Automation Anywhere Reviews

We're using Automation Anywhere (AA) for the financial departments of a lot of civil engineering companies here in Greece. There's also one pharmaceutical company that uses it in their financial department.

I find Automation Anywhere (AA) to be really fast on the development side. They are also using a good engine. They have an efficient and intelligent system, e.g. it's IBM's, so it's one of the best. The connectors in Automation Anywhere (AA) are also good, and they're working fine. These are all the features I found most valuable in the tool.

One area for improvement in Automation Anywhere (AA) is its monitoring system. It's not that good.

The scalability of the tool also needs improvement, because when you set up another machine to run the process, the system would become full.

We've been using Automation Anywhere (AA) for three years.

My impression on the stability of Automation Anywhere (AA) is that there's still room for improvement there. A lot of times during the day, one or two out of 20 cases lose their elements, or lose a window, and that should be improved.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere (AA) needs to be improved.

Setting up Automation Anywhere (AA) was not that hard, but I can't say that it was easy. I don't know if I did something wrong in the configuration when I first installed the tool. You have to configure the database yourself, and I believe that the tool should configure itself.

Licensing for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid on a yearly basis. Out of all the RPA tools, it has the most value for money, e.g. what you pay is what you get.

On a scale of one to five, with one being cheap and five being expensive, I'm rating the price of Automation Anywhere (AA) a three. It's not as expensive, but it's not that cheap, too. If you'll use it long term, then it's better, but the company that you're selling it to, they have to trust you, and you should also have knowledge about the sales.

We're now using version 16 of Automation Anywhere (AA), and that is the latest version. Previously, I was able to use version 11.

I have not contacted the technical support team for Automation Anywhere (AA), because we are partners with IBM who are partners of Automation Anywhere (AA), so I'm working with IBM and talking with IBM support, instead of the support team for the tool.

If somebody wanted to use Automation Anywhere (AA) for the first time, the advice I would give that person is that it's the only tool that's easy to learn in terms of how to develop, but you have to read the manual about the monitoring system and the control room, especially about the control room, because it's really complicated. I found the control room complicated.

Overall, I'm rating Automation Anywhere (AA) eight out of ten. I'm giving it an eight, just because of the cases that you are losing according to the spying or monitoring system. You're losing a lot, and your customer is not really happy about that.

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.

Parts of Automation Anywhere (AA) that we are using include IQ BOT, RPA products, and a human in the loop attended Bots as well.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is useful for our customers.

Automation Anywhere IQ Bot is very strong in comparison to other vendors because Automation introduced this intelligent document processing product a long time ago, which is one of its unique features. 

When compared to UiPath and Blue Prism, the rest of the products are the same. They are distinct in comparison to the IQ Bot, but other than that, they share many of the same features as other products.

Automation Anywhere has a uniqueness with respect to the IQ Bot.

There is room for improvement; with the overall architecture as it is tightly coupled. Everything is coupled with the Control Room of the overall product architecture.

When I look at the UiPath product, where they have a mostly combined architecture and development environments. It should be more loosely coupled, but both products have advantages and disadvantages. 

The overall product in Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to improve a little bit on the overall architecture side.

Integrations should be included with the analytics platforms and third-party SAP, enterprise-level applications, as well as if there are any built-in connectors where you can connect with the ERPs to automate the required teams. 

There are ready-made connectors available, which will help to democratize automation across the enterprise with various customers across the globe.

They should include integration with not only analytics but also analytics and enterprise applications, as well as advanced AI/ML features. It's not just about the IdP; some AI/ML features should be available. Aside from computer vision, NLP, NLU, and NLG, as well as a variety of other advanced features, should be included.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere (AA) for six years.

For the last two years, Automation Anywhere (AA) has been deployed on the cloud, and prior to that, it was on-premises.

There are several versions of Automation Anywhere. They have version 11, as well as Automation 360 and Enterprise 360.

Version 11 is considered stable. You will also notice that Automation 360 is attempting to stabilize the overall product.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere's cloud version is excellent, but the on-premise version is a waste of time and money.

I'm familiar with both Automation Anywhere (AA) and UiPath.

Initial setup, after cloud, is fine. It was complicated earlier, but it's fine now. When you sign up for a cloud subscription, then it's plug and play, but it's a little more complicated in the case of on-premises.

I compared Automation Anywhere to UiPath and Blue Prism.

We are resale local partners.

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

Here's a use case of Automation Anywhere (AA): In a bank, you have an account opening process. The customers go into the bank, then apply for account opening. They will go to a portal, fill out the form, then put their documents. All the data that had been entered and all the documents that are being uploaded will go into a document repository.

With Automation Anywhere (AA), you have a data capture solution that extracts the data, and will put the data extracted into a case management solution, instead of having somebody just taking data and doing manual data entry into the CRM platform or core banking platform. This solution can take the data extracted from the upload, log into the CRM platform, and key in the data one after the other, in that same order on the CRM or the core banking platform, instead of having a human doing that repetitive task of data entry. You can use this RPA solution to handle the document repository, extract the data from it, log into the CRM portal automatically, then key in the data as an automated data entry into the CRM.

There are other competitive solutions, e.g. Blue Prism and IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and those are very good ones, but if you asked me, Automation Anywhere (AA) really, really stands out.

One of the things I like about this solution is its functionality. It's highly functional, aside from it being stable and scalable.

I also like that the Automation Anywhere (AA) team is always innovating, e.g. they're always coming up with new features that would speak to various operational use cases.

Improving on the ease of use and user experience of Automation Anywhere (AA) could help.

We've been providing Automation Anywhere (AA) to our customers for 10 years now.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is a stable solution.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is scalable. It's one of the best you can have in the market.

Automation Anywhere (AA) has very good technical support.

Installing Automation Anywhere (AA) is not a complicated process. How long the installation takes will depend on the client environment. For the cloud version of this solution, you just need to configure it to the use cases of the customers. For the on-premises version, you have to set it up within the client data center environment, and even that doesn't take time. Installation is straightforward.

Our customers pay for the Automation Anywhere (AA) license yearly, for the cloud version.

We were able to evaluate Blue Prism and IBM RPA.

We currently have three customers using Automation Anywhere (AA). We have three people handling the deployment and maintenance of this solution: the system administrator, the developer, and the solution architect.

The advice I would give to other people who want to start using Automation Anywhere (AA) is that the most important thing is for them to understand their use cases before even embarking on the journey, so they can be sure their use cases are RPA related and can be taken cared of by this solution. Automation Anywhere (AA) cannot cater to all automation use cases, as it's mainly focused on clearly defined manual repetitive tasks.

The customers can decide whether they want to have this solution deployed on cloud or on-premises.

I'll give Automation Anywhere (AA) a rating of eight out of ten.

We are currently using Automation Anywhere for a Master Card customer complaint bot that will log tickets on our top priority websites. When customers complain it can be logged directly or the agent logs it on one of our databases. The bot goes to the database and can pick up the ticket that was logged on a top priority website. It then becomes a role ID number to us for verification that has been locked properly. Third parties can take notes, then once locked, they can give the ticket to us.

We did this procedure manually before the use of Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is very simple to use. The features are very simple and the application light. Overall I love it.

I have been using Automation Anywhere(AA) for approximately five months.

Automation Anywhere is a very stable solution.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere is perfect.

I am the only one using the solution. However, I am going to create a team that can use it optimally.

The challenge we face is the response time of the Automation Anywhere support teams. They could be quicker to give support. However, the problem could be because of the time difference. When we do get in contact with the support their knowledge is very good.

I have used other BPM solutions previously, such as Optimus.

We decided to take processes away from Optimus and we now are using Automation Anywhere.

The initial implementation of Automation Anywhere regarding the elastic search and database set connection can be a little difficult. However, I am skilled enough to get through it. There were some balancing issues that my other team members had to manage. They are having difficulty in balancing when I checked the architecture properly. We determined later that there was no need for a load balance to be done on the servers. We didn't do any load balancing and then the elastic search was not done.

The first time we did the implementation took us some time because we had to set up the server based on the minimum server requirements that were sent to us. Then we had some load balancing issues which took some days because we did not have all the knowledge.

If we had all the information we would have been able to do it faster. When we were applying the certification to the servers it was a different approach because it's a Java-based solution. In the first instance, we had a challenge doing the implementation. After the initial problems were resolved I did not have any problems implementing Automation Anywhere. It took approximately two hours to get it all done.

The deployments only need approximately five to ten people.

We don't have a lot of processes. If we want to expand we can change the license to allow it. Currently our license, we can only have 10,000 bots, on all processes. If we have approximately 10,000 bot processes on the control we'll be able to manage the processes in the control room. Five and ten people should be able to manage 10,000 bots.

There is an annual license to use the solution.

I would recommend this solution to any organization or individual.

I rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the SAP application and the DLLs that Automation Anywhere provides. These DLLs help automate the SAP application. In A360, the latest version of Automation Anywhere, they provide many connectors for the different frameworks, like Office 365 or any other APIs, so those connectors are useful.

They still need to improve the SAP application's ability to use the features it has. For example, we have been using a MetaBot to automate SAP applications. They have given the SAP the ability to command Automation Anywhere itself, but we have encountered some limitations. Microsoft Power Automate has so many connectors, like its connector with Microsoft Office and SharePoint. On the other end, I have found Power Automate to be overpowered compared to Automation Anywhere because they already have so many connectors with Office 365, Teams, and other APIs. There are even more if you consider the cloud flow of Power Automate, so it's easy to get triggered.

Automation Anywhere is not so easy to trigger. For example,  I can create an automation in Power Automate where the user provides input into a form, such as Microsoft Form, and that info gets pulled into SharePoint. In Automation Anywhere, we do not have some trigger like that. We have to keep one bot running 24/7 to get this data into SharePoint. Power Automate does not have anything like scheduling. Whenever you fill out the form, it gets triggered on its own, and the information is saved into SharePoint. So this is an advantage of Power Automate that Automation Anywhere does not have.

Automation Anywhere should add the same feature that Power Automate has, so whenever I create a flow, there is a trigger given by Automation Anywhere. Instead of scheduling that bot on CR, there should be something running in the background constantly, so I do not have to schedule the bot or trigger the bot manually. The trigger should be integrated into Automation Anywhere. Also, if I am creating one variable in one module, I have to make the same variable in another subtask, then I have to create a mapping between those two. If Automation Anywhere were to come out with a feature like Power Automate's environment variables, then that variable could be created globally and used throughout the process. That would be better. 

Another feature I would like to have in Automation Anywhere is "Go To Line." When we are writing the code, it sometimes extends 500 to 600 lines. If I want to go to some line numbers — say, the bot has failed on line number 120 — I have to go manually to line 120. If Automation Anywhere provided something like a "Go To Line" feature, that would be useful for us. For example, if you face an error at line number 500 and your code is 1,000 lines, you have to scroll so far down to get to line number 500. 

Furthermore, in Automation Anywhere, you have to write a DLL separately when you want to have something from a .NET perspective. In UiPath and some other tools, there are direct call functions available. It would be nice if Automation Anywhere came up with something like that, where you can directly have the method called.

I've been using Automation Anywhere for around four years.

Automation Anywhere is quite stable. It has been around for many years now and has undergone several updates.  

To some extent, I can say Automation Anywhere is scalable.

The technical support by Automation Anywhere is quite good. Whenever we have an issue, we create a ticket on the Automation Anywhere support site, and the support from their side is quite extensive.

Setting up Automation Anywhere is a bit complex. When I entered into the RPA industry, Automation Anywhere had just been launched. Automation Anywhere was first released in 2014 or thereabouts, and I started working on it in 2017. I was just a novice when I began my journey with RPA, and it was a whole new concept in my organization as well. When we were setting up the control room server and the client, it was a bit daunting. We had to do so much in the background database and then the client. It is pretty complicated to set up the Automation Anywhere control room and the high availability clusters. 

I'm not too sure about the pricing part, because our organizers handle that. I'm just a developer. We get the software already installed on our machine. 

I would rate Automation Anywhere seven out of 10. It is a simple tool to learn, and with A360, they have gone way beyond. They also have an intelligent bot. However, I would suggest going with Microsoft Power Automate ranter than Automation Anywhere because Power Automate's cloud flow is easier to use. In addition, you can use Power Automate with very minimal coding. With Automation Anywhere, you need extensive knowledge of SQL and .NET. You have to learn so many things before implementing Automation Anywhere. 

I have worked on Automation Anywhere for four years and also UiPath. Between these two, I have found Automation Anywhere easier to work on. Also, it's stable because I have delivered around 20 plus automations on Automation Anywhere to date. Based on my experience, I have found Automation Anywhere to be more stable and accessible. I prefer Automation Anywhere. 

In my previous organization, I had worked on UiPath, but I haven't worked on UiPath much for the last two-plus years. So I only have six to eight months of experience on UiPath. I find the Orchestrator feature quite complex and difficult to understand. When I was working on UiPath, they had just introduced their advanced features in Orchestrator, so I found UiPath much more valuable from the .NET perspective. But if we're talking about how easy it is to program, Automation Anywhere is more straightforward. For the past one or two months, I have started getting my hands on Power Automate. In terms of cloud flows, I find Power Automate more useful. Every tool has its pros and cons. After working on Automation Anywhere for around four years, I do find it easy and scalable. But now, now that I've been introduced to Power Automate, I find that I like it because of built-in connectors and templates.

We are currently working on a vendor bill reconciliation process. It is in production now. We are also working on an incident management process for customer service. Within the customer services, there are four or five different processes that we are working on. All of them are incident management but for different categories at different levels. The next use case that we will be working on is bank reconciliation, and then we are planning to expand into HR for onboarding and recruitment. These are unattended robots. 

We are able to integrate it with other products through APIs, which we may not have thought about. For example, there are some in-house solutions that we have for which we have built APIs, and we're able to integrate those APIs with Automation Anywhere. We didn't expect that we'll be working on that but it happened.

The ease of use for the end user and the very low complexity in trying to build a bot are the big factors for us. We are able to work on a project, identify a use case, come up with a design spec, and execute and build a bot within a span of six to eight weeks. In nine to ten weeks, we are able to go live, which reduced complexity. Once we go live, the user interface and the user experience are extremely good.

Their bot runners could be made to handle multiple payloads at the same time because if I want to run multiple parallel operations, the number of bot runners that I have to buy just keeps increasing. It is adding to the cost. However, there is a possibility that we don't need that many bot runners, and we can run multiple operations in a bot runner. This would be a great addition to have.

I have been using this solution for six months.

You get what you paid for. What it says on the tin is what you'll get inside. As a customer, you will not be disappointed. If you're thinking that you want to build rockets using Automation Anywhere, then you will be disappointed. As long as you know your business needs, the automation that you want to focus on, and you understand the product's functionalities in a good way, you will not be disappointed.

Scalability depends on how many parallel processes you want to run. A bot runner basically runs a bot. How many bots can it run? How many of these need to run in serial? How many of these need to run in parallel? This information will determine how much you have to scale. Now, if you're willing to pay a lot of money and have multiple bot runners, that means for each and every bot runner, you can have multiple processes running at the same time. So, if you are willing to pay, yes, you can scale. It depends on your budget. The product works whether you're on 1 bot or 20 bots. The product just goes off and does its thing. That's not a problem.

If it is 1 bot that you're running once a day at 10:00 in the morning, then you need one bot runner. If you have 20 processes that you're automating and these 20 things have to run throughout the day at different points in time at 10:00, 12:00, or 2:00, you can still run them with one bot runner. In those use cases, scalability is not a problem. Scalability becomes an issue when you have multiple processes. If a reconciliation process needs to run along with the general ledger balancing, month-end closing, and everything else, and all of them need to run at the same time, then you're looking at about 10 bot runners running 10 different bots at the same time. If you're willing to pay, you can get what you want, but it becomes a very expensive affair.

We have 15 to 20 people who are touching the application for various purposes. We have business analysts, developers, testers, and the external implementation team. We also have business users.

I have used both UiPath and BluePrism in my previous organizations. Automation Anywhere gives me the flexibility for both on-prem and SaaS, and the difference is not huge for me in terms of performance, security, and all that stuff. It gives me the flexibility, but honestly, on paper, all these three products pretty much do the same. There is a plus or minus 5% difference here or there, but you'll not go wrong with any of these products.

The initial setup was very straightforward. There are specific things that they ask in terms of the environments that we need to build in our typical Windows server, that is, what kind of memory and what kind of processing capability we require. I can't talk from the SaaS perspective because we have an on-prem deployment, but giving on-prem equipment based on the defined specs is pretty much child's play. There is nothing complex about it. It is very easy for developers who understand the platform. You can quickly roll out something and get it live, but you need to understand a lot of logic and the complexity behind the applications such as ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce, etc. 

We started off with an implementation partner, and our experience with them was good. They had about three people in their team, and we had our business people who were giving the requirements. We also had our technology people who were basically acting as the bridge between our business people and their developers.

We are expecting a significant ROI by the end of the year. 

From a business angle, understand what is it that you need. Where do you see inefficiencies? If you're going to fix inefficiencies that are going to be fixed as part of a larger company-wide transformation program, then use the transformation program and fix those inefficiencies as part of the existing solution. If you think that that larger transformation program is not going to touch some places or if that larger transformation program will touch some of these inefficient areas but not in the near future, and you want some immediate wins, then going in for an RPA tool is a good decision.

At the end of the day, the business needs to be aligned with why you're making the decision, and where and what is your priority? What is your sense of urgency with respect to the places where you're implementing it. For example, in my office, we are working on customer service. There is a massive transformation program going on right now, but that transformation program is touching sales, marketing, finance, and all those areas. It is not touching customer service at all, but customer service has its own inefficiencies. So, we introduced automation in customer service because it's not being touched by the transformation program, and we don't want to keep waiting to gain the ROI of whatever we can get or the reduced cost we'll get from customer service. For example, if I'm going to implement a massive cloud ERP like Oracle or SAP, then I will fix the process as part of that cloud ERP implementation and not wait for a bot to be developed.

From a technical perspective or an integration perspective, use an API to directly communicate between the apps, if you can. You don't need a bot or an RPA to do what an API can do.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for building Solutions involving RPA bots. We have implemented two standalone infrastructures each with A2019.16 Control rooms. 

Multiple Developers are working using the tools and commands in A2019 to create bots that will be deployed for clients to address their business requirements.

The infrastructure is running on the private cloud . 

The control room is running on the latest Windows server and the latest Windows SQL server is running the control room database.

Developers use VMware Virtual desktops to execute their bots. Chrome and IE browsers used by the developers.

Clients approach us to implement Automation Anywhere for three main reasons:

1: FTE reduction
2: Improving AHT 
3: Quick implementation and getting started on their RPA journey.

We have seen AA bringing immense value to the clients once operational. Bot deployment is easy and controlling Access is easy with RBAC with the recent additions. User groups and user management is on par with tools like Blue Prism & UiPath.

From a development perspective, the web-based approach is easy to deploy. The downside is that it is difficult to troubleshoot as logging on to the clients has been reduced.

It's comparatively easy to find developers who are accustomed to working with AA compared to other RPA tools.  

A2019 Control room

1: Single installer for all components and it installs all pre-requisites- Makes life easier as only admin access is required from the IT team to complete the installation
2:RBAC - Each component access can be controlled via Custom roles. I have created roles for developers, schedulers, admin, testers are all in a single control room.
3: Inbuilt credential vault with encryption is easy to implement and manage.
4:Recently included features of adding Security groups from the Active Directory is a lifesaver for the Control room administrator. Users are managed at the AD level with no overhead tasks of CR admin managing users.

A2019 Bot Agent

1: Easily installed but requires admin rights. 
2: It can be installed on a server now as the option to add multiple users is enabled in bot agent installer files

Verbose logging of bot compiling and deployment from the control room. Events occurring during compiling, pre-processing the bots should be logged in the control room or bot launcher logs.

Exported bots packages are not updated. Each package must be validated independently upon being exported from one control room to another.

Moving away from Client-server architecture to web-based deployment compromised developer experience of app reliability offered by 11.3.X flavors.

Desktop app experience >>> Web experience. Developers are not pleased. 

I have been using A2019 for 4 months.

Stick to long term releases.

Easily scalable on-premises.

Customer support is excellent and have helped on multiple occasions.Raising a ticket through through partner/support portal is very easy. Frontline engineers are quick to respond and access the issue mentioned in the ticket.

In my experience , most of the cases are resolved by frontline team and rarely get to involve their escalation team. Case resolution time differ vastly based on the complexity of the issue being reported and availability of the support engineer. 

Getting quick support/response is difficult and most of the calls are pre-scheduled. Categorizing a support ticket is crucial to get right resources for the issue. You will not like a platform engineer supporting a bot development issue and vice versa.

Enhancement requests via support requests are time consuming and might not see daylight till next minor/major upgrade.  

knowledge base articles available for troubleshooting known issues can be improved. Articles are not sorted properly and finding the correct KB for a known issue takes lot of time and effort.

UiPath, we switched due to organizational use.

Simple installation.

In-house.

Setup: A2019 is very easy. A single installer does it all.

Cost: Cheaper compared to Blue Prism and UiPath Orchestrator.

Licensing: Floating licensing 

We evaluated Blue Prism but it had a high cost.

Too frequent updates and major changes in each update is frustrating.