Automation Anywhere Reviews

The primary use case has been for automatic service transformation. 

We have automated back office and customer services.

The tool enables employees to work on other value-added projects.

IQ Bot is its most valuable feature.

The user experience is easy. Anyone can work on it.

• I would like to see more complex use cases coming out for our industry.
• I would like to know how it can scale using enterprise data, especially for back office.

It is stable.

The product can scale.

It took us six months to scale to our current number of bots.

The technical support is critical for this product, but we have found them a challenge to work with.

Our decision to move to RPA was driven by market analysis and ROI.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is a very guided experience: out-of-the-box with Automation Anywhere University training.

Our ROI has been cost and time savings.

The Community Edition is also a good offering from the company.

We also evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

Adding Automation Anywhere is a tremendous value-add in the long-term.

We have done a few use cases for the business, IT, and financials. The primary use case is for the business client.

It has provided our organization a lot of benefits. We have reduced our headcount, approximately 200 to 300 employees, by eliminating manual, repetitive work. It provides profit to the business. 

It is also good to incorporate new technology into our business and systems.

The MetaBot is a valuable feature.

We can integration with other APIs, which is a good thing. This helps us with our database integration. For example, we have done an SAP integration, which is great, since SAP has a lot of manual work.

IQ Bot is great for invoices. It helps a lot for retail and on the SAP side.

Ease of use:

• For developers, the Control Room components are very popular. They are easy to use, along with the Repository Manager, Schedule Manager, and maintenance of the bots.
• For people from nontechnical backgrounds, the product is simple from them to use. Everyone can learn it. It takes about two weeks on the tool.

With Citrix, we need a dedicated server to work with it. This has become complicated, as it is not easy to pull all the systems together into one place. It would be better if the Automation Anywhere team could make this easy and simple.

We would like to see AI incorporated into the tool. With the cognitive capabilities, they need to be improved to handle unstructured data.

The screen scrapping needs to be improved.

Some of the commands, like object cloning and OCR, are not so reliable when we are automating five to ten websites into the same task. Also, when we autofill fields, the comments are not so reliable.

We have built many bots. It is good to use the best practices when developing them. For example, we add logs and error handling to each bot, so if it is not working, then we can see why. This helps our developers a lot.

It took us two to three months to scale up from our pilot to the number of bots that we are currently using. What took time was our business people needed to be educated on bots and their capabilities.

I have faced some of the problems with the Automation Anywhere tool. The technical support is quick and very responsive. They make sure the problem is completely resolved, which is good.

We implemented it in-house.

Go directly to the Automation Anywhere University site. There is some hands-on usage for the tool, and you can also download a trial there.

I have taken some classes from the Automation Anywhere University. I did three types of certifications, as well. The Automation Anywhere University site provides a lot of information, along with certifications. It gives an overview of what is the tool is and how the developers can code the product, which is a good thing.

There are several features that are very valuable to me, and these are the main reasons I was attracted to it.

1. It has a very wide array of built in functionality. I am able to test against SNMP (v1 and v2), Telnet, SSH, Command Line, Web Browsers (IE, Google, FireFox), email, Microsoft Office, Windows integration, etc… On top of all that I can write other apps in other languages and have Testing Anywhere control them when necessary.
2. The scripting language is easy to learn and very quick to build on.
3. The server side allows for multiple developers to be involved and all their work is saved to a single repository.

We chose this product because we had an extremely aggressive timetable to develop automation from scratch. In a traditional setting it would have taken several developers months to develop a full of suite of tests for just one feature set. Using Testing Anywhere we were able to leverage the built in capabilities such as Telnet and product a quick turnaround in developing a Telnet menu test that took a matter of weeks to develop.

There are a few areas that this product really needs to bring to the next level. First, the server is good but very basic. It does a great job of storing all the test files in a central location for all developers to use. However, it lacks all the standard features a normal “code” repository has such as Check In/Check Out, Branching, Version Control, etc…

Second, the IDE – or development interface is simple and easy to use. But if you come from a coding background such as myself you’ll find that it is a little too simplistic. I've become accustomed to the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE where it is very functional and helpful in developing your code. The Testing Anywhere IDE lacks all the bells and whistles you get in a full features IDE such as Visual Studios.

I have been using this solution for about 1 ½ - 2 years now.

Testing Anywhere offers two licenses for deployment – a runtime license and an EXE license.

The EXE license is such that I can create “executable” files from the developer machine and deploy it. In creating the EXE you include all of your scripts necessary for it to run. However, there is no control on how or when those are created and the file that you created can only be deployed to one system. SO if you wanted to deploy this test file to say 10 test systems you would need 10 licenses.

The runtime license is basically the same as a developers license without the ability to edit. I've come to believe this is very useless as I have to manually put in all my scripts and manually check them every time I run (because there is no way to verify what is running is the latest). One of our tests involved 200 scripts, so this can be a rather tiresome venture. To Testing Anywheres' credit, there is supposedly a different server than I am using, and that allows you to update the scripts on a remote machine but we are not using that nor have I seen it so I cannot comment on its abilities.

We have encountered a few. My company was one of the early users (if not the earliest) of the Testing Anywhere product. I'm told we used the product in ways that was not anticipated and pushed the boundaries of the product and development teams at Testing Anywhere. Because of this we uncovered a number of bugs that we were able to work with the developers at Testing Anywhere to get resolved.

We have run into a few. First, the server we purchased is limited to just a handful of licenses - six I believe. This includes developers and runtimes. This may seem like a lot but if you include all your test machines (the run times) that quickly dissipates. We are currently discussing evaluating the next level of server offered called Test Lab which is supposed to resolve this issue.

I would rate them as 5/10, and only because I have had most of my interaction with technical support and our product manager. I have not had to contact customer support much at all – Which is a good thing!

I would rate them as 8/10. They are always responsive. I am often in contact with someone on their team ensuring that they can re-produce the issues and working with them to find a solution.

I come from a background where we developed all of our test tools internally. I’ve used mainly Visual Studio. The only reason I entertained and then chose this solution was because of the time table and resources made available by my management.

I found the initial setup rather easy and straight forward. I think coming from a programming background made it that much easier but others that I have worked with that did not have a programming background have not had much difficulty either.

This was done through an in-house team.

Yes, we did look into several other options. We looked at an internal team of developers developing in some type programming language. We also looked at Selenium, Squish, and a few others.

If you are looking for a fast solution using minimal resources not requiring an advanced programming skill set this is your product. It’s easy to learn and quick to deploy.

While it has some really great features and is extremely easy to use it is still fairly new to the market and has its bugs. (Not that other solutions do not).

We're using Automation Anywhere to automate and schedule some processes. 

Many tasks take a long time for a person to do them. Automation Anywhere enables us to do those jobs in less time. Our overall automation consumption has increased by about 80 percent since we started using AA. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to use, even if you lack technical skills. People without deep technical expertise can easily develop scenarios.

Automation Anywhere could add a few technical features to the UI and some better reporting or validation about whether processes are running successfully. 

We have used Automation Anywhere for only two weeks. 

We haven't used the solution for very long, but it seems stable so far. 

I rate Automation Anywhere eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support eight out of 10. 

Positive

I was around for the deployment, but I didn't set Automation Anywhere up. The deployment only required one engineer and took a day to complete. The solution hasn't required any maintenance in the short time that we've used it. 

Automation Anywhere is a subscription-based service. I think the price is reasonable. 

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of 10. It's a good tool that supports a lot of scenarios, and it can save you time and money. In some cases, you can use API integration, but RPA makes more sense for other tasks because you don't need to develop anything. 

We primarily use the solution for business process automation. We use it to help us with background processes.

It's a very stable solution.

We have found the solution to be very scalable. 

The solution, in particular, is simple to set up.

There are quite a few very strong features available to users.

I haven't really used it long enough to critique too heavily. I need some more time to do a deep dive into its functionality, which I haven't done yet. 

The solution should have a more robust forum to help users navigate the solution, learn about it, and get help when they need it.

It should have a better marketplace where you can gather various workflows, et cetera. It would be an ideal place to find pre-built workflows, for example. 

I've been using the solution for maybe one year.

The stability of the product is quite good. It's reliable and offers good performance There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It's quite scalable. We have many users on the solution. 

I'm not sure if I have ever actually contacted technical support. I can't recall dealing with them directly, and therefore would not be able to comment on their services. 

I'm also familiar with UiPath.

In general, when you set up the cloud solution, it's very, very easy. It's not overly complex. The on-premises version does take a bit more work. It's a bit more complex. That said, it's not too hard to handle either. 

The deployment is pretty fast. You're looking at maybe a 15-minute setup.

There is a community version, which is free. they also have a yearly paid license. 

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

Overall, I would give it a rating of eight out of ten.

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.

My primary use case starts with downloading an inventory file in IE and then storing it in the database. This uses DB variables that interact with the banking application.

Through its automating system of generating quotations, it is much easier for us to track back the same customer data. It is giving us a real-time capability for generating reports.

Automation anywhere has equipped us with amazing tools including Bot Insight, IQ Bot, Discovery Bot, etc. The Discovery Bot is used to search the entire task in the system that can be automated. It keeps much value in our organization.

Extracting PDFs is very easy using Automation Anywhere. Its strong points are that it is easy to use, easy to deploy, easy to share, and has multi-user support. Different devices can be used to execute the bot.

The Bot Store provides some utilities for free, which can then be integrated into my workflows easily.

Using automation has reduced between five and eight FTE in our inventory download and update task. This is more generic to the RPA space than AA specifically, but we tried to automate a large, high FTE, end-to-end process as a POC.

AA is user friendly.

The most valuable features are the web recorder, which is used to extract structured table data, the Metabot to handle smart process automation (SPA), Object Cloning, variable assignment, and Message boxes.

IQ Bot is a unique offering from AA that allows you to extract information from semi-structured documents like PDF invoices, using built-in ML. The ability to train documents and easily review any that fall outside of the model is excellent.

AA has good coverage in terms of out-of-the-box functionality for bot development and management. A2019 has some great new features that take this further, such as the ability to create custom commands for your organization, which helps code reuse and development.

Comparing the code from dev to QA or production should be in some easier way.

Pausing the bot and resuming it in Metabot should be easier.

The Control room audit logs should be moved to an archive for those that are more than six months old.

The error handling capability is good but we are facing difficulties when there are multiple tasks in the same project. I want to be able to handle errors that occur in sub-tasks and it would be better to introduce a global error handler so that we can debug all of the relevant tasks.

I would like to have a project sharing hub like GitHub, inside of the tool, which will help to consolidate project files post-deployment.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past four years.

We experienced continuous bot disconnections in our environment. Once we validated it with the AA support team, they suggest for version upgrade and it solved our problem.

The technical support team has good knowledge of the product. They understand problems well and then provide solutions. 

My recommendation would be to start with some simpler processes. This will build your capability and understanding far more quickly. Automating processes that utilize a lot of different web applications can be tricky without additional input/error checking. Be sure that your code is resilient enough to ensure inputs get transcribed accurately and pages/content are loaded before executing more lines of code.

My primary use case is the automation of manual tasks involved in Order to Cash and Procure to Pay.

During the digital transformation of a company, the number of internal portals and applications increases leading to an increased number of data silos.

TCPL has successfully implemented a bot to synchronize data flow (including document files viz. docs, pdfs, images) between its in-house developed install portal and Microsoft Navision ERP.

TCPL has automated the AWB tracking of all outbound shipments to get latest updates on all our shipment movements, take timely corrective measures to ensure our customers receive shipments on time. This helps in ensuring timely order deliveries which results in higher customer satisfaction and lower DSO as we can collect on time only if we deliver on time.

Other bots are:

Vendor Invoice Processing and Data Entry

Accounts Receivables Data Entry

• AA RPA has drastically reduced speed of execution and thus turn around time of processes, ensuring all service level agreements are met and our customers get a great experience.
• Savings of fives Full-time Equivalent or 160 manhours.
• Lower Daily Sales Outstanding as we now meet SLAs and can collect all payments in time.
• Reduction in errors as bots never do wrong calculations or get distracted
• Higher Employee productivity as they are now free from the repetitive mundane work
• Important financial decisions based on updated and accurate information in-hand.

I find the graphic user interface and ease of usability to be the most valuable feature.

The wide range of functions and drag and drop workflow designer makes it easy to learn and work on, for both developers and business users. Being completely web-based makes it even easier and more comfortable to work on, for everyone. From a personal experience, I could learn and start building RPA bots using automation anywhere community edition in less than one month due to the good quality training material available at AA university and the use of usability.

Though IQ Bot is the most powerful and effective cognitive OCR platform for data extraction in the market, still, there is a lot of scope for improvement as there are a lot of non-standard documents which do not give a high straight-through processing rate and accuracy.

Additional features to be included in the next release should be the option to develop basic web portals through which business users can view and run required bots on demand. Secondly, some features of BPM should also be included in the RPA platform itself so that business workflows can be defined and automated easily.

I have been using AA for eight months.