Automation Anywhere Reviews

I started my career in RPA and the first tool I learned was Automation Anywhere v11.3. Within a month, I learned the tool and was Master Certified in it.

I had noticed that the majority of clients for my company demand developers who know AA well. I wondered why, with so many other tools available, why clients are so interested in AA as the only RPM. This is when I realized that AA is much easier, more reliable, and has value for money also with good and vast customer support.

In the past two years, I have become somewhat of an expert with Automation Anywhere. As a senior RPA developer, I deal with clients alongside my project manager and I always suggest AA. It is worthwhile to know that most of our clients are already aware of this tool, its market popularity, and its capabilities. This makes it easier to solidify a business relationship with them.

Thanks to the benefits of Automation Anywhere, 90% of our clients trust and use this tool.

I love its reliability, ease of use, and the vast customer support that are always present to help us.

In the new cloud-based version, A2019, some good upgrades have been added. I feel that everything has been covered in A2019 that was missing in the older v11.3. These advancements have helped to impress our clients and create new business opportunities with them. As a cloud deployment, it saves clients problems with desktops that occurred with the previous version, v11. There are also more commands and features that have made it more awesome for me to explore and play with new commands.

I love the user interface and the automation commands they have provided in the AA 2019 version.

Especially while using v11, I often experience freezes with OCR extraction from PDF files. It just didn't work properly. I had to work around this using Python scripting. It would be a big improvement to have the inbuilt OCR capability work seamlessly. A perfect OCR would be awesome. 

I have been using the Automation Anywhere tool for the last two years.

The new version offers no compromise regarding stability. 

I will rate this product a ten out of ten for scalability.

I had contacted technical support two or three times and they solved my problem on the same day. I will rate them a ten out of ten on support. In my opinion, they are the best and I hope that they maintain the same.

I started working with AA and have moved to the A2019 version. I never switched to another tool, as AA is one that I have found reliable, and has everything that I need for RPA.

ROI is something my management knows, but as a developer, I cannot say for. However, I am pretty sure that AA has benefited our company.

The cloud-based version comes at an increased cost, although our clients are happy with the new features and have not complained about the pricing. Precious things are valuable, and they know that.

I started with AA and have not evaluated other RPA products.

It has now been two years and I have migrated to AA 2019. I now consider myself an expert in Automation Anywhere. Thanks, AA, for providing such a big and powerful platform to us.

I always recommend this product, and that clients implement AA first.

We use Automation Anywhere to automate business processes for insurance clients. Automation Anywhere reduced the manpower up to 80% with a high return on investment. The process which we automated can complete the entire workload within 10 days when the normal process would have taken around 30 working days.

Apart from this, we automated password reset processes which saved time and effort and also enhanced security.

We are also automating the deployment process for new process setups. 

Bot Stuck Automation is helping us to keep track of the bots that are stuck for long time.

Automation Anywhere made a huge impact in maintaining client relationships. The reason is a high Return on Investment from the processes we automated. Because we have high ROI we gained new clients which increased the client count as well as our company's financial strength. 

Most of the employees learned the Automation Anywhere tool and got certified from Automation Anywhere University. AA makes their professional life much easier from a career perspective. 

Our organization has improved revenue just by automating the business processes where too much manual work was involved.

Web-based control is the most valuable feature. We can access it from anywhere in the world with the control room URL and in any browser. Bot Insights make our report generation and other insights view easier. We can export the data in the form of CSV, PDF, etc.

Credentials is another important feature, where we can store the important/bot credentials securely in the Control room itself and we can track who accesses the credentials and we can restrict the access based on users.

Bots get disconnected from control rooms sometimes without any reason and this takes up a lot of time. 

If the user creates a schedule then he/she leaves the company, that schedule became unusable at some point and I can't edit it. We need to create it again using generic IDs. This problem can be avoided in an upcoming release or update. There should be a button for customer support.

For each process, we have a separate log folder/files and it's tedious to go and check each process. They should include a button/feature to check the logs for each/process and or bots in the control room itself.

There should be an option for the quick addition of disconnected bots/kind of rollback options.

I would also like to see the One-Touch Asset management report button in the control room.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years. 

We can assure 98% stability and the remaining 2% is just because of the environment issues.

It is highly scalable.

Support was good but sometimes they ask for logs that have client information. But apart from this, they are really helpful.

We have been using Automation Anywhere from the initial stages.

The setup is good but the control room setup takes some time.

We have an in-house team to implement AA solutions. 

We saved around 80% man-power.

Small companies can't afford this cost as the pricing is a little higher.

Yes, I evaluated with Blue Prism.

Automation Anywhere is a very Interactive and easy to use RPA tool.

We have headquarters in London and we also have a presence in the US, Dubai, and a global development center in Hyderabad. We specialize in digital services such as our own chatbot platform, and we are also working on a specific OCI platform called PixTract which would complement existing RPA tools as well as many other projects which are relevant in this scenario.

As we are a partner of Automation Anywhere, there are quite a few use cases that we believe can provide good solutions for most organizations. We are looking at showing that Automation Anywhere is a good solution in terms of automating a lot of centers out there. There a lot of mundane tasks which happen in such centers and which include a lot of processes. I believe that automation can really do a lot of justice [in such cases]. It could be invoice processing in insurance or it could be claims processing in any type of insurance. [It can be used for] automating a lot of manual processes. I see a lot of areas where we can actually do it.

As we speak, we are talking to an insurance company. We are planning to have a PoC on their invoice automation and I see great potential with it.

IQ Bot is something which is going to disrupt the market in the future. We, at Avenir Digital, are particularly impressed with the evolution of IQ Bot and the kind of disruption it is bringing to the OCR space. We are also looking forward to leveraging IQ Bot in addressing a lot of other areas apart from automation or RPA as a tool. We would also want to take IQ Bot to the next level and into other areas.

When talking about IQ Bot, we are talking about computer vision, we are talking about OCR in particular. Thanks to the Digital India campaign, most Indian organizations are actually looking forward to automating their manual process in terms of scanning their ID cards, their bank cards; a lot of validation that happens manually. Everything can be automated and I believe IQ Bot could be a significant contributor there in automating all these. That is one area that we are looking forward to.

The new version 6.5 has come [out]. They are still working on the handwritten format — they want to get more accuracy in handwritten forms, which might take some time. It's everywhere, because the algorithms are evolving and the technology is only going to become more and more accurate. That is one area where we are really looking forward to understanding how IQ Bot can really leverage handwritten forms and also make significant progress into what could be called the "untouched places" at the moment - as far as rural India is concerned.

We have worked with various tools over many years and we believe that Automation Anywhere is one of the most stable platforms. When it comes to concurrency, it provides a great platform for large organizations to go ahead and use this. I believe this platform is very stable.

More than the technical support, we have been relying on presale support. In the future, we might need the technical support as well, when we locate complex use cases. But the presale support and the partner-enablement support have been a great help for us until now.

It's getting simpler day-by-day. The innovation that Automation Anywhere is taking up in terms of getting started in setting up their environment, is making it simpler. I see no problems. It's only going to be better and better. It gives a perfect platform to jumpstart. 

More than that, the initial training that we are being provided also helps us in getting a good, smooth start.

Our general approach to RPA implementation is to go with a PoC first; do a discovery followed by a pilot if needed, and then do full-scale development. That way we can make sure that our customer fully understands the potential and the relevance of the tool.

The reason I'm giving Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten is that no product is perfect.

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.

We need to automate business unit solutions in our office. As of now, there are a lot of requirements RPA within our organization with many verticals who require their redundant tasks to get automated. 

It saves manpower, time, and money. E.g., one particular task may require five FTEs to work on it daily doing repetitive work. Using Automation Anywhere, we automate the task and those five FTEs can be saved from doing it.

By automating the process, we are reducing human error.

The IQ Bot is unique. It is not available in another RPA tool that I am aware of, like UiPath or Blue Prism. IQ Bot converts unstructured data to structured data.

You can assign a time to a bot when it should run through the Schedule Manager. This feature is much easier to use in Automation Anywhere. Both UiPath and Blue Prism have their versions of a scheduler which are not as user-friendly. UiPath Orchestrator is a bit complex.

It is easy to use with a drag and drop. All the options are right in front of you. Anybody without an IT or development background can start off with Automation Anywhere.

Security needs improvement. 

I need to understand the migration from desktop to cloud. There are questions around this that I need clarified, like: "How is it going to happen?" Migration is not easy. It will take time. Will the process be smooth? I have a few doubts.

The stability is really good. We have not had any downtime.

Scaling is easy. We can have one Control Room with 10 bots working simultaneously, which is very good.

The technical support has been brilliant. We haven't needed to wait a lot. Anybody from my team, whenever we tried to contact the customer care or technical support, has gotten a reply back probably within one to two hours. So, support has been outstanding from the Automation Anywhere team.

I learned about Automation Anywhere from online searches. I trained myself on it. My organization learned about Automation Anywhere from me.

The setup wasn't easy nor was it difficult. After one or two times, the setup became easier.

I set Automation Anywhere up with the help of Acronotics, who came in to train us and help set up our environment.

We have saved one to two FTEs per year. A bot processes their projects now.

I tried out all the RPA tools and found Automation Anywhere to be the most user-friendly.

Blue Prism is more secure than Automation Anywhere. E.g., Blue Prism has a system that is difficult to penetrate. You can't simply go into their system and make any changes.

Any company looking at starting RPA should look at a user-friendly software. Compared to other RPA tools, I prefer Automation Anywhere.

Whenever I have used Automation Anywhere, it has been brilliant.

There are still so many features that I need to explore in Automation Anywhere.

We are working with our clients using this solution. Often, they are automating some of their retail and marketing processes, including the generation of bills and statements in finance.

Our clients are using a hybrid cloud, with their own VM environment.

One of the recent projects that I worked on was for a complex financial process in a bank. It involved automating several manual processes. The data had to be retrieved from SAP by means of a file and then imported into an Excel worksheet. My suggestion included implementing an SQL server and then automating the process using this solution. Instead of the series of manual tasks, they now only have to verify the final result, and it makes life much easier.

We are assisting our clients by improving the way they do things. This is a great platform, and we are implementing the logic into the bots that they are using to automate.

The user interface and tools are good.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see more OCR agents included.

My customers would like to use the IQ Bot without having to invest more money in purchasing another license. If it is not possible to include IQ Bot in the basic package then, at least, the OCR features and the TaskBot can be enhanced. This would allow us to include small-scale industry, as well as large organizations.

There is an issue with security where users can see the values in the credential vault. Because of this, we don't see the point in creating values inside the vault.

This system should be able to handle situations with very there are very large volumes of data in Excel.

Stability depends on your skillset, and how you have written the code in terms of logic and handling errors. If you have built the code properly, in a systematic way as it requires, then it will definitely be stable. If instead you randomly do things that you needed to be done today, I don't think the stability of the bot will be very good.

Stability is good now, although we have had problems in the past. For example, when we were processing very large amounts of data in Excel, Automation Anywhere failed. The volume was in the millions of rows of data.

The scalability of this solution is good compared to others.

We have not used technical support for this solution.

In addition to this solution, I have good knowledge of Blue Prism and UiPath.

Initially, I found the setup of this solution to be complex.

Before getting started we had to install the SQL server and perform the migration. Then, it involved user accounts. You have to create a new user and add the details, which is quite complex. Then, whenever you are installing the Enterprise Edition, you have to perform setup that includes the IIS settings. Overall, it was quite hectic, and some of the people were not able to do it.

The implementation of this solution is something that we assist our clients with, but it depends on the situation. Different organizations have different ways of implementing. For the most part, I create the packages and give my work to the COA teams, and they finish it themselves. When they are not able to do that, we help them further.

We are using MetaBots as well as TaskBots.

There are lots of features that are still not there in version 11. I know that version 12 is coming, but I do not know much about it.

This is a solution that I recommend. We began with the free license, but if you are going to use Automation Anywhere then you have to purchase the license. It's an investment. With UiPath, the development license is free, so it depends on the situation. In general, if the client is ready for automation then I suggest this solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

We use this solution for updating manual tasks such as downloading, processing, and uploading.

An example of this is manual posting, where the customer is asking for money to be posted. For example, let's say that some extra money is posted by mistake. That has to be reconciled and be pushed back to the actual owner.

Another example is bank transfer, where the customer is requesting money to be transferred from one bank to our bank. We generally interact with the customer and the bank, and there are several transactions that need to be completed. We now have this as a Complete Conditional Automation, where depending on the status, one of several sub-processes will be triggered and completed.

This solution has helped us in several ways, the first of which is scheduling processes.

There are many processes that need to be run during office hours, which is fine, but there are many that can be run outside of office hours. By taking care of these processes outside of office hours, it improves our efficiency. Also, if the bot were only being used for eight hours out of a possible twenty-four hours then the cost-per-hour is higher.

The recording feature accelerates the timeline of your implementation. It means that it takes you less time with lesser investment. The resource cost becomes less and brings your break-even point closer.

The most valuable feature is the recording feature. If you compare to a solution like Blue Prism, in that case, you need to build everything from scratch. Here, you record everything and then it is easy for you to build the automation. There is a skeleton in place, and you just have to build from there.

The scheduler is a really helpful feature for us because there was a time when people used to do attended automation, and they needed to run the software. This lets us schedule it to run at any time.

I would like to leverage the AI component without the requirement to know a coding language, such as Python.

This solution is pretty stable. We only had issues with the previous version.  We don't have any malfunctions so far, although, with the older version, we faced some object de-capturing issues. We had captured where it was supposed to hit, and it was hitting elsewhere. With the new version, so far so good.

Considering the automation that we have done, we have not been required to scale.

Technical support for this solution is excellent. They organize video chats and were able to guide us initially when it was installed. They gave good training to people and helped with some development activities. They are also fast in responding to issues.

We have used Blue Prism and there are some differences between the two solutions. The first is that Automation Anywhere provides you free training, and Blue Prism does not. You have to take the time to attend class, and you have to pay for the software to do some hands-on. Even then, you don't know if you will get the latest version. On the other hand, with Automation Anywhere, you have the Community Edition. This is good enough for a beginner to learn on.

The recording feature in Automation Anywhere helps a lot because you don't have to build everything from scratch, brick-by-brick.

Finally, Automation Anywhere is evolving faster than Blue Prism.

I was not there when the solution was initially set up, but I assisted with the upgrade.

There was a misunderstanding between the infrastructure team, our team, and the Automation Anywhere team, which was a major issue. It was unclear how the servers were going to be set up and who was going to install. Nobody knew what the requirements were, and as a result, things took longer than they should have.

We recently upgraded versions from 10.5 to 11.3.2, and the newer version is better. The major issue we used to face is an auto-login failure. It caused a lot of havoc with the customers because some process that had to run in the morning before we came into the office had not run. However, with this new version, that problem has been solved. There were also a few applications that were not previously compatible, and we were told that they would be with this new version. So far, the ones we have checked are now compatible. 

One example of these is Phoebus. There are some legacy banking applications that we are moving to Phoebus, so this has to be compatible because our future automation depends on that.

I am looking forward to using the AI in this new version. I want to see how user-friendly it is, without much knowledge of Python or another coding language. I saw a video and it seems to have become very user-friendly, with a step-by-step guide. I want to see how easy it is to leverage that power without needing to know how to code.

For anybody who is researching RPA solutions, I would definitely tell them to go with the top players in the market. These are UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. Then, you do your cost analysis and figure out who is giving you the best price. Then you analyze the service to figure out who is providing the best service. Finally, you can compare.

I recommend Automation Anywhere considering my experience with their service. Once you buy the product, the product may be good. But, if the service is not good then you may suffer. If you have a problem and you do not have service for three days, then how much business have you lost in that time? So, service matters a lot after you purchase the product. That is how you choose the solution, rather than by cost alone.

In our experience, Automation Anywhere is great, but I am expecting more in the AI and with the IQ Bot.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.