Automation Anywhere Reviews

We have varied use cases and have worked in different business areas. Customer service is one of our biggest business areas, along with investments and finance. We also have some risk compliance, legal, and HR use cases involving about 50 different applications.

Automation Anywhere has freed people's time and effort to do more useful things. Some smaller teams have a lot to work on during the holidays. The solution has improved error reduction and work-life balance. It was all the more useful during COVID-19 when we worked from home for four years. RPA was a godsend. People could do things more easily. We continue to grow our program through this year because of the benefits it provides.

We really like all the features of the solution. The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use. In 2018, we assessed four different products available on the market. We chose Automation Anywhere because it seemed to be the easiest and most intuitive to use for non-technical people. That has always been our model. We are a very citizen developer-focused organization in terms of RPA and intelligent automation.

The integration of Automation Anywhere with our business applications is excellent. We haven't yet encountered an application with which it doesn't integrate. That's the point of Automation Anywhere or RPA. You use the applications as is. It sits as a bridge or a layer on top of your existing application and does a fabulous job.

We have integrated very few use cases into our workflow. We hope to do that a bit more with attended automation and Copilot. We have no complaints so far regarding documents, but we hope to do a little more with that. From what I've heard, you have a lot more API integrations available now than before. We would like to assess them and use them.

Automation Anywhere has definitely improved work-life balance and error reduction. Our audit and compliance team regularly advocates for the RPA team. They reach out to different business areas when they're auditing them. They are absolutely one of our biggest advocates. We have seen an overall improvement in employee morale with the various benefits we have gotten apart from the obvious time-saving.

The biggest metric that we use is annualized automated hours. I think we have saved about 50,000 annualized hours. In addition, we have saved another 50,000 hours for automated monitoring where people aren't needed. It has saved us a lot of time.

Automation Anywhere is excellent at providing automation at scale.

Through my sessions yesterday, I'm absolutely very interested in the benchmarking process that comes as a part of the Pathfinder program. We are also hoping to use Copilot very, very soon.

We haven't used Professional Service Accelerators yet because of how our program is structured. We started five years ago. We do everything in-house, including training and development. Our citizen developer program is quite robust. We have been able to do all our migrations and development ourselves.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is connecting with many different people. I've been coming to the Imagine event since 2019. Every time I come here, listening to all the keynote speakers on the first day makes me realize that the world is moving at such a fast pace, and we are so behind.

You meet people and realize that these are all possibilities and opportunities for us to be a part of this revolution. It's amazing, and it always feels great to come to the Imagine event.

The most important part of the Imagine event is the people. We have worked with Automation Anywhere all the time. We have worked with excellent people, whether it's the customer success team, the accounts team, or all the leaders at Automation Anywhere. It is wonderful to meet all of these people and hear and see what their vision is and what their thoughts are.

The highlight of every Imagine event is all the products and services that are coming in the near future that we could use or leverage. It's really exciting. It's just me this time, but we usually have more people at Imagine. People are generally very excited to come and be part of it.

With Automation Anywhere or RPA, the way we automate things now is different from traditional automation. The focus of our organization has been to help nontechnical business people automate their own processes. It makes it so much easier for them to learn to automate their own work as opposed to traditional automation, which was mainly done by IT.

It is extremely easy for business users who do not have technical skills to use Automation Anywhere. We use the Automation Anywhere training. We train our own citizen developers within the organization, but the training program is based on what Automation Anywhere provided us at the beginning.

While we have to teach business users how to use basic technical things, we also have to teach technical people how to approach business and business processes. That's a part of our training program. Apart from that, it's very intuitive and straightforward. It's equivalent to a six-month-old who can operate an iPhone.

We take our cues for the solution's learning curve from the Automation Anywhere initial training. We think it takes about six weeks for people to learn to use Automation Anywhere effectively, and we build that into our training program. We cover the basics in week one. We take a use case and work with that in week two. People continue working on their use cases in the third, fourth, and fifth weeks.

In week six, we target to put the use cases into production and cover more advanced topics. We have continued collaboration with our developers to learn new skills. I think six weeks is the amount of time needed for people to be comfortable using the tool on their own for their own use cases.

On our platform, we have about 50 other applications integrated with Automation Anywhere. We have expanded our program from RPA to intelligent automation. Intelligent document processing, Alteryx, Power Automate, and Automation Anywhere actually work hand in hand. While Automation Anywhere is still our main automation orchestration program, we integrate these other automating applications along with it.

I could personally use automated testing, which we currently do not have in Automation Anywhere. When we looked at the document processing IQ Bot, it didn't work for our documents. Since I haven't looked at it recently, I don't know if it needs improvement now. I'm sure the current version is much better.

We started using Automation Anywhere at the end of 2018, so, it's been five years and counting.

We have no complaints about the solution's technical support. I rate the entire customer success team a solid 11 out of 10. That's my comparison scale. Over the last five years, we have had five customer success managers, and all of them have been excellent. They had different personalities and different ways of working, but all of them were excellent. The last four are personal friends now.

We started seeing a return on investment after the first year and a half of using Automation Anywhere. The growth has been a little bit slow but steady during the time we were all working from home, but I'm hoping for it to grow again over the next 12 months. We'll probably have bigger and better stories to share at the next Imagine event.

I think the solution's pricing is reasonable. Setup cost is what you expect in the industry so far, and the licensing is at par. However, I like the ease of licensing and the flexibility in scaling up or down. We have done that over the last few years. I am looking forward to moving to the cloud between now and the end of August. That will change the licensing model a little bit.

We do not have Dev Stage licenses. From what I understand, it's going to be a pool that we pull out of. It'll be different, but I think it'll give us more flexibility.

We did not use a different RPA solution before using this. We assessed four different products, starting at the end of 2017 through 2018, and realized that Automation Anywhere is the best fit for us. We still think the same because it works great, and we have no reason to complain. We haven't had the need for any other product just yet.

For our current setup, Automation Anywhere is set up on a private cloud on-premises. However, we are working to move to the Automation Anywhere cloud. We are assessing and going through the initial steps. We hope to be on the Automation Anywhere cloud by the end of this year.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We have a bot called Marjorie that fetches all the requests in ServiceNow, distributes the request, reads the description, decides whether it's SAP or an Oracle request, downloads the attachments, and processes it for fixed assets. With Automation Anywhere, we were able to control and scale it up based on the demand, especially since quarterly, the requests are huge, resulting in saving two FTEs.

The best feature of Automation Anywhere is the IQ Bot option, which is excellent for document processing and can process almost all types of invoices with great accuracy.

We conducted a pilot for invoice processing with IQ Bot in the same finance team, and it performed exceptionally well, achieving strong accuracy compared to the earlier simple Microsoft OCR that we used.

Automation Anywhere has had a huge impact in my organization, especially in saving time and compliance-related process automation by reducing errors drastically and ensuring quick processing of requests with proper logs available for the audit team.

Compared to other RPA tools, the UI of Automation Anywhere is not that great and is not that easy to pick up for people, which takes more time for a newbie.

The UI needs to be more user-friendly, and similarly, debugging and logging should also be more friendly.

In the current field, it has been about eight years.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

The scalability is amazing with Automation Anywhere since we can scale it up based on demand, which is why we prefer it for finance-related use cases.

The customer support team is excellent; if there is a technical issue we cannot solve, we create a ticket, and they help us very quickly.

Positive

We have evaluated Blue Prism, UiPath, and Power Automate in the market before making our choice.

I cannot provide the exact figure, but we have a strong automation COE team that evaluates the ROI, and only if it is good will they approve the automation.

We are in a hybrid setup with Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Power Automate Desktop, making it a hyper-automation environment.

I am not familiar with the pricing, but I feel the licensing is a little bit complex compared to other tools.

I would recommend not relying on one single RPA tool; it is better to have a multi-view approach with two to three or four tools instead of relying on one single vendor.

I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

The main use cases that we have currently for Automation Anywhere are for our finance department, where we tend to have a lot of manual labor regarding the whole process of paying for everything within our company. We use Automation Anywhere in order to streamline these processes and make it really efficient for the department to do their internal processes.

What I appreciate the most about Automation Anywhere is that, from a development and developer side, it is really intuitive to do the whole automation, which also makes it easier to do all the support side of the code. It is really great for the user to be able to see everything that is happening in the code, such as what could be wrong or right. 

At the end of the day, the effort that you put in has exponential benefits, giving you many advantages from your lines of code, which is amazing.

One of the problems we have found with Automation Anywhere is that the rollout of new upgrades or tools is not readily available for everyone to know about the new benefits offered. For example, the Imagine event is a great way for everyone to learn about what is coming and the new benefits, but outside of Imagine, it can be difficult to know what is new.

The whole company has been using Automation Anywhere for around four years; I have been using it for around two and a half years.

At Volkswagen Mexico, we just use Automation Anywhere. However, I believe that Volkswagen Germany uses another tool. The decision to implement Automation Anywhere at Volkswagen Mexico was made by Volkswagen Germany. I do not know what considerations they took into account, but they chose to go with Automation Anywhere.

Since Automation Anywhere is intuitive for the developer, it is easier for them to express to the business side of the company what the benefits and opportunities are, making that communication really easy so we can get ideas from the business and then develop them from our knowledge. It is also easier to onboard people onto this tool.

The main challenge with agentic process automation that we are trying to solve is the whole implementation of artificial intelligence within our company, which is crucial because everything that has to do with security and all our databases requires us to be super careful. We are currently facing the issue of ensuring careful implementation while realizing the opportunities for implementing these agentic solutions within our company, which I expect will happen in the next couple of years.

In the age of agentic AI, understanding what all the things that agentic AI can provide for our company means focusing on translating AI technology into actual use cases. The challenge lies in prioritizing and making the link between actual use cases and the tools available, especially since AI technology presents many options but can leave us uncertain about which to tackle first.

We are currently migrating to document automation; we previously used an older version before starting this migration, but we are just at the beginning. In Mexico, where our company is based, we face issues regarding obtaining new licenses, as this has to be done through a third-party company. This limitation affects what we can get because there are certain packages we have to purchase, restricting our ability to acquire specific licenses, such as for testing AI agents, since we must buy the entire package to get just one license. Therefore, that presents challenges when trying new things.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine because we want to try new things and incorporate more innovations into our company that Automation Anywhere offers; however, the nervousness about testing them poses challenges, which is the only reason I would not rate it a ten.

We have many use cases. We have 200 bots, and we are doing extensive order management. We work at Cargill, so they do a lot of order management type of bots, but there are many different types of bots for all industries.

With Automation Anywhere, the features we are using help to remove tasks that humans are not good at, such as repetitive tasks. It's this type of task that people don't want to do. With intensive repetitive work, it's prone to human errors. That's what is helping us. It first motivates people not to do this type of work, so they can focus more on the customer and work on things that are more engaging. Additionally, it reduces the errors.

The main challenge that we are trying to solve with agentive process automation is business rules. We have many bots that have complex business rules, and these business rules are usually hard coded.

I joined my company, Cargill, in 2018, and since then, they have been using Automation Anywhere. I have been six years working with Automation Anywhere.

The main complaint with Automation Anywhere is when they release features that they don't have ready.

I did use another solution before choosing Automation Anywhere for the first time. In the past, we had UiPath as well. Also, when I worked for Hewlett-Packard, we were using WinAutomation, which is the one that Microsoft is using now for Power Automate desktop.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing of the platform are the worst. This is my major concern and complaint.

I have considered other solutions. We are working with Power Platform, which is another vendor we are using at Cargill. We did an analysis last year on cost for the long term. If it works, we might change to that platform in the future.

In the age of agentive AI, the biggest challenge for me and my company is that there are many vendors and companies offering the same thing, which gets complicated and confusing.

I would rate Automation Anywhere overall a nine out of ten.

I am working as an RPA Developer, and I am expected to create bots that simplify people's jobs, allowing them to focus on more important tasks. I am tasked with creating robotic processes.

Business analysts come to us with their problems and want to find out if we can address them with robotic process automation. My role is to confirm whether we can do it with Automation Anywhere. They handle the metrics calculations in terms of the impact on the business, but I am informed that with Automation Anywhere, we have streamlined processes, eliminating errors and reducing time. Previously, these jobs were performed manually, but with Automation Anywhere, they can concentrate on more significant tasks.

Its integration with Outlook and SharePoint was easy with the help of the Automation Anywhere team. After we got information about the connection strings and other things from them, integration was easy.

I like web automation and SAP application automation. 

It has a good interface. Those who do not have programming experience can easily use Automation Anywhere. It is very easy to learn. Within three months, they can start creating basic automation.

Sometimes, I find that Excel automation is not as expected. Excel automation can be enhanced. For instance, to accomplish tasks faster, I use scripts. However, if I could achieve the same speed without scripting, that would be ideal. 

For web automation, the recorder package can be improved. It is sometimes hard to catch certain elements on the web. 

The Automation Anywhere community is less active than the UiPath community, which is a downside. When I ask questions in the Automation Anywhere community, responses take a longer time. I have checked the UiPath community, where there are more active participants.

I have used this solution for a bit more than four years.

It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. It is being used for automation for multiple departments. I am working in the RPA team. My company has more than 100 people, but the RPA team has seven people using Automation Anywhere. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

When I encounter difficulties, I raise a ticket with the Automation Anywhere team. They respond promptly and are willing to help, but some team members seem to lack the necessary skills. As a result, problems that typically should be resolved in one day may take three days.

Neutral

I only have experience with Automation Anywhere.

I have not installed Automation Anywhere.

The deployment of automated tasks is easy. I can do it in two minutes. I have used both on-premises and cloud models. In terms of maintenance, the bots usually require updates when there is an issue or there is an update from Automation Anywhere. It is usually once every three months.

I do not know the price, but I am told that it is cheaper than UiPath.

I would recommend this product to other users because it is user-friendly, and I appreciate its features, such as SAP automation and web automation. 

We have not yet used AI in Automation Anywhere, but there is an upcoming course on integrating AI, which I will attend. 

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

We are using this in our college laboratory where I am a professor. We are using it for educational purposes. 

In our college, we are also taking attendance using automation software that we have built. It automatically takes student attendance based on face recognition. We have automated this process.

Automation Anywhere is very useful for automating repetitive tasks. It saves time. Our attendance automation helps take attendance of every person easily. It enables focus on strategic work, boosting productivity.

Automation Anywhere is very easy. It helps in many ways to do more work. It is user-friendly and provides good productivity. It has improved our productivity by at least 10%. 

The best feature is its ability to combine Automation Anywhere with AI to build intelligent bots. It saves time and offers better career opportunities for our students. IQ Bot automation helps to extract data from PDFs and invoices and store it in the database. It is beneficial for students and allows employees to focus on strategic work. 

It is very easy to learn. If you want to do a particular work, you can do it fairly easily. There are drag-and-drop opportunities available, and everything is easily integrated. We can quickly learn and find solutions to our problems. A simple task takes two or three days to learn. A complex task may take about five days.

There is limited scope for complex decision-making. For instance, a bot can extract invoice details, but it cannot determine if an invoice is fraudulent without AI integration. The enterprise version is expensive for small businesses and individual users, which can pose a challenge.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for more than a year.

It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

The stability of the bot depends on the factors like design and application changes.

It is highly scalable and flexible. Cloud-based Automation Anywhere offers maximum scalability. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

In our university, there are more than 500 students using Automation Anywhere.

It has good technical support, but the response quality and availability depend on your subscription plan. They offer standard technical support as well as premium and enterprise support.

Multiple support channels are offered, including documentation, community forums, chat, email, and phone support. Self-service support is also available for all users and is free for everyone. Community forums are helpful but not always reliable for critical issues.

Positive

It is better than UiPath Community Edition, open-source RPA tools like RoboCorp, and Blue Prism. 

Automation Anywhere is very easy to use. It does not require any coding which makes it more user-friendly than Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is also cloud-based which is not the case with Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere's price is better than Blue Prism.

Its deployment is easy. The deployment time for Automation Anywhere cloud depends on factors such as infrastructure complexity. For a standard cloud deployment, if using a basic setup, the time required is between thirty minutes to two hours.

Ongoing maintenance is required, especially if bots interact with a dynamic application, cloud service, or AI model. We are using cloud services, so regular updates are required. If the UI of an application changes, we may need to update it.

The enterprise version is expensive for small businesses and individual users.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten. It is a great solution for automating business processes and repetitive processes. It works great for data entry, invoice processing, and customer service automation.

We have multiple entities and businesses in our organization, which leads to various use cases. Specifically, there are numerous SAP use cases where we perform automation. Additionally, there are use cases with application automation and document automation.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to automate repetitive tasks done on a daily or weekly basis and utilize the time saved for other tasks. We wanted to save time and costs.

It integrates well. We have SAP CRM and browser automations. We also have document automations. We also have API integration.

We have multiple bots running. It saves time. If manual invoice processing in SAP takes two to three hours on a daily basis, a bot can do the same job in half an hour. We are saving more than 70% of the time.

The feature that I currently like is Agentic AI process automation, where we use LLM models to automate our processes. I have heard a lot about it. I am eager to learn more about it and implement it in my organization.

It is very easy to use. You do not require any prior knowledge. Through Automation Anywhere University, you can learn it and implement your use case. A non-technical person can learn it within a month. For a technical person, it is easier to understand the loops, conditions, and workflows. A technical person needs only 10 to 15 days.

One improvement would be to implement a log mechanism within the workflow, similar to other automation tools. Currently, the log mechanism uses a text file. If we want to monitor a process, we need to check manually.

Another improvement would be to facilitate copying code blocks between projects, as currently, it is not possible to copy and paste them either locally or on the web.

I have more than six years of experience as an RPA developer and have used other tools. I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past two years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it ten out of ten for scalability.

We have about 1,700 automation users. We are a big organization with multiple locations globally. We develop automation for multiple departments and multiple entities.

Their technical support is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have used UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Both are very good. Automation Anywhere is cost-effective compared to UiPath.

The deployment is fine. It is very easy. 

It is completely on the web. We have our own licensing management tool. Anyone who has done internal training can request the license. A dedicated license is generated for you for a few hours or if needed, permanently. We have a dedicated portal for deploying our projects.

The upgrades are also easy. It does not require much maintenance.

We have multiple communities for automation. We have citizen developers and we also have expert developers. To identify the use case, we approach the entities and ask them to identify any mundane, repetitive, or complex task. We have a perfect pipeline for automation use cases. When a use case enters the feasibility check, an expert assesses its feasibility based on multiple parameters. If feasible, we proceed with development, prepare documentation, and design all solution documents. Next, we prepare the architecture, and development commences. After development, we conduct several rounds of UAT. Before deployment, we conduct a pre-delivery check with a dedicated department, ensuring best practices and proper exception and error handling. Once approved, we proceed with deployment.

In our organization, we are the first ones to work closely with the Gen AI and AI topics. We have a few opportunities to use the Gen AI capabilities in automation.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

I use Automation Anywhere mostly for automating processes and document processing. The challenges I was trying to solve by implementing Automation Anywhere involved many processes where business users perform repetitive tasks daily, such as checking PO creation or invoice validation. There are multiple processes that they have to repeatedly check each day, weekly, or monthly, which becomes more of a headache for them. We automated these processes so they will be processed automatically, and users will get the end result for validation. It is basically time-saving for them. Some of the processes we automate are due to time constraints. There are many processes where the business required a huge team to implement and process all the invoices, which this bot accomplishes in just a few minutes or hours instead of taking weeks with manual processing.

The best features of Automation Anywhere are the Task Bot and flow managing, which are easy to use. Many things have been newly introduced through continuous updating of the Automation Anywhere tool. They're providing new actions that help to automate in a much better way. The time savings for users is approximately 6 to 10%.

IQ Bot has been changed and enhanced for Automation Anywhere, but the accuracy is still not optimal. They should enhance their document processing capabilities. The Tesseract OCR engine should be significantly enhanced. While IQ Bot has been improved, it still lacks accuracy. This is why most clients opt for third-party document extraction instead of using the built-in Automation Anywhere features.

I have been using Automation Anywhere since 2019, which is approximately six-plus years.

Regarding stability, I would rate it as eight out of ten, indicating it is stable.

Regarding scalability, I would rate it as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly scalable.

I would rate Automation Anywhere support as eight out of ten.

While I don't know much about other tools, I have basic knowledge of UiPath and Blue Prism. Currently, Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to examine their selling points. UiPath is advancing with more openings and automation projects, possibly due to costing, licensing, and usability factors.

For pricing of Automation Anywhere, I would rate it as six out of ten.

I haven't used Automation Co-pilot. Thousands of users are using Automation Anywhere. My relationship with Automation Anywhere is as a developer who creates solutions and provides training for the bot. The company maintains the partnership while I work as a developer. I mostly receive notifications about events. Overall rating for Automation Anywhere is 7.5 out of 10.

I train new analysts and developers how to use Automation Anywhere, so my use cases are rudimentary. We automate many internal processes, such as our monthly reports, employee onboarding, and time cards. On the client side, we focus on finance and accounting use cases, such as order to cash, procure to pay, record to report, etc. I do a lot with revenue ops and revenue cycle automation.

You can create synthetic data to test automation capabilities without using real data. For every RPA delivery lifecycle, you can use synthetic data instead of production-grade data. If you need to beef up your artifacts or documentation, you can use Generative AI to have more complete or comprehensive artifacts as a part of your delivery artifacts.

Document Processing has been a higher priority for our clients this year. Automation Anywhere can meet that need in two areas: FortressIQ transactions and the IQ bot capability.

Automation Anywhere has significantly improved efficiency within my organization. For instance, we reduced the time to enter orders from five to ten minutes to less than a minute in one use case. This has given full-time employees significant time and enabled us to process more orders. We save a ton of time using automation to onboard folks and for our time cards.  

Automation Anywhere's most valuable features include its end-to-end capabilities within a single platform. It offers desktop automation, unattended automation, a recorder for tasks, and advanced IDP capability, which means that I can handle everything from basic cutting and pasting to advanced use cases. With Automation Anywhere, I don't need multiple other tools to automate end-to-end processes. I only need one additional chatbot tool, assuming conversational AI is part of the solution. If I don't have chatbots, all the capabilities are built into the platform.

It's the second-easiest platform we use. Blue Prism is the easiest for non-technical users, but Automation Anywhere is also straightforward. It has a drag-and-drop interface that helps people who have used visual tools and a recorder for rudimentary task automation. If you're not a professional developer and haven't gone through the process yet, it's pretty easy to build a bot without much training.

When I took the training, I did 40 hours of basic and 100 hours of advanced. If I had learned it from scratch, my experience would be different. It was the last platform I learned out of the three. I had Blue Prism and UiPath under my belt before I learned it.

It takes 40 hours to train a non-technical user in basic automation. A process analyst only needs eight hours, but if you use the platform outside of Bot Insight, you need 40 hours to be proficient. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to integrate for all the standard use cases if you have an API. Otherwise, you'll need to build a custom plugin or use computer vision. You can integrate workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents. 

The IQ Bots need more out-of-the-box models to lessen the time required for model training. Their competitors provide more built-in models, which enhance capabilities in document processing.

Automation Anywhere white-labels the Shibumi platform and calls it COE Manager. They could expand on that platform to reduce the development time and manage robots in production. The COE tool could do more. I think that's another place where they can expand their capabilities.

I started using Automation Anywhere in 2019, so I'm on my fourth year.

Stability issues are typically avoidable. Proper infrastructure setup and understanding are crucial for robot processing speeds. Infrastructure is critical, and you must ensure you design these bots to identify all business exceptions In the bot hardening process and the RPA delivery lifecycle. System exceptions are unavoidable, so you need to fix them. But outside of that, there isn't an inherent latency based on legacy software or anything else.

Automation Anywhere’s ability to provide automation at scale is on par with its competitors.

I rate Automation Anywhere eight out of 10. It's on par with competitors, especially if you get the enterprise version. They're a leader in the cloud, with more cloud clients than any of their competitors. 

Positive

I have used UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are similarly easy to use. Automation Anywhere comes with all the digital capabilities you need right out of the box. They added those capabilities through acquisitions, but they own them outright. Blue Prism is easier to use but doesn't have all the same features.  They were late to market with their RDA capability, And I would say their IDP capability isn't as accurate, so it's not as highly rated.

Given its web-based architecture, the initial setup is genuinely straightforward. The hardest thing is a hybrid setup because you have to remember the rules for each one. Depending on the web browser, you have to have a certain amount of power and bandwidth at your disposal. I don't know that I would manage the environment myself. I'd rather have hybrid to cloud so that AA could manage the upgrades for me.

 Larger, multi-tenant deployments typically take three to five weeks, while a single device on a VM can be set up in two to three days. When we sell it and do it for infrastructure, we use senior consultants, so it's 1.5 resources. Depending on how complex the configuration is, we may need more senior consultants, but one architect plus a consultant is usually enough to get it done. 

Automation Anywhere requires some maintenance. We provide managed services to our clients for break-fix and business or system exceptions, but Automation Anywhere handles all the upgrades, patches, etc., as long as it's in the cloud. 

 It's difficult to say how much maintenance Automation Anywhere needs because it varies based on your environment. Sometimes, your environment isn't set up correctly, so the service crashes a lot, and you spend a lot of time resetting services and restarting processes.  

It also depends on the configuration and the number of automations. My largest client has 400 automations in production, so it's a full-time job. They say one person can manage that many, but I don't think that's a healthy number. It's more like 140, depending on the SLAs and use cases. An IT resource can fix most system exceptions, but business exceptions require somebody who's at least minimally basic-certified and ideally advanced-certified. 

In other cases, the automation wasn't built with the best practices in mind, so the process will time out and take longer than a human. Many things can cause maintenance and uptime to increase. Ideally, you want to do load management with the bot, so you're sharing the work. You want a utility available if the workload increases or a bot goes down. Lastly, you should ensure enough onboard memory and bandwidth for the automation to run.

The time to value varies depending on the size of your project and its objectives. It takes four to six weeks to produce a viable project if your goal is to prove that you can automate a process in your environment and realize value. Medium-to-large high-value automations might take six to 10 weeks or more. Once you have 10 processes in production, you'll see a return of two to five times the investment.

Complaints are generally about the cost of IQ Bot, which is higher than its competitors. The base model’s pricing is comparable to other platforms with attended, unattended, and IDP capabilities as well.

I rate Automation Anywhere eight out of 10. They're one of the leaders. I don't want to give a bad score, but no one is a 10 because there's always room for improvement. While the market share doesn't reflect it, they're tied for first place, in my opinion. 

I recommend doing the training before you purchase Automation Anywhere so you can understand the terminology, components, capabilities, and best practices. You should also get a partner to help you avoid all the hang-ups and pitfalls of adopting and monetizing new technology. About 70 percent of solo implementations fail.

Jersey STEM is an all-volunteer organization, which means that we have interns doing development using donated systems. The beauty of donated systems is they're free. The challenge of donated systems is that there's a lot of data that isn't correlated, and the systems don't talk to each other, so we use RPA to establish some communication between the systems and gather data into a central coherent location.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization by giving us a relatively easy way to gather all the data we need. We have data from HR, volunteer-matching systems, and grants systems. Automation Anywhere has enabled us to automate data gathering and posting that data into usable forms.

Before implementing Automation Anywhere, we processed these tasks manually by getting data from websites, putting them into spreadsheets, and going from spreadsheets to databases. Attempts to automate that using other tools were pretty onerous. 

Automation Anywhere enables us to simplify the process and see results much faster. Previously, it would take six to eight weeks to get results. With Automation Anywhere, we're getting results in two to four weeks, which makes the business happy. When I say business, I must remind you that these are all volunteers with little time on their hands. They're doing this with full-time jobs. Our goal is to make their lives easier with Automation Anywhere.

Jersey STEM primarily uses Google, so we use tools like Google Sheets and Google Docs. The automations all have to do with the Google ecosystem. Additionally, we must integrate with all donated systems, including HR, volunteer-matching, and grant systems that are donated to us. Jersey STEM is building the data warehouse as we gather all that data.

In a volunteer organization, employee capacity and compliance are not the primary metrics. Because we have an all-volunteer crew, we don't have them eight hours a day. We only have them for a couple of hours a day. We want to do anything we can to better utilize those two hours a day so that they're not spending them moving data around in spreadsheets. 

I have some metrics at the top of my head, but they're a little abstract. Accomplishing what we've done so far with the bots in production would take 40,000. It's not a direct correlation of full-time employees because that's all work that would not have gotten done because they don't have time for that kind of nitty-gritty work. 

Automation Anywhere has saved us a lot of time but not so much cost because everything is donated. If you have volunteers and they're giving you two hours a day, it is better to spend time on intellectual work rather than repetitive mundane work. That's the big bang that Automation Anywhere gives us.

Automation Anywhere's ease of use is the most valuable feature. We have interns doing RPA development, and it takes them about four weeks to get advanced-level certification. And within four weeks, they're productive. It's user and developer-friendly, robust, and scalable. We started in March with four bots in production. We have four more bots about to go online, which is pretty quick in the RPA world.

At Jersey STEM, we haven't put Automation Anywhere directly in front of business users. We don't have citizen developers because most processes we tackle are back-office automations. In the fullness of time, we will put citizen developers to work. I'm confident they will pick it up fast because Automation Anywhere does a great job of simplifying the process of building automations.

The learning curve for Automation Anywhere is quite simple. I had four interns do some basic training online. We did a three-day course with them to get them the advanced training, and they were productive within four weeks. They are in the process of building more bots. At this stage, we may be in danger of having them run out of work because they're working so fast.

Integration is the primary reason that Automation Anywhere process-building is so simple. All the building blocks are handed to us. It removes the guesswork of what has to be connected to where. We can pay more attention to the logic of the process rather than the mechanics and infrastructure of the process.

The only thing I would advocate for is making Automation Anywhere's developer environment Mac-enabled because many of our graduate students are coming out of school with Macs. Everything else in the Automation Anywhere world is built for Windows.

We've only been using Automation Anywhere at Jersey STEM since March of this year.

Automation Anywhere has been rock solid for us. We have had no issues.

We have yet to find out the limits of Automation Anywhere's scalability because we're only starting. We have a control room with one attended bot runner. I can imagine that within the next year or two, we'll need to scale up. Given the way Automation Anywhere is architected, I am confident that scaling up won't be a problem. 

Deploying Automation Anywhere was relatively seamless. I've been using Automation Anywhere since version 10 and was a solution architect for version 10 and version 11. An on-prem deployment requires a computer science degree to understand because there are so many factors involved. With a cloud deployment, everything was done for me. The only thing I had to do was provisioning and configuration. It made life a lot easier. I could complete it on my own in about two weeks.

It's too early, but the ROI will not be measured in dollars and cents. It will be measured in our ability to get data faster. For example, if we have a base of volunteers waiting to connect with us, we can connect with them much faster. If there are grants to be had, we can get to those grants a lot faster. 

The difference between a volunteer organization and a typical business organization is that our funding has to come from outside. We have to find it. Help comes from outside. We have to find it. The return on investment is getting there quicker.

We purchase Automation Anywhere through a service partner that's also helping us with those costs.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. It's a solid nine and a half because I don't give out tens. 

The Imagine event has been highly informative and useful for me. It's informative because I'm learning all about the generative AI coming down. That's been the focus. It's useful in that I've made lots of connections this year. When folks find out about Jersey STEM's goal, they're interested in volunteering. I have a whole bunch of new people to talk to who will help us with our future endeavors.

The Imagine experience is a full-on fire hose of automation, but it's a lot of fun. All the presentations have been geared to keep people's attention and to be entertaining. It's a brave new world, and there's a wow factor here.

I would invite folks in my field and other volunteers. It would be self-serving because our volunteers would make more connections, get more people to help, and also learn about the possibilities of where we could take Jersey STEM from a data infrastructure perspective.