A great software for users with some technical knowledge
August 23, 2019

A great software for users with some technical knowledge

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Automation Anywhere

We provide Automation Anywhere setup and task customization services to our customers, most of them are telco companies. The solutions we offer are often integrated with an orchestration platform so we can automate a large business process that uses both RPA and other types of automation/integration like web services, APIs, business rules engine and databases.

Several common problems we address with RPA are:
  • Incident, change and problem creation, resolution and assignment to other workgroups.
  • Integration between legacy systems, that provide some actions only through the UI.
  • Data collection /input on online systems (web, Java) and spreadsheets.
  • Data backup/replication through system UI.
  • Send email based on some specific condition based on the data collected in the legacy systems.
  • Built-in tools like FTP, SOAP / REST integration and native database connection through ODBC.
  • Support for several technologies through plugins (web / Chrome, Java and others).
  • Task versioning.
  • Variable context passing through multiple tasks.
  • Task deployment unstable in some situations.
  • To deploy bots through Control Room, logged users in the machine have a runner profile (can't deploy on a creator profile for testing).
  • The REST API documentation isn't well detailed.
  • Cost reduction per action executed.
  • More tasks accomplished in less time.
  • Error reduction and process standardization.
  • A broader time window of work, as bots can run off business hours.
On more complex use cases, Automation Anywhere requires technical background like knowledge on network protocols and database language on task creation, and even people with technical background might have some trouble in the beginning because of the product particularities on how variable manipulation works, or how to get the object cloning (a more resilient screen manipulation command) to work as intended.

The scheduling of tasks on the Control Room and the autologin feature isn't intuitive as they should, so much of this works requires documentation analysis to get it done on the first time.
I needed support a few times, and in my case, I've found incorrect documentation of how the control room API works for task deployment through the API. Aside of incorrect information, we've contacted support to solve a task deployment problem through the API and it took a few weeks to pinpoint the source of the problem, that was caused too because of lack of information on the documentation.
Automation Anywhere is well suited for most RPA use cases, because it comes with a good and versatile set of commands, screen actions and built-in tools and features (it supports FTP, SOAP, REST, Database, variable assignment and manipulation, and simple math).

Its applicability is more or less suited depending on the creator user profile (those who will program the tasks that will be executed by bots). Users with a technical background won't have any problem using the software and creating the bots, while people that don't have a technical background might have difficulty while using Automation Anywhere because programming logic and other computing concepts (protocols, SQL, etc) will be required for more complex RPA use cases.