Automation Anywhere Reviews

Automation Anywhere is an RPA tool. The use case is the same for all automation tools. In my most recent project, I've used it for three-way invoice matching and sending it to the accounts for verifications. The process was a mixture of IQ bot, which is an OCR from Automation Anywhere, and then other RPA bots. 

I've used it in health care, where people apply for insurance applications to the insurance companies. 

I have implemented more than five hundred use cases as of now.

It's helped manage repetitive processes. If there's a repetitive process, that is our best use case, and we can pitch to the customer that we can make it shorter. Then we save them man hours and increase their efficiency and accuracy. 

For example, mostly in finance, when companies are preparing the salaries and have to prepare 1,500 payments for employees, sometimes they make mistakes, and they have to spend time on that. 

We can instead provide a fixed format for the robot that they have to follow every month, and it saves a lot of time, a lot of man hours. One of our customers here in the Middle East has saved around 10,000 man-hours for a telecom company with the help of 50 to 60 robots initially, and now the same company is using around 4,000 robots now. 

It helps save time on manual tasks. Compared to manual input, the results are much better, faster, and more accurate. For example, we have clients that can now easily process 10,000 invoices in one day. They have around 55 employees for that. We can augment the workload with a root, and if an employee wants to take a holiday or needs sick leave, other employees don't have to pick up the slack. Robots can input information into the system. 

The era of automation has changed. It's time for hyper-automation now. RPA is moving from just handling repetitive tasks to allowing for AI and offering automation plus conversational AI. It will help me. Soon I will be able to use it in WhatsApp, and all of the information can be entered, and you can initiate appointments, et cetera. RPA plus conversational AI plus AI-enabled OCR systems will be the future. 

There are a lot of great features, especially the IQ bot. It has very good accuracy on invoices. Previously, we were dependent on different software, and now, we can build in Automation Anywhere only.

It's easy to use for non-technical people. It's not rocket science. A business user might take a few weeks or a month to learn it, and then they will be quite capable of doing things themselves. A technical person may learn it in 15 days. Everything needs time; however, the learning curve is not so bad. A lot of things are available to help with learning. If someone spends one or two hours a day, they will pick it up. You can Google information or watch YouTube videos. There are hundreds of demos, materials, and more free of cost.

We do use CoPilot. We try to build a center of excellence with all customers, and we're giving them training around any bottlenecks they have.

The solution has helped us increase productivity. How much of an increase differs from customer to customer. Usually, it improves by 20% to 30%.

There's lots of integration possible. We've integrated with business tools like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. We can integrate easily into various workflows and APIs. We can access APIs with just a few clicks. We can also build out a UI-based integration.

It's helped us save time. Every customer saves a different amount of time, percentage-wise. Some can save hundreds of hours.  I've had a client save 30% of their time over the past few years thanks to automation. 

There is a dependency issue around the control room. If the control room is not working, the bots will not work. When that happens, we have to wait for the control room to go back up. Other tools in the market do not have this issue. If something is down, it means everything is down.

I've been using the solution for three years now. However, I've worked with automation in general for six years. 

The solution is stable. It's good software. It works well. 

The product scales well. 

Technical support is good; however, sometimes it takes a while to solve problems.

Positive

I previously was using UiPath. It's quite easy to use. They are both very similar solutions. 

I was mostly involved in the infrastructure, so I was not directly involved in the deployment. My understanding is that it is not difficult. However, when we upgraded it, we had challenges. 

There is some maintenance required. Normally, it works fine. Sometimes, there may be migrations or updates required. Only one or two people need to handle maintenance. We don't maintain bots. However, we just deploy them. Maintenance can be completed by the customer, and it might take five to six hours or one day at a maximum. 

Compared to Microsoft, the solution is expensive. However, compared to UiPath, it's fairly low - maybe 25% less. Generally, within the market, the price is average. It's competitive.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We're a reseller. 

I am working with an integrated resort. It is a hotel with a casino in Singapore. There are about 130 manual processes that we have automated touching the front office, call center, back of the house, finance, facilities, and casino areas as well. We have automated scheduling and workforce planning. 

My business is divided into what we call gaming and non-gaming space. It is an integrated resort. We started out by automating use cases from the non-gaming area. In the third year, we started venturing out a little bit into the gaming area. We did not go into the heavy gaming areas such as on the casino floor. We went for support processes at the back of the house, which included scheduling and things like that. We are also doing reporting. 

Most of what we have is for attended and unattended bots. We have just started to use Co-Pilot or what used to be known as AARI. It is something new for us, and we have only one process using that. It is a pilot project. It is something new that we started now in our fifth year.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption. It has helped the business address some of the pain points. It has helped the business understand that there are other ways of doing things and getting out of the manual processing. We come from a heavily people-oriented industry. We are into hospitality where you need the human touch for our business. We are not a bank. We are not a financial institution. The mindset change that I have seen with my business stakeholders because of the automations that we are doing for them is a plus. It is a game changer. In our first year of doing this, we started out very small. I had a team of myself and one developer, and now, in our fifth year, we have over 130 bots touching over 40 business units. I now have a team of four people, so we have grown. We now have a culture or ecosystem where the business stakeholders know that if they are still doing something heavily manual and highly repetitive, and it is not adding any real value to the time of the team member, there is a team within the organization that they can approach. This team will help with whatever pain point they have or take that task out of their day-to-day work so that they can concentrate on higher-value activities. This whole mindset or this whole culture or ecosystem is now there in the company. Automation Anywhere has helped elevate the consciousness of the organization by realizing that there is an automation world out there, and we can bring solutions to the table for their problems and use cases.

When it comes to integration, we have been lucky so far. We use many applications. The processes that we have automated touch 30 to 40 applications that we have in-house. It is seamless. It is fine, but some of the third-party applications that we are trying to integrate with are not necessarily very automation-friendly. The objects of those third-party applications are always changing, and therefore, we constantly have to rescript, but that is not necessarily Automation Anywhere's problem. That is just the nature of the other third-party applications that may not necessarily want you to be automating or layering on top of their systems and get behind their applications. I have been lucky so far. We have not had to go back to a business and say that we cannot automate their process because Automation Anywhere cannot integrate with a particular application. I have not had that experience as of now.

The learning curve of Automation Anywhere for my own team was pretty good. If you are a full-on developer, it is one of the easier tools to learn in the market. It is pretty good as long as this is something that you are using regularly. If you are a dedicated person doing the development and working with the tool, it is very easy to use. As far as my developers are concerned, it is very easy. We are able to turn around projects or use cases in three to four weeks. For even complex ones, there is a fairly good turnaround time in terms of delivering to our stakeholders. We do not train nontechnical people on its use. Businesses only receive automation from us, so they are not trained on it. If they are going to be trained on it, it is only on how to run their bots, and that is a part of our production development checklist or lifecycle that we give them. It just takes a day or two because we only teach them how to run their bots. It is delivered to them. We do all the installation on their machines. We set up their machines, and then we teach them how to run the bots.

When we first engaged with them, we thought that we could easily go into what we refer to as a citizen developer type of framework, but that did not go too well. We rely heavily on the CoE team, which is my team, to do automation. We have a build and support model for our business users. Business users are only taught how to run their bots. We do not teach our business users how to build a bot. We tried that and did some training with some key business stakeholders. It was a three-day training, but it did not prove to be too successful. After the training, they go back to their business units, and if it is not the core or what they do on a day-to-day basis, it is very hard to sustain, so the main building and the heavy lifting came back to the CoE team. Our team delivers to business units. From that perspective, I would rate Automation Anywhere a three out of five. Business users cannot just go ahead and build their own bots without really learning and understanding the tool.

The whole suite of RPA modules that they have is very good. They have three environments in which you can do your automation. You have development, staging, and production environments. These are run by licenses as well, which is very good. There are a lot of ways of automating processes with this application. I am not a developer. I run the RPA CoE team. I have a team that does the actual development, so I cannot speak of features per se, but the whole RPA module that they have is one of the best in class.

It is easy to use. When you need to make changes to your automation, it is quite quick. You do not need to go through the whole script. You can do it in modules or subtasks.

There are several things. They can improve their billing. I have had issues with their billing.

Their license model needs to be improved. The biggest issue for me is that the license is tied to a person, and it is not something that I can pass if I want to use it for the first five hours and pass it on to you for the next five hours and so on. When we automate, the license is tied to me, and if you or somebody else needs to use that license, as a COE administrator, I need to transfer the license from person A to person B. This is something that I have always told them that should not be this way because you want to utilize your licenses effectively. You want to ensure that your utilization of licenses is maximized throughout the organization because you are paying on a per-license basis. If it is tied to a person or to an AD account, how can you pass on that license to others to use if they are from other departments? If there is one big thing that they could change in terms of the subscription model for a license, it would be that it should be concurrent and not tied to a user.

In terms of the product, they can improve the upgrades. They are in A360, which is the cloud version. They went from version 11 to A360, and there are new updates and features all the time. Sometimes, these upgrades break other things that were working previously. We have found out that there are some bugs that are going on with the updates. Because they are on the cloud now, they do every quarter some kind of upgrade or patch.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past five years. We started out in 2018. I was scouting around the market for an RPA vendor. I am based in Singapore, and after doing a study of top vendors at that time, I decided to go with Automation Anywhere. We are now in our fifth year of engagement with them.

Automation Anywhere is very good at providing automation at scale. We have about 130 bots. They absolutely have the ability to scale for me. Their platform is geared towards that. It is all license-driven, and it is quite easy to scale using this tool. The infrastructure is dependent on us as a company, and making sure that our environment is ready for all the builds that we need to do, the development that we need to do, and the rollouts that we need to do, so there is a handshake between the company and the tool. It is not very complicated once you get the rhythm and once you get your governance going. It is quite good.

I contacted their technical support when some of the functionality broke because of an upgrade or the functionality did not seem correct. In some of those cases, as a client, we were the ones who told them about an issue or a bug in a particular feature. We appreciate that they came back and said that it is correct, they are aware of it, and it is going to be fixed in the next release. We have had a couple of those kinds of instances.

I would rate their support a seven out of ten because we had issues with them in terms of response and in terms of trying to get to the root cause of a problem. We had just migrated to A360. We were on version 11, and we had to switch over because it was going to be end-of-life or end-of-support. They were pushing all their clients to move to A360. In the beginning, my team had to tell their team that these are some of the issues that their A360 tool has and these are some of the bugs. They were a bit slow to react and get to a resolution or root cause.

Also, in the beginning, we were communicating with so many people. There was no continuity in terms of the person handling the ticket. They might have been changing shifts, but when you leave clients to repeat themselves to a new set of people they are talking to overseas, it gets a little bit annoying. I did highlight this point to their management team, and ever since I did that, their support team started handling the account a little bit better, but that is the reason why I am giving them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We were not using any other solution previously. It was our first foray into robotic space. We have been with Automation Anywhere ever since.

Our setup is hybrid. Our control rooms are on the cloud. We are on A360, so our control rooms are on the cloud, but our bots runners are on-premises.

I was involved in its deployment. When we did this at the initial stage in 2018, it was pretty straightforward. They provided great support. We started out by doing eight processes as a pilot. 

Their team provided the developers because I had no developers on my end at that time. Their team did it remotely. They were probably doing it from India. They gave us the requirements. They educated us on what was needed and how we needed to set it up so that they could connect to whatever systems they needed for the eight processes or use cases that I had chosen. They did deliver all those processes within two weeks, so it was pretty straightforward.

Their professional services team was top-grade. They knew what they were talking about, and the people that they gave me in Singapore at that time were very good.

In terms of maintenance, it does not require any maintenance from my end. They do a quarterly patch of it. They announce that they are doing a patch, and it gets done. There is no maintenance on my end for the tool. What I need to maintain are the bots that we have built for the business. That is where the maintenance is, but that is more on our end. That is mostly because the bots break because of the change in third-party applications. 

They had about two or three developers doing the work remotely. There was a salesperson who was based in Singapore, and then they had sent two people from India to come over to Singapore to handle the account in terms of education. We had a program manager as well as a solution architect.

Five years ago, we looked at UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and WorkFusion. We did the scoping in terms of SWOT analysis, and we found Automation Anywhere to be a better partner to work with and a more stable one in 2018. 

To those evaluating Automation Anywhere, I would say that make sure they give you somebody who really knows the tool and they explain the RDLC and the delivery method to you clearly in terms of what you need to set up within your company before you engage. You need to ask the questions because it sounds simple, but it is not that simple, so you need to ask what are the things that you need to have in place in your own organization so that it is a successful rollout.

I was sold on the idea that it is an easy tool to use. Anybody can do it. They do not need to be full-stack developers. Our regular team members can pick it up, but as I got into it, I realized that is not true. Not everybody can do this. You need to have a developer mindset. You need to know how to code. It is not something that anyone can do. That was one thing that I had to learn the hard way. I realized that this model is not going to work for my company, so you need to ask questions. Understand the tool, and make them do a deeper demo in terms of how to build a bot or a complicated process. Do not go with a simple and easy process. If it is of medium complexity, find out how a regular person would do that. Ask them, for instance, what would you need to get this going. Understand the tool and spend more time with the tool before committing.

To someone who wants to use an API integration instead of a robotic process automation (RPA) solution, I would say that if you are doing it through API calls, it is a better way to go. It is more stable because you are doing it from the backend. You are getting connections there rather than using RPA from a front-end perspective.

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

We are supposed to produce 40,000 components of shells for bayonet caps. Forty thousand caps are required in each shift, which means it comes to about 120 caps per minute. For that purpose, we make use of the vibrating feeder and inserts for all the shoots. We also had composite tools to perform various operations. The additional components, which are supposed to come on the rotary table, were also finished and brought to the table. The shell gets placed from the vibratory feeder on top of it. There are two operations: hot white glass falls into it, and as soon as it falls, it goes to the next position, where it gets molded. The molding shape takes place.

Actually, we are supposed to produce 40,000 components of shells for bayonet caps. Forty thousand caps are required in each shift. That means it comes to about 120 caps per minute. Automation is going to become a new area we will certainly encourage a lot of people to pursue because of the lasting dividends it provides, including saving time and manpower.

I have not come across them. Automation Anywhere is a company that keeps sending their literature very often. I possess it, and I am getting good information through them.

Normally, I go through a lot of journals that provide a lot of information on automation. Practically, I have done a lot of work, which gives me the confidence that I can handle any type of automation.

You only give instructions to them regarding what is required. You explain to them.

AI is also supporting now. Most people are into AI because of the benefits we get, and it enables changes required through AI easily. It offers a lot of cost benefits and enables faster productivity. Normally, there are specific people we use to contact, who actually do the automation. No, I cannot decide a rating right now.

We used Automation Anywhere to automate three SAP projects.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to update company code levels with a new general ledger and profit and loss accounts. This update was based on conditions involving multiple P codes and SAP instances.

Previously, updating the general ledgers across multiple SAP instances was a manual process, but it has since been automated.

Automation Anywhere is easy to learn, with a dedicated certification that takes one month to complete. However, to gain sufficient practical experience, users typically require at least six months to work on automation projects.

Automation Anywhere has helped save costs by, for example, doing the job of two full-time employees.

We have integrated SAP desktop automation, Web applications, and ServiceNow with Automation Anywhere.

We use ServiceNow APIs to manage tickets, not the application itself. All actions, including updating ticket details, processing, and adding comments, are performed through the APIs. If processing is successful, we update the ticket comments via the API. For any issues, we attach logs and update the comments with the error message before closing the ticket, all through the ServiceNow API.

Automation Anywhere has helped save costs and time and has reduced the number of human errors.

The Automation Anywhere interface is user-friendly, allowing even new users to grasp the basics within a few hours. While I haven't used Blue Prism, its interface appears more complex. Other automation tools also present a steeper learning curve than Automation Anywhere.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface. When updated packages are available, we receive demos and can practice the automation in the portal.

Automation Anywhere's frequent updates are unnecessary and disruptive. Updates are often pushed for no apparent reason, even for perfectly functional packages. This excessive update frequency is undesirable and should be reduced.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two and a half years.

I would rate the stability of Automation Anywhere eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Automation Anywhere seven out of ten.

The initial deployment is straightforward. We move code from private to public in a zip file and provide it to the developers. It takes approximately ten minutes.

I have heard that Automation Anywhere is expensive.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten.

Our client is an enterprise business.

Two leads and three support people are required to maintain Automation Anywhere. Once we develop the bot, we hand it to the support team.

We have approximately 2,000 users of Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere helps automate routine tasks, freeing employees to focus on other areas, and can even automate processes with underdeveloped back-end systems.

We primarily automate tasks in the financial area, including invoice processing. We can automate audits and do onboarding and offboarding as well, among other tasks. 

Automation Anywhere is simplifying processes. It is helping us create better customer experiences. 

The Co-Pilot feature is one of the features we really like. It's helped accelerate automation adoption more broadly across our organization. There are a lot of use cases for it. Co-Pilot has helped us increase productivity. Automation Anywhere in general makes tasks faster. We can do jobs in a couple of minutes versus hours or days.

We can do automation for some complex issues.

Before the processes were automated, there were a lot of gaps and places where human error could occur. Processes that took days and days of time are streamlined and reduced significantly.

Even for users who don't have technical knowledge, there are drag-and-drop features that help them create automation. They don't need to be technical. 

It's helped us free up staff time to work on other tasks. All of the people who were initially part of the job processes can be moved off to other things. The automation handles the tasks. 

We have other tools integrated into Automation Anywhere, including Microsft Programs. 

The integration of automation into workflows and business applications has been good. It's been easy to adopt.

It's positively affected our business. We've been able to apply it to broader jobs and save time. It's enhanced user and customer experiences and ensures we have on-time interactions with customers. 

We've been able to save on time and cost. We've witnessed a lot of savings. We're able to spend a few minutes on tasks instead of hours or days. 

It can provide automation at scale. We've been able to develop programs that engage teams effectively.

We can go online and learn about what we learn about Automation Anywhere. There is AI training on the roadmap, and we're excited to see how much AI will enhance the solution in the future. 

We'd like to see more AI features.

Technical support was okay. They have been able to supply patches to us for issues. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The setup process was easy. We were able to leverage some time savings during the deployment. We didn't have too much downtime.

We initially began the deployment with a reseller. 

The pricing and licensing are reasonable. We were able to get what we needed. The vendor understand what we wanted and offered certain pricing based on what we wanted. As we scale up, the pricing will change according to how we use it. 

We did evaluate other options and decided not to move forward. 

I'd rate the solution at nine out of ten.

The use cases depend on the group functions that are in our business units. They are related to finance, procurement, and marketing spaces. This is where we are heavily utilizing it for productivity gains in terms of FTE realization.

It is an enterprise-grade tool for us. At the COE level, we are using it for automations related to the group functions. We have a comprehensive team of around 30 to 40 people supporting it. It is not used for one or two use cases. It is a proper enterprise-grade automation mechanism for us for different areas. On average, we do a couple of million dollars of automation engagements annually with it.

It meets the productivity targets that we have set for ourselves. The customer service that they provide is also quite efficient. They try to keep a close eye on our key problem areas and how they can be a partner in solving it. It has always been a very positive collaboration with them.

The integration of automation into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents with Automation Anywhere is quite good. It is quite seamless and scalable. They are certified. We can only adopt it if it is a certified integration.

Automation Anywhere has helped save time and cost. The savings are tangible and recorded with us.

The core RPA service that it provides and the stability that it has in maintaining that as a cloud service solution is a key enabler for us. Its stability is good, and the low-code/no-code setup that it has is very user-efficient.

The AI centricity is a bit behind compared to the way we see Microsoft and AWS doing it. This is the feedback that I have also given to them. They need to expand themselves to provide more services than just RPA. Only RPA may not be enough for us, and it would not be our preferred choice for an automation tool.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for around three years.

It is quite stable. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

Its scalability is quite good. It is much better and improved now. I would rate it a seven out of ten for scalability.

It is being used by multiple departments at one location. It is being used purely at the group functions level such as finance, supply, and marketing, but not for the asset-centric operations with mining and other things.

They are quite good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We are using both Automation Anywhere and Power Automate Desktop for different purposes. Automation Anywhere is our COE tool, whereas Power Automate Desktop is our citizen developer tool. We have good experience with both of them, but we are trying to make a switch from Automation Anywhere to Power Automate Desktop as a part of our cost-efficiency drive. We are doing a competitive analysis to see whether we are ready for it or not.

Overall, Automation Anywhere has been stable, especially the latest versions, but its usage is expensive for us. Power Automate Desktop is our preferred tool.

Our business users who are not technical are more comfortable with Power Automate Desktop than Automation Anywhere. Automation Anywhere is a COE-grade tool. It is not for citizen developers. Automation Anywhere is easy for professional developers or someone who has experience with automation technology. It would take a non-technical person a month of hands-on experience to learn it.

The deployment was good, but the migration to the cloud was a bit tedious. It was an extensive engagement.

The upgrades are quite seamless now because it is now in the cloud, so the effort is quite less. We have a team set up for maintenance.

A team of around 20 people was needed because it was a big-scale implementation. In migration, 25 to 30 people were involved. We have a DevOps team for operational support with almost the same number of people.

We have seen ROI for our original automations. They were mostly low-hanging fruits with savings of a few FTEs, but the moment any automation has an ROI of only one FTE, it is not an economical solution for us to use. Power Automate Desktop is cheaper for us to use.

Its usage is expensive for us because my user base is mostly in Manila and KL. The unit cost of labor is cheaper there than in the U.S. or Australia, which puts a bit more stress on how to get a positive ROI while continuing to use it.

I would rate it a six out of ten for pricing.

I would absolutely recommend Automation Anywhere. It has great potential. The people who provide services are quite professional. They want us to succeed in our journey. They are not only interested in profits. They want us to do well. 

When it comes to automation and AI, there is a huge appetite at the group functions level but not much on the asset side of it. We are more focused on health and safety, and from the functional or transactional aspect, we have a keen interest in the overall automation and AI.

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

Some of our use cases for Automation Anywhere have been embedding automation into our AML process and Anti-money laundering process as well. Also using automation to navigate some of our legacy applications to extract information from the UI.

The challenge we're trying to solve with Automation Anywhere is extracting information from our legacy applications. We do not have exposed endpoints. We have to use Automation Anywhere to be able to navigate and extract information for customers and from data information as well.

The processes and tasks automated by Automation Anywhere are a little bit more detailed. What we've come to figure out is the processes previously were not documented correctly. And Automation Anywhere allows us to get more insight and documentation out of our processes.

One of the immediate opportunities we see to leverage AI within our processes and our operations is customer service. Leveraging the natural language models and human response to be able to generate customer-focused responses is something that we plan to leverage very soon.

Automation Anywhere has improved our organization by allowing our resources to focus on the task at hand that impact our customer, while we use Automation Anywhere to replace some of the redundant work that some of our users and internal team members are facing.

Our company approach to generative AI for Automation Anywhere is more in line with building the future, allowing us to enhance our processes without necessarily embedding our internal team members with redundant tasks, allowing them to focus on the actual deliverables of a business versus generating a response to email or reading email. Allowing them to be a more human-focused team member.

Looking into Automation Anywhere in terms of the relationship with AWS, we manage our servers locally for our VMs and are looking to migrate to AWS. The partnership with AWS will allow us to integrate some of our processes and allow access to some of our DVs. This will be a good improvement for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use for people who don't have experience because it is a no-code solution and is user-friendly in terms of being able to generate automation with a plethora of available tasks and variables.

One or two automation walkthroughs of the actual process are required to learn Automation Anywhere. It takes a short amount of time for a user to get acquainted with Automation Anywhere. There are some latencies with being able to expose certain things such as APIs or establish a certain connection, but building automation is short in terms of development.

We have a few tools that are integrated with Automation Anywhere. We use a lot of Microsoft tools. Azure AD is integrated directly with Automation Anywhere and allows us to expand our ability to automate processes. We also have some desktop applications and some proprietary software that we would like to integrate with Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is a robust platform that allows us to make multiple connections and scale horizontally across the actual environment to give us a more robust integration or automation that allows for downstream impact whether it is internal users or external users of our products. It allows us the ability to go horizontally fast with a lot of multiple integrations of products.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save time and costs, sometimes in the same automation as well as replacing some of the redundant tasks. Some of our users are giving us the ability to scale quicker without adding additional resources. That saves costs. We save hundreds of hours with some automation and two to three hours for others, but the cost impact of being able to do that with automation has saved a ton of costs as well. We have a lot of bots running daily, manipulating and removing the redundancies of those manual tasks. The resource costs saved equal hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The feature we found to be the most valuable is the documentation automation as it allows us to focus on the actual important piece of building automation instead of tracking some of the repugnant documentation that goes along with building automation. 

Automation Anywhere's network has room for improvement. Expanding its partnership with a few other vendors. The likelihood of including companies like AWS, Google, and things like that is the exact approach to what I think Automation Anywhere can improve on. It allows business users who participate and are clients of those vendors to a seamless process integration with Automation Anywhere. This allows for an ecosystem that supports a more robust development of automation because we get a broader use case amongst multiple users of the same product.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere allows us the ability to scale across multiple platforms and in different volumes. At a small scale, we don't have to readdress that automation or that bot to be able to scale if configured and built correctly. It is a very scalable approach that we can take in terms of the integration that we have access to. It allows for an open platform to be able to scale.

The technical support is user-friendly. They are responsive and normally respond within 24 hours. They provide us with updates so we are not left in the dark and keep us involved. They make sure to follow up with a call if anything is needed.

Positive

We did not use any automation beforehand but we have a partnership with Workato that allows us to leverage more API-driven automation as well. We utilize both due to the actual diversity of Automation Anywhere. It gives us the ability to navigate a UI, a more legacy application whereas Workato gives us the ability to connect APIs. We use both of them in the same automation platform.

It took us a month to deploy. We set up a few runners or virtual machines to be able to do that work with our IT team who configured some of the runners and made sure that we embedded applications that were gonna be useful and practical for the actual automation itself. We then walked through a few test automation and were able to deploy our first automation within a month.

Automation Anywhere pricing and licensing are competitive compared to the other automation vendors. Automation Anywhere gives us a platform to scale quickly without embedding a lot of costs on our end. It is reasonably priced.

We evaluated the landscape of automation and the partners and vendors that offer the service before we chose Automation Anywhere. My positive previous experience with Automation Anywhere helped make the decision a lot easier for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use. It is a simple platform to understand. A simple platform to roll out. We don't need a robust education in terms of automation. We can train internally. We can expose other POs or PMs to the actual application and they will be able to give us additional insights of automation that we can improve.

The con is the resources assignment outside of our internal team members. Finding resources who have good experience variant with Automation Anywhere in the States may be a con for us.  

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten. From what I have seen, they are headed in the right direction to get a ten.

We do not currently use Automation Co-Pilot, but we are excited to start using it. We are going to have a session about using Co-Pilot with our internal teams.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is simple in terms of the control room to be able to do an upgrade or speak to our account executive to get additional licenses or products added to our instance.

Maintenance depends on how we build the automation. We keep in mind the actual process of being able to manage automation as we build it, which will ultimately save us a call for maintenance at the end. Being able to enable notification error handling within the automation helps reduce the actual maintenance requirements for automation.

Not many people are involved in the maintenance of our automation because we embed some of the process owners into the process so they are aware if a bot was to fail. Then we give them corrective actions in terms of exception handling to be able to oversee that bot as well as to reinitiate a bot or add additional variables into the bot to allow the success of that bot. A minimal amount of people are required for bot maintenance.

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.