Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

I have overall 10 to 12 years of experience in RPA. I started RPA doing VBA. That seemed like I needed coding, and for coding alone, I wasted more time. I came to know Automation Anywhere, which is a product that automates RPA processes in an easy manner. 

I was interested to learn it. I had an opportunity to attend training for Automation Anywhere for almost one month. I started with version 10.5. It was really interesting.

From the beginning, before I interacted with Automation Anywhere, I thought that I would also need to code something using the details, then it will take more time. That is not the case. If I want to automate something, I can easily drag and drop. There is any function that I need for a business case or some critical thing that I need to automate, then we can create a condition, have a API, use Excel automation, or do everything together. 

Most companies in the industry are facing the task of automating unstructured data or repetitive tasks. It's too difficult to use some of the other RPA tools, VBA, Java, .NET, etc. So, when I try to automate something using Automation Anywhere and I want to consolidate something when there are a hundred Excels in the folder, I can easily use my files and folder option. I can put in a condition without a need to code. I can just drag and drop. I can open Excel, select all those things, and put it altogether, then send it to my client. So, it's very easy to interact with Automation Anywhere.

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the value of feature lessons, like I had a session for A2019. I attended a session for 2019, which is very impressive. It's weightless. There isn't another system that I have found like this in version 11.3. Every system is busy. With the new version, I can easily open my browser and navigate. I can automate it wherever it is, and that's really interesting.

I face little challenges when I move code to production. In Automation Anywhere 11.3, when the bot is running until it loops 24/7 in my development and UAT environment, we don't have our antivirus on it. When it comes over to production, there is an antivirus running on it. However, we don't know what time it will be scheduled. My client is taking care of that. So, when I raise a ticket with Automation Anywhere, they share some suggested documents to exclude those lists from antivirus. When I approach my client, they want to exclude those things because they are treating them as maybe not secure.

What I am suggesting, when using A2019, if there are any additional features to exclude those antivirus scans until after my task is completed, then the antivirus can start scheduling. Then, I can easily tell the client that the priority are running and the Automation Anywhere scans can wait until after the release.

I had a chance in Intellect Design Arena to go from installation to deployment. This was the first process with RPA in Intellect Design Arena, so people were thinking it's the first project that we have with Automation Anywhere. However, we are very experienced and can automate nearly anything.

It's obviously reliable. It has a reusable component. If you compare some of the other RPA tool, they are more difficult to explain. We need to create one solution design with a low level and high level each for everything. When it comes to Automation Anywhere, and someone has joined, they can easily understand the way of the coding. When you see the code of the structure that we do, it's really impressive and anyone can easily understand it.

Their guys will take maximum only two hours to solve the biggest problems. If I need any clarification, I will raise a ticket. However, their people won't message me when replying back, "Are you checking this setting?" Their people will call me and ask, "How can I help you? This is the issue. Have you followed the steps by testing or calling it something different." Instead of sending a mail and wasting time, their people will directly call me and ask, which is the best thing with the Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is easy. As a first step, it will ask for the location. As a second step, if you want to add an SSL certificate or database. There are just four steps of installation. It's very usable. Anybody can easily install Automation Anywhere, if they want.

I have used UiPath and a basic version of Blue Prism. 

When I compare it with other RPA tools, Automation Anywhere seems pretty good. It's a user-friendly tool. Anyone can easily understand it. If there is an error, you can easily debug it from the developer level. In Automation Anywhere, the error handling happens in the easiest way. In case of an error, we send an email. It's not too difficult code to understand. There's only beginning and ending error handling, which is easy to understand. 

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

We use this solution to automate tasks for which multiple steps have to be done.

We do it a very large number of times in a day.

We have been able to automate tasks that have a lot of repetitiveness.

The most valuable feature is the object cloning.

The user interface is easy to use.

While we have been developing over time, there have been issues with stability.

The speed of automation needs to be improved.

This solution is not that stable.

We have been able to scale ok.

I implemented this solution for my company.

This is a solution that I recommend.

We are looking forward to trying the IQ Bot to help with reading, scanning, and querying of files.

This solution has a wonderful concept, but the stability needs to be improved.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are trying to automate a few of the processes that we did manually. Product setup is an important aspect, as we are using bots to do the setup for us. We used to do the setup manually about three to four months back. 

We used to set up 150 to 250 products in a week. That has come down to a day. 

I initiate the bot, then I go home. So, it's working 24 hours. I am restricted to working nine hours. Time is something that we are saving. We are becoming more efficient and our partners are happy. They can send us workloads. Then, we can just kick it off, go home, and by the time we are back, it is done. I send an e-mail saying, "Whatever you've sent over is done." 

Efficiency is something that has increased a lot. Productivity has increased a lot too.

Object cloning is one of the main features that are using. We are very happy with it. as It has enabled us to capture a lot of things on screen and use them. 

We want it to work with more APIs. It needs to integrate with multiple APIs. That would be something that I would like going forward.

Currently, it does not work that well with legacy tools.

It is a bit wonky with HTML when I'm working with it. There are times when it's not able to detect the technology that we are using. I don't know whether it's an Automation Anywhere issue or an internal issue. I want it to work smoothly with more technologies.

Our tool is a bit slow, as it's a legacy tool. Automation Anywhere is having a some issues when running back. This is one of the things that we are not happy with. We need to upgrade our systems for Automation Anywhere to work better.

As of now, we have it limited to one process. However, we can scale the solution. It can cascade onto multiple processes, so that is a positive note for scalability.

We are just in the initial phases. I personally have created about three to four bots. 

We have not contacted the technical support because we have not had issues.

My manager works our customer success manager.

Automation Anywhere is our first introduction to automation. I'm pretty happy with it. I did ask people who had come from Automation Anywhere about UiPath to get a clear idea about it. I think UX is one of the strongest points for Automation Anywhere which can attract competence to your workbench and work. That's what we have been told. 

I still need to experiment a lot with it. Whatever I've done so far. it's been at an 80 to 85 percent success rate.

I've not had the chance to work with UiPath.

We want to do more Automation Anywhere certifications and learn more about them. We did not get that information from our account team, which could be improved.

We use this solution for updating manual tasks such as downloading, processing, and uploading.

An example of this is manual posting, where the customer is asking for money to be posted. For example, let's say that some extra money is posted by mistake. That has to be reconciled and be pushed back to the actual owner.

Another example is bank transfer, where the customer is requesting money to be transferred from one bank to our bank. We generally interact with the customer and the bank, and there are several transactions that need to be completed. We now have this as a Complete Conditional Automation, where depending on the status, one of several sub-processes will be triggered and completed.

This solution has helped us in several ways, the first of which is scheduling processes.

There are many processes that need to be run during office hours, which is fine, but there are many that can be run outside of office hours. By taking care of these processes outside of office hours, it improves our efficiency. Also, if the bot were only being used for eight hours out of a possible twenty-four hours then the cost-per-hour is higher.

The recording feature accelerates the timeline of your implementation. It means that it takes you less time with lesser investment. The resource cost becomes less and brings your break-even point closer.

The most valuable feature is the recording feature. If you compare to a solution like Blue Prism, in that case, you need to build everything from scratch. Here, you record everything and then it is easy for you to build the automation. There is a skeleton in place, and you just have to build from there.

The scheduler is a really helpful feature for us because there was a time when people used to do attended automation, and they needed to run the software. This lets us schedule it to run at any time.

I would like to leverage the AI component without the requirement to know a coding language, such as Python.

This solution is pretty stable. We only had issues with the previous version.  We don't have any malfunctions so far, although, with the older version, we faced some object de-capturing issues. We had captured where it was supposed to hit, and it was hitting elsewhere. With the new version, so far so good.

Considering the automation that we have done, we have not been required to scale.

Technical support for this solution is excellent. They organize video chats and were able to guide us initially when it was installed. They gave good training to people and helped with some development activities. They are also fast in responding to issues.

We have used Blue Prism and there are some differences between the two solutions. The first is that Automation Anywhere provides you free training, and Blue Prism does not. You have to take the time to attend class, and you have to pay for the software to do some hands-on. Even then, you don't know if you will get the latest version. On the other hand, with Automation Anywhere, you have the Community Edition. This is good enough for a beginner to learn on.

The recording feature in Automation Anywhere helps a lot because you don't have to build everything from scratch, brick-by-brick.

Finally, Automation Anywhere is evolving faster than Blue Prism.

I was not there when the solution was initially set up, but I assisted with the upgrade.

There was a misunderstanding between the infrastructure team, our team, and the Automation Anywhere team, which was a major issue. It was unclear how the servers were going to be set up and who was going to install. Nobody knew what the requirements were, and as a result, things took longer than they should have.

We recently upgraded versions from 10.5 to 11.3.2, and the newer version is better. The major issue we used to face is an auto-login failure. It caused a lot of havoc with the customers because some process that had to run in the morning before we came into the office had not run. However, with this new version, that problem has been solved. There were also a few applications that were not previously compatible, and we were told that they would be with this new version. So far, the ones we have checked are now compatible. 

One example of these is Phoebus. There are some legacy banking applications that we are moving to Phoebus, so this has to be compatible because our future automation depends on that.

I am looking forward to using the AI in this new version. I want to see how user-friendly it is, without much knowledge of Python or another coding language. I saw a video and it seems to have become very user-friendly, with a step-by-step guide. I want to see how easy it is to leverage that power without needing to know how to code.

For anybody who is researching RPA solutions, I would definitely tell them to go with the top players in the market. These are UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. Then, you do your cost analysis and figure out who is giving you the best price. Then you analyze the service to figure out who is providing the best service. Finally, you can compare.

I recommend Automation Anywhere considering my experience with their service. Once you buy the product, the product may be good. But, if the service is not good then you may suffer. If you have a problem and you do not have service for three days, then how much business have you lost in that time? So, service matters a lot after you purchase the product. That is how you choose the solution, rather than by cost alone.

In our experience, Automation Anywhere is great, but I am expecting more in the AI and with the IQ Bot.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The IQ Bot is the most valuable feature and a significant market differentiator. 

While you don't a coding skill set as a business user, you do need to have some knowledge before using the product.

We would like Automation Anywhere to have a way to run a capacity check on machines and show us what is available.

In the past, the solution has been unreliable. Now, it has become reliable in terms of the issues that we are seeing. Now, it is stable with no major issues.

Scalability has been a pain point. The scalability is there, but there are ongoing operational issues with it.

The technical support needs to do a better job of triaging tickets and updating critical people at companies.

The setup is straightforward. Automation Anywhere provides customer success managers to help with the setup.

I am an RPA consultant who does deployments.

Whatever you automate, it is important to identify what you want to do after your journey.

Attended automation is okay.

The primary use case is to automate processes internally for my company.

I build a lot of processes which have saved a lot of time for my company using this solution. 

In my previous company, a payroll employee would close a payroll, which resulted in him receiving six to seven reports. He managed 15 companies. Each report took him 30 to 40 minutes per company. With Automation Anywhere, I was able to save this work time for him. He was then able to focus on other value-added tasks. The bot now pulls the report for him, sending it directly to the client.

It is very easy to use and learn compared to a programming language, where you have to have a background in coding. Anyone can learn it. Learning the software is easy.

As a developer, the product is easy to use. It has a lot of commands that I can select from, such as folders, organizing files, and going to websites. It saves time from what a human would be doing.

The only challenge is knowing the process of using the software.

I would like to have Git implemented with the version control system.

Sometimes, the recorder from Automation Anywhere does not work well and is inaccurate. This should be improved.

I haven't had experience with the technical support. I never call them.

I would like them to have better license management.

Automation Anywhere is a very friendly tool compared to other RPA tools.

Look into the usefulness of RPA robotic process automation. As a solution, Automation Anywhere is complete for business users and developers.

The bot creation is easy if you have one or two TaskBots. However, if the process is complex, you will need to split the process into modules.  

The solution integrates very well with other applications. Though, it only works with Internet Explorer right now, but you can run other applications with an open program. Object clone captures the objects very well from the software. It code APIs, run stuff from the back-end (like SQL queries), and executing procedures. Everything is in one package.

While I am registered to take courses with Automation Anywhere University, I don't feel that I need to take them. I learn from hands-on training.

I am new to learning about IQ Bot, but I think it is really useful for an insurance company because they scan documents all the time.

We are using Automation Anywhere to automation some of our menial processes.

We have automated our pricing update and audit functions that we do as an operations team.

Our organization used to have a process which took five business days to do: our monthly pricing update. This was a very manual process. Our very first bot built was to automate this process. Now, the bot runs in the background every month and the process takes less than a day to run.

It is easy to use and learn.

Working with the Automation Anywhere servers and domains have proven to be difficult. We are trying to get more licenses and servers set up, so we can run multiple scenarios simultaneously. 

I am excited for the web browser Automation Anywhere. This will be helpful for us because the solution is limited to our team at the moment. A web browser solution would allow us to expand it to different teams.

I haven't really had to work with the Automation Anywhere technical support. I mostly use my in-house technical support.

Their previous process was terrible, so they started looking at automation as a solution.

While the initial setup is fine, the servers have caused us a few headaches.

Our first bot was complicated, and probably not the best thing to start with. However, as we learned from that experience and more of Automation Anywhere's features, we can now push bots out fairly quickly. The process is a lot smoother. Our infrastructure and design have improved tremendously.

We deployed the solution with our in-house team.

We were spending 50 to 70 hours a month doing manual processes and possibly making errors. Introducing bots has saved us on hours and eliminated of errors (as bots don't make them). We have not had an accuracy issue since introducing bots.

In terms of monetary savings, we automated a bot in three days that has saved us $30,000 in costs.

A lot of companies are putting a lot of effort into increasing and improving their front office processes.

It is a great resources right now. I am really looking forward to ramping up for my second year of going into automation.

We wanted to have more automation around our customers' processes. We do claim insurance type processing. Therefore, we wanted a process for their first notice of loss and a lot of the government regulations that they have to handle.

We started using the tool in-house to help us deploy a lot of our own internal processes. We also use it to deploy Automation Anywhere bots to set up other virtual machines and deploy software.

We have automated sending out a first notice of loss. We have done some automation of incoming documents, but it has been somewhat hard. Therefore, we are looking at IQ Bot, as a possible solution.

The most valuable features are ease of use and deployment. It has very good ease of use.

It integrates very well with other applications.

I am looking forward to seeing writing on Linux in the web and WorkBatch in the next release.

The stability is very good. I haven't had any issues.

The scalability is very good. I haven't had any issues.

From pilot to our current number of bots, it took about two months.

The technical support is very good.

We chose Automation Anywhere over other solutions due to the ease of deployment. We had also looked at UiPath, but their deployment was more difficult. We have some on-premise clients, so we were going to have to also deploy Automation Anywhere for them in their environment, and we needed something easy to roll out.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller for the deployment.

Our return on investment is high. We have saved primarily time.

If you are looking into Automation Anywhere, get the Community Edition and play with it.

I like the Automation Anywhere University courses.

We are looking at using IQ Bot to digitize documents.