Automation Anywhere Reviews

Automation Anywhere has been useful to implement business solutions that were previously performed manually by the business Team.

We have been using it to automate applications such as Excel, PDF, Web applications, Windows applications, Outlook, Word documents, and more. Using it will help reduce the time and improve the efficiency of the project, and also to reduce FTE.

Our organization also uses IQ Bot and Metabot for projects that require cognitive capabilities. Also, the OCR extraction helps in reading data from PDF.

Automation Anywhere has helped customers to reduce the time and manual effort required in day to day business by automating multiple projects.

The features like IQ Bot and Metabot have helped our organization to gain business trust and provide a greater number of unique solutions to our clients for complex projects. Also, Automation Anywhere is very easy to learn and implement solutions by any developer. That gives organizations the power to automate complex and unique solutions to bring a change and drive to automation projects quickly.

Solutions which require cognitive abilities can easily be implemented using Automation Anywhere. It's great to have a tool that gives the power to automate ML/AI requirements. 

Also, the features like the terminal emulator and Active Directory that are provided by Automation Anywhere are great to implement solutions.

For improvements, I would like Automation Anywhere to add new default mail operation commands, which might help developers to automate Outlook solutions easily and effectively.

Similarly, some PDF commands can help developers to automate complex PDF automation projects and help developers to extract the PDF data more accurately and precisely. IQ Bot has some limitations that should be improved in future releases.

It would be great if the work items concept is improved; that would help the developers and support team.

The AI and ML features should be more fully explored in the future.

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

The stability is good.

Automation Anywhere's scalability is good. We are planning to use the cloud infrastructure for our project. We hope to implement projects with 100 and 200 bots in the upcoming days. 

Automation Anywhere is the best tool to scale up and increase the bots without facing many issues in the production environment. 

The customer service and the technical support team are doing good work. Whenever we face issues, the Automation Anywhere team helps and supports in resolving them.

Because of this, we have not faced many issues in the implementation of projects. I hope this continues into the future, as well.

I have also used the Blue Prism solution but it does not allow you to implement cognitive requirements. Because of this, we switched to Automation Anywhere to help clients build cognitive and AI solutions.

We had an expert team who helped with the installation and set up of the infrastructure, without any major issues. Hence, the initial setup didn't require much effort and was easier to implement.

We have implemented Automation Anywhere with the help of an expert team. 

We have saved around 90% of the time that would be required to perform tasks manually.

Now, with the implementation of the solutions, the clients are really happy to see that the time and the cost are being saved due to the automation of their projects, without any variations in the results.

The same results are being achieved in other automation projects using this product. Our company has also partnered with Automation Anywhere to deliver more solutions to different clients.

I hope other clients also get the same benefits that we have achieved in our project. In our project, we have reduced the manual effort by 90% and have also reduced the variations in results achieved using automation by 40%. I hope this percentage should increase over time so as to benefit the team more.

We use AA for automation of daily mundane tasks, which allows me to focus more on tasks that resonate with my interests. These are Excel-based daily tasks.

We also use it for:

• Automation of long, rule-driven tasks that only require some fixed mouse clicks & keystrokes. This saves time and reduces human error
• Deployed bots to work alongside human counterparts for cross-communication between legacy and new platforms.
• Automated data entry and data validation workflows for 24/7 output.
• IQ & Discovery bots for more complex use cases that require image processing & artificial intelligence.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to save human efforts on mundane tasks and shifted it to more analytical/interesting tasks.

We have saved hours so that we can spend more time on deriving insights from business, which will help us to increase our profits. 

We have leveraged automation to increase economies of scale and value-added work while reducing operating costs.

The most valuable features include:

1.  UI Automation including mouse clicks, keystrokes, opening & closing applications.
2. The OCR package allows us to read texts from files.
3. Excel automation can automate most of the tasks and even allows you to automate them without having the application on the system.
   
4. FTP automation allows for maintaining archives on FTP, as well as placing & deleting files from the FTP server.
5. Recording tasks with dynamic variables is helpful for web-based automation.
6. Mail automation allows for downloading attachments and saving emails on the system.

Improvements that can be made are:

• It should be easier to automate tasks on a virtual machine that uses a different environment altogether.
• The AA portal should not give us pop-ups every time a bot agent is updated.
• Ease of debugging & inbuilt debug messages can be improved to help find relevant bugs easily.

In the next release, they should add the Tableau tool as a package since most organizations use it for reporting & analytical purposes. Useful actions would be:

1. Opening & closing tableau
2. Downloading sheet data in Excel
3. Refreshing extracts
4. Publishing Tableau

I have been using Automation Anywhere 2019 Enterprise version for a year.

Best customer service. They heard our case and provided the solution in a short turnaround time.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is a little complex when it comes to dealing with installing certificates and the bot agent.

It is the most economically friendly and it provides you with a lot of functions.

We did not evaluate other options before selecting Automation Anywhere.

We are using AA to automate business use cases, which includes applications like SAP, ServiceNow, Outlook, etc.

We use Windows Server for the Bot Runner, Bot Developer, and Bot Creator. The Control Room is installed in an on-premises hosting. We have multiple clients here at HCL and we used AA for many clients and automated many use cases.

We provide AA setup for customers as well. We install, manage, and set up AA for customers to use, which makes it easy and can be expanded whenever they want. 

AA helped us to reduce the processing time of requests almost instantly.

One of the challenges we had was SAP Password Reset Requests, and we automated this process in AA and now the bot runs as soon as it receives an email in its inbox. AA extracts the data from email, logs into SAP, and then after resetting the password, sends the notification to the user. This all takes place within two minutes, maximum.

Another important use case involves user termination from the organization. The HR team raises a request to SNOW, and the bot receives the alert from SNOW. After checking if the termination date is met, the user is terminated from all the applications, and access is revoked by the bot.

I found that the REST API commands are very useful and easy to use. We use the REST API in multiple places, which saves a lot of time in terms of development as well as execution. We use the SNOW API and the TOPdesk API to create and update tickets in these apps.

Another great feature is MetaBot; when we automate web applications (mostly), after some time, the design or UI gets updated and we only have to recalibrate the bot. The bot accepts the changes and it starts to work again, which saves a lot of time for the developer and the business.

I would like to use VB.NET native code inside of Automation Anywhere. If there were a feature like InvokeCode in UiPath, it will help me to write native VB.NET code inside of AA. This would be a relief to the developers. 

Another feature I want to see is data conversion from one format to another. For example, I want to convert a string date time to Date Time format, or a float to an integer, etc. This will give me the flexibility to interact with other applications and help with passing correct values. I won't have to worry about the error handling from the application that I am automating.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past year and a half.

I am using both AA and UiPath, and I see both of them at par. Each tool has some advantages over the other.

The setup and licensing cost is affordable, and it is not exaggerated like UiPath.

We evaluated Blue Prism, NICE, WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. We ranked AA first pace.

I think AA is a great tool and I love working with it.

We have used RPA technology to build solutions which are across discipline and cater to end to end business process. At the start, we were performing use cases that primarily dealt with the Project Control group as most of the manual activities are based on the Excel operations which are either Macros based or involved tedious manual upload to the system in a periodic manner. Later we moved our strategy to cater to the more enhanced solutions which were primarily digital solutions involving - OCR, AI & ML. We were focusing on the Engineering Drawings which were more Unstructured & had the potential to create a Digital Workflow using the unstructured information.

Automation Anywhere has surely helped our organization to shape its Digital Journey - It was our first RPA tool which helped us to perform basic automation which created Point solutions but has added tremendous value at the early stage. We were able to scale-up fast using Automation Anywhere due to its user-friendly AI and later on IQ Bots provided the required edge to handle the unstructured data. We also tried to explore the Bot Insights which helped us to monitor the day to day Bot health and the hardware needs.

We have found both the basic Task Bot & IQ Bot very useful as the combination of both helped us to create some solutions which were End to End Business solutions. IQ bot performs the basic Data Sample set creation and Extraction of the details from the unstructured PDFs and later we have used the Business Rule engine using the IQ Bot to perform the data feed into the various Systems. Overall we were able to achieve the value using the combination. As part of our internal solution, we have also created custom Python scripting to handle the OCR failure issues surfaced due to IQ Bot product limitations

Automation Anywhere can be improved in certain areas specified in the cognitive zone where the information needs better OCR Engine + Machine Learning capabilities. Also, they can improve on the System Identified region function of the IQ Bot - Our team faced a tough time in handling that as we were not able to assign variable to System Identified Region as the IQ Bot tool wasn't allowing it. Also, we have had a certain issue while performing the WLM - Workload Management functionality, applying Queue mechanism becomes hard sometimes - Can be more intuitive for the end-users.

We have been using Automation Anywhere from the past 3.5 yrs and the product is catering to all our basic to mid-level complex requirements. We have developed multiple Bots catering to multiple disciplines. RPA Solutions are presently catering to Internal Stakeholders and we are planning to roll out for our External Clients as well.

We haven't used as such any RPA tool prior to this but yes we have used UiPath parallelly with the Automation Anywhere. Both tools are good but Automation Anywhere has an upper edge on Cognitive area as compared to UiPath.

Each RPA Tool has its own limitation & benefits - For an early started UiPath may be a better option because the license cost is less but once you Scale & Try to move to advance complex Use Cases involving Cognitive it may not help much

Yes, we have evaluated other Options but with the Tradeoff between License Cost & Functionality, we have found Automation Anywhere as the best fit for Oil & Gas Use Cases.

Nothing specific Automation Anywhere can do better in Cognitive it needs to stabilize its products. Also Cloud product is the game-changer for them A2019

The primary use case is for automating regular applications. We will get data from users, then automate that application. An example of a process that we would automate:

• We get a bank statement. 
• We would need to upload those records into the regular application. 
• We would need to update the invoice numbers into our regular applications. 
• We need to validate everything before uploading all the data.

It rectifies small things.

I make changes, but when updates happen, then I have to make those changes again. This has to be fixed from the product side, so we are not continuously making changes again after updates. It takes us four to five weeks to develop a bot and the upgrades erase a lot of that work, because it takes another two weeks of small coding changes after an upgrade has been released. 

We are looking forward to seeing additional features in version 11.3, such as the new APIs and MetaBot features. They are also adding Jenkins and AWS.

With any new upgrades, we have to make changes in the codes. To us, this means that the tool is not stable. We have been told by Automation Anywhere that this will be fixed in future releases.

This value-add product is fast growing.

We have 20 bots in production.

The technical support is fine. As soon as we raise an issue, we can get the technical support that we need. They provide the solutions to our issues.

We deployed the solution in-house.

We haven't seen ROI yet, but we will see it in the future.

We haven't faced any major issues with the tools that we are using.

We use this solution primarily for transporting data from Excel to SAP. 

This solution has decreased the time that our employees spend on manual processes. It has solved many of the problems for mundane and rule-based activities, so we can do some parallel creative work rather than taking care of these things.

The most valuable part of this solution is the import feature. We can take the data from where it is stored, in Excel, and upload it to a web site or where we need it.

The interface is user-friendly, well-developed, and straightforward.

When it comes to reading email, this solution is unstable and improvements need to be made. Specifically, it should be able to handle email based on the subject or the email sender.

This solution is quite stable for daily activities, but it has problems with reading email and improvements need to be made.

For the version that I have and what I'm using it for, the scalability is very good.

Technical support for this solution is very good. The response is very good and they come back to us very fast.

We did not use another solution prior to this one. Our employees were getting bored of doing the same thing, which is why we started looking into automation.

The initial setup of this solution was a little difficult. When we had trouble, we started calling the technical support team and they solved it. It was a little messy in the beginning.

We have just started using this solution, so we have not seen ROI yet.

We had heard great things about this solution so we chose it without evaluating other options.

This is a user-friendly solution that is all drag-and-drop, and very good.

When a new version of this solution is released, it would be very helpful if the vendor would give an explanation as to everything that is new. Simply releasing it is not a good idea.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our journey starts from discovering and understanding what process to automate. That's where our deep domain and process expertise come into the picture. We leverage process mining technologies over there, partnerships with Celonis and TimelinePI. We take advantage of that. The journey continues from there to designing and developing automations. Automation Anywhere is the RPA platform we use for creating the bots in automation and along with that we also use many of the technologies including AI and ML. 

Toward this life cycle, we have a very structured approach of governing, monitoring, and tracking. Insights we gain from this governance, we apply towards automation strategy and implementations. We've done this for many clients across the globe. We are happy to share those experiences with some of you as well.

The focus on usability and user experience is bang on. Addressing several personas and making it easy for every persona to adopt and embrace is the spot on focus. That's an area that has a lot more room to improve. In the absence of that, the skills and expertise in the industry are going to struggle and if you need broader adoption, which has maximum potential, the persona-based user experience is a focus and I'd say Automation Anywhere is already working on.

In terms of onboarding, we step back and think about how to leverage this technology. We have created some IP around this and leverage our deep learnings from several implementations. We apply the process and domain expertise and determine which process needs to be automated by leveraging what technology and what ROI will you get out of it.

We leverage the process insights technology, we bring that to the table, we understand what processes need to be automated and we apply the relevant technologies. Automation Anywhere is one of the many we apply in transforming across automating the entire process end to end.

Number one thing when you're trying to automate, you need to start thinking beyond productivity gains and think about other value drivers such as improved business outcomes and superior customer experiences. The creation of a bot is only one half of the journey. The other half of the journey is understanding what to automate, what technologies to use and having a digital workforce and a governance platform around it is the other half of the journey. That's the one big learning for all of us from the many implementations we have done.

I would rate it around eight to nine. We have personally seen the platform really mature from several implementations, from scalability to availability, to API programmability. The vision and the journey Automation Anywhere is on is phenomenal.

In our company, if you look at the SAP security area, there are a lot of user requests. There's a confusion around the rules. With Automation Anywhere, we can increase the automation capabilities and automate all the user-provisioning in that area.

It's definitely useful. I went through the enterprise client and the Control Room and using it, a lot of processes can be automated. The SAP integrations look to be very useful. We have a big SAP shop, so a lot of processes can be automated using that integration.

There are three parts to the savings: 

1. the number of hours saved
2. the dollar amount saved
3. how streamlined the process is.

A manual process can be one where an email is sent and then another email is sent to get the approval, and they have to wait one or two weeks until that email comes back. That full manual process can take three weeks while the automated task takes about 30 minutes.

Ease of use is one thing that definitely first comes to mind when I think of Automation Anywhere. The tools are built in a fairly straightforward way. The documentation is really good and a Knowledge Base is available on every topic.

The bot creation process is very straightforward compared to other tools I have used. ServiceNow has a workflow which is a drag-and-drop activity itself, and then you configure it. Here they are going in that direction too: flow, design. It's really good.

The number of activities available to automate is amazing. There are 500-plus so there are a lot of possibilities with that. I can automate a lot of processes.

I would like to see more bots available right out-of-the-box in the SAP area. For example, if you take the overall OTC in our organization, we have to contact 15 teams. Even if we provide one big bot for the OTC, it won't work. It will not be used by one person. So if there could be more specific bots out-of-the-box, that would be really helpful. 

An example would be a credit check. There might be one there but I'm just giving an example where it would be specifically targeting a single process. 

More Meta Bots would also be good because they are reusable. If we had more of them that would make it faster for whomever is working on them and make the process more seamless. They would be able to build the bots very fast.

As of now, we have one or two instances of Automation Anywhere, so I'm not yet able to comment on its stability. Once we install it in production, with multiple processes running, multiple bots running, we'll have to see how it performs overall, how scalable it is.

To scale from pilot to the number of bots we're currently using went pretty quickly. I have talked to other teammates who are working on Automation Anywhere and developing the bots. I've heard really good feedback on that. It's within weeks, and sometimes days, depending on the complexity.

Doing a simple password reset went really fast. If they are doing something on an OTC process or a P2P process or integrating with SAP, it will be a long process. First, you have to get approval from all the business owners and understand the process. That takes time. But the technical aspect - once you have everything in place and you know what you are going to do - the coding itself, is pretty fast.

I have not yet had to contact technical support.

In terms of switching to a new solution, as a company, if we grow out of a solution or it's not at a level that will help us with all scenarios within the company, then they will usually look to change.

There are many factors they look at, such as return on investment and cost. They will look at all the parameters, but the main parameter will be that it should be very useful to all the different teams. It also needs to be scalable since we have about 50,000 employees.

The setup was straightforward.

We managed it ourselves.

You will usually see return on investment easily see because of the depth of things you can automate with it is huge.

My way measuring ROI of an automated process is that first, even before starting any automation, I will see what the input is for the process, how the process works, what the output from the process is, and I'll measure how much time it takes, end-to-end in the manual process.

There will be some initial investment ahead of time and, after that, everything is a return on investment. Based on the number of minutes it takes manually, versus automation, the reduced amount of time will be the savings that I calculate, per request. I'll put a dollar amount to it based on who the user is. If they are, for example, paid $50 per hour, and the automation saves 40 minutes, that's a savings of $33 per request.

Every time we do an automation, we definitely note how many requests it processes. For example, in ServiceNow we count every automation request that goes through, without manual intervention. It writes to a table and we go there and run a report on the table. Straight away, I know my return on investment from that part of the automation.

As you understand more and apply the tool to the processes, you will start to leverage the tool more quickly. 

I have looked at other tools, like UiPath. While I have not completely tested them, Automation Anywhere definitely has ease of use and a strong community available.

I have taken the developer courses and done certification in the Automation Anywhere University. It's really good and helpful and I was able to grasp things quickly by using it. I installed the Community Edition on my laptop and started using it straight away. It's very good.

I would rate the product at nine out of ten because of the number of uses. We have automated 30 to 40 processes. Those kinds of things have been very easy to automate using Automation Anywhere. We didn't need any other platforms. We were able to straight-out build all the bots. 

As I said, there could be more on the SAP integration side. Also, knowledge of the actual process of automating is not readily available outside. If they could build up their Knowledge Base more that would be helpful. That's where the real investment for the company is, not in automating the IT team's requirements. For example, if I automate an application for my IT team, that's one thing, but if I automate a business process and I'm able to provide them analysis and provide a report on something that the business really needs, that will help to deliver on the business side. There's a difference.