Automation Anywhere Reviews

I highly depend on the product for automation processes on most of our organization systems. 

It has been able to simplify most of the tasks and projects from the creation of bots that perform most duties. Our team members have focused on more productive duties that require human input leaving less operative duties to robots. 

Service delivery has improved and our customers are very happy since they can be served at faster speeds by robots. It has created a conducive working environment that has overseen our workforce team increasing production.

Automation Anywhere has led to faster growth in our organization. We have increased our sales volume and ensured that the current international threshold. We have created robots to undertake critical roles and left some duties under the labor force team. It has streamlined workflow infrastructure and sped things up in our company. The deployment cost of Automation Anywhere is relatively low when compared to other RPA platforms. It has secured our data and given us very effective cloud services. An increase in production has enabled our teams to focus more on quality and fulfilling customer demands.

The Robotic Process Automation tool is very powerful and most useful in our organization. It has enabled our system management teams to design robots that fit most programs. Cloud operation features are very convenient and have lead to faster deployment processes. It has created a conducive collaboration feature that has led to better teamwork among our team members. The creation of most applications in our company has been done from the programming interface and they have been very effective in running our business programs.

The current version is very effective and I have no recommendation for improvement. Since we deployed Automation Anywhere is has never failed in functionality. It has led to faster growth of our enterprise and lead to increased productivity. 

Automation of most services has led to faster service delivery and given our organization an opportunity to win over many customers. 

The next version could have more data storage capacity that can be customized to sustain different workloads. I am satisfied with most features overall and I am very proud of this Software.

I've used the solution for two years.

This platform has has highly increased performance across the entire organization. Production has increased leading to faster growth.

The customer support team has been very supportive since we deployed it.

Positive

I have not used a different solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented through a vendor and they were very supportive and had a high level of experience.

It has contributed to a positive ROI.

The setup cost is relatively low and is affordable while offering a quick ROI. 

I explored other options, such as UiPath, but have settled on Automation Anywhere.

I primarily use Automation Anywhere for:

1. SAP Automation using DLL MetaBots.
2. Salesforce Automation using REST APIs.
3. Citrix Automation.
4. Teradata Automation.
5. Oracle Application Automation using MetaBots.
6. Automate Mainframe application.

Details: Salesforce Automation

Automating the salesforce application to create the case ID and update the chatter field accordingly using the API.

Through the Bot, we are processing the case number with all of the required operations and at last, changing the case status with the API.

Environment:

We are developing the Bot in the dev environment first, and later testing is performed in the UAT environment. If everything looks fine then we move it into production.

AA brings a lot of benefits for our organization in a number of different ways.

I could say that many of the Salesforce activities are now replaced by bots, like creating the case ID number, uploading the attachment in the Chatter feed object, and many more.

Earlier users were converting the unstructured data from the PDF into the structured format to process the task but now, this activity is replaced by IQ Bot. It reads the unstructured data from the PDF and processes the task smoothly. Basically, we are dealing more with the invoice PDF to read the unstructured data.

I believe everyone is aware of the Jira application, which is used for issue tracking and project management. Now, all the Jira activities are replaced by the bots. Whenever any user is logging any issue through Jira, the Bot automatically assigns the ticket to the respective individuals, which saves a lot of time. In a simple way, I can say the Bot has replaced our Jira monitoring team.

From my point of view, IQ Bot is the most valuable feature in AA. It is a type of cognitive bot designed to support, as well as learn from business users and enable them to experience the power of advanced artificial intelligence technologies. Integrated with the Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA, the IQ Bot offers enterprise massive gains in productivity, as it includes competency in automating complex tasks involving unstructured data.

The REST API is also a very valuable feature in AA. Using this, we can automate the web application through the API and execute it in the background in a fraction of time.

MetaBot is also a valuable feature in AA. Using this, we can run the DLL of any application and also develop the process in offline mode. If there any minor changes in the screen then we can avail of the calibrate feature of MetaBot.

It would be great if there will be a built-in machine learning model available in the AA, so the developer can directly map it with their task and train the model accordingly. Training and testing the model can be achieved using these features.

I have been using the Automation Anywhere solution for the past five years.

Stability-wise, Automation Anywhere is excellent.

The scalability is excellent.

I have had an awesome experience with the service and technical support team.

I still remember that initially, there were four or five times where I had raised a support ticket. I got the optimal solution and each time, I received a positive and quick response from the technical support team. I really appreciate their patience and effort.

Fortunately, I have started my career in the RPA field, and that too with the Automation Anywhere tool.

The initial setup is average in terms of difficulty.

We implemented using an in-house team.

I feel the cost of licensing is very high for the A2019 version. There is nothing much to say about the setup cost.

I have been trained in Blue Prism as well, but I feel a more friendly environment in AA.

As of now, I am using the 11.3v of AA, and whatever improvement is required I believe it is already taken care of in the A2019 version.

We have started doing migration of bot in A2019 and have seen that many new features have been added in the latest version of AA. Nonetheless, I can say that AA can expand its features and functionalities in the Artificial Intelligence area.

Apart from licensing costs, I don't have any concerns. I would suggest everyone go with this product and avail all the features wisely.

Our primary use case is for building RPA automations on this platform to automate and execute business processes. There are various use cases implemented for various end-users by our firm and the environment infrastructure is complex and stretched across multiple systems. Financial processes such as journal posting, invoice processing, PO and non-PO order processing are automated with the help of Automation Anywhere across a spectrum of applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, and many other financial applications and across various domains.

Business process automation has improved the efficiency and accuracy of processes and reduced manual efforts which can be utilized in value addition for the firm. Basically, when mechanical processes are automated with the help of the RPA platform Automation Anywhere, then users are able to reduce FTE hours spent on doing that work and instead can focus on driving the business growth and value addition to self and the firm. Automation Anywhere has been instrumental in helping our organization achieve this for our clients.

SAP GUI Integration commands are highly useful while working with SAP applications and facilitate easy use of the software. This feature has been recently incorporated within the software and we have been using it to interface with SAP systems in development as well as production. The Meta Bot feature is also highly useful where the Automation Anywhere platform is able to create scripts with inbuilt error handling capability and can perform the same function over and over without room for technical errors.

Excel functionalities, the macro interface can be improved in the next release of RPA platform Automation Anywhere. Functionalities such as maneuvering on the excel worksheets, increased capability to manipulate formulae, and other Excel functionalities will give Automation Anywhere and edge in the RPA platform category since most financial applications use a lot of Excel and macro sheets for their calculations and postings. This will not only help the developer in saving time to develop simple keystrokes but also make the final bot much more stable and robust. 

I have been using AA for two years.

It is very stable and robust with the latest version.

This solution is scalable.

We have had reasonable good experience with technical support team who regularly assist us with any product issues in a timely manner and professionally.

I have always been using Automation Anywhere.

Straightforward.

In-house.

This information is with project senior leadership.

Licensing is pretty straightforward with Automation Anywhere since creator licenses are unlimited and free if we select a certain package. Setup cost and pricing is also very reasonable which helped us in making all client projects economically viable

We evaluated options such as UiPath and Blue Prism.

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.