Automation Anywhere Reviews

We are an integrator. We are selling RPA products to various customers. They have different use cases. 

We have cloud as well as on-premise deployments of this solution.

It is an easy product. It is easier and less complex than any other RPA tool in the market. It is a popular product.

Some of the machine learning (ML) components are still in development. They deployed many of them, but they are doing some improvements on the machine learning part.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is suitable for enterprises.

Their technical support is good. I get very quick support whenever I face an issue. I raise a ticket, and the Automation Anywhere support team is available.

The deployment of Automation Anywhere is much easier as compared to any other RPA tool in the market. The solution itself is browser-based. So, we don't have to install complex software.

Its price is competitive with all other products in the market.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

Automation Anywhere is an RPA tool that is used to Automate any repeated simple/complex tasks with ease. Automation Anywhere is not perfect but it is still the best tool available in today's market.

It is one of the simplest RPA tools, having a simple user interface, and it is very easy to get hands-on with this platform. It has vast learning resources available, too.

Use Cases:

1. Extracting data from scanned PDFs: Using Automation Anywhere made it much simpler to scrape data from scanned PDFs and convert it into standard Excel format, as per requirements.
2. Portal Automation: AA makes web automation simple and our manual tasks have now been automated. Our portal is for making client bookings of the client. The Bot reads the Excel file shared by the user and accordingly, makes the booking in the portal with minimum time and with high accuracy.

Automation Anywhere is known for its high performance, reliability, and simplicity. Using Automation Anywhere has been a boon for my organization. It saves time and does not require human intervention, depending on the task or process that is automated.

As data scraping from scanned PDFs was a huge task for our organization, and with other tools, the accuracy was around 50-60%, we were facing a huge data loss. When our organization switched to Automation Anywhere, the accuracy rate improved and consequently, there has not been much data loss.

Automation Anywhere has great features and I have found Object Cloning and SAP integration to be the most valuable among them.

Object Cloning: Using Object Cloning, any web-based process or task that has fixed steps to be followed can be automated with ease. Object Cloning captures the object, DOMXPath, Inner text, etc. The drop-down menus can also be automated easily.

SAP Integration: Automation anywhere has added one more feature to this command in v11.3.5, which is SAP GUI. Using this feature/command, SAP Automation has become simpler than before, as it required using Metabot, DLL, etc. Everything can now be done in the task bot itself.

Automation Anywhere should improve its OCR command, as it's my observation that I have faced data loss or improper data being extracted. If the image quality is low then the data extraction with 100% accuracy is a huge task that I have been facing.

If the scheduling of the bot were much simpler, also allowing us to schedule bots prior to the start time, it would be an improvement. 

We have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

The stability is good.

The scalability is very good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Excellent support.

Once, I was facing an issue so I raised a ticket. The Automation Anywhere support team helped me to resolve it quickly, with proper follow up via email as well as calls.

We did not use another RPA product prior to Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is straightforward. The Control Room and client are simple to set up, too.

We have an in-house team with a high level of expertise.

Considering the cost, it is a bit high, but worth the price because the output accuracy is high.

Automation Anywhere is a tool that I love! I am quite happy using this tool and there are no features or commands that I have found to be missing that should be added.

Its advantages are performance, simplicity, and excellent support!

Please go for Automation Anywhere. I am sure that you won't regret it!

We are a factory and supplier corporation, e.g. we focus on the financial and automation niche, but mostly financial. Our service is implementing automation, e.g. we implement Automation Anywhere (AA) for customers. It's a tool for automating processes.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is easy to use and understand, even if the user didn't have previous experience with RPA (robotic process automation) software before. This solution has many tools for automation. It's good even if you're just starting with RPA software, e.g. we don't have to decide on the whole productivity process, so we can put in the costs step by step first, then put in the details after.

Other solutions require you to know the codes first and make decisions on the whole process. This means that with other RPA solutions, if the user doesn't have the experience, it will be difficult for them to use and decide on those automation programs, which is not the case with Automation Anywhere (AA).

An area for improvement for Automation Anywhere (AA) is its organization or utilization, because if it's your first time to initiate automation, you have to convert it properly, and you have to develop the amendment path through the automation path, but you have to pay a subscription for it first. The first part is difficult because if you buy the full package without having much experience with the product, it could be difficult to utilize the process from manual to automation.

There are some limitations in the migration from the manual process to automation, because currently, Automation Anywhere (AA) is trying to develop transfer from on-premises to cloud. There's a limitation in migration.

The setup and deployment processes for this product also need to be improved, e.g. made easier.

I worked with Automation Anywhere (AA) before, and I helped a developer team provide it to the customer, and that was last year. We implemented it. I've been dealing with the solution in the last two years, but changed my focus to analytic solutions for a year.

Automation Anywhere (AA) is a stable tool.

Scalability for this tool is good.

It's difficult to set up Automation Anywhere (AA) on the on-premises environment. It's also difficult to make preparations for it. You have to be ready so it can support the automation process. That was what people experienced in the on-premises deployment, but I'm unsure how it is when it's set up on cloud. Setup could be easier if it's done on the Cloud.

If you have a person who knows the utilities of this solution, setup will take one to two weeks.

Our clients are paying for a yearly subscription of Automation Anywhere (AA).

Automation Anywhere (AA) is very easy to understand, but automation is something new here in Thailand.

We have 20 clients using this solution. For deployment and maintenance, we have a technical team made up of 10 people, with one vision analyst.

We have an automation hypercare team responsible for supporting customers after we've deployed Automation Anywhere (AA).

I would recommend this tool to others who want to start using it, because it's a good tool.

I'm giving Automation Anywhere (AA) a score of eight out of ten.

• 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.

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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. 

This solution was originally introduced to help operations reduce manual tasks. After seeing positive results, we have now implemented this RPA solution in IT.

We have been able to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks completed by operations, allowing individuals to move onto tasks which cannot yet be automated.

Currently, under Automation Anywhere, we only use the Bot Runners and Bot Creators. This ensures we can automate processes without the need for manual interaction.

I would like to see more stability around scheduling a bot to run headless. I believe version 11 may be more stable and have less issues when trying to run headless.

It is more stable now than it was three years ago. So far, I have no major concerns and am looking forward to upgrading to version 11 in Q3.

As we have a small number of bits in production on version 10.5.4, we found it easy to scale. Version 11 will provide a load balancer, making it easier for us to run a pool of VMs to complete a task.

We mostly use it for operations right now. We are looking at possible IT RPA use cases.

The tech support has improved over the years. I believe the tech support to be sufficient right now.

I wasn't part of the original PoC team who completed the initial setup. 

After joining the team, we engaged in two upgrades to deal with stability issues. We found this a painful process as we were early adopters. This meant that the install wasn't stable. To resolve this, we decided on an approach where we would only upgrade to a major release six months after its release.

The deployment is quick. You could complete this in a weekend. Realistically, you need a week to prep and another week to triage unexpected issues.

Our implementation strategy has been to upgrade development, confirm everything functions as expected, and only then upgrade production.

We have a team of six, which consists of developers, a tech lead, and manager. We have set up a run support team to handle maintenance and bot stability issues. Their role is to get the bots back up and running in the event of an issue.

It is expensive. Automation Anywhere has reduced the price slightly, as we have grown. However, the price is still excessive enough that we are engaged in PoCs on other tools.

I wasn't part of the initial conversations, though I believe we proceeded with the number product in the market.

As a total package, this is probably the easiest solution to start with. Even if you add something that you will not need, e.g., Bot Insight won't be required until you have more than 50 bots in production. Even then, see if you can develop this through in-house metrics.

We are using this product for the development, running, and monitoring of automated processes. We are using IQ Bot for advanced tasks using cognitive technology.

Automation Anywhere has helped in automating business processes for simple to complex business cases. It also helped in understanding, learning, and discovering new automation ideas.

The features that I find most valuable are:

1. There isn't much scripting.
2. It is easy to learn and implement.
3. No prior programming knowledge required to learn and develop.
4. On the server-side, multiple developers working on a single project can save their individual works and have them stored in a single repository.

Custom models with advanced features can be included in the IQ Bot models for unstructured and semi-structured data.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for between eight and nine months.

For us, the primary use of Automation Anywhere bots is to automate the business, administrative, and financial aspects of businesses. We have automated many tax reconciliations and also automated the monthly salary slip generation for all the employees.

In business processes, the purchase order and invoice generation scenarios have been automated. Automation of Salesforce entries has also been done with Automation Anywhere, which has significantly reduced the burden for employees and made their day more productive.

Automation Anywhere can have a significant impact on any company's operation, as it can automate a wide variety of tasks that are mundane, time-consuming, and the least productive.

The Automation of salary slip generation for all employees in the organization has helped the HR spend less time manually preparing excel sheets and reconciling with other data and more time in improving the quality and working experience for employees by addressing their issues.

Other administrative functions like keeping a record of employee attendance and work hours have also been automated

The Automation Anywhere (2019) is now a SAAS product, hence I feel it's more fluid to use in any environment compared to the AA11.3x versions.

Automation Anywhere used to have a three-layer architecture with a Control Room, Runner, and Workbench but now it has combined the Control Room and Workbench into One. This made it easy to create bots and administer them.

The document Processing tool called IQ Bot has had several new updates, like a logic field, where you can include Python scripts. I feel it makes the tool more adaptive and flexible.

Automation Anywhere is one of the leading RPA tool vendors and they have done splendid work on improving their tool. The places where I still see scope for improvement is in their background automation are, and also their ability to handle Java applications.

I feel that document extraction like IQ Bot can be made more refined so that it may reach its full potential. 

Another area I feel that needs improvement is the variances caused in extraction results when using the tool with third-party OCRs. This is something that needs to be addressed. I believe rather than giving more third-party options, a single good OCR solution must be added to prevent variations in extraction results.

I have been using Automation Anywhere both A11.3x and A2019 for more than two years.

There is brittleness in UI Automation but this can be circumvented by using REST APIs if they are available. Also, the Java Applications still seem a herculean task to automate for many RPA tool vendors.

The bots are scalable and the only thing one has to ensure for better scalability is proper architecture at the beginning with a long-term approach in mind.

The customer service of AA has been good. Many of our queries were addressed with the raising of tickets as quickly as possible.

The set up was easy and straightforward, and the support was also good.

I have automated and released at least a thousand bots by now. I have also used Automation Anywhere's Intelligent document extraction solution called IQ Bot, both the 11.3 version and the 2019 version.

We are a solution provider and we use this solution to help our customers with internal processes. For example, we help them with the automation of information processing tools.

From a manageability perspective, this solution is very good. It's just understandable, and this has helped a lot.

The most valuable feature of this solution is drag-and-drop. You don't need to be a coding genius to create a bot. It has a simple interface.

From what I have seen with the IQ Bot, it is very impressive and I think it is going to solve a lot of problems that we face right now.

The cost of this solution can be improved. We have written applications that do the same thing as Automation Anywhere, but for less cost.

When it comes to stability, there are a lot of dependencies. The bot, itself, I would say has always been good for us. The only problems that we have had are when the tools change, the bot has to be enhanced. That is something that is unavoidable.

Compared to other RPA tools, I think Automation Anywhere is very scalable.

For example, we have written simple applications where they do one thing today, but tomorrow they may add something else to it. They're developing an additional, or expanded version of the bot, and it is always simple. In this way, the scalability is pretty good.

The only problem we've had is when we need to expand the userbase. This is because of the ports attached to it.

We do reach out to Automation Anywhere technical support and it definitely helps.

In the beginning, it was a little bit complex and difficult for us to understand how to get things running. We reached out to technical support for help.

Initially, we had planned on going simple. Then, we wanted to be centralized and have a cloud-based environment, which is where we were facing a lot of challenges. One of the challenges was DB connectivity for accessing SAP, which was a security issue. We also had some trouble automating web pages.

Initially, we did see ROI. The problem is that we could not re-use those licenses. One license is not going to be running for twenty-four hours. We considered planning and scheduling to make the best of this, but its split across multiple teams, so there are multiple license requirements. Not everything has huge savings attached.

I have worked with other RPA solutions, such as UiPath.

We are looking forward to having the capability of building the IQ Bots the way we want, using Python scripts. With our scripting, we can fill in the gaps and improve accuracy.

My advice to anybody who is researching RPA solutions is to consider several things. I can see that the path that Automation Anywhere has right now is going to take it to the highest levels. My suggestion is that if you have a lot of coding or scripting experience then I would recommend UiPath. It has its own plusses and minuses, as with every tool.

Instead, if you're looking for someone that can you you build a bot within a short time, who doesn't know any coding or have a background in programming, then I recommend Automation Anywhere. You cut out the cost of developers, but you add to your cost in terms of licenses.

Also, for manageability, Automation Anywhere is the best choice.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.