Automation Anywhere Reviews

The main and primary use case using Automation Anywhere is "Invoice generation", which has repetitive steps and a huge amount of data. For this automation, we worked on a database, Excel, and mail activities.

In order to connect Automation Anywhere with our database, which is in a remote location, we had to install related drivers in the working machine. After that, we apply some business logic to the data and insert it into an invoice template that is in XLSX format.

Ultimately, we save the file as a PDF and send the output file to the user through email.

Automation Anywhere helped us to reduce the work time on data operations. It helps us to work fast and deliver fast. Without it, our work takes too much time using manual effort.

Along with reducing the time, we get the return on investment fast. Now, we are identifying many use cases that are fittable with RPA and Automation Anywhere. The organization has set up a separate RPA CoE and various teams working in this center of excellence. From this, we are working on various problems and providing solutions to clients.

Automation Anywhere has many features that are not supported by other RPA vendors. One of these features is Metabots, and I find it to be the most valuable part of Automation Anywhere.

Metabots are reusable and can be developed easily.

The Control Room is the most important feature, where we can manage the bots and publish to various bot runners in the environment. Here we can add users, edit them, and we are able to assign various roles to the users.

Task Bot can be used to implement the business logic, step by step. 

I think automation anywhere is a complete system if we have to work on structured data that doesn't require human decisions. However, it does not work as well with retrieving data from images. Image automation is something that needs to be improved.

One more thing is that Automation Anywhere does not support reading and writing to CSV files. If we are getting input from a CSV file, we have to add one more layer of automation that first saves the data to an Excel file. This is important to us because most of the data we get from the database is saved to a CSV file.

For the last three years, we have been partnered with Automation Anywhere.

I would rate stability at 90%.

Scalability-wise, I would rate AA a nine out of ten.

The technical support is good.

I haven't used any other RPA solution. We tried with Automation Anywhere and the solution works.

The initial setup was quite easy, and they will provide setup documents.

I have worked both in-house and with the vendor team.

I would rate the ROI a ten out of ten. I can say it is profitable to use Automation Anywhere as your RPA solution.

Overall, the pricing of Automation Anywhere is good.

We have compared it to other RPA vendors like UiPath and Blue Prism.

My primary use case is automating the reports from SAP for various domains like accounts, billing, shipment, etc. AA is consolidating the reports for these various domains across different employee numbers and order numbers, then sending them to different business owners using the SMTP server. This reduces human intervention and effort.

This automation helped the functional people to focus on other tasks instead of looking into these, and this saved around 50% of the total effort of the day.

Since business users receiving reports on time and with accuracy, this helped us in achieving better customer satisfaction

AA has vastly improved my organization in gathering more business, reducing human efforts, and optimizing client business. It does this by automating the business processes in almost the domains of SAP, which results in better client satisfaction.

With the help of Automation Anywhere, we have provided more automation ideas from our side, which helps the client in building trust with us and providing more business opportunities to grow.

We started with a team size of five and within the short span of three years, we have increased our team members to 25, handling different business domains.

We use the IQ Bot and Metabots extensively in almost all of our tasks. We have created the bots to consolidate reports from various resources like webpages, databases, and different message formates like PDFs, Excel, XML, and submitting them to the business owner.

Scheduling helps to generate and send reports without any delay.

We have used this functionality to automate business processes that submit the order forms in SAP for a large number of orders without any human intervention.

Automation Anywhere should think about the integration with Machine learning and deep learning with ease, so that AA can be used in various other domains that require human calculation and logic to work. A good application would be IVR, as this can help businesses reduce the response time and achieve better customer satisfaction

AA should include more features in the mobile app, such as monitoring and debugging bots. This can help the administrator to look at the status on the fly.

They should provide more features to improve the visibility of bots.

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

I would rate the customer service a ten out of ten, as they provided excellent support, and in a short timeframe. This helped to resolve all of our issues quickly and as efficiently as possible.

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

We have implemented in-house.

Before choosing AA, we evaluated IBM, Blue Prism, and UiPath.

We automate mundane and repetitive tasks for our clients, like invoice processing, purchase order creation, sales order creation, refund processing, transaction chargeback, and many more.

These tasks are basic and require no special skillset, hence are an extra cost to the company. By automating them, the company saves a lot of manpower, leaving them to better utilize their resources for a more value-added task. This ultimately leads to a better return on investment.

Automation Anywhere has provided the capability to automate repetitive tasks for the organization, which in turn has lead to a lot of cost-savings. It has also helped in removing the robots out of humans, by investing their time in more value-added activities.

Humans can work approximately eight to ten hours, whereas if the same activities are done by the bots, they can keep on working round the clock. Therefore, improving the productivity of the organization.

The percentage of human error in such cases has become little-to-none when processed by the bot.

The universal recorder along with the Excel basic and advanced packages has been highly valuable. With Excel basic, we can perform basic Excel activities even if Excel is not installed in the system. The Excel advanced package has a lot of features added, which were initially not there in Version 11 and we had to rely on external scripting for the same.

Earlier in Version 11, we had different sets of recordings, which often made things confusing but with the universal recorder, the situation is not the same anymore.

The UI could be made better because the UI in Version 11 was better and easier as compared to a2019. We were able to fit in more lines of code on the screen at a time, whereas in a2019, we can see much less. This means that the developer has to scroll again and again to view his/her code.

An option should be provided to disable the flow and dual-mode since those are not used often by the developers, and hence take up extra space on the screen.

The IQ bot should also have a feature to process documents with multiple invoices, as currently, we need to split the document according to invoices beforehand.

I have been working as an RPA Developer for the past three years. For the first three and a half years, I was using Version 10 and 11 of Automation Anywhere, and for the last six months, I have been using A2019.

The solution is quite stable.

The solution is easily scalable. We can add more bot runners or creators as per our need when the requirements increases.

The technical support was great. The support team response is quite prompt and they will provide you the solution to your issues most of the time.

Automation anywhere was my first RPA tool.

The initial setup is straightforward and if there is any difficulty, the AA support team will come to your rescue.

Our in-house team automates processes for our clients. The expertise level was good.

From my experience, I can say that the initial setup cost is easily recovered over a period of time once the bots start running in production. We develop bots for our clients and as per their information, most of the time, the automation of a single process has returned their original investment amount.

We did evaluate other RPA tools but we found Automation Anywhere to be more user-friendly and easy to use. 

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

I am a platform architect for the RPA so I deal with all 3 major RPA vendors. I build the Infra for all big setups. I have immense experience plan, design, and building the setup on cloud, on-prem and with different configurations.

I implemented AA in different environments, the AA installation is the smoothest compared to other RPA software installs.

Migration is a little challenging since it requires direct integration with DB, credential vault and all that. Since multiple credentials are involved, it is a challenge to get all the credentials, it should be easier if only the control room credential was required. Versioning migration is still a challenge.

My company uses AA extensively for internal BPO work as well as we refer and deploy it to the customer as a RPaaS model. It helps in increasing productivity, reducing the cost of the whole operation. It makes fewer errors and in the COVID situation proves to be a reliable workhorse.

We implemented a lot of new environments recently. v10 expiry and COVID situation accelerated the implementations. Compared to older days now all implementation of infra bot happened pretty quickly.

Bot with Citrix integration may require a lot of improvement but having any extra feature really helps in complex implementation.

The cloud templates for implementation helped greatly and it helps us in pushing the software fast.

• The OCR integration came a long way. They have intelligence inbuilt into it.
• Ease of deploying and the KB article really help people to just read and deploy different 3rd part components as well(svn, DB, LB, etc) .
• Nowadays, the screen scraping techniques evolved in RPA and it is good to see they are in play which was not the case couple of years ago.
• HBC is most suitable for COVID times. 
• The RPaas offering will help customer to use it for less number of bots.
• AD security group integration is a good feature
  
• AI sense is good too.
  

They need to concentrate lot on a nonpersistent RPA model. Integrate IQ bot with AA instead of making it as a separate component, since nowadays intelligent bots need to be integrated into RPA core. Instead of bot agents getting installed on the machines, concentrate on making it independent of the system and only as a plugin in the browser.

It doesn't have an independent small install for developers and always requires to be fully installed.

Bringing a DevOps model for bot implementation integrated through private bot store might be a good idea to improve the tool.

I being using it since couple of years, i am impressed by the transformation from v10 to v11 and v11 to A2019. 

The solution is pretty stable, we didn't face many issues. Once the instalation is done the control room core architecture wont face many issues.there are quick fixes like service restart if anything goes off. but most of the time we hear AA support suggesting us to reinstall with the new version of software for performance issues, but with my experiance i hardly see that making huge differnce in fixing the actual issue.

 Monitoring can be done through email alerts for the core infrastructure. Issues mainly in HA(High Availability) with cluster sync issues still not monitored at the dashboard level, which might be a concern if the cluster goes out of sync. At the bot implementation lot of things are dependent on the way we code so it's additional work for the developer to get the code keeping in mind all the events which might happen. I would have been impressed if the solution had framework at the control room level to keep track of the overal execution and transactions, hope they can bring that feature in future releases

We never faced any issues with scalability for AA. sometime it takes high CPU on CR, but that is expected. one of the frequent questions we encouter with HA setups is the single point failure of repository storages, i understand that this needs to be taken care by storage fault tolerance, however most organization might not use cloud for RPA and if we are doing on prem install they might not have a high resillenace storage. SQL availability group still needs a SQL expert to get that right and DR solution totally depends on the underlaying infra we work on (there may be lot of alternative solution and its a big discussion to be honest :-)   )

Hence HA and DR solution really require a expert like us who have extensive knowledge on RPA, cloud, infra, windows and SQL  

They offer excellent customer service. No complaints except that every time they ask for a software upgrade as soon as they hear about an issue, which is not actually a good solution. Otherwise, they have very good knowledge of most of the issues. 

We keep switching between RPA software for a number of reasons. We prefer AA for the following reasons:

• Low cost for run licenses compare to other RPA solutions
• A high number of certified developers help in bring efficient automation compared to others, they in turn promote the RPA software that they know of.
• Easy to program, no prior experience of programming required.
• Easy to use compared to other RPA.

The initial setup was straightforward, even a complex setup can be set up in 20 mins if you have all prerequisites.setup can be complex if there is a HA , DR implementation, as a architects we need to factor in lot of variables. some are target application access,  MFA for the application or windows authentication, credential management, data accessibility, network reachability , underlaying hardware, PaaS offering in cloud(depends on the cloud) , VDI or VM template to choose (Makes huge difference in performance and costing), citrix or native application . Overall simple install, but huge planning to figure out the overall feasibility and effectiveness of implementation

We implemented in-house. I implement it within Accenture and for customers as well. I rate my self pretty high for implementation. I have solid experiance (AA master) as well as cloud certification. I have 12 years experiance in infra, so expect a good solid backgroup on both AA and infra.

ROI is important for the business case. ROI is good if you are going for long run, year on year. i never stayed on a project till we start getting the actual values, i see nowadays ROI is shrinking due to RPA vendors raising thier license costs , additional cost added to get the complex RPA solutions to be implemented

The setup cost for AA is always fixed since the configuration won't change much for the different number of bots, the license cost is lower in AA,

We usually evaluate Blue Prism and UiPath along with AA for implementation. We decide based on the requirements.