Automation Anywhere Reviews

I, being a Robotic Process Automation Developer, extensively use various Automation Anywhere products on daily basis. I use Automation Anywhere for end-to-end implementation of processes for clients, as well as my organization.

We have many use cases. One of them is from the marketing department. Every organization needs to market their products and services to get future clients. The marketing people used to mail the prospective clients one by one manually, as per their mailing list. They used to spend approximately one minute on each email. We created a bot that helps the department in sending emails to prospects with product information, service information, brochures, etc. 

Now, the department needs only to specify the content file and an Excel file having email IDs, and the rest is done by the bot. It sends approximately 500 emails within 10 minutes. That makes the process of sending emails extremely fast, including customized content.

Automation Anywhere has helped save many man-hours in my organization by letting us automate monotonous and repetitive tasks. Let's take an example of procurement, to Purchase (P2P) Process in SAP S/4 Hana.

This task requires an employee to manually verify the invoice, feed data into SAP, Park Invoice, Validate Line Items, and generate MIRO. This takes approximately 10 minutes per invoice and that doesn't require any human intelligence. It is just a tedious task. Instead, we implement this solution using Automation Anywhere.

We used the Automation Anywhere IQ Bot to extract data from invoices.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise is used to automate email, for data entry into SAP, 3-Way Match in SAP, as well as MIGO & MIRO Generation in SAP. This frees up employee's time as well as increases the accuracy of the work.

I am inclined towards features such as Automation Anywhere Bot Store, Automation Anywhere Enterprise Client, Recorders, and Scheduling with the Auto-Login Feature.

Automation Anywhere Bot Store; The Bot Store is an online library where anybody can find different types of pre-developed, production-ready bots. Being production-ready and easily accessible saves development time. All bot submissions to the bot store pass through strict security checks, which makes them secure to download and deploy.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise Client; The Automation Anywhere client has 500+ commands to perform various tasks. It has a user-friendly workbench and UI. The most important part is the scriptless development, where you just drag and drop the command and you are ready to run it.

Recorders; Recorders make automating desktop applications, as well as web applications, very reliable and easy to implement. Think of creating a bot to extract data from a webpage in less than 30 mins and it can be run by pressing a button daily. It makes tasks easy to finish. 

Scheduling with Auto-Login Feature; Automation Anywhere has the most user-friendly way to schedule a bot. Scheduling is so accurate in Automation Anywhere that we don't need to worry if the task will be deployed at the specified time or not. I personally manage 30+ schedules and each runs at its set time. Scheduling comes with an awesome Auto-Login feature. This feature logs into locked Windows even when the system has a disclaimer message. It makes scheduling reliable and accurate.

For me, IQ Bot needs to be improved. It has great capabilities and works really well for fully structured and spotless documents. When we try to process structured documents but with some little pen marks, improper partitions, or faded documents, IQ Bot fails to extract data properly out of them. Typical Indian supplier invoices are hard to process through IQ Bot.

I would love to see a package for Regular Expressions with various sub-commands such as regex builder and regex replace.

OAuth2.0 native support should be added in future releases. From a security point of view, there is work that is needed.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for more than 30 months.

Stability is great If you follow the recommended hardware and software. If you do not meet the requirements then it sometimes creates problems. So, the hardware should be up to the mark for a seamless experience.

The product is highly scalable. Scaling is easy. We started with the Marketing department and within the next three months, we were able to deploy bots for six more departments.

Automation Anywhere has a superb support team. They are prompt in responding to queries based on urgency. If I log a ticket with a production-level issue, they quickly respond and help to solve the problem.

The overall experience with support has been great. They even follow up to see if the issue has been solved after giving the solution.

We did not use another similar product. We started our RPA journey with Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward. Automation Anywhere has descriptive documents to guide in installing the application on the server. Initially, I was the only person starting the RPA journey in my organization. I needed to set up the infrastructure, develop the bots, and give support as well.

Installing the application on the server was very easy. All credit goes to excellent documentation.

We implemented it through our in-house team.

With the newer cloud version of Automation Anywhere product, the setup cost has been cut down because the customer doesn't need to invest in new hardware.

Automation Anywhere is flexible in terms of costing and licensing.

We evaluated only one other vendor, which is UiPath.

Automation Anywhere seemed easy to work with, in our initial journey of RPA. So we choose it.

The product is promising and is successful. You should start your Automation journey with simpler processes and step-by-step, move towards bigger and more complex problems. They have a great support team and the product's community is active as well. This will help to make your automation journey seamless.

When we started using Automation Anywhere, it was the elimination of mundane tasks, to free up employees who were doing repetitive tasks, and to ensure they could do better quality work. So, we started off with the finance department, where we permitted our accounts payable, as in the billing process. Now, we have slowly moved on to other departments, like HR, quality, and projects.

Since our implementation, I can vouch for the fact that it is very easy to use. You do not need to know a lot of coding, even the business users, who have virtually no idea of coding, can easily operate it. They can run their bots and have the analysis ready for higher management. This is something which provides a great ease of use, and also in part why it is scalable.

Initially, once you have set up the solution and the implementation is done, then it doesn't take too long to scale up bots from one to a 100. Other than that, the professional services team (the customer support team and customer service manager) is committed to your success. This is a good sign, as they help us to achieve our business goals.

If it is in the cloud, then you have a lot of scope of doing it even faster because you spend a lot of time in installation of virtual machines (VMs) alone. So, they are coming out with that, which is good. 

I believe that if there is some functional expertise within the organization, this helps in improving the process timelines even more because our current architects are totally IT-based. If they have some functionalities, that would help in automating processes faster. If we want automate some Automation Anywhere processes, we have to do it from scratch. If they are already there, we can use and scale them, then when can customize them. This is something worth thinking about.

As of now, we have not seen any major problems. It's quite a stable product. It's reliable also because we have seen quite good straight-through processing. 

We quickly moved from one bot to 15 to 20 bots in about two or three months. I've seen other companies do even better and go to around 500 to 600 bots. So, scalability is something which is pro for Automation Anywhere always.

I would break it down to two separate departments:

1. The Professional Services, who help us in automating the processes, have been quite phenomenal. The support that has been given, not only automating, but also re-engineering of the processes for the better has been great. 
2. Technical support is quite proactive. They have bettered their customer support portal. They made it better.

So, we have not faced any issues as of now in this regard.

The initial setup was quite complex. We have faced an issue. During the initial implementation stages, it took longer than we expected. It affected our timelines to a certain extent. Once that was done, it was quite seamless. I think now that they are coming out with a cloud solution, this will help a lot in reducing the implementation duration. It will help future clients get results even sooner.

As it has been a good experience until now. The product is good and helps in solving business problems. Because of the ease of use, I would definitely give it around an eight point five (out of 10). So, eight point five (out of 10) would be my number.

It has made our life easier during the interim process with what we do in the banking sectors.

I'm in the banking sector, so there will be some data to be extracted from web applications that I have worked on and SAP automation suite too. There was an interim process where we extracted the data using Automation Anywhere. It is quite easy. Before, there was about four to five resources to extract it. Now, with automation, this has helped us reduce the time to two to three minutes, then the work will be done. That is one thing. The SAP automation suite is a very good platform to automate the things.

The best part is I'm a developer. I can automate end-to-end processes and use the automation in every process. That is the best thing.

It is much easier for Excel automations, getting data from their web applications, and extracting data and validating it, then sending it to clients' mail and giving it all the stakeholders as well. That is the interim process that we need to have done, which is the best part. It can done with time-savings, good accuracy of the data extracted, and endurance.

As for the stability of the product, we can use it in any use cases or to automate anything, like manufacturing or for the banking sector. We can automate all things. The stability is quite good. It is easy to use and user-friendly. You can automate whatever you do manually and day-to-day things work. We can automate repetitive tasks as well.

We can handle it if it crashes. We handle it by logic using exception handling. I am using 11.10. I've used Automation Anywhere version 10 to its current version. There are many commands that I have used. Before, there were only so many commands, like MetaBot, where we used to have only four or five commands. Now, it is entirely different to use. In the newer version, there are third-party things, and MetaBots. It's quite easy to automate things and get all the work done in a fraction of a second. It's helpful and makes our life easy.

The IQ Bot is pretty good. We can run maximum 150 documents, save them, and automate that process. That's quite good for me.

I have asked many questions of the technical support team. They replied to me with very good answers. When I'm stuck in any part of the coding, then I'll go and ask them. They have given me very nice support. It's pretty good how they are ready and they have supported me when I've asked questions in a call.

I was not involved in the decision to bring in Automation Anywhere to the company.

One to 10, I can give it a nine. We still have to use it and it's not being urgently used. After using it, we can tell how it is being used and how we can make use of it.

They have pretty good commands which we have used. We will be getting everything in one web server, where can use MetaBot and also IQ Bot. They are providing an all in one application. So, it is quite good.

In our own company, we are using it for own employees. They are building bots for our own employees.

In an organization that you join, there are so many things. Today, you have different type of requests for laptops or any type of service that you want from the team. There are different sort of things. We have created a bot (use case) where your bot will do everything for you.

Once you join our company, you can ask your bot to create different types of tickets, whatever you require. Also, in our organization, you have to fill out timesheets on a daily basis. For that, we have also created a used case, where you have to order your bot to fill out your timesheet. So, it will automatically fill it out. You don't need to do it manually.

The automation does the basic things needed in our day-to-day work. We have implemented Automation Anywhere, and our bots are doing all this work.

For your daily work, if you are investing three to four hours doing your repetitive work, e.g., you are taking data from SAP and some warehouse, analyzing all the data, then manually doing all the formulas of Excel and checking the output. It takes three to four hours on a daily basis. With automation, you can reduce that effort to half an hour or an hour. So, it will improve your efficiency and save you a lot of time, so you can improve your time in other work. Therefore, you can be faster than the previous way.

Automation Anywhere has many functionalities. The newest version of Automation Anywhere, A2019, has improved a lot. So, it has many functionalities for Excel, such as, Excel automation. Throughout the entire organization, we have different types of work-related Excel, which you can easily automate to Automation Anywhere.

Also, Automation Anywhere includes IQ Bots. So, IQ Bots is the key part of Automation Anywhere. You can work on any type of PDF, images, invoices, or billing things in any company. You can just upload it and extract the data, then use it as you require. It is a key part of Automation Anywhere: the best part.

There is a small thing from a development point of view. There should be a static site box for finding any command if I am writing a code. If there are hundreds of functions, you can only scroll up and down to find one each one. There should be a site box where we can find the commands and easily use them.

In the new version, they have included a flow chart instruction. This should be easily removed by mouse cursor. It's basically no problem; like we have to always use keyboard or mouse. This should be independent since we are either using a mouse or keyboard. This should be running smoothly.

These are very small things which need to be improved.

Stability is good. It is improving. Even with the newest version, they have improved a lot. Earlier, we used to face some blockages. Now, with the newest version launch, there will be so many new functions.

Previously, there were very few functions for Excel automation. We had to put in logic for everything, like in other coding languages. Now, they have included so many functions in Excel. You can easily automate your Excel work to the function without writing a script. Hardly, a script is required.

We have the option of handling exceptions. They have given us so many options to handle exceptions. If your bot crashes, you are trying to find some page, or you're trying to find some file and it is not found, we have alternatives. We can handle the exception, like coding in Java or Python. We can handle the error because we have the functionalities. Also, we can write a small code for handling all these exceptions. So, it is easy to use without any fuss.

We have IQ bots. In IQ Bots, they have the option of uploading around a maximum of 150 documents at once. So, if your organization is generating some PDFs or images on a daily basis, maybe it's hundreds of documents, you can upload them at once. You have to train IQ Bot for one of these documents, then it will automatically take for the rest of these documents. It will easily map all the keywords and extract all the exact information that you want. That is important.

We are creating bots, as of now, for different areas and use cases that we have. Once, that is completed and pushed to production, then the support team will come in. We have lifetime support for production, which is for the partnership.

We are currently developing the bots. Once, we are done with our development, then production will finally start.

I am a developer on the development side. I am not a business person.

For the current version, I will give them an eight out of 10.  The future version will get more one plus one.

We'll be discussing our implementations for Salesforce and using Automation Anywhere to automate sales for processes within the organization. We focus mainly on sales and BFSI.

A very important piece within sales is that we've noticed most of the salespeople hesitate from updating their Salesforce at a frequent interval. You jump on a call, you have multiple calls with your customer, and you hesitate to keep dealing these updates within Salesforce. The idea behind this implementation, or this specific solution, is that we take care of all the updating of Salesforce processes. We take care of all lead conversions, lead updates, lead generations, etc. through our RPA. All you need to do is have a conversation with your bot, and say, "Hey, I just had a conversation with Nick. He seems good with all the implementations. We should convert him from Level 1 to Level 2." These basic implementations have been taken care of.

We're also looking at mobile transcription. So, if you are on a call with XYZ, you say, "Hey, I'm jumping on a call with XYZ, just transcribe what I'm talking about." So, you transcribe those calls and update them in your total documentation. That's the idea.

Automation Anywhere has been an integral part of this product's evolution in general. A hindrance that we were faced with was companies who did not have API integrations for Salesforce. This is where RPA and Automation Anywhere came in and helped us with integrating solutions which did not have API integrations within themselves. That's how we've evolved in the past two to three months.

IQ Bot seems to be a good solution that Automation Anywhere has come up with. It sets them apart from the other solutions. I want Automation Anywhere to work on IQ Bot further to help evolve the tool more and create a certain set of solutions using IQ Bot. They can maybe use better machine learning algorithms to come up with better accuracy for OCR extractions. This is an area that I want them to work on.

It is absolutely robust. Automation Anywhere as a solution, as well as our implementation, have been robust in nature with thorough testing and UAT processes being involved. Automation Anywhere can be considered as one of the most stable RPA tools in the industry, according to the perspective of the limited amount of tools that I've used. But, Automation Anywhere seems to be the most stable one.

We initially started off with a customer who had just three bots. We've now scaled them to 15 bots. It didn't take us more than an hour to scale. Automation Anywhere helped us scale from one bot to 100 bots within a period of hours, if not minutes. Unless you're scaling from 10s to 1000s, I think Automation Anywhere has it covered.

Support is five (out of five). The technical support is better than any other automation tool that I've seen. The ticketing resolution that they provide not only for paid customers, but for PoCs that we conduct, IQ Bot, and other scenarios wherein the product might not be functioning properly. The support is top-notch. There are scenarios wherein we need to be able to identify the best possible solution, and there is support for that as well.

We started off about one and a half years back initially. In those days, Automation Anywhere hadn't picked up so much. The initial setup was difficult, but as they have moved from on-premise to cloud, the setup has become much easier. Now, we are hands-on with the setup and can do it within hours.

With another client, we are saving about 20 hours. However, we are not able to justify that return on investment by just saving time. There are other parameters that we would have to look at for justifying the ROI.

The return on investment for most of our clients depends from scenario to scenario. Some of them look at it on a long-term basis and some of them look at it from the amount of time saved. For example, we are currently working on a solution for a CIO. We are saving about four hours of his time during a particular week. The return on investment for that particular person is humongous.

We evaluated all the solutions. We had different RPA tools. Looking at the feedback from the market and the type of technical support that we had received, we went ahead with Automation Anywhere. The major reason for going with Automation Anywhere was the technical support that developers have.

I'd rate it an eight point five to nine because there's still always room for improvement.

We are an Automation Anywhere partner and we use it in the finance domain, in areas like B2B or B2C, etc. We also use it in HR and other domains for our clients. We have used it for vendor-invoice processing and recruitment. Those are our two major use cases as of now.

We have automated the recruitment and onboarding process for one of our clients. In that scenario, it has saved a lot of time. A process that used to take seven to ten days has now been reduced to half an hour. It has created a lot of efficiency.

It has also helped in terms of security because of all the off-boarding processes that we have automated. If an employee leaves, all his security access, email IDs, etc., are disabled on that same day. That person no longer has access to work on the company's domain.

IQ Bot is one of the most valuable features because it helps in processing different formats from different vendors.

As of now, it's only available on Windows machines. I would love if it were to also be available for Mac machines. That is something which is lacking as of now.

A cloud version was also missing, but now, with the new A2019 version, that's coming.

When I compare Automation Anywhere with the competition, some of the competitors have ready-made, off-the-shelf modules. For example, UiPath integrates with Windows AD. That is missing as of now in Automation Anywhere. If that became available it would also be great.

Stability-wise, it's a fine product. We haven't faced any major challenges up until now.

Scalability is also great. You automate one process and replicate it again and again.

For example, one of our clients has global operations. What we automated in one country, we were able to implement around the globe. We were also able to just keep on adding on new virtual machines in a given location, to have more and more processes automated. 

It's easy to scale.

Technical support is great. We have raised multiple queries over time and the results have been really good. The responses have been really good and fast. The feedback I have heard is that they get back to us same-day or, if not, the next day.

We had a good due-diligence process before we finalized. We compared different aspects like security, reliability, and compliance. AA scored high on the compliance front, so that's why we went with it.

The initial setup is straightforward. I don't see any complexity involved.

We have seen ROI in areas I mentioned earlier like time savings. We have seen good results.

The product starts at $10,000 and then it's up to you regarding how much you can consume. Comparatively speaking, the costs are higher for Automation Anywhere.

It's a good product. Compared to the competition, you can do multiple processes with one license. So there are a lot of savings in terms of license costs. It's easy to use and has good, UI-based interaction. It's easy to deploy as well. Clients can also train their own staff to do easy implementations, so they can save costs there as well.

I would rate Automation Anywhere at eight out of ten. There is always scope for improvement. There are a few ready-made things that they need to incorporate.

The primary use case would be to do automated processing using Excel with an application, even SAP. We use it for extracting data tables, clicking on data, recording records, and extracting the records table. We use it for all the Excel operations. 

We updated Automation Anywhere already to version A2019 with all the Excel operations.

It has reduced the number of full-time employees. 

The Excel operations are very good. Even in the MetaBot, they have included all the commands. Because of security, we automate our processes in MetaBot. 

IQ Bot is good compared to the other tools available in the market.

The dashboard and Control Room are very good compared to the market.

They are launching cloud into the market, which is very good.

They need to improve the OCR engine which is not up to the market.

We still cannot use IQ Bot with our documents.  

They have to work on the OCR and object cloning features.

However, I have not used version A2019 and cannot comment on the latest Automation Anywhere updates.

I would rate the stability as an eight out of 10.  There is an issue with the object cloning in Excel. OCR is also not that stable. Image recognition works fine, but not all the time.

Scalability is very good.

It is easy to set up.

The licensing costs are a bit high, but the profits are very good. 

I have worked on Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. The user interface of Automation is good and helpful. 

I have gone through the online training.

We are in the financial business and we use this solution to help provide reports for management.

We download data, perform Excel manipulation, and then generate reports. The reports are then sent to the higher levels of management.

There are things that used to take us a lot of time, like manual entries or HR queries, but now that the bots are in place, we are saving a lot of time. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is recording macros. The MetaBot is also great.

People can easily go in and automate anything they want.

This solution will connect to the database directly.

DLLs can be used to automate the MetaBots.

The GUI can be improved by making it more user-friendly.

Python integration is coming with the next release, and they should expand on that.

This solution could be more stable because sometimes I see some bugs.

This solution is very scalable. The bots do not depend on any specific system.

We have more than one hundred bots in production.

Technical support is great, but some of our tickets have not been solved.

There was a lot of manual effort being put into our processes, and we decided that we needed automation. 

The initial setup was really straightforward. We spoke with AA about what kind of architecture it needs, and they have created it in a way that is very robust.

We evaluated UiPath and some others and decided that Automation Anywhere had the best features.

There are a lot of different features that are built-in, and this is a great product.

There are some bugs in the version that I am using, and it can be improved.

I would rate this version an eight out of ten.