Automation Anywhere Reviews

I am a developer and I have developed bots mainly for insurance companies. Most insurance companies in my country usually have big problems trying to transfer data from one application to another, this hence has made it very difficult for them to be up to date with their entry. Usually, they are faced with a one month lag since they employ humans to do the work for them. 

In addition to this, the data transfer usually contains a series of errors, and in that area accuracy is very key. A slight mistake can end up ruining things big time .

Our company's reputation has made it easy to improve recently after beginning to offer RPA services to clients.

Before AA, the insurance companies used to do data manually from one app to another, but after introducing them to automation the speed and accuracy have been outstanding. They had a lot of workload hanging around. 

After automating the process, my company has been able to acquire new clients who are interested in automating their processes using automation anywhere. This hence means more work for us which is always a good thing.

1. I would say business analytics, it provides real-time data that's something other competing companies lack. It uses statistics and graphs to show the performance of the bots which processes are lagging behind and if you need to give priority to certain tasks. 

2. The control room and the bot creator - the control which is the brain is a powerful feature that allows administrators to be able to control how the bots work, create users, and be able to give roles to a user. 

The bot creator allows developers to be able to customize bots according to the client's needs 

Most clients use systems which use old Java versions, trying to automate on these systems is really difficult since most features/commands are not supported. Java earlier than 1.7 cannot work something and most firms I have interacted with their systems are old. Another thing according to Automation Anywhere, it's main aim is not to change the client's system but to be used on top of the existing one hence Automation Anywhere should consider those clients since in my country most of them use systems which date back to 2000, and they are not willing to spend another fortune to change them just so they can use Automation Anywhere.

Additional features: Automation Anywhere should add a couple of commands which will help most developers not to always use a script, a good example is in String operations.

I have been using AA for two years. 

This solution is stable, as of now, I can't complain about anything but more attempts to make it more stable would be okay maybe I haven't encountered one yet but I'm sure it's flawless when it comes to stability.

Definitely would like it, scalability means more new features.

Most customers we've interacted with at first are usually not certain about automation but immediately we do a proof of concept, they are eager to implement. 

I have only used Automation Anywhere and I love it.

It was straightforward.

It was an in-house one.

Anything above 50%. Most clients cannot go for anything less.

I usually advise them not to worry about the overall cost since the outcome will be profitable.

Yes, I had considered UiPath.

I like the way Automation Anywhere has migrated from v11 to a2019 my concern is about bots in a2019, once you delete them it's impossible to get them back.

• Automate and Digitization
• Process understanding
• Finding gaps in process
• Process re-engineering
• Process mining

All customers were happy after automating using AA because:

• Better accuracy
• Easy to develop and manage
• Easy to manage orchestrator
• It's an automated simple process within the organization.

Metabots and IQ bots.

PDF extraction and cognitive automation need improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year. 

The stability is awesome.

Scalability is good.

Their technical support is very good.

We used Ui Path. We switched because of the cost.

In-house.

We have seen good ROI.

• Automating frond end and back end office jobs.  
• Automating tiring jobs - Automation Anywhere is used to Automate many jobs that are repetitive. 
• To deploy a digital workforce and optimize productivity.
• Report generation.
• Revenue forecasting.
• Beneficial to QA processes.
• Data validation and auditing.
• Data replication and migration.
• Customer Relationship Management and other operational sales activities                               

RPA helps to Automate these jobs perfectly.

With better technologies and research at its disposal, we will see a decrease in the cost of RPA tools.

With it, the other processes on work, the automation cost will dramatically reduce in the upcoming years.

Moreover, as the number of robotic vendors grows, the RPA licensing will see a significant decline rate in RPA licensing and with more space for changes.

RPA Security:

With more significant responsibilities on the robots’ shoulders, the bigger are the possibilities of a breach and system failure.

There will be an improvement in protection measures from the new types of cyber threats or any internal faults will see an increase due to a constant rise in security requirements.

Better Cloud-Based RPA Platform:

According to “Robotics Process Automation (RPA) – 2018 Annual Report,” Everest Group, 2018; currently over half of all RPA processes (~57%) are attended.

Including cloud-based, unattended RPA represents the remaining 43% (33% on-prem, 10% cloud-based).

The growth of IoT and improved cloud services gives more flexibility and security to Robotic Process Automation.

The cloud supplies unlimited, off-site storage, and on-demand access to data.

Automation at its best:

About 70% to 80% of rule-based processes in a business can be automated. RPA has a good hold in both the back- and front-office with advancements in AI, big data, speech recognition technologies, machine learning, and deep neural networks.

As a consequence of predicted growth in the field of Cloud-based tech and natural learning processes, RPA tech is positioned to be even more integrated, automated, and independent.

Workload management is a cool feature of Automation anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is one of the most popular RPA vendors offering powerful and user-friendly RPA capabilities to automate the business processes that are performed by humans. AA is a web-based management system that includes a control to run end-to-end automated business tasks for companies. Over 500 leading brands across the world use this tool to handle and scale their business processes with near-zero error rates and minimizing operational costs. AA allows building scripts to perform repetitive tasks instead of writing code. They can automate a broad range of chores from basic level Windows configuration steps to the ultimate networking and remote database processes. The three core components in the AA architecture are:

Bot Creator – It allows the developers to create bots to automate their desktop-based applications.

Control room- An application that works as a controller and handles the entire execution and management of clients, scripts, credentials, roles, security, etc.

Bot Runner – A machine that allows us to run the bot. The status of bot execution is reported back to the control room.

The company offers various products to support enterprises in their journey of digital transformation. They are as follows:

Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA

The product is dedicated for the business user and comprises advanced capabilities to offer an intuitive interface for the business user, bot developer, and automation administrator. This platform is easiest to use, supports to avoid complexity, and ensures fast adoption & rapid deployment. It not only fulfills the requirement of the digital workforce but also be flexible to evolve with the business needs.

2. IQBots

IQBot is a cognitive bot designed to support as well as learn from business users and enable the business user to experience the power of advanced artificial intelligence technologies. Integrated with the automation anywhere enterprise RPA, the IQBot offers enterprise massive gains in productivity, as it includes competence of automating complex tasks involving unstructured data. The table below explains the different types of bots in automation anywhere: Task bot, Meta bot, and IQ bot.

Image1-28

3. Bot Insights

The platform displays statistics and graphs to analyze bot performance in the system. It also allows calculating the time saved in the automation process. It is the first analytics solutions build for bots. Bot Insights tightly integrates the real-time business insights with the digital workforce performance.

4. BotFarm

It is an on-demand enterprise-grade platform for RPA bot. The platform scales the capacity of the digital workforce by deploying bots anytime, anywhere with a single click. It can create, deploy and handle thousands of software bots and can ensure resilience, elasticity, and scalability.

5. Bot Store

The first marketplace for plug and play bots dedicated to business automation initiatives. It enables enterprises to discover, deploy, and mobilize bots, including process bots, application bots, and cognitive bots in a fraction of seconds.

I would like for AA to add an inbuilt debug log that has functionalities to view the values of variables during run time in order to have a point-to-point debugging in case of an error.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year. 

Automation Anywhere has been useful to implement business solutions that were previously performed manually by the business Team.

We have been using it to automate applications such as Excel, PDF, Web applications, Windows applications, Outlook, Word documents, and more. Using it will help reduce the time and improve the efficiency of the project, and also to reduce FTE.

Our organization also uses IQ Bot and Metabot for projects that require cognitive capabilities. Also, the OCR extraction helps in reading data from PDF.

Automation Anywhere has helped customers to reduce the time and manual effort required in day to day business by automating multiple projects.

The features like IQ Bot and Metabot have helped our organization to gain business trust and provide a greater number of unique solutions to our clients for complex projects. Also, Automation Anywhere is very easy to learn and implement solutions by any developer. That gives organizations the power to automate complex and unique solutions to bring a change and drive to automation projects quickly.

Solutions which require cognitive abilities can easily be implemented using Automation Anywhere. It's great to have a tool that gives the power to automate ML/AI requirements. 

Also, the features like the terminal emulator and Active Directory that are provided by Automation Anywhere are great to implement solutions.

For improvements, I would like Automation Anywhere to add new default mail operation commands, which might help developers to automate Outlook solutions easily and effectively.

Similarly, some PDF commands can help developers to automate complex PDF automation projects and help developers to extract the PDF data more accurately and precisely. IQ Bot has some limitations that should be improved in future releases.

It would be great if the work items concept is improved; that would help the developers and support team.

The AI and ML features should be more fully explored in the future.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one and a half years.

The stability is good.

Automation Anywhere's scalability is good. We are planning to use the cloud infrastructure for our project. We hope to implement projects with 100 and 200 bots in the upcoming days. 

Automation Anywhere is the best tool to scale up and increase the bots without facing many issues in the production environment. 

The customer service and the technical support team are doing good work. Whenever we face issues, the Automation Anywhere team helps and supports in resolving them.

Because of this, we have not faced many issues in the implementation of projects. I hope this continues into the future, as well.

I have also used the Blue Prism solution but it does not allow you to implement cognitive requirements. Because of this, we switched to Automation Anywhere to help clients build cognitive and AI solutions.

We had an expert team who helped with the installation and set up of the infrastructure, without any major issues. Hence, the initial setup didn't require much effort and was easier to implement.

We have implemented Automation Anywhere with the help of an expert team. 

We have saved around 90% of the time that would be required to perform tasks manually.

Now, with the implementation of the solutions, the clients are really happy to see that the time and the cost are being saved due to the automation of their projects, without any variations in the results.

The same results are being achieved in other automation projects using this product. Our company has also partnered with Automation Anywhere to deliver more solutions to different clients.

I hope other clients also get the same benefits that we have achieved in our project. In our project, we have reduced the manual effort by 90% and have also reduced the variations in results achieved using automation by 40%. I hope this percentage should increase over time so as to benefit the team more.

We are proposing a documentation solution like archived files, payroll, and integrating data between Excel forms and CRM/SAP.

We have a solution for how to digitize archived files into PDFs and distribute them to a dedicated folder. We use Excel forms to manipulate data, then the physical data will be scanned and contains the date, which will be input by the user manually. After that, the bot will execute the process for distributing the file, and finally, will send a report to the user.

We use analytics as part of the result.

We are not the end-user. Rather, we are helping users to get the best solution out of their business process. Mostly, we are learning from webinars or the AA YouTube channel.

We know that many things can be solved by using RPA, but the con is that the branding image of AA in Indonesia is low. We have to compete with UiPath on a line per line basis, so it will be not easy to persuade users to use AA.

I hope we can get more support for AA to expand in the Indonesian Market.

There are many features that are valuable including Whatsapp messages, OCR, and image recognization, but I have not tried all of them.

My opinion is that we need to have a video or tutorial on how to implement these features, as well as seeing what results to expect. We are having difficulty explaining RPA to users if we have to. The competitors can present the features more interactively using video, which is better than a PowerPoint presentation. Having this would make it easier to sell to the user, because the market in Indonesia prefers to see the demo/result, as opposed to learning the technical aspects first.

Similarly, they would prefer to see a success story and case study, instead of listening to a text presentation. I think we need to create an interactive presentation that is more creative and gives more proof of results for the process, and lesser in terms of technical description.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for seven months.

I have experience with traditional RPA.

IQ Bot is useful but the price is not friendly. Many users are interested to try it, but the cost is not a good deal when you consider ROI.

The price between distributor and partner is different, especially in terms of the discount. We cannot lock the discount from partner to distribution, so we still have a different price. 

We have evaluated other products but we need more time to see the results of our automated processes.

I would love Automation Anywhere to expand the market in Indonesia but I need more support. This is not only from a technical perspective, but business development assistance is needed to grow the market in this region.

Our use case is to extract information from web applications.

We use this tool to perform an end-to-end process flow that includes extraction, execution, and updating.

The product is simple to use and provides a good base of functionality out of the box to cover most automation scenarios. It is also very extensible in that functionality can be added through the use of class libraries, and AA works as the glue between several processes at our company. Many times, it is the quickest and most effective solution to implement right away, while other solutions require exponential amounts of support.

I am updating my review score to be slightly higher due to its expanded realm of use cases I have explored and successfully implemented.

It helps in increasing accuracy and decreasing human errors. Also, it helps to double the rate of productivity. It is highly accurate and gets up and running in a very short period of time.

You can keep the Bot learning by feeding more and more data sets, which makes the whole process highly efficient.

It is very cost-effective when deployed and when scaling out to the limit. Each command in the tool is more effective to build a bot very easily, without any issue, and less coding is required.

It can be easily learned by anyone who spends a bit of time with it.

The Workflow Designer helps to create the sequences and assigning end-to-end tasks.

Image Recolonization helps with scanned PDF documents, where it will identify certain clauses. Using AA validates all of the PDF documents with high accuracy and less time.

Bot Creator and Task Editor and valuable features.

IQ Bot and Meta bots are super-efficient and AA has a control room that is easy to use with lots of features.

IQ Bot helps to automate PDF and image documents.

It helps in daily reporting through email automation.

Exception handling is pretty decent and we don't have to worry about a process being stuck, as it moves to the next iteration on its own.

Cloud-Based architecture is what we expect.

Training is good and interactive but the final certification exam is very tough and it requires in-depth practical knowledge.

I think the process design flow should be simpler than the present feature. Nothing much, but requirements keep adding with complexity, so automation becomes complex for now. That should be one more area of improvement.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

We did not use another RPA product prior to this one.

We came to know about UiPath and Blue Prism.

This is a perfect solution for us and Automation Anywhere helps us to close many deals. I thank them for that.

My primary use case is to minimize the manual, repeated work done across the organizations and putting Bots in place for more accuracy, fastened process timings, and employee satisfaction.

Our major reason for implementing the solution is to reduce the FTE count and allow them to realize the benefits over a period of time. The primary use of this tool is automating areas like HR and admin.

It is easy to implement and most of the shared service areas are getting relieved by implementing Bots as part of the process.

From the organizational level, Automation Anywhere helped us in getting more business. Each client comes with their own standards, wherein it helps us in understanding their business altogether.

We can provide them the solutions in various ways, helping them with implementing the Bots, which requires us to enter into their core businesses and provide solutions to different areas.

The tool feature I found the most valuable is Metabot, as we can include the DLLs that are proprietary written code in .NET or other technologies.

Apart from the functionality, their working model and support are good.

Most of the tool's capabilities and features are very good in terms of architecture. It is easily understandable and very well structured. It is the most promising tool in the market, so it is helpful in attracting customers by demoing the already implemented Bots.

It would be great if they provide installation documents that are easier to understand, place more focus on capturing the fields, and most importantly, concentrate more on the OCR capability. Lots of customers come with scanned PDFs, wherein we find that area is more challenging. If a constant solution can be provided to read the non-editable documents, then that would be the highest milestone of the Automation Anywhere.

Lots of companies do not follow the LEAN method, so most of the processes are still with the old models. AA can focus on those areas and introduce some techniques to address those issues within the processes.

They can conduct more regular sessions with partners about their ability and new developments, which will help us in bringing new businesses.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for six years.

Their support in case of any tickets raised is more helpful for us in resolving the issues at the earliest.

We have been using Robotic Process Automation for the configuration of newly issued cloud environments and building cloud IT solutions.

Automation Anywhere Taskbots are being used to build Oracle Cloud environments by leveraging Excel files containing the configuration details. The Automation Anywhere Taskbots will scrape the Excel files in a dynamic way to configure the product using the most appropriate method for the data provided.

The Taskbots effectively match equivalent human inputs, rather than configuring from the backend.

AA has helped to accelerate the initial delivery stage of projects, wherein repetitive tasks were originally completed by consultants. This was an unnecessarily costly exercise, as this did not require the level of skill of a consultant.

The skillset of the consultant lies within gathering the correct requirements and providing the configuration details of these requirements in the predefined Excel files. Having the consultant also perform the arduous and repetitive configuration exercise was not efficient.

The code history functionality is the most valuable feature, although this could be improved upon with better tracing abilities and UI changes.

Overall, the commands provided have enough range to complete almost any task, with creative out-of-the-box thinking required sometimes for workarounds.

The simplicity and base nature of the commands are where the value lies; in combination, the variables, error handling, if/else, loop, etc, can produce significantly variable codes.

None of the commands are unique to Automation Anywhere, which allows beginners to leverage external knowledge.

Where minor but widespread changes are made to the cloud product being operated upon (e.g. a banner was added, or dropping all DIVs down 1), changing the cloned search values (Taskbot) individually was incredibly time consuming, and it shut down the RPA service until it was fixed.

To counter this, it would be valuable to have a 'mass update' of search values for cloned objects, in a similar way to Metabots.

Better tracing of 'if' and 'else' statements and their corresponding 'end' statements would be helpful.

Vertical connecting lines would be appropriate within the code, and a collapse/expand feature for code blocks would be ideal.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for 16 months.

Stability-wise, this product is good.

The scalability is reasonable.

No previous RPA solution was used before this one.

Other options may have been considered, but am unaware of which.