Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are a distributor of Automation Anywhere in Malaysia, and our focus is on solving business problems related to accounting, reporting, network operation centers, and first-level troubleshooting.

We deploy the solution on both AWS and Google Public Cloud.

Since we are the distributors of the solution, the improvements provided by Automation Anywhere vary for each of our customers.

The drag-and-drop feature is valuable.

Once we deliver to the customer, and they see the code, they can truly understand it without needing programming knowledge. As customers don't want to rely on vendors constantly.

The analytical dashboard in the Control Room could use some improvement. Currently, it's quite basic, which can pose a challenge when customers require more advanced features. Of course, different customers will have varying needs and expectations, so there's no one-size-fits-all solution. However, I believe it would be helpful if our team could have more flexibility in developing a more sophisticated analytical bot to meet these diverse demands.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We use the solution in multiple locations.

The technical support is good.

Positive

I previously used UiPath and WinAutomation by Softmotive but Automation Anywhere is easier to use.

The return on investment that our customers experience with Automation Anywhere typically revolves around the saved processing time and reduced headcount.

Although the initial implementation cost of Automation Anywhere is relatively high compared to other options, its annual subscription cost is lower than UiPath's, which has the opposite pricing structure.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend Automation Anywhere to others.

We have been using RPA for the past seven years and have dealt with a lot of other RPA vendors. We have many use cases across all of the verticals like technology, HR, Finance, Mortgage, Insurance, etc.

The current one, on which we are focusing is Mortgage use cases. We have proven experience in all of the verticals with different use cases. Especially when it comes to the environment, there are no restrictions in that regard because it's all based on the client's requirements and their expectations as well. There are a few clients that came with a Citrix gateway, others use the VDI based approach, and still, others bring their own operating systems.

One thing that I want to highlight AA for is their security standards. It's an easy win situation when we present this to our clients. The CyberArk integration and setup are really amazing and it helps us to win deals for new projects.

Especially on the Cognitive capabilities, AA enables us to adopt third-party extensions and products, which is very useful to accommodate more use cases and push the RPA practice to the next level.

The most valuable features are the IQ Bot and Process Discovery.

1. IQ Bot - In earlier days, everyone started with RPA by mimicking the users' actions and achieved some automation expectations. But nowadays, apart from the basic action, there is a need for intelligence like Machine earning, Deep learning, and Artificial Intelligence. The IQ Bot accommodates such expectations. There are a lot of pre-trained workflows available and a lot of capabilities to involve users to train the model.
   
2. Process Discovery - The next trend is Process discovery and it involves automating the identification of process requirements for activities and then automatically developing the workflow.

The dedicated BPM from AA should help to cover more use cases. I would strongly say that AA should have a more advanced BPM tool to support the process/use cases attempted in the project. Instead of depending on other open-source BPM products, AA should provide their own BPM for attended automations.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Stability-wise, this product is excellent.

The scalability of AA is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

We have more than seven years of experience in RPA and with different vendors and a lot of different tools. We used the same approach but the recent updates and growth of AA have helped us decide to make use of it

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented in-house, with the help of vendor support documents.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Automation Anywhere is that 

It's not always necessary to tie up or utilize unattended bots or achieve 100 % automation. A lot of opportunities are there with the ratio of 80:20 (80% automation and 20% manual intervention) or 70:30.

• Automating frond end and back end office jobs.  
• Automating tiring jobs - Automation Anywhere is used to Automate many jobs that are repetitive. 
• To deploy a digital workforce and optimize productivity.
• Report generation.
• Revenue forecasting.
• Beneficial to QA processes.
• Data validation and auditing.
• Data replication and migration.
• Customer Relationship Management and other operational sales activities                               

RPA helps to Automate these jobs perfectly.

With better technologies and research at its disposal, we will see a decrease in the cost of RPA tools.

With it, the other processes on work, the automation cost will dramatically reduce in the upcoming years.

Moreover, as the number of robotic vendors grows, the RPA licensing will see a significant decline rate in RPA licensing and with more space for changes.

RPA Security:

With more significant responsibilities on the robots’ shoulders, the bigger are the possibilities of a breach and system failure.

There will be an improvement in protection measures from the new types of cyber threats or any internal faults will see an increase due to a constant rise in security requirements.

Better Cloud-Based RPA Platform:

According to “Robotics Process Automation (RPA) – 2018 Annual Report,” Everest Group, 2018; currently over half of all RPA processes (~57%) are attended.

Including cloud-based, unattended RPA represents the remaining 43% (33% on-prem, 10% cloud-based).

The growth of IoT and improved cloud services gives more flexibility and security to Robotic Process Automation.

The cloud supplies unlimited, off-site storage, and on-demand access to data.

Automation at its best:

About 70% to 80% of rule-based processes in a business can be automated. RPA has a good hold in both the back- and front-office with advancements in AI, big data, speech recognition technologies, machine learning, and deep neural networks.

As a consequence of predicted growth in the field of Cloud-based tech and natural learning processes, RPA tech is positioned to be even more integrated, automated, and independent.

Workload management is a cool feature of Automation anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is one of the most popular RPA vendors offering powerful and user-friendly RPA capabilities to automate the business processes that are performed by humans. AA is a web-based management system that includes a control to run end-to-end automated business tasks for companies. Over 500 leading brands across the world use this tool to handle and scale their business processes with near-zero error rates and minimizing operational costs. AA allows building scripts to perform repetitive tasks instead of writing code. They can automate a broad range of chores from basic level Windows configuration steps to the ultimate networking and remote database processes. The three core components in the AA architecture are:

Bot Creator – It allows the developers to create bots to automate their desktop-based applications.

Control room- An application that works as a controller and handles the entire execution and management of clients, scripts, credentials, roles, security, etc.

Bot Runner – A machine that allows us to run the bot. The status of bot execution is reported back to the control room.

The company offers various products to support enterprises in their journey of digital transformation. They are as follows:

Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA

The product is dedicated for the business user and comprises advanced capabilities to offer an intuitive interface for the business user, bot developer, and automation administrator. This platform is easiest to use, supports to avoid complexity, and ensures fast adoption & rapid deployment. It not only fulfills the requirement of the digital workforce but also be flexible to evolve with the business needs.

2. IQBots

IQBot is a cognitive bot designed to support as well as learn from business users and enable the business user to experience the power of advanced artificial intelligence technologies. Integrated with the automation anywhere enterprise RPA, the IQBot offers enterprise massive gains in productivity, as it includes competence of automating complex tasks involving unstructured data. The table below explains the different types of bots in automation anywhere: Task bot, Meta bot, and IQ bot.

Image1-28

3. Bot Insights

The platform displays statistics and graphs to analyze bot performance in the system. It also allows calculating the time saved in the automation process. It is the first analytics solutions build for bots. Bot Insights tightly integrates the real-time business insights with the digital workforce performance.

4. BotFarm

It is an on-demand enterprise-grade platform for RPA bot. The platform scales the capacity of the digital workforce by deploying bots anytime, anywhere with a single click. It can create, deploy and handle thousands of software bots and can ensure resilience, elasticity, and scalability.

5. Bot Store

The first marketplace for plug and play bots dedicated to business automation initiatives. It enables enterprises to discover, deploy, and mobilize bots, including process bots, application bots, and cognitive bots in a fraction of seconds.

I would like for AA to add an inbuilt debug log that has functionalities to view the values of variables during run time in order to have a point-to-point debugging in case of an error.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year. 

I have overall 10 to 12 years of experience in RPA. I started RPA doing VBA. That seemed like I needed coding, and for coding alone, I wasted more time. I came to know Automation Anywhere, which is a product that automates RPA processes in an easy manner. 

I was interested to learn it. I had an opportunity to attend training for Automation Anywhere for almost one month. I started with version 10.5. It was really interesting.

From the beginning, before I interacted with Automation Anywhere, I thought that I would also need to code something using the details, then it will take more time. That is not the case. If I want to automate something, I can easily drag and drop. There is any function that I need for a business case or some critical thing that I need to automate, then we can create a condition, have a API, use Excel automation, or do everything together. 

Most companies in the industry are facing the task of automating unstructured data or repetitive tasks. It's too difficult to use some of the other RPA tools, VBA, Java, .NET, etc. So, when I try to automate something using Automation Anywhere and I want to consolidate something when there are a hundred Excels in the folder, I can easily use my files and folder option. I can put in a condition without a need to code. I can just drag and drop. I can open Excel, select all those things, and put it altogether, then send it to my client. So, it's very easy to interact with Automation Anywhere.

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the value of feature lessons, like I had a session for A2019. I attended a session for 2019, which is very impressive. It's weightless. There isn't another system that I have found like this in version 11.3. Every system is busy. With the new version, I can easily open my browser and navigate. I can automate it wherever it is, and that's really interesting.

I face little challenges when I move code to production. In Automation Anywhere 11.3, when the bot is running until it loops 24/7 in my development and UAT environment, we don't have our antivirus on it. When it comes over to production, there is an antivirus running on it. However, we don't know what time it will be scheduled. My client is taking care of that. So, when I raise a ticket with Automation Anywhere, they share some suggested documents to exclude those lists from antivirus. When I approach my client, they want to exclude those things because they are treating them as maybe not secure.

What I am suggesting, when using A2019, if there are any additional features to exclude those antivirus scans until after my task is completed, then the antivirus can start scheduling. Then, I can easily tell the client that the priority are running and the Automation Anywhere scans can wait until after the release.

I had a chance in Intellect Design Arena to go from installation to deployment. This was the first process with RPA in Intellect Design Arena, so people were thinking it's the first project that we have with Automation Anywhere. However, we are very experienced and can automate nearly anything.

It's obviously reliable. It has a reusable component. If you compare some of the other RPA tool, they are more difficult to explain. We need to create one solution design with a low level and high level each for everything. When it comes to Automation Anywhere, and someone has joined, they can easily understand the way of the coding. When you see the code of the structure that we do, it's really impressive and anyone can easily understand it.

Their guys will take maximum only two hours to solve the biggest problems. If I need any clarification, I will raise a ticket. However, their people won't message me when replying back, "Are you checking this setting?" Their people will call me and ask, "How can I help you? This is the issue. Have you followed the steps by testing or calling it something different." Instead of sending a mail and wasting time, their people will directly call me and ask, which is the best thing with the Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is easy. As a first step, it will ask for the location. As a second step, if you want to add an SSL certificate or database. There are just four steps of installation. It's very usable. Anybody can easily install Automation Anywhere, if they want.

I have used UiPath and a basic version of Blue Prism. 

When I compare it with other RPA tools, Automation Anywhere seems pretty good. It's a user-friendly tool. Anyone can easily understand it. If there is an error, you can easily debug it from the developer level. In Automation Anywhere, the error handling happens in the easiest way. In case of an error, we send an email. It's not too difficult code to understand. There's only beginning and ending error handling, which is easy to understand. 

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

I have done a lot of use cases. Recently, I have done SAP automation. I worked with MS Excel, a web application, a Windows application, and a mainframe application. We automated three to four applications at once. We automated them in a row where one application's output would be input for another application.

I have done development and production support. I have helped organizations with integration.

The Visual Studio development for the basic version, which they launched long back, that's amazingly good. It has a good design, which is better than Blue Prism and somewhat better than UiPath.

They have good people.

Citrix automation is unstable. It is failing on a frequent basis. With the bot, they claim a lot of things, but it is not the real picture. It is not as powerful as they claim. It is not up to the mark.

Once I'm friendly with a tool, then I'll start checking the stability and power of it. It is not there with Automation Anywhere.

The management people don't know the technicalities. The actual tool is not as powerful as they claim. They are pitching the IQ Bot, but it's not as powerful or as fruitful in real world scenarios as it should be.

The user analytics are not analytics.

Their Community Edition is awful. Every second day, it will fail. It will become corrupt.

Stability depends on your use case and what type application you are automating.

Stability is good, RPA is a emerging field, so you can't expect a lot of stability. You develop things and the maintenance is there. 

Stability depends on the applications being developed. E.g., if it's a Windows application, they are already stable. Doing automation is not a big thing, but doing automation with little maintenance, that is a big thing.

Scalabilty is good.

The technical support is good. 

Their marketing team is good.

The initial setup is good.

I am the person with does the integration. I am developer. I can develop an application in three weeks (done and dusted). After moving it to production, there are a lot of challenges. Then, I am spending three hours of my bandwidth being occupied every day with maintenance.

RPA implementation will be always fruitful. Return on investment will be always higher than the input costs.

Automation Anywhere is a bit more expensive. This is one of the things that we face when we talk to small start ups in Bangalore. They want to do an RPA implementation, but don't have the money. UiPath is the answer.

We have done a lot of complex automation using different RPA tools: Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Blue Prism.

UiPath is a bit better. UiPath is a bit strong in fewer areas, such as Citrix automation. Citrix automation is like a thin client automation. For applications not present on your local machine and in the cloud, UiPath is more powerful. With RPA, you can automate things. Howe, are those automations stable? That is another question. In order to stabilize automation of thin client, UiPath is more powerful. There are few other features which are better than Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

UiPath has amazing scalability, while Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are good.

UI Path is leading the market. There is no doubt about it. They have their own challenges. They aren't flawless. 

UiPath Visual Studio is not good. It is messy. Automation Anywhere Visual Studio integration is smooth and user-friendly. 

Automation Anywhere is good in some parts with their Smart Recorder that they they are launching in A2019, that is there but yes they are leading. They are putting in real hard work and emerging. They are in second place as of now in the RPA world.

There are a lot of templates where details come in different formats. There is no way this can be totally automated without the human intervention, but human intervention takes a  long time. We are trying to figure out what software to use, so we can automate the entire process without human intervention and the data transfers without errors. We also need faster processing of the data to happen at a higher level.

We are working with one of the bots where we send claims through WhatsApp. Any user could take a photo in WhatsApp, then send that data to the organization. Now, whenever a photo is takes, different phones have different primary resolutions, and the data being captured is not clear data. At that moment, the data is automated to a very power system which centralizes the process to one point. This is what we are using for the insurance provider. They fill out the claims form and send this information to the organization, then we use automation tools to automate the process and come to a conclusion.

We are using IQ Bot for automation and marketing things.

False positives: We are trying to determine how false positives are generated. This is our key challenge. We are trying to assess how they are reusing the algorithm for automation. 

The technical support needs to be improved. Often, this is the first time people are working with automation. 

I would like to see more marketing automation. I believe more marketing stuff can be automated through bots. Currently, marketing automation is not there. It needs machine learning to automate the process. This is something that I would like to see.

There is a lot of scope for improvement in terms of stability. It is a concern, because right now we are close to 20 to 25 percent false negatives that are coming up. If we can work on standardizing the template for any automation tools, that would be key in working on the stabilizing the software.

Technology for scalability is very powerful because we are using Amazon AWS. 

You can take scalability for granted if your algorithms are properly working.

Technical support needs to be worked on as the turnaround time can be around a week, even though we are just using the solution on a pilot basis. We are working in real-time with realistic data. While the process of a logging a ticket is good, the process from logging a ticket to closure needs faster support time.

The setup and onboarding processes were easy and straightforward. It was very easy to onboard because it was more about the data. We learned how to streamline the process during that time, which was good.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

It is too early to determine ROI.

We are using the trial version. We are still trying to come to a conclusion about purchasing the product, which will take some time.

Their licensing processes are in par with most industry standards.

We looked at a lot of vendors. Automation Anywhere has brand recognition.

Go to conferences to analyze what suits your business. Automation is very important if you want to grow your business to the next level because of the transparency, speed, and scalability for any organization. While there isn't any ready-made solution in the market, consider checking out the closest solutions and modifying them to suit your needs. Then, start using it.

Our use case is spread across multiple areas: 

1. We are using it in finance: automating the month-end process. 
2. There are a lot of review processes that happen every week. We are in the middle of that.
3. We have a product lifecycle management process that when we close the books on a product, information needs to go into multiple systems. We have another bot in system for this.

These are the three things that we have in production right now.

A project that we automated: A person used to spend about eight to twelve hours every week to finish the process. The bot finishes it in half an hour. Now, the person just reviews it, then passes along the information. This has helped our organization because originally EMEA and APAC would not receive the files the same day that they were processed. But because the bot only takes a half an hour, everyone can now receive the files on the same day.

We know the process. It doesn't deviate.

Speed: A process that would take two days for a person every month to do is now completed within two hours.

Right now, the audit trail sits in file systems. I would prefer it to be in a database where it is queryable and searchable. 

Another major downside is an upgrade. If I have to switch over from single sign-on to non-single sign-on, etc., then it's a complete reinstall. When I do a complete reinstall, I lose a lot of information because it's a new instance. I'm not able to bring information from the old instance and my metrics are all gone. I basically have to reset the whole infrastructure. I would like to see an option to switch over to single sign-on post-installation. It should not have to be a reinstall. It should be part of the installation or configuration.

I wanted to see a cloud version and mobile app but those will be available in the A2019 version.

I would like the bots to be more automatic without having to check emails, which is how we have our tool setup. Going forward, the bots should be more interactive.

So far, the stability has been pretty good.

We did have some issues when our database server sort of crashed. A lot of processes went uncommitted, so we had to engage the Automation Anywhere support team. They came in to clean up the database and bring the server back up. Otherwise, we have seen pretty good stability.

So far, the technical support has been really helpful. We were even able to engage the customer success team when we needed them. They have helped us solve our problems, which is very good.

We had a major issue when it came to single sign-on. We couldn't get it working. There was a bug in Automation Anywhere that eventually got solved just a few weeks back. However, we have not implemented it. We have had hiccups with the single sign-on, but otherwise it was a smooth setup. We are not using single sign-on because of this bug.

We used our implementation partner for the deployment and implementing the bots. Our experience with them was good. Most of them are good developers. They have been able to solve a lot of issues and build a lot of processes.

We have seen ROI on two out of our three bot processes. We see ROI from hours returned back to us.

It is a lot easier to debug Automation Anywhere than UiPath because of the code. Our clients like Automation Anywhere which is another reason that we picked it.

Automate several smaller processes within departments. Show the benefit there before implementing an end-to-end solution. This will get people excited about the solution and kick start the process.

We got our workloads for issues and our bugs fixed, which is why I rated the product a 10 out of 10.

We are trying to automate a few of the processes that we did manually. Product setup is an important aspect, as we are using bots to do the setup for us. We used to do the setup manually about three to four months back. 

We used to set up 150 to 250 products in a week. That has come down to a day. 

I initiate the bot, then I go home. So, it's working 24 hours. I am restricted to working nine hours. Time is something that we are saving. We are becoming more efficient and our partners are happy. They can send us workloads. Then, we can just kick it off, go home, and by the time we are back, it is done. I send an e-mail saying, "Whatever you've sent over is done." 

Efficiency is something that has increased a lot. Productivity has increased a lot too.

Object cloning is one of the main features that are using. We are very happy with it. as It has enabled us to capture a lot of things on screen and use them. 

We want it to work with more APIs. It needs to integrate with multiple APIs. That would be something that I would like going forward.

Currently, it does not work that well with legacy tools.

It is a bit wonky with HTML when I'm working with it. There are times when it's not able to detect the technology that we are using. I don't know whether it's an Automation Anywhere issue or an internal issue. I want it to work smoothly with more technologies.

Our tool is a bit slow, as it's a legacy tool. Automation Anywhere is having a some issues when running back. This is one of the things that we are not happy with. We need to upgrade our systems for Automation Anywhere to work better.

As of now, we have it limited to one process. However, we can scale the solution. It can cascade onto multiple processes, so that is a positive note for scalability.

We are just in the initial phases. I personally have created about three to four bots. 

We have not contacted the technical support because we have not had issues.

My manager works our customer success manager.

Automation Anywhere is our first introduction to automation. I'm pretty happy with it. I did ask people who had come from Automation Anywhere about UiPath to get a clear idea about it. I think UX is one of the strongest points for Automation Anywhere which can attract competence to your workbench and work. That's what we have been told. 

I still need to experiment a lot with it. Whatever I've done so far. it's been at an 80 to 85 percent success rate.

I've not had the chance to work with UiPath.

We want to do more Automation Anywhere certifications and learn more about them. We did not get that information from our account team, which could be improved.