were extracted, applying the proper logic in the Oracle environment (Similar to SAP).

Proper logging and exceptional handling were supported.

Testing was done in the Dev and Test Environment and finally deployed to PROD.

The Bot was scheduled as per the customer requirements in the Control Room, to be executed as per the demand.

It has improved a lot by automating repetitive steps and hence saving a lot of quality time. 

It's very easy to use and all of the employees can easily get involved in the process, whether they are a developer, support, or have an HR background.

Almost all the easy and complex processes can be automated.

For each employee, the tool is useful if they have some redundant or repetitive tasks to perform on a daily or weekly basis, such as timesheet submission or shift allowance extra. It's a BOT BUDDY, as it is called in our organization.

It's very fast and takes no time to execute a lengthy process.

It's secure; all of the passwords and UN are secured.

The tool is simple and easy to debug and run.

The Automation Anywhere University is vast and we can easily get support from other community members.

Free certification and tutorial videos are readily available and are free of cost.

The Control room is valuable, as we can schedule the bot at any time and give access to anyone from anywhere.

The Recorder feature helps to automate without any effort and is very robust and precise.

The automation is very fast and in no time, it executes the process and hence increases the SLA by a vast margin as compared to other RPA tools.

IQ Bot is a very high niche tool and reads any kind of scanned copy and gives the output with more than 95% precision. It's very simple and supports Python and NLP for adding extra features.

Metabot helps to make reusable components and can be used as a function wherever needed.

It supports Dlls, VBScript, Python script, and macros.

Bot Insight helps to get the analytics in a more enhanced and visually attractive way.

The simplicity of the tool is a plus point, as it does not require one to be from coding background to work on it.

I would like the AA tool to be more proficient and a single entity tool that does not require DLLs or some script to be written separately where it is not capable. It should have more commands, which should remove the dependency on MetaBots or other scripts so that everything is available in the tool itself. This would save time.

All the time working on the tool requires internet connectivity, and it will be great if we can work offline. Offline development would be helpful.

More features like AI and ML should be included, as well as additional features to automate Citrix applications and mainframe applications.

I would like to see more Excel commands available.

Introduction to dictionaries and other data types should be included.

I would like to have a ready-made framework available so that less time is spent to develop the whole framework for the processes.

In terms of robustness, the bot should be efficient enough to deal with the code breakdowns. This could be done with more exception handling features and a ready-made framework.

More tutorials with complex scenarios and ILT training would be an improvement.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The product is very stable and runs without delay, failures, or system hangs.

Logs are maintained both locally and at the server level.

The client and server connection is smooth.

Scalability is wonderful for AA, we can easily add the extra robots as per the transaction load without impacting the process.

The customer support and technical support are very helpful and service is available 24/7,  around the clock.

Communication is very good and their knowledge of the tool is in-depth.

Support teams are pro-active and they have a vast network of partners.

We did not use a different RPA solution before this one.

The initial setup was easy, as per the guidelines shared by AA, including the minimum system requirements such as OS level, RAM requirement, SQL Server, and .NET requirement. This information was shared via the documentation.

When finding any problem, their support team is very fast and cooperative in helping to resolve the issue ASAP.

Our company directly consulted with the Automation Product teams for RPA implementation and COE implementation in our organization.

ROI is high; usually, one process automation is equivalent to three FTEs in our organization.

It's cheapest among the competition, although bargaining is a must.

Different licenses are for Bot Runner and Bot Creator, which saves on the cost.

We evaluated UiPath and Automation Edge.

We found AA to be the best among the others in terms of pricing, licensing, support, and tool capability.

Automation of AP 3 Way Invoice Matching Process. Details from PDF invoices with the corresponding data in terminal. This project involved applications like Outlook, Aurora Terminal, PDF reading by IQ Bot, and Excel. The current scope of the project was to process around 600 invoices per day from 20 different suppliers which has saved a lot of time for the end-user. It has been deployed in production and the customer is pretty much happy with the performance of the bot.

On-Premise installation of CR with 1 runner and 2 creator license.

IQ Bot

16GB RAM

It has improved a lot. We could identify a lot of manual processes that can be automated for our customers. The scope of automation by using Automation Anywhere has become wonderful. IQ Bot and AI sense are the incredible features provided.

The features and the architecture of Automation Anywhere make it easy to analyze any process and conclude good candidates for the automation. The flow chart view helped our customers understand the code pretty easily. The handover or knowledge transfer also becomes very comfortable. 

• The most valuable features I see on the actions added have a lot of commands that were unavailable in older versions.
• The concept of packages with the flexibility of adding our own package. The packages for running Python Scripts, different packages for excel, and it has the option to work with Excel if it is not installed in the machine.
• Exception handling with try, catch, finally and many other actions introduced.
• Concept of different data types.
• The different views for writing code like Flow or List or Dual.

1) We have encountered some issues in the actions like Terminal Emulator-> Send Key -> Page Down/Up not working.

2) We found difficulties while copy-pasting commands after the end of "IF" condition and "Loop".

3) A scroll bar will be good in the "Flow" tab.

4) When any command is double-clicked, if the command opens in a popup window as we had in AA desktop versions, then that could have saved some space for development as the code writing section seems to be less which creates difficulties when there are loops in the loop.

5) Email trigger was also not working.

I have been using AA for four months.

Currently, it is a beta version but has pretty good performance stability. There are issues in some packages. I hope with all the updated packages the solution will be much more stable.

For example: Terminal Emulator-> Send Key -> Page Down/Up command is currently not working.

Excellent.

Supportive but takes longer time to respond.

I always used Automation Anywhere from version 10.5 to A2019.15

It was easy and straightforward.

In-house.

ROI of the current project delivered saved 4 hours of time per day of the end user.

The setup cost is less than other solutions in market

Blue Prism. I personally did not like the way and features provided for developing bots.

It's an awesome solution for automation.

Currently, our primary use cases are for the automation of medical appeals and charge processing. 

We are currently on the 11.3.4.2 version in our production environment in a HA configuration. We use bare-metal servers for our production Control Room. All of our bot runners are Windows 10 virtual machines. We are in the process of adding A2019 IQ Bot and Control Room servers into our production environment. 

In our Dev/UAT environments, we have added A2019 Control Room and IQ Bot servers in addition to our v11.3.4.2 servers.  

It has allowed us to generate additional revenue without having to hire additional people. Our fleet of bots is able to complete the work of roughly 40 FTEs. Without automating these tasks we would have had to hire additional staff or offshore this workload. 

We have largely targeted processes performed by offshore contractors in order to reduce our reliance on overseas workers. Where we have automated processes performed by onshore workers we have been able to reassign impacted users to more productive work. 

I don't think one feature is more valuable than any other. In my opinion, the value is in the totality of the platform. It is easy to use for our developers with a well laid out UI and many canned tools. The Control Room is very easy to navigate and mostly intuitive to use. 

The AA Client is easy to install and configure. I have found it very easy to integrate into our environment. And with the right vision and direction can be used to automate very complex tasks with plus 95% reliability and uptime. 

I am currently on 11.3.4.2 and the analytics feature of AA, Bot Insights, needs improvement. It is not easy to implement. It is not intuitive for the developer as you have to mark variables for analytics. Because it is very clunky you either have to build "helper" bots to display your bot analytics or use another platform like Tableau. 

I would also like to see improvement in the segregation of roles. I still do not understand the login in not allowing the Control Room Administrator to also be a Bot Insights Administrator. 

I have been using AA for 15 months.

I have found no stability issues with Automation Anywhere.

I have found the platform to be very scalable. We have seen no limitations thus far.

Customer service and tech support have always been responsive, knowledgeable and quick with a solution.

This is our first RPA platform.

I found the initial setup to straight forward. Automation Anywhere has been a great partner through the entire process.

In-house implementation

Our ROI was roughly 10 months.

RPA solutions are not cheap. There will be a large cost to implement any RPA solution but ROI can be huge and very quick if you are not timid. Do not go slow. Embrace the platform and it's huge potential and your RPA program will be a cash cow for your organization. 

We did evaluate UI Path and Blue Prism before choosing Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere provides a tool for RPA. We can create software bots that mimic humans. The RPA solution is created to work for repetitive tasks and to use human resources for a creative perspective. Automation Anywhere provides the best feature to make a software bot for processes. We use it for SAP, HRMS, SQL, etc.

Environment: we have a V11.x environment and A2019 cloud-deployed environment on AWS Cloud. Right now we are doing a migration process from V11.x to A2019.

Automation Anywhere provides an RPA solution for my organization. We automated many processes through Automation Anywhere in which productivity increased. We also implemented the IQ Bot by extracting invoice data to CSV format and uploaded it to Oracle E-Business Suite. We implemented Automation Anywhere in many department processes. We have two unattended bot runners. We implemented more then 40 processes until now. I used both V11.x and A2019 and I like more A2019 than V.11.

Automation Anywhere provides many features for automating processes.

1. V.11 has three different recorders but A2019 Automation Anywhere created an all-in-one recorder called Universal recorder which more reliable to use.

2. One of Automation Anywhere's best features is the IQ Bot. In V.11 we created many instances & train many groups. In A2019 Automation Anywhere updated IQ Bot to provide more accuracy. They included Python scripting for validation. Before that, we used Macro for validation.

3. Automation Anywhere provides more commands in A2019 and also provides a feature called Packages through which we can update commands that we need.

Automation Anywhere changed OCR features in A2019. My suggestion is to improve the OCR command scope and usability. We use OCR for PDF data extraction as we use in V. 11.x product.

Automation Anywhere has a perfect structure of working. Automation Anywhere has the best product structure. It also provides support for customers and they respond in 24 hours.

They still provide updates on packages to get more accuracy in process creation. The automation has already improved very much.

I have been using AA for 1.5 years.

Through Automation Anywhere, we can create stable bots for processes.

Through Automation Anywherl, we create bost for process and it very scalable & secure. 

I only use Automation Anywhere tools V 11.x &A2019

The initial setup is easier than the migration. We have to follow the steps given by Automation Anywhere for the initial setup. If we have any issues with the setup, Automation Anywhere provides support.

We implemented in customer environment. 

We have to calculate ROI before the process creation to get clarification and to understand the benefits of automation. 

Automation Anywhere provided the best quality for products like iPhones. 

Before using Automation Anywhere I checked Blue Prism & Ui Path but I preferred Automation Anywhere because it is best in quality. It also has IQ Bot for unstructured data converting in structure.

Use case: Extraction from Main Frame Application

Solution : 

The bot will log in to the email box and then picks the invoice no, order invoice amount, and surcharge details. 

Based on a single line item and multiple line items, the bot will log in to AS400 and feed and check all the information. If there is a discrepancy then the bot will update it based on the tolerance limit. If there is no discrepancy, the bot will accept the orders. The bot will validate costs in Excel and AS400 application and it will allocate cost for each invoice.

Easy to access: Without the need to download and install software on a local machine, we can access the RPA application from virtually anywhere.

Easy to use: Automating a business process is as easy as logging in, clicking, and automating any kind of business.

Value for time: with the help of Enterprise A2019, we can get instant value. We can log in, set up automation, and go live within minutes, giving an immediate return on your investment.

Scalability: With help of Enterprise A2019 is a highly scalable application, we can deploy a few bots and automating any kind of business processes.

1) By using Workload Management in Automation Anywhere a lot of manpower was reduced. 

2) Credential Manager used to keep customer/client information's more secure.

3) The product is dedicated to the business user and comprises advanced capabilities to offer an intuitive interface for the business user and bot developer.

4) This platform is easiest to use, avoids complexity, and ensures fast adoption & rapid deployment. 

5) It not only fulfills the requirement of the digital workforce but also be flexible to evolve with the business needs.

1) Needs some improvement in IQ BOT:

* while uploading input files we are facing issue with grouping even the same kind of PDFs

* consuming of CPU utilization and requiring more RAM

2) It is not able to use OCR effectively and has limited usability.

3) Handwritten documents are still a drawback.

4) Some of the control room GUI can be improved, it is also difficult in terms of control room management.

5) If Excel gets hanged Automation Anywhere does not give any notification.

6) Needs improvement in image recognition.

7) BOT insights taking more CPU utilization.

I have been using AA for three years and five months.  

Automation Anywhere is a stable RPA application.

Enterprise A2019 is a highly scalable application, we can start small by deploying a few bots and automating any kind of business processes.

We are satisfied with their customer service and technical support.

We have used Blue Prism for Automation. Cost wise it is higher than Automation Anywhere.

A2019 has zero installation required.

We didn't look at other options while choosing Automation Anywhere.

UiPath and Kryon.

There is only one option Automation Anywhere for cost-effective RPA.

Our primary use case is to automate the Client's workflow of reading a ticket from ServiceNow and then assign it to different bots which in turn performs the validations of the tickets with respect to different regions of the client's parameters. After the completion of the validations, the bot will update the ticket as per it's status and then send the hourly output report to Client's operations team. In between, if the bot fails, system exceptions or some business exception scenarios, human team will do the rest of the task.

Automation Anywhere has improved my organization in the following ways:

1. Repetitive tasks have been automated and hence the employees work in crucial logical thinking processes.

2. Tasks now don't depend upon the unavailability of certain employees/colleagues to be completed. Also, bots can run all day long which also affects the overall budgets.

3. Centralized Backup, Security & Disaster Recovery, Bot Insights, Workload Management, ROI Calculator in COE Dashboard.

1. IQ Bot, Automation Lifecycle Management, Workload Management, Centralized Backup, Security & Disaster Recovery

2. Image Recognition and OCR activity

3. Drag and Drop activities eases the task to write codes.

4. Control Room is very useful for bot's activity insights

5. Easy to use activities and almost all the artifacts available in the official AA's docs and forums can solve complex codes.

6. Certification exams are too good and almost cover all the required knowledge to be sound in working with Automation Anywhere.

1. User Interface can be simpler.

2. Master Certification now paid (previously it was free of cost) which sometimes creates hesitation to go for it.

3. Though the courses in the certification's learning hub are great and awesome, there is some more space for adding more explained contents.

4. Citrix automation lacks the perfect end to end automation.

5. Web Automation fails when an automated Screen Resolution is changed to some other resolutions. 

6. Pricing with respect to the competitors is more.

I have been using AA for two years. 

Performance is up to the mark with limited constraints of applications to be used. An application must be of a certain version provided by certain organizations and thus discontinuation of the said applications affects a lot while maintaining the bot.

Scalability is very high. There's no limitation of the number of bots to be used simultaneously and in a single port/machine/ID.

Technical Support provided almost all the solutions we had.

We had used a different solution for the following prominent reasons:

1. Cheaper price for same type of tool.

2. Citrix Automations.

3. Unavailability of required configurations that supports Automation Anywhere

Since the IT team and Infosec looked up for the setup, I don't have much idea about this.

Since the support for IE is discontinuing soon, we are now moving the base code to EDGE Chromium. ROI will be recounted after that. Previously as per the efficiency, we decreased the numbers from the process.

The installation is a bit of hectic process and also the price is more in market compared to other competitors.

UiPath, Blue Prism, AssistEdge