Automation Anywhere Reviews

Most of our use cases are for primary supply chain management. We have a lot of business processes and back office automation that we do primarily for our product people and our finance team. Most of the work is automation done in supply chain management, product setup, and product administration. 

I have been using this solution for almost four years and one year at my current company.

We have automated our critical functions, like supply chain management and purchase orders. Overall, there's been a direct benefit from it so far. We just completed our Phase I project this year. We have staff who have been moved out of the mundane tasks and are now doing value-added activities. 

Object cloning is the primary way of capturing inputs from screen scraping or mimicking the user flow, and it is 70 percent of the work that we do using Automation Anywhere.

We have a few issues which have persisted. These end up restarting the machine. We are hoping in version 11.3 of Automation Anywhere, our compatibility and infrastructure issues will be resolved. 

If you are using object cloning, it is stable. However, if you work with image recognition and custom objects, there are stability issues. 

We are on version 10.5.7. We have upgraded bits of it to 11.3, but it is still not operational on 11.3. We are currently working on migrating our infrastructure to version 11.3.

We are still small from a robotics implementation standpoint. We are just about 20 bots right now with no issues. If we scale up to 500 bots, I am not sure how the infrastructure and systems will behave, but I have had a good experience from a scalability standpoint on the tool so far.

I have a team of about 25 people with six people in support with the rest in development. At any given time, we have more than 50 people running Automation Anywhere.

This particular ticket management system works well. It's a reliable. If we need to a raise ticket for any issue, there is an escalation mechanism. Though, I have not used it. I try to utilize our customer success manager to be able to right person from Automation Anywhere. My experience has been good, though not excellent, from a support standpoint.

We were not using a solution before Automation Anywhere.

In version 11.3, the setup changed. So far, it has been simpler. Also, in version 11, they have changed the design into a Java Jetty architecture, which is more stable. However, we were not familiar with it, so we had some issues with it. Thankfully, Automation Anywhere diligently answered our calls and helped us through the installation. It wasn't easy to install on our own using the guide. We needed support from a technical entity from the support site to be able to do it.

It needs a lot of coordination between the DBAs, which is a separate team within our organization, the infrastructure team, our team, and the Automation Anywhere teams to execute the deployment. Getting them all together was a good three hours exercise just to install.

Two people from my team worked on the deployment, one of them being a DBA.

I have a technical team of support members who know our internal infrastructure. We built it in-house and the support is not outsourced to any IT vendors. We take care of the infrastructure provisioning, support, etc. We do everything ourselves, along with the help of Automation Anywhere.

I have a deployed team of six people for maintenance. 

We have seen more efficient processing and less number of errors due to quality control.

Savings have not been able to catch it that much. I believe there is huge potential here. This year, we are focusing a lot on the indirect benefits of speeding up the process. For example, we want our key customers to benefit, or buyers and suppliers boost up their business to receive benefits indirectly by freeing up their time.

They give us a good deal on the licensing because we bundle and customize things. If you ask to get a bulk business deal, you will receive more benefit. If you take other products from the suite, like IQ Bot, you can also receive a deal on the licensing. 

We have also worked with them for so long now that we have developed a relationship.

My current company looked at UiPath. We decided to go with Automation Anywhere vs UiPath, because of cost, reliability, and scalability.

We do look at companies like Microsoft Azure to do unstructured data processing for us.

It is a good with a good support app, but I would like it to work 100 percent of the time.

We are looking to increase our usage in the future. First, we need to locate the opportunities to automate within our organization to automate which are good contenders for RPA engines. We are also trying to standardize our processes to push more processes into the automation pipeline, leading to expansion. We are getting Automation Anywhere to assist with this as part of our Phase II project, and increase our bot usage by the end of the year.

If you are implementing it, you should have a good business case. Know what you're using it for: Is it for your direct or indirect benefits and what is the business value that you're going to bring in on the tool. Providing the tools for your business are important before onboarding it. Once you have onboarded it, you will need a good, capable team in-house to be able to keep the infrastructure maintained. 

Start slow. Don't start with a huge approach, then you decide that you failed. Do some proof on concepts. Ensure there is work for your organization. Gain the trust of your stakeholders. Then, take baby steps to move forward.

We have used Automation Anywhere to develop different software bots. We currently use version 10.7 for Windows 10 and we are in process of migrating our version to 11.2. We have automated important processes like creation of purchase orders from attributes that are in a Sharepoint form, and upload of exchange rates in our ERP system from data that is available in websites (central banks). We look at automating processes that are manual, repetitive, and rules based.

AA has allowed the generation of gains in productivity by automating certain processes, moving the hours from FTEs to a software robot, thus creating a digital workforce. The employees who were working on those manual activities are now focusing their time in the critical analysis of their processes. Here a few examples:

• Load of daily exchange rates - 840 hours/year saved
• Creation of purchase orders in Oracle - 1056 hours/year saved
• Processing of bank account statements - 600 hours/year saved

• The user friendly interface enables a quick learning process by any developer, and the ability to interact with virtually any system.
• MetaBots - This is an intelligent component/functionality that makes connection to websites or web forms a breeze. This functionality also works great with our corporate ERP system.
• Technical support - Very quick, efficient, and acknowlegeable. They were able to address all our inquiries very satisfactorily.

• Object cloning - This component seems to be unstable in version 10.7. We have run tests in version 11.2 and they seem to work much better there. During development/test cycles it is common to see object cloning components that were working previously stop full of a sudden. In these cases we usually migrate those components to MetaBots.
• Schedule queue - Scheduling is allowed at intervals of 30 mins. Having this interval reduced to 15 mins would allow better control of taks that run more quickly. The ability to schedule bots to run in different time zones would also be a great addition.
• Control Room - Enabling the ability to customize it would be a great addition. In version 10.7 we need to pay attention to the URL to differentiate between Dev, QA, and Prod. We could also use the function to create our own custom dashboards.
• Give MetaBots the ability to work with objects in applications running on a terminal server. This functionality would be a great help to developers.

Less than one year.

The solution in general is very stable, we haven't found any problem with bots deployed to the production server. As far as development goes, object cloning is a component of the solution that seems to be unstable, as it apparently stops working for no reason. Once deployed to production, everything is very smooth.

Scalability is associated to the number of bot runners purchased. More bot runners can be purchased at any time depending on how the demand grows, and AA offers the ability to process bots in a platform called bot farm.

AA Technical support has been contacted for different reasons, including validation of bot developments. In all scenarios, support was very responsive, efficient, and acknowledgeable, resolving all issues very quickly. Support is available 24x7 with tickets being raised either by their own ticket system or by direct calls. The customer service manager engages with the SPA in the company via phone call every quarter, to check on the customer satisfaction.

We previously used the product Automate. That product had issues working with Java forms, which were extensively used by our ERP solution.

The basic setup was straightforward. Deployment took two months. Our implementation strategy consisted of three servers, one for Dev, one for QA, and one Prod, as well as five bot runners: one for Dev, one for QA, and three for Prod. Finally, we have one administrator and one backup. AA provided the needed support to get the solution up and running quickly and smoothly.

Our company has a long-term partnership with TCS. We are currently using their consulting support, which has been good. TCS is able to engage with top professionals in the market.

We started utilization of the tool with a target of generating productivity, specifically by saving 10,000 hours between August and December 2018, regardless of the number of bots deployed.

Automation Anywhere is costlier than the general competition. I believe that it is consistent with their market share and with the benefits AA has to offer.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere vs UiPath.

Automation Anywhere is a great platform. It is the tool that allowed us to bring back to life former plans to create our digital workforce. One suggestion is to go with the most recent release, both for the app and Control Room. Versions after 10.7 are the ones with enhanced functionalities.

We purchased ten developer licenses, all of which are in use now. The developers are responsible for deployment and maintenance along with two administrators. We have a target to be met and it requires extensive use of the product. This target will certainly be increased in 2019.

We primarily use the solution for business process automation. We use it to help us with background processes.

It's a very stable solution.

We have found the solution to be very scalable. 

The solution, in particular, is simple to set up.

There are quite a few very strong features available to users.

I haven't really used it long enough to critique too heavily. I need some more time to do a deep dive into its functionality, which I haven't done yet. 

The solution should have a more robust forum to help users navigate the solution, learn about it, and get help when they need it.

It should have a better marketplace where you can gather various workflows, et cetera. It would be an ideal place to find pre-built workflows, for example. 

I've been using the solution for maybe one year.

The stability of the product is quite good. It's reliable and offers good performance There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It's quite scalable. We have many users on the solution. 

I'm not sure if I have ever actually contacted technical support. I can't recall dealing with them directly, and therefore would not be able to comment on their services. 

I'm also familiar with UiPath.

In general, when you set up the cloud solution, it's very, very easy. It's not overly complex. The on-premises version does take a bit more work. It's a bit more complex. That said, it's not too hard to handle either. 

The deployment is pretty fast. You're looking at maybe a 15-minute setup.

There is a community version, which is free. they also have a yearly paid license. 

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

Overall, I would give it a rating of eight out of ten.

We are an integrator. We are selling RPA products to various customers. They have different use cases. 

We have cloud as well as on-premise deployments of this solution.

It is an easy product. It is easier and less complex than any other RPA tool in the market. It is a popular product.

Some of the machine learning (ML) components are still in development. They deployed many of them, but they are doing some improvements on the machine learning part.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is suitable for enterprises.

Their technical support is good. I get very quick support whenever I face an issue. I raise a ticket, and the Automation Anywhere support team is available.

The deployment of Automation Anywhere is much easier as compared to any other RPA tool in the market. The solution itself is browser-based. So, we don't have to install complex software.

Its price is competitive with all other products in the market.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We are a factory and supplier corporation, e.g. we focus on the financial and automation niche, but mostly financial. Our service is implementing automation, e.g. we implement Automation Anywhere (AA) for customers. It's a tool for automating processes.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is easy to use and understand, even if the user didn't have previous experience with RPA (robotic process automation) software before. This solution has many tools for automation. It's good even if you're just starting with RPA software, e.g. we don't have to decide on the whole productivity process, so we can put in the costs step by step first, then put in the details after.

Other solutions require you to know the codes first and make decisions on the whole process. This means that with other RPA solutions, if the user doesn't have the experience, it will be difficult for them to use and decide on those automation programs, which is not the case with Automation Anywhere (AA).

An area for improvement for Automation Anywhere (AA) is its organization or utilization, because if it's your first time to initiate automation, you have to convert it properly, and you have to develop the amendment path through the automation path, but you have to pay a subscription for it first. The first part is difficult because if you buy the full package without having much experience with the product, it could be difficult to utilize the process from manual to automation.

There are some limitations in the migration from the manual process to automation, because currently, Automation Anywhere (AA) is trying to develop transfer from on-premises to cloud. There's a limitation in migration.

The setup and deployment processes for this product also need to be improved, e.g. made easier.

I worked with Automation Anywhere (AA) before, and I helped a developer team provide it to the customer, and that was last year. We implemented it. I've been dealing with the solution in the last two years, but changed my focus to analytic solutions for a year.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is a stable tool.

Scalability for this tool is good.

It's difficult to set up Automation Anywhere (AA) on the on-premises environment. It's also difficult to make preparations for it. You have to be ready so it can support the automation process. That was what people experienced in the on-premises deployment, but I'm unsure how it is when it's set up on cloud. Setup could be easier if it's done on the Cloud.

If you have a person who knows the utilities of this solution, setup will take one to two weeks.

Our clients are paying for a yearly subscription of Automation Anywhere (AA).

Automation Anywhere (AA) is very easy to understand, but automation is something new here in Thailand.

We have 20 clients using this solution. For deployment and maintenance, we have a technical team made up of 10 people, with one vision analyst.

We have an automation hypercare team responsible for supporting customers after we've deployed Automation Anywhere (AA).

I would recommend this tool to others who want to start using it, because it's a good tool.

I'm giving Automation Anywhere (AA) a score of eight out of ten.

Automation Anywhere is primarily useful for any processes with repetitive data entry. For example, supplier invoice processing. This solution can be deployed on-prem as well as on the cloud. 

Automation Anywhere is stable, scalable, and easy to use. 

The product's technical support could use improvement. 

I can't think of any additional features I would like to see. The existing features are okay. 

We have been providing Automation Anywhere for over four years. 

Automation Anywhere is very stable. 

This product is very scalable. 

The number of customers we have using this solution exceeds 50. 

Automation Anywhere's tech support could be more knowledgeable. 

The installation is straightforward. It usually takes under two to three hours. Full deployment can take anywhere between four to twelve weeks for one process automation. For deployment and maintenance, we have a team of roughly three to four: one project lead, one solution architect, one BA, and one developer.  

We implement this solution through an in-house team. We are IT service providers and partners of Automation Anywhere, so we provide this solution to customers. 

There is an annual subscription for Automation Anywhere. 

I rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten, and would recommend it to others. 

My primary use cases consist of the following:

1. Filtering and manipulating multiple Excel, CSV, XLS files to gather relevant data as per the business requirements.
2. Extracting text from searchable and non-searchable PDF files and uploading the data to separate output files or web-based forms.
3. Scheduling tasks to run on a daily basis or implementing trigger-based process execution.
4. Implementing email automation in various modules.
5. Working with external macros and JScript files, depending on the given business logic. 

Automation Anywhere has by far, provided one of the best and easiest solutions to implement RPA. It has helped increase our productivity in the following ways:

1. The scheduling and trigger-based solutions provided by Automation Anywhere have saved the effort of manually checking the conditions and executing tasks.
2. The OCR commands have made document processing efficient to a certain extent.
3. Working with external scripts has been very useful; I have used JScript and VBScripts in my processes.
   

The features I found most valuable are:

1. PDF Integration Commands: It is easy to extract text from PDF files in two ways, plain text and structured text. Automated password protected files, as well.
2. FTP Commands: I found it very easy to automate processes where I have to extract, upload, and rename files on the SFTP server for my process.
3. Error Handler: One of the most valuable features is the error handler, as this command has helped me design bots that can handle multiple errors and exceptions.
4. Object Cloning Features: This is one of the most reliable features provided by Automation Anywhere.
   

The product is amazing, nevertheless, it would be really great to see the following points being implemented:

1. Better OCR Extraction: The OCR extraction is good to some extent, but I have seen some cases where it has failed to extract text from a few documents, and this was quite unexpected.
2. More Excel Commands: The set of Excel commands I am currently using in Automation Anywhere V11.3 are limited. Most of the Excel commands such as filtering and removing duplicates are not available.
3. Options to edit Document and PPT files: The scope of projects could be expanded if we have such commands. 

I have been using Automation Anywhere for more than a year.

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!