Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We primarily use this solution to automate manual processes of limited or negligible value in terms of up-skilling personnel.

AA has indirectly helped in re-engineering processes, which has made them more robust and efficient. Hence, this has helped the business immensely.

The most valuable features of this solution are its scalability, security using the credential vault, and ease of use for business.

A Cloud-based version of this solution would reduce dependence on architecture.

Better use case management to prevent each development from scratch would be an improvement.

We have quite a few use cases that we have built. Not one, but many. I see a lot of value in the cognitive part of it: the IQ Bot. In the traditional RPA market, people have been doing it for a very long time now.

There's one use case that we did it for a U.S. organization for their accounts payable process. That's the biggest use case that we did. We took that and showcased it to all our customers, so they could get confidence. By doing that, we got three to four more leads out of it, increasing the business. That's a huge use case where we showcase the capabilities of IQ and its strongest aspects.

The cognitive is where everyone is heading to in the RPA platform. What really helps RPA to grow is the cognitive part of it. That's where the product is really good. Initially, it started out as RPA, but now there is a cognitive aspect to it. That's a key value to it.

An interesting thing: If you look at AA, the OCR capability is actually from a third-party. They don't have their own OCR in there. They use ABBYY or Tesseract. They should have their own engine built-in with their own IP. It increases the value rather than trying to use a third-party solution. That's where I see a lot of value.

As a product, it's been always very stable. The only thing that we wanted was it to be on the cloud. We saw at Imagine yesterday that now it's on cloud and will be more stable and accessible. People can start building bots in the click of a second. That's the good part. It's more stable now because it's on the cloud.

I don't think there were any challenges. Everybody who wants to do RPA can start very small. They do a PoC, build a few bots, and then they scale up. I don't see a challenge as long as you have the right people doing what they are trying to do. A lot of use cases in our organization are only two to three bots initially, and now, they have 40 to 50 bots. So, I don't think there is an issue in terms of scalability at all.

Technical support needs to be much faster. I also had the project delivery. I had six clients whom I looked after. Whenever we got stuck, it was all about sprinting. There was a two or three week sprint. Within that, if you just wait for two to three days, it doesn't make sense. The support needs to implode, because I was just talking to a customer now who came directly and asked us, "Can you give us a dedicated support team?" It's feedback from our customer that support takes too long.

It's just the time; the pure amount of time. Imagine processing 5,000 to 6,000 documents, how much time does that take if a person does it? It saves on the quality of work, because the quality can be bad when somebody's doing it. If a bot does the work, it's faster and comes with good quality. These are two important things along with the cost saving in the long run. That's where the value is.

I would rate it between a seven and eight (out of ten), which is good. I want it to improve on the support. They really need to improve on the support model. Also, the cognitive bit needs to be enhanced. I know that there are other products on the market who do much better than the product that we have. A lot of work can still go into it. One thing, it still cannot do is cursive writing. IQ Bots still cannot read cursive writing. That's where a lot of development effort can go into it and make it a great product.

In our company, we are following a different structure in this case: How we are going to develop the tool and what are the key nodes that we need to concentrate on. Though, we always concentrate on this type of information. Lastly, we are talking about the accuracy of the output. These are the scenarios that we are coding all the time. 

There are a lot of features that are valuable from Automation Anywhere. If I want to automate something in a browser or some other applications today, then it is done in Windows or the web. I don’t want to bother with anything else. I can do whatever I want. This is what the most valuable feature in my point of view.

Automation Anywhere is a valuable tool. As a developer, I can do whatever I want. If I want to do automation with the web, Windows, etc., e.g., mainframe or SAP applications, we can do whatever we want with automations using Automation Anywhere. If I’m going to automate a web-based application, I can use object cloning. There are multiple options available to do the automation. Each and every point’s valuable for me.

We face some issues, but we can’t prove them again. They occurred sometimes, but don’t occur again. For example, I record a video when a bot is running, and it is working fine. Another time it is not working. We face issues with Excel file creation. I’m trying to create a file in Excel .xls. It is getting corrupted. In these type of scenarios, I am not able to prove the issue from my end. I give suggestions as a developer, and these are in the notes, and I have already raised a ticket. I got information from the support team as well.

Comparatively, in previous versions, we had some issues. So, they are trying to improve the tool to be much better than the previous versions. This is an improvement that we need to achieve. Finally, we need to find accuracy and output. These should be the best and working on target.

From our technical support, we receive a lot of suggestions. If you do it in this way, it will make your output easier and much better. So, the suggestions are very important when we are developing tools and bots. From Automation Anywhere technical support, we got a lot of information like this. If we have any doubts or need any clarification, they are ready to support us all the time (within a particular time) until we get a response. That is the main point that I want to highlight here.

We are facing some issues when installing the software because of the antivirus. It won’t allow us to install it. We need to disable some features during the installation of it. Sometimes if the bot is running, we need to disable it. This feature needs to be made available, but made better than this.

The tool is a huge time saver. If I want to do something manually, it will take half an hour, but the bot can do the task within minute or seconds. In a day, month, or year, this will be a huge amount of time for me. A reduction to a fraction of seconds will be a big impact.

I can give it an eight (out of 10). More implementations should to be added to the tool. This is a suggestion from my end to make it more powerful from the previous versions.

We use it to develop bots. 

Use cases: We do Excel operations if we have to download any file from a portal to do any Excel operations. We send these outputs to our business customers. 

Bots are specific for each customer.

Most of the tasks that our organization used to do were manual. We automated our internal processes so it would give us FTE benefits and work would be done in less time. This also saves us time and FTE benefits.

The most valuable feature is the Excel operations because the most repetitive task which we used to do was Excel operations. Automation Anywhere has the Excel commands feature where we can run Excel Macros, which is very valuable. It's saving so much time for us.

We have our limitations. We can run only VBScripts and one more thing. If we want to run Python scripts or batch files, we cannot do it. So, if they would add these extra things in there then that would be beneficial.

I have to add in Excel commands because it is a limited feature, as we only have five to six commands. Suppose we have a spreadsheet and we have to get the counts for how many rows were filled, we have to do it through a Macro or VB. We have to write a separate code and call through Automation Anywhere. If they added in this inbuilt feature into Automation Anywhere that would be helpful for us.

Stability is pretty good. If we want the code to be stable, then we have to handle it in a particular way. We have to utilize the tool in the best way. An example is if there is a web page, and it gets refreshed every time, then the odd properties will get refreshed. If it is the UI making changes, then the properties will get refreshed. So, we can utilize error handling in the best way and make use of it. Instead of failing, we can make it run, making it more robust.

We have so many use cases. When customers come to us, they'll ask for a very simple use case, they will not know the features of Automation Anywhere and what we can automate. Once they get to know it after we automate one process, they will want more features which they'll ask for. They'll give us more use cases for us to do.

We have done many bigger tasks. If the customers are doing it manually, it will take them 12 to 24 hours. But, if they're doing it through Automation Anywhere, it will done in half an hour to an hour.

Automation Anywhere gives quick responses to any request when we used to reach out to them. Then, they will response and work with us to get it fixed. I have multiple experience like that.

I was partially involved, not fully involved, when they were doing the IT Bot setup and migrating to latest version. It went well because the Automation Anywhere team was there. They helped us migrate from the older version to the latest version. Whatever code that we had written in the older version, that needed to be migrated to latest version. With all these things, they helped us out.

Automation Anywhere helped us if our bots should be in their Control Room, if they were migrating or adding extra features. Then, they would take care of it. I don't know much about what would be in the background.

They asked me to use Automation Anywhere and I went through studying the others, UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is user-friendly, and if you're automating, then it's good for developers.

I'll give Automation Anywhere an eight (out of 10). They lost two points for the Excel commands. We have so many things to do in Excel, but we have very limited commands for it. We need to use Macros. We also have to know extra coding languages, like VBScripts.

I belong to the learning and development department, and this solution is part of our capability. We do not have only a single use case. We work on POCs for SMEs, handling the automation of modules such as Vendor Master and journal entries.

In the projects that we are getting, we have been using Automation Anywhere for things like automating Excel. This is a solution that was recommended to us, and we have a roadmap for our resources to scale up and work on that. I see our work with SMEs as a collaboration with Automation Anywhere.

The cognitive automation gives us an edge towards intelligence using IQ Bot, and this allows us to integrate and give a combined solution to a customer.

It is really helpful that this solution is deployed in the cloud.

The integration of IQ Bot, Bot Insight, and other products should be flawless, and the execution should be seamless, so this needs to be improved.

The vendor should make recommendations based on our customer's requirements so that they can make the right choice.

Automation Anywhere will sometimes announce releases or updates in their roadmap, and we wait for them, but they do not happen on time or at all. This happened, for example, when we had an issue with IQ Bot. We ended up waiting for two more months.

The stability of this solution is good. I don't see any issues with the product itself, although when we were integrating, there were a few issues that have since been phased out.

It is on a case-by-case basis, where we found that some things were not working smoothly. As soon as you start integrating other products, using them hand-in-hand, there are issues. Automation Anywhere was there with us to understand and resolve the issues. I had to go myself to identify and understand them, and it was a long process, but it was sorted out.

This is a scalable solution that is robust and will help to take us forward.

Technical support is very good, and we are getting what we require. Initially, it wasn't that great at the start of the year. We had a discussion with them and came up with a communication plan. Since then, it has helped us out and we are happy with that.

The initial setup of this solution is simple. We had the required support and the materials were all delivered, so we were able to do it easily. 

The deployment was performed by our in-house team, and we have control rooms to monitor the bots.

We have seen ROI with this solution in terms of automating manual processes, resulting in FTE benefits.

We purchased the commercial version with the license.

Compared to UiPath, this is a robust tool.

We considered both UiPath and Blue Prism, and I feel that Automation Anywhere is still leading. It is more stable and more structured. They also have the support staff.

This is a stable solution and a product that you can go for.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a lot of systems filled with documents and PDFs, such as finance, accounts payable, and operations.

We just started and have only implemented one bot.

I would like to have a cloud-based version with support.

It took us three months to scale up our first bot.

The technical support is very good. We are very happy with them. It takes them time, but they do get results.

We were not using another solution prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup of the software takes time.

We deployed the solution in-house.

We save only time, not money. We save 30 minutes every day using this solution.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

The IQ Bot is a very nice concept, and it will be very successful.

We have automated desktop applications, web applications, SAP applications, invoice processing through IQ Bot, as well as other projects. We have been achieving high accuracy with a maximum success rate.

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 additional functionality can be added through the use of class libraries and APIs.

I like all of the product features, but I mostly like to work with IQ Bots because they have cognitive automation capabilities. We simply train the Bot by uploading sample files, and it then begins classifying, processing, and extracting the data within a short span of time. We can easily train the bot to extract the required fields, and we are processing tons of invoices using IQ Bot in a fraction of the time. This has saved our company lots in terms of both costs and manpower.

Working with Automation Anywhere is very easy in my environment. The automation is built with easy workflows and commands, which are user-friendly, even for people without a programming background.

The biggest advantage that Automation Anywhere provides is the Bot Store, where we search the existing bots and download relevant ones for our own use. These are very helpful in our automation because they are done very fast and deploy in a short time.

They bring out new or enhanced functionality on a very short cycle, which is great, although a criticism would be sometimes new features are released so quickly they can sometimes be a little buggy.

We have been faced with inconsistent error handling during the bot development stage, which is something that should be improved. The error handling is generally good, but the problem arises when developing multiple tasks within the same project. Specifically, I want to handle the error that occurs in a sub-task, as we have to ensure that all of the relevant tasks are completed properly in order to continue the process.

I would like to see a global error handler introduced, which will explicitly handle errors over the entire project.

I would like to have a Project Sharing Hub, similar to that of GitHub, but inside the tool. This would help with consolidating all of the project files at the end of the deployment.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

We have used Automation Anywhere in SAP Automation, Billing Block release, sales office creation, generating reports, and daily monitoring activities.

Regarding business flexibility and scalability, once a series of instructions are given to a software bot, as many bots as required can be quickly deployed to perform the process. This includes processes of any complexity, thereby increasing scalability and flexibility overall.

It has helped our organization in many ways, starting with reducing manual efforts.

We have automated reports and daily monitoring tasks. Our team and client were impressed.

We have also automated monotonous tasks. It increased the speed of our work, making us more efficient.

The most valuable features are Screen Recordings, Smart Recordings, Task Bots, and IQ Bot. I was really impressed with how MetaBots work. I really like Screen Recording because it is used to record a task or a series of actions. It was running an automated process on the same computer that was recorded.

Web Recorder is an awesome option. The way it automates processes (tasks) that involve a web application or a browser, is very good.

Image Recognition is also an important feature. It checks for an existing image within another image. It is a beautiful feature, as it specifies the minimum percentage match for the image captured.

We can quickly and effectively drag and drop commands, which is helpful. It has a clean and friendly interface.

It is easy to integrate with other systems and it plays nice with them. Users are able to create automated processes that utilize all of the lines of the business system, without a single group.

Had we had access to the RPA bots in advance, we would have practiced before fully implementing. This is something that should be changed in the future.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two months.

Stability-wise, Automation Anywhere is good.

The scalability is excellent.

A software Bot can cost one third the price of an offshore FTE and as little as one fifth the price of an onshore FTE.

Basically, to be frank, most of the features are awesome. Of course, we were able to understand it easily because it was neatly explained.

We have excellent business benefits and it also supports SAP, Oracle, Java Applications, Mainframe/Terminals, Unix, Email Applications, Window Applications, Legacy Applications, Google, etc.

The best thing is that the platform can be used to automate any applications.