Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case is to automate business processes for a manufacturing company.

My clients have seen tremendous value when it comes to automating business processes. The robust nature of the application allows them to scale their business processes pretty quickly. They receive the benefits in around a quick 12-week period.

The reporting capabilities are pretty nice. 

The Excel component is valuable, when compared to other tools in the market.

From an ease of use point of view, on a scale of one to ten with ten being really easy, I would rate the tool a six. The interface is not intuitive for business users who are used to seeing the process on a flow chart, like a Visio workflow diagram. This may be because of the nature of the way the interface is structured and the way the functions are built in list type of format. I feel like there is a bit of a learning curve for anyone who is new to the program. As with everything, it takes time and you start to get better at it. 

From pilot to production, we scaled our last bot in about nine weeks. It was a very interesting process because the building deployment can be done pretty quickly, but if you don't narrow down the scope early, you can face a lot of challenges. I don't think this necessarily has to do with the platform. It is more about understanding and narrowing down your scope from the beginning. It's okay to add more functionality later, but that adds delay to your overall timeline. However, being that it's very easy to configure the bot and add components to it, this is one of the benefits of building with Automation Anywhere. You can make changes pretty quickly.

With everything, you will have to be careful and not get caught up always making changes. You have to really narrow the scope down quickly and build it in very small components. Don't build everything end-to-end. Break down your processes, as much as possible, and deploy as little functionality as possible. This makes it way more easy to manage. It is also a much better way to build a bot.

I did attempt to reach out to customer support a few times. I didn't really get any response. 

I would rate them a five out of ten. There is room for improvement.

It does take a lot of space to install. However, you are installing a very powerful application which has very powerful components in it.

Pay attention to what you're doing, and the following:

1. Capabilities that you have in-house.
2. Support down the line. 
3. Handing over your solutions to someone else to pick up. 

You want to have this type of mindset. 

With any tools, you have to ensure you have the right capabilities in-house to be able to help build out and manage any solutions in the future, along with managing your army of bots in deployment. 

It is a good, powerful application. It can fit pretty much any use case, but that is one component to it. The other component is do you have the right in-house skills to help you manage the Automation Anywhere bots?

I took the RPA Advanced course for developers (entry-level) in Automation Anywhere University. I took it a while ago, and I don't know if it's changed now, but it was very informative, detailed, and intuitive. I came from automation tools, so it was a bit easier for me to pick up on the information because of my background. The course was pretty informational. I felt comfortable building an application, building a bot, and putting it into production after the course.

Building a bot can be pretty quick. If you understand what the problem is that the bot is trying to solve, then you can get it done pretty quickly since the process is easy and straightforward. However, if you are coming from other tools or are not an experienced developer, you might face a bit of a challenge in the beginning. Everything will eventually come pretty quickly, as you can build a bot in an hour, or even less than that.

I'm learning how to use the IQ Bot, which is a pretty good component of the application. I can see how it would be a really powerful feature for some of my clients.

I haven't used the Citrix feature yet.

It is our RPA platform. It is the main platform that we use for backups.

It has helped us a lot with our digitized work.

We have automated a lot of the bank's processes.

My team has taken courses through the Automation Anywhere University. The courses have been good. They have helped us, but it could improve some things, like how the courses are designed.

It is pretty stable, but we have experience issues.

We are working on scaling it now.

We use it with more than 17 applications. So, we work it on a very large scale.

The technical support is good. 

It took us two years to scale it from the pilot it to our current number of bots. The process was too much work.

We have saved 53 minutes through automation.

It is a very good product.

There are several features that are very valuable to me, and these are the main reasons I was attracted to it.

1. It has a very wide array of built in functionality. I am able to test against SNMP (v1 and v2), Telnet, SSH, Command Line, Web Browsers (IE, Google, FireFox), email, Microsoft Office, Windows integration, etc… On top of all that I can write other apps in other languages and have Testing Anywhere control them when necessary.
2. The scripting language is easy to learn and very quick to build on.
3. The server side allows for multiple developers to be involved and all their work is saved to a single repository.

We chose this product because we had an extremely aggressive timetable to develop automation from scratch. In a traditional setting it would have taken several developers months to develop a full of suite of tests for just one feature set. Using Testing Anywhere we were able to leverage the built in capabilities such as Telnet and product a quick turnaround in developing a Telnet menu test that took a matter of weeks to develop.

There are a few areas that this product really needs to bring to the next level. First, the server is good but very basic. It does a great job of storing all the test files in a central location for all developers to use. However, it lacks all the standard features a normal “code” repository has such as Check In/Check Out, Branching, Version Control, etc…

Second, the IDE – or development interface is simple and easy to use. But if you come from a coding background such as myself you’ll find that it is a little too simplistic. I've become accustomed to the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE where it is very functional and helpful in developing your code. The Testing Anywhere IDE lacks all the bells and whistles you get in a full features IDE such as Visual Studios.

I have been using this solution for about 1 ½ - 2 years now.

Testing Anywhere offers two licenses for deployment – a runtime license and an EXE license.

The EXE license is such that I can create “executable” files from the developer machine and deploy it. In creating the EXE you include all of your scripts necessary for it to run. However, there is no control on how or when those are created and the file that you created can only be deployed to one system. SO if you wanted to deploy this test file to say 10 test systems you would need 10 licenses.

The runtime license is basically the same as a developers license without the ability to edit. I've come to believe this is very useless as I have to manually put in all my scripts and manually check them every time I run (because there is no way to verify what is running is the latest). One of our tests involved 200 scripts, so this can be a rather tiresome venture. To Testing Anywheres' credit, there is supposedly a different server than I am using, and that allows you to update the scripts on a remote machine but we are not using that nor have I seen it so I cannot comment on its abilities.

We have encountered a few. My company was one of the early users (if not the earliest) of the Testing Anywhere product. I'm told we used the product in ways that was not anticipated and pushed the boundaries of the product and development teams at Testing Anywhere. Because of this we uncovered a number of bugs that we were able to work with the developers at Testing Anywhere to get resolved.

We have run into a few. First, the server we purchased is limited to just a handful of licenses - six I believe. This includes developers and runtimes. This may seem like a lot but if you include all your test machines (the run times) that quickly dissipates. We are currently discussing evaluating the next level of server offered called Test Lab which is supposed to resolve this issue.

I would rate them as 5/10, and only because I have had most of my interaction with technical support and our product manager. I have not had to contact customer support much at all – Which is a good thing!

I would rate them as 8/10. They are always responsive. I am often in contact with someone on their team ensuring that they can re-produce the issues and working with them to find a solution.

I come from a background where we developed all of our test tools internally. I’ve used mainly Visual Studio. The only reason I entertained and then chose this solution was because of the time table and resources made available by my management.

I found the initial setup rather easy and straight forward. I think coming from a programming background made it that much easier but others that I have worked with that did not have a programming background have not had much difficulty either.

This was done through an in-house team.

Yes, we did look into several other options. We looked at an internal team of developers developing in some type programming language. We also looked at Selenium, Squish, and a few others.

If you are looking for a fast solution using minimal resources not requiring an advanced programming skill set this is your product. It’s easy to learn and quick to deploy.

While it has some really great features and is extremely easy to use it is still fairly new to the market and has its bugs. (Not that other solutions do not).

I am using IQ Bots for invoice indexing for many clients.

My primary use case is extracting invoice details from different vendors for validation purposes. We convert CSV files to Excel for formatting and before A2019, I used to do all validations with VBA script. Now, with AA A2019, it validation very easy using Python. It is also very fast and efficient.

I have created Task Bots for many finance-related clients and they are also working very well. Recently, I converted all of my bots to A2019.

Automation Anywhere has improved my organization, OMFYS Tech.

We have implemented many processes in the organisation with RPA, as we had done with HR bots for different HR processes. From these, we made most of the demo videos that we show to our clients. It helps to discover new processess to automate and use in new projects.

The A2019 version is very stable for the processes that we make. On the other platform, we have projects using Java, Oracle, Python, and HTML, where we had automated processes when required.

I found the new feature of integrating Python and HTML the most valuable. Using this, we can get the DOMXPath dynamic for every HTML property.

On the other hand, Python scripting is very helpful nowadays. We just create a Python script and integrate it with the bot, which makes the work very easy and fast.

I like the IQ Bot very much, as most of my projects use it for invoice indexing purposes.

The recorder in the A2019 version is way ahead, as it allows us to use Chrome and other browsers to capture the object properties. 

The UI can be improved a little bit to make it easier for beginners to understand.

There are many commands called Actions that are very good but sometimes, I feel that it should be more comfortable to find and search for specific commands. There should be some type of hint or notification system about what actions are useful, according to the situation or part of the process that it is in while creating the bot.

The speed of the bot processing on a whole can be improved so that the bot can run in less time than the task or processes.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

Stability-wise, it is a ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

I did not use another RPA solution prior to this one. I started my RPA journey with automation anywhere only because it is the best available solution in the market.

This is a value for the money product.

I evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism but neither one had IQ Bot-like features. That's why I rejected them and choose AA.

My advice is not to think too much. Just compare the features then you will get to know why AA is the best solution of all.

I started my career in RPA and the first tool I learned was Automation Anywhere v11.3. Within a month, I learned the tool and was Master Certified in it.

I had noticed that the majority of clients for my company demand developers who know AA well. I wondered why, with so many other tools available, why clients are so interested in AA as the only RPM. This is when I realized that AA is much easier, more reliable, and has value for money also with good and vast customer support.

In the past two years, I have become somewhat of an expert with Automation Anywhere. As a senior RPA developer, I deal with clients alongside my project manager and I always suggest AA. It is worthwhile to know that most of our clients are already aware of this tool, its market popularity, and its capabilities. This makes it easier to solidify a business relationship with them.

Thanks to the benefits of Automation Anywhere, 90% of our clients trust and use this tool.

I love its reliability, ease of use, and the vast customer support that are always present to help us.

In the new cloud-based version, A2019, some good upgrades have been added. I feel that everything has been covered in A2019 that was missing in the older v11.3. These advancements have helped to impress our clients and create new business opportunities with them. As a cloud deployment, it saves clients problems with desktops that occurred with the previous version, v11. There are also more commands and features that have made it more awesome for me to explore and play with new commands.

I love the user interface and the automation commands they have provided in the AA 2019 version.

Especially while using v11, I often experience freezes with OCR extraction from PDF files. It just didn't work properly. I had to work around this using Python scripting. It would be a big improvement to have the inbuilt OCR capability work seamlessly. A perfect OCR would be awesome. 

I have been using the Automation Anywhere tool for the last two years.

The new version offers no compromise regarding stability. 

I will rate this product a ten out of ten for scalability.

I had contacted technical support two or three times and they solved my problem on the same day. I will rate them a ten out of ten on support. In my opinion, they are the best and I hope that they maintain the same.

I started working with AA and have moved to the A2019 version. I never switched to another tool, as AA is one that I have found reliable, and has everything that I need for RPA.

ROI is something my management knows, but as a developer, I cannot say for. However, I am pretty sure that AA has benefited our company.

The cloud-based version comes at an increased cost, although our clients are happy with the new features and have not complained about the pricing. Precious things are valuable, and they know that.

I started with AA and have not evaluated other RPA products.

It has now been two years and I have migrated to AA 2019. I now consider myself an expert in Automation Anywhere. Thanks, AA, for providing such a big and powerful platform to us.

I always recommend this product, and that clients implement AA first.

We use Automation Anywhere to automate business processes for insurance clients. Automation Anywhere reduced the manpower up to 80% with a high return on investment. The process which we automated can complete the entire workload within 10 days when the normal process would have taken around 30 working days.

Apart from this, we automated password reset processes which saved time and effort and also enhanced security.

We are also automating the deployment process for new process setups. 

Bot Stuck Automation is helping us to keep track of the bots that are stuck for long time.

Automation Anywhere made a huge impact in maintaining client relationships. The reason is a high Return on Investment from the processes we automated. Because we have high ROI we gained new clients which increased the client count as well as our company's financial strength. 

Most of the employees learned the Automation Anywhere tool and got certified from Automation Anywhere University. AA makes their professional life much easier from a career perspective. 

Our organization has improved revenue just by automating the business processes where too much manual work was involved.

Web-based control is the most valuable feature. We can access it from anywhere in the world with the control room URL and in any browser. Bot Insights make our report generation and other insights view easier. We can export the data in the form of CSV, PDF, etc.

Credentials is another important feature, where we can store the important/bot credentials securely in the Control room itself and we can track who accesses the credentials and we can restrict the access based on users.

Bots get disconnected from control rooms sometimes without any reason and this takes up a lot of time. 

If the user creates a schedule then he/she leaves the company, that schedule became unusable at some point and I can't edit it. We need to create it again using generic IDs. This problem can be avoided in an upcoming release or update. There should be a button for customer support.

For each process, we have a separate log folder/files and it's tedious to go and check each process. They should include a button/feature to check the logs for each/process and or bots in the control room itself.

There should be an option for the quick addition of disconnected bots/kind of rollback options.

I would also like to see the One-Touch Asset management report button in the control room.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years. 

We can assure 98% stability and the remaining 2% is just because of the environment issues.

It is highly scalable.

Support was good but sometimes they ask for logs that have client information. But apart from this, they are really helpful.

We have been using Automation Anywhere from the initial stages.

The setup is good but the control room setup takes some time.

We have an in-house team to implement AA solutions. 

We saved around 80% man-power.

Small companies can't afford this cost as the pricing is a little higher.

Yes, I evaluated with Blue Prism.

Automation Anywhere is a very Interactive and easy to use RPA tool.

We have headquarters in London and we also have a presence in the US, Dubai, and a global development center in Hyderabad. We specialize in digital services such as our own chatbot platform, and we are also working on a specific OCI platform called PixTract which would complement existing RPA tools as well as many other projects which are relevant in this scenario.

As we are a partner of Automation Anywhere, there are quite a few use cases that we believe can provide good solutions for most organizations. We are looking at showing that Automation Anywhere is a good solution in terms of automating a lot of centers out there. There a lot of mundane tasks which happen in such centers and which include a lot of processes. I believe that automation can really do a lot of justice [in such cases]. It could be invoice processing in insurance or it could be claims processing in any type of insurance. [It can be used for] automating a lot of manual processes. I see a lot of areas where we can actually do it.

As we speak, we are talking to an insurance company. We are planning to have a PoC on their invoice automation and I see great potential with it.

IQ Bot is something which is going to disrupt the market in the future. We, at Avenir Digital, are particularly impressed with the evolution of IQ Bot and the kind of disruption it is bringing to the OCR space. We are also looking forward to leveraging IQ Bot in addressing a lot of other areas apart from automation or RPA as a tool. We would also want to take IQ Bot to the next level and into other areas.

When talking about IQ Bot, we are talking about computer vision, we are talking about OCR in particular. Thanks to the Digital India campaign, most Indian organizations are actually looking forward to automating their manual process in terms of scanning their ID cards, their bank cards; a lot of validation that happens manually. Everything can be automated and I believe IQ Bot could be a significant contributor there in automating all these. That is one area that we are looking forward to.

The new version 6.5 has come [out]. They are still working on the handwritten format — they want to get more accuracy in handwritten forms, which might take some time. It's everywhere, because the algorithms are evolving and the technology is only going to become more and more accurate. That is one area where we are really looking forward to understanding how IQ Bot can really leverage handwritten forms and also make significant progress into what could be called the "untouched places" at the moment - as far as rural India is concerned.

We have worked with various tools over many years and we believe that Automation Anywhere is one of the most stable platforms. When it comes to concurrency, it provides a great platform for large organizations to go ahead and use this. I believe this platform is very stable.

More than the technical support, we have been relying on presale support. In the future, we might need the technical support as well, when we locate complex use cases. But the presale support and the partner-enablement support have been a great help for us until now.

It's getting simpler day-by-day. The innovation that Automation Anywhere is taking up in terms of getting started in setting up their environment, is making it simpler. I see no problems. It's only going to be better and better. It gives a perfect platform to jumpstart. 

More than that, the initial training that we are being provided also helps us in getting a good, smooth start.

Our general approach to RPA implementation is to go with a PoC first; do a discovery followed by a pilot if needed, and then do full-scale development. That way we can make sure that our customer fully understands the potential and the relevance of the tool.

The reason I'm giving Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten is that no product is perfect.

We are an Automation Anywhere partner and we use it in the finance domain, in areas like B2B or B2C, etc. We also use it in HR and other domains for our clients. We have used it for vendor-invoice processing and recruitment. Those are our two major use cases as of now.

We have automated the recruitment and onboarding process for one of our clients. In that scenario, it has saved a lot of time. A process that used to take seven to ten days has now been reduced to half an hour. It has created a lot of efficiency.

It has also helped in terms of security because of all the off-boarding processes that we have automated. If an employee leaves, all his security access, email IDs, etc., are disabled on that same day. That person no longer has access to work on the company's domain.

IQ Bot is one of the most valuable features because it helps in processing different formats from different vendors.

As of now, it's only available on Windows machines. I would love if it were to also be available for Mac machines. That is something which is lacking as of now.

A cloud version was also missing, but now, with the new A2019 version, that's coming.

When I compare Automation Anywhere with the competition, some of the competitors have ready-made, off-the-shelf modules. For example, UiPath integrates with Windows AD. That is missing as of now in Automation Anywhere. If that became available it would also be great.

Stability-wise, it's a fine product. We haven't faced any major challenges up until now.

Scalability is also great. You automate one process and replicate it again and again.

For example, one of our clients has global operations. What we automated in one country, we were able to implement around the globe. We were also able to just keep on adding on new virtual machines in a given location, to have more and more processes automated. 

It's easy to scale.

Technical support is great. We have raised multiple queries over time and the results have been really good. The responses have been really good and fast. The feedback I have heard is that they get back to us same-day or, if not, the next day.

We had a good due-diligence process before we finalized. We compared different aspects like security, reliability, and compliance. AA scored high on the compliance front, so that's why we went with it.

The initial setup is straightforward. I don't see any complexity involved.

We have seen ROI in areas I mentioned earlier like time savings. We have seen good results.

The product starts at $10,000 and then it's up to you regarding how much you can consume. Comparatively speaking, the costs are higher for Automation Anywhere.

It's a good product. Compared to the competition, you can do multiple processes with one license. So there are a lot of savings in terms of license costs. It's easy to use and has good, UI-based interaction. It's easy to deploy as well. Clients can also train their own staff to do easy implementations, so they can save costs there as well.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at eight out of ten. There is always scope for improvement. There are a few ready-made things that they need to incorporate.