Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We are using this product for the development, running, and monitoring of automated processes. We are using IQ Bot for advanced tasks using cognitive technology.

Automation Anywhere has helped in automating business processes for simple to complex business cases. It also helped in understanding, learning, and discovering new automation ideas.

The features that I find most valuable are:

1. There isn't much scripting.
2. It is easy to learn and implement.
3. No prior programming knowledge required to learn and develop.
4. On the server-side, multiple developers working on a single project can save their individual works and have them stored in a single repository.

Custom models with advanced features can be included in the IQ Bot models for unstructured and semi-structured data.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for between eight and nine months.

For us, the primary use of Automation Anywhere bots is to automate the business, administrative, and financial aspects of businesses. We have automated many tax reconciliations and also automated the monthly salary slip generation for all the employees.

In business processes, the purchase order and invoice generation scenarios have been automated. Automation of Salesforce entries has also been done with Automation Anywhere, which has significantly reduced the burden for employees and made their day more productive.

Automation Anywhere can have a significant impact on any company's operation, as it can automate a wide variety of tasks that are mundane, time-consuming, and the least productive.

The Automation of salary slip generation for all employees in the organization has helped the HR spend less time manually preparing excel sheets and reconciling with other data and more time in improving the quality and working experience for employees by addressing their issues.

Other administrative functions like keeping a record of employee attendance and work hours have also been automated

The Automation Anywhere (2019) is now a SAAS product, hence I feel it's more fluid to use in any environment compared to the AA11.3x versions.

Automation Anywhere used to have a three-layer architecture with a Control Room, Runner, and Workbench but now it has combined the Control Room and Workbench into One. This made it easy to create bots and administer them.

The document Processing tool called IQ Bot has had several new updates, like a logic field, where you can include Python scripts. I feel it makes the tool more adaptive and flexible.

Automation Anywhere is one of the leading RPA tool vendors and they have done splendid work on improving their tool. The places where I still see scope for improvement is in their background automation are, and also their ability to handle Java applications.

I feel that document extraction like IQ Bot can be made more refined so that it may reach its full potential. 

Another area I feel that needs improvement is the variances caused in extraction results when using the tool with third-party OCRs. This is something that needs to be addressed. I believe rather than giving more third-party options, a single good OCR solution must be added to prevent variations in extraction results.

I have been using Automation Anywhere both A11.3x and A2019 for more than two years.

There is brittleness in UI Automation but this can be circumvented by using REST APIs if they are available. Also, the Java Applications still seem a herculean task to automate for many RPA tool vendors.

The bots are scalable and the only thing one has to ensure for better scalability is proper architecture at the beginning with a long-term approach in mind.

The customer service of AA has been good. Many of our queries were addressed with the raising of tickets as quickly as possible.

The set up was easy and straightforward, and the support was also good.

I have automated and released at least a thousand bots by now. I have also used Automation Anywhere's Intelligent document extraction solution called IQ Bot, both the 11.3 version and the 2019 version.

We are a solution provider and we use this solution to help our customers with internal processes. For example, we help them with the automation of information processing tools.

From a manageability perspective, this solution is very good. It's just understandable, and this has helped a lot.

The most valuable feature of this solution is drag-and-drop. You don't need to be a coding genius to create a bot. It has a simple interface.

From what I have seen with the IQ Bot, it is very impressive and I think it is going to solve a lot of problems that we face right now.

The cost of this solution can be improved. We have written applications that do the same thing as Automation Anywhere, but for less cost.

When it comes to stability, there are a lot of dependencies. The bot, itself, I would say has always been good for us. The only problems that we have had are when the tools change, the bot has to be enhanced. That is something that is unavoidable.

Compared to other RPA tools, I think Automation Anywhere is very scalable.

For example, we have written simple applications where they do one thing today, but tomorrow they may add something else to it. They're developing an additional, or expanded version of the bot, and it is always simple. In this way, the scalability is pretty good.

The only problem we've had is when we need to expand the userbase. This is because of the ports attached to it.

We do reach out to Automation Anywhere technical support and it definitely helps.

In the beginning, it was a little bit complex and difficult for us to understand how to get things running. We reached out to technical support for help.

Initially, we had planned on going simple. Then, we wanted to be centralized and have a cloud-based environment, which is where we were facing a lot of challenges. One of the challenges was DB connectivity for accessing SAP, which was a security issue. We also had some trouble automating web pages.

Initially, we did see ROI. The problem is that we could not re-use those licenses. One license is not going to be running for twenty-four hours. We considered planning and scheduling to make the best of this, but its split across multiple teams, so there are multiple license requirements. Not everything has huge savings attached.

I have worked with other RPA solutions, such as UiPath.

We are looking forward to having the capability of building the IQ Bots the way we want, using Python scripts. With our scripting, we can fill in the gaps and improve accuracy.

My advice to anybody who is researching RPA solutions is to consider several things. I can see that the path that Automation Anywhere has right now is going to take it to the highest levels. My suggestion is that if you have a lot of coding or scripting experience then I would recommend UiPath. It has its own plusses and minuses, as with every tool.

Instead, if you're looking for someone that can you you build a bot within a short time, who doesn't know any coding or have a background in programming, then I recommend Automation Anywhere. You cut out the cost of developers, but you add to your cost in terms of licenses.

Also, for manageability, Automation Anywhere is the best choice.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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

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

MetaBot is one of the most useful features. 

It should be easier to use.

I have been using AA for five months.

Automation Anywhere is one of the simplest RPA tools!

We primarily use it for data scraping from PDFs. AA has helped me to get the data from scanned PDFs with a higher accuracy rate, automating multiple formats, and maintaining its data in Excel format.

In this scenario, the user emails a PDF to the Bot email ID, the Bot downloads the attachment & scraps the data from it. As per the format, the data is pulled and maintained in Excel, in a standard format. The Excel file is then emailed back to the respective user.

When anybody talks about Robotic Process Automation, Automation Anywhere is the first thing that comes to my mind. Automation Anywhere is one of the simplest Robotic Process Automation Tools.

Its drag and drop feature is the best because there is no hard coding required. Even if a person is not from a coding background, they can easily learn and get their hands on this tool quickly. There are a lot of learning resources provided by Automation Anywhere University and AA provides certifications too.

Using AA has helped to reduce time & human error.

Object Cloning is the most valuable feature I have found for automating a website or a process that includes multiple mouse clicks. This is something that can easily be done using the Object Cloning command.

Object Cloning can also be used to get the DOMXPath inner text of a specific object. It also helps to automate the dropdown menus and in selecting the desired value from them. It is fun to use and if used with proper technique, a user can automate a website or portal with 100% accuracy.

The OCR can be a little better because sometimes while scrapping, it leads to data loss.

In the future, more commands for automating SAP should be included.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years. 

Stability totally depends on the power of your coding level. In general, AA is highly stable.

AA has high scalability.

Technical support from AA is excellent!

The AA support team is just Awesome. Any query or issues we face while using it can be brought to their notice by raising a ticket. They will coordinate with the user until the issue is resolved and without much delay. Automation Anywhere provides the best service.

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

The initial setup was straightforward.

Our in-house team is responsible for deployment and maintenance.

The pricing is a bit higher.

We evaluated UiPath before choosing AA.

Choose Automation Anywhere over other RPA Tools for better service & accuracy.

I am using it with my work on our disaster recovery process. It has been performing well, so far.

It is easy and simple to use with its drag and drop functionality.

The bot creation is easy, as you automate the steps exactly as you perform them.

The product is still lacking some features. However, I know that Automation Anywhere is continually improving it.

The stability is alright. I have had a couple of crashes and issues. Overall, it does seem pretty stable. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are measuring our ROI through time savings. We haven't done metrics for money yet.

This solution is a more robust, better product than the other solutions that we evaluated.

It is a great solution. We have had a lot of business users come in and use it, being successful with it.

We have used some of the IQ Bots, but we haven't used them too extensively.

We save about three hours a week using this solution.

We are running the Control Room and the Bot Runners.

Currently, we have two processes in production, and another three are currently under development. Those in the development stage are running efficiently, but there are bugs here and there. Even for the processes that are in production, we have constant involvement, where we bring them back for more development and then return them to the production environment.

Our primary use case has to do with automating payment tasks. We process about thirty-five hundred invoices per month, which is a substantial amount. At the moment, we process about fifteen hundred, and our goal with automation is to reach thirty-five hundred.

At the moment, about twenty-five percent of the volume is covered by the RPS side of things. The rest of the work is done by hand, and our goal is to reach seventy-five percent by the end of this year.

This solution has allowed us to reduce our idle time by about thirty percent.

In terms of FTEs, we have cut approximately three, and hour goal is to cut fifteen by the end of this year.

The IQ Bot is very impressive to us. We have tried several tools in the industry, and we have not been able to automate to the same level as provided by this solution.

The stability of this solution depends on the processes, but I think that there is room for improvement in this regard. We are using Microsoft Dynamics, and it would help if they had a set of standard development specifications for each of these solutions. 

We are having some challenges when it comes to stability. Things have kept stable for three to four months at the moment, but we are still working on stabilizing the bots. We are hoping to have everything stabilized within the next few months.

The scalability of this solution is very good. We have operations on the other side of the world, such as South East Asia, so we tend to have different languages. The IQ Bot is able to read these languages, which will help us to expand into other regions, as well.

I have dealt with technical support for this solution and they are one of the best, I would say. Their response time is very fast and the knowledge that the tech team has is impeccable. All of the issues that we have raised were solved within a day and this has been very helpful for us.

The initial setup of this solution was sort of complex for us. We are at the initial state of it, and it is quite challenging because we didn't know what the technology was all about. Each and every day we learn new things, where it is not the same thing that we had learned before and already implemented.

We partnered with a consultant from a company in Sri Lanka and they are assisting us with the implementation. This includes development and scaling. We give them the strategic plan according to what we want, then they evaluate the process and let us know the architecture. We may also get involved with the architecture in cases where they might not have the in-depth knowledge of our systems.

Our long term plan is to have a COE where we will have our in-house developers. This will help in development, as well as post-production.

We have not yet seen ROI, but our estimation is that it will occur within three years. We have made a huge investment in this solution.

The bugs that we have had are generally not because of the product. We have had one product bug, and it has already been taken care of, although it is not released yet. It will be included with the next release of the solution.

The bug is related to popups, where those commands are issued but we cannot give them in the development stage. It is a major drawback in our process. Because of this, certain processes have a two to three-minute delay, and that's a major impact on one of our processes. It does have something to do with a third-party application for which nobody has applied an automation tool. I wouldn't say that it is a major bug, but it should be rectified in the future.

We are now looking at the AI side of this solution, and have started using the IQ Bot.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to invest small and see, rather than going for a bigger investment all to once. See the ROI and then evaluate again. We had issues with the business users because they were not confident enough to use the Bots. At that time, they were much more comfortable using the hands-on, manual approach. Try one use case and then expand.

I have not evaluated all of the features so my rating might be higher when I do.

Compared to other products, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

As a developer, I improve our company processes through automation.

The company has been working with the solution for two years. In my area, we have approximately five bots running.

It interacts well with other software tools. Other automation tools have trouble with integration. 

The tool provides everything that we need to design a task. It is a complete tool.

The tool is user-friendly and easy to use. It is easy to understand how to automate a task.

The bot creation process is easy, manageable, and everything is well-organized for a developer. Everything is centralized.

I would like to have a command that allows me to add code, like C#. As a developer, this would be helpful.

The technical support is amazing. It is the best support that we have worked with.

Our CoE calculates our ROI.

Go to the market. You can see the difference between this tool and the others there.

The product has everything that I want. I don't have to look for another tool to integrate with it.

I am working on getting certified through Automation Anywhere University. The courses are good for people who have no knowledge regarding the tool.