Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We use it to automate all kinds of business processes. The primary use case is the RPA platform, even though they have the cognitive platform and the analytics platform. We use it for so many different things it's hard to focus on one, but it's automating business processes in our banking system.

We're interfacing a lot with Excel, our ERP systems, some legacy systems, the databases, file folders, text files, CSVs. It's hard to pin down one.

Through the software, we have been able to reduce the time that we spend on manual, repetitive tasks so that we can focus on activities that add value to the business or to our partners and customers. The most important things are saving time, increasing control, and increasing automation.

It has reduced a lot of repetitive manual work and manual mistakes that can occur while doing repeated work. This tool is very accurate. Everyone wants to automate their day to day work because of which we will be getting more and more work.

Since more and more companies want to automate their process because of the current situation, jobs for RPA developers have increased. Automation Anywhere has made tedious jobs so easy and time-saving. If the project is super automated, it can be finished in a very short period of time.

String extraction, Excel integration, and web services are the most valuable features. Because we are using web services it is so easy to connect with third-party applications. 

Excel automation is one of the best features in Automation Anywhere. If we have to work with multiple excel sheets with lots of rows and columns, it gets really difficult to keep track of this is done manually. But Automation Anywhere makes it really simple and error-free. 
Email automation is another command which is really good and time-saving. If we have to send out emails to a group and if it is everyday job, AA is very helpful

I would suggest adding more fields while calling in API. There is no option to generate an Authentication token within the Bot.

While using REST web services, we faced a lot of issues as we were trying to connect with the Salesforce application which needs an authentication token to connect. Since there was no option to create an authentication token we had to find a different solution altogether. This feature can be improvised.

Object cloning is another feature which is not very stable and this can be improved as well

I have been using AA for three years.

Cost Licensing is little high.

We are working for the Telecom industry, so there are multiple orders that come every day for service changes, add, and disconnect, so we have automated repeated steps using Automation Anywhere.

We use the Schedule feature to run an Unattended Bot, which gives a structured report prior to office hours, and we can directly start manual steps once we log in or come into the office.

It is easy to automate SAP by using Cloning and Metabot.

We can easily perform actions on a vendor-based tool that is specially designed for the Telecom industry or for database purposes.

Real-time mail notification is useful when reporting Bot status.

It definitely changed our approach; we automate repeated process steps using the simple GUI of Automation Anywhere's Bot creator, commands, and variables.

The Scheduling and Trigger features make Automation Anywhere fabulous in terms of unattended or independent automation.

We are showcasing our Automation potential to our clients. We offer them a cost and time-effective solution for repeated and time-consuming processes, which surely help a lot in terms of improving quality. It helps to exceed expectations beyond a predefined service level agreement. 

Once you create or paste the file/folder into a specific location, it will trigger the assigned Bot for execution.

We are getting the real-time status of the Bot, indicating whether it is successfully completed or failed.

The Mail notification feature also gives us the exact route cause of Bot failure using the Error Handling feature. It also gives a Snapshot of the error.

We can easily assign roles as Bot Creator, Bot Runner, Attended, or Unattended using the Control Room. We can also create custom roles as per our or clients' requirements.

We can smoothly monitor the status of the User, Bot Status, and many other metrics using the Dashboard feature in the Control room.

The time taken to execute a Bot through A2019 can be reduced. It takes time to upload Bots/Files once you click on Run, and it is difficult to wait while we are developing automations because deadlines are always a risk factor for developers. Code needs to be run code multiple times to achieve requirements shared by the client or team.

Migration from V11 to A2019 is difficult and needs more attention because it should be simpler.

They need to improve the  Object Cloning feature because it creates problems when the resolution is changed.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than three years. We started working on AA Version 10.X.

It is more stable than any other solution available in the RPA industry.

The scalability is tremendous and it is like a magical stick in your hand for automating repeated tasks.

Technical Support is always available and they help from scratch, trying to resolve each query.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to AA.

The initial setup was difficult but later, it gets easier in each progressive version released by Automation Anywhere.

We did not evaluate other products.

Automation Anywhere is most easy platform to learn about Robotic Process Automation and show potential of Automation.

The primary use of this tool is to automate the business process end to end for different finance towers. We have automated the following processes end to end with the help of Automation Anywhere:

R2R: In the R2R tower we have automated the process of uploading the backup files in SAP.

Manually it took around 7 working days to upload 10k documents to SAP.

With the help of Automation Anywhere, we are able to upload 10k documents in 1 4 working hours which is a great achievement for us.

We managed to save 5 FTE by automating this business process.

• Automation Anywhere has helped my organization to automate the complex process which usually takes 7-8 FTE and lots of human effort in repetitive tasks/processes.
• We have developed a bot that would automate the process of calculating the KPI of a P2P finance tower which would usually take 8 hours for each FTE to present the KPI.
• The bot takes usually 2-3 hours to represent the KPI across all regions for the P2P tower.
• The benefits are so great that the organization is saving the effort of 7 FTE from this project.
  

The following features are best in the Automation Anywhere tool:

Automation Anywhere offers the capability of integrating the DLL files with meta bot and hence the developer can use DLL files to connect to applications likes Outlook, SAP, etc.

Automation Anywhere offers the best tool in the market for extracting information from PDF and is called IQ bot. IQ bot is built on machine learning and natural language processing. It helps users to create layouts for the pdf and then process the similar format pdf in one go.

Automation Anywhere is the best automating tool on the market and it's very difficult for me to think to suggest something to improve the tool.

Here are my few suggestions:

Automation Anywhere can include database commands like insert row, bold row, etc commands in 11.x

They can also include features like API integration features in the command panel.

They should create a standard framework like re framework in Ui Path.

As it enhances the capability of the developer to create an automation project.

I have been using the Automation Anywhere tool for more than 2.5 years.

I am a Digital Transformation Consultant & my role revolves around suggesting, recommending & implementing the best automation solution across to my clients. Some of them also include:

a) Lower operating costs

b) Faster ROI

c) Ability to be more competitive

Giving the right automation solutions can reap major benefits. Understanding these benefits—and some obstacles—will help us develop support for an operations automation project. The primary benefits of operations automation cited most often were cost reduction, productivity, availability, reliability, and performance.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has helped me in suggesting, recommending & implementing the best automation solution across to my client

AA is a better and more intelligent approach to cost containment and reduction. The greatest opportunity is to increase service to the customer (end-user) while systematically reducing costs. Management often overlooks this potential for savings. Most modern servers have a low operating cost and the total cost of ownership has been declining. AA solution has helped to streamline operations in businesses of all sizes.

The benchmarking scores, the latest technology improvements & the use cases are the most valuable aspects. 

• Intelligent automation for business and IT tasks.
• Uses SMART Automation Technology.
• Rapidly Automates complex and complicated tasks.
• Create automation tasks like recording keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.
• Distribute tasks to multiple computers

AA allows you to create processes using 3 types of robots: Task Bot, Meta Bot, and IQ Bot. Instead of rewriting redundant code for processes, a meta bot can be used instead. This type of robot is best used for complex scalable processes. IQ Bot: The most powerful of the 3 types of robots is the IQ Bot.

With more demo recordings and positive real-time reviews from the clients. AA should provide a free evaluation period so it is easy to attract new customers. It is not able to use OCR effectively and has limited usability. Handwritten documents are still a drawback. 

It is also difficult in terms of control room management. The debugger is also a weakness of the tool, forcing the developer to use error handling or message box to map errors. Few applications take more time for loading when integrated.

I have been using AA since 2017.

• It is highly accurate and gets up and running in a very short period of time.
• You can keep the BOT learning by feeding more and more data sets, which makes the whole process highly efficient.
• It is very cost-effective when deployed and when scaling out to the limit.

• Using Automation Anywhere's tool we can automate window and Web-based processes. It is very easy to use.
• It can automate rule-based and repetitive processes.
• It can work 24*7 without taking a rest.
• Time-saving. It is very fast in comparison to doing something manually.
• Cost-saving.

They are always up to mark and ready to help out when in need.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team, they were great !

It has been fair to be honest.

The setup cost, pricing and/or licensing of AA sounds reasonable considering its capability.

Keep up the good work & keep improving as you grow.

The product is used to automate mundane and repetitive business processes and in turn, increase process accuracy and headcount benefit.

The primary area this tool focuses on is automation in RPA. Service-based companies use this tool to provide automation services to organizations who would want to go on a digital journey to cut their expenses, or to organizations who focus on helping their employees get rid of mundane tasks and provide them more efficient and oriented tasks.

Digital implementation would be the primary focus.

Automation Anywhere has transformed the financial/healthcare/automobile sectors to a great extent by automating backend office work. It also automates parts of frontend office work, as well, using attended automation capabilities.

Automation Anywhere's product strategy has helped service firms get a very good client base and has increased their service capabilities. The product has a very good roadmap and a very good customer base, and this would help service providers to get a lot of customers in the market.

The most valuable feature would be ingesting data into third-party applications through seamless technology. Be it a Windows application, a web application, or a legacy tool, Automation Anywhere is able to achieve automation on these technologies seamlessly.

Another interesting feature would be the ability to massage and clean data and perform some sort of data analytics using the data, this would be very helpful when Excel-based automations are performed and the user needs to spend very little time now to verify the results.

The cloud version has been enhanced to a very great extent by being completely built from scratch and using a different technology stack altogether. The idea of going on-cloud is a very good option as it does reduce the effort for the infrastructure team to set up the environment, and this would be very helpful for the development team to seamlessly build things and deploy them.

Going on-cloud comes with security hiccups and concerns. The product team has managed to go both on-premise or off-premise, as per comfortability, but the cloud version has more concerns.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than two years.

Highly stable with HADR.

It can be scaled to a very large extent.

The technical support is good.

We did not use a different solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is of medium complexity.

In terms of pricing, this is a good product.

We evaluated both UiPath and Blue Prism.

We are using this product to automate various BPO processes, where the manual operation team currently does them manually in my project. The process we are currently working on has multiple applications and the API integrated, so we get details from the API and feed those into the front end application. We then process and update the status of the policy in another application.

The main interaction involves retrieving data from a set of applications and feeding it into other applications. Therefore, AA is mainly used for handling end-to-end processes that are compromised of all of the business validations.

This tool provides us with easy accessibility for adopting the new process, as it is more user- friendly. This is the main reason that we implemented this tool. Many new resources are able to grasp the tool and start doing the automation with ease, which is basically missing in the other vendors' tools.

In terms of adaptability, AA has a significant contribution. Most users can easily understand it. The support team is good and is able to resolve the issues or any challenges we encounter.

Actions are very much user-friendly, which we can easily use to proceed with development. The API connection is easy to incorporate and also has the ability to track the task status in the Orchestrator.

XML action commands and Excel commands are the ones we most frequently use in the real world processing of the policy. When we have features targeting those, it will be good enough for the majority of the process we automated.

All of the key action items have been easy to incorporate.

Sometimes the tool is timing out, which would be a good thing to have resolved.

It will be good if we have a framework that is created with the package, so we can leverage those for the multiple processes. As it is now, we create a base framework.

When we have more packages for each of the basic operations, it will be more user-friendly and easier to complete, rather than starting from scratch.

Ideally, when we have those packages we can leverage them for overall project development. Adopting the cloud platform will be more convenient, as opposed to depending on the on-premises setup.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three and a half years.

Applications can be more effective with the development of bots that are affected less by changes in the object and environment.

The support team is good in helping with queries and issues that had held up the automation.

We used UiPath previously. AA is more user-friendly and adaptable such that anyone can learn and more easily understand how to incorporate it into the process automation.

The initial setup is not complicated.

I would rate the vendor installation team and eight out of ten.

I don't have the exact figures but it does provide ROI.

The setup cost depends on multiple factors, so you need to get details before choosing.

Version A2019 is available and will be adopting it in the coming months. We are looking forward to working on this new version.

The primary use case depends on SAP and Excel platforms, where we automated repetitive tasks. Also, we automated the Tableau server using this.

We use SQL DB for storing logs. We have been using it for one year for our client. The support also is great. If we are stuck, the Automation Anywhere team comes to the rescue. I have worked on other RPA tools but this is more logical and easy to use. The flows and the commands can be easily learned by a beginner as coding knowledge is not needed.

It has helped us a great extent as we are part of the service and basically provide clients with automation solutions for their manual and repetitive tasks. We have done automation on SAP, Excels, web applications, Outlook, and many more application platforms. 

It is JAVA based so it is easy to use and user-friendly. Now comes the support part, where the use cases are deployed and hyper care is given to the bot. It is easy to schedule an easy process of deployment too. The credentials are stored safely.

Mostly the Metabots function and Excel as DB function are of great help as we can connect to SAP and work on that easily. Excel as DB helps us to perform operations on it even when huge amounts of data are on it. 

The control room is the best part as everything can be seen and controlled from there, scheduling storing of credentials, and much more. I have used PDF extraction and other tools where data needs to be extracted and it works great at that part. I highly recommended this tool for automation.

Already the new version is out, which has cognitive abilities. The bot learning skills are there, which helps to train the bot. AA has done a great job by bringing compatibility with IBM Watson and many other AI interfaces. If some more functions we can get related to other web applications will be a great help. At some places, the if-else statements become so confusing so, at that place, they can change the UI for better understanding. Apart from this I liked this tool and would like to continue working on this.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year. 

It is quite a stable platform based on Java.

It is highly scalable.

We once had an issue with the SAP meta bot, where the click was not working so the tech support team helped find the issue and then changed the code so that the issue does not come back. 

We had a resolution issue, where the bot was unable to find the screens. They also helped us with that.

I used Automic but switched because it was not much compatible with other applications. Also, it was more of coding which made it a complex tool to work upon.

The vendor team is great, we have reached out for many issues and they responded well.

Setup cost is a bit okay, but once it is up, it can give a great amount of ROI.

This tool is a good platform for automation.

We did the PoC in 2016. It was mainly in the services process. We were more focused on the company billings, where there were multiple subprocesses and sub business units. We have did the complete landscape of more than 15,000 FTEs. We are talking around 153 different work types. As the main lead, I was to provide the real-time support to the customers who needs us to fill out required details. That was a completely repetitive task. We decided to conduct a PoC on that, which we did.

If we talk about the automation RPA. it definitely has worked very well for us. I'm talking about giving good savings, about more than 180 FTE savings, after implementing more than 200 plus bots. It has worked well. As an organization, it has supported us very well, and also for our customers.

Our task was very repetitive in nature. We had to fill information from Excel to some application. That was quite repetitive and the volume was also very high. Initially, we did the PoC from that process, which was easy to implement. Because it was a first for us, it was very easy to implement. That has provided good savings for us, where we have implemented 13 bots with the reduction of 16 FTEs.

There were also some tasks where we needed a cognitive approach or an OCR solution. There were some scanned documents in a PDF format. We were in the initial stages and struggled at that time. I'm talking about in 2018. We struggled to get them into the structure format.

In the current stage, there are lots of opportunities in terms of claims, insurance, and banking where we need AI and cognitive solutions to automate unstructured documents. That is a need of ours. Automation Anywhere should improve in this field so they can provide support for artificial intelligence and cognitive solutions.

Initial days, we struggled. When we started the automation for six weeks, the solution design was put on hold because of the system capability. But, they provided us good support and upgraded their systems, and now, it works smoothly.

If you ask me to rate the technical support from one to five, I will rate them a four. I will say that the technical support is good. If it is required that they provide their resources, they will send their resources to your organization to support you in terms of development and technical support. 

I have experience with UiPath too. If we talk about Automation Anywhere and UiPath, it's a completely different experience. Our work now is more for the claims and payroll processes where thought and human intervention are involved to process transactions.

This is now a completely different experience. Initially, it was a very repetitive task. Now, manual intervention is required. We have to go and read through documents. We have to read through histories. In terms of that, I can rate equally Automation Anywhere and UiPath. However, if we talk about artificial intelligence in 2019 and what Automation Anywhere is coming out with, it is great then.

The initial setup was not that great. The road was very up and down. We struggled. A lot of the features were not compatible with applications which we are using. That was the reason. This was the initial days, we are talking about 2016 to 2017. The buzz was not as much as we are having now. 

From that time until now, Automation Anywhere has upgraded their systems. They are at a good pace now. But, at the initial stage, we struggled in terms of getting things sorted. We also needed support, so the Automation Anywhere team sent some support to us who helped the developers in terms of coding and finding solutions.

Some of the features were not very well identified at that time. The Automation Anywhere team provided the support for that. Initially, it was like a rollercoaster for us.

If we talk about time, normally bots take more time than users. The benefit is the bots can work 24/7, if your application supports. With the solutions that we have now, we can have attended and unattended bots.

There are savings in terms of ROI, but It's not only about savings. It's about the customer experience nowadays. If we talk about the customer experience, your experience will be improved. There will be a lot of reversals which happen when you are processing transactions manually. When you are implementing the RPA, you eliminate those reversals. You deliver the product right the first time. That is more important in terms of keeping your organization having consistent growth. That is a very important thing. 

You will see savings, not in the same year, but in the coming years. In two to three years, you will definitely save money.

Automation Anywhere works very well. When you have a large number of accounts, have to automate, and the task that is repetitive, you can use Automation Anywhere. The features work very well.

I will rate it an eight (out of 10). We had that experience where we struggled to have the structured format of scanned documents and PDF formats. There, we struggled a lot. That is the reason for the rating. The rest, I think is perfect. The services are fine. Automation Anywhere services are good. It is easy to implement. The best thing: It's simple and easy to implement.