Automation Anywhere Reviews

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.

We use Automation Anywhere to automate business processes for insurance clients. Automation Anywhere reduced the manpower up to 80% with a high return on investment. The process which we automated can complete the entire workload within 10 days when the normal process would have taken around 30 working days.

Apart from this, we automated password reset processes which saved time and effort and also enhanced security.

We are also automating the deployment process for new process setups. 

Bot Stuck Automation is helping us to keep track of the bots that are stuck for long time.

Automation Anywhere made a huge impact in maintaining client relationships. The reason is a high Return on Investment from the processes we automated. Because we have high ROI we gained new clients which increased the client count as well as our company's financial strength. 

Most of the employees learned the Automation Anywhere tool and got certified from Automation Anywhere University. AA makes their professional life much easier from a career perspective. 

Our organization has improved revenue just by automating the business processes where too much manual work was involved.

Web-based control is the most valuable feature. We can access it from anywhere in the world with the control room URL and in any browser. Bot Insights make our report generation and other insights view easier. We can export the data in the form of CSV, PDF, etc.

Credentials is another important feature, where we can store the important/bot credentials securely in the Control room itself and we can track who accesses the credentials and we can restrict the access based on users.

Bots get disconnected from control rooms sometimes without any reason and this takes up a lot of time. 

If the user creates a schedule then he/she leaves the company, that schedule became unusable at some point and I can't edit it. We need to create it again using generic IDs. This problem can be avoided in an upcoming release or update. There should be a button for customer support.

For each process, we have a separate log folder/files and it's tedious to go and check each process. They should include a button/feature to check the logs for each/process and or bots in the control room itself.

There should be an option for the quick addition of disconnected bots/kind of rollback options.

I would also like to see the One-Touch Asset management report button in the control room.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years. 

We can assure 98% stability and the remaining 2% is just because of the environment issues.

It is highly scalable.

Support was good but sometimes they ask for logs that have client information. But apart from this, they are really helpful.

We have been using Automation Anywhere from the initial stages.

The setup is good but the control room setup takes some time.

We have an in-house team to implement AA solutions. 

We saved around 80% man-power.

Small companies can't afford this cost as the pricing is a little higher.

Yes, I evaluated with Blue Prism.

Automation Anywhere is a very Interactive and easy to use RPA tool.

We have a long list of customers and multiple use cases in pharma, account & finance, customer billing & payment, and other domains. We use AA to automate those tasks that need less or no human interaction. The reconciliation tasks, SAP and Excel operations, are automated using AA, take less time, and give accurate results. 

Working with MetaBot provided simple drag and drop functionality, integration of DLL of SAP, Outlook, Excel and other application make tasks easier for developers.

Customers are happy with overall performance of bots and it makes the developer's life easy.  

We have a lot of clients who use AA bots in their own process. Tasks that are automated require less human input. AA bots save a lot of time, increase efficiency, deliver accurate output, and provide consistency which improves the overall function of processes in different domains.   

AA is an amazing tool that provides great features to perform Excel operations, Data Integration, and manipulation saving thousands of hours. It is an easy to use application that makes the developer's life comfortable. It doesn't require a technical background.

MetaBot is one of the most valuable features of AA. The simple drag and drop functionality, integration of DLL of SAP, Outlook, Excel, and other application make tasks easier for developers. There's nothing like MetaBot in other tools. 

One can also check the Bot farm for readymade Bots provided by other AA developers and experts.

A2019 is another great feature introduced by AA. The web-based Bot development, Control room, and Bot Insights are other nice features. Improved Error Handling and support of Python script in A2019 seems good.

I have identified a few areas where one can find the scope of improvement:

1. AA IQ Bot has not yet succeeded in living up to its reputation due to its high cost, low ROI, and its inability to meet client requirements.

2. Commands such as OCR are not up to the mark the output accuracy is not satisfactory.

3. It is unable to identify IF/Else, for Loop block when reviewing/writing AA code. There should be an expand/collapse button to identify a block of code.

Integration with Google Spreadsheets and other products should be included in the next release.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last three years.

It is a great and advanced tool for the development of Bots.

In terms of scalability, AA is one of the best available tools in the market and provides a lot of command and tools that do not require any technical specialty.  

Easy to use, advanced features like MetaBot, Improved Error Handling, Web-based bot development in A2019, support of Python script and many more.

I have had a great experience with the technical team. I got stuck in one scenario where Object Cloning was not working in the production environment. After spending many hours, I connected with the AA technical team and they provided a prompt solution.

I did not use any other solution.

ROI depends on time, cost, output accuracy, and effective and consistent results.

The pricing of AA is quite high as compared to other tools as it's one of the best RPA tools available in the market.

I did not evaluate other options.

Just reduce AA licensing prices and provide real scenario-based training modules in learning sections.

We use the platform to help our customers by building automation solutions in order to solve their business problems. The use cases include AP processing, form data extraction, data collection, and Excel reporting.

We use a combination of RPA and IQ Bot to deal with semi-structured or unstructured data, such as documents and images. We also use Bot Insights for business process analytics and bot operation health checks.

The platform is deployed using an on-premise configuration and connected to multiple bot runners, running in virtualized environments. 

We found that RPA with additional AI capabilities, such as machine learning and Computer Vision, can enable the organization to augment existing business operations by creating efficiencies and improving the accuracy of data to be processed, without changing too much of the existing system.

This will reduce the change cost and help business units to elevate their existing teams, processes, and systems so that they can focus on higher-value tasks that require creativity to perform.

The handwriting recognition capability in IQ Bot is particularly interesting, as we can see a high level of accuracy in extracting handwritten texts. 

The IQ Bot component has enabled the business to quickly identify the different documents and provide the ability to integrate with in-house or external AI functions. This enables us to extend the initial document extraction facility to transform the information into key decision-making attributes. The document training facility has made it easy to identify select-extract the components on the documents and it is also capable to recognize handwriting context with the help of pre-configured Azure AI services. 

The improvements that we could see would be the increased stability of each A2019 releases and reduce the likely impact on existing features. We are also looking to see improvements in the upgrade and bot deployment processes to make them easier and less interaction with back end servers. 

We are also to see more features to be added to seamlessly transition between human and bot tasks in the long-running process. We are also keen to see the new AARI feature develop into a voice-enabled command activation to run the bot process. 

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than a year, ever since its release in 2019. 

The A2019 in early releases had been quite unstable to our experience. However, since A2019.14 there seem to be improvements in this area and so far we haven’t seen any major issues that impact the existing features we are using. For any of the new features, we suggest to always check on the release notes and understand the limitations of the features before using them in your solution. 

The technical support team has been prompt and helpful in addressing issues coming out of the platform. There is a limitation in having multiple admin accounts to view the same ticket information but we were told that a new improved system will be implemented to address this limitation. 

We use a process-based workflow automation solution and we actually still use them to deal with long-running processes as they have more extensive features to deal with workflow-based problems. However, we see RPA can help in complementing the process by automating the mundane tasks of the process and getting greater efficiency for the business as well as reducing the likelihood of human errors. 

The installation is quite straightforward as they provide us with an installer package that guides you through using wizards. But the pre and post-installation process can be quite complex and laborious depending on what features you need to enable. In some cases, these feature configurations require the underlying services to be restarted from the server backend. When using virtualized environments in the cloud connecting on an internal network domain, there would be extra care needed on the network configurations to ensure communication channels between the machines are properly connected.

We deployed in-house. 

You need to be mindful about the initial server costs if you go with an on-premise deployment model as the specification can surprise some of your stakeholders. For licensing, always try to get through reselling partners for getting more customized and better prices.

We observed all major players in the RPA space such as UiPath, BluePrism, and WorkFusion. There are also some companies that operate in a specific market that we looked at.  

Earlier, our payroll process required a lot of human intervention or human dependency as we have Biometric Application and Payroll Application separately. To complete the payroll, we first need to manually fetch the attendance from the Biometric application and manually upload it to the Payroll Application.

We have used it for an HR use case, wherein the BOT automatically fetched attendance from a Biometric application and it uploads it in the Payroll system, and calculates payroll automatically. It also sends emails to all respective employees with their respective payslips. 

It has saved our HR department time since this process automatically happens without anybody's intervention. Our HR department is able to devote their time to more productive work or activities. It has also saved a lot of costs since every employee in the HR department is involved in the attendance and payroll process. Second, the process is now no more human dependent.

Earlier, we used to all work manually and the chances of errors were higher since it was a sensitive process as it involves finance. However, this tool has helped us to automate our payroll process.

The most useful features of this tool are that this tool has less coding activity as compared to other tools, it has drag menus. Most Excel/VBA coding is automated in the AA tool, since, in Excel or VBA we need to do manual coding.

The following features are very valuable to us :

• Web Recorder
• Smart Recorder
• Work Bench Command Library
• Object Cloning Command
• Business Analytics
• Meta bot Designer
• File or Folder Command
• Error Handling Command
• Control Room Administrator
• Integrating PDF Using the PDF Command

As long as we are using this tool, it includes all features required from a process automation perspective. As of now, we are not looking for any additional features. 

However in IQ Bot if the following features can be added then I would be very grateful: The recognition of Voice /Audio

As of now IQ Bot only takes/fetches the record of the places that we have marked. e.g. Invoices fields that are dynamic in nature are very difficult to fetch the data from the scan copy. If this feature gets added, it will save a lot of time for developers.

We have been using AA 2019 for the last year and we have been using Version-11 for the last three years. 

It is an absolutely stable tool.

It is very scalable.

Support is good. We received timely support from AA.

No, we did not use a different solution, since we were doing the process manually.

The setup is straightforward.

It was implemented by our internal team members.

It has saved us a lot of time and money.

It is a very effective tool since it requires less coding and one can easily get trained on this tool with little knowledge of coding.

No, we have not evaluated any other tools.

We use this product to automate business processes with higher accuracy, efficiency, scalability, and robustness. The projects include applications like SAP, SAP BOBJ, SAP BI, and a few legacy enterprise applications like Oracle EBS, and Oracle BI Discoverer.

These applications can be easily automated using Automation Anywhere, and integration with Outlook or Gmail for email, so that automatic responses can be set, is something else that can be easily included.

In a few of our environments like HR and finance, where the process runs with higher priority, Automation Anywhere works perfectly.

In our organization, areas like the human resources department and revenue department are completely being replaced by robots. The bots are saving a massive amount of human time and also reducing the intervention.

The process we have called Job Posting involves scraping data from two websites and posting the job in another's portal. This normally takes three people almost 50-60 hours per week, whereas the bot can easily do it in two hours. This is one of the important use cases that we have implemented.

The tool is designed to be easy enough for a new user to automate tasks.

The first and foremost feature is the availability of activities. These include activities for the keyboard, mouse, different types of loops, conditional, clipboard, and many more.

The overall UI of the tool is so user-friendly that even a beginner can use it easily.

The predefined recording facility is helpful and it mainly includes three types, being smart, screen, and web.

Automation can be more complex when the use case is to scrape text from a non-digital image, although thanks to Automation Anywhere's image recognition and OCR facility, the job can be completed easily.

One of the important drawbacks of Automation Anywhere is that it needs to be able to show the automated process as a single flowchart. After complete deployment of the bot, such as a Task Bot, to see an overview of the complete process and the steps in the job is difficult. As such, I would like to suggest that they provide an option to show the entire process as a flowchart. This isn't required for the UI pane, but perhaps simply export it as a flowchart. This would be great.

The ability to automate using third-party code involvement should be improved. As far as I know, Python scripts can be used to automate a few use cases but it would be great if there is a change to include the .NET and C# languages. I've also worked on UiPath and .NET code can be used for most of the Excel automation. This includes operations like creating pivot tables and applying advanced filters. These are things that work directly with VB.NET code. 

Automation anywhere needs a forum where active users can provide answers for standard errors and exceptions. More webinars regarding the latest releases and the features should also be created.

Automation Anywhere has been used for less than one year in our organization. 

I would say the stability of the solution depends on how well the developer understands the process. When it comes to the product's stability, Automation Anywhere is doing a great job in maintaining timely releases.

I would say this product is very scalable and the ability to have Metabots and Task Bots makes it even more so.

Automation Anywhere has a great technical support team. We had a situation where the bot needed to deal with difficult tasks and the entire team got stuck. At this point, we had the idea of asking technical support for help, and the response time was very good.

I came from a UiPath background and I haven't completely moved to Automation Anywhere. I still work on both of these tools. Based on the use cases and the client's requirements, the appropriate tool will be chosen.

To speak in particular about Automation Anywhere, I've heard a few of our clients saying that Automation Anywhere has much more ability, such as the usage of Metabots, and Task Bots, which can be used repeatedly in different use cases. To me, this is a very interesting feature.

The initial setup was a bit hectic, but later on the with the help of the wonderful support team, it went smoothly.

I would rate the vendor team an eight out of ten.

So far, the organization has 20+ bots, which has generated more than $50K of ROI. As a developer, I am not familiar with all of the numbers.

Pricing is a bit high when compared to other available tools; however, the tool is worth the cost.

When it comes to automation, the common question will be to compare the tool with other available tools and as per my knowledge, the first comparison happens with UiPath. Although UiPath has its own advantages, when it is balanced with the most popular capabilities like scalability, security, and maintenance, Automation Anywhere wins.

I would like to suggest the vendor have a well-maintained community forum, where the notice board should be available to notify of upcoming releases. I would also like to see more webinars conducted to help make the tool more popular

It is good to see more improvements in the tool and the effort of the team to implement all of the latest features is highly appreciated.

My primary use case is automating the reports from SAP for various domains like accounts, billing, shipment, etc. AA is consolidating the reports for these various domains across different employee numbers and order numbers, then sending them to different business owners using the SMTP server. This reduces human intervention and effort.

This automation helped the functional people to focus on other tasks instead of looking into these, and this saved around 50% of the total effort of the day.

Since business users receiving reports on time and with accuracy, this helped us in achieving better customer satisfaction

AA has vastly improved my organization in gathering more business, reducing human efforts, and optimizing client business. It does this by automating the business processes in almost the domains of SAP, which results in better client satisfaction.

With the help of Automation Anywhere, we have provided more automation ideas from our side, which helps the client in building trust with us and providing more business opportunities to grow.

We started with a team size of five and within the short span of three years, we have increased our team members to 25, handling different business domains.

We use the IQ Bot and Metabots extensively in almost all of our tasks. We have created the bots to consolidate reports from various resources like webpages, databases, and different message formates like PDFs, Excel, XML, and submitting them to the business owner.

Scheduling helps to generate and send reports without any delay.

We have used this functionality to automate business processes that submit the order forms in SAP for a large number of orders without any human intervention.

Automation Anywhere should think about the integration with Machine learning and deep learning with ease, so that AA can be used in various other domains that require human calculation and logic to work. A good application would be IVR, as this can help businesses reduce the response time and achieve better customer satisfaction

AA should include more features in the mobile app, such as monitoring and debugging bots. This can help the administrator to look at the status on the fly.

They should provide more features to improve the visibility of bots.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last three years.

I would rate the customer service a ten out of ten, as they provided excellent support, and in a short timeframe. This helped to resolve all of our issues quickly and as efficiently as possible.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to Automation Anywhere.

We have implemented in-house.

Before choosing AA, we evaluated IBM, Blue Prism, and UiPath.

We use it in the field of banking, especially for repetitive tasks in card centers. We use automation with IBM BAW tools. 

It's helpful in creating new customer accounts, as we work with other systems that have no API or services to work with. The process starts in IBM BPM and it calls the robot to finish the work by calling other systems like iScore and T24. These add customer details and retrieve scores for the customer, especially when working with loans (personal, car). 

We used it in sending and collecting emails to and from different sites. 

We use it for repetitive tasks that need a lot of people and consume time, as bots work 24 hours and 7 days.

It helps in:

1. Improving employee productivity, morale, and retention. 
2. While there is some fear that automation will eliminate jobs, the consequences of automation are counter-intuitive: automation actually removes the tedious parts of work and frees up often stretched-thin employees for more meaningful and creative work. 
3. Streamline chaotic processes and workflows.
4. Increases transparency.
5. Enhances customer service and delivery.
6. Drives exponential growth.

Recorders and Bot Insights are very valuable features.

In addition:

1. Workload management helps to make the best use of the bots to make sure bots work well.
2. Concurrent bot executions. 
3. A web-based solution for bot creators.
4. It is a cloud-based solution.
5. Dashboards, especially for bot and task monitoring.
   
6. The REST APIs help to integrate with other systems.
7. Commands in the Excel package that make it easier to work with Excel files.
8. Email package commands.
9. Bot store.
10. Run DLL and Python code that helps a lot in working with machine learning.

The product needs improvements in dealing with remote servers and providing more APIs that will be used with other systems.

Also in need of improvement are:

1. The AI sense command needs improvement.
2. Bot discovery needs more work.
3. Migration tools should be improved.
   
4. REST and SOAP services need work.
5. AA should provide the ability to use custom packages that follow a standard to be imported in RPA.
6. I would like the ability to use custom cryptography algorithms with commands.
7. They should improve PDF commands and IQ features to include Arabic language OCR.
8. The admin user should have the ability to change the tome out of the session. 
   

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Stability-wise, AA is very good.

The scalability is good.

Technical support is good.

I previously used Blue Prism but changed because I found that AA has more helpful features. 

Straightforward, installation with disaster recovery approaches. 

The vendor team assisted us with deployment and they are very helpful and have a very good level of expertise

It helps to increase the ROI by 25%.

It's very good in terms of cost and pricing.