Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

Our primary use case is the insurance of clients.

The solution has improved our organization through its integration with other products. We can integrate multiple platforms through the use of Automation Anywhere via the use of third-party APIs, so there is no human intervention at all. Everything happens on the back-end.

Automation Anywhere is excellent for integrating with other solutions. It provides the ability to leverage the APIs of third-party solutions. We use some of the already built-in MetaBots to then scrape the data and manipulate independent data that we need in order to integrate with other third-party solutions.

• IQ Bot
• Cognitive automation: The ability for the product to learn based on corrections made, such as exceptions and the way those exceptions are handled. Then, these are taken into consideration for future exceptions of similar type (autocorrecting).

I would like to have a bot as a service platform on AA Cloud. This would minimize the installation process, and we wouldn't need to have all the hardware to support the platform in-house.

We have worked on several different projects, so far. From prototypes to production, on average, scaling our bots takes somewhere from three to six weeks.

The technical support is great.

The Automation Anywhere University is very good. I liked the courses and the videos, which were included. I found it to be very intuitive and educational. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The videos on the Automation Anywhere University are extremely helpful during this process.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

We are currently measuring ROI based on cost, labor and time to market metrics.

UiPath and WorkFusion were also on our shortlist. We selected Automation Anywhere based on the product's ease of use, functionality, development environment, and workbench. This product surpassed what these other competitors had to offer.

In addition, we have a market which allows us to get products developed in timely fashion. This is beneficial to partners and clients, alike.

Automation Anywhere is one of the products which allows you to leverage the power of RPA digital workforce technology is a timely and scaled approach. Compared to other RPA solutions on the market I have worked with, AA surpasses its competitors by far.

The growth of Automation Anywhere product's stability, functionality, and technical advancements demonstrates the company is dedicated to its product, clients, and partners. It is evident that the product will only get better.

The ease of use for developers utilizing this solution is excellent. I’ve abandoned the use of WorkFusion from our practice due to its limitations. Automation Anywhere, in particular, allows us to extend the functionality of the platform by writing our own DLLs, so we are able to easily integrate it into any RPA process that we may be developing. At the same time, the ability for us to use other users' bots downloaded from the Bot Store has added a huge amount of value to the product and our ability to get to market quickly.

I don't use Citrix.

I primarily used Automation Anywhere to streamline and automate standardized business processes. This included tasks such as claims handling, policy registration, and document processing from customers. Our focus was on creating efficient and consistent workflows for handling routine documentation flows.

We aimed to solve the challenges of a hands-off, lights-out approach by implementing Automation Anywhere. The goal was to automate processes like claims handling and document registration, minimizing manual intervention and ensuring a more efficient workflow.

Anywhere contributed to increased efficiency, reduced manual efforts, and notable time savings across various processes.

There is room for improvement in terms of costs and procurement considerations. Additionally, aspects like procurement conditions, technical connectivity, and global reach with Automation Anywhere could be enhanced as well. As part of procurement, these factors become crucial, especially in a global operating context where using the platform in various countries is a key consideration.

We started using Automation Anywhere in 2018.

I wasn't entirely satisfied with Automation Anywhere's support. Cultural differences between them and UiPath or DDI were noticeable, and understanding their company perspective was crucial. Despite this, I handled it professionally, and it was generally okay with no major issues. I would rate the support as an eight out of ten.

Positive

Before using Automation Anywhere, we initially explored three different automation solutions. One was widely mandated across the company and had better pricing. The second was used regionally, but the local teams struggled to adapt to robotics process automation. 

When comparing Automation Anywhere specifically, the solutions were acceptable and useful, but pricing conditions and procurement leverage were areas that could be improved. Overall, the transition to Automation Anywhere enhanced our processes. The choice depended on factors like regulations and conditions. Automation Anywhere didn't have the ease of a global solution we experienced with another tool. We also used DDI locally, which was good in quality but needed transformation into a full RPA solution. Comparing Automation Anywhere with UiPath, UiPath was more global, scalable, and had better contract and pricing conditions.

Automation Anywhere requires limited maintenance, and at the time, three individuals were involved in maintenance and implementation. As the applications expanded, there was a need for a gradual increase in the team for ongoing support and enhancements.

Introducing Automation Anywhere to non-tech-savvy business users had its challenges. Some needed training to understand and develop their use cases with technical support, while others already grasped the requirements and could effectively communicate with developers. Managing this diverse group required a centralized approach. Training typically took one to three months, depending on individual skill sets, to bring non-technical employees up to speed on using Automation Anywhere.

We currently use standard RPA with Automation Anywhere, not incorporating Automation Co-Pilot. The challenge is identifying repetitive tasks suitable for RPA. We are exploring whether these functionalities are embedded in existing software or if direct engagement with RPA providers is necessary. The ongoing discussion revolves around the potential future integration of robotic solutions into software. For artificial intelligence, we distinguish between IoT, machine learning, and similar aspects, with development ongoing from both smaller players and major companies like Microsoft. The goal is to combine both robotic and AI solutions for comprehensive automation eventually.

Integration with other tools and applications with Automation Anywhere was smooth, especially for cloud-based applications. We did not encounter any significant difficulties, and the process was straightforward, meeting relevant requirements.

Automation Anywhere provided us with good automation at scale, and we did not encounter any problems with its ability to handle large-scale automation tasks.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight out of ten.

Automation Anywhere is similar to Blue Prism. We do a lot of process mining and RPA tasks. We've used it in some very large companies. It's for automating activities in large service centers like home loan originations, insurance claims, or for service desks for utilities for telephone companies.

Companies were trying to eliminate a lot of manual processes that were being handled by people at keyboards and some of the repetitive nature. A lot of it is the front-end handling of incoming phone calls or incoming service requests that might be sent via email or text. Rather than having people look at the request on a green screen or on a website, the robots would actually handle some of the routing of the requests or the routing of the documents. For example, for a home loan application or some kind of claim. A lot of the time, most of the companies have people sitting in a service center, receiving those requests and reviewing them. However, now, a lot of the inputting of the data can be handled by the robot.

The solution is easy to deploy. It scales. It's easy to configure. They are pretty generic. There's not a lot of difference between any of the three big RPAs. 

Automation Anywhere is very focused on the Microsoft world. They don't do anything other than Windows and Microsoft, whereas Blue Prism and UiPath compete with other platforms.

The learning curve is low. It's faster to learn than the others.

Some people in my company have used the Co-Pilot functionality. Right now, they use Salesforce, although they have their own RPA now and they are going to replace it with MuleSoft's automation.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide automation at scale for Microsoft is excellent. 

The integration of RPA bots, APIs, or business applications and documents is pretty robust.

They should consider being more multi-platform.

I've used the solution since 2018. I've used it for about five years. 

I've never used technical support.

I've also used Blue Prism in the past.

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The project would dictate how long it would take to deploy. It could take a couple of days to a couple of months. There's a question of governance proliferation and compliance that needs to be considered in RPA. The internal policies would affect the overall setup. 

There is maintenance in the form of updates. It doesn't take much maintenance. We don't use bots and therefore do not need to maintain them.

I don't have any thoughts on pricing or licensing. 

For someone who wants to use an API integration instead of a robust process automation solution, I'd advise it depends on the culture of the company, and the complexity of the integration that one wants to do. Depending on the culture, on average, it's a 50/50 split. There are some environments where RPA is the right thing to do since it's quicker. It's faster. It's easier to manage them from the perspective of just configuring the conformance and compliance with internal policy. However, in other parts of the same organization, you might need API integration depending on what you're integrating.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Nobody gets a ten. Nobody's perfect.

We use it for processes related to IT operations in the manufacturing industry.

There are hectic IT processes, jobs that run overnight, weekly, and monthly. We can optimize, rewrite, and automate them. They represent the most important use cases that I have been involved with: IT operations and software for manufacturing.

It has helped our organization increase automation consumption by 20 to 30 percent.

The most valuable feature is the Control Room.

Also, the integration of RPA bots with other processes and documents is good. We don't have any issues there. We could have more connectors, but it's fine. I have used it for SAP and for direct API-to-API, and that went well.

It is good for standard procedures with an SOP. For those, it works well. But there are processes that are tricky and need human intervention and intelligence. In those cases, the process gets stuck. Something that is a straight-ahead process—you do A, B, C, and D—is fine. But when you do A and then have to decide whether to do B or C, where there is a need for logical thinking and human intervention, we find it difficult to automate those cases. We have to break down those processes and do that tweaking.

We would like to see a more seamless UI, and we would like AI help. Wherever we are stuck or there is a logical error, AI help, with prompting and suggestions on what to do, would be good. If I have dragged and dropped something in the wrong logical sequence and it fails during execution, there should be automated AI help.

We use NetBeans IDE where we get something like automated help, but that's a platform for doing standard Java and PHP development. Automated help is coming up more and more in many tools. For example, Microsoft is providing it. We would like to have something like that in Automation Anywhere, with automated debugging and self-help.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Overall, the product is stable for SOP-based use cases. It is not very stable for complex use cases.

It is not very scalable for complex use cases.

Their technical support is good overall, not excellent. They can improve the response time and on-call support. We have SLAs, so we need support to be immediate.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

Recently, automation has gone to the cloud, and that has been most beneficial because installation was quite hectic before. On-prem was quite difficult, but the moment they launched the cloud version, it became easy.

With on-prem, there were issues with installation over production as well as the setup of the Control Room. Often, the Control Room would go down or hang, and we would have to do restarts. It was not seamless.

The licensing cost could be improved. It costs a lot. At the very least, the developer licenses and the control panels should be made free to enterprises, and the production environment licensed. Production should bear the cost; we would be okay with that, but not the development side.

Business users didn't find it that easy to use, but for developers who are building the use cases, it's quite easy. For the business users, the issues were standard ones, such as navigation, user friendliness, and the terminologies that they needed to understand. They often require training before using it, and not just one training session, but training and retraining. On a scale where 10 represents a low learning curve and one is a large learning curve, Automation Anywhere is a seven. For non-technical people, it's difficult. For them, the learning curve is a four or five. It usually takes four to five months for them to be able to really use it on their own.

We have developed solutions for IT back-end processes, so there are no end-users. These jobs run weekly, fortnightly, and monthly. There are two or three people involved with it, but it's the jobs that we have automated.

We need three to four people to maintain the solutions, but that doesn't take a lot of time—about four hours a week. It's not something that needs to be done every day. Before the jobs run, they check to make sure everything is okay, that no errors or notifications are coming up. The maintenance is very low.

Automation Anywhere is good but not exceptional. It's good because, for simple use cases, we use it with different technologies. For complex processes, automations should perform better.

We are using Automation Anywhere for the automation of supply chain management, logistics, and procurement processes. We are automating invoices and supply chain processes.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to automate repetitive tasks. Because of this solution, my business is able to complete the work quickly. It saves a lot of effort and hours. It is time-efficient and cost-efficient. It reduces human error and manual effort.

It takes three to six months to realize its benefits because businesses need some time to understand what is the difference, but going forward, with the enhancements, there is a reduction in the cost and errors.

The integration of RPA bots, APIs, business applications, and documents is easy in Automation Anywhere. It is not difficult to get the details from the Automation Anywhere University, learn it, and do it. There is training for everything. For the APIs or document processing, there is limited material, but anyone can still learn it on the go. We have a portal where we can ask questions and get answers or suggestions.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption, but I do not have the metrics.

I use SAP connectors, and I use Excel operations and Windows operations. I also use the OCR functionality and the functionality for sending emails. 

It is easy to learn. There is an assistant in Automation Anywhere, so even a layman can access it, utilize it, and quickly learn it. It is not a problem. It takes a week for a new person to start working on it. It is straightforward. 

There are not many areas for improvement. As compared to V11, A360 is more user-friendly and flexible. It is fine. They have even included support for ChatGPT, Azure, and other things in the latest version. They have incorporated many latest technologies, such as AI, and there is always scope to improve the processes and have more stability.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for the past six years.

I can rely on it. 

Going forward, I can do more and more automations to save time. I can improve the business processes with the latest technologies as well, so from the scaling perspective, it is good.

I know our team is using Automation Anywhere, but I am not sure whether any other team is also using it. There might be more teams using it. 

We have plans to increase its usage. We are getting more projects.

For me, it is easy. Generally, if I am not able to understand something, I go through the documentation, and I am able to find the information quickly. In case of any issues, I inform the platform team, and they raise a ticket and get in touch with the Automation Anywhere team. They involve me in the issue description, but it is completely owned by the platform team because they do the first level of testing and go ahead with ticket creation and other things. The problem always gets resolved. In terms of time, the duration depends on the availability of the platform team. 

Positive

I did not use any other solution previously.

I was not involved in its deployment. For its maintenance, the platform team is there, and they are doing the maintenance activity.

It is an easy tool and easy technology. It is quick to learn. You can use Automation Anywhere University for learning.

Excel advanced operations are very good. Document processing is also very good. Handling of the web forms and sites is also good. Before using this solution, I thought it would take me time to automate all the processes, but I was able to use it easily.

Automation Anywhere is at the number one position now. That itself proves how good it is and how well it is doing. From the time I started using it, it has been going up. It never went down. There are more features and more technologies coming in.

To someone who wants to use API integration instead of an RPA solution, I would say that you can utilize the API integration in RPA as well. It might be a little faster in the API, but for certain business processes, you need user intervention or user clearance. In such cases, RPA is required.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

We typically use Automation Anywhere for backend operations and financial processes, such as APR.

The biggest benefit of Automation Anywhere is that it makes our processes error-free. Accuracy is how you build efficiency within the system and increase productivity.

Document automation, one of Automation Anywhere's core features, is excellent. All the other features are also useful, and their cloud solution is pretty seamless. 

Automation Anywhere is relatively accessible to non-technical business users. It's about 60:40. Around 60 percent of the solution is intuitive, but you still need to do some work to learn the platform. The company offers strong learning resources. Most people can easily learn Automation Anywhere in a couple of months using tutorials.  

Automation Anywhere works with POST and REST APIs, so it's easy to integrate with any platform or application. Automation Anywhere is applicable to any industry or department where there are large volumes of processes that are straightforward and require no manual human intervention. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for nearly four years.

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10 for scalability. We usually optimize one or two processes until we can achieve an ROI and scale them up for the entire organization.

I rate Automation Anywhere support 10 out of 10. They have a solid team to address any issues or glitches as they arise. 

Positive

We typically deploy to Automation Anywhere's public cloud. We haven't used the private cloud option because it's expensive. I'm the project delivery manager, so I was involved in the deployment. It doesn't require any infrastructure because it's in the cloud. 

The deployment time depends on the complexity of the processes. Simple processes can be configured in a couple of weeks, but complex projects might take up to three months. 

The number of people involved also depends on the client's needs and the licenses purchased. You need a developer license for each engineer. Automation Anywhere licensing is based on the individual users, not the partners. For example, let's say a project will take one engineer three months, but the client wants it done in 45 days. You would need to double the number of engineers and pay for an additional license. 

Automation solutions require some maintenance and change management because no process remains constant. You will need to update and optimize the bot as the process mechanism changes. 

We have seen an ROI. It's hard to give a solid metric because every organization has a different way of calculating it and it varies between processes. However, I can say that Automation Anywhere reduces costs while increasing productivity and accuracy. By automating repetitive tasks, we can shift our human employees to more productive work that requires imagination and creativity. 

Automation Anywhere is expensive. They should consider lowering the price to make Automation Anywhere more affordable to SMEs, which comprise a huge segment. The license is annual, not monthly. You need to pay for some of the advanced features, such as document automation, which doesn't come with the base package.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. RPA can be integrated with API and integrated on top of any application. However, it's always better to go with API if you have that option. It's steadier, more scalable, and more robust. The best part about RPA is you can create a hybrid model, so you can use API when available or RPA when that isn't the case. 

I've used Automation Anywhere RPA as one of the RPA platforms to automate business processes within the company. It started as attended automation initially and then moved to unattended mode. We're using the on-prem version with Runners on virtual desktop. 

We have used/are using the AA360 Platform for automating the business processes in HR, Finance, and telecom operations.  

IQBOT is also used for purchase order processing to capture the semi-structured data and process it in ERPs to achieve straight-through processing of these documents.

Implementation of Automation Anywhere (AA) allows us to automate business processes and has brought productivity gains, error reduction, and speed of execution in multiple HR and Finance operations. 

This automation has also helped in achieving better compliance and standardization of the processes. A number of processes were able to be digitalized 100% without much human interaction required. The only exceptions are managed by humans although the RPA bots are doing the majority of the work. 

Implementation of IQBOT has helped in capturing the semi-structure data from pdfs and doing the straight-through processing of these documents.

Web-based ID for development is helping developers to use any machine (laptop, VDI, etc.) to access the environment and develop it.

Enabling collaborative development where multiple developers can work together is great.

The flow view is helping us to view the overall flow of the activities and is helping the functional review faster without jumping to the code level, ensuring all the exceptions are handled accordingly and there are no exceptions that are not handled.

The addition of multiple drag and drop functions in the development of IDE helps ease the development work.

Queue management is still missing from the latest version which is a barrier to using the platform to start implementing complex cases where you have parent and child transactions going through multiple stages.

Without queue management, it is not possible to manage the multiple-step work item processing. For example, task automation instead of process automation is where hands-off is required in between the workflow steps.  

Simplification in managing multiple environments for dev, test, and production would be useful.

There needs to be more stability in the platforms.

I've been using Autoamtion anywhere for the last five years. I've used a different version and now have migrated to AA 360 for the last year.

The stability is an improvement area for the product. We still have issues sometimes where bots hang up.

It's a scalable solution. We didn't face any issue in that regard.

There is good technical support available from the AA team.

Positive

We started with AA for more attended automation.

The setup is a bit complex and was done by the AA team.

We implemented the solution using an internal team and external partner.

We say an ROI after six to nine months.

The solution is cost-effective in comparison to others. However, you need to pay for the control room for each environment. You also need developer licenses and even runners are required for test and pre-production environments.

We evaluated UiPath.

Our primary use cases for Automation Anywhere (AA) are billing, email automation, and ticketing.

Most of the features of Automation Anywhere (AA) are good, but one big feature which I really like is its OCR (optical character recognition) feature.

Another important feature of this solution is how it handles variables, e.g. my engineers don't need to have complete programming expertise, and they don't need to declare variables and get variables captured on the fly.

I also find the accuracy rate of this solution valuable, and I like that it performs better after implementation. Most of the features of this solution are amazing.

Multiple things still need to be improved in Automation Anywhere (AA), and the key thing is its error handling command, though it has come a long way from the previous version. This solution still has a lot to improve on error handling, especially when compared to other platforms that are doing very well.

Another area for improvement is its file handling. Automation Anywhere (AA) now supports automating file-related operations, but that still needs to be improved. We can directly import and do the script, e.g. the script feature is new and is found in the latest version, but still needs a lot of improvement.

An additional feature I'd like to see in this solution is more scripting integration. Integration needs to be fluid, e.g. integration of different items are in the latest version, but it always comes with limitations.

If a more fluid integration can be built into Automation Anywhere (AA), I can go and unpack a project file, open it, then from there, I'll know that we need to extract the data. Currently, the native RPA takes a whole lot of time to open a particular file, then read the data. It's always easier to utilize the data frame, read and slice the data, then take what's next. In that note, we can enable the RPA within itself, e.g. in-house data solution that can be integrated, making it a better solution. There is an integration feature in Automation Anywhere (AA), but it's not that fluid, and it's not easy to integrate. We always have to build something outside and integrate the whole process, and this needs to be improved.

I have experience with Automation Anywhere (AA) within the last 12 months, and I've been leading projects in a product manager capacity. I've worked with this solution for three years, using the previous generation and the latest generation, e.g. the 2019 version. I handled the implementation of the previous version and the transition and migration to the 2019 network.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has a lot of stability issues. It needs a lot of maintenance. If it runs 24/7 in the server, it's fine, but on the development machines or the VM (virtual machines), it isn't. We really need someone to attend to it, e.g. that person has to monitor the VM, then if an issue starts from the control room, we need to identify what's going on, then we may need to do something to the machine, or to the application. This is a problem in the previous version and the current version, and this solution hangs at times, for no reason at all.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is scalable, but we have not tried to scale it to a larger instance. The implementations we currently have are on-premises, and our costs are limited. We test if this solution works fine for the demos with clients we have worked with, but on the production side, we haven't tried to scale it for more than 20 or 30, and that's the limit we have.

I've contacted and escalated to the technical support team for this solution multiple times. I would rate them 3.5 out of five. They are quick to give support, but it could vary. Their second level technical support are good, but their first level technical support require a lot more insight into the tool and how they're handling issues.

The initial setup for Automation Anywhere (AA) was straightforward, but the current deployments we are working on are a bit complicated because these are switch solutions, and they are not straightforward.

We have multiple systems communicating with each other, e.g. the SaaS systems we need to interface with, then we have other data that we need to introduce to these systems. Because Automation Anywhere (AA) is an on-premises platform, we are looking into whether implementing or deploying it will be safe, but I believe it is safe. In most cases, when it comes to switch solutions where you want to switch your RPA on top of other automation or other technologies, it can be complicated, depending on the technology you're with. It can be complicated when you want to integrate with other systems.

We're paying for a yearly package for Automation Anywhere (AA). It's not a standard license. It's a license package, e.g. it comes with the fee for automation, or the license for the product, and anything beyond that, we pay a base fee, and whether we utilize it or not, it's paid for, and it has to be allocated. That's the current deal we have. What would be better is for them to have different packages for different types of organization.

As Automation Anywhere (AA) is an RPA platform, we have development users and end users, e.g. we have 14 developers who are working on it, and they are direct developers, then we have six citizen developers from the business side, who are certified and are using this product.

Automation Anywhere (AA) always requires maintenance, so we always need maintenance engineers to monitor the application around the clock. Because of cost implications, most clients don't use cloud solution assets, e.g. they use on-premises, which means a lot of maintenance is required.

My advice for people who want to start working with Automation Anywhere (AA) is to get a certification first, and then they also need to determine their purpose, e.g. what kind of case they want to work with. When their certification is ready, they still need to keep learning, especially when they run into issues. They should always get in touch with the forum, or they should get whatever knowledge or information they can take from their certifiers, or whatever organization they got their certification from. There is a learning curve, and it can either be quick to learn, or hard to learn.

I would rate Automation Anywhere (AA) an eight out of ten.