Automation Anywhere (AA) Review

We have done a few use cases for the business, IT, and financials. The primary use case is for the business client.

It has provided our organization a lot of benefits. We have reduced our headcount, approximately 200 to 300 employees, by eliminating manual, repetitive work. It provides profit to the business. 

It is also good to incorporate new technology into our business and systems.

The MetaBot is a valuable feature.

We can integration with other APIs, which is a good thing. This helps us with our database integration. For example, we have done an SAP integration, which is great, since SAP has a lot of manual work.

IQ Bot is great for invoices. It helps a lot for retail and on the SAP side.

Ease of use:

• For developers, the Control Room components are very popular. They are easy to use, along with the Repository Manager, Schedule Manager, and maintenance of the bots.
• For people from nontechnical backgrounds, the product is simple from them to use. Everyone can learn it. It takes about two weeks on the tool.

With Citrix, we need a dedicated server to work with it. This has become complicated, as it is not easy to pull all the systems together into one place. It would be better if the Automation Anywhere team could make this easy and simple.

We would like to see AI incorporated into the tool. With the cognitive capabilities, they need to be improved to handle unstructured data.

The screen scrapping needs to be improved.

Some of the commands, like object cloning and OCR, are not so reliable when we are automating five to ten websites into the same task. Also, when we autofill fields, the comments are not so reliable.

We have built many bots. It is good to use the best practices when developing them. For example, we add logs and error handling to each bot, so if it is not working, then we can see why. This helps our developers a lot.

It took us two to three months to scale up from our pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. What took time was our business people needed to be educated on bots and their capabilities.

I have faced some of the problems with the Automation Anywhere tool. The technical support is quick and very responsive. They make sure the problem is completely resolved, which is good.

We implemented it in-house.

Go directly to the Automation Anywhere University site. There is some hands-on usage for the tool, and you can also download a trial there.

I have taken some classes from the Automation Anywhere University. I did three types of certifications, as well. The Automation Anywhere University site provides a lot of information, along with certifications. It gives an overview of what is the tool is and how the developers can code the product, which is a good thing.