Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are using this product to automate various BPO processes, where the manual operation team currently does them manually in my project. The process we are currently working on has multiple applications and the API integrated, so we get details from the API and feed those into the front end application. We then process and update the status of the policy in another application.

The main interaction involves retrieving data from a set of applications and feeding it into other applications. Therefore, AA is mainly used for handling end-to-end processes that are compromised of all of the business validations.

This tool provides us with easy accessibility for adopting the new process, as it is more user- friendly. This is the main reason that we implemented this tool. Many new resources are able to grasp the tool and start doing the automation with ease, which is basically missing in the other vendors' tools.

In terms of adaptability, AA has a significant contribution. Most users can easily understand it. The support team is good and is able to resolve the issues or any challenges we encounter.

Actions are very much user-friendly, which we can easily use to proceed with development. The API connection is easy to incorporate and also has the ability to track the task status in the Orchestrator.

XML action commands and Excel commands are the ones we most frequently use in the real world processing of the policy. When we have features targeting those, it will be good enough for the majority of the process we automated.

All of the key action items have been easy to incorporate.

Sometimes the tool is timing out, which would be a good thing to have resolved.

It will be good if we have a framework that is created with the package, so we can leverage those for the multiple processes. As it is now, we create a base framework.

When we have more packages for each of the basic operations, it will be more user-friendly and easier to complete, rather than starting from scratch.

Ideally, when we have those packages we can leverage them for overall project development. Adopting the cloud platform will be more convenient, as opposed to depending on the on-premises setup.

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

Applications can be more effective with the development of bots that are affected less by changes in the object and environment.

The support team is good in helping with queries and issues that had held up the automation.

We used UiPath previously. AA is more user-friendly and adaptable such that anyone can learn and more easily understand how to incorporate it into the process automation.

The initial setup is not complicated.

I would rate the vendor installation team and eight out of ten.

I don't have the exact figures but it does provide ROI.

The setup cost depends on multiple factors, so you need to get details before choosing.

Version A2019 is available and will be adopting it in the coming months. We are looking forward to working on this new version.

We are using AA to automate business use cases, which includes applications like SAP, ServiceNow, Outlook, etc.

We use Windows Server for the Bot Runner, Bot Developer, and Bot Creator. The Control Room is installed in an on-premises hosting. We have multiple clients here at HCL and we used AA for many clients and automated many use cases.

We provide AA setup for customers as well. We install, manage, and set up AA for customers to use, which makes it easy and can be expanded whenever they want. 

AA helped us to reduce the processing time of requests almost instantly.

One of the challenges we had was SAP Password Reset Requests, and we automated this process in AA and now the bot runs as soon as it receives an email in its inbox. AA extracts the data from email, logs into SAP, and then after resetting the password, sends the notification to the user. This all takes place within two minutes, maximum.

Another important use case involves user termination from the organization. The HR team raises a request to SNOW, and the bot receives the alert from SNOW. After checking if the termination date is met, the user is terminated from all the applications, and access is revoked by the bot.

I found that the REST API commands are very useful and easy to use. We use the REST API in multiple places, which saves a lot of time in terms of development as well as execution. We use the SNOW API and the TOPdesk API to create and update tickets in these apps.

Another great feature is MetaBot; when we automate web applications (mostly), after some time, the design or UI gets updated and we only have to recalibrate the bot. The bot accepts the changes and it starts to work again, which saves a lot of time for the developer and the business.

I would like to use VB.NET native code inside of Automation Anywhere. If there were a feature like InvokeCode in UiPath, it will help me to write native VB.NET code inside of AA. This would be a relief to the developers. 

Another feature I want to see is data conversion from one format to another. For example, I want to convert a string date time to Date Time format, or a float to an integer, etc. This will give me the flexibility to interact with other applications and help with passing correct values. I won't have to worry about the error handling from the application that I am automating.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past year and a half.

I am using both AA and UiPath, and I see both of them at par. Each tool has some advantages over the other.

The setup and licensing cost is affordable, and it is not exaggerated like UiPath.

We evaluated Blue Prism, NICE, WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. We ranked AA first pace.

I think AA is a great tool and I love working with it.

We primarily use the solution for universal scanning. As an example, the solution can take various service provider bills and will allow us to view all of them in Excel format. That's a very basic use case.

In SAP, there are many similar regular tasks that are done regularly. In human resources, we created several core SAP systems so that the basic users, in human resources can reduce redundancies by 10 times with very little cost. We actually didn't expect that outcome. It was a nice surprise.

It depends on the use case, however, I'd say the most valuable aspect of the solution is the IQ Bot. 

Normally, you just scan the invoice. However, what makes Automation Anywhere different from other services is machine learning, which includes AI. It's easier and more convenient. 

We can include Python programming language too for getting better results.

The solution provides a Community Edition to all the users. It's a great jumping-off point to learn about automation. There are some features that are reduced, however, it's still quite good.

The insights provided by the dashboard are excellent.

If I build a bot today and don't use it, however, in several months, someone tries to use it, there's a 30-40% change the bot will fail in one or two areas. I'm still trying to figure out why. It's on a ticket right now. It may be due to updates or changes to the environment. I'm not sure.

The solution lacks in the approval process area. They need to provide more solutions.

I've been using the solution for about two years.

The stability is pretty good. The only place it lags is if a bot is made and then not used for many months. Then there can be errors. Other than that, it's got excellent stability.

The solution is quite scalable, however, it all depends, from customer to customer and what their actual requirements are.

We have about ten to 15 people who use the solution regularly. We also have an administrator who oversees everything.

We plan to expand across both the enterprise and A2019 versions. Currently, we're just exploring its capabilities more and more.

The technical support is excellent. I'd rate it ten out of ten. At first, we did run into a lot of issues, and the support team was very kind. They were also very helpful and responsive. We're quite satisfied with their level of service.

I work with RPA technology and have knowledge of multiple companies including Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Webpack, and multiple other vendors. However, in this company, we've only ever used Automation Anywhere.

I've worked with the free version of Blue Prism for tasks like sending email. It was fine and worked without issue.

The initial setup is not complex. It's also not straightforward.

If someone is an automation novice, for him to set everything up, he must be very clear and aware of the ports. It's advisable to meet the system requirements. If the system requirements fail, there may be challenges on the system and some features may not work or could potentially work if some adjustments also get made. There needs to be a mastery of the technical network like ports and servers.

If I implement it now, if I just install the automation in my server, then it's a one one-time installation

The deployment time isn't too long. It may just take two or three hours if someone is completely aware of what we are doing.

In order to deploy the solution, one person is enough. You don't need a whole big team.

I don't have any information about the pricing or licensing on offer. It's my understanding that there's different pricing, depending on how many licenses a client needs. It's very flexible. If a client just needs a certain aspect, they can just get a license for that.

Automation Anywhere has two different versions, or, rather, two different products. One is the Automation Anywhere Enterprise Edition which is only on-premise. Automation Anywhere also has another service that is called A2019, which can be deployed on-premise. 

One of the main differences between the Enterprise Edition of Automation Anywhere is the dollar policy shop. In there, they can't create or customize our own comment. With A2019, you have an option to create our own comments. A2019 is more flexible. I'd advise new users to go for that version, as opposed to the enterprise version.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I have used Automation Anywhere for automating different use cases which involved applications such as Excel, SAP, PDF, Salesforce, Outlook Web applications, Desktop Automation Email automation, and many more. I have automated many processes that involve report generation using Excel, invoice processing, order processing, BPO related processes, and many more. It's safe to automate processes that involve secure credentials because Automation Anywhere provides an encrypted centralized credential vault.

My organization has worked with multiple clients and helped them automate their repetitive and mundane processes. These organizations have seen a drastic increase in employee productivity, reduced human errors, and better SLAs. All of this leads to customer satisfaction.

AA is not much more expensive compared to other RPA tools, so ROI was much higher by automating some of the end-to-end business processes. Support and maintenance work is also easy because of the well-managed control room architecture. 

The best feature is the drag-and-drop command. Users with less coding knowledge can also automate their end-to-end processes very easily. 

Centralized Control made maintenance and support work easier. 

Bot Insights is another feature in which the bot can log all the statistical information and display it to the end-users in a graphical view.

In A2019, I liked Excel Automation because now it is possible to automate Excel files without having Excel installed on the machine in which the bot runs.

When it comes to Citrix automation, AA should improve or add more features in such a way that all the commands should work when automating a Citrix application.

There should be more options to write codes in VBScript, C#, Python, etc. directly within any commands, instead of just invoking an already existing script.

Since A2019 is cloud-based and since it is a new product, there are a lot of commands that require improvisations such as the Outlook Save Email command, Rest API commands, and a few others.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last two years and for the past six months, I have been using the latest version, A2019.

When it comes to scalability, AA has a lot of potential. Now with A2019, the commands and the subcommands got doubled and now automation has been very easy.

We get excellent support from Automation Anywhere for any type of product-related issues and queries. They typically reply within 24 hours of time.

I have not used any other solutions before. But recently I have started using UiPath.

The setup was so straightforward for me as I was from a technical background. 

In-house.

ROI was much higher compared to what we have expected or calculated during our ROI calculation stage.

The cost of unattended bots is reasonable and when it comes to attended automation the licensing cost for Attended bot runners is a bit expensive. The overall price is not so expensive compared to other tools.

I have not evaluated because this solution was chosen by my organization.

I believe that A2019 is going to be the next big thing in the RPA field.

We are an SI vendor. We have been implementing customer-facing solutions for processes like reports generation, bank reconciliation, payroll processing, etc.

There were different bank statements generated for reconciliations. With some standardization, we were able to automate a process that took more than 4 hours in under 15 mins. In one of our customer implementations, the environment was to use simple RPA functionalities without any complexities. We achieved it with the basic pack of AA license.

The organizations where we have implemented AA have seen tremendous benefits achieved in terms of time and cost-saving with the highest quality of deliverables. Since this is about how it has helped our organization, I would explain it from the context of a system integration vendor. We are able to build a steady pipeline when we position AA as a solution and enhance our resource skills by certifications of AA.  This has certainly improved or relevance in the RPA market space with a growing team of Automation Engineers.

The features that help us satisfy the needs of the customer to overcome mundane activities using task bots and meta bots are the most valuable along with the rich controls in the control room. The developer team is able to capture all the necessary steps without much hassle with the visual designer and the ability to test each step of automation has helped in delivering error-free automation to our customer. With the new version of AA, we have more control over the implementation and we are able to quickly deploy the solutions to the customer.

OCR - OCR capability needs to become better. For the handwritten documents, we had a struggle to extract with accuracy while some other market tools were able to achieve it without any issues. 

The OCR component should allow integration with 3rd party OCR. This way we can use the best of breed solution along with AA or allow better control over OCR packages to be customized. As of now, it acts like a black box where there is very little control over the outcome of the OCR. We had great struggles with a customer who had handwritten data extraction. Finally, the customer was not able to see the value and the exploration went on hold post COVID.

We partner with multiple tools. We find AA to be much superior in support.

The primary use case depends on SAP and Excel platforms, where we automated repetitive tasks. Also, we automated the Tableau server using this.

We use SQL DB for storing logs. We have been using it for one year for our client. The support also is great. If we are stuck, the Automation Anywhere team comes to the rescue. I have worked on other RPA tools but this is more logical and easy to use. The flows and the commands can be easily learned by a beginner as coding knowledge is not needed.

It has helped us a great extent as we are part of the service and basically provide clients with automation solutions for their manual and repetitive tasks. We have done automation on SAP, Excels, web applications, Outlook, and many more application platforms. 

It is JAVA based so it is easy to use and user-friendly. Now comes the support part, where the use cases are deployed and hyper care is given to the bot. It is easy to schedule an easy process of deployment too. The credentials are stored safely.

Mostly the Metabots function and Excel as DB function are of great help as we can connect to SAP and work on that easily. Excel as DB helps us to perform operations on it even when huge amounts of data are on it. 

The control room is the best part as everything can be seen and controlled from there, scheduling storing of credentials, and much more. I have used PDF extraction and other tools where data needs to be extracted and it works great at that part. I highly recommended this tool for automation.

Already the new version is out, which has cognitive abilities. The bot learning skills are there, which helps to train the bot. AA has done a great job by bringing compatibility with IBM Watson and many other AI interfaces. If some more functions we can get related to other web applications will be a great help. At some places, the if-else statements become so confusing so, at that place, they can change the UI for better understanding. Apart from this I liked this tool and would like to continue working on this.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year. 

It is quite a stable platform based on Java.

It is highly scalable.

We once had an issue with the SAP meta bot, where the click was not working so the tech support team helped find the issue and then changed the code so that the issue does not come back. 

We had a resolution issue, where the bot was unable to find the screens. They also helped us with that.

I used Automic but switched because it was not much compatible with other applications. Also, it was more of coding which made it a complex tool to work upon.

The vendor team is great, we have reached out for many issues and they responded well.

Setup cost is a bit okay, but once it is up, it can give a great amount of ROI.

This tool is a good platform for automation.

Batch JOB processing and Monitoring which was a manual activity earlier.

We've done a lot of automation with the product in the last two years. We started with accounts receivable processes in finance. I would say the AR function is one of the most mature functions in the product right now because we almost automated all the aspects of accounts receivable. 

We have also started looking at automating the accounts payable process as well. I've only mentioned finance at this point, but we also have done a lot of automation with IT, as well as with procurement. Right now, the penetration is higher with the support functions but we are also looking at different ways to automate. For example, we would like to use automation technology in core engineering. We also want to be expansive and do projects beyond our current boundaries — outside of just India. We've already done a small PoC (proof of concept) with a company in China and we also automated three small processes with a U.S. entity. 

We use it daily and have done projects with support functions, such as financial services, IT, and procurement support. We have 50 to 60 processes that have been automated using RPA in all three areas put together. This is the breadth and extent of what we have automated. We are using the on-premise deployment model.

Automation Anywhere helps to automate much of the manual activity. There are already a few inbuild use case builds which we have used and expands for our convenience.

We use it to automate all kinds of business processes. The primary use case is the RPA platform, even though they have the cognitive platform and the analytics platform. We use it for so many different things it's hard to focus on one, but it's automating business processes in our banking system. We're interfacing a lot with Excel, our ERP systems, some legacy systems, the databases, file folders, text files, CSVs. It's hard to pin down one.

• Intelligent automation for business and IT tasks.
• Uses SMART Automation Technology

Bot Creator- Developers use desktop-based applications to create bots. Their dev licenses are checked with that configured in the control room. On authentication, the code of the bots they create is stored in the control room. Different developers may create individual tasks/bots. These bots could be merged and executed at once.

Bot Runner - The Bot Runner is the machine where you run the bot. You could have multiple bots running in parallel. You only need the Run License to run the bots. The bots report back the execution logs/pass/fail status back to the control room.

Autosuggestion of existing use cases based on the problem statement could use improvement. 

My primary use cases are where I'm dealing with a lot of raw data extraction and transformation so that the data can be used by other systems. An example would be getting the data out of PDF files, transforming it from semi-structured to structured, and putting it into an extra-stable system like Excel or a CSV so that it can be used by other systems. Listed are low hanging fruits and will boost the confidence of the stakeholders in the RPA deployment, recommend to look at such use cases when looking at Automation Anywhere and its implementation.

• Native cognitive automation for unstructured data
• Bot Store—Jumpstart your RPA with verified, ready to use bots
• 24/7 global support
• Business users can build bots to automate their processes
• 1 bot—20,000 bots
  From pilot to enterprise-scale, at your pace
• Embedded real-time analytics—
  No integration, No delays
  
• Better customer support

It's a great product, timely support, and guidance.

IBM Robotic Process Automation.

I mainly used AA to extract data from invoices from PDF files with multiple formats and to upload this data to a Data Lake, on a Windows machine.

Other projects involved extracting data from Excel and CSV files and then inserting them into custom applications, databases, and mainframes and finally sending recap emails to the user.

The Bots developed, according to the end user's needs and the type of process, were both attended and unattended. In both cases, the end-users were always satisfied with the functioning and performances of the Bots.

By automating the process with AA and using the verification station, it was possible to speed up the process and strengthen it, involving the process owner in the verification of the correctness of the data extracted.

It is becoming more and more normal for companies that a process is carried out partly or totally by a Bot, thus allowing humans to dedicate themselves to high value-added activities.

The speed-up and greater control over the quality of the processes have also led to savings in money and are increasing the happiness of the company's customers.

I consider the verification station very useful because it allows you to quickly check if the data extracted are correct or if you need to change the process. The process owner is also much happier because he is more involved in the implementation of the Bot and thus it is easier to develop the requirements.

During the test phases and during the review, it is possible to engage the process owner who almost enjoys verifying the correct functioning of the Bot, thanks also to the simple and attractive interface of the verification station.

You could improve the tools for reading CSV/Excel, also providing wizards or detailed guides, otherwise, it is quite complex to use them, especially at the beginning.

It would be useful to have an online wiki on each tool that can be used on AA with practical examples of use, with images and videos.

It would also be useful to increase the community and make public in a forum the problems solved by other developers through the support, so that we can use past experience to solve development problems without having to send emails to AA about a problem that may have already been solved.

I use Automation Anywhere for five months.

I think the final product is quite stable. All the functionalities included in AA are extensively tested and thus do not present strange errors after the Bot has been released into production. AA also handles the release of new versions of the IDE very well, guaranteeing the portability of the code with simple procedures.

It is a very scalable product, also thanks to some features included in the IDE.

So far, I have not used customer service very much.

I currently use both Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Depending on what you need to automate, one may perform better than the other.

The initial setup is quite long and full of different phases. It would take only one official AA installation guide with the most detailed step-by-step description and one image per step, without the need to consult more than one guide.

I implemented through a vendor team and their level of expertise is medium-high.

We also evaluated UiPath.

It is a tool that allows you to have excellent performance but some features are not intuitive to use.