Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

I have automated the applications that we use for daily checks. We automate the application health check functionality, capture the result in an Excel sheet, and share it.

By using this, we are saving time and we no need to do routine work, as it is now automated and the result is shared with all of the end-users. We are able to navigate if any further application changes.

It captures all of the day-to-day activities and monitors the jobs at the time we specify. It helps with all technologies.

Automation Anywhere, by the name, can be used anywhere for automating tasks. Everywhere automation and anywhere automation. By using AA, we are able to reduce the time and manpower spent on tasks.

We can also have data updates in form of email, which can be saved for later usage.

It is very easy to understand the code.

AA helps in moving people's current trends using the current technology. AA is an RPA tool that makes robots do all of the work or jobs as assigned.

AA is a good tool for all technologies in all organizations.

The features I found valuable based on my usage are:

• Error Handling helps to find the exact error line in the logs.
• Email can be used to send emails to any number of users.
• Excel advanced and basic modules help to execute most of the commands in Excel.
  
• OCR captures the exact text.
• Keystroke shortcut is used within the shortcut, like TAB or ENTER.
• The universal recorder captures the specific options that need to be captured.
  
• The mouse click option can be used to capture exact actions.
• The delay function can be used to make applications wait for a specific time.

In the Universal Recorder, we face minor bugs in A2019. For example, the browser closes and using the recorder.

There are some minor bugs in the universal browser. In cases where Microsoft Silverlight is used, it doesn't capture the button.

In V11 we use OCR, it captures the image and displays the text it captured. However, in A2019, it only captures and does not display the text.

In A2019 it does not display the exact running status, but rather it displays the previous one.

In V11, we used to add images in email message boxes with the current date and time but in A2019, we are unable to do so 

I have been working on Automation Anywhere since February 2020.

The first-ever RPA tool that I used was AA V11.

I started with AA V11, completed the Advanced and Master certifications, then moved to the next version, A2019.

AA comes at a more affordable price than the other tools.

AA is the best tool compared to others in the market such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and ProcessRobot by Softomotive.

I am expecting that in the next versions of A2019, more actions will be added.

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 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.