Automation Anywhere Reviews

Automate Business processes pertaining to various business units. We used Automation Anywhere Control room and different versions of AA 10.x and AA 11.x to deliver Robotic Process Automation Solutions for different clients. Automation Anywhere helped multiple clients to save a lot of data entry time and have automated almost every repetitive task. AA control room helped to manage the operations of both Attended and UnAttended automations and have helped a continuous run of the bots saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Automation Anywhere helped our organization to get our training and implementation needs successful by providing both community edition and partner edition. Automation Anywhere seamlessly handed off exceptions to employees from Automation Anywhere bots. It helped to better manage  Automation Anywhere bot capacity, as well as to reuse and repurpose the bots in the cloud. 

It helped in Monitoring Automation Anywhere bot progress and report on bot usage and value in the form of Insights provided instant details of the savings and work in detailed analytical charts.

A 2019 dual-mode is very useful and the Control room type of setup for use of A2019 Client is very useful as it eliminates disconnection issues. Also, the broad range of Commands and elimination of the need for Metabots is also very helpful in Automating the increased number of variable types cover an expanded range of web and window components. 

Bot insights and IQ bots are both valuable features if implemented in a cost-effective way for larger enterprises, Bot insights provide analytical details of the ROI that is generated by running bots and IQ bots help to automate document processing in an intelligent way minimizing the cost of document processing and hence saving a lot of employee time and money for any enterprise with a large volume of pdf data.

Version A2019, the Number data type variables should be available to display in "Message Box" command. This will help in debugging. At the present, a type conversion is needed to display it in the message box. There should be an efficient way to integrate AA 11.x. meta bots into AA2019.

Also, the Master certification should be provided free of cost for partners. More practical samples and examples of bots using new features in A2019 should be available in people Documentation. A2019 presentation material for proposing A2019 as an RPA choice should be provided to partners.

I have been using AA for six years.

Excellent

Straight Forward

7

We used AA for all of our healthcare clients for multiple use cases. We have automated most manual steps of Claim Adjudication, Claim Pre-Work Validation, Overpayment Recovery, Triaging, Quoting Census, etc.

In the front office side, we have automated Provider Calls as attended solution which helps Agents to take calls hassle-free while Bots gather the required information from multiple applications. We have automated KFI process where AA OCR identifies the CMS1500 form run it through IQ BOT and further post it on the target application.  

By automating most of our LOB's on the healthcare side and putting it on production, we have saved millions of dollars and were also able to achieve FTE benefits. It has improved our quality, AHT, and was also able to achieve target TAT and SLA. 

We have successfully processed 10 million claims through unattended BOTs. We also saw significant improvement in Agent performance for provider calls where we deployed attended Bots. Overall, Automation Anywhere has been great for us and helped us in generating revenue as well. We had recognized by Automation Anywhere as Innovation Partner of the Year - 2020 in Payer Segment which helps us in selling our solutions to new healthcare clients.   

There are many features of Automation Anywhere that were found to be most valuable like WLM, PDF integration, Advanced Excel Commands, Terminal Emulator and its commands, Interactive Forms building features of A2019 which helped us in developing UI for our front office automation and integrate it with multiple rest APIs. The new features which were introduced in A2019 like Data Table, custom DLL, IBM Watson Speech to Text, IQ BOT, Document Extractor has been impressive. The option to use the Python Script has been very helpful.

We noticed slowness in a few of the commands like Object Cloning, Web Recorders, etc. on which Automation Anywhere can work to make it more robust. There are improvements required in the WLM solution provided by AA, which can make it a more robust queuing system and the system should retry by itself in case of failure due to system error. There should be the option of selecting credentials by passing variables and not just limit it to selection. Retry mechanism should be included in Enterprise 11.x version which helps developers to reduce the number of lines of code.

I have been using AA for 4.5 years.

Whatever product they launch they make sure that it is 99.9% stable. The stability of this solution is pretty high.

It is scalable for sure and has the capability of becoming the world's number one RPA tool.

It was nice interacting with CS/tech support. Most of the time they resolves issues within 24 hours.

Before AA, we tried a few other RPA tools but those have few challenges in terms of security and interaction feasibility after the AA worked for us nicely.

The initial setup is straightforward and does not necessarily requires technical knowledge.

In our case it was both. The level of expertise was 9 out of 10

We saved millions of dollars and had FTE benefits.

The licensing model and cost are very impressive. Now, you do not have to worry about infra setup cost like Server, Database as it comes free of cost with the A2019 cloud version.

We evaluated BP, UiPath, Pega,  etc.

One word for Automation Anywhere keeps shining and helps your customers/partners to automate & gain more.

We are using MS 2007 Windows OS mostly with IE and Excel operations. Anyone can write code with AA software with basic coding knowledge, we just need to know which command will help to build the next step. We had developed almost eight major processes and a few POCs for different clients. As we worked mostly with Web and Windows applications, we had used most of the commands related to Web and Windows applications. We can say bot accuracy was 95% in the final result. Bot consumes around 12 minutes to process 1 application, where if a human performs the same they would take a minimum of 18 minutes on average.

AA application is very good for running the application on a schedule. But a few times, the client requirements were 24/7 so it stops every few days. We found three drawbacks with the product in production:

1. For 24/7 running applications Bot Insights won't be generated.

2. For 24/7 running bot stops every few days, it might be an environmental issue or something.

3. the Same name of Mebabot cannot be uploaded to CR.

4. We tried to upgrade to 11.3.4 but there were few bugs while performing actions in Excel. (You may have fixed later stages).

WLM & Device Pool, where multiple devices perform the same thing parallel and complete the tasks at the same time. The Credential Manager for security is one of the most valuable features for storing credentials and providing security between the developer usage and future maintenance where passwords expire every 90 days. There is no need to touch the code and just update the CR locker section. CR UI is also user-friendly for creating deleting and updating users, roles, etc within the CR. The Audit Log section is also good for logging all the operations done in CR.

It would be better if they could extend the support for AA version 11 for a few more years, as most of the companies have tasks completed in AA version 11, and A2019 is much slower compared to AA 11. It keeps on downloading dependencies, and time-consuming while running the tasks. In AA version 11, if the bot stops uninterruptedly it's better if it could resolve itself and back to normal and process the applications.

You can give clients some more time to get used to A2019 and find and fix the concerns observed till then. That way you can add more features and easy to implement for the development team. If you ask all the clients to migrate to the latest version. Few are still thinking about the migration of code from the old to the new environment and various other factors.

Bot Insight for 24/7 tasks is limited in the AA 11 version. If this gets fixed a few more clients will renew this license as well.

I have been using AA for the past three years. 

We need to train the bot to handle all kinds of conditions. So it will behave accordingly when that situation occurs.

The technical support team were very responsive, they were available 24/7 and for severity 1 issue's for the production part they used to reply or communicate with us in maximum 45 minutes.

Other than the CR set up with the database will take little time. Client installation and configuration was straightforward.

We are a vendor team and worked with the client's environment along with their in-house team. Our clients are always happy with the product and its performance. There are few scenario's due to system instability they used to complain, we used to check and revert back to them what is the problem.

I don't remember the exact number, in one of my bot runner I had seen a $5million change.

Pricing depends upon the number of licenses required by the company. They can implement using the community version. If their business can be automated based upon the business process workload they can decide a number of Bot runner and Developer licenses are required.

To use other tools you need to have knowledge with VB script. But using AA no need of that.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA was used in conjunction with Automation Anywhere IQ Bot and Automation Anywhere Bot Insights to reduce the time taken to process a mortgage application by automatically verifying the applicants, the address, title, and scheduling a settlement meeting. The automation solution extracted information from or entered data into more than six applications including four major bank web applications. The environment included a Control Room server, an IQ Bot server, a bot runner machine, all running windows server 2012.

Automation Anywhere is stellar and the pre-built bots on the bot store help reduce the development time and effort. The IQ Bot solution can read from scanned images and documents which has hugely benefited the mortgage processing team.

The professional services team at Automation Anywhere helped in designing and architecting the solution effectively and their modular approach to the solution meant, the solution could be tested for user acceptance in stages. It helped the team provide early feedback and suggest changes to optimize the automation solution.

There are several valuable features : 

(1) Validate the data extracted from digital and scanned documents.

(2) Schedule the bots to run at specified intervals and report on the execution status.

(3) Ability to resume automation from intermediate states in case of exceptions.

(4) Ability to introduce human in loop for making decisions without requiring the mortgage application to be started again.

(5) Reporting on straight through processing, exceptions and failure.

(6) Business user friendly interface, easy-to-learn tools and availability of on-demand training for free.

There are some areas that the product can be improved : 

(1) Better exception handling mechanism.

(2) Parallel processing of branches to improve execution time.

(3) IQ Bot: An easier way to tag the document's source after extracting information from the document. (Which group does the document or a transaction belong to).

(4) Better integration with external data sources for Bot Insights.

(5) Advocating and encouraging use of queues and device pools by providing implementation details with success rate and support from services for the same.

I have been using AA for 1.5 years.

V11 is very stable. 

A2019's stability is yet to be determined but most usecases would not have any trouble being automated in A2019. It is more robust in terms of feature availability and bot code maintenance.

Highly Scalable.

Stellar.

We used UiPath and Kofax Kapow.

Not quite straightforward. Required support from Automation Anywhere Support team but that was made available at no cost.

Vendor team and Automation Anywhere's Professional Services.

>80%

Calculate the IQ Bot page count and usage.

Factor in the development as well as training time required for IQ Bot training and validation. The effort is easily underestimated.

We evaluated UiPath but Automation Anywhere's IQ Bot solution was the only fit for our use case at that moment. (UiPath was yet to unveil their "Document Understanding" product suite).

The learning curve is less steeper compared to other automation products in the market. 

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.

We use Automation Anywhere to implement robotic process automation solutions for complex and time-consuming scenarios, especially legacy systems, SAP, & mainframes.

I have recently used Automation Anywhere successfully for a system that is very old, and didn't even have API support. In fact, the creators are no longer providing support for their product, but we successfully implemented the solution and helped the client to reach their customers.

The other use case we have implemented is for invoice processing, where there are a number of templates available. 

AA helped our clients to achieve their goals faster and more efficiently, also reaching ROI very quickly. We, as an organization, now have a very positive image from our clients' perspective by suggesting Automation Anywhere instead of their competitors. This product has helped them to implement RPA in their organization.

In addition to providing services to our clients, we have used AA in HR management and the payroll processes, where it helped our employees to get rid of tedious and repetitive work. Our employees are engaged in better and more productive tasks compared to the past.

Automating Mainframes, Legacy systems, SAP applications, IQ Bot, & Natural language processing abilities are its strong points. By using its AI & ML capabilities, we have solved many problems for our clients.

No other tool is as stable as Automation Anywhere, considering the ML & AI capabilities & ease of use.

Automation Anywhere's interface is pretty awesome and easy to use, even for a business user. The dashboard & Bot analytics are very clear, even for a guy without any technical knowledge. 

I still believe there is a long way to go when it comes to ML & AI capabilities, though Automation Anywhere is the leader here in the market.

A2019 is awesome with its features but I don't find it as stable as v11.

I suggest having more ways to perform string manipulations and string operations, instead of just what is pre-defined in the V11 tool. 

I would like to have a buffer-type thing where the bot should throw an exception to the production support team when it is looping through a record.

Date operations can be improved without using VS script. 

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

The solution is pretty stable but A2019 can be improved. 

The scalability is the best of all the RPA tools that I have seen.

Their technical support is the best. I always find the best solutions in the customer portal.

I did not switch from another tool. Instead, I select AA as per my client's requirements. That said, my choice is Automation Anywhere any day.

The initial setup is very simple and straight forward.

We implemented using our in-house team. 

Our ROI is 70% annually.

The pricing is reasonable and one can achieve ROI faster when compared to other tools.

Automation Anywhere is your best choice if you want to implement RPA.

I primarily use Automation Anywhere for:

1. SAP Automation using DLL MetaBots.
2. Salesforce Automation using REST APIs.
3. Citrix Automation.
4. Teradata Automation.
5. Oracle Application Automation using MetaBots.
6. Automate Mainframe application.

Details: Salesforce Automation

Automating the salesforce application to create the case ID and update the chatter field accordingly using the API.

Through the Bot, we are processing the case number with all of the required operations and at last, changing the case status with the API.

Environment:

We are developing the Bot in the dev environment first, and later testing is performed in the UAT environment. If everything looks fine then we move it into production.

AA brings a lot of benefits for our organization in a number of different ways.

I could say that many of the Salesforce activities are now replaced by bots, like creating the case ID number, uploading the attachment in the Chatter feed object, and many more.

Earlier users were converting the unstructured data from the PDF into the structured format to process the task but now, this activity is replaced by IQ Bot. It reads the unstructured data from the PDF and processes the task smoothly. Basically, we are dealing more with the invoice PDF to read the unstructured data.

I believe everyone is aware of the Jira application, which is used for issue tracking and project management. Now, all the Jira activities are replaced by the bots. Whenever any user is logging any issue through Jira, the Bot automatically assigns the ticket to the respective individuals, which saves a lot of time. In a simple way, I can say the Bot has replaced our Jira monitoring team.

From my point of view, IQ Bot is the most valuable feature in AA. It is a type of cognitive bot designed to support, as well as learn from business users and enable them to experience the power of advanced artificial intelligence technologies. Integrated with the Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA, the IQ Bot offers enterprise massive gains in productivity, as it includes competency in automating complex tasks involving unstructured data.

The REST API is also a very valuable feature in AA. Using this, we can automate the web application through the API and execute it in the background in a fraction of time.

MetaBot is also a valuable feature in AA. Using this, we can run the DLL of any application and also develop the process in offline mode. If there any minor changes in the screen then we can avail of the calibrate feature of MetaBot.

It would be great if there will be a built-in machine learning model available in the AA, so the developer can directly map it with their task and train the model accordingly. Training and testing the model can be achieved using these features.

I have been using the Automation Anywhere solution for the past five years.

Stability-wise, Automation Anywhere is excellent.

The scalability is excellent.

I have had an awesome experience with the service and technical support team.

I still remember that initially, there were four or five times where I had raised a support ticket. I got the optimal solution and each time, I received a positive and quick response from the technical support team. I really appreciate their patience and effort.

Fortunately, I have started my career in the RPA field, and that too with the Automation Anywhere tool.

The initial setup is average in terms of difficulty.

We implemented using an in-house team.

I feel the cost of licensing is very high for the A2019 version. There is nothing much to say about the setup cost.

I have been trained in Blue Prism as well, but I feel a more friendly environment in AA.

As of now, I am using the 11.3v of AA, and whatever improvement is required I believe it is already taken care of in the A2019 version.

We have started doing migration of bot in A2019 and have seen that many new features have been added in the latest version of AA. Nonetheless, I can say that AA can expand its features and functionalities in the Artificial Intelligence area.

Apart from licensing costs, I don't have any concerns. I would suggest everyone go with this product and avail all the features wisely.

We used Automation Anywhere to create and integrate a solution that is suitable for a dynamic application. We had a business challenge where things were dynamic in terms of the environment, and we need to integrate into a CICD system.

It reduced cost and effort significantly. Yearly, our organization saved $14,000. The company started to save more, and increased efficiency in the field of automation then started to pioneer.

Within less time than it used to take, we can automate a complete Apex task. Being able to do this is how we managed to win the work for our client. The client was amazed and suggested the solution throughout the organization.

Complex tasks can be automated easily and reliably.

I feel the tool has to provide deeper insights for debugging issues, considering both internal and external factors.

The image recognition functionality needs to improve so that we can work faster.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for one year and eight months.

We were highly attracted to this product due to its scalability. This is because we started to work within a CICD environment.

The technical support is excellent.

Previously, we used the UFT solution provided by Micro Focus. It did well with us for a couple of years but as the application keeps on growing and becoming more complex, UFT has shifted from pros to cons. That's where we shifted to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented through a vendor team and their level of expertise was excellent.

Our advice is that anybody interested in this product should negotiate product bundles in order to reduce the cost of installation and setup. This product will ultimately help you to innovate and excel, and we recommend it.

We evaluated other options like UiPath, but we got what we needed that was specific to our requirements, so we onboarded AA.

I believe Automation Anywhere bundles everything for generic needs and in my case, everything was covered in these generic bundles.