Automation Anywhere Reviews

Being a QA analyst, I am involved in testing my application's stability on a daily basis. A2019 helped me in automating the repetitive process that I have been doing every day.

Once I get familiarized with A2019, I am planning to discuss with my teammates how to implement it into our project for all of the new requirements.

Our primary use cases are smoke testing of the applications, sending email for reports, stability testing, API testing for REST services, database testing, and pulling data from Excel and using it in applications.

A2019 has significantly helped us in reducing the overall time that we have spent on our application manually. Going forward, we have also planned to implement the IQ Bot feature that we are still exploring.

Tasks or activities that were taking almost six hours a day have been reduced drastically to 30 minutes, which saves time as well as business costs.

Smoke testing of the application is performed.

Sending reports and sending emails is easy.

I have found the below items most valuable:

1. The ability to find objects easily through the 'Capture' option saves your time most significantly.
   
2. The ability to run only a particular step, instead of running it from scratch.
   
3. The ability to debug.
   
4. Given that A2019 is a web application, it saves space in a significant manner.
   
5. It is user-friendly and anyone can learn easily.
6. No coding knowledge needed.
7. The flow chart view of the steps is very easy to understand.
   
8. The free learning course provided helped me a lot. I was able to better understand and also practice on my own.

I would like to have on-call customer care support so that if the user gets stuck anywhere, he/she can get the issue clarified.

Additional details or support can be provided for IQ Bots.

The Help menu/description can be provided while hovering over actions so that it can help us better to know them.

The Variable feature can be improved, as there is no single place to handle all your variables.

Sometimes, while recording, the screen hangs and we are not able to perform any actions during that time.

Also, the support should be more user-friendly, as we are not getting any support online.

I have been using A2019 for more than five months.

This product is extremely stable.

Scalability is very good.

I was using Selenium but because it involved too much coding, I switched to A2019.

The initial setup is very easy.

I implemented it on my own.

The cost can be reduced a little for users.

I did not evaluate other options before switching to Automation Anywhere.

Primarily we use this to get rid of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as sending TDS certificates to the client according to their PAN details, invoice processing, and collecting data from online websites.

Processes related to the invoice, Sales Order, and Purchase Order are commonly used so as to avoid time delay and increase efficiency.

We have also developed bots to browse to share market sites and generate a report on the Top 10 Gainers and Top 10 Losers, which has been scheduled, and the report gets mailed to all at ease and on time.

Automation Anywhere has been a boon for our organization because the tedious task that used to be hectic and made us remain seated for hours is now done with a single click.

The development of bots has helped a lot for every branch in the organization, whether it be financing, HR, or the IT department. Now, employees are not depressed working the same repetitive tasks and that time can be utilized for some other productive work.

While many of the bots are scheduled, reports are automatically generated on time and there is nothing to worry about regarding the time constraints.

There are many valuable features in this product. The OCR for character recognition has helped a lot during the invoice processing and billing, as there are some parts of the documents which are handwritten.

The scheduling of bots is also very important. No matter where you are, you need not be physically present for running the bot at that particular time.

Error handling plays an important role when you schedule a bot because if you are not physically present and something happens, you need to know what has gone wrong. 

We do not have a precise area that needs improvement, but sometimes while running bots that traverse through different websites, the screen hangs or takes time to fully load. This in turn increases the wait time. So, if possible, having saved a screen while the earlier bot runs and comparing that saved screen with the current bot run, so as to get an idea if the screen has been fully loaded or not, would be great. 

Though we can make this happen by adding extra logic to the bot, this would increase the bot size for every new website search.  

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than two years.

In 2018-2019 it was AA v10.7 and then in 2019-2020, it was updated to AA v11.3.

Nothing as such, as Automation Anywhere keeps on upgrading which in turn makes it easier and efficient to develop bots from the prior version.

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.

I primarily use Automation Anywhere A2019 to professionally develop RPA bot solutions for our clients and our own internal uses.

I personally use the free community edition for personal practice and personal projects outside of a work environment. 

Our organization has A2019 Enterprise on an on-premise server, but for my home use, I simply log in to my community edition account from my own desktop computer. 

Our clients use a variety of on-premise and cloud-deployed installations for whatever their specific use case is. 

Automation Anywhere has presented us with a platform that is easily accessible from a web interface, enabling us to write code for RPA scripts without having to download a dedicated software application.

It has provided us with a robust set of RPA actions, making it both easier and quicker to develop functional scripts. AA has continually listened to our feature requests and customer insights and maintained a positive relationship with us on that front. 

It has also presented us with an active AA developer community and bot store, allowing us to learn from the best practices of others. 

The features I most appreciate are the built-in version control system, historical log, audit trail features, and the breadth of RPA action commands included out of the box. 

I also like the credential locker functionality and think that feature was developed in a logical, clear, and helpful manner.  

It is nice being able to develop and manage/schedule scripts from the same web browser interface, but there are times I wish that the bot developer screen was made more user friendly. Some of my recommendations for solutions of that nature are listed below. 

I would like to see a button on the bot developer web page that allows you to "expand all" and "close all" actions, folding them up into their respective "Steps".  

I would like to see a comment feature that allows you to embed comments/notes into an action sidebar, without having to actually take up a line of code in order to write such a statement. 

I would like to see a dedicated XPath web interaction drag and drop action that allows you to click/interact with websites via an XPath query. This way, you are not required to use the recorder action to gain this functionality. 

I would like to see an option allowing you to change the color scheme of the bot developer page, so you can use colors that are less harsh on the eyes when developing a script. A simple dark mode skin would be nice as well. 

I have been using the A2019 Enterprise platform for several months now, but have been using the Automation Anywhere Community Edition for about one year. 

The stability of the solution is good, although as expected, there are periodic growing pains associated with the rapid development and rolling out of the A2019 platform.

In general, the platform has grown more robust with each release, and I expect its stability and functionality to only improve over time. 

I believe it is scalable and valuable to any organization looking to implement an RPA solution within their organization. 

I have only used customer support once, but the support team member I spoke with was very friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. 

I previously have used and experimented with several different RPA platforms, including but not limited to Workfusion, UiPath, Blue Prism, Microsoft Power Automate, WinAutomation, Robin, and somewhat similar to RPA - AutoHotkey. 

As an RPA developer, I do not personally have a number to share here that would reflect our organization's ROI. 

As an RPA developer, I do not personally have much to say about this topic. I find the license pricing to be competitive and reflective of the pricing models throughout the RPA space, and I believe there is a lot of value in continuing to maintain the free community edition platform. 

As I listed above, I have experimented/evaluated just about all of the market-leading options as well as the most popular options that are currently growing in recognition in the RPA space. 

I have done my best to outline my thoughts about the Automation Anywhere platform here, and do not have anything else specific to share. 

We use AA for automation of daily mundane tasks, which allows me to focus more on tasks that resonate with my interests. These are Excel-based daily tasks.

We also use it for:

• Automation of long, rule-driven tasks that only require some fixed mouse clicks & keystrokes. This saves time and reduces human error
• Deployed bots to work alongside human counterparts for cross-communication between legacy and new platforms.
• Automated data entry and data validation workflows for 24/7 output.
• IQ & Discovery bots for more complex use cases that require image processing & artificial intelligence.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to save human efforts on mundane tasks and shifted it to more analytical/interesting tasks.

We have saved hours so that we can spend more time on deriving insights from business, which will help us to increase our profits. 

We have leveraged automation to increase economies of scale and value-added work while reducing operating costs.

The most valuable features include:

1.  UI Automation including mouse clicks, keystrokes, opening & closing applications.
2. The OCR package allows us to read texts from files.
3. Excel automation can automate most of the tasks and even allows you to automate them without having the application on the system.
   
4. FTP automation allows for maintaining archives on FTP, as well as placing & deleting files from the FTP server.
5. Recording tasks with dynamic variables is helpful for web-based automation.
6. Mail automation allows for downloading attachments and saving emails on the system.

Improvements that can be made are:

• It should be easier to automate tasks on a virtual machine that uses a different environment altogether.
• The AA portal should not give us pop-ups every time a bot agent is updated.
• Ease of debugging & inbuilt debug messages can be improved to help find relevant bugs easily.

In the next release, they should add the Tableau tool as a package since most organizations use it for reporting & analytical purposes. Useful actions would be:

1. Opening & closing tableau
2. Downloading sheet data in Excel
3. Refreshing extracts
4. Publishing Tableau

I have been using Automation Anywhere 2019 Enterprise version for a year.

Best customer service. They heard our case and provided the solution in a short turnaround time.

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

The initial setup is a little complex when it comes to dealing with installing certificates and the bot agent.

It is the most economically friendly and it provides you with a lot of functions.

We did not evaluate other options before selecting Automation Anywhere.

The environment is within a Citrix environment. Our primary use case is for interaction with mainframe applications along with web links and Excel spreadsheets. The bot interacts with the Excel spreadsheet, captures the task, go to the mainframe application, and pastes it with searching details of the task if it matches different details. It populates in the Excel spreadsheet if it is matched or not matched. There are numerous logics used in it. AA bots do the verifications and give an output in the Excel spreadsheet which becomes an input for the agents on the production floor. 

We have used more than 30 bots in our healthcare vertical and are going to use many more bots. We have a very resourceful pipeline to use AA bots in our RPA projects and we are looking to be more engaged with the AA team in deploying these bots. We have very strict cost efficiency savings to be shown to the client and AA has helped us to meet this to a great extent. We have lined up a huge list of RPA projects and are waiting to partner with AA to a great extent which will help us to achieve these cost efficiencies in a great way.

AA has a bouquet of features that can be used in our projects. We have utilized all the features in our existing projects. It may be task bots, meta bots, or IQ bots. The features in the AA bots may be object cloning or security features where the bots can be triggered only from the control room and will help clients to maintain their security concerns. The number of commands is more which will help us to achieve different types of details being captured, verified, and executed in the project for us.

We have a challenge in our front office automation where capturing details from a table within a table does not happen in the existing AA Enterprise client version 11.3.4. The AA team tries various methods like using an Excel spreadsheet to capture the tables. Using object cloning it recognizes only the top line items and not the table which is in an HTML format then they asked to use Python codes within AA to identify tick boxes as a windows box. If this gets improved then we should be able to work on all the voice-related projects for a particular healthcare payer.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for more than three years.

Automation Anywhere solutions used in our RPA projects were easy to deploy for multiple projects, stable from a bots running continuously for close to 18 hrs each day. We will give a 9 out of a scale of 10 for the stability point of view.

The scalability of this solution is high as we can scale it in a very limited time and replicating the codes is easy.

The customer service/technical support is very good with AA and they are very supportive and listen to our issues patiently and give possible solutions wherever available.

We have not used any different solution as it is a client mandate to use only Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was a bit complex as the control room was maintained by our clients and we had to approach them for each and every thing whenever there was an error/issue.

We implemented in-house but the control room was maintained by our clients and they helped in moving the codes to the control room and we have specific access to run from there.

Our ROI is very good by using AA. There are some projects where we can get close to 1:10 ROI.

We would advise going for Automation Anywhere as it is cost-efficient and easy in-terms of licensing form.

We did not have an opportunity to evaluate other options.

Any repeated user steps would be a good use case for Automation Anywhere. There are also many other use cases that are proactively using the cognitive solution.

We are mostly using it for audit, finance, quality assurance, procurement, and the reconciliation of various reports. All of these use cases helped to improve the business team efficiency and they are now effectively involved in the analytics of the data prepared by the RPA process.

Automation Anywhere is the first RPA solution we have taken and suggested implementing it to our customers. It has helped tremendously in assisting our customers in achieving their goals.

We have seen consistent improvement in how new use cases are coming with various domains and it efficiently takes care of all of the different domain processes.

The most advanced command options with a wide range of variants are really good to use and they cover almost all of the information silos. 

Every command has its own purpose and usage, which helps with any use case that comes as a process. We are able to achieve the same without any hindrance or impediment. 

With Discovery Bot, we can even have our business people enabled with process finding and do an evaluation on whether it can be converted into an opportunity.

A wide range of variable data types in A2019 is a good feature to have.

A2019 should have more improvement for developers, as it was in v11.x. For example, copying of specific lines between Bots, and Metabots (Calibrate option). All this will make A2019 even more unique in its own way.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for almost four years.

We have not used any other RPA solutions. We have been able to see how Automation Anywhere is improving in every aspect of the product from version 10.x to A2019.

Our customers are effectively using more solutions on this with a good ROI.

It's an ideal pricing model to customize the components based on everyone's needs.

We evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath.

With the recent version of A2019, Automation Anywhere has stepped into a new era of RPA development. We can see a lot of functions coming up with Automation Anywhere as a bundle like AARI, Bot Analytics, and Discovery Bot.

Excellent growth in product improvisation over the period. Keep Going!

We are using Automation Anywhere to automate manual processes and make the organization digital. We have replaced most of the human resources and we are utilizing them for more valued tasks. Now, the other business users are attracted by the output of it and are approaching us to automate their processes in their respective lines of businesses.

We started at version 10 and moved to version 11x. It is more powerful than the previous one, but the new cloud-based RPA has attracted us more and we are migrating to A2019.

We have increased our productivity by five times as of now, and we are still growing.

Now, most of the processes are automated and even free from an audit perspective, as they are completely automated without human intervention. This is getting better and better.

The user is experiencing much higher outputs without error, rather than using humans who are prone to errors. As this works 24 by 7, they are preferring to automate the task and get it processed using the bot. Multiple business lines are adopting this.

OCR, Image Recognition, Object Cloning, and PDF integration help us a lot. We have used these mostly, as our system is legacy. We automate primarily with image recognition and MetaBots, which are mostly accurate. 

Metabots are a useful feature that helps us overcome the issues that we face using image recognition. The reading of data from Excel is much easier and is getting even better in A2019.

The bot store helps us to download most of the reusable utilities and overcome our issues. We also earn at the same time.

It can be improved in a few areas where the legacy system can be read through object cloning.

The Image Recognition functionality should be enhanced to improve the accuracy of checkboxes. In A2019, the bot agent will be deployed on the local machine when we run the bot runner, but to download it takes too long, and the user will lose patience. My advice is to improve on this.

Sometimes, the files are getting corrupted and this causes us a lot of trouble. This is an issue that is still pending.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for three and a half years.

Automation Anywhere is very stable.

The scalability is very good and we have had a pretty good impression from the beginning. It has not changed yet.

The technical support is very good. Whenever we raise any ticket with the support team, they respond immediately. Our issues have been resolved on our schedule after they determine the root cause of the problem.

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

The initial setup was straightforward. The technical team from Automation Anywhere has helped us in installing. They were able to answer our questions wherever required.

The vendor assisted us and they were very good. They are very responsive and reliable.

Not sure as it is from higher management. As of now we cannot share it.

The price is very reasonable.

We did not evaluate other options.

Overall, this product seems pretty good as of now.