Automation Anywhere Reviews

Most of our automation happens on Automation Anywhere. 

While the automation is being done, we use it as a platform. Then, depending on the number of users/ bots needed, we apply  for the corresponding licenses.

The good thing about Automation Anywhere is that any process:

1. Which is repetitive, rule-based, and only requires you to do collect/ edit information on the application frontend can be automated. 

Therefore, Automation Anywhere makes for a good use case. 

2.Wherever the process is  deterministic, with no decisions to be made, you can use it. 

It can automate any processes where 

3. Process is well established, standard, or stable, and there are not many changes in the process. For example, a simple task, such as logging into a website, launching a website and doing systematic steps on the website, can easily be captured to Automation Anywhere.  I see lot of applications, especially in finance and accounting domain.

You might have a lot of steps where you need to either extract data, repeat data, or collect data. All of those processes can be automated through RPA, and especially Automation Anywhere. You can use even automation from the server side, not just websites. The only constraint is that the process should not require human intervention and decision making.

We see the application in the 

# BPO space, 

# Finance and accounting, 

# Health care in terms of claim processing.

E.g. in F&A, if you're doing invoice processing where the entire process is manual, and the analyst has to go through the invoice to determine invoice details, discount on the payment  or a penalty should be levied. In such cases, you can scan this information through an OCR, which is an optical character recognition tool. Then, the rest of the information can be pretty much retrieved by the RPA, which means the RPA will scan the information to classify this information and fill up the  web form. This will be sent to the ERP. This is how the workflow would look like. 

Wherever you can put

# a rule-based system, you can automate all of the processes. In our company, all these processes are manual and you might have 50 to 60 people supporting this process for a mid-size company. You can automate it and reduce the manual effort by almost 40 to 50 percent, depending upon how many techs are enrolled and what is the effort being spent in order to process transaction volumes.

I have been familiar with a couple of projects where this was implemented in cash applications or invoice processing, and they could automate these steps. So, I'm familiar with some of the back-end processes and where they are getting automated.

#1.You don't have to really code anything, as it gives you a good interface (UI), because the components are already preconfigured, you  have to just a drag and drop sequence in terms of how you want to execute the steps. 

#2. There are preconfigured APIs that can be used. E.g., if you want to interact with the mailbox solution, you can have the RPA fetch attachments or email body from the mail solution. You can process attachments via test file or PDF. You can even make Automation Anywhere work around PDF, which is typically not that easy to work with in terms of extracting information.

#3. Metabots/ IQ Bots: One of the features, which we have not used too much, but available, is the MetaBot feature. These preconfigured solutions are easily downloadable, and you can just plug-and-play with a bit of customization, which also means you do not have to keep recreating and can reuse existing functionality. Some of the typical uses are that you could be regularly logging into a website. You can just download a MetaBot, as a useful webpage interface and just run it. All you have to do is maybe replace the name of the website, and in case there is a certain authentication mechanism that is being used, then provide that information.

# 4.There are multiple levels of cloning. In case screen cloning doesn't work, you can do object-based cloning or keystroke-level cloning, depending upon what parameters are available to you and what is the level of information that you capture. You can traverse between object cloning, which is the lowest, most basic form of cloning to a stroke-based cloning, which is like taking care of each keystroke-level which is made by the agent.

#1 Exception Management and Notification: When you are making a code, and there is a happy path and exception management mechanism, it would be nice if there was feedback in terms of whether this is the most appropriate way to code this. I'm not sure how this can be done, but that could be very insightful. It already gives you some screen tips, but this could be done in a better fashion, in case you are creating the workflow and then you believe a beta workflow is available or could be done. If a screen tip could be given to the coder for this sort of workflow, this would be a much better feature for Automation Anywhere. 

# 2 Type of Cloning: I've realized that sometimes when screen-level cloning is a better option, people still use object-based cloning. It would be useful if Automation Anyone could give you tips recommending fewer steps or fewer areas of exception management after you inputted your code. I'm not really sure if this is doable from a technical standpoint.

#3 Debugging: Currently, I believe the debugging of bot is a bit tricky and not very elegant, you might have to keep re-running the script to be able to identify the bug. This can be looked at, as a possible area of improvement. 

#4 Scheduling:There are two modules: the run module and the control center. In terms of scheduling and triggering, they could make it a bit more helpful and provide suggestions, e.g., if you are scheduling it, and there is a conflict, can you resolve it this way. Maybe you can get an upfront alert or something to that effect. 

#5: Stability, Workaround and fall back mechanism: When  bot breaks down, is there any of mechanisms or notifications that can be given? You can possibly choose to notify people, typically in organizations people are pretty much adverse to automation. If something breaks down, they would like to know at the earliest given opportunity that something is breaking down and piling up. They want to be able to resolve it quickly. If the resolution is going to take time, they want to be able to make some specific workaround mechanism kick in. If a bot breaks down, immediately the fallback mechanism should work too. If there could be information in terms of  when the process was out of range and somebody might need to take a look at what has happened. This is because most of these business processes that get automated are critical in nature and might have financial and operational impact. People need to know that there are working fine and not broken down. It can really have an adverse impact if they break down and nobody knows.

#6. Platform Training: My experience has been that if the person who codes the bot is not very well-trained, then they might create unstable bots. So, it's not the platform. It is just how somebody has coded the bots which can bring in lot of instability to them. I recommend that when you are using a coder that the person well-trained and have a good amount of experience already working on bots. They shouldn't be newbie or beginner who comes in to code because that will impact the quality of the code itself.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for the last three years at two different companies.

# Business process stability: Before robotic automation, the business process itself should be stable and very well-documented. Also, anytime a change is made to the process or subprocess ensure, that the RPA gets updated too. Typically, the entire process of automation might take some time, then by that time, the initial business process might have changed a bit. There could variations in terms of volume or in the process itself.

The most important thing is that before you automate something that you must make sure that it is stable, in its steady state for whatever changes might be upcoming over the next six month to year. Otherwise, you might create a bot, which will go into production,  and fail because the underlying process itself has changed.

# Monitoring and controllership: If there is no changes in the process, bots are pretty much stable and especially, if they have been well coded. In case there have been any changes anywhere in the process or subprocess, the bot can fail. This means you must have a review mechanism with monitoring in place. Once you put a bot into production, you have to monitor it and do regular sanity checks. Otherwise, you could have situations where bots have failed and you might not know, then the process comes to a standstill. In a nutshell monitoring and control is an important aspect of RPA in the run phase.

Scalability is just scaling up the number of bots, so scalability is not a problem. You can increase the number of machines and number of bots to scale up the solution, but it can be sometimes very cost prohibitive. E.g., typically, it requires a dedicated machine, and it can't be a shared environment. This can be a bit of a constraint in terms of the number of machines being used. Otherwise, the solution is completely scalable. In case the process requires more throughput, you can just increase the number of bots which are working. Also, if you are doing this properly, then you have to make sure that there are not multiple bots running at the same time which might be at cross purposes.

I don't interact with the people from Automation Anywhere.

# Procurement of the license is easy, but depending upon what you want to automate and how you automate it that might take time. Setup is not at all difficult. You just take the license and install the application, then it's ready to go. However, in terms of what you're trying to automate, how you're trying to automate it, and the complexity of the problem, the entire automation process can take time.

# Implementation timelines:The time frame to implement depends on the complexities and number of the processes and subprocesses. In a typical process, the coding, testing, and deployment could range from a week to four weeks. However, I have seen it sometimes take longer because you have to continuously keep checking and testing it. Every time the code breaks down, you have to possibly start from the beginning.

My experience has been one to four weeks as the ideal time frame. However, depending on how well the process was understood and documented, there can be certain gaps which would only become evident during the testing phase, not otherwise.

# Resources: Depending on the number of bots that you have to create and the number of the complex processes along with the given budget and timelines that you have in mind, the number of developers range from one to multiple developers. The resources that you really need are developers because they are people who will be coding. Otherwise, from an ownership standpoint, we need some subject-matter expertise for the process. The people who are subject-matter experts will be needed on a part-time basis for the developer to be able to map the process well and be able to create their technical design. Then, you will need a technical master who creates the technical documentation of how it will be coded. The number of technical masters again depends upon the processes and complexity along with the corresponding number of developers.

The deployment team may not be very big. You need just the developers and a design architect, mostly two people. All the other people come and go per the requirement stage of the deployment. There might be people who are there only for consultation. Some people might be there only to approve the solution. Whenever you bring in automation, it has to be reviewed, monitored, and assessed from the organization's standpoint. There might be people who are just doing approvals for this process deployment in case it's a very complex project, and then there is a project manager. Otherwise, sometimes the technical design person doubles up as a project manager too.

Before implementing, you do the assessment of why the organization wants to automate:

Imperatives for Robotic Automation 

• What do they want to automate? 
• What are the key objectives  the organization wants to achieve through robotic automation? 
• Is it a process optimization or is it cost cutting? 
• Who is driving the automation? Is it client-driven or is it vendor-driven? 

Then, you have to build the business case in terms of what you want to try to automate. E.g., how much can actually be automated? That assessment should be done. Even the cost and time of automation versus that benefits that you're going to get out of it needs to be done.

# Process Degeneration: When we start automating, we do a process desegregation. This means whatever processes are under scope that we try and understand the task level, activity level, and precedence details. We make activity diagrams, then try and assess out of all of these which one can be automated. So, if the automation index is pretty high, which means that most of the process can be automated, e.g., up to 80 percent, then it might make a better business case than if the automobility is only say 30 to 40 percent. Then, the cost of automation might be way higher.

# Setting the right expectations with the client: t is also important to set the right expectations with the organization. Are they new to automation or do they some prior experience with automation? Because this helps us set the right expectations in terms of the benefits which can be had. The customer might also want to understand what are the impacts if automation fails and the fallback mechanisms. For example:

• How do you mitigate or remediate the impact of automation failure? 
• What is a criticality of the process you're automating? 
• What are your points of failure and choke points? 
• What are your backup plans if things aren't going well?

The most important thing is the business case as to the cost versus the benefits of automation.

# Legal and Compliance Regulations: Also, are any legal or compliance regulations which are applicable because technically it might be feasible to automate, but legally or from a compliance point of view, it might not be good idea to automate. You might want to still have human intervention in terms of verification and validation.

# Criticality of the process: From a financial impact standpoint, things that require a bit of background investigation might be better kept as a manual process or require a human approval rather than automating it completely.

It all depends on the scale. In one project that I have worked on, we had a savings of $200,000 over a three-year period and a payback period of 6 months. The typical ratio is that one bot will replace two people.

# Licensing: One of the components of key drivers for us to renew our contract is AI or automation. As an organization, we are moving toward smarter operations.

Our pricing a year ago was $600 per license, but I am not sure of our current licensing cost.

# Set up cost: Additional costs will be for the machines and the number of machines that you are using. You can deploy virtually as well as on physical machines. In both the situations, you do need to allocate a certain budget for securing the machines and where the software will be installed and running. 

# Dedicated Machines: The machines cannot be used for anything else, because only a certain bot can run at a certain time. You need to be very particular about your scheduling of running the bots, and while the bot is running nobody can use the machine. You cannot have an agent working on a machine and the bot running in the background. The machine  has to be completely dedicated. 

# Network Bandwidth and Disk Space: Then there are the network bandwidth requirements and  disk space requirements, which are additional costs apart from the licensing and software costs. The developer is also going to charge you for their coding time too.

There are two or three more tools in the market such as Blue Prism, UI Path, but I think the preference was given to Automation Anywhere.

I have only worked with Automation Anywhere.

Understand why you are choosing Automation Anywhere, as the platforms are pretty on the same level except for certain functionalities. Also, in some scenarios, one platform could be better than another. Pick a platform and stick with it.

It is easy to use, but I realize that the effectiveness of the platform depends on the coder and how he is doing the coding. This is my experience, because I have seen that the quality of the automation is as good as the person who is using it. In Automation Anywhere, the skill set of the coder really determines how good the automation is, which is why I am making it a eight (out of 10), not 10 (out of 10). Because while the platform is feature-rich and easy to use, it is the skill of the coder that determines how well the platform is leveraged.

I' am now mainly driving AI at my company. RPA has become a bit secondary in the sense that it is a part of my solution, but most of the time, it is AI-driven. RPA sort of helps in the execution of some of the components of that overall solution. From the organization's standpoint, automation is already a part of all our solutions. E.g., our organization is moving toward automation where almost 30 percent of any deal will be allocated to automation. It will be a ratio of 70:30, where out of $100, a total of $30 dollars will be allocated toward automation and AI.

I did my certification on version 10.4.

I have used AA to automate various business processes varying from HR and AR teams to Sales.

Starting with HR, we have automated various processes from auto-downloading the data and uploading it to a database without human intervention, to combining multiple file data into one.

For the AR team, we have automated the process to download data from the server and generate the AR report, then updating the dashboards for senior management.

For Sales, we created a form where the Bid Manager would update pursuit details and the tool would pull that data and then send the request to required teams for SPOC allocation.

For HR, the automated download and upload of data (every half hour) resulted in getting the latest performance data to the BPHRs in real-time, as per their access. This helped in saving the manual effort every time a report is asked for including the downloading and sharing of data, as per the access. This way, the BPHRs would directly log into the dashboard and see the data.

Similar effort savings were recorded in other processes as well. Automation of such tasks helped in clearing the bandwidth of the users and requestors alike and saved a lot of to and fro just asking for the latest data.

Automation also resulted in tracking, analytics, and defining a structure for the processes that would help in faster onboarding and easier handover.

Object cloning, Excel, web recorders, database, if-else, loops, and string are some of the most commonly used commands, by me.

Pulling data from web pages using Object Cloning has been an absolute delight. It is very accurate and runs flawlessly.

Up until v11, the Excel commands were very limited compared to what Excel has to offer. We had to use macros mostly, to cover up the gap and avoid using keystrokes. However, A2019 has Excel Advance, which has a lot more functions and covers that gap significantly. 

We are still exploring all the new features and functions of A2019, but one thing I noticed was that it has introduced variable type. While helpful at certain places, I miss the previous method, where one variable can handle any type include a string, numerical, or boolean value.

If the option were available to use the old generic-style variable type, it would be helpful. Now, I need to create one variable for holding a numerical value and convert it to a string value to display it on a message box, which is a little inconvenient. This is purely based on past experience. Once I get used to it, I might find it better and more convenient.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last three years. Started with v10 to exploring vA2019, AA has come a long way with excellent features and updates with A2019.

For the HR process, a macro script was created to download data. But the main requirement was that the screen should be locked. As in the working of the tool should not be visible to people around. Hence, the macro script was not working, on lock screen as expected. This is why we moved to AA.

We able to able to replicate the downloading of files and uploading it to database using object cloning and database functions provided by AA.

Most of our ROIs were calculated based on the FTE hours saved since the teams were internal. for some projects it was around 4 hours weekly to 13 hours weekly for others.

The Sales team would take care about pricing, since other teams were also using AA. Licensing was modified based on the runners needed as per the projects. Number of developer licenses were fixed.

We had somebody to teach us about AA, so we directly started with it.

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.

The primary use case of this solution in my environment is to use bots to extract the important logistical information from each of the customer Microsoft Excel sheets. Next, the information is transferred, to be entered into the government official logistics documentation.

Prior to submitting the data to the company warehouse management system, it is checked and balanced. The same needs to be done before submission to the official government website.

It helps my organization to further improve the management and assigning of tasks to its human resources.

Through the use of Automation Anywhere bots, no longer do the staff in my organization need to carry out the task of transferring data from Excel sheets to our data or the government website. Thus, as all of these processes are being automated, this manpower can now be shifted to be used in other areas that can be beneficial to the company.

The most valuable feature is IQ Bot, as it allowed us to train it to extract important logistical information from customer PDF documents, irrespective of the format. This is valuable because not all PDF sheets have the same format. Many customers tend to use various formats to represent their data. Hence, with IQ bot, even with the wide variety of different PDF formats, the bots would still able to help us extract what we needed.

I hope that Automation Anywhere can further optimize its bots to help automate tasks with Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft PowerPoint documents because, in most organizations, there is a lot of reporting required. Hence, it would be great and more cost and time-efficient if there is a way to automate everyday tasks such as Microsoft Word Report Generation and Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation Generation.

Further, I would also recommend that Automation Anywhere assist users with automating tasks such as the monthly payment of essential services. For example, automating payment of utilities like the water bill or electricity bill, online.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic, as the bots can be run on multiple machines at the same time.

The customer service is fantastic and they always provide reliable feedback and help.

We did not use another RPA product prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have an in-house developer as well as a vendor team. The vendor team has a high level of expertise.

The ROI in terms of finance cannot be disclosed due to company policy but the bots have made the everyday process of extracting logistics information from customer Excel sheets or PDF files much more efficient and faster than the traditional manual method.

I advise others that even as of right now, the setup cost and licensing cost to automate bots on Automation Anywhere is steep but it is worth the investment!

We considered other Robotic Process Automation tools such as UiPath and Blue Prism.

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 primary use case is automation development supporting internal business operations at KPMG. We have 100+ live automations, with v10 and v11 deployments.

Using this solution has freed internal operations employees to do more "human value-add" work by removing mundane manual tasks. It has improved the quality of these tasks through automation and enabled us to do things we couldn't have previously done due to time and cost.

The most valuable feature so far is Task bot deployment. We hope to expand to IQ Bot this year.

Automation Anywhere's interaction with Excel is a key benefit.

Currently, Automation Anywhere's debugging functionality is minimal.  Most notable is that it works on only the top-level task (not on sub-tasks called by the top-level task).  This limits its practical usefulness.  Increasing the robustness of the debugging functionality would be very helpful.

Additionally, implmentation of a "global" variable concept (variables shared across tasks) would be very useful.  AA's variable mapping between tasks is cumbersome.  

We have been using Automation Anywhere for three and a half years.

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.

We use automation for a tax invoice process, finance process, and human resource process.

In the tax process, it collects all tax invoices from a folder, then AA reads a QR code on the document to confirm, then extracts it to an Excel sheet for the success process and failed process.

For finance, AA calculates the tax type on each project. After that, AA inputs the data into the ERP system for further processing.

For the HR department, AA will shortlist the candidates on the portal. It will then send an email to qualified candidates to follow further instructions for testing. Then, AA will collect the results of the test and send them to the HR staff to process further.

On the tax, finance, and HR processes, AA will automate collecting documents, then extract them into an Excel file, and also do the confirmation using a QR code. In the past, these processes were completed by three or four staff over one to two days. Using automation, these processes are completed in between one and two hours, using one robot. With these savings in time, the staff can do more in other areas. 

These advantages improve staff productivity and creativity. It also means that they do not need more overtime. As a result, it will impact positively on the company overall. 

It's a cloud-based solution, so we do not need any on-premises server. Having a cloud-based deployment provides more flexibility because we just need an internet connection for connecting the agent into the AA cloud.

For a few workflow processes that need credentials, AA provides more security for this. Their encryption is to ensure that our credentials are always secure and cannot be accessed by unauthorized people.

The dashboard can be accessed by several roles. User monitoring, for example, can view the dashboard, watch how many robots have failed, and other stats, but they cannot change how the robot works.

For the short term, in this pandemic era, they should have a feature to write and save directly into Word documents, Office 365, or Google Docs. As it is now, it can only save to Excel files.

In the long term, in the cloud era, it would be great if they had an API or connection into other cloud services, such as SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS. This would mean that their automation ecosystem would be more complex, helping to improve our productivity and creativity.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about a year.

Stability-wise, this is a good product.

The scalability is good.

We have not yet tried to contact technical support.

Before AA, all of our processes were done manually.

The initial setup is straightforward, as this is a cloud-based deployment.

We implemented using an in-house team.

Our ROI is approximately USD $40k to $50k.

The cost of this solution is a little bit high, but it is worth the price.

We evaluated UiPath before choosing Automation Anywhere.

So far, all the features and services match today's technology, and we expect it will remain current for at least the next two to three years. I hope that they keep this great work on RPA.