Automation Anywhere Reviews

I, being a Robotic Process Automation Developer, extensively use various Automation Anywhere products on daily basis. I use Automation Anywhere for end-to-end implementation of processes for clients, as well as my organization.

We have many use cases. One of them is from the marketing department. Every organization needs to market their products and services to get future clients. The marketing people used to mail the prospective clients one by one manually, as per their mailing list. They used to spend approximately one minute on each email. We created a bot that helps the department in sending emails to prospects with product information, service information, brochures, etc. 

Now, the department needs only to specify the content file and an Excel file having email IDs, and the rest is done by the bot. It sends approximately 500 emails within 10 minutes. That makes the process of sending emails extremely fast, including customized content.

Automation Anywhere has helped save many man-hours in my organization by letting us automate monotonous and repetitive tasks. Let's take an example of procurement, to Purchase (P2P) Process in SAP S/4 Hana.

This task requires an employee to manually verify the invoice, feed data into SAP, Park Invoice, Validate Line Items, and generate MIRO. This takes approximately 10 minutes per invoice and that doesn't require any human intelligence. It is just a tedious task. Instead, we implement this solution using Automation Anywhere.

We used the Automation Anywhere IQ Bot to extract data from invoices.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise is used to automate email, for data entry into SAP, 3-Way Match in SAP, as well as MIGO & MIRO Generation in SAP. This frees up employee's time as well as increases the accuracy of the work.

I am inclined towards features such as Automation Anywhere Bot Store, Automation Anywhere Enterprise Client, Recorders, and Scheduling with the Auto-Login Feature.

Automation Anywhere Bot Store; The Bot Store is an online library where anybody can find different types of pre-developed, production-ready bots. Being production-ready and easily accessible saves development time. All bot submissions to the bot store pass through strict security checks, which makes them secure to download and deploy.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise Client; The Automation Anywhere client has 500+ commands to perform various tasks. It has a user-friendly workbench and UI. The most important part is the scriptless development, where you just drag and drop the command and you are ready to run it.

Recorders; Recorders make automating desktop applications, as well as web applications, very reliable and easy to implement. Think of creating a bot to extract data from a webpage in less than 30 mins and it can be run by pressing a button daily. It makes tasks easy to finish. 

Scheduling with Auto-Login Feature; Automation Anywhere has the most user-friendly way to schedule a bot. Scheduling is so accurate in Automation Anywhere that we don't need to worry if the task will be deployed at the specified time or not. I personally manage 30+ schedules and each runs at its set time. Scheduling comes with an awesome Auto-Login feature. This feature logs into locked Windows even when the system has a disclaimer message. It makes scheduling reliable and accurate.

For me, IQ Bot needs to be improved. It has great capabilities and works really well for fully structured and spotless documents. When we try to process structured documents but with some little pen marks, improper partitions, or faded documents, IQ Bot fails to extract data properly out of them. Typical Indian supplier invoices are hard to process through IQ Bot.

I would love to see a package for Regular Expressions with various sub-commands such as regex builder and regex replace.

OAuth2.0 native support should be added in future releases. From a security point of view, there is work that is needed.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than 30 months.

Stability is great If you follow the recommended hardware and software. If you do not meet the requirements then it sometimes creates problems. So, the hardware should be up to the mark for a seamless experience.

The product is highly scalable. Scaling is easy. We started with the Marketing department and within the next three months, we were able to deploy bots for six more departments.

Automation Anywhere has a superb support team. They are prompt in responding to queries based on urgency. If I log a ticket with a production-level issue, they quickly respond and help to solve the problem.

The overall experience with support has been great. They even follow up to see if the issue has been solved after giving the solution.

We did not use another similar product. We started our RPA journey with Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward. Automation Anywhere has descriptive documents to guide in installing the application on the server. Initially, I was the only person starting the RPA journey in my organization. I needed to set up the infrastructure, develop the bots, and give support as well.

Installing the application on the server was very easy. All credit goes to excellent documentation.

We implemented it through our in-house team.

With the newer cloud version of Automation Anywhere product, the setup cost has been cut down because the customer doesn't need to invest in new hardware.

Automation Anywhere is flexible in terms of costing and licensing.

We evaluated only one other vendor, which is UiPath.

Automation Anywhere seemed easy to work with, in our initial journey of RPA. So we choose it.

The product is promising and is successful. You should start your Automation journey with simpler processes and step-by-step, move towards bigger and more complex problems. They have a great support team and the product's community is active as well. This will help to make your automation journey seamless.

The primary usage of this solution is for the development of software bots using this RPA solution for various customers, and also for in-house process automation.

Bots have been developed for various domains like Automotive, Banking and Finance, HR, Housing, etc, and across various end-user software like Oracle, SAP, QAD, Terminal applications, etc.

As a first step towards having companies direction move towards emerging technologies, getting the right skillset available for adding Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, NLP, etc, so that we could provide a complete end-to-end solution to the customers.

We internally host v11 and A2019 Web CR of this solution for in-house development and training/learning purposes.

RPA was introduced as an emerging technology in our company and Automation Anywhere was chosen as the RPA Solution. Thirdware became an AA partner for reselling AA licenses. Thirdware performs bot development as a vendor using this solution and has automated more than 60 processes to date in various domains.

The Automation Anywhere RPA solution has opened gates for Thirdware to step into providing an end-to-end solution to customers by implementing emerging technologies like Machine learning, Artificial intelligence, NLP, etc.

AA has brought a completely new skill set for entering a completely new domain and being versatile as a service/solution provider.

1. Bank-grade security provided by AA with Credential Vault and Lockers. With the level of security provided by AA, it is a global leader and it becomes easy to convince prospects and turn them into customers.
   
2. Bot Insights provide visibility. Simply tagging variables used in the bot, can provide automated real-time dashboards that are presentable to management showing them a complete view of how the bots are performing.
3. Platform support is very good. AA supports on-premise and all major Cloud providers for the installation of the software.
4. The solution is very scalable.
5. After learning other RPA tools, I can say that AA provides one of the best user experiences with the user-friendliness of the UI.
6. The role-based access controls (RBAC) provided by AA are simple to define and provide clear distinction and segregation of duties and roles, and they help to maintain security.
7. The A2019 bot agent and development on browser means that there is no need to install a thin client like v11 or other RPA tools. The automation development of bots can be performed right from the browser itself.
8. The Flow view and List view for development mean that development becomes much easier, even for newbie users. The flow view and the drag and drop command flexibility is very helpful. The list view is generally preferred by the developers.
9. Workload management and Queues are valuable components. With the WLM module, multiple bot runners can be utilized to perform a single task more quickly and thus help achieve SLAs. Multiple bot runners can be used optimally to divide and perform tasks simultaneously on different machines.
   
10. Inline Python scripting support with A2019 is possible, which reduces a lot of lines of code for programmers. 

Technical support provided by Automation Anywhere is not up to the mark and needs a lot of improvements. Solutions or details provided by L1 support are contradicted by L2 and/or L3 support persons, thus leading to confusion.

The quality and response time of the support, even on Sev-1 tickets, is not satisfactory.

Enhancements or product issues/bugs are not fixed quickly and no ETA is provided for the same.

Working of triggers (email file, etc) in A2019 in unattended mode is a feature that was available in v11 but missing in A2019. I would like to see this feature in A2019.

In v11, RDP-based deployment and auto-login both were possible but with A2019, only the RDP-based approach is possible. Due to this, there is no way to maintain any application open inside the RDP, as each and every time Web CR connects to RDP to run the bot and disconnects, it closes all of the open apps inside RDP and terminates. I need a way where open apps inside RDP must be left open if they are open already.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for more than three years, right from v10, v11 until the latest A2019 release.

All of the bots deployed by our company are working quite stably in production with minimal support required. Unless there are some changes/enhancements to the bot logic suggested by business users, there are no changes or modifications required to the bot to work.

There was a bug in A2019.14 version which did not allow proper bot deployment intermittently. this had led to a major issue on PROD where schedules were running but bot was not getting deployed on PROD runner machine leading to instability. We had raised the concern with AA team and they have addressed the same in A2019.15 release.

The solution is highly scalable, which is a USP of this solution. Adding more creators and runners is a quick task.

I would rate my experience with technical support as four out of ten, due to a lack of responsiveness and the quality of support provided.

This was the first RPA solution that was introduced in our company.

However, personally, I have learned UiPath and found the Automation Anywhere solution better in all the aspects (Features, Releases, User-Friendliness, Cost).

Customers do ask for a comparison of this solution with the competitors in the market but it is always seen that Automation Anywhere is a clear winner.

The initial setup is straightforward if it is done in express installation mode.

Custom mode installation and installations involving SSO and AD authentication are more complicated.

IQ Bot installation requires expertise.

All installations and implementations are done in-house in our company.

ROI achievement for most of the customers is observed from four to eight months from the time of implementation.

The one-time setup cost can be fully recovered with the ROI achievement within six months, provided the implementation of bots is planned properly.

The pricing and licensing are definitely moderate to costly but easily recoverable by achieving ROI quickly.

Our setup cost was only procuring AWS instances but installations are performed in-house.

UiPath was evaluated but it was found that Automation Anywhere is a clear winner and a market leader globally.

AA is a global market leader and the best RPA software to go with, in all aspects. If the AA support improves then this definitely deserves a rating of nine and a half out of ten.

I work as an RPA developer where I use the Automation Anywhere software.

We work with many clients, wherein we automate their processes. We get positive feedback from the client regarding the processes that we have developed. It saves a lot of their manual time and most of their work is done by the bot, without any human intervention. So far, we have all positive views.

IQ Bot is the most important feature and it has been extensively used by our clients. With all of the new features of IQ bot, I feel it is the most utilized component of Automation Anywhere.

The scheduling/triggering of the bots from the CR, without going to the actual environment and starting the bot, is an interesting feature.

I feel A2019 is still not completely ready and the discontinuing of version 11 is a negative impact for all of the users and clients. I feel version 11 should still be continued and it should be the client's choice whether they want to buy version 11 or A2019.

I have been using automation anywhere for the past two and a half years.

I have not used another RPA, although I have worked on several versions of Automation Anywhere. I have developed in version 10, version 11, and currently on A2019.

Although I'm new to the A2019 version, I find that version 11 was the most user-friendly version of all.

The price of this product is good.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Automation Anywhere.

We have used RPA technology to build solutions which are across discipline and cater to end to end business process. At the start, we were performing use cases that primarily dealt with the Project Control group as most of the manual activities are based on the Excel operations which are either Macros based or involved tedious manual upload to the system in a periodic manner. Later we moved our strategy to cater to the more enhanced solutions which were primarily digital solutions involving - OCR, AI & ML. We were focusing on the Engineering Drawings which were more Unstructured & had the potential to create a Digital Workflow using the unstructured information.

Automation Anywhere has surely helped our organization to shape its Digital Journey - It was our first RPA tool which helped us to perform basic automation which created Point solutions but has added tremendous value at the early stage. We were able to scale-up fast using Automation Anywhere due to its user-friendly AI and later on IQ Bots provided the required edge to handle the unstructured data. We also tried to explore the Bot Insights which helped us to monitor the day to day Bot health and the hardware needs.

We have found both the basic Task Bot & IQ Bot very useful as the combination of both helped us to create some solutions which were End to End Business solutions. IQ bot performs the basic Data Sample set creation and Extraction of the details from the unstructured PDFs and later we have used the Business Rule engine using the IQ Bot to perform the data feed into the various Systems. Overall we were able to achieve the value using the combination. As part of our internal solution, we have also created custom Python scripting to handle the OCR failure issues surfaced due to IQ Bot product limitations

Automation Anywhere can be improved in certain areas specified in the cognitive zone where the information needs better OCR Engine + Machine Learning capabilities. Also, they can improve on the System Identified region function of the IQ Bot - Our team faced a tough time in handling that as we were not able to assign variable to System Identified Region as the IQ Bot tool wasn't allowing it. Also, we have had a certain issue while performing the WLM - Workload Management functionality, applying Queue mechanism becomes hard sometimes - Can be more intuitive for the end-users.

We have been using Automation Anywhere from the past 3.5 yrs and the product is catering to all our basic to mid-level complex requirements. We have developed multiple Bots catering to multiple disciplines. RPA Solutions are presently catering to Internal Stakeholders and we are planning to roll out for our External Clients as well.

We haven't used as such any RPA tool prior to this but yes we have used UiPath parallelly with the Automation Anywhere. Both tools are good but Automation Anywhere has an upper edge on Cognitive area as compared to UiPath.

Each RPA Tool has its own limitation & benefits - For an early started UiPath may be a better option because the license cost is less but once you Scale & Try to move to advance complex Use Cases involving Cognitive it may not help much

Yes, we have evaluated other Options but with the Tradeoff between License Cost & Functionality, we have found Automation Anywhere as the best fit for Oil & Gas Use Cases.

Nothing specific Automation Anywhere can do better in Cognitive it needs to stabilize its products. Also Cloud product is the game-changer for them A2019

• We have validated all the primary features of A2019. New features can be added just by updating the new Package (a group of commands).
• Pass Credentials in CR Directly to run a bot on any device.
• Instead of installing AA Client, we will just install Bot agent on the runner machine. 
• Excel commands are classified into two types Excel Basic, Excel Advanced By giving a lot of scope to use a wide range of Excel operations.
• Instead of using AA Client, A2019 provides users the ability to create bots directly in the control room.
• Flow, List, Dual Views enable the user-friendly environment.
  

We have done lot of implementation with Automation Anywhere. Recently, we have used IQ Bot's latest version and delivered a few projects. It is saving most FTE benefits using Automation Anywhere automation. One good thing in A2019 is that all products of Automation Anywhere, like IQBOT services, Meta Bot Designer, Discovery Bot, and Control room are all together in one product which is very effective for any business team. Package options and workload management with queues are the most efficient features.

• The universal recorder is a kind of hybrid recorder that enables the user to record the data across devices.
• Option to send email from Outlook or SMTP.
• A2019 also supports Python script(2.0/3.0) along with Javascript and VBScript. Also it as inline scripting and importing script file feature. 
• A2019 contains almost 11 diffs. datatypes. Ex: window,number,table.
• Browser support is Improved with Different Browsers support: IE, Mozilla, Chrome.
• A2019 is not dependent on single os. It supports Linux, Windows, etc.
• Running bot through Excel, Waiting for release from the vendor
• Instead of meta bots we can use run DLL commands

• Cloud API vision and OCR engine integration should be more effective. 
• Auto-update of the Bot agent in runtime machines from Automation Anywhere control room server. 
• The import and export of the previous version bots to the latest version of A2019 should be more flexible and friendly for the end business users. 
• AI Sense recorder should be upgraded with additional features for better results. 
• SMTP mail features should come with migration options. All kind of VB scripts and Java scripts which we built using exiting version should support in this version.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for three months. 

The stability of the solution is good with the latest version with final patches. Automation Anywhere team release patches in every release to enhance the features and performance of the added features

It is good for scalability.

Technical support is good. 

We have migrated few projects from other RPA tools to Automation Anywhere RPA automation.

The setup is easy but it is better to have AA support person during that activity.

AA Support team is good in the environment setup.

ROI is as expected.

I am managing the entire cost, price, and licensing model for our project.

We have entirely validated the products before using in our projects.

Initial version of products bugs should be reduced.

We have multiple use cases, we build & supported 200+ automations and one of the main businesses was related to the contract processing and due to high volume and complexity, it was very crucial. Also, we built and supported multiple operations related use cases.

We have built and implemented multiple SharePoint, OutLook, web-based, and automation related to ticketing tools.

Automations were from simple to medium and high complexity related however with the help of many easy to use and user-friendly features, we have implemented them with high accuracy.

Using Automation Anywhere we have built/supported 200+ automation around operations and automated different Sharepoint, Outlook, ServiceNow, and contract processing related use cases. It offers a lot of features, flexibility whether it is through Meta bot, IQBot, etc. 

It offers :

a. Zero-install, Web-ready platform: Deploy RPA across the entire organization and scale bots on-demand in a few clicks.                                                                                                  b. Use the pluggable API architecture to maximize extensibility and customize RPA to meet unique business automation requirements.
c. Integrated machine learning: Streamline your document-centric processes with drag-and-drop IQ Bot integration.
d. Self-learning automation engine: Create a smarter automation engine by infusing third-party AI technology.

Movement on cloud architecture according to me provided by AA2019, will be most beneficial as it will be easy to use and will provide flexibility.

However, we have almost sued all the features extensively and few of them are as below :

• Intelligent automation for business and IT tasks
• Uses SMART Automation Technology
• Rapidly Automates complex and complicated tasks
• Create automation tasks like recording keyboard strokes and mouse clicks
• Distribute tasks to multiple computers
• Automation Anywhere offers scriptless automation
• Auto-login runs scheduled tasks at any time, even when the computer is locked.

1. Accuracy to process handwritten documents.

2. Should add more Analytics and Intelligence related capabilities.

3. Scalability along with the volume and business should be more flexible.

4. Cognitive capabilities should be improved more.

5. Large scale robot deployment is limited.

6. Licensing costs should be reduced.

7. Error handling should be improved more.

As AA has recently moved to Cloud architecture, there will still be a lot of additions and improvements in terms of the features and offering and this will be evolved over the period of time only. About the exact performance on the cloud maybe we have to wait a bit more time and should evaluate once it will get settle down more.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than 3 yrs and implemented 200+ uses cases. Also, we have started using the new version AA2019 for a few months (4) and did a few POCs.

The stability is good.

Scalability is good, however, it can be improved.

Technical support is good.

We have evaluated other RPA tools as well however, looking at overall feasibility from features to costing perspective we have taken a call to go along with AA and we are happy that we have made a right call and it has benefited us to a great extent.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have our in-house development and support team.

Looking at overall feasibility from features to costing perspective we have taken a call to go along with AA. Installation is easy however pricing etc. can be reduced a bit as it is still more for small business/automation.

Yes, we have evaluated other RPA tools like UiPath and BP as well.

Looking at overall feasibility from features to costing perspective, I strongly feel Automation Anywhere offers a lot of features and scalability and is a very good tool overall and people who have not tried should give a try and put some hands-on. 

We are in the Oil & Gas Sector and our use cases are completely different from standard Industry Use Cases (BFSI). We work upon Engineering Drawings as the Data collection point and IQ Bot plays an important role to perform the tasks. We have built use cases which were involving the Finance Business processes, Procurement process, HR process and also we have developed solutions which were catering to Shared Services in Malaysia where value derived was quite substantial as its cost center and any automation creates a value add to them.

AA has improved our digital strategy extensively and provided the required leverage to place ourselves above other peers in the O&G Industry. We were able to develop quick digital solutions by demonstrating the ROI and gain momentum by aligning the desired resources & budget from leadership. All this has happened due to early wins which were supported by Automation Anywhere. We were able to build our solutions using the OCR Engines provided by Automation Anywhere which helped us to perform the Data Scrapping we have even integrated the tool with Free OCR available in the market.

We have used almost all the features of AA - IQ Bot is no doubt the most useful one for us. Task Bot & Meta bot forms the baseline and is used extensively for most of the use cases. Also, we were able to deploy composite solutions .NET + AA to achieve greater benefits. We have also purchased some other Digital Tools to help us with OCR, these tools have inbuilt Machine Learning capability which makes it easier for us to extract the components from the P&Id's which is an essential part of our pre-processing. Task Bot completed their job of creating the post workflow seamlessly.

Additional features should involve the Cognitive Section where we need more Advance solutions involving ML & AI. We have entered into the Cognitive zone where our solutions are much more advanced in nature due to the complexity involved in the Use Cases. Structured Data require a higher level of data analysis and grouping. We also recommend Automation Anywhere to start incorporating Plugin with Open Source Softwares so that we are able to build robust solutions - presently custom scripting is limited. The automation team can also explore the Oil & Gas sector as a target sector as this Industry have lots of potential and they need to foray in the Digital world in the near future.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for the past 3+ years and we have deployed around 40+ Bots to date with quite a significant amount of savings associated with it.

We mostly use it on engineering processes. We also use it for finances in SAP — uploading, invoice creation, etc. But we have mostly focused on our engineering processes.

An example from the finance area is when we need to invoice a customer. We open our SAP account and upload all the data into SAP, create an invoice, and send a notice to the finance team that the process has been completed. They then move the process further along. It's a daily type of operation, whenever such requests come.

We are using the on-premise version because the cloud version (A2019) is not out yet.

One of the ways it has improved our organization is regarding working on Saturdays and Sundays. Obviously, employees don't like to come in on those days. When a user is not there and we want certain processes to be done, we don't expect the engineers to sit there and do them. We can schedule things via email so a bot runs on Saturdays and Sundays. That results in a reduction of man-hours. 

It automates all the processes which do not require human intervention, things which are very repetitive. That means we can give more important work to the engineers now, rather than asking them to do repetitive tasks.

We have these invoices which gets generated every month. We have to enter these invoice details into the stacks. It is a tedious task that is done by our finance team. We have automated the process of entering the details into the stack, and t reduces a lot of manual work.

The best feature of AA is the scheduling and the triggering part of it. Whenever an email comes in we can just use Automation Anywhere. We don't have to sit there. The unattended bots of Automation Anywhere are something which we find very useful.

It does not require much onboarding skills. It's easy to train anyone. We just ask them to apply logic.

One very important thing would be more support for Citrix automation. We want something to support Cisco. Citrix automation is not a very good tool. We are not able to use it properly. Even if we go through a remote desktop connection, it goes along only with the keystrokes and image recognition.

Also, when we are moving from one version to another version, it's very difficult because most of the features stop working. They should first test everything and then release the new version. For example, there's a system variable known as the Excel Cell Row. It gives you the current row of the inner loop. When going from version 11.1 to 11.3, this variable was suddenly not supported, and most of our bots were dependent on that. Everything went down and we had to start from scratch. If you do not have a developer who has done this, it's going to be a big problem in terms of the time it will take.

We need the migration from version 11 to A2019 to go smoothly. Our developers cannot be expected to enter the code again.

I'm not sure about the stability because there are a lot of upgrades all the time. Whenever we move from version to version, like 11.1 to 11.3, if we have ten bots we have to go around and test all ten bots. And in case something is not working, we have to make changes. If they support a migration utility properly, I think it's a great tool.

The scalability is great. Nearly a 100 bots have been deployed in finance, HR, and mostly engineering. We will be implementing bots going forward in procurement.

It has taken us two years to scale to our current number of bots because we spent a lot of time on training at first.

Technical support from Automation Anywhere is great. I have written to Automation Anywhere support many times and there is a great response from them. Even if they do not have the exact answer, they always say, "You can try this option or you can try this option."

We started with Automation Anywhere. The biggest reason our company chose Automation Anywhere was because we found it more reliable for our operations than any other. Also, the response from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We started with version 10.7. When we started, initially downloading the Control Room and those types of things was a bit complex. We had the user manual, but I don't think it's very good. It misses many points. When we missed something, we needed to contact Automation Anywhere support, so there were some delays in the process. 

Then we moved to version 11.1, which was more complex and requires more of your system space.

Overall, the other process is a bit complex. They have said they're coming out with the cloud version. I think that will be a bit easier. 

The development process took us about six months.

We have a team in our company which is responsible for RPA. It's something which we do internally for our company.

There has been a great return on investment. We are interested in saving manual engineer man-hours. So far, we have saved $100,000.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. We chose Automation Anywhere because of how well it suited it our office.

Automation Anywhere is easier to use. With drag and drop, we don't need the uploading skills, etc. Everything is just there. You can just drag and drop, then just go ahead and do it. With UiPath, it was a little difficult to understand the process. Also Automation Anywhere has email automation.

I would rate the solution at seven out of ten. One main drawback is that migration issue. Another thing I would like to see is support for all the other scripting languages, like Python, JavaScript and all.

Go through the Automation Anywhere courses properly to be aware of all the system variables and all the features it has. Then proceed with the development phase. Until you're clear on the basic things you cannot do anything in the tool. You need to know those things.

I have done the Masters course on Automation Anywhere University. I have a Masters Certification from them. Their courses are pretty interesting. At the end of the Masters course, we had an interview on the course itself. There were a lot of informative things and it was a great experience.

Next year, we should be moving into cognitive document processing.