Automation Anywhere Reviews

Automation Anywhere is an RPA tool that is used to Automate any repeated simple/complex tasks with ease. Automation Anywhere is not perfect but it is still the best tool available in today's market.

It is one of the simplest RPA tools, having a simple user interface, and it is very easy to get hands-on with this platform. It has vast learning resources available, too.

Use Cases:

1. Extracting data from scanned PDFs: Using Automation Anywhere made it much simpler to scrape data from scanned PDFs and convert it into standard Excel format, as per requirements.
2. Portal Automation: AA makes web automation simple and our manual tasks have now been automated. Our portal is for making client bookings of the client. The Bot reads the Excel file shared by the user and accordingly, makes the booking in the portal with minimum time and with high accuracy.

Automation Anywhere is known for its high performance, reliability, and simplicity. Using Automation Anywhere has been a boon for my organization. It saves time and does not require human intervention, depending on the task or process that is automated.

As data scraping from scanned PDFs was a huge task for our organization, and with other tools, the accuracy was around 50-60%, we were facing a huge data loss. When our organization switched to Automation Anywhere, the accuracy rate improved and consequently, there has not been much data loss.

Automation Anywhere has great features and I have found Object Cloning and SAP integration to be the most valuable among them.

Object Cloning: Using Object Cloning, any web-based process or task that has fixed steps to be followed can be automated with ease. Object Cloning captures the object, DOMXPath, Inner text, etc. The drop-down menus can also be automated easily.

SAP Integration: Automation anywhere has added one more feature to this command in v11.3.5, which is SAP GUI. Using this feature/command, SAP Automation has become simpler than before, as it required using Metabot, DLL, etc. Everything can now be done in the task bot itself.

Automation Anywhere should improve its OCR command, as it's my observation that I have faced data loss or improper data being extracted. If the image quality is low then the data extraction with 100% accuracy is a huge task that I have been facing.

If the scheduling of the bot were much simpler, also allowing us to schedule bots prior to the start time, it would be an improvement. 

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The stability is good.

The scalability is very good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Excellent support.

Once, I was facing an issue so I raised a ticket. The Automation Anywhere support team helped me to resolve it quickly, with proper follow up via email as well as calls.

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

The initial setup is straightforward. The Control Room and client are simple to set up, too.

We have an in-house team with a high level of expertise.

Considering the cost, it is a bit high, but worth the price because the output accuracy is high.

Automation Anywhere is a tool that I love! I am quite happy using this tool and there are no features or commands that I have found to be missing that should be added.

Its advantages are performance, simplicity, and excellent support!

Please go for Automation Anywhere. I am sure that you won't regret it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

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

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

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

The initial setup is straightforward.

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

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

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

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

We use this solution for all the business processes and mainly to integrate with Excel files, our database, and our ERP.

We basically process data that are in form of Excel, PDF, or CSV formatted files. We also interact with information that is stored in our database.

Generally, we automate a lot of processes that are repetitive and time-consuming. We work mainly with processing data, thus reducing the time needed to do the process manually. The workforce is also reduced for completing simple tasks like logging in to a forum, as well as complicated tasks like banking or finance. All of these all possible.

Automation Anywhere has helped us in many ways and is one of the best RPA tools. AA has helped us to spend less time on repetitive tasks by automating them.

The two most important aspects are saving time and saving effort by our workforce. Repetitive work and rule-based tasks are the areas that are being replaced by bots.

The tutorials that are available from Automation Anywhere are very helpful for newbies to learn the platform and get going with the tool.

It is very difficult to pin down one valuable feature because each and every one of them is valuable in its own way.

I find that IQ Bot is the most amazing feature, as it helps us to work more efficiently with business documents.

Object Cloning is another good feature that helps us to save time.

Metabot is another valuable feature that exists in AA.

PDF integration is another important feature that avoids using IQ bots, and using the OCR helps us to extract text from an image.

I have had some difficulty with OCR extraction, which could be a little better.

Automation Anywhere is not fully compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer while working with web extraction.

Maybe there could be more options added for PDF integration.

Having a few practical use cases added to online learning would be helpful for newbies.

Other than these,  I don't see other difficulties. In terms of extra features, they are adding them day by day to make for the smoother automation of processes.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for the past seven months.

We have been using RPA for the past seven years and have dealt with a lot of other RPA vendors. We have many use cases across all of the verticals like technology, HR, Finance, Mortgage, Insurance, etc.

The current one, on which we are focusing is Mortgage use cases. We have proven experience in all of the verticals with different use cases. Especially when it comes to the environment, there are no restrictions in that regard because it's all based on the client's requirements and their expectations as well. There are a few clients that came with a Citrix gateway, others use the VDI based approach, and still, others bring their own operating systems.

One thing that I want to highlight AA for is their security standards. It's an easy win situation when we present this to our clients. The CyberArk integration and setup are really amazing and it helps us to win deals for new projects.

Especially on the Cognitive capabilities, AA enables us to adopt third-party extensions and products, which is very useful to accommodate more use cases and push the RPA practice to the next level.

The most valuable features are the IQ Bot and Process Discovery.

1. IQ Bot - In earlier days, everyone started with RPA by mimicking the users' actions and achieved some automation expectations. But nowadays, apart from the basic action, there is a need for intelligence like Machine earning, Deep learning, and Artificial Intelligence. The IQ Bot accommodates such expectations. There are a lot of pre-trained workflows available and a lot of capabilities to involve users to train the model.
   
2. Process Discovery - The next trend is Process discovery and it involves automating the identification of process requirements for activities and then automatically developing the workflow.

The dedicated BPM from AA should help to cover more use cases. I would strongly say that AA should have a more advanced BPM tool to support the process/use cases attempted in the project. Instead of depending on other open-source BPM products, AA should provide their own BPM for attended automations.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Stability-wise, this product is excellent.

The scalability of AA is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

We have more than seven years of experience in RPA and with different vendors and a lot of different tools. We used the same approach but the recent updates and growth of AA have helped us decide to make use of it

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented in-house, with the help of vendor support documents.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Automation Anywhere is that 

It's not always necessary to tie up or utilize unattended bots or achieve 100 % automation. A lot of opportunities are there with the ratio of 80:20 (80% automation and 20% manual intervention) or 70:30.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about a year.

Stability-wise, this is a good product.

The scalability is good.

We have not yet tried to contact technical support.

Before AA, all of our processes were done manually.

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

We implemented using an in-house team.

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

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

We evaluated UiPath before choosing Automation Anywhere.

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

Our primary use case is assisting clients in automating redundant, repetitive tasks to drive value and efficiency.

Working with the Automation Anywhere application is very easy in our environment. It has allowed us to win more work and prove value to our clients. 

 AI and ML integrations are also easy to apply, as well as cognitive features.

I would like to see them continue building out documentation with more video-aides.

Training is good and interactive, although the final certification exam is very tough and requires practical, in-depth knowledge. The certification exam for AA is not as per the training videos, as the questions are more scenario-based. This makes it very hard for beginners to clear the exam after just tutorial knowledge.

Automation Anywhere is a good RPA tool, but not so good if we compare it with UiPath. 

The drag-and-drop feature is quite similar to that of UiPath.

My primary use case starts with downloading an inventory file in IE and then storing it in the database. This uses DB variables that interact with the banking application.

Through its automating system of generating quotations, it is much easier for us to track back the same customer data. It is giving us a real-time capability for generating reports.

Automation anywhere has equipped us with amazing tools including Bot Insight, IQ Bot, Discovery Bot, etc. The Discovery Bot is used to search the entire task in the system that can be automated. It keeps much value in our organization.

Extracting PDFs is very easy using Automation Anywhere. Its strong points are that it is easy to use, easy to deploy, easy to share, and has multi-user support. Different devices can be used to execute the bot.

The Bot Store provides some utilities for free, which can then be integrated into my workflows easily.

Using automation has reduced between five and eight FTE in our inventory download and update task. This is more generic to the RPA space than AA specifically, but we tried to automate a large, high FTE, end-to-end process as a POC.

AA is user friendly.

The most valuable features are the web recorder, which is used to extract structured table data, the Metabot to handle smart process automation (SPA), Object Cloning, variable assignment, and Message boxes.

IQ Bot is a unique offering from AA that allows you to extract information from semi-structured documents like PDF invoices, using built-in ML. The ability to train documents and easily review any that fall outside of the model is excellent.

AA has good coverage in terms of out-of-the-box functionality for bot development and management. A2019 has some great new features that take this further, such as the ability to create custom commands for your organization, which helps code reuse and development.

Comparing the code from dev to QA or production should be in some easier way.

Pausing the bot and resuming it in Metabot should be easier.

The Control room audit logs should be moved to an archive for those that are more than six months old.

The error handling capability is good but we are facing difficulties when there are multiple tasks in the same project. I want to be able to handle errors that occur in sub-tasks and it would be better to introduce a global error handler so that we can debug all of the relevant tasks.

I would like to have a project sharing hub like GitHub, inside of the tool, which will help to consolidate project files post-deployment.

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

We experienced continuous bot disconnections in our environment. Once we validated it with the AA support team, they suggest for version upgrade and it solved our problem.

The technical support team has good knowledge of the product. They understand problems well and then provide solutions. 

My recommendation would be to start with some simpler processes. This will build your capability and understanding far more quickly. Automating processes that utilize a lot of different web applications can be tricky without additional input/error checking. Be sure that your code is resilient enough to ensure inputs get transcribed accurately and pages/content are loaded before executing more lines of code.

Our primary use case is for the automation of output reports in Excel.

It improved the task performance at a team level and improved productivity.

MetaBot is one of the most useful features. 

It should be easier to use.

I have been using AA for five months.