Automation Anywhere Reviews

We mainly use Automation Anywhere to automate or mimic manual business processes. We use Automation Anywhere to develop bots that mimic human interventions in business applications such as SAP and web report applications. We use Automation Anywhere to automate human actions in the applications.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we mainly wanted to automate business processes.

I am a developer, and I am using Automation Anywhere to develop automated tasks for business users. I am not a business user. Before automation, business users were manually updating the data into the portals or desktop applications. The business required more time and resources.

Automation Anywhere helps save time and resources for the business. For example, an e-commerce website wants to create purchase orders for its client orders. They get the information regarding the clients in an Excel form, and the bot picks up the data one by one and updates it in the desktop or web application. They get hundreds of records daily, so updating the data manually can take more than a week. The business would require at least two to four resources. To save time and resources, we automate such tasks. With a bot, the process is done within minutes.

We are a service provider for business people. So far, our business people are very satisfied with our bots. They are getting huge outputs as per their expectations. It is beneficial for our clients.

There are multiple features. About three to four years ago, they introduced IQ Bot which helps to get data from documents with different structures. We receive bills, invoices, or purchase orders from different vendors in multiple formats. Each vendor uses a different format. IQ Bot automatically scans all the documents, extracts the required data from all unstructured documents or PDF files, and provides it to the business user. It is a very helpful feature of Automation Anywhere. They have recently introduced Automation Co-pilot which is very helpful for developers doing automation or automating the business process. Automation Co-pilot is very useful to create tasks.

Its user interface is very understandable. Even a non-technical person can understand it. Everything in the user interface is self-explanatory. It is quite good.

To use Automation Anywhere, no technical knowledge is required because it is simply a drag-and-drop type of tool. Each and every action is available in the tool, and we can easily automate a task. Business people can also easily run the created bot and monitor a particular task. They can easily monitor the results based on their business criteria. Automation Anywhere is a very good tool. It is easier than UiPath. A non-technical person can learn it very quickly.

I have experienced the issues of UI getting stuck. There seems to be an issue with server stability. This is something that can be better.

At times, the created tasks start failing randomly or intermittently which affects the business. They are failing at the runtime because of the bot launch crash issue. Business people are impacted a lot because of these failures at the run time.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

We sometimes have issues with server stability. There are also run-time failures of bots. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

For scalability, I would rate it a ten out of ten. Automation Anywhere is moving with the current technologies. It is scaling day by day. 

We are a large organization.

We have used UiPath. It needs technical knowledge. You must know the C programming language to automate with UiPath. As compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere is better. A non-technical person can easily understand Automation Anywhere.

We are also learning Power Automate. As a service provider, we need to learn the latest technology. We are looking into Power Automate. Our business people are interested in Power Automate because it comes along with Microsoft Office.

Automation Anywhere also keeps on introducing the latest technologies. In the future, there will be good competition between Automation Anywhere and Power Automate.

Previously, it was on-premises, but now, everything is on the cloud.

Its deployment is very easy. Because it is a cloud platform, you just need to install a single file. It does not take more than two minutes to download. Within two minutes, the cloud license will appear. One person is enough for the deployment.

It gets updated automatically because it is a cloud version. There is no need to update it manually. Everything is done automatically. If auto-update is not working, we can update it manually, but that also does not take more than five minutes.

In terms of maintenance, regular maintenance is required because there are issues related to stability and tasks failing at the runtime because of unknown reasons. These things need to be fixed, so regular management is required for Automation Anywhere at the backend.

I am a service provider for business people. Business people will have a better idea about the ROI. From what I understand, there are time savings. 

My understanding is that the license cost of Automation Anywhere is more reasonable than UiPath and Blue Prism.

I would recommend Automation Anywhere for all business people. Automating a business process is easy with Automation Anywhere.

We have not yet used Automation Co-pilot. From what I know, if we are reading from an Excel file, it helps to generate each and every action for a task. What usually developers do is done by Automation Co-pilot automatically based on the information that we give it. Automation Co-pilot will improve productivity for a repetitive task. It will save 40% to 50% work for developers. We are currently not using the AI capabilities of Automation Anywhere.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten.

I use Automation Anywhere for SAP, email, Excel, and web automation. We first try to understand the process and check whether it can be automated. Some processes require human intelligence and a human touch. If it's a completely goal-based process, you can consider it as a potential use case. After that, we conduct a complete analysis, based on which we set up the modules and proceed to development. 

Automation Anywhere helps us save time by replicating manual processes so our users can focus on other areas and perform meaningful work. It helps us automate repetitive tasks. We started with version 11. After that, they upgraded to 2019, and now there is Automation 360. Clients were frustrated with version 11, but 360 has a lot of good features. When 360 came out, the clients needed to spend money on the migration because they had to do some testing. 

It has saved the clients time. I would say reduces the time spent on these processes by about 30 percent. I can't say how much they save because I'm a developer and not involved in the business side of things. I don't even know what the license costs.

In one of our client's use cases, the user needed to log in at 6 a.m. because there is a trigger in Salesforce that happens around 9 a.m. Before 9, they have to do all the manipulations and place the files into a particular location. She had to start early in the morning to get all this work done. Now, with Automation Anywhere the bot handles all of this. Her job is so much easier.

I like Automation Anywhere's document automation. It can distill or scan documents and convert the information into a structured format. The solution doesn't require much of a technical background. I'm from a mechanical engineering background and don't have any prior experience with coding. I only know the basics of SQL. Even a business user who is willing to put in some hard work can learn and do some small things. The learning curve depends on the complexity of what you're trying to do. For me, one month was enough to understand the solution. 

We have begun exploring Automation Anywhere's AI features, but we have some limitations. We need to adopt rule-based automation, and there are still some use cases we cannot do. With AI, we can do some more use cases. We have done some POCs, but haven't done any projects where we integrated ChatGPT because we cannot put some of the things as a rule. 

It's easy to integrate automation into workflows and APIs. We just need to know where to pass the parameters or the details. If you have that knowledge, it will be easy.

Automation Anywhere's stability could improve. It isn't completely stable, but it's getting better daily. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for four years.

I rate Automation Anywhere seven out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. I have raised multiple tickets with Automation Anywhere, and they usually respond within hours.

Positive

I previously worked with AutoIQ and Blue Prism, but it was a while ago. 

The deployment time depends on the process. If the processes don't have any dependencies, we just need to move the code to public and schedule it with the necessary configuration. The configuration is related to the process, not to automation anywhere. The processes require some maintenance after deployment. The number necessary to maintain them depends on the client. 

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. It only requires scripting for complicated jobs, but non-technical users can handle simple processes or those that are moderately difficult. 

We use Automation Anywhere for our clients which consists of banks and a telecommunication company to automate their developing systems using bots. We receive the process definition documents from our clients and we developed a process that they need to approve before we can implement the automation.

With Automation Anywhere, we can automate high-priority projects first and gradually shift our focus to automating smaller, manually-driven projects.

It takes around three months to train non-technical people to use Automation Anywhere. We start training on simple Excel automation tasks and progress from there.

Automation Co-Pilot has helped increase productivity. The bots save three to five minutes for each small task per person and even more time on larger tasks. One bot can handle thousands of projects.

Automation Co-Pilot has helped save staff time for other projects.

Automation Anywhere successfully integrates automation into workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents. Everything runs seamlessly in the backend with no issues. 

Automation Anywhere offers valuable features, including command packages for PDF, Windows, XML, and Excel, as well as universal recording capabilities.

Automation Anywhere has difficulty collecting data from Citrix and Oracle applications.

Extracting customer addresses from Google that are not in a standard URL format is a challenge for Automation Anywhere.

I would like Automation Anywhere to make available more development tools, so our people can learn on their own and enhance their skills.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for just over one and a half years.

Automation Anywhere effectively automates our manual tasks at scale.

We clear up any issues in the testing phase, so once we are ready to deploy it is straightforward.

The solution itself is free unless we want to add the support option but we have to pay for the bots we use. There are two types of payment options: monthly or quarterly licenses for the bot agents. 

Between Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Blue Prism I find Automation Anywhere to be the best with UiPath a close second.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is easy.

We use Automation Anywhere in multiple projects and multiple teams.

Maintenance is required for updating bots or if changes are made by the developers.

We have five to six people working around the clock who are responsible for the bot maintenance.

In the banking, financial services, and manufacturing domains it is used for process automation and OCR.

For example, it is used by banks for large-scale reconciliation. A group of companies often has multiple bank accounts. We have to do the reconciliation with multiple currencies. On a daily basis, there can be more than 10,000 transactions.

We have implemented Automation Co-Pilot in our organization. Suppose a business head needs to check the details about a customer, such as order history, payment clearance time, how many invoices have been sent, and how many of them have cleared on time. They may also need information about how many projects they have executed with that customer, how many of their resources have been used, and how long that customer has been associated with their organization. I get all this information in one portal by using Automation Co-pilot.

It is talking with Monday.com, our CRM, as well as with our in-house project management tool, and SAP, where I get all the account details. It gets all the information needed and more, such as how many times we had discussions with the customer about multiple projects, and which salesperson is assigned to that customer. All the details required for business management are presented on one page, using Co-Pilot.

An example of how Automation Co-Pilot has affected our productivity is that in India the taxation system differs from that in the UK. Everything is on a government portal. If I want to deal with new customers and need data about their previous taxation, I obtain all the details from the government portal using Co-Pilot.

We also use Co-Pilot for customer support. We are the number-one partner in India for Tableau and data analytics and we have many projects where we provide Tableau support. We've configured Co-Pilot to gather all the necessary background information from our support system about a customer who raises a ticket. This information is displayed on one screen from our project management systems, repositories, and accounts. All the details are presented in our ticketing software, Jira. Based on this information, we understand the customer's scenario, and what kind of dashboards and RPA processes they have implemented. Initially, a customer support ticket is opened by a chatbot, not a human. The chatbot communicates with the customer and registers the ticket. A bot then opens the ticket and triggers Co-Pilot to gather all the details. With all the details collected, a bot will then assign that ticket to a specific person. This process, which used to require three people, is now done completely by bots.

Another benefit is around approval processes. You can build one using Automation Anywhere Co-Pilot when multiple levels of approvals are involved. Initially, we didn't have an approval process. Multiple people were in approvals. Now, with all the details in a ticket, when it is resolved, it is approved by the manager. That wasn't integrated into Jira, so we automated that in Co-Pilot. A solution should be verified by a senior person. Now, when tickets are approved, it helps us provide a good customer experience and customers will renew their contracts.

And in banking, where you have thousands of loan applications each day, assessing each application involves getting the applicant's credit score and details from multiple portals and government websites. Making a decision for one applicant used to take half an hour. But by using Co-Pilot, the decision-making time is reduced to just five or 10 minutes. It is genuinely helping people speed up operations and decision-making processes.

It has also helped us increase automation. Every day we are sending the "overdue" report to everyone in sales because they do the recoveries. The salespeople update all the details in the database and a reminder is automatically sent to the customer as well as the salesperson if the payment has not cleared within the payment terms. Initially, there were three people generating the reports and sending them to Salesforce, updating SAP, et cetera. Now, there's only one person who is handling the exceptions, because there are exceptions that are not handled by the bot.

Now, our salespeople are focusing more on business opportunities and not worrying about payments. Most of the time, payments are taken care of by the bot.

After we implemented that process, we then implemented vendor invoice processing, customer invoice processing, customer payments, PO processing, and bank reconciliation. We have implemented multiple processes.

The most valuable feature, which was launched last year, is Automation Co-Pilot. Microsoft has a co-pilot, but it's only for Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. But Automation Anywhere offers a co-pilot that is suitable for Salesforce, Genesys, Atlassian, and other contact center and standard applications. This is a game-changing feature for Automation Anywhere compared to the market. We are also getting good responses from customers about this product.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use. In my experience with more than 100 customers, coding is not a big deal nor is writing the bot. Understanding the process and providing optimized workflow, and fitting RPA properly for their processes are important.

In terms of the learning curve, Automation Anywhere provides detailed resources through their portal, including instructor-led training, prerecorded sessions, and exams. When training my team, I initially recommend that they go to the Automation Anywhere University. Then, for two days, I provide high-level training, covering the use cases and overall process. We then give simple use cases to the team and they are ready to implement them. Within three months, I have trained a team of over 20.

I hire people who have worked with other technologies but who want to shift to RPA. They already have knowledge of processes and their logic is strong. Others don't know about logic or how to apply algorithms.

I'm impressed with the solution's OCR and document automation because I've worked with multiple OCRs and Automation Anywhere has built in most of the document formats so you can easily get results. You can easily and quickly extract data from a PDF and it's faster than other tools.

I would like to see a low-code/no-code platform, similar to Zoho Creator or Joget, for process building, so that we can build applications within Automation Anywhere itself. Right now, we need some kind of portal that supports these types of activities. We would like to give a 360-degree solution to our customers without needing to get help from other technologies, like Joget to build processes, or Java to build custom portals.

If Automation Anywhere included these features, I would be able to include all these processes. There are features in place in Automation Anywhere right now, in AARI and Co-Pilot, but they have limitations. They do not match the development capabilities of platforms like Joget or other applications like that.

I'd like to see the stabilization of Co-Pilot and integration with multiple products. Right now, it is integrated with Genesys and Salesforce, among others. In the future, I will require integration with SAP Oracle, Atlassian, and Service Now. The contact center vertical is important and ticketing comes into the picture. We can build integration with Atlassian, but I have to do the coding and use extensions on everyone's laptops. Integration of Co-Pilot with Atlassian and other products will help the user.

For instance, if a big bank wants to automate loan application management with Co-Pilot and I need to use their CRM, if the CRM is not supported they won't do the project. And if a bank has over 3,000 loan agents, I have to install the extensions and integrations on each of their laptops. Instead, I could add one line of code inside Atlassian and get all the results automatically on everyone's laptops. This would save a lot of time for both developers and customers.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for more than four years.

Technical support is related to the product only. We receive good support from them because they respond within one hour. They even have chat support.

Customer environments aren't the same. Sometimes they block the reverse proxy or other things. That's when I need help from Automation Anywhere because they are the product experts, while we are implementation experts. If we have an issue with the product, we get help from Automation Anywhere. 

For example, if there is a problem with communication between the server and client and the bot is down, I need to contact Automation Anywhere to resolve the issue. We reach out to Automation Anywhere for these kinds of problems, but we handle process-related or implementation-related issues ourselves.

Positive

I worked with UiPath for about two to three months.

Co-Pilot is not free. It has a user-based cost. If I have 100 users, I need to purchase 100 licenses. But for practice purposes, you can get the Community Edition where you can understand all the details for implementing Co-Pilot.

The pricing is reasonable.

Automation Anywhere is the only RPA tool that is developed using something other than .NET technology. If you go for UiPath, Blue Prism, AutomationEdge, or Pega, they are all built on .NET, and only support Windows. But Automation Anywhere is developed on Java and Python entirely, and is totally web-based. Other tools are desktop-based. That means I can install their server on Linux too. Most banks and many other enterprise organizations require servers on Linux, not Windows. That's an advantage for Automation Anywhere.

We are working with one of the top-three banks in India. They have a policy that all servers have to be Linux servers. Because of that, UiPath and other tools were eliminated in the first stage of the deal.

We did build our own product related to OCR but not RPA, but Automation Anywhere is the biggest product. We also looked at Power Automate, but cost was a factor. Power Automate charges per process, not per bot. For example, it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to close the last month's General Ledger. One of our customers was paying $600 per month for this process with Power Automate. He went with Automation Anywhere, where he only had to pay $3,000 to $4,000 in total for an unattended bot, which was able to help 24/7.

And to get all the components in UiPath that are similar to what you have in Automation Anywhere, a customer would pay more than $37,000, while an Automation Anywhere customer would only pay $25,000. That is a game-changer.

As for using an API integration instead of RPA, API is faster than desktop automation, but it depends on the scenario. If you want to work with standard applications like SAP or Oracle, you can use APIs or desktop automation. I faced an issue with one of my customers who said that to do an API ABAP integration for SAP automation, he would have to pay for automation and ABAP development. I suggested he not pay for ABAP and just do desktop automation. What will be cost-effective depends on the scenario and the automation.

If a customer has to spend $10,000 on ABAP and another $30,000 to $40,000 for Automation Anywhere, they will kick us out. But if we go with Automation Anywhere and there is no need for ABAP, and instead we'll do desktop automation, the customer will be much happier because they are saving costs.

I have replaced existing portals for multiple customers. For one of my customers in Dubai, when we came into the picture, multiple things were not in their portal. They had developed the portal in-house. We started by understanding all the requirements. Before we started with RPA, we redeveloped the portal and then applied RPA OCR and pushed the data where it needed to go.

People develop their portals according to their convenience, but they don't know the standard processes and how to implement them. When they have to provide reports to management, or they have to do an audit, or they have to check details of particular transactions, they don't get the details from their existing portal or process. We standardize their process and then we implement RPA. If their process is not standardized, RPA will be a failure for the customer.

A simple process, from requirement gathering to production, takes about one month. Solutions don't require more than two or three people. For smaller projects, we don't assign a dedicated project manager. Instead, we use a shared project manager. The business analyst is also shared, because the costs of these roles need to be recovered. If the cost isn't recovered, there's no need for us to assign this role. The business analyst will do the final testing of the project because they're involved from the initial phase of the project.

The time spent maintaining bots depends on the bots, the situation, and the customer. A critical process might have 40-plus unattended bots and might take two resources during business hours for project support and monitoring. But I recommend support on an hourly basis.

An enterprise with multiple licenses should have at least one dedicated support person. That resource will provide reports to management. For instance, when discussing future projects, management will require all the information to approve the budget. We can present all the information: the number of transactions over the last month, and how much time or money was saved. Support will also provide training to business users if required. When AARI is part of the picture, we have to train people.

We use Automation Anywhere to process our collections. 

We couldn't hire more people, but we had some information stored in Excel that we needed to distribute. The sales information was centralized in one area, so we automated the process of putting the information into Excel so everyone could help themselves. The benefit we get from this is increased efficiency. The bot performs the tasks four times faster than a human. Our goal is efficiency, not replacing bots humans with bots. We wanted to do more with the eight people we had and allow people to focus on what was important.

We got what we wanted, but the implementation took slightly longer than expected because we changed our methods and partners. We had some issues with our partner at the beginning, but we implemented the software in one or two months. It was fast.

I think the person in charge over there has the same mentality now, but we wanted to automate everything that is transactional or everything that impacts the client at the end of the day. We were looking to use AI to make development or programming more efficient, like finding some codes. I know Automation Anywhere has some kind of AI incorporated in it that can read PDFs and stuff. That would be nice to use, but I haven't had a chance to implement it.

We were working on a system called AS 400. Automation Anywhere performed well on that old system. It handled complicated processes. I had to review different menus and screens and give resources, storage, and databases. That's complicated.

We found a local Automation Anywhere expert and then trained someone inside the company to be a developer. This person had technical skills, so it was easy for him to understand the things in Automation Anywhere. The learning part was kind of quick, but I don't think that would be easy for a normal business user. I think it would be more complicated for a normal business user. I won't say that I learned all about Automation Anywhere, but I know how to automate simple tasks I learned by watching some videos and checking the community forums.

The Insight feature could be improved. I don't think there's a lot of information about how to use Insight, so you have to try different scenarios to understand that feature better.  

If I compare Automation Anywhere with UiPath, which has something cool that lets you automate a workflow. We have no positive response when we try to use it with Automation Anywhere. We are doing everything by code and the drag-and-drop component.

I don't think it's easy because Automation Anywhere is marketed as a low-code solution, but it isn't low-code at all. It requires some programming skills, and I don't think it would be easy for a non-technical user to program something on Automation Anywhere. 

One challenge the company faced while integrating Automation Anywhere was people. The IT department is big and has been divided into different areas, including databases, infrastructure, and support. To adopt automation anywhere, you have to put everything on the table and see what you want to do.  I also require resources with the capabilities and technical skills to program in Automation Anywhere.

We have used Automation Anywhere for four years.

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. The support is good. The team from Colombia responsible for selling in Latin America can provide whatever you need. I don't have any complaints about that. They are always willing to offer you proof of concept in case you have to use it. I talked to somebody in Colombia because we wanted to do something in terms of proof of concept about document automation because we had so many processes that included PDFs. 

Positive

Automation Anywhere is deployed on the cloud, so I think it was very straightforward and fast. It took around one to two weeks.

Automation Anywhere is somewhat expensive. The prices are slightly higher, but if you need something, you must pay for it.

We also evaluated Blue Prism.

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10. I would recommend It for a medium-sized or enterprise business. Because of the cost, it isn't appropriate for a small business. The solution itself is good, but it isn't a low-code product.

Automation Anywhere Co-pilot functions similarly to BPM because one user forms and triggers the bot, which works in the background, then shows a message to other departments for approval. It is very predictable and used in many companies. However, in Pakistan, many departments use BPM instead of Automation Anywhere Co-pilot, so they are not utilizing Automation Anywhere Co-pilot.

I am an expert in Automation Anywhere because I develop automation scripts and use IQ Bot for design workflow and process design. Automation Anywhere is very comfortable for any developer to use RPA tools.

Automation Anywhere has citizen developer capabilities. When we develop a bot, the RPA is low-code, no-code development, making it very easy for business developers to use.

AARI is a bot tool that is easy to develop. As an Automation Anywhere Co-pilot developer, I can say that it basically integrates many bots in one platform. It is used by business developers to connect different departments, making it very accessible to automate processes.

Automation Anywhere is not difficult to upgrade because we have bot scripts. When we upgrade, the bot scripts remain unchanged, so there is no difficulty.

Automation Anywhere is very scalable when used on-premises rather than in the cloud. It is used in banking environments, and many large banks across different countries use Automation Anywhere, which demonstrates its scalability.

Automation Anywhere's scale level involves a discovery bot. We use their bots, allowing us to easily scale our bots and maintain proper logging.

Before Automation Anywhere, I worked on Power Automate, but since it is a cloud platform, it was not suitable for banking systems in Pakistan as they do not use cloud computing.

As an RPA consultant who has purchased many licenses and evaluated numerous tools, I recommend Automation Anywhere because it integrates easily with AI and Power BI tools for reporting and discovery bot capabilities, allowing proper log control.

Automation Anywhere uses rule-based access where only admins and developers can access the code. Citizen developers or business users cannot see the code due to rule-based access.

They offer unique features such as hybrid bot capability, which supports both attended and unattended bots on one platform, setting it apart from other tools.

For rule-based tools, I recommend RPA. For unstructured data and predictions, AI is more suitable. For chatbots and different models, Gen AI is appropriate. As an RPA developer, I work with three modes: OCR for AI integration, and chatbot integration, such as Watson in IBM RPA for Gen AI applications.

We have built over 75 automations with Automation Anywhere across various teams in the organization, delivering a high value for our internal teams. We have explored a couple of process transformations with Automation Anywhere using their IQ bots and AI automation tools.

We have integrated applications like SAP ECC, One Source Automation, and SharePoint using Python code. Our company has 25 AA developers. 

AA improves process consistency and reduces human error. We have saved our clients considerable time using Automation Anywhere. While we don't assess the dollar savings, we look at the amount of time saved per project. The tasks were previously completed by hand, but Automation Anywhere enabled a lot of process automation, giving users automation that runs around the clock. For example, we can automate processes to address point-in-time reports so a user doesn't need to wake up at midnight to handle these issues. 

We haven't gotten approval to implement AI, but when we do, I believe it will accelerate the time savings we realize through automation. We will work with other teams to show them the value of AI and automation. 

Automation Anywhere's most valuable feature is its ease of use. It's easy to envision a solution or process to transform with Automation Anywhere from end to end. We can realize the value much faster because it's easy to use and understand. 

All the features are impressive. We haven't had a chance to use the Copilot or other AI features, but the studio is great. It's the platform where we build the bots. The IQ Bot used to be excellent, but the IQ Bot isn't available anymore. I believe it's document automation, which is also very good.

Anyone at any level can use Automation Anywhere. Once you get the hang of it, it's highly intuitive, and the learning curve is short. We started seeing value from Automation Anywhere within a month or so after implementation, but that was with the older version. It's even faster now that everything is on the web.

Training employees using the courses takes a couple of weeks, followed by another week or so of hands-on learning on the platform. It takes about four weeks to onboard a user.

Automation Anywhere can improve its integration. For example, you can't directly integrate Automation Anywhere with SharePoint or third-party applications seamlessly. Adding seamless third-party integration would add a lot of value to the platform. We need to use APIs or Python coding to integrate the third-party applications. If Automation Anywhere could add some connectors, that would be great. 

I'd love to see the ability to build web or mobile applications that are integrated with Automation Anywhere bots, so that a user can work on a web interface directly. Then, it can be linked to the Automation Anywhere bots in the background. They just hit a button, and all the data or information will be used by the bot to do some process in the back end.

We have used Automation Anywhere for five years.

We've never had any issues with stability.

It's easy to build automations and scale Automation Anywhere.

I rate Automation Anywhere support 10 out of 10. The tech support is great. We have a CSM we can contact for information, and they're very responsive. 

Positive

We use the SaaS model of Automation Anywhere, so the deployment was easy. We set up the infrastructure in under a week. We worked closely with the Automation Anywhere folks because we wanted a clean slate. We didn't want to migrate from the older version to the SaaS edition and took it as an opportunity to clean up the bots. It didn't require much effort, and only two people were involved. The upgrade process was simple. Maintenance is minimal. It only takes a couple of people to maintain 75 bots. 

Automation Anywhere's pricing is excellent.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. I would recommend it to others. It's intuitive and easy to implement. 

We use it for P2P, AP, O2C, AR, inventory management, finance and general ledger, and HR.

Moving forward, we see opportunities to operationalize AI within our organization for loss cash discounts, payment term mismatch, credit blocks for vendors, duplicate invoices, accounting entries, and invoicing in SAP.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to achieve productivity and decrease the complexity of the processes. The key issue has been the complexity. RPA is not meant for complex processes. When a process becomes complex, we face a lot of errors. That creates slowness of processing, some interactions at critical moments, and frustration in the business because the job is not done. As an alternative, we have to work manually.

We built many complex bots, and that was not the best strategy. It is better to simplify and then automate, and not automate to avoid simplification. When you take this wrong approach, you have to deal with many technical issues, and you are not able to leverage and benefit from the other tools as part of the automation itself. In the business roadmap of an RPA project, there should be some reporting or dashboards of bots' portfolio so that you can see the percentage of successful processing, the rate of failures per bot, and the rate of exceptions. There should also be something to measure the return on investment to be able to say that this bot is meeting expectations and productivity. It was worth it to invest in this bot, and it costs less than manual work. If the bot is always facing issues, it will be better to come back to manual processing. We should not move from manual to automation without thinking about simplification. We need to simplify first and then automate.

We have a centralized infrastructure, but we have a decentralized business strategy. We gained 60% productivity, which is at a high level.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use for business users who do not have tech skills, but first, they need to be able to play the role of business analyst. You should not have many points of contact. You should have a single point of contact, which we call SPOC, and this person should be a business analyst. This single point of contact should collect all the requirements and needs and be able to communicate them in a structured way in order to enable the solution team to tackle the points. It is easy if the person who is supposed to do it follows the learning of the business analyst and is able to speak English. We have English speakers because we are in a multinational group. They should also have a minimum level of experience in IT or in general business. If the training is intensive, it takes three months to train non-technical employees on Automation Anywhere usage.

The RPA automation itself is valuable. We are not using the other components that are part of the platform much because we want to first stabilize the platform, the environment, and the infra.

It could be improved in terms of the global analysis of all the issues caused by the dependency components. For example, if bots are running on virtual machines on Microsoft Windows 2019, sometimes an issue might come from the virtual machine. Automation Anywhere should work closely with Microsoft or any other editor with which there are some issues occurring and stopping the bots from running properly. They need to collaborate together to enhance and improve the platform and the dependencies. It should not be that because the problem comes from Microsoft, Automation Anywhere does not tackle the issue. They should tackle the issue even when they are not responsible 100%. Microsoft or any other editor should work with Automation Anywhere.

I would like them to include process mining.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years, and I have been using UiPath for two years.

I would rate it a five out of ten in terms of stability because of the issue of dependency components, such as Microsoft components.

I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of scalability.

Their support can be improved in terms of understanding the issue more deeply and involving enough resources based on the criticality or urgency of the issue. They should involve the right resources and the right number of resources. If we need an architect, they should bring us an architect. If we need an engineer, we should have an engineer in front of us. They should provide the right person at the right time.

Neutral

I have worked with UiPath. The move to Automation Anywhere was not my choice. It was a group choice.

We have a hybrid cloud. The implementation is easy if you are business-oriented, you first tackle simple use cases, and you involve all the teams. The complexity is always there, but to have less complexity, it is important to ensure these three elements. 

We include people from development, monitoring, management of development and monitoring, central IT management, and central business management.

In terms of upgrades, it is difficult to upgrade Automation Anywhere. The upgrades of Automation Anywhere are sometimes not adapted to the clients. They sometimes choose to upgrade the platform during a critical period, such as accounting month-end closing. It is definitely not the right moment to launch the upgrade. Automation Anywhere sometimes pushes general upgrades during critical periods. The best will be to take into account the constraints of the clients in order to not make it difficult for them.

In terms of maintenance, if the bots are running 24 hours a day, you need three people or at least two people for monitoring. The upgrade of bots requires one developer.

You get a return on investment only after 18 months. You can get 50% savings.

It depends. For example, for my group, we are centralizing the infrastructure in Paris. Our contract is signed with Automation Anywhere in France. The currency and the pricing of Automation Anywhere in France can appear beneficial and interesting for Germany and Scandinavian countries, but when we share our infra and are internally charging other countries such as Poland, Brazil, or some other country with a lower currency value as compared to Euro, it becomes less beneficial. They would prefer to sign the contract directly with Automation Anywhere because they will benefit from a price that is as per their local market.

The price works well for France, but it becomes a bit complex when you centralize it for all the countries or groups. In the international context, you have to propose something a little bit tailored for some countries, such as Romania or Brazil.

When it comes to automation and AI, I always think about being business-oriented. Always start with the needs of the business and do not automate just for automation. You have to think about relevant use cases and also scalable use cases. In a multinational group, it is important to not think individually. This way you can collaborate more and reuse more things. You can reuse the components that have already been built. It is also economical.

Each center of automation should have a governance plan. The governance plan should be very precise, and it should expand the roles. Each stakeholder should know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it at each cycle or phase. After that, you should come to the functional and technical aspects. Without a governance plan, nothing is possible.

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