Automation Anywhere Reviews

Our primary use is a bot to look up accounts from Excel to the source system and entering it back into Excel.

We have a bot running on a computer that is doing manual tasks that we used to do. There is an initial setup time but pays off quickly.

I haven't done anything fancy yet, but the basics work for me for now.

It would be better to make it more user-friendly so that individuals with no experience can pick it up pretty quickly.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

I start using automation anywhere for my first project to automate HR process. For HR, one of my customers uses a lot of manual processes in their company. They manually update reports in Excel and have a lot of use cases that trigger emails to staff.  Examples of emails are applications for training or requests to top management for approval.

By using Automation Anywhere, we can help our customer manage their data by connecting the Bot to the database and automate emails that are sent between staff and the top management.

When implementing RPA with AA for an organization, we can figure out the spaghetti processes and align the business process so that they become linear. This is possible because RPA uses rule-based automation. Ultimately, it means that the organization will be more structured.

Having AA also helps to improve time-savings, as it is able to complete the whole process faster. The accuracy of the data posted in the system also increases.

In terms of cost, AA reduces the cost of hiring workers because the number of workers can be fixed after implementing RPA.

The most valuable features are object cloning, image recognition, assignment value, and automation for databases, OCR, PDF, Excel, and email.

Excel automation is especially helpful because a lot of small companies are still using Excel as their data storage.

Database automation is really important for executing report queries.

PDF automation is useful because a lot of companies still use PDFs as fillable forms. To automate a PDF, it uses the OCR function to extract data, from either a soft copy or handwritten-scan form.

Last but not least, the assignment value command is really needed to help with the manipulation of variable datatypes. Without this, it is quite hard to manipulate the data.

The assign value function is not there in the A2019 Community edition, which makes it hard for a developer to manipulate the data. For example, using a data table record, when I want to assign a value to a record variable, I am not able to assign it properly. I am only able to define a hardcoded value inside that variable, whereas the requirement is to put the value inside that variable dynamically using another variable. 

In the next release, I am hoping to have a feature where the developer can use a programming method like ".Double/.toString" to make programming faster. As it is now, one has to pull commands one by one for assignment.

Next, I am hoping that AA can have an explanation and directions for each command and how it is to be used by developers. For example, with the OCR function, it would be helpful to know what data is compulsory for the developer to enter, and what data is optional. By having guide like this, it would be more developer-friendly. This would be better for beginners who are using AA for the first time. 

We have been using Automation Anywhere for less than one year.

the stability of the studio is ok and some features is easy to use. but sometimes i feel to automate excel is quite hard and developer need to make many repetitive steps just to insert dynamic data into each cell in excel.Hopes in version 11.3 will have read range and write range function instead need to loop many times and set the cell one by one.btw, i like dictionary data type and impress with AA because no need to read file and just put the path it can already work. but i hope for dictionary variable data type also can support .xlsx file to save as dictionary and able to add dictionary key and value that outside from the file by able to add keypair value by assigning them  as temporary value during process.

Quickly scale to thousands of bots in the front and back office, no matter the type—attended, unattended, or intelligent automation.

The modern microservices architecture enables the platform to scale both vertically and horizontally, delivering fast ROI.

We do not yet have experience with customer support. We have been using AA for less than one year.

In another company, I previously used a different RPA solution. I have switched because I have changed companies, to one that is using AA.

To install the application is easy, but you need to prepare a few accounts during the initial setup. These include a Creator account for developers, a Bot Runner, a server, and a database.

We deployed with the assistance of a vendor team and we are satisfied.

Some of the factors that contribute to ROI are the low cost, ease of maintenance, and automatic updates.

This is a comprehensive automation offering with a scalable architecture and flexible pricing models. This keeps the RPA TCO low and you can automate with confidence.

We evaluated UiPath before choosing Automation Anywhere.

Overall, this is a great tool because it's easy to maintain and it can reduce hiring costs, leading to reduced overall costs in the future.

We have so many use cases. One of them is in finance. We have a finance portal where the team updates the billing records. Based on the Excel input, the file bot creates entries in different modules based on conditions. One error bot maintains a log. It takes value input dynamically and the tool is very flexible so in case of any changes in the future, the developer or user doesn't have to change the code. They can do it with the help of configurable files. At the end of the process, the bot sends an intimation mail to the end-user with the bot execution status.

With the help of Bot, it has increased the productivity of the current process and we do not need to spend more time on error resolution and rectification.

While doing processes manually, the user has to manually open all the Excel files and needs to check each and every row one by one to check a few validations and conditions. For that, the user has to filter all the unique records that were very time-consuming. In case of invalid records, the user has to manually update a few fields into that. Now, with the help of Automation Anywhere Bot it's being handle automatically, and work that would take one week is now being completed within an hour.

There are many valuable features available but the Automation Anywhere learning portal has very good learning materials and videos in place which is very user-friendly and can be learned easily.

From a Commands perspective, below are some most valuable features:

1. Metabot (User can develop the code offline just after capturing the screen, easy to drag and drop commands, reusable, and easy to use).

2. Object cloning (helpful to capture most of the controls with its Object properties)

3. Excel operations, Emails, Default Error handling features, Version control, etc...

Many clients use the Citrix environment but AA has very low functionality to automate a Citrix environment.

I would like to see improvement in advance Excel commands like lookups, Pivots, etc. 

After changing the name of the ATMX file, the developer has to remap all the variables again manually at all place and it does not auto handle the renaming of ATMX or variable. In older version 10 it worked fine but from version 11 due to enhancement, this function does not work and faces issues during the development.

I have been using AA for the last three years. 

Automation Anywhere is the best in terms of customer service/technical support. 

We have used Ui Path, Python with Selenium. Automation Anywhere provides effective training videos and material which helps users to understand the tool easily and we can easily drag and drop commands to automate with a user-friendly user interface. Automation Anywhere also has better customer service support.

The initial setup was easy with the help of Automation Anywhere team support.

They're very flexible around pricing and licensing.

We have evaluated Blue Prism, Ui Path, and Workfusion.

Within just a few years Automation Anywhere has different versions and closing their support to the older version soon. Migration of each bot to a new one becomes a bit difficult for clients.

Automation Anywhere should have a single and stable version which can be easily accessible and easily migrate the processes.

We are an SI vendor. We have been implementing customer-facing solutions for processes like reports generation, bank reconciliation, payroll processing, etc.

There were different bank statements generated for reconciliations. With some standardization, we were able to automate a process that took more than 4 hours in under 15 mins. In one of our customer implementations, the environment was to use simple RPA functionalities without any complexities. We achieved it with the basic pack of AA license.

The organizations where we have implemented AA have seen tremendous benefits achieved in terms of time and cost-saving with the highest quality of deliverables. Since this is about how it has helped our organization, I would explain it from the context of a system integration vendor. We are able to build a steady pipeline when we position AA as a solution and enhance our resource skills by certifications of AA.  This has certainly improved or relevance in the RPA market space with a growing team of Automation Engineers.

The features that help us satisfy the needs of the customer to overcome mundane activities using task bots and meta bots are the most valuable along with the rich controls in the control room. The developer team is able to capture all the necessary steps without much hassle with the visual designer and the ability to test each step of automation has helped in delivering error-free automation to our customer. With the new version of AA, we have more control over the implementation and we are able to quickly deploy the solutions to the customer.

OCR - OCR capability needs to become better. For the handwritten documents, we had a struggle to extract with accuracy while some other market tools were able to achieve it without any issues. 

The OCR component should allow integration with 3rd party OCR. This way we can use the best of breed solution along with AA or allow better control over OCR packages to be customized. As of now, it acts like a black box where there is very little control over the outcome of the OCR. We had great struggles with a customer who had handwritten data extraction. Finally, the customer was not able to see the value and the exploration went on hold post COVID.

We partner with multiple tools. We find AA to be much superior in support.

Automation Anywhere is an RPA package for basic Automation to Complex Automation. It also has analytics and cognitive capability.

I have used Automation Anywhere in many use cases from PDF integration to Excel reconciliation. The best use case was invoice processing using IQ Bot. In this process, we download PDFs from an application and pass it to IQ Bot for the extraction of invoice data.

This helps in extracting data from PDF documents and use it to post the invoices. This is something that we had done in a single dev environment, where Automation Anywhere was on-premises and secured in terms of sharing details for data extraction.

I have also explored other products from Automation Anywhere including IQ Bot and Bot Analytics. In addition, I have provided POCs to customers with Attended Automation 2.0 and the Automation Productivity Pack.

Our organization is a COE for RPA and a partner with Automation Anywhere. We have implemented RPA in many of our clients' projects. Not only this, but we have updated the way that we work by adding internal bots to increase our productivity.

We have increased our productivity internally by using RPA with our employees who are completing the same tasks every day. These include jobs like claim management, documentation, etc.

This helps our organization by increasing productivity, and also helps us to understand more use cases that can be applied to our clients' organizations.

Automation Anywhere is a package of many features. There is no single feature that will get more value because each feature is important on its own.

I like the software updates because I see new things being added all the time.

The jump From AA v11.3 to A2019 was a great start to help explore RPA and provide more options to developers who are implementing RPA using Java Packages.

This product is easy to use, and it helps business users to more easily understand RPA.

I believe Automation Anywhere is working perfectly and it is the best in the market. However, some points based on a development perspective I would like to add are:

1. Universal search.
2. Creating a variable from anywhere, including from the properties/attributes of commands.
3. I would like to have the ability to delete multiple variables.
4. It should be possible to delete multiple parameters for the API.
5. I would like to have commands to link with the respective knowledge base.
6. Having a refractor in the code would be an improvement.
7. A predefined framework for Bot Development that includes an audit log and error handling would be helpful.
8. It would be useful to have some updates for the control room in terms of analytics.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past three-plus years. I have quite a good understanding of the older versions from 10.5 to 11.3, as well as the latest web version A2019.

Stability-wise, this is a good product.

The scalability is good.

Our experience with technical support has been good. The support does screen sharing to solve issues and explain what they are doing.

Prior to working with this RPA solution, I used programming languages for automation. These included VBScript and Python.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Our in-house team deployed this product with the assistance of experts.

If it is saving FTE and Generating a good ROI then it is Worth Investing.

Before choosing Automation Anywhere, I looked at options like free online tools

We are using this solution to reduce the time and management required for the completion of manual tasks. We are also teaching our students how to create bots for automation.

For example, if you have a simple copy and paste operation to complete in an Excel sheet then it might take one or two minutes. It's small but if you have a large amount of data and the task has to be repeated many times, then it is very helpful to have the bots. Using automation technology in any company is very useful for both customers and the company.  

I use the Control Room and we also write the code.

We have a student database that contains over a thousand students and their results. When a student wants to check their individual mark, they visit the university website and they enter their registration number to check the data.

When we want to get a list of the student marks, all we need is a list of the registration numbers in Excel and our bot will automate the task. With the press of a button, the bot will collect all of the student results and display them. This will take at most one minute, instead of an hour. Within one minute we can view more than one thousand students and their results.

The most valuable features of this solution are its user-friendliness and the flexibility in terms of programming language. We can use any programming language, and I have just started to learn Python. I want to next look at real-time scenarios and see how Python can be used to help write bots. Having no restriction for any single programming language is very useful.

This solution uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help automate tasks. Our analytics people and data scientists are looking forward to seeing how this will help.

It is very difficult to create and automate timetables because they are modal and it would be helpful if the bot could assist us with this.

This is a stable solution and a very strong tool.

This is a scalable solution. 

We do resolve some problems ourselves, but if it is difficult then we approach the technical support for Automation Anywhere. Their response is very good and they are very helpful.

I heard about this particular technology only last year, and then I completed my certification. I'm impressed with automation and bots. When I first heard the term, I thought that the bots were actual robots. Later, I saw that we were writing the programs and creating the bots for these manual and repetitive tasks.

We handle the deployment of this solution ourselves. If there are special requirements then we will ask.

A bot is doing in one hour what it takes ten hours for a person to do. This savings in time is very important for the IT industry. Most of the time being wasted is on simple things, so if the bot is doing then work then it gives more time of other things, such as coding.

We only looked at this solution.

Initially, when I was first trained, I had some difficulty using this solution. However, when I went through all of the training and learned how to write the code, I found it was very easy.

We are training our students in the use of bots for automation. We are teaching students how to create bots, and how to use them so that companies will be prepared. We are trying to create more use cases, or examples, for learning how to code.

Some people are saying that they will lose their jobs because of this solution. A single bot is capable of doing the work of ten people. This is a very strong tool, but the problem relates to any technology. We have to adapt, and we have to understand the technology.

Time is very important. For any work that you are doing, if you finish the work within the time set by the customer then they will be really impressed. When the customer is happy with the company then they will give them more work. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

I work with clients who are in banking, the financial sector, and the accounting sector. It mostly involves work with Excel, SAP, and BI. A typical use case starts with downloading data from SAP, manipulating it in Excel, sending relevant emails, and then receiving the responses.

This solution has helped us bring in more clients. We are able to satisfy our clients in ways that we did not think was possible. When we started interacting with our clients, the expectations were pretty low. We were hoping to automate ten processes. Now, with the capability provided by Automation Anywhere and our coding knowledge, we have put everything together and have automated approximately one hundred processes. So, the clients who expected ten and ultimately were given one hundred were pretty happy. The company image has been boosted, as well as the trust and confidence in this solution.

One of the strongest aspects of Automation Anywhere is the ability to have custom MetaBots through images, or through the use of DLLs or APIs. This functionality was introduced in version ten.

This solution is easy to use and easy to learn compared to Blue Prism, UiPath, and others. You don't need to know C# or any other programming language. It is helpful because you can build DLLs, but if you don't then you can still manage. You can use Automation Anywhere from a non-coding background. If somebody is not familiar with RPA then they can still swoop in and get experience by doing automation projects.

They have a good community online with a lot of documentation and videos available. 

I would like to see this solution made to be a little more robust. As a coder, I have written more than one hundred functions and I can do high-level testing, but I can't do the low-level testing of complicated use cases. I think that AA has to look at it from that perspective. Hire a few developers, give them some complex work or use cases, let them work on it, and then check for stability when there are two or three tasks. For example, one task runs, the output goes into another task, one window opens, then another window opens, and you interact with multiple interfaces. This type of testing may be how they'll get to know what is wrong with the application.

I would like to see more Excel functions built-in. Currently, they have forty-five or forty-eight functions supported, but I have written a DLL that includes one-hundred functions. They can do many more than forty-eight, and because we are dealing with accounting and finance, Excel is used a lot. We need Excel and we don't want to always have to depend on a custom-built DLL. When using a DLL, ninety percent of the time it won't be uniform for all of the processes. This means that I have to modify it, rebuild the DLL, and deploy it again. Native support would be much better.

Web automation capability needs to be improved.

I would like to see more features in the next release of this solution, including data tables, spying, and cloning.

IQ Bot is bad and needs a lot of tweaking. It needs to have thrust because right now you use it and it doesn't get off the ground. It just stays there. They made us believe that there is potential, so they have to fulfill it. For example, they speak about this ML component in IQ Bot, but I know that it doesn't exist. There is no ML component there, and I would like to see one kick in when IQ Bot fails to extract data. It should start automatically, and maybe ask us for some guidance at the beginning on how to do the work. With the ML component working, IQ Bot would be very good.

I would rate the stability of this solution somewhere around an eight out of ten. Although it seems to be very stable, perhaps ninety-nine percent of the time, when you need it the most, it stops working. Object cloning, for example, even when you go through DOMXPath, and even if you map the exact path by going through the Object ID, the DOM, you collect the DOM and then you map the exact object, it hangs sometimes.

Scalability is very good, except in the case of IQ Bot.

IQ Bot has problems with respect to scalability. As an example, consider that you want to upload one thousand POs per day. You have two machines, and you want to split the work, but there is a problem. IQ Bot is going to put the output into the same output path, but how do you know which machine has generated this output? How do you map it? This is an inherent flaw that hinders scalability in the long run. IQ Bot doesn't even let you know whether an output has been generated. They have a database, and I built a custom bot to look at their database to find out if the output has been generated, or not. However, people have told me not to touch this database because it is proprietary.

The other point with regards to scalability is that it doesn't just happen out of the box. You do not just add a hundred more machines and have it work in the same manner. You need to use it in tandem with an SQL database, or another application like Tableau. If you do then it will be very strong and very robust. It will be loosely coupled but highly scalable.

I have corresponded with them and I would rate technical support a nine out of ten. I do not want to be too hard on them but what I've noticed is that they will support people, but may not fully understand the technical aspects of the components that they're using in Automation Anywhere. So, if you were to ask them, "How do I get to the Moon?", they would answer, "Just build a rocket". They won't tell me how to build the rocket. If they would connect developers to their own backend engineers then that would be really helpful.

The initial setup of this solution is a little bit complex, but if from the start you know where to go, what to click, and exactly what each button does then it will be very useful. If you have somebody to guide you then it will be much easier.

We implemented this solution ourselves. We developed the Bots like we always do. We uploaded it to a repository and moved it to a production environment that we set up. We then synchronized all of the files that are required to be present in the production environment. Finally, we provided support for a week after the deployment.

We have saved a lot of time and replaced a few FPEs with this solution. It is a one-time investment for a year. You may replace people or alternatively put them elsewhere to work on better activities. This solution saves money for our clients, which is a good thing.

I have seen my colleagues use UiPath and web automation is excellent. I have been involved in hackathons where I have used Automation Anywhere for web automation, and I have struggled. In web automation, if UiPath completes it in ten seconds, then Automation Anywhere will take seventy to eighty seconds for the same task.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.