Automation Anywhere Reviews

We used Automation Anywhere to create and integrate a solution that is suitable for a dynamic application. We had a business challenge where things were dynamic in terms of the environment, and we need to integrate into a CICD system.

It reduced cost and effort significantly. Yearly, our organization saved $14,000. The company started to save more, and increased efficiency in the field of automation then started to pioneer.

Within less time than it used to take, we can automate a complete Apex task. Being able to do this is how we managed to win the work for our client. The client was amazed and suggested the solution throughout the organization.

Complex tasks can be automated easily and reliably.

I feel the tool has to provide deeper insights for debugging issues, considering both internal and external factors.

The image recognition functionality needs to improve so that we can work faster.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for one year and eight months.

We were highly attracted to this product due to its scalability. This is because we started to work within a CICD environment.

The technical support is excellent.

Previously, we used the UFT solution provided by Micro Focus. It did well with us for a couple of years but as the application keeps on growing and becoming more complex, UFT has shifted from pros to cons. That's where we shifted to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented through a vendor team and their level of expertise was excellent.

Our advice is that anybody interested in this product should negotiate product bundles in order to reduce the cost of installation and setup. This product will ultimately help you to innovate and excel, and we recommend it.

We evaluated other options like UiPath, but we got what we needed that was specific to our requirements, so we onboarded AA.

I believe Automation Anywhere bundles everything for generic needs and in my case, everything was covered in these generic bundles.

We have been using Robotic Process Automation for the configuration of newly issued cloud environments and building cloud IT solutions.

Automation Anywhere Taskbots are being used to build Oracle Cloud environments by leveraging Excel files containing the configuration details. The Automation Anywhere Taskbots will scrape the Excel files in a dynamic way to configure the product using the most appropriate method for the data provided.

The Taskbots effectively match equivalent human inputs, rather than configuring from the backend.

AA has helped to accelerate the initial delivery stage of projects, wherein repetitive tasks were originally completed by consultants. This was an unnecessarily costly exercise, as this did not require the level of skill of a consultant.

The skillset of the consultant lies within gathering the correct requirements and providing the configuration details of these requirements in the predefined Excel files. Having the consultant also perform the arduous and repetitive configuration exercise was not efficient.

The code history functionality is the most valuable feature, although this could be improved upon with better tracing abilities and UI changes.

Overall, the commands provided have enough range to complete almost any task, with creative out-of-the-box thinking required sometimes for workarounds.

The simplicity and base nature of the commands are where the value lies; in combination, the variables, error handling, if/else, loop, etc, can produce significantly variable codes.

None of the commands are unique to Automation Anywhere, which allows beginners to leverage external knowledge.

Where minor but widespread changes are made to the cloud product being operated upon (e.g. a banner was added, or dropping all DIVs down 1), changing the cloned search values (Taskbot) individually was incredibly time consuming, and it shut down the RPA service until it was fixed.

To counter this, it would be valuable to have a 'mass update' of search values for cloned objects, in a similar way to Metabots.

Better tracing of 'if' and 'else' statements and their corresponding 'end' statements would be helpful.

Vertical connecting lines would be appropriate within the code, and a collapse/expand feature for code blocks would be ideal.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for 16 months.

Stability-wise, this product is good.

The scalability is reasonable.

No previous RPA solution was used before this one.

Other options may have been considered, but am unaware of which.

I use Automation Anywhere in the banking and private sector.

I work in a private company, where I do a lot of processes like MasterCard, MIZA, and ATM errors.

For example, in the case of MasterCard, I download a lot of daily files from the Express MasterCard program, I upload the files to a special server, and then I activate the downloaded files. I take a copy of the files and paste it in the folder of the MasterCard on the date of the download and in the end, I send an email after completing the task.

In the case of an ATM Error, this task is very important because through it you can get all errors in the ATM and know the cause of the malfunction and whether or not you need human intervention to fix the malfunction. Most banks need this process to help solve ATM problems.

Automation Anywhere has helped my company with a lot of things such as technical support and answering our questions. Because of the presence of Automation, it helped my company deal with banks in this field and to know many important processes in banks and private companies.

It also helped me in the way of thinking and dealing in the local and global markets. Knowing everything that is new, developing it and developing my company as well, and working to develop this field in the entire Middle East.

The development of the company from Automation Anywhere V11 to a2019 was valuable. I found many important and new features, like changing the way we write code and programming. It became much easier and very flexible in version 2019A. It became very easy to use and the recording was also good. Excel became very good too.

Bot Agent is the best thing that happened in this upgrade in Automation anywhere A2019.

It is easy to handle, easy to use, and fast to connect to the control room.

The areas in which the product and service must be improved are in the government sector and ministries such as the Ministry of Education and Health.

From my point of view, we need a lot of features that must be added in future releases, for example, improving the special dashboard in bot insight, reducing the duration session from 20 min to 5 min, and added SAP API command.

I would like to have the ability to work on a remote desktop connection, run the recording on it and use all commands.

I've been using v11 for two years and currently, I've been using a2019 for a year. 

The stability is pretty good.

Scalability is excellent.

Their support is good.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was easy.

We did the deployment in-house.

We mostly use it on engineering processes. We also use it for finances in SAP — uploading, invoice creation, etc. But we have mostly focused on our engineering processes.

An example from the finance area is when we need to invoice a customer. We open our SAP account and upload all the data into SAP, create an invoice, and send a notice to the finance team that the process has been completed. They then move the process further along. It's a daily type of operation, whenever such requests come.

We are using the on-premise version because the cloud version (A2019) is not out yet.

One of the ways it has improved our organization is regarding working on Saturdays and Sundays. Obviously, employees don't like to come in on those days. When a user is not there and we want certain processes to be done, we don't expect the engineers to sit there and do them. We can schedule things via email so a bot runs on Saturdays and Sundays. That results in a reduction of man-hours. 

It automates all the processes which do not require human intervention, things which are very repetitive. That means we can give more important work to the engineers now, rather than asking them to do repetitive tasks.

We have these invoices which gets generated every month. We have to enter these invoice details into the stacks. It is a tedious task that is done by our finance team. We have automated the process of entering the details into the stack, and t reduces a lot of manual work.

The best feature of AA is the scheduling and the triggering part of it. Whenever an email comes in we can just use Automation Anywhere. We don't have to sit there. The unattended bots of Automation Anywhere are something which we find very useful.

It does not require much onboarding skills. It's easy to train anyone. We just ask them to apply logic.

One very important thing would be more support for Citrix automation. We want something to support Cisco. Citrix automation is not a very good tool. We are not able to use it properly. Even if we go through a remote desktop connection, it goes along only with the keystrokes and image recognition.

Also, when we are moving from one version to another version, it's very difficult because most of the features stop working. They should first test everything and then release the new version. For example, there's a system variable known as the Excel Cell Row. It gives you the current row of the inner loop. When going from version 11.1 to 11.3, this variable was suddenly not supported, and most of our bots were dependent on that. Everything went down and we had to start from scratch. If you do not have a developer who has done this, it's going to be a big problem in terms of the time it will take.

We need the migration from version 11 to A2019 to go smoothly. Our developers cannot be expected to enter the code again.

I'm not sure about the stability because there are a lot of upgrades all the time. Whenever we move from version to version, like 11.1 to 11.3, if we have ten bots we have to go around and test all ten bots. And in case something is not working, we have to make changes. If they support a migration utility properly, I think it's a great tool.

The scalability is great. Nearly a 100 bots have been deployed in finance, HR, and mostly engineering. We will be implementing bots going forward in procurement.

It has taken us two years to scale to our current number of bots because we spent a lot of time on training at first.

Technical support from Automation Anywhere is great. I have written to Automation Anywhere support many times and there is a great response from them. Even if they do not have the exact answer, they always say, "You can try this option or you can try this option."

We started with Automation Anywhere. The biggest reason our company chose Automation Anywhere was because we found it more reliable for our operations than any other. Also, the response from Automation Anywhere is really good.

We started with version 10.7. When we started, initially downloading the Control Room and those types of things was a bit complex. We had the user manual, but I don't think it's very good. It misses many points. When we missed something, we needed to contact Automation Anywhere support, so there were some delays in the process. 

Then we moved to version 11.1, which was more complex and requires more of your system space.

Overall, the other process is a bit complex. They have said they're coming out with the cloud version. I think that will be a bit easier. 

The development process took us about six months.

We have a team in our company which is responsible for RPA. It's something which we do internally for our company.

There has been a great return on investment. We are interested in saving manual engineer man-hours. So far, we have saved $100,000.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism. We chose Automation Anywhere because of how well it suited it our office.

Automation Anywhere is easier to use. With drag and drop, we don't need the uploading skills, etc. Everything is just there. You can just drag and drop, then just go ahead and do it. With UiPath, it was a little difficult to understand the process. Also Automation Anywhere has email automation.

I would rate the solution at seven out of ten. One main drawback is that migration issue. Another thing I would like to see is support for all the other scripting languages, like Python, JavaScript and all.

Go through the Automation Anywhere courses properly to be aware of all the system variables and all the features it has. Then proceed with the development phase. Until you're clear on the basic things you cannot do anything in the tool. You need to know those things.

I have done the Masters course on Automation Anywhere University. I have a Masters Certification from them. Their courses are pretty interesting. At the end of the Masters course, we had an interview on the course itself. There were a lot of informative things and it was a great experience.

Next year, we should be moving into cognitive document processing.

We primarily use this for customer data management.

We use this tool to help perform transformations on our data.

This solution has helped our customers to work with large data. They want to perform data transformations to assist them in making decisions. Our customers are very happy with this tool.

The most valuable feature is the ability to transform data into clusters.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see a plug-and-play tool for NLP programming.

This solution needs to have more support for big data, including decision-making abilities.

The stability of this solution has improved. We have less than one percent downtime in a day, so it is stable.

This solution scales based on licenses and the number of processes. The bots, themselves, are very mature and can scale. The bots are plug-and-play.

We don't have very many issues so we have rarely used technical support. I would say that my experience with them has been satisfactory. 

We had a lot of manual processes that we wanted to automate. We also had a lot of industry-specific automation tools, but we were not doing bot development. 

I was not involved in the initial setup of this solution, but I have been responsible for some of the updates. The update process is not complex. 

We used a local company to assist us with the implementation of this solution. 

I have seen customers save resources by using this tool. One of them replaced two hundred users with automation.

The licensing fees are approximately $10,000 USD for between five and ten users.

We were already familiar with this solution because we had recommended it for customers in past project proposals. We had also helped them with implementation.

We are having a very good experience with this product. It has capabilities for artificial intelligence, analytical programming, and machine learning. Once you understand your data, you can understand your customer.

In the long run, we see that Automation Anywhere will have a very good place in the market. Data is very important, and we feel that this tool will be a market leader.

This solution is very mature compared to some of the others in the market.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this product is BOE (Bill of Entry affecting imports in India) analysis and processing.

Previously, we were checking the inventory with checklists and two kinds of Excel validations, and sending the mismatches to have them reassessed in a manual process. Before four of us were working on the data reliability, and really three people were completely dedicated to this task full-time. We were repeatedly taking the Excel inventory and the Excel invoices we are getting from the different vendors, and then we would check all the attributes of the data. This would mean we had to review invoice numbers, invoice dates, currency codes — so many little things needed to be validated. The detail also had to be examined like the number of items, the SKU (Stock Keeping Units) numbers and check those against the item names by validating with a checklist.

So after, we created a bot with Automation Anywhere for that issue to speed up processing. Now the automated checking time is reduced to 15 minutes. That's all.

The product has improved our organization cost-wise and bank savings in transactions. Everything has been changed for the better. It is easier to track various domains, various kind of devices, and control recording of all the process. The quality of the results are improved, we spend less time and resources, so the time we save can be spent on other things. This all reduces the time spent on menial activities and reduces the cost of processing. It is very important that we have increased accuracy and control over data errors.

The best part of this solution is that this product has more capabilities than our previous solution with Excel. The error handling and sending mail — all those additional features — give us more control when using Automation Anywhere with less time and effort.

In the future, I think we would like to see more capability for integration and more customization with some features. For example, email records should have their subject like email that's been downloaded. Because it is not doing this, we now need a separate solution for this based on the subject line. Integrations that we'd like to see are that the product is more friendly with languages like Python and JavaScript. These are the type of integration we are expecting. Also, it should be more friendly with Excel commands which it does not seem to agree with or have so that we can customize the output.

The product is not working sometimes with the methods we prefer. If it is going to be a flexible product it should include some more common things. There are so many small issues with the product it is not as good as it could be.

We really have had no stability issues ourselves, or actually there were some minor things. There has been nothing we could not resolve.

As far as scalability, it is one of the most important things for us. We were looking for that only when we went to upgrade our process. We want to automate any of the processes that we can by using Automation Anywhere. It is the whole point for us using the product.

We have never had to call into technical support.

We were not involved in this decision to adopt this product.

For the implementation, almost everything was a little complicated. We faced issues actually but everything was manageable and then we addressed the issues and the initial setup was fully completed.

Mostly the issues had to do with security. The product was new to us and we had to set everything up for the first time so we had to learn about some things, like how to deploy the security features correctly. That is the kind of issue we faced as a learning curve.

During our onboarding, we had some issues and during integrations, we were having various small issues. But the reason for all of that is this was a new technology for us and we had to learn something about it. We learned by working with the product and all the integration issues and security things have all been resolved.

We did not use an external integrator, reseller, or a consultant. We implemented the product ourselves.

Our return on investment is that it costs us less. One of the problems with some licensing is if you have six employees and later 27 people are working, your cost can go up even if nothing extra is used. Now we need one developer's license only. One license and it is covered. There are more problems if you have to purchase one license per user. For example, if five people never work with the product and two of us work daily we are charged for the minutes for the CPU. It is not wasted.

The pricing strategy is one license, one creator. It is more complicated than that depending on the options you choose.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight.

When we update to the newer version, maybe it will have what we want and it will be better. It could be a ten if it were a perfect partner for us without any errors or had all the features we would like.

This is a very good product, but like managing other software and solutions, issues, bugs, and all various activities, you see the things that could be better. Obviously we think users will be satisfied by your outcome with using Automation Anywhere as we have had success. But right now it is an eight.

We use this solution to automate the following task:

• Open MS-Excel-File from Folder
• Update the data with keystroke-command
• Wait for calculation of the result
• Save the file
• Loop the command above for each file in the folder
• Send email-notification to the task owner
• Send Quality Check to task owner (.pdf-command)
  
• Error handling (where applicable)

This solution gives us greater employee satisfaction because manual recurring work has been reduced. We also have a savings of manpower, independently of office-hours thanks to bot scheduling.

We redesigned tasks before the implementation of bots, and have higher stability through standardized Bot Runner.

We find several functions valuable, including:

• The Files/Folder command makes it easy to work off each file in a folder. I don't know how else to do this command.
• The Variable Operation makes it easy to work with variables. The system variables catalogue is helpful.
• The Send eMail Command helps with the flow of information.

In the Microsoft Excel features, it needs a command to wait for a calculation to complete.

In Microsoft Excel, why isn't it possible to share a session in different tasks? It's complicated to program all of the commands in the same tasks (loss of overview).

The Filter function only supports four commands (Mouse/Key/Delay).

In the Optical Overview for the Loop command, an if/else would be helpful.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

It takes a lot of effort to build up the internal infrastructure/topics like Virtual Machine/Security/development-Governance/Usecase-Management.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Our use cases for this solution are all related to Telecommunication Companies (Telcos) because these are our prime customers. We also use this solution to automate the support system.

Some examples of use cases are service creation, service deletion, getting complaint details, ticket booking, and ticket updates. We have created unattended bots to handle these processes.

We have found that the automation bots we have developed give great savings in terms of higher productivity and efficiency. We are able to provide value-added to our customers because these processes were done manually, not automatically. It has improved our customer satisfaction.

This most valuable features of this solution are the drag-and-drop interface, and it is easy to code.

We have begun using the IQ Bot, and while we are not using as much of the document analysis functionality, I'm sure that we will be using these features for automating more processes for our customers.

Change management can be an issue because as applications change, the bots need to be modified.

There are some business areas for which this tool is not capable of doing, such as in the areas of graphically-based input. The image capturing of the network management systems is not up to date for all of our customers' processes. We are seeking some kind of improvement in this light. We have use cases that the tool does not currently support, and we will be able to do many more if this capability is also covered.

Technical support for this solution could be improved if they categorized according to severity. At the highest degree of severity, one dedicated person should work to resolve it as early as possible.

It would be helpful to have a repository of use cases that are created by different customers. They could be accessed from the Bot Store. For us, it would help if we had access to use cases specifically for Telcos.

We have a lot of problems installing for some customers. In particular, if it is a distributed environment then we face challenges. For example, the database should be installed in a network other than where the control is installed. It can be very time-consuming, and support for these situations is very important.

The stability of the bots is generally good. Sometimes, the applications get changed for business reasons, so we have to recapture the data that was used to develop the bot. For this reason, we do sill have some challenges.

I don't think that we will have any challenges with scalability. We started in a small way and I'm sure when we really require it, we will be able to scale.

Technical support for this solution is good, and they have provided us with resolutions to our problems. We are partners, so naturally, our support systems are connected.

Normally we need to wait for a message from the technical support team, and then we have to capture screenshots and do some monitoring. We also need to do some analysis. This makes for a huge gap in resolving an issue.

We do have a customer with a technical issue that was taking quite a long time because of their Oracle integration. There was a very long gap in time before resolution, so the customer was a little bit unhappy about it. They have to be able to foresee these types of use cases and ensure that they have a stable tool that is able to cater to my new ones.

There are some complexities with the initial setup of this solution. Most of our installations are done in our client's network environment, and there are challenges because there are two or three parties involved. Our IT team, the customer's IT team, and Automation Anywhere are involved. With the different stakeholders, we have to ensure that all of them are in sync and able to complete the installation on time.

We have seen ROI. In fact, before starting automation we performed an initial feasibility analysis which resulted in our proceeding with the implementation. Most of our deployments see ROI between six and nine months.

I will be focusing more on the artificial intelligence and analytics part of this tool that they are bringing in.

For anybody considering this type of solution, I would first suggest that they look at what kinds of processes they are trying to automate, and then look at the right tool. It depends a lot on what the process is. For standard ones, this is a mature tool so they can use it. However, for a very mixed set of processes then you look at the specific tools for those types of automation.

This solution is good, but there are still more features to add. There are some use cases that I cannot handle, otherwise, the solution would be perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.