Automation Anywhere Reviews

My primary use case is to minimize the manual, repeated work done across the organizations and putting Bots in place for more accuracy, fastened process timings, and employee satisfaction.

Our major reason for implementing the solution is to reduce the FTE count and allow them to realize the benefits over a period of time. The primary use of this tool is automating areas like HR and admin.

It is easy to implement and most of the shared service areas are getting relieved by implementing Bots as part of the process.

From the organizational level, Automation Anywhere helped us in getting more business. Each client comes with their own standards, wherein it helps us in understanding their business altogether.

We can provide them the solutions in various ways, helping them with implementing the Bots, which requires us to enter into their core businesses and provide solutions to different areas.

The tool feature I found the most valuable is Metabot, as we can include the DLLs that are proprietary written code in .NET or other technologies.

Apart from the functionality, their working model and support are good.

Most of the tool's capabilities and features are very good in terms of architecture. It is easily understandable and very well structured. It is the most promising tool in the market, so it is helpful in attracting customers by demoing the already implemented Bots.

It would be great if they provide installation documents that are easier to understand, place more focus on capturing the fields, and most importantly, concentrate more on the OCR capability. Lots of customers come with scanned PDFs, wherein we find that area is more challenging. If a constant solution can be provided to read the non-editable documents, then that would be the highest milestone of the Automation Anywhere.

Lots of companies do not follow the LEAN method, so most of the processes are still with the old models. AA can focus on those areas and introduce some techniques to address those issues within the processes.

They can conduct more regular sessions with partners about their ability and new developments, which will help us in bringing new businesses.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for six years.

Their support in case of any tickets raised is more helpful for us in resolving the issues at the earliest.

We have been using Robotic Process Automation for the configuration of newly issued cloud environments and building cloud IT solutions.

Automation Anywhere Taskbots are being used to build Oracle Cloud environments by leveraging Excel files containing the configuration details. The Automation Anywhere Taskbots will scrape the Excel files in a dynamic way to configure the product using the most appropriate method for the data provided.

The Taskbots effectively match equivalent human inputs, rather than configuring from the backend.

AA has helped to accelerate the initial delivery stage of projects, wherein repetitive tasks were originally completed by consultants. This was an unnecessarily costly exercise, as this did not require the level of skill of a consultant.

The skillset of the consultant lies within gathering the correct requirements and providing the configuration details of these requirements in the predefined Excel files. Having the consultant also perform the arduous and repetitive configuration exercise was not efficient.

The code history functionality is the most valuable feature, although this could be improved upon with better tracing abilities and UI changes.

Overall, the commands provided have enough range to complete almost any task, with creative out-of-the-box thinking required sometimes for workarounds.

The simplicity and base nature of the commands are where the value lies; in combination, the variables, error handling, if/else, loop, etc, can produce significantly variable codes.

None of the commands are unique to Automation Anywhere, which allows beginners to leverage external knowledge.

Where minor but widespread changes are made to the cloud product being operated upon (e.g. a banner was added, or dropping all DIVs down 1), changing the cloned search values (Taskbot) individually was incredibly time consuming, and it shut down the RPA service until it was fixed.

To counter this, it would be valuable to have a 'mass update' of search values for cloned objects, in a similar way to Metabots.

Better tracing of 'if' and 'else' statements and their corresponding 'end' statements would be helpful.

Vertical connecting lines would be appropriate within the code, and a collapse/expand feature for code blocks would be ideal.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for 16 months.

Stability-wise, this product is good.

The scalability is reasonable.

No previous RPA solution was used before this one.

Other options may have been considered, but am unaware of which.

Automation Anywhere is one of the simplest RPA tools!

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

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

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

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

Using AA has helped to reduce time & human error.

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

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

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

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

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years. 

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

AA has high scalability.

Technical support from AA is excellent!

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

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

The initial setup was straightforward.

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

The pricing is a bit higher.

We evaluated UiPath before choosing AA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I automated Server applications like SAP, ERP, CRM, etc. With SAP, we can use different kinds of automation like BAPI with MetaBot and the SAP GUI with DLL automation.

One of my uses cases to help understand how we use AA is email-related. First, we used to get emails, and based on this as input, we needed to trigger some events in SAP. Depending on the resulting error, we needed to delete some records and further, needed to generate DB for some records (daily around 1,000 records). This is a repetitive process that happens every day.

Mmainly, we implemented SAP tasks related to customer support functionality. We also use it for the creation of PowerBI reports related to sales.

We have automated approximately 30 processes, reducing the manual effort a lot. Now all of the manual work is handled by the Bot alone.

We trigger by email sometimes, and it is also scheduler-based. We handle errors and can extract information. If the bot is not able to perform any step, then the support team gets into the picture and they will resolve the issue.

I like all of the features, especially the MetaBot, REST API, and SAP DLL.

We use the MetaBot to capture all of the screen contents, then if the elements are captured properly, it is fine. Otherwise, we create a custom object that acts as a click function.

The price is a little high and could be reduced.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past five years and it is one of the best tools to automate manual tasks.

Stability-wise, Automation Anywhere is good.

I would rate the scalability a 9.8 out of 10.

The technical support is good. We directly reach out to the AA guys by raising a ticket, and they also have a forum to resolve issues

Previously, we went through manual work. It was only with Excel that we had some automation using macros.

The price is a little bit high but the support is good.

We compared different RPA vendors and finally, we decided to go for Automation Anywhere as our single RPA solution.

Many new options have been implemented in the cloud version. NLP and G suite automation are also available, among a lot of other options in the A2019. At this point, we just need to explore the options.

The platform is amazing. One of the things that we were worried about when we initially started looking into RPA was having the right people to be able to cope. The advantage of Automation Anywhere is that you don't necessarily have to come from a programming background. It's very easy to pick up. Within the team, we were able to train people within a very short period of time and start our process in as little as two months.

For now, because we just started using Automation Anywhere recently, it's probably a little difficult for me to answer that (room for improvement). But from the feedback that I've received from the team, it is a great tool. We're definitely looking forward to using it more in the future.

Because we are very new to our process, so we're still sort of working through it. One of the features that I just learned about in this particular conference yesterday was about the Enterprise addition that they're just coming out with. I think in about six or seven days. So, that's very exciting because I don't particularly come from a programming background. I think it'll be really easy for us to continue to do more RPA-related processes, and not necessarily have to worry about having the right programmer on the team, or programmers, for that matter.

For the enterprise, we've been using Automation ( /categories/security-orchestration-automation-and-response-soar ) Anywhere for a few years. In my specific team, we've been using the platform for about eight months now.

It was very easy. The Automation Anywhere community is extremely helpful with answering any questions that we had throughout the process, or any sort of concerns that we had. So, it really wasn't difficult at all.

I would highly recommend it. If RPA is something that they're doing for the first time, Automation Anywhere is definitely one of the best in the industry that they should stick to.

I would definitely give it a ten (out of ten).

I am a platform architect for the RPA so I deal with all 3 major RPA vendors. I build the Infra for all big setups. I have immense experience plan, design, and building the setup on cloud, on-prem and with different configurations.

I implemented AA in different environments, the AA installation is the smoothest compared to other RPA software installs.

Migration is a little challenging since it requires direct integration with DB, credential vault and all that. Since multiple credentials are involved, it is a challenge to get all the credentials, it should be easier if only the control room credential was required. Versioning migration is still a challenge.

My company uses AA extensively for internal BPO work as well as we refer and deploy it to the customer as a RPaaS model. It helps in increasing productivity, reducing the cost of the whole operation. It makes fewer errors and in the COVID situation proves to be a reliable workhorse.

We implemented a lot of new environments recently. v10 expiry and COVID situation accelerated the implementations. Compared to older days now all implementation of infra bot happened pretty quickly.

Bot with Citrix integration may require a lot of improvement but having any extra feature really helps in complex implementation.

The cloud templates for implementation helped greatly and it helps us in pushing the software fast.

• The OCR integration came a long way. They have intelligence inbuilt into it.
• Ease of deploying and the KB article really help people to just read and deploy different 3rd part components as well(svn, DB, LB, etc) .
• Nowadays, the screen scraping techniques evolved in RPA and it is good to see they are in play which was not the case couple of years ago.
• HBC is most suitable for COVID times. 
• The RPaas offering will help customer to use it for less number of bots.
• AD security group integration is a good feature
  
• AI sense is good too.
  

They need to concentrate lot on a nonpersistent RPA model. Integrate IQ bot with AA instead of making it as a separate component, since nowadays intelligent bots need to be integrated into RPA core. Instead of bot agents getting installed on the machines, concentrate on making it independent of the system and only as a plugin in the browser.

It doesn't have an independent small install for developers and always requires to be fully installed.

Bringing a DevOps model for bot implementation integrated through private bot store might be a good idea to improve the tool.

I being using it since couple of years, i am impressed by the transformation from v10 to v11 and v11 to A2019. 

The solution is pretty stable, we didn't face many issues. Once the instalation is done the control room core architecture wont face many issues.there are quick fixes like service restart if anything goes off. but most of the time we hear AA support suggesting us to reinstall with the new version of software for performance issues, but with my experiance i hardly see that making huge differnce in fixing the actual issue.

 Monitoring can be done through email alerts for the core infrastructure. Issues mainly in HA(High Availability) with cluster sync issues still not monitored at the dashboard level, which might be a concern if the cluster goes out of sync. At the bot implementation lot of things are dependent on the way we code so it's additional work for the developer to get the code keeping in mind all the events which might happen. I would have been impressed if the solution had framework at the control room level to keep track of the overal execution and transactions, hope they can bring that feature in future releases

We never faced any issues with scalability for AA. sometime it takes high CPU on CR, but that is expected. one of the frequent questions we encouter with HA setups is the single point failure of repository storages, i understand that this needs to be taken care by storage fault tolerance, however most organization might not use cloud for RPA and if we are doing on prem install they might not have a high resillenace storage. SQL availability group still needs a SQL expert to get that right and DR solution totally depends on the underlaying infra we work on (there may be lot of alternative solution and its a big discussion to be honest :-)   )

Hence HA and DR solution really require a expert like us who have extensive knowledge on RPA, cloud, infra, windows and SQL  

They offer excellent customer service. No complaints except that every time they ask for a software upgrade as soon as they hear about an issue, which is not actually a good solution. Otherwise, they have very good knowledge of most of the issues. 

We keep switching between RPA software for a number of reasons. We prefer AA for the following reasons:

• Low cost for run licenses compare to other RPA solutions
• A high number of certified developers help in bring efficient automation compared to others, they in turn promote the RPA software that they know of.
• Easy to program, no prior experience of programming required.
• Easy to use compared to other RPA.

The initial setup was straightforward, even a complex setup can be set up in 20 mins if you have all prerequisites.setup can be complex if there is a HA , DR implementation, as a architects we need to factor in lot of variables. some are target application access,  MFA for the application or windows authentication, credential management, data accessibility, network reachability , underlaying hardware, PaaS offering in cloud(depends on the cloud) , VDI or VM template to choose (Makes huge difference in performance and costing), citrix or native application . Overall simple install, but huge planning to figure out the overall feasibility and effectiveness of implementation

We implemented in-house. I implement it within Accenture and for customers as well. I rate my self pretty high for implementation. I have solid experiance (AA master) as well as cloud certification. I have 12 years experiance in infra, so expect a good solid backgroup on both AA and infra.

ROI is important for the business case. ROI is good if you are going for long run, year on year. i never stayed on a project till we start getting the actual values, i see nowadays ROI is shrinking due to RPA vendors raising thier license costs , additional cost added to get the complex RPA solutions to be implemented

The setup cost for AA is always fixed since the configuration won't change much for the different number of bots, the license cost is lower in AA,

We usually evaluate Blue Prism and UiPath along with AA for implementation. We decide based on the requirements.

The primary use case is automation in respect to the financial sector. We have been operating with trades across globe. 

Right now, we have been upgrading to version 11.3.2. Two months prior, we had been using version 10.7.5.

We have automated a few processes, which take four to five hours to do manually. When we automated these processes that time became less than one hour with RPA. This was our goal. We have reduced the time frame.

The best feature is the MetaBot, which we've been integrating and calibrating with a lot of stuff. This has been helpful to us.

I like the object cloning.

The development period is shorter.

It is easy to fix bug issues which you encounter in the post-production process.

MetaBot still needs to be optimized, though Version 11.3 did integrate all the commands into it. We are not able to see all the lines of code which are executed in MetaBot. 

Integrate .NET functionalities instead of installing Visual Studio, which is an additional resource to us.

Needs more Excel features and functionality.

We are moving onto Python machine learning and would like to have additional functionalities to be added, especially to MetaBot. This would help for the use cases that we are working on.

There are some discrepancies in respect to the variable creation of copying and pasting the code. However, in version 11.3, these type of disturbances has been removed.

The stability is up to 90 percent. It's not a meeting 100 percent because we keep on upgrading. Whenever we upgrade, we have to fine tune a few of the products because we have been interacting with some of the older applications and legacy parts. In those cases, it is somewhat failing. 

The application is very stable in respect to automation. I am able to automate the Terminal Emulator, along with the Linux part, of a command prompt, the web application, and even the simplest application. It has been stable. However, in few cases, it has some pitfalls and stability get reduced.

Scalability is up to the mark. We have been building our solution from the low to high level. It is scalable.

Technical support has been a great asset. We have been encountering migration issues associated with database activities due to computer database back-end. We have contacted the technical support with database issues due to object cloning and SAP Objects. They have been helpful.

Their response time is within one to two hours. In some cases, it has dragged on up to six hours. I haven't found it dragging on for one to two days.

We kept on hiring resources to do the same type of operations, which increased our team resources. So, our SLAs were not up to the mark. the client that we were supporting was not satisfied. Therefore, we pushed toward RPA to optimize a few areas, such as onboarding employees, company access, and reading invoices from the PDF files. 

The documentation is very clear in respect to the installation and migration. If there are any bugs or anything goes wrong, the technical support team helps. The installation and setup are very straightforward. It was very easy for us.

We have seen ROI as we keep on increasing bot utilization and building our own solution. We have optimized a few bots and integrated them into our solution. These bots have helped us prioritize our operations.

We are increasing our SME's time. Depending on the bots that we code, we are sometimes increasing or decreasing our developers' time.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is more flexible in development and production. The development timeline is short. 

UiPath has a lot of functionalities, but a lot of those functionalities can be replicated using MetaBot.

Blue Prism uses a workflow functionality, which seems like chaos to me.

I would encourage a developer to learn RPA and enhance their knowledge. If they start with Automation Anywhere, it will be easy to continue learning on the tool. It is harder to transition for another RPA tool to Automation Anywhere.