Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

We use it for our refund department. We use it to initialize payments and everything else that is a repetitive process. 

We use Automation Anywhere to automate financial processes, invoices, billing, etc. 

Because it reduced the time duration of our processes, our costs went down.

Right now, we have Automation Anywhere integrated with artificial intelligence (AI).

I am certified in the Automation Anywhere University as a developer. It is a good tool. It goes topic-by-topic with real-time examples.

The product has a lot of options and visibility.

I just came to understand that there is a cloud attached to it. I would like to see how the cloud is going to work, because every application is coming out with a cloud version. If you are not on-premise, then you will need to have Citrix automation. 

It took one month to scale to the amount of bots which we are currently using.

Initially, the setup is not complex; it is straightforward.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

This product is really useful for me. I recommend Automation Anywhere as a solution.

The bot creation process is good, though it depends on the use case.

I don't use Citrix.

1. Avatar Repository: Created for an individual script, shared to Global Avatar Repository and can be reused by other testers. Avatar Repository can be locked and given access to those who grant authorization with an appropriate username and password
2. Easy to create scripts by drag and drop commands
3. Running Batch files – Easy to add files in the Run Suite and align to the order by drag and drop to run.
   
4. Result Log window – displays the result for each statement also when called in a loop, checkpoints
5. Saves the test result for each run and also displayed in the Visual Logs
6. Triggered to run the script and the script run when the tool is closed

1. Easy to create Reusable scripts and Main scripts
2. Easy to save the scripts in the Testing Anywhere server
3. Easy to retrieve scripts created by other testers in different locations
4. Easy to view files in the Testing Anywhere Client window

With 7 months experience, I couldn't find any need for improvement.

7 months

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I would rate the level of technical support as 8/10.

Yes, I worked with QTP in a different company and I switched when I moved jobs.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Implementation was done through a vendor team. Their level of expertise is 9/10.

This Testing Anywhere is a good tool for the functional testing and also good for the beginners in Automation who don't have knowledge in scripting.

We are an integrator. We are selling RPA products to various customers. They have different use cases. 

We have cloud as well as on-premise deployments of this solution.

It is an easy product. It is easier and less complex than any other RPA tool in the market. It is a popular product.

Some of the machine learning (ML) components are still in development. They deployed many of them, but they are doing some improvements on the machine learning part.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is suitable for enterprises.

Their technical support is good. I get very quick support whenever I face an issue. I raise a ticket, and the Automation Anywhere support team is available.

The deployment of Automation Anywhere is much easier as compared to any other RPA tool in the market. The solution itself is browser-based. So, we don't have to install complex software.

Its price is competitive with all other products in the market.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

Automation Anywhere is an RPA tool that is used to Automate any repeated simple/complex tasks with ease. Automation Anywhere is not perfect but it is still the best tool available in today's market.

It is one of the simplest RPA tools, having a simple user interface, and it is very easy to get hands-on with this platform. It has vast learning resources available, too.

Use Cases:

1. Extracting data from scanned PDFs: Using Automation Anywhere made it much simpler to scrape data from scanned PDFs and convert it into standard Excel format, as per requirements.
2. Portal Automation: AA makes web automation simple and our manual tasks have now been automated. Our portal is for making client bookings of the client. The Bot reads the Excel file shared by the user and accordingly, makes the booking in the portal with minimum time and with high accuracy.

Automation Anywhere is known for its high performance, reliability, and simplicity. Using Automation Anywhere has been a boon for my organization. It saves time and does not require human intervention, depending on the task or process that is automated.

As data scraping from scanned PDFs was a huge task for our organization, and with other tools, the accuracy was around 50-60%, we were facing a huge data loss. When our organization switched to Automation Anywhere, the accuracy rate improved and consequently, there has not been much data loss.

Automation Anywhere has great features and I have found Object Cloning and SAP integration to be the most valuable among them.

Object Cloning: Using Object Cloning, any web-based process or task that has fixed steps to be followed can be automated with ease. Object Cloning captures the object, DOMXPath, Inner text, etc. The drop-down menus can also be automated easily.

SAP Integration: Automation anywhere has added one more feature to this command in v11.3.5, which is SAP GUI. Using this feature/command, SAP Automation has become simpler than before, as it required using Metabot, DLL, etc. Everything can now be done in the task bot itself.

Automation Anywhere should improve its OCR command, as it's my observation that I have faced data loss or improper data being extracted. If the image quality is low then the data extraction with 100% accuracy is a huge task that I have been facing.

If the scheduling of the bot were much simpler, also allowing us to schedule bots prior to the start time, it would be an improvement. 

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The stability is good.

The scalability is very good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Excellent support.

Once, I was facing an issue so I raised a ticket. The Automation Anywhere support team helped me to resolve it quickly, with proper follow up via email as well as calls.

We did not use another RPA product prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is straightforward. The Control Room and client are simple to set up, too.

We have an in-house team with a high level of expertise.

Considering the cost, it is a bit high, but worth the price because the output accuracy is high.

Automation Anywhere is a tool that I love! I am quite happy using this tool and there are no features or commands that I have found to be missing that should be added.

Its advantages are performance, simplicity, and excellent support!

Please go for Automation Anywhere. I am sure that you won't regret it!

Our primary use case is the comparison of field-level capture status of English invoices done using UiPath Document Understanding, with a converted CSV header and table-format CSV file of invoices done using IQ Bot A2019.

Automation Anywhere (AA 2019) IQ Bot has improved efficiency and is very useful for the Conversion of Invoices to CSV files and JSON files to PDF boxes.

The most valuable feature is the conversion of PDF Invoices to CSV and to PDF Boxes.

The conversion time of invoices to JSON File should take less time using AA2019 IQBot, the report file creation feature should be added into IQ Bot A2019.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for the past four months.

We are a factory and supplier corporation, e.g. we focus on the financial and automation niche, but mostly financial. Our service is implementing automation, e.g. we implement Automation Anywhere (AA) for customers. It's a tool for automating processes.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is easy to use and understand, even if the user didn't have previous experience with RPA (robotic process automation) software before. This solution has many tools for automation. It's good even if you're just starting with RPA software, e.g. we don't have to decide on the whole productivity process, so we can put in the costs step by step first, then put in the details after.

Other solutions require you to know the codes first and make decisions on the whole process. This means that with other RPA solutions, if the user doesn't have the experience, it will be difficult for them to use and decide on those automation programs, which is not the case with Automation Anywhere (AA).

An area for improvement for Automation Anywhere (AA) is its organization or utilization, because if it's your first time to initiate automation, you have to convert it properly, and you have to develop the amendment path through the automation path, but you have to pay a subscription for it first. The first part is difficult because if you buy the full package without having much experience with the product, it could be difficult to utilize the process from manual to automation.

There are some limitations in the migration from the manual process to automation, because currently, Automation Anywhere (AA) is trying to develop transfer from on-premises to cloud. There's a limitation in migration.

The setup and deployment processes for this product also need to be improved, e.g. made easier.

I worked with Automation Anywhere (AA) before, and I helped a developer team provide it to the customer, and that was last year. We implemented it. I've been dealing with the solution in the last two years, but changed my focus to analytic solutions for a year.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is a stable tool.

Scalability for this tool is good.

It's difficult to set up Automation Anywhere (AA) on the on-premises environment. It's also difficult to make preparations for it. You have to be ready so it can support the automation process. That was what people experienced in the on-premises deployment, but I'm unsure how it is when it's set up on cloud. Setup could be easier if it's done on the Cloud.

If you have a person who knows the utilities of this solution, setup will take one to two weeks.

Our clients are paying for a yearly subscription of Automation Anywhere (AA).

Automation Anywhere (AA) is very easy to understand, but automation is something new here in Thailand.

We have 20 clients using this solution. For deployment and maintenance, we have a technical team made up of 10 people, with one vision analyst.

We have an automation hypercare team responsible for supporting customers after we've deployed Automation Anywhere (AA).

I would recommend this tool to others who want to start using it, because it's a good tool.

I'm giving Automation Anywhere (AA) a score of eight out of ten.

• Automating frond end and back end office jobs.  
• Automating tiring jobs - Automation Anywhere is used to Automate many jobs that are repetitive. 
• To deploy a digital workforce and optimize productivity.
• Report generation.
• Revenue forecasting.
• Beneficial to QA processes.
• Data validation and auditing.
• Data replication and migration.
• Customer Relationship Management and other operational sales activities                               

RPA helps to Automate these jobs perfectly.

With better technologies and research at its disposal, we will see a decrease in the cost of RPA tools.

With it, the other processes on work, the automation cost will dramatically reduce in the upcoming years.

Moreover, as the number of robotic vendors grows, the RPA licensing will see a significant decline rate in RPA licensing and with more space for changes.

RPA Security:

With more significant responsibilities on the robots’ shoulders, the bigger are the possibilities of a breach and system failure.

There will be an improvement in protection measures from the new types of cyber threats or any internal faults will see an increase due to a constant rise in security requirements.

Better Cloud-Based RPA Platform:

According to “Robotics Process Automation (RPA) – 2018 Annual Report,” Everest Group, 2018; currently over half of all RPA processes (~57%) are attended.

Including cloud-based, unattended RPA represents the remaining 43% (33% on-prem, 10% cloud-based).

The growth of IoT and improved cloud services gives more flexibility and security to Robotic Process Automation.

The cloud supplies unlimited, off-site storage, and on-demand access to data.

Automation at its best:

About 70% to 80% of rule-based processes in a business can be automated. RPA has a good hold in both the back- and front-office with advancements in AI, big data, speech recognition technologies, machine learning, and deep neural networks.

As a consequence of predicted growth in the field of Cloud-based tech and natural learning processes, RPA tech is positioned to be even more integrated, automated, and independent.

Workload management is a cool feature of Automation anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is one of the most popular RPA vendors offering powerful and user-friendly RPA capabilities to automate the business processes that are performed by humans. AA is a web-based management system that includes a control to run end-to-end automated business tasks for companies. Over 500 leading brands across the world use this tool to handle and scale their business processes with near-zero error rates and minimizing operational costs. AA allows building scripts to perform repetitive tasks instead of writing code. They can automate a broad range of chores from basic level Windows configuration steps to the ultimate networking and remote database processes. The three core components in the AA architecture are:

Bot Creator – It allows the developers to create bots to automate their desktop-based applications.

Control room- An application that works as a controller and handles the entire execution and management of clients, scripts, credentials, roles, security, etc.

Bot Runner – A machine that allows us to run the bot. The status of bot execution is reported back to the control room.

The company offers various products to support enterprises in their journey of digital transformation. They are as follows:

Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA

The product is dedicated for the business user and comprises advanced capabilities to offer an intuitive interface for the business user, bot developer, and automation administrator. This platform is easiest to use, supports to avoid complexity, and ensures fast adoption & rapid deployment. It not only fulfills the requirement of the digital workforce but also be flexible to evolve with the business needs.

2. IQBots

IQBot is a cognitive bot designed to support as well as learn from business users and enable the business user to experience the power of advanced artificial intelligence technologies. Integrated with the automation anywhere enterprise RPA, the IQBot offers enterprise massive gains in productivity, as it includes competence of automating complex tasks involving unstructured data. The table below explains the different types of bots in automation anywhere: Task bot, Meta bot, and IQ bot.

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3. Bot Insights

The platform displays statistics and graphs to analyze bot performance in the system. It also allows calculating the time saved in the automation process. It is the first analytics solutions build for bots. Bot Insights tightly integrates the real-time business insights with the digital workforce performance.

4. BotFarm

It is an on-demand enterprise-grade platform for RPA bot. The platform scales the capacity of the digital workforce by deploying bots anytime, anywhere with a single click. It can create, deploy and handle thousands of software bots and can ensure resilience, elasticity, and scalability.

5. Bot Store

The first marketplace for plug and play bots dedicated to business automation initiatives. It enables enterprises to discover, deploy, and mobilize bots, including process bots, application bots, and cognitive bots in a fraction of seconds.

I would like for AA to add an inbuilt debug log that has functionalities to view the values of variables during run time in order to have a point-to-point debugging in case of an error.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year. 

This solution was originally introduced to help operations reduce manual tasks. After seeing positive results, we have now implemented this RPA solution in IT.

We have been able to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks completed by operations, allowing individuals to move onto tasks which cannot yet be automated.

Currently, under Automation Anywhere, we only use the Bot Runners and Bot Creators. This ensures we can automate processes without the need for manual interaction.

I would like to see more stability around scheduling a bot to run headless. I believe version 11 may be more stable and have less issues when trying to run headless.

It is more stable now than it was three years ago. So far, I have no major concerns and am looking forward to upgrading to version 11 in Q3.

As we have a small number of bits in production on version 10.5.4, we found it easy to scale. Version 11 will provide a load balancer, making it easier for us to run a pool of VMs to complete a task.

We mostly use it for operations right now. We are looking at possible IT RPA use cases.

The tech support has improved over the years. I believe the tech support to be sufficient right now.

I wasn't part of the original PoC team who completed the initial setup. 

After joining the team, we engaged in two upgrades to deal with stability issues. We found this a painful process as we were early adopters. This meant that the install wasn't stable. To resolve this, we decided on an approach where we would only upgrade to a major release six months after its release.

The deployment is quick. You could complete this in a weekend. Realistically, you need a week to prep and another week to triage unexpected issues.

Our implementation strategy has been to upgrade development, confirm everything functions as expected, and only then upgrade production.

We have a team of six, which consists of developers, a tech lead, and manager. We have set up a run support team to handle maintenance and bot stability issues. Their role is to get the bots back up and running in the event of an issue.

It is expensive. Automation Anywhere has reduced the price slightly, as we have grown. However, the price is still excessive enough that we are engaged in PoCs on other tools.

I wasn't part of the initial conversations, though I believe we proceeded with the number product in the market.

As a total package, this is probably the easiest solution to start with. Even if you add something that you will not need, e.g., Bot Insight won't be required until you have more than 50 bots in production. Even then, see if you can develop this through in-house metrics.