Automation Anywhere Reviews

I have used Automation Anywhere for automating different use cases which involved applications such as Excel, SAP, PDF, Salesforce, Outlook Web applications, Desktop Automation Email automation, and many more. I have automated many processes that involve report generation using Excel, invoice processing, order processing, BPO related processes, and many more. It's safe to automate processes that involve secure credentials because Automation Anywhere provides an encrypted centralized credential vault.

My organization has worked with multiple clients and helped them automate their repetitive and mundane processes. These organizations have seen a drastic increase in employee productivity, reduced human errors, and better SLAs. All of this leads to customer satisfaction.

AA is not much more expensive compared to other RPA tools, so ROI was much higher by automating some of the end-to-end business processes. Support and maintenance work is also easy because of the well-managed control room architecture. 

The best feature is the drag-and-drop command. Users with less coding knowledge can also automate their end-to-end processes very easily. 

Centralized Control made maintenance and support work easier. 

Bot Insights is another feature in which the bot can log all the statistical information and display it to the end-users in a graphical view.

In A2019, I liked Excel Automation because now it is possible to automate Excel files without having Excel installed on the machine in which the bot runs.

When it comes to Citrix automation, AA should improve or add more features in such a way that all the commands should work when automating a Citrix application.

There should be more options to write codes in VBScript, C#, Python, etc. directly within any commands, instead of just invoking an already existing script.

Since A2019 is cloud-based and since it is a new product, there are a lot of commands that require improvisations such as the Outlook Save Email command, Rest API commands, and a few others.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last two years and for the past six months, I have been using the latest version, A2019.

When it comes to scalability, AA has a lot of potential. Now with A2019, the commands and the subcommands got doubled and now automation has been very easy.

We get excellent support from Automation Anywhere for any type of product-related issues and queries. They typically reply within 24 hours of time.

I have not used any other solutions before. But recently I have started using UiPath.

The setup was so straightforward for me as I was from a technical background. 

In-house.

ROI was much higher compared to what we have expected or calculated during our ROI calculation stage.

The cost of unattended bots is reasonable and when it comes to attended automation the licensing cost for Attended bot runners is a bit expensive. The overall price is not so expensive compared to other tools.

I have not evaluated because this solution was chosen by my organization.

I believe that A2019 is going to be the next big thing in the RPA field.

We are an SI vendor. We have been implementing customer-facing solutions for processes like reports generation, bank reconciliation, payroll processing, etc.

There were different bank statements generated for reconciliations. With some standardization, we were able to automate a process that took more than 4 hours in under 15 mins. In one of our customer implementations, the environment was to use simple RPA functionalities without any complexities. We achieved it with the basic pack of AA license.

The organizations where we have implemented AA have seen tremendous benefits achieved in terms of time and cost-saving with the highest quality of deliverables. Since this is about how it has helped our organization, I would explain it from the context of a system integration vendor. We are able to build a steady pipeline when we position AA as a solution and enhance our resource skills by certifications of AA.  This has certainly improved or relevance in the RPA market space with a growing team of Automation Engineers.

The features that help us satisfy the needs of the customer to overcome mundane activities using task bots and meta bots are the most valuable along with the rich controls in the control room. The developer team is able to capture all the necessary steps without much hassle with the visual designer and the ability to test each step of automation has helped in delivering error-free automation to our customer. With the new version of AA, we have more control over the implementation and we are able to quickly deploy the solutions to the customer.

OCR - OCR capability needs to become better. For the handwritten documents, we had a struggle to extract with accuracy while some other market tools were able to achieve it without any issues. 

The OCR component should allow integration with 3rd party OCR. This way we can use the best of breed solution along with AA or allow better control over OCR packages to be customized. As of now, it acts like a black box where there is very little control over the outcome of the OCR. We had great struggles with a customer who had handwritten data extraction. Finally, the customer was not able to see the value and the exploration went on hold post COVID.

We partner with multiple tools. We find AA to be much superior in support.

The primary use case depends on SAP and Excel platforms, where we automated repetitive tasks. Also, we automated the Tableau server using this.

We use SQL DB for storing logs. We have been using it for one year for our client. The support also is great. If we are stuck, the Automation Anywhere team comes to the rescue. I have worked on other RPA tools but this is more logical and easy to use. The flows and the commands can be easily learned by a beginner as coding knowledge is not needed.

It has helped us a great extent as we are part of the service and basically provide clients with automation solutions for their manual and repetitive tasks. We have done automation on SAP, Excels, web applications, Outlook, and many more application platforms. 

It is JAVA based so it is easy to use and user-friendly. Now comes the support part, where the use cases are deployed and hyper care is given to the bot. It is easy to schedule an easy process of deployment too. The credentials are stored safely.

Mostly the Metabots function and Excel as DB function are of great help as we can connect to SAP and work on that easily. Excel as DB helps us to perform operations on it even when huge amounts of data are on it. 

The control room is the best part as everything can be seen and controlled from there, scheduling storing of credentials, and much more. I have used PDF extraction and other tools where data needs to be extracted and it works great at that part. I highly recommended this tool for automation.

Already the new version is out, which has cognitive abilities. The bot learning skills are there, which helps to train the bot. AA has done a great job by bringing compatibility with IBM Watson and many other AI interfaces. If some more functions we can get related to other web applications will be a great help. At some places, the if-else statements become so confusing so, at that place, they can change the UI for better understanding. Apart from this I liked this tool and would like to continue working on this.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year. 

It is quite a stable platform based on Java.

It is highly scalable.

We once had an issue with the SAP meta bot, where the click was not working so the tech support team helped find the issue and then changed the code so that the issue does not come back. 

We had a resolution issue, where the bot was unable to find the screens. They also helped us with that.

I used Automic but switched because it was not much compatible with other applications. Also, it was more of coding which made it a complex tool to work upon.

The vendor team is great, we have reached out for many issues and they responded well.

Setup cost is a bit okay, but once it is up, it can give a great amount of ROI.

This tool is a good platform for automation.

Batch JOB processing and Monitoring which was a manual activity earlier.

We've done a lot of automation with the product in the last two years. We started with accounts receivable processes in finance. I would say the AR function is one of the most mature functions in the product right now because we almost automated all the aspects of accounts receivable. 

We have also started looking at automating the accounts payable process as well. I've only mentioned finance at this point, but we also have done a lot of automation with IT, as well as with procurement. Right now, the penetration is higher with the support functions but we are also looking at different ways to automate. For example, we would like to use automation technology in core engineering. We also want to be expansive and do projects beyond our current boundaries — outside of just India. We've already done a small PoC (proof of concept) with a company in China and we also automated three small processes with a U.S. entity. 

We use it daily and have done projects with support functions, such as financial services, IT, and procurement support. We have 50 to 60 processes that have been automated using RPA in all three areas put together. This is the breadth and extent of what we have automated. We are using the on-premise deployment model.

Automation Anywhere helps to automate much of the manual activity. There are already a few inbuild use case builds which we have used and expands for our convenience.

We use it to automate all kinds of business processes. The primary use case is the RPA platform, even though they have the cognitive platform and the analytics platform. We use it for so many different things it's hard to focus on one, but it's automating business processes in our banking system. We're interfacing a lot with Excel, our ERP systems, some legacy systems, the databases, file folders, text files, CSVs. It's hard to pin down one.

• Intelligent automation for business and IT tasks.
• Uses SMART Automation Technology

Bot Creator- Developers use desktop-based applications to create bots. Their dev licenses are checked with that configured in the control room. On authentication, the code of the bots they create is stored in the control room. Different developers may create individual tasks/bots. These bots could be merged and executed at once.

Bot Runner - The Bot Runner is the machine where you run the bot. You could have multiple bots running in parallel. You only need the Run License to run the bots. The bots report back the execution logs/pass/fail status back to the control room.

Autosuggestion of existing use cases based on the problem statement could use improvement. 

My primary use cases are where I'm dealing with a lot of raw data extraction and transformation so that the data can be used by other systems. An example would be getting the data out of PDF files, transforming it from semi-structured to structured, and putting it into an extra-stable system like Excel or a CSV so that it can be used by other systems. Listed are low hanging fruits and will boost the confidence of the stakeholders in the RPA deployment, recommend to look at such use cases when looking at Automation Anywhere and its implementation.

• Native cognitive automation for unstructured data
• Bot Store—Jumpstart your RPA with verified, ready to use bots
• 24/7 global support
• Business users can build bots to automate their processes
• 1 bot—20,000 bots
  From pilot to enterprise-scale, at your pace
• Embedded real-time analytics—
  No integration, No delays
  
• Better customer support

It's a great product, timely support, and guidance.

IBM Robotic Process Automation.

I mainly used AA to extract data from invoices from PDF files with multiple formats and to upload this data to a Data Lake, on a Windows machine.

Other projects involved extracting data from Excel and CSV files and then inserting them into custom applications, databases, and mainframes and finally sending recap emails to the user.

The Bots developed, according to the end user's needs and the type of process, were both attended and unattended. In both cases, the end-users were always satisfied with the functioning and performances of the Bots.

By automating the process with AA and using the verification station, it was possible to speed up the process and strengthen it, involving the process owner in the verification of the correctness of the data extracted.

It is becoming more and more normal for companies that a process is carried out partly or totally by a Bot, thus allowing humans to dedicate themselves to high value-added activities.

The speed-up and greater control over the quality of the processes have also led to savings in money and are increasing the happiness of the company's customers.

I consider the verification station very useful because it allows you to quickly check if the data extracted are correct or if you need to change the process. The process owner is also much happier because he is more involved in the implementation of the Bot and thus it is easier to develop the requirements.

During the test phases and during the review, it is possible to engage the process owner who almost enjoys verifying the correct functioning of the Bot, thanks also to the simple and attractive interface of the verification station.

You could improve the tools for reading CSV/Excel, also providing wizards or detailed guides, otherwise, it is quite complex to use them, especially at the beginning.

It would be useful to have an online wiki on each tool that can be used on AA with practical examples of use, with images and videos.

It would also be useful to increase the community and make public in a forum the problems solved by other developers through the support, so that we can use past experience to solve development problems without having to send emails to AA about a problem that may have already been solved.

I use Automation Anywhere for five months.

I think the final product is quite stable. All the functionalities included in AA are extensively tested and thus do not present strange errors after the Bot has been released into production. AA also handles the release of new versions of the IDE very well, guaranteeing the portability of the code with simple procedures.

It is a very scalable product, also thanks to some features included in the IDE.

So far, I have not used customer service very much.

I currently use both Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Depending on what you need to automate, one may perform better than the other.

The initial setup is quite long and full of different phases. It would take only one official AA installation guide with the most detailed step-by-step description and one image per step, without the need to consult more than one guide.

I implemented through a vendor team and their level of expertise is medium-high.

We also evaluated UiPath.

It is a tool that allows you to have excellent performance but some features are not intuitive to use.

We use Automation Anywhere to automate business processes for insurance clients. Automation Anywhere reduced the manpower up to 80% with a high return on investment. The process which we automated can complete the entire workload within 10 days when the normal process would have taken around 30 working days.

Apart from this, we automated password reset processes which saved time and effort and also enhanced security.

We are also automating the deployment process for new process setups. 

Bot Stuck Automation is helping us to keep track of the bots that are stuck for long time.

Automation Anywhere made a huge impact in maintaining client relationships. The reason is a high Return on Investment from the processes we automated. Because we have high ROI we gained new clients which increased the client count as well as our company's financial strength. 

Most of the employees learned the Automation Anywhere tool and got certified from Automation Anywhere University. AA makes their professional life much easier from a career perspective. 

Our organization has improved revenue just by automating the business processes where too much manual work was involved.

Web-based control is the most valuable feature. We can access it from anywhere in the world with the control room URL and in any browser. Bot Insights make our report generation and other insights view easier. We can export the data in the form of CSV, PDF, etc.

Credentials is another important feature, where we can store the important/bot credentials securely in the Control room itself and we can track who accesses the credentials and we can restrict the access based on users.

Bots get disconnected from control rooms sometimes without any reason and this takes up a lot of time. 

If the user creates a schedule then he/she leaves the company, that schedule became unusable at some point and I can't edit it. We need to create it again using generic IDs. This problem can be avoided in an upcoming release or update. There should be a button for customer support.

For each process, we have a separate log folder/files and it's tedious to go and check each process. They should include a button/feature to check the logs for each/process and or bots in the control room itself.

There should be an option for the quick addition of disconnected bots/kind of rollback options.

I would also like to see the One-Touch Asset management report button in the control room.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years. 

We can assure 98% stability and the remaining 2% is just because of the environment issues.

It is highly scalable.

Support was good but sometimes they ask for logs that have client information. But apart from this, they are really helpful.

We have been using Automation Anywhere from the initial stages.

The setup is good but the control room setup takes some time.

We have an in-house team to implement AA solutions. 

We saved around 80% man-power.

Small companies can't afford this cost as the pricing is a little higher.

Yes, I evaluated with Blue Prism.

Automation Anywhere is a very Interactive and easy to use RPA tool.

We have a long list of customers and multiple use cases in pharma, account & finance, customer billing & payment, and other domains. We use AA to automate those tasks that need less or no human interaction. The reconciliation tasks, SAP and Excel operations, are automated using AA, take less time, and give accurate results. 

Working with MetaBot provided simple drag and drop functionality, integration of DLL of SAP, Outlook, Excel and other application make tasks easier for developers.

Customers are happy with overall performance of bots and it makes the developer's life easy.  

We have a lot of clients who use AA bots in their own process. Tasks that are automated require less human input. AA bots save a lot of time, increase efficiency, deliver accurate output, and provide consistency which improves the overall function of processes in different domains.   

AA is an amazing tool that provides great features to perform Excel operations, Data Integration, and manipulation saving thousands of hours. It is an easy to use application that makes the developer's life comfortable. It doesn't require a technical background.

MetaBot is one of the most valuable features of AA. The simple drag and drop functionality, integration of DLL of SAP, Outlook, Excel, and other application make tasks easier for developers. There's nothing like MetaBot in other tools. 

One can also check the Bot farm for readymade Bots provided by other AA developers and experts.

A2019 is another great feature introduced by AA. The web-based Bot development, Control room, and Bot Insights are other nice features. Improved Error Handling and support of Python script in A2019 seems good.

I have identified a few areas where one can find the scope of improvement:

1. AA IQ Bot has not yet succeeded in living up to its reputation due to its high cost, low ROI, and its inability to meet client requirements.

2. Commands such as OCR are not up to the mark the output accuracy is not satisfactory.

3. It is unable to identify IF/Else, for Loop block when reviewing/writing AA code. There should be an expand/collapse button to identify a block of code.

Integration with Google Spreadsheets and other products should be included in the next release.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last three years.

It is a great and advanced tool for the development of Bots.

In terms of scalability, AA is one of the best available tools in the market and provides a lot of command and tools that do not require any technical specialty.  

Easy to use, advanced features like MetaBot, Improved Error Handling, Web-based bot development in A2019, support of Python script and many more.

I have had a great experience with the technical team. I got stuck in one scenario where Object Cloning was not working in the production environment. After spending many hours, I connected with the AA technical team and they provided a prompt solution.

I did not use any other solution.

ROI depends on time, cost, output accuracy, and effective and consistent results.

The pricing of AA is quite high as compared to other tools as it's one of the best RPA tools available in the market.

I did not evaluate other options.

Just reduce AA licensing prices and provide real scenario-based training modules in learning sections.

We use the platform to help our customers by building automation solutions in order to solve their business problems. The use cases include AP processing, form data extraction, data collection, and Excel reporting.

We use a combination of RPA and IQ Bot to deal with semi-structured or unstructured data, such as documents and images. We also use Bot Insights for business process analytics and bot operation health checks.

The platform is deployed using an on-premise configuration and connected to multiple bot runners, running in virtualized environments. 

We found that RPA with additional AI capabilities, such as machine learning and Computer Vision, can enable the organization to augment existing business operations by creating efficiencies and improving the accuracy of data to be processed, without changing too much of the existing system.

This will reduce the change cost and help business units to elevate their existing teams, processes, and systems so that they can focus on higher-value tasks that require creativity to perform.

The handwriting recognition capability in IQ Bot is particularly interesting, as we can see a high level of accuracy in extracting handwritten texts. 

The IQ Bot component has enabled the business to quickly identify the different documents and provide the ability to integrate with in-house or external AI functions. This enables us to extend the initial document extraction facility to transform the information into key decision-making attributes. The document training facility has made it easy to identify select-extract the components on the documents and it is also capable to recognize handwriting context with the help of pre-configured Azure AI services. 

The improvements that we could see would be the increased stability of each A2019 releases and reduce the likely impact on existing features. We are also looking to see improvements in the upgrade and bot deployment processes to make them easier and less interaction with back end servers. 

We are also to see more features to be added to seamlessly transition between human and bot tasks in the long-running process. We are also keen to see the new AARI feature develop into a voice-enabled command activation to run the bot process. 

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than a year, ever since its release in 2019. 

The A2019 in early releases had been quite unstable to our experience. However, since A2019.14 there seem to be improvements in this area and so far we haven’t seen any major issues that impact the existing features we are using. For any of the new features, we suggest to always check on the release notes and understand the limitations of the features before using them in your solution. 

The technical support team has been prompt and helpful in addressing issues coming out of the platform. There is a limitation in having multiple admin accounts to view the same ticket information but we were told that a new improved system will be implemented to address this limitation. 

We use a process-based workflow automation solution and we actually still use them to deal with long-running processes as they have more extensive features to deal with workflow-based problems. However, we see RPA can help in complementing the process by automating the mundane tasks of the process and getting greater efficiency for the business as well as reducing the likelihood of human errors. 

The installation is quite straightforward as they provide us with an installer package that guides you through using wizards. But the pre and post-installation process can be quite complex and laborious depending on what features you need to enable. In some cases, these feature configurations require the underlying services to be restarted from the server backend. When using virtualized environments in the cloud connecting on an internal network domain, there would be extra care needed on the network configurations to ensure communication channels between the machines are properly connected.

We deployed in-house. 

You need to be mindful about the initial server costs if you go with an on-premise deployment model as the specification can surprise some of your stakeholders. For licensing, always try to get through reselling partners for getting more customized and better prices.

We observed all major players in the RPA space such as UiPath, BluePrism, and WorkFusion. There are also some companies that operate in a specific market that we looked at.