Automation Anywhere Reviews

Coming from a startup background, we lack a formal administrative structure. This means we operate without established procedures and often tackle daily tasks, such as Excel updates or attendance tracking, on an ad-hoc basis. To address these challenges, we develop internal proofs of concept and present them to clients. In my previous role, I automated approximately ten web- and Excel-based processes using Automation Anywhere.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to address the challenge of manually entering data, such as transferring thousands of rows from Excel to a web application. When performed manually at a rate of 200 records per day, this process typically takes five days. By utilizing RPA technology, we can drastically reduce this timeframe to a matter of hours. Our primary goal is to minimize labor hours and enhance efficiency, enabling employees to focus on higher-value tasks like logic and content development instead of repetitive data entry.

The generative AI is helpful for jobs that fail. It will try to redo the same operation by implementing different numbers, and if it succeeds, it will automatically continue the process.

The task process, before and after Automation Anywhere, requires a series of actions performed by either a human or a bot. Previously, without automation, the process was identical. Rather than having employees sit at computers inputting the same data daily, automation allows for their redeployment to other areas such as administration, cash flow management, or payments. The goal of RPA is not job elimination but to enhance efficiency. While automation platforms can handle many tasks, they are not infallible and require human oversight. Regular maintenance and monitoring are essential for any automated process.

The initial learning curve for Automation Anywhere will be challenging because the drag-and-drop interface differs significantly from traditional coding. While packages are used, the underlying logic is expressed visually rather than textually. This transition may take one to two months as users acclimate to the new terminology and approach. Once familiar with the platform, developers will find it easier to construct automation processes due to their existing programming knowledge, which includes concepts like string operations, conditions, loops, and other programming language constructs. Although the terminology will be unfamiliar, the underlying logic remains consistent, making the platform more accessible over time.

The training takes at least four months for technical employees to learn, understand, and implement what they learn.

Automation Copilot is a valuable tool for streamlining daily tasks, but human oversight is essential during execution. For instance, if a sales representative quotes a package requiring managerial approval in a tourism scenario, the process should automatically route to the manager for confirmation via email, message, or another preferred method. While Automation Copilot is beneficial, it's crucial to incorporate a mechanism within the process to handle this manual intervention.

Organizations can benefit from Automation Anywhere's document, web, and Excel automation capabilities.

Automation and AI used to be a frightening prospect for our clients, who feared job displacement. However, they have embraced the idea after experiencing how these technologies can free up their time for more critical tasks.

Our organization has integrated Automation Anywhere with Epicor, Aurora, Dynamic 365, SAP, and Power BI.

Due to the numerous internal teams and domains, Automation Anywhere has been implemented across various IT departments within our organization. Multiple processes within each team have been automated using Automation Anywhere, from account management to application maintenance. These automated processes often involve handling documents, APIs, Excel files, or web-based interactions.

The most valuable feature is the back-end process automation. I primarily encountered this issue in back-end operations. To illustrate, consider the medical industry where I previously worked. ICD codes, a critical component, must be mapped by the administrative department. Traditionally, reconciling a single report was a manual, ten-hour task. Automation Anywhere offers a clear advantage over other market solutions by streamlining these time-consuming back-end processes.

Although the UI and elements are user-friendly, it is still difficult for business users without experience to understand how to use Automation Anywhere.

Automation Copilot has generated a strong foundation, but its analytics capabilities lag behind competitors. While Automation Anywhere offers numerous built-in dashboards, its data visualization options are limited. In contrast, Microsoft Power Automate provides extensive data manipulation and visualization flexibility, allowing users to create various chart types and formats. To remain competitive, Automation Anywhere must significantly enhance its data visualization features.

Licensing fees could be a barrier to entry for many potential customers interested in using Automation Anywhere.

A major drawback of Automation Anywhere is the lack of notification for all customers when upgrades occur. Without any information about these upgrades, it is difficult to determine specific details.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for five years.

I contacted technical support for problems related to the in-progress tab. In 2021 or 2022, numerous tasks appeared in the in-progress tab despite not running on the machines in real time. This led to the development of an API to address the issue. However, a new problem arose: when triggering the bot on runner machines, the bot was not actually triggered on those machines, yet it still appeared in the in-progress tab. This discrepancy persisted despite multiple reports, but the issue was resolved recently.

Neutral

The initial deployment is straightforward.

BotCity is a newcomer to the RPA market, currently holding ninth place on the top ten list. They are rapidly expanding and offer a unique advantage: no additional software is needed as long as the system supports Python.

I would rate Automation Anywhere seven out of ten.

Maintenance is required for server-based environments but not for cloud-based architectures since Automation Anywhere is self-hosted and managed by them.

Our customers have a large variety of use cases. It varies from financial processes, R&D processes, IT processes, services, and service desks. Most customers implement the solution for business processes. From a vertical perspective, we have pharmaceuticals, transportation, logistics, the public, defense, and banking sectors.

Some of our customers see growth in sales. Some see streamlining of the processes or removing errors from the process or rework. For others, the tool provides better usage or upscaling for the employees. All the customers can see benefits from the product. We do not implement any platform without a clear ROI to the customers, especially for the customers in Israel who are very ROI-oriented.

The product’s ability to have everything in one place is valuable. It's a web-based application so, our customers do not have any overhead from the maintenance perspective. 

The solution is very easy to implement. Developing something on it is very easy because we don't need to work on different screens, applications, and clients. It's the most user-friendly and developer-friendly RPA application in the market. It’s very, very easy to understand.

The product is not really intended to integrate with web applications. However, almost all enterprises use web applications, low-code applications, or advanced applications that use webhooks to trigger events. The product falls behind in working with webhooks.

Automation Anywhere has invested in the service desk, however, the first tier of the service desk, especially chat, is not really helpful but the second tier is very knowledgeable and professional. The product can do better in the service desk area. The tool must also add some of the more innovative features. 

I have been using the solution for the last six years.

The application is pretty stable. The on-premises system’s application doesn’t crash. It is stable as long as the infrastructure is stable.

On the SaaS version, we do not have any scalability issues. It’s 100% perfect. Since 2019, I haven't experienced downtime with the cloud systems.

The technical support depends on the tier. The first-tier support by chat is low quality. The whole process can take a long time for the customer. 

Neutral

The initial deployment took us less than one hour. If everything is prepared, all infrastructures are in place, and all the relevant people, definitions, and Active Directory are available, it can be deployed in less than one hour.

Automation Anywhere’s implementation is a click-through process. Mostly, it's a decision process within the system. There is a built-in bot distribution system if we need to scale up. We define the servers, and the system fires out the add-ons to the servers. Since it's a web-based system, we don't need to install almost anything. Just install the control rooms, and then everything else is done through the browsers.

The defense sector customers prefer to deploy the product on-premises. Half of our customers are on the cloud, and half are on-premises. The customers do not care what cloud provider we use since it’s a SaaS application. It is very transparent for the customer.

Usually, we need three people to deploy the solution. We need one person from our side and two from the customer’s side, including a system administrator and a DBA. The tool requires maintenance once it's on-premise and there is no connection to the cloud. However, if there is a connection to the cloud and the servers are intact, we don't need to maintain anything.

The pricing model can be a bit more flexible. It mostly has the option for bundles. There is almost no possibility of adding single licenses to the bundle. I rate the pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive.

Our customers are aware of automation. Most of the processes are implemented in the areas where regular business automation with integration will not apply. Where people are currently applying manual work, our customers would like to automate those processes fully, but there is no possibility of any integration. Our customers also use the product in service areas where they need someone to work in two teams, like integration and screen scraping.

Once business users who don’t have tech skills understand how to use the solution, it's relatively easy for them. It's easier than using an iPad. However, the tool is not filtered to enable the business user to see what they need to see. We need to educate and train the users to use it. On the flip side, this ability is not present in other applications or is more difficult for business users to understand. Automation Anywhere is an easy application to learn.

The time taken to train non-technical employees on Automation Anywhere depends on which level we train them. They would need one week of training to implement basic processes based on desktop applications or Excel files.

Some of our customers use Automation Co-Pilot at the service desk. Automation Co-Pilot is only on the front with the business user. In the back, the core product runs on the business applications. It's the same integration and the same screen scraping. It's like an extension of the capabilities and translation of the graphic interface to the business user. If someone clicks on the screen, both aspects run on the back end of the different applications.

Automation Co-Pilot increases productivity because everything done in 50 clicks before is done in one click now. Processes where a user must follow the instructions and run through the processes, including the decision metrics and decision junctions, Co-Pilot provides all the best practices within it. No one needs to open any applications and learn the processes. All the decisions are made on the application. It's a tremendous improvement in the time spent and efficiency achieved.

Automation Co-Pilot freed up some time for staff from a business perspective, but mostly, it improved the response time to the customers. Whatever someone needs to do on ten screens in five to ten minutes, it's done in one click in a few seconds.

Automation Anywhere’s ability to provide automation at scale is pretty good. It depends on the scale and how large the company is. It's very easy to see in an enterprise. The top three RPA platforms are not intended for SMB users. It's mostly for enterprise companies or at least for the companies with large operations, not necessarily from the headcount perspective but from the operation perspective. In such companies, it's very, very successful.

Automation Anywhere works well with API, but it lacks API management capabilities. Automation Anywhere could be better in integration. Integration between core Automation Anywhere applications with other core business applications can be better.

Automation Anywhere has helped all our customers to increase their automation consumption. Our largest customer in the pharmaceutical area had an exponential increase in their automation consumption, and they are still growing. We started in 2020. Now, they have hundreds of processes. Smaller companies are increasing on the center of excellence side. We implement at least 10 to 20 processes every year if companies have a small center of excellence. Some customers implement 40 to 50 processes a year. It's scaling up really quickly.

My advice to someone who wants to use API integration instead of robot process automation depends on the use case. There is an automation paradigm, and we need to know what to automate and how to automate it. Some processes are not intended to be automated with RPA. Some processes are intended to be automated only with RPA. So if a company doesn't have any API management tool, then automating with API can be very challenging because they can do it right but not manage it. Then, they would have a spaghetti of API connections that they cannot maintain or manage. However, if a company has an API management tool, API capabilities, and applications, it's probably better to automate using APIs and not screen scraping.

If a company with limited IT capabilities is keen to implement business processes that require RPA, I would suggest they configure Automation Anywhere because it's very easy to implement. It is user-friendly and developer-friendly. It is pretty business-user-friendly. It is very, very easy to maintain. It's a great application to implement.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I have numerous use cases for Automation Anywhere. One of these use cases involves retrieving data from the Etimad portal and inputting it into an Excel sheet, which generates reports for me. This is one of the tasks I have accomplished using Automation Anywhere. Additionally, I utilize Automation Anywhere in the Business Intelligence solution for SFDA. This platform generates reports regarding available medications or food items for purchase, whether from vendors or suppliers. I have several more use cases as well.

We have implemented Automation Anywhere to eliminate repetitive tasks for humans and enable them to concentrate on more relevant tasks that enhance customer engagement.

Automation Anywhere is designed for business users, providing a user-friendly UI that enables them to create and access reports quickly.

The learning curve of Automation Anywhere is brief. The solution permits drag-and-drop commands, and the documentation is straightforward to understand and follow.

Non-technical individuals can begin using Automation Anywhere within two months of training.

Integrating Automation Anywhere Co-Pilot with our organization's day-to-day applications is straightforward.

Co-Pilot has contributed to a 90 percent increase in productivity, as humans are now able to concentrate on tasks that provide greater value.

Co-Pilot assists in freeing up staff to engage in value-added projects. We employed this solution for an organization that had 3,000 employees working on repetitive tasks, thus allowing them to dedicate more time to relevant assignments.

Automation Anywhere has enhanced our clients' organizations by accelerating their tasks.

Automation Anywhere helps to increase automation consumption. Presently, we are implementing the solution in over 3,000 automation projects. In comparison to the manual execution of tasks prior to employing the solution, we now witness a sevenfold increase in automated tasks, a number that continues to grow each quarter.

The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the automation that frees up time for our employees to engage with customers.

Automation Anywhere could enhance its services by establishing a local office in our region to provide better support.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

I would rate the stability of Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

I would like the technical support to respond quicker to the assigned tickets.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. The deployment usually only requires me and one programmer from the client's end.

I am a consultant and help implement the solution for our clients.

Our clients do experience a return on investment through the reduction in costs for tasks that were previously carried out by humans and are now automated. Automation Anywhere is five times faster than humans and more efficient.

The Automation Anywhere license is affordable and not complex. In our region, we have the option to implement the solution on-premises or in a sandbox since nothing is in the cloud. This aspect makes the license even more cost-effective.

I evaluated UiPath, which is exceedingly expensive but offers superior support in our region. When considering the cost, support, capacity, integration, and overall value, Automation Anywhere emerged as the more economical and superior option.

I also evaluated IBM, but I found that they were imitating UiPath, which is not advantageous for me.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

I have integrated RPA with various applications such as Excel sheets, Oracle systems, SAP, Salesforce, DTS, the corresponding tracking system, Enterprise Content Management, as well as some of the business processes from Camunda.

Robotic process automation is crucial for maintaining operational efficiency in a business while eliminating human errors.

We have many endpoints using Automation Anywhere.

Maintenance is completed by the support engineers as per the license requirements.

I recommend Automation Anywhere. The solution is cost-effective and offers significant value. It is recognized as one of the leaders by Gartner.

We use it for backoffice processes. We are part of a shared service, so we do billing, credit, collections, and those types of processes.

We have done close to 50 projects in the last three years. AA improves our speed as far as moving files goes. It also helps in getting people prepared to work on a daily basis. We have a lot of jobs that run at night so that when people come in in the morning, everything's ready to go for them.

For example, we have two very separate systems which need to talk to each other. It sounds very simple, but we have a job that takes a file from one system and loads it into another. But it has to do that close to 1,500 times in the middle of the night. It's a job that used to be done manually by 150 people in 150 different markets. Now, it's something that's done during the night, and when they come in it's all completed. So it was a very simple task, but there was a lot of volume. It has saved everybody a lot of time and it has saved a huge amount of manpower. It saves us thousands of hours a month.

It's also very useful as far as interacting with employees. Employees can kick off jobs on an as-needed basis rather than scheduling them. It's always very helpful to have a tool that's interactive with the employees.

One of the most valuable features is object cloning, the ability to get into websites and do things faster.

I also like its usability. It's pretty easy to learn, pretty quick to get things taken care of with it. Our average developer is up within 30 days. We have our own training program. We don't use anything from AA for training. We've been doing it long enough that we created our own.

In addition, the user interface is easy to use. It's fairly user-friendly when you don't know anything about it and open it up for the first time.

The scheduling is a little difficult at times. Rather than setting up individual instances, it would be really nice if we had the ability to set repetitive jobs easily. Right now, if you want a job to run every 15 minutes, you have to schedule it a lot of times. I'd rather have the ability to just say 'run every 15 minutes.'

There could be some improvements made in the Control Room. I really like the concept of the application that they've got, so you can now access the Control Room from a mobile device, but there's only a lot of potential, there's not a lot of functionality there yet. That would be a great place for it to be able to expand, so you could have full functionality of the Control Room through a mobile device.

And in general, I would like to the solution to get into more machine-learning/AI. I know that the IQ Bots are looking to go there, but there's definitely a lot more potential there as well.

We haven't had any problems with the actual application going down. We really haven't had any issues. We have issues with third-party products going up and down, but we've never had AA just stop.

We're a small user, so we haven't had any problem with scalability. We've talked to a lot of people who have used it on a much larger scale. For us, it's very easy to add TaskBots. We're more than satisfied with the scalability.

We're always looking for expansion of the solution within our company. We use most of the commands available. There are very few that aren't applicable to what we're doing. We're always trying to get the solution into other departments within the organization itself. We use it a lot within the shared services, the area which we own. But outside of the company, we have several projects that are not within the shared service and we're always looking to talk to the other departments and get them involved.

We have 25 bots, meaning 25 licenses. Our core team that does development has four people plus a project manager.

Tech support has greatly improved. Three years ago we didn't necessarily have the best experience, but over the years they've gotten better.

As a side note, we go through a third-party first, through ISG. That's through how our service model works. Then ISG gets AA involved if they can't answer the question. We don't necessarily directly contact AA. Most of it's through the third-party provider, and then AA eventually.

ISG is great. We really haven't had a lot of problems. When we implemented version 11.3, we went so quickly - we went with it right when it came out - that there were a few questions that ISG wasn't aware of yet because it was so new. We went to AA through ISG and they were able to answer the questions right away. But for the most part, ISG is very on top of it, and we don't need to engage AA.

This is our first go in the RPA world. We had an internal resource, somebody within the company who had seen Automation Anywhere used in other companies. That person introduced us to the concept and, from there, we did some research and saw that that's where the market was going.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I did it myself and I'm not an IT guy, so it wasn't super-difficult. It took me a couple of hours, including configuration. Our IT team set up the actual virtual machines themselves, but the installation was done completely by me.

Our implementation strategy was that we started super-small. At that time, we started with five bots and the Control Room. It wasn't overly difficult. I just followed the documentation provided to install the service and configure everything.

Our initial project had to have an ROI, and that's why we started small. We have never not had a yearly ROI. We've always greatly exceeded the cost of, or the investment in, the tool. In terms of how much it's saving us, I don't want to be quoted on the exact amount, but it's more than millions of dollars a year.

We purchased AA through ISG and have done both annual renewals and a multi-year renewal, the latter recently. It has been very easy to add bots on an as-needed basis.

There are no additional costs from Automation Anywhere, but there is obviously the infrastructure costs for the VMs.

We definitely evaluated lots of different options at the time. Of course, it came down to Blue Prism or to AA. We went with AA because of the feature set, the way that the development was laid out. And support was also a factor. We were much more interested in States-side support.

Any company in today's environment would be foolish not to implement RPA. There are definitely different types of use cases where you could spread it out amongst the organizations and let them do their own thing. We have chosen to keep it centralized and have been pretty successful in doing it. But everybody should be using an RPA in some capacity.

I would absolutely recommend specifically Automation Anywhere.

Our experience with the solution has been a ten out of ten. I can't speak to the other tools because we haven't used them, but we're very satisfied with what we have.

We have used Automation Anywhere to develop different software bots. We currently use version 10.7 for Windows 10 and we are in process of migrating our version to 11.2. We have automated important processes like creation of purchase orders from attributes that are in a Sharepoint form, and upload of exchange rates in our ERP system from data that is available in websites (central banks). We look at automating processes that are manual, repetitive, and rules based.

AA has allowed the generation of gains in productivity by automating certain processes, moving the hours from FTEs to a software robot, thus creating a digital workforce. The employees who were working on those manual activities are now focusing their time in the critical analysis of their processes. Here a few examples:

• Load of daily exchange rates - 840 hours/year saved
• Creation of purchase orders in Oracle - 1056 hours/year saved
• Processing of bank account statements - 600 hours/year saved

• The user friendly interface enables a quick learning process by any developer, and the ability to interact with virtually any system.
• MetaBots - This is an intelligent component/functionality that makes connection to websites or web forms a breeze. This functionality also works great with our corporate ERP system.
• Technical support - Very quick, efficient, and acknowlegeable. They were able to address all our inquiries very satisfactorily.

• Object cloning - This component seems to be unstable in version 10.7. We have run tests in version 11.2 and they seem to work much better there. During development/test cycles it is common to see object cloning components that were working previously stop full of a sudden. In these cases we usually migrate those components to MetaBots.
• Schedule queue - Scheduling is allowed at intervals of 30 mins. Having this interval reduced to 15 mins would allow better control of taks that run more quickly. The ability to schedule bots to run in different time zones would also be a great addition.
• Control Room - Enabling the ability to customize it would be a great addition. In version 10.7 we need to pay attention to the URL to differentiate between Dev, QA, and Prod. We could also use the function to create our own custom dashboards.
• Give MetaBots the ability to work with objects in applications running on a terminal server. This functionality would be a great help to developers.

Less than one year.

The solution in general is very stable, we haven't found any problem with bots deployed to the production server. As far as development goes, object cloning is a component of the solution that seems to be unstable, as it apparently stops working for no reason. Once deployed to production, everything is very smooth.

Scalability is associated to the number of bot runners purchased. More bot runners can be purchased at any time depending on how the demand grows, and AA offers the ability to process bots in a platform called bot farm.

AA Technical support has been contacted for different reasons, including validation of bot developments. In all scenarios, support was very responsive, efficient, and acknowledgeable, resolving all issues very quickly. Support is available 24x7 with tickets being raised either by their own ticket system or by direct calls. The customer service manager engages with the SPA in the company via phone call every quarter, to check on the customer satisfaction.

We previously used the product Automate. That product had issues working with Java forms, which were extensively used by our ERP solution.

The basic setup was straightforward. Deployment took two months. Our implementation strategy consisted of three servers, one for Dev, one for QA, and one Prod, as well as five bot runners: one for Dev, one for QA, and three for Prod. Finally, we have one administrator and one backup. AA provided the needed support to get the solution up and running quickly and smoothly.

Our company has a long-term partnership with TCS. We are currently using their consulting support, which has been good. TCS is able to engage with top professionals in the market.

We started utilization of the tool with a target of generating productivity, specifically by saving 10,000 hours between August and December 2018, regardless of the number of bots deployed.

Automation Anywhere is costlier than the general competition. I believe that it is consistent with their market share and with the benefits AA has to offer.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere vs UiPath.

Automation Anywhere is a great platform. It is the tool that allowed us to bring back to life former plans to create our digital workforce. One suggestion is to go with the most recent release, both for the app and Control Room. Versions after 10.7 are the ones with enhanced functionalities.

We purchased ten developer licenses, all of which are in use now. The developers are responsible for deployment and maintenance along with two administrators. We have a target to be met and it requires extensive use of the product. This target will certainly be increased in 2019.

Initially, when we started, we were using it for back-office automation. The solution has definitely evolved. We're focusing on implementing customer and experience-facing use cases. Time is the most valuable piece, and that's how we measure the success of automation now. 

The solution is helping our customers save time. 

We were trying to solve a few different challenges with Automation Anywhere. For example, during the pandemic, gaining bandwidth was huge. Hiring while shifting to remote was challenging. There was such an accelerated use of the technology during the pandemic. Having to integrate with existing and older systems was key. That flexibility to work with other applications and other aspects of the platform really drove our decision to adopt more and more of the solution.

We've noticed time savings. The time saving varies. We look at how much value the customer gets. We've noticed time savings of up to 40 minutes, based on wait time and verification delays. Sometimes, we might only be saving a minute or slightly less. However, this is a slightly higher volume scenario where something needs to get done by the end of the day. It offers a broad range of time savings. For example, if someone calls in for the healthcare side to get benefits verified. Typically, that would take 45 minutes in terms of gathering information and validating information and prep work both before and after. Now, we can do that autonomously in a matter of minutes. 

Within the processes of automation, robots learn differently than humans. They are very interactive and literal. Diving into that tribal knowledge that makes an organization unique was really what we had to do differently. For example, if you tell someone, "Go check your email," they know what that means. With a robot, you have to translate that action into a specific language, and that was the challenging part from the process side.

Copilot is great at bringing agents and humans into the loop. Creating that AI assistant that can almost tell someone the next step, that suggested intelligence, is helpful. Getting the data an organization has over to a customer very quickly is effective with Copilot. Simple queries that may take 15-20 seconds to answer, you still have to, for example, to find the number, make the call, et cetera, and suddenly that 20 seconds if two minutes longer. Having that information ready in a conversational way is where generative AI can really help compress time. 

There's a lot of human involvement in the workflow. Automation Anywhere does a fabulous job of integrating users into the workflow. That's important. You wouldn't be able to automate with just the technology. Teaching users to interact in a relatable way with relatable interfaces has had a big impact on the business users' side.

Understanding the technology is very easy based on the way it is positioned. There are a lot of great resources out there. 

How much time it takes to get comfortable using the automation process varies. You need to gain the knowledge of understanding ways to do things, then have the practical knowledge of how to apply; then, there's a third piece of constantly improving, monitoring, mentoring, and iterating. That piece is ongoing. 

Copilot is helpful for pure-play back-office stuff. From the call center side, it's integrated and becomes available as an option as well. Any document processing is great for Copilot. 

With the new enhancements, it's very easy to integrate. It integrates well with infrastructure solutions and testing products, as well as data and analytics.

The integration with workflows has only been enhanced over time. 

In terms of document processes, there is some uncertainty between structured and unstructured. However, the intelligence applied cut down time by 50% or more. That's in time to do the work, not necessarily accuracy.

In terms of APIs and applications, when automation first came out, they shunned APIs. That was a challenge due to the fact that, when you sold it to an organization, they asked why it would be done a certain way when they already had an API. Now, it's making it easier to use solutions. You can bring in your tool kit and create synergy.

Copilot has helped us increase productivity. It's a new feature, so it's hard to quantify. I do see the established value increasing exponentially. 

The product has helped us free up staff time. The biggest thing we measure is experience. If it's moving towards higher-value projects, it's great. However, so is going home and not taking work home with you.

If we look at the concept of bringing automation to a broader user group in an organization, the focus right now is on how to build it properly. We're building it out with instruction manuals and working to make it more user-friendly. We need to do a lot of work from the perspective of education. The messaging is essential. Also, figuring out the platform so that users know where they need to interact. We're pointing users towards that and giving them the help to do that. The messaging and education around how to leverage the platform need to be more precise. Understanding what the benefits are going to be needs to be very clear. 

When you are implementing it initially, it's challenging as there's a lot of change management. That's where the lessons need to be learned. That curve is hard to overcome.

There are more challenging integrations that should be left to more expert users. 

We've been using the solution since 2015. It's been about eight years now.

Technical support is good. You don't have to reach out to them very often. The new layers are great. The services you get alongside the solution are helpful, and combining that with bug fixes, et cetera, makes it fit for purpose for all uses. 

Positive

I'm familiar with other options. The difference is the people side of things. The team outside of the technology, the people putting it together, is what makes the solution itself better. 

It's important that Automation Anywhere is easy to use. There's an intimidation factor when you present people with a massive ecosystem. It's practical and fit for purpose from the outset, yet very flexible and versatile. 

I was involved in the initial setup. 

If you start out pretty simple, the challenges that cause delays are more from change management and security and clearance. That's outside of the platform itself. That takes 80% of the time.

You can stand it up in a couple of days, however, it can sometimes take a month for reasons outside of the platform.

You can get things going within a week, which you can iterate on pretty quickly. 

Maintenance depends on usage. There are tools where you can build automation to provide alerts. You need someone who's at least slightly dedicated to that. Once you get bigger, you'll need a dedicated team, and then you have to figure out how to prioritize your time, in terms of evangelizing it, making more automation, et cetera. 

The pricing is okay. We've established the value of bringing it into our organization. For scaling, you can't beat the price of adding a robot that provides basically unlimited scale. 

Our strategy when it comes to automation and AI (and generative AI) right now, as with any technology, there's a lot of buzz. Historically, we've had periods of punctuated innovation, like automation in general, that was a real change in how organizations did business. Right now, we're seeing an iteration of that with generative AI. We have the foundation down with these platforms. Our strategy is the same: understand the technology from the people's side. We're the ones using the technology. You can't blame a piece of technology - it's still on us. We need to establish it. At the end of the day, we need to own it. Technology isn't a silver bullet. However, if we approach it right, we'll have all the success in the world.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We are using MS 2007 Windows OS mostly with IE and Excel operations. Anyone can write code with AA software with basic coding knowledge, we just need to know which command will help to build the next step. We had developed almost eight major processes and a few POCs for different clients. As we worked mostly with Web and Windows applications, we had used most of the commands related to Web and Windows applications. We can say bot accuracy was 95% in the final result. Bot consumes around 12 minutes to process 1 application, where if a human performs the same they would take a minimum of 18 minutes on average.

AA application is very good for running the application on a schedule. But a few times, the client requirements were 24/7 so it stops every few days. We found three drawbacks with the product in production:

1. For 24/7 running applications Bot Insights won't be generated.

2. For 24/7 running bot stops every few days, it might be an environmental issue or something.

3. the Same name of Mebabot cannot be uploaded to CR.

4. We tried to upgrade to 11.3.4 but there were few bugs while performing actions in Excel. (You may have fixed later stages).

WLM & Device Pool, where multiple devices perform the same thing parallel and complete the tasks at the same time. The Credential Manager for security is one of the most valuable features for storing credentials and providing security between the developer usage and future maintenance where passwords expire every 90 days. There is no need to touch the code and just update the CR locker section. CR UI is also user-friendly for creating deleting and updating users, roles, etc within the CR. The Audit Log section is also good for logging all the operations done in CR.

It would be better if they could extend the support for AA version 11 for a few more years, as most of the companies have tasks completed in AA version 11, and A2019 is much slower compared to AA 11. It keeps on downloading dependencies, and time-consuming while running the tasks. In AA version 11, if the bot stops uninterruptedly it's better if it could resolve itself and back to normal and process the applications.

You can give clients some more time to get used to A2019 and find and fix the concerns observed till then. That way you can add more features and easy to implement for the development team. If you ask all the clients to migrate to the latest version. Few are still thinking about the migration of code from the old to the new environment and various other factors.

Bot Insight for 24/7 tasks is limited in the AA 11 version. If this gets fixed a few more clients will renew this license as well.

I have been using AA for the past three years. 

We need to train the bot to handle all kinds of conditions. So it will behave accordingly when that situation occurs.

The technical support team were very responsive, they were available 24/7 and for severity 1 issue's for the production part they used to reply or communicate with us in maximum 45 minutes.

Other than the CR set up with the database will take little time. Client installation and configuration was straightforward.

We are a vendor team and worked with the client's environment along with their in-house team. Our clients are always happy with the product and its performance. There are few scenario's due to system instability they used to complain, we used to check and revert back to them what is the problem.

I don't remember the exact number, in one of my bot runner I had seen a $5million change.

Pricing depends upon the number of licenses required by the company. They can implement using the community version. If their business can be automated based upon the business process workload they can decide a number of Bot runner and Developer licenses are required.

To use other tools you need to have knowledge with VB script. But using AA no need of that.

Our company uses Automation Anywhere for enterprise automation of various finance tasks, focusing on accounting. This includes processing accounts payable invoices, managing oil and gas revenue, extracting data from text, and downloading files from our ERP system. These automated processes, some of which are business-critical and complex, enhance efficiency and accuracy within our finance operations.

Automation Anywhere has helped to address process bottlenecks and departmental inefficiency. It is used as an attempt to streamline operations.

It simplifies the management of complex workloads.

Automation Anywhere has a significant learning curve, but it is understandable and reasonable. Having a support team makes the process easier compared to learning it independently.

The training for non-technical users takes one to two months.

We've integrated numerous tools with Automation Anywhere, most notably our accounting system, which is interfaced via SQL and terminal. Additionally, we utilize RPA to interact with various systems employed by other departments.

One of the strengths of Automation Anywhere is its user-friendly interface, which makes it accessible even to those without a development background. As someone who began with no coding knowledge, I found it a great entry point into the world of automation. This accessibility, compared to tools like UiPath, stems from its intuitive design. Furthermore, the capacity to deploy RPA solutions across various virtual devices, a common feature in RPA, is invaluable for streamlining and scaling automation efforts.

Automation Anywhere's API feature is a fantastic offering, providing the valuable ability to call or execute tasks.

As a developer, I find Automation Anywhere's bot editor riddled with minor workflow issues that hinder productivity. For instance, the broken bot package versioning system prevents copying and pasting code between bots with different package versions, a stark contrast to the flexibility of Python. This inconvenience arises even when transferring code between bots within the same process, significantly disrupting workflow. While there are other minor improvements I could suggest, Automation Anywhere has been, albeit slowly, addressing our concerns.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for five years.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is quite good, with few outages from the platform itself.

Automation Anywhere is a very scalable product capable of handling large-scale automation operations.

In my experience, Automation Anywhere's technical support has been lacking. Many of their representatives don't understand the product enough to offer effective assistance. As a developer, it's frustrating to encounter issues and try to communicate them to support staff who seem unfamiliar with the underlying technology. This lack of product knowledge hinders effective troubleshooting and resolution.

Our current support plan is the most basic, so I don't anticipate a quick resolution. However, they generally respond within the expected timeframe for this level of support.

Neutral

Although I wasn't involved in deploying Automation Anywhere, I recall the process being straightforward and immediately successful for the company.

The implementation included a team of four to five individuals supported by a contractor.

We evaluated UiPath and another product that I cannot recall.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

My experience upgrading Automation Anywhere from an on-premise solution to the cloud was challenging despite some helpful features. While a tool was provided to convert version 11 tasks to 360, it introduced unnecessary code during migration. This inefficiency may be specific to Automation Anywhere or a common issue with automation upgrades. Regardless, the process was lengthy and tedious.

Automation Anywhere requires considerable maintenance due to a combination of factors. Our automation of an older Java-based accounting solution causes some challenges. Additionally, automating browser-based tasks in large oil and gas SaaS companies leads to frequent breakage of bots when the underlying HTML or code changes. Consequently, ongoing maintenance is necessary and will be a permanent responsibility for our maintenance team, which includes our project leader and a group of developers.

Establish consistent policies and procedures before doing anything. This aligns with the Center of Excellence framework. Having clear, consistent policies is important before building bots and implementing solutions.