Automation Anywhere Reviews

As an RPA developer and RPA champion, I coordinate the implementation of RPA in my company and I also develop the automations. The main reason or main functionality that I am using Automation Anywhere is to integrate and collect data between systems, such as gathering data from one system and collecting data from another system, making some analysis, and having some results out of that. This is the main purpose or main use case in general for what we are doing here with this software. The specific challenge that we are trying to solve with implementing Automation Anywhere in our environment is to achieve better integration with SAP. Our ERP system is SAP, and this is quite a closed system, so to get any data or input any data, the only possibility is to use the user interface, or it is very difficult to do it in any other way. Therefore, Automation Anywhere acts as a simulator of a user, helping a lot with getting the data in time or uploading the data in a proper and easy manner. So for repetitive tasks related to SAP, this is the key functionality that we are using; integration with SAP.

The best features in Automation Anywhere that I really appreciate are found in the basic module for pure RPA, such as the recorder function, which helps in making automation even easier. No coding is required; you are just doing things, and the recorder records your movements and actions, creating the code out of that. This makes preparing RPAs faster. Another significant aspect is Automation Anywhere University's e-learning materials, now called Pathfinder, which enhances this learning curve significantly. The software's easy-to-understand interface is its biggest benefit, aiding rapid learning and automation creation. Moreover, the integration capabilities with databases and external web portals are well-developed, enabling seamless data management and exchange, whether it involves Microsoft SQL or MySQL databases or Microsoft Excel for reporting. Despite not having significant experience with other RPA platforms, I assess these features positively.

Regarding what I would to see improved or enhanced in Automation Anywhere, it's difficult to judge if the problems we are facing are truly RPA related or related to other systems that we cooperate with. The main issue is to have better resilience of the whole system. If we have 95% success during the bot runs, it costs a lot of time to debug and find the errors or to rerun the bots. So constantly working on the resilience of the bots, whatever it may be, will help. One thing I would to see included in the next releases of Automation Anywhere is a more clear overview of when we have gaps in our automation scheduling. Currently, when we are scheduling our automations, and we have historical data of our runs, there is no clear overview of when we have space in time to schedule another automation. So having functionality that shows in one clear picture where we have gaps to run additional automations would be beneficial.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for already four years.

I would evaluate the stability of Automation Anywhere as generally stable, but there are some issues. It's always difficult to judge what the root cause is; it may be the software, the hardware, or other software. But in general, I would say it's stable in 90% of the cases.

It is difficult for me to rate the technical support I received because I was not fully involved; it was resolved between our IT and this support. I was just waiting for the results and trying to support. I would rate it a seven.

Although I didn't directly participate in the evaluation process when choosing Automation Anywhere, I know it was chosen because of its full no-code approach. Unlike other automation tools or systems, there is sometimes a necessity to know coding, making them low-code platforms. Here, we have a totally no-code solution, making it much friendlier for individuals with no IT background. I have previously used a different RPA just once or twice; I had the opportunity to use Power Automate, but it was just one or two hours of trials and nothing more. So basically, I have no significant experience and cannot justify which is better or worse.

For me at the very beginning when I started working with that, the technical setup was extremely complicated and extremely problematic, and we spent half a year to really make the software work. At that time, we were not happy with the support of Automation Anywhere. But now if everything is already set up, it's quite easy to learn how to do it and to make easy automations quite fast.

I have not calculated ROI, the return on investment from Automation Anywhere; we don't have such a complex analysis. We are calculating for single automations, but we don't have complex ones.

The main benefits I see from using Automation Anywhere, in terms of time-saving, cost-saving, and resource-saving, is the release of resources from high-paid and high-skilled specialists for more creative tasks. My recommendation for other organizations considering Automation Anywhere for their environment is based on my experience; it is always good to analyze the process first, then optimize this process, and after that, make automation of that. Otherwise, without proper analysis of the process, you end up digitalizing a non-optimal process, making automation challenging. So first analyze the process, optimize it, and then try to automate it; otherwise, you will have an automated process that is still not good. I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

I am working as a solution architect at Boston Scientific, and I help other teams automate their manual processes using Automation Anywhere as the primary RPA tool. 

The business cases come from multiple teams, such as the HR team, service management team, or supply chain management team. We identify the manual processes that are the best fit for automation opportunities. 

Initially, we review the entire process to understand how the teams are completing their tasks manually. Then, we assess how much we can automate using Automation Anywhere, the features it provides, and how suitable it is for the process. We then convert that particular manual process into automation opportunities.

We are on the path of implementing GenAI for digital transformation. We are doing demos of the AI agents to implement GenAI across all the verticals at Boston Scientific. We are figuring out the right opportunities and use cases.

With chatbot integrations and AI agents, we are able to create responses by extracting the data from the database, massaging those replies, and replying back to the customers. 

We just need to know the end goal to automate a particular process. In Automation Anywhere, we have multiple commands to automate from Excel or record the UI. A person needs to just drag and drop the commands and fill in the data.

Automation Anywhere supports various types of integrations. We have integrated SAP, Excel, Python script, and JavaScript. We can easily integrate them with Automation Anywhere.

We have many opportunities from multiple teams. There are requirements to automate Excel, the UI, or their scripts. We have various integrations with technologies like Python, Java, or macros. Automation Anywhere is perfect for integrating those technologies.

Automation Anywhere has undergone drastic changes over the past five years, transitioning from version 10 to A360, including desktop-based and cloud-based options. The tool is now more stable, with more opportunities and new commands, like recording for the UI or advanced Excel features. 

For beginners learning Automation Anywhere, there should be predefined templates to start creating a task bot. Instead of dragging and dropping action commands and doing error handling, there should be predefined templates that they can directly use. It will help maintain code uniformity across the organization. Besides templates, most features are already available in Automation Anywhere to help automate a manual process into an RPA opportunity.

I have been using Automation Anywhere since 2016, so it has been nine years.

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

I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have multiple teams in India, the USA, and Costa Rica. We are working from multiple locations. We are a team of 35 users.

The technical support is excellent. I would rate it a ten out of ten. We just have to raise a ticket, after which we receive a call, email, or ping from the Automation Anywhere team. We then provide our queries or show where we are getting stuck, and they provide us with the solution.

Positive

Previously, I worked with UiPath and Power Automate. However, I find Automation Anywhere to offer a better experience.

The setup is easy because all updates and upgrades are synchronized with the newer versions.

We have a dedicated support team that helps deploy the bots. We raise the change requests, which are approved by a technical person and the release manager. After all the approvals and validations are in place, the automation bot gets deployed to the new environment.

The time required for the maintenance of bots depends on the requirement or process. We can see the status of all bots in the control room. It is simple.

We have a completely dedicated team to track bots. We have more than 100 bots running in the control room.

In terms of ROI, we have a good amount, which amounts to millions of dollars per year.

I am not responsible for the pricing part, but I know the pricing is competitive compared to other tools.

It is relatively simple. It is a platform where you get all the commands for integration and other functions to automate your end-to-end process. It is easy to learn and cloud-based. The control room is easy to understand. All these features will be helpful for automating or starting your RPA journey. 

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

I started with Automation Anywhere version 11, which was the desktop-based version. It was the most initial cloud version. There is also a 2019 cloud version of Automation Anywhere. With some modifications and improvements, 2019 led to A360, which was again a cloud version but an improved form of the 2019 version. A360 is the current and running version of Automation Anywhere.

Most of the problems we've worked to solve have been related to business process automation. We were able to automate email - including replying to email, and capturing data.

We've also used it for website automation. We can do object cloning in PRA terms.

We were able to automate several data systems. We've automated Excel, for example, and various backbones of process systems.

It releases humans from monotonous tasks. Automating helps a lot and gives us the ability to free people for more high-end activities.

Most of the problems we have solved are related to business process automation. Ideally, in RPA, around 80% of the problems are related to business process automation. 

Processes and tasks automated compared to a manual approach offers a lot of benefits. Any RPA tool will offer good time savings. When we have to do things manually, if there is a 20 or 30-step process, as a human, we may get confused and redraw information. We make mistakes. All of these things take time. Things can be very data-intensive and this takes time for a human. They need to look it up and validate, et cetera. and there are high chances of error. A human can misread or misunderstand, this could lead to losses. With RPA, we gain time savings, and we can make everything 100% error-free.

To train a non-technical employee, it might take a bit. They need to learn the basic foundations. It might take a month or two if they give time to learning every day.

It helps increase productivity by 20% to 30%.

I can integrate tools with Automation Anywhere. We've done Excel and database automation, web applications, data tables, FTTP tables, et cetera. 

Copilot is an area with a lot of scope for improvement. It's the number one thing to improve. It just gives us a structure. It doesn't automate the workflow. This is a major area of improvement. Currently, it's still evolving. The integrations in Automation Anywhere are evolving, and going forward, they could be more beneficial for end-to-end processes. It should not be just an add-on, but it should be very well integrated.

I have been using it for close to four to four and a half years now.

The stability is okay. I would rate it 8.5 out of ten.

I would rate the solution 8.5 out of ten. It is quite scalable. 

Power Automate is quite good, and gaining ground. With Automation Anywhere, you can log into the control room and work on it.

The deployment is on the cloud. The process depends on how straightforward it is. It depends on the number of steps. The deployment time doesn't take too long, however, they could improve a bit on the scheduling. It could be a bit more user-friendly if there is a new person coming in and using the solution for the first time.

Deployments tend to take a few days once all the approvals are in place.

The solution does require maintenance. Once you have developed and deployed a bot, there could be many things that may break the bot. We need to maintain them to keep them running as expected.

The ROI may be high. It depends on the process and the number of people involved.

It's not cheap. It's expensive. Power Automate is much cheaper.

I have experience using Automation Anywhere to automate various processes, primarily in the banking domain. I've worked on credit card reconciliation for Citibank in Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, as well as loan services and contract renewals for CIMB Malaysia. Additionally, I've utilized IQ Bot to analyze Twitter sentiment, identifying positive and negative comments to create service tickets. My experience includes working with ServiceNow, SAP, and mainframe environments, specifically IBM SQL Server.

Automation Anywhere has significantly transformed its platform. Previously, tasks were created and managed locally through the control room panel. However, with the introduction of cloud technology, users can now build and deploy tasks directly in the cloud. By installing a bot agent runner on their systems, tasks can be executed automatically. Furthermore, the platform now integrates with Git and Azure repositories, enabling version control and collaborative development. This means multiple users can work on a single project simultaneously, enhancing efficiency and promoting agile methodologies. Additionally, the platform offers automated code review capabilities, allowing users to track changes and identify contributors. The control room manager also receives email notifications for any modifications made. This transition to the cloud has been a gradual process, spanning two to three years, and has significantly improved the platform's accessibility and functionality.

Automation Anywhere has a two to three-month learning curve.

Integrating Copilot into our system is straightforward. From a chatbot perspective, we can use it for tasks like sending emails or completing daily assignments. By utilizing Automation Anywhere, we can build an agent that functions as a Copilot, automating tasks for us. Copilot is also integrated with machine learning models, providing prompts and responses that can be modified as needed. Its user-friendly interface and ability to integrate with existing applications make it a valuable tool for streamlining daily tasks and improving efficiency.

Copilot has helped to improve our productivity by up to 30 percent.

With the use of Automation Anywhere, the organization has seen improved efficiency, particularly with the introduction of IQ Bot and Metabot for tasks such as extracting data from invoices and purchase orders. The combination of RPA with AI and cloud solutions has considerably transformed our processes, allowing for intelligent document processing and seamless system integration, thus streamlining operations.

I use a variety of AI technologies for our research and development, including generative AI, custom bit models, GPT-4, and LaMDA. We've also built our own product for GPT-4 called Thor, which utilizes intelligent document processing to extract data from contracts, purchase orders, invoices, and receipts. This data is then integrated with our machine-learning models and downstream systems. Our focus is on transforming our processes using RPA, AI, and cloud technologies, migrating existing systems to the cloud and enhancing them with AI and ML capabilities.

I have integrated Automation Anywhere with numerous applications, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, ITSM, SAP including S4/HANA and Fusion, Oracle including Oracle Fusion, Java Technologies, .NET Platform, Maple's Web Platform, various databases including QLS with dual database configurations, and Power Platform. I am also familiar with backend systems like Data Lake.

I enjoy using applications and API integration tools to efficiently connect systems. Our organization favours API automation, so we developed an ML-based automation product. We prioritize API integration for all applications, leveraging our back-end team and custom APIs for seamless connectivity. While UI automation can be time-consuming, API integration, especially with back-end services, is significantly faster. Our strategy involves collaborating with IT business partners to prioritize API development.

Automation Anywhere helps us save at least 85 percent of our costs.

I find the terminal emulator feature very valuable, particularly in how it interacts with IBM mainframe automation. The Control Room and credential vault are also noteworthy features. Control Room ensures security and access management by keeping credentials within a secure vault. The variable panel, with its comprehensive variety list, array, Boolean, and string types, is quite efficient. Additionally, Metabot stands out as an efficient tool for applications that change frequently.

Automation Anywhere's Metabot and IQ Bot have become increasingly efficient tools for automating tasks. IQ Bot, in particular, has evolved significantly since its launch. Initially, it struggled to effectively extract data from various document types like invoices and purchase orders. However, with the integration of built-in machine learning models, IQ Bot now excels at data extraction and processing. Furthermore, users can build custom models to suit their specific needs, leveraging Automation Anywhere's pre-trained models and readily available tools. This continuous development has made IQ Bot far more user-friendly and efficient than its earlier versions.

There are improvements needed in error handling processes, as currently, they rely on start and end error commands. A more strategic approach could enhance efficiency. While the implementation of a structured development approach has been introduced, further enhancements could be made to accommodate non-technical users better, perhaps by making the platform more accessible and user-friendly through a flowchart or diagram-based setup.

Automation Anywhere can be moderately challenging for business users without technical skills. While the platform offers some drag-and-drop functionality, building automation requires a strong understanding of logical operations and scripting. To become proficient, users may need to invest time in learning basic coding concepts or pursuing relevant certifications. This learning curve can mean that users typically require a few months of training before they can effectively build and implement automation.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for approximately eight years.

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

I would rate the scalability of Automation Anywhere as eight out of ten. Automation Anywhere is capable of scaling to automate multiple processes and tasks.

Support for Automation Anywhere includes L1, L2, and L3 tiers, which respectively handle various levels of issues from preliminary checks to development challenges.

Neutral

I have used various other automation solutions including UiPath, Blue Prism, and NICE. Each of them offers different strengths, but Automation Anywhere stands out for its terminal emulator and credential vault.

The initial deployment of Automation Anywhere is straightforward, conducted through the Control Room, where understanding task scheduling is vital for effectiveness. While verifying production readiness takes one day, the actual transition to production is a simple switch.

The implementation of Automation Anywhere has yielded substantial financial and time savings, effectively reducing the workforce by approximately 16 full-time equivalents within six months.

Automation Anywhere's pricing falls within the mid-range, but the long-term benefits outweigh the initial investment. After a year, significant cost savings and efficiency gains become apparent, justifying the expense.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven out of ten. The process of building a script is difficult due to the lack of clarity in identifying the problematic stages. While the code highlights issues, the studio's interface is not user-friendly, especially for those unfamiliar with scripting languages. This lack of intuitive design can make it challenging to utilize the solution effectively.

I started using Automation Anywhere during its beta version and continue to use the latest version for both cloud and desktop deployments. One challenge I faced was the extensive number of default commands, 545 in scripting, 2,565 in web and the need for scripting knowledge, particularly when interacting with other services or adjusting system settings. While Automation Anywhere promotes itself as scriptless, understanding coding concepts is beneficial, especially for tasks like connection manipulation. Although the platform offers a vast array of pre-built commands and drag-and-drop functionality, creating custom activities requires building DLLs, which can be complex. Overall, despite some tricky aspects, Automation Anywhere remains a robust tool for both scripting and scriptless automation development.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere can be complex because its products rely on the .NET framework. When namespaces, components, or libraries within the framework are updated, the entire system isn't always fully adjusted to these changes. This necessitates careful analysis of the specific modifications and their impact on the overall system, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the upgrade's effects.

Our organization has over 45 users of Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere requires monthly maintenance. While patching the virtual machines only requires a reboot with minimal impact on the production environment, any changes to the environment itself, such as modifications to personal systems or processes, will significantly impact production.

The time spent on bot maintenance varies based on the complexity of the tasks. Simple cloud server or production changes require minimal time, approximately two to three hours. Application changes are more involved, with L3 or L2 tickets potentially taking three to four days depending on the service level agreement and impact. Minor L1 tickets, such as troubleshooting malfunctioning ML or server downtime, can involve either small or large changes. Migrating environments, like transitioning from on-premise to cloud, constitutes a major change that can take a month or even a couple of months.

Automation Anywhere offers a robust infrastructure with advanced features like Metabot, IQ Bot, and seamless integration capabilities with AI technologies, making it a commendable choice for automation needs. However, users should have some technical knowledge before using the platform.

We were in finance before, so all of our use cases have been in finance. Recently, we have grown out to IT. Our use cases now encompass HR, IT, legal, and everything that we can.

There have been numerous improvements in the organization. We have saved hours and time and hard dollars. In the first year, we saved over half a million dollars. That was about six months of time. After that, we have done at least three million year over year, and we have increased that very much. As far as time saved, it is well over 10,000 hours in the first year alone, and we continue to grow. This year, we are projecting 30,000 manual hours saved.

Prior to the implementation of Automation Anywhere, we had lots and lots of manual work. People would go into Excel and copy data from one master sheet to many sheets. They would compile data. They would take lots of time to do these things. Today, they can go in, press a button, and launch it. They can download hundreds and thousands of invoices, whereas previously, they used to do it manually. One of our use cases saved two people four days a week of time, which is 32 hours each. We now do that automatically in six hours.

The learning curve is initially a little daunting, but after you are in there and you understand how it works, it is very seamless. It is very easy to pick up and very intuitive, and then from there, it is pretty much you go and get your hands dirty.

The tools that we integrate with Automation Anywhere so far have been Python scripts and PowerShell. We have got Power Automate and Power Flows from Microsoft. We are starting to do some cognitive RPA. We are implementing OpenAI through Azure. We have got a lot of that going right now.

The integration with all of the documents and APIs is very seamless. There are packages available in the store if you do not have the integration built-in out of the box. They are available to everyone. Everything that we have been able to use has been just drag and drop. We can just pop in our credentials and be done.

Automation Anywhere has affected us in a positive way in terms of employee capacity and compliance. We have not had to backfill roles. We have not necessarily replaced people, and that is by intent. We did not want to replace people, but we also did not want to have to backfill people. We wanted people to focus on things that they value and be more productive instead of doing mind-numbing things that get no value, but they just have to do it.

Our time and cost savings have been immense since the beginning. In our first year, after we started launching the bots in June or July of 2019, we saved half a million dollars and 10,000 man-hours. Since then, we have grown more than 70% year over year. This year, we are on track to go up to about 40,000 man-hours saved and more than three million hard dollars saved.

They have been able to provide automation at scale pretty well. We fired up and started off with only three production machines. We are now up at five. Officially, we were going up to seven as of next week. We have heard about people here at the Imagine conference who, for example, have hundreds, so the point is proven, and the facts are there. They can scale up very quickly.

The main Automation Anywhere Program offering we use is Pathfinder. We have not utilized our partner services or anything like that, but Pathfinder has been great. Their user groups have been great. To be able to focus and see the product launches beforehand has always been advantageous. The ability to see that has been good.

The features that we found most valuable have been just automating manual processes. We are able to integrate and work with applications that users typically work with. That has been the best feature for us right now. 

Some of the biggest improvements they can make are with the interface. It can be improved in terms of usability or searching for something. For example, icons are hard to find. Typically, you jump into the search box, but being able to go in and find things quickly with the eye could be very valuable.

We have been using Automation Anywhere since 2019. It has been five years.

The stability of the solution has been great so far. It has been very resilient. Obviously, it depends on how you build it. You can obviously make a bad solution and it is going to be bad, but the uptime has been amazing. We have not had any issues with the cloud service since we moved to A360. It has been great since then.

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. There is some room for improvement. A lot of that depends on who you talk to. You have a great person and you have a not-so-great person. 

On the client support, so far, their service has been a ten out of ten. We have had amazing reps who I have worked with, and I have nothing bad to say about them.

I did not use a similar solution previously.

We use a mix of on-prem and cloud devices. We are exploring Microsoft Azure to go to it soon, but we are not using it today.

The deployment experience was a little bit frustrating at first, but I was not the one involved. Our architects were having issues, but we engaged with the Automation Anywhere solutions engineers. We were on the phone for maybe an hour or two hours and they fixed it. The deployment was great.

Our ROI is time saved and money saved. This has just been massive, and we continue to grow. We will be growing in the future, especially after this year.

There has been a half-million-dollar return on investment in the first six months alone. We will be up to three million this year. That is our projection, and I think we are going to exceed that.

The evaluation was done before I got here, but I know the company did evaluate UiPath, Blue Prism, Kofax, and a few others. They evaluated the top Gartner Quadrant applications.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is being able to see what other customers are doing, not just networking but seeing the presentations, the breakout sessions, and seeing how other companies are doing the same challenges and maybe way better. It is a good time to go and reach out and ask them how they are doing something or how they are scaling up. For example, one company here has managed to scale up to more than 800 bots. They do something with Azure where they turn on a machine, and it is very cost-effective. That is solving some of the problems that we have.

The Imagine experience has been great. This is my second year here. It has been fun. It is helpful to learn. We have done a lot, so I really enjoyed the entire experience.

I got one of my direct reports here for the first time this year. Some of the things or the reasons I did tell him to come were:

• Being able to network
• Being able to learn from others and see how they do things
• Being able to talk to people who have the same challenges that we have and being able to figure out how to do it better

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten.

We have a pretty big shop nowadays. We have 324 automations in production. Our use cases were concentrated on loan services. Most recently, our initiatives have been targeted in the control space - automating the things that make the bank go around and seeing that the bank is in a good position every day. 

We have a backlog in the hundreds, automation is not something that we'll finish anytime soon. It's definitely a marathon to finish all the things that we need to do.

In 2017, there was a lot of hype around RPA. They paved the way for us to see those benefits, and we continue to grow every year. 

In those early days, we had 28 automations in our first year. We thought we were pretty proud of that number. In 2023, we created over 100 automations in a single year and moved those to production. The volume and the increased capacity for our businesses improved. The employee engagement, when we talk about bots now, is much better. It's "how can we help?" There are no real concerns of "They're going to replace our jobs." Over seven years, our automations have grown, and we've matured with them. 

There are several aspects that we value. The control rooms, monitoring the performance, and making sure everything is up and running has been a great feature. From the design and capacity of the developers' perspective, the intuitive interface is excellent. It's a workflow-driven design session. Following the flow of the users alongside the code makes for an easy automation that everyone can understand.

Automation Anywhere brings in and changes the way we do process automation. Everything was very manual beforehand. We'd have to do batch processes where integrations of systems were pretty costly and took a lot of time. Mapping database fields from screens down to the next system was more difficult versus with Automation Anywhere, you get the visual input of the screens. You can click on those fields and not have to do the data mapping or extract them. You can correlate them to other systems almost instantly individually. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to pick up for business users. Initially, we trained 45 people. Whoever raised their hands, we said, "We'll train you." About 65% of those initial trainees were from the business side. A couple of years later, we noticed that the people who created the automation did really well. They were receiving promotions. Then, all of a sudden, we didn't have the people to support our automation needs since those original trainees moved up. We made a shift and said, "Hey, business users, you want to come to technology? We're going to centralize development." 13 said yes, and we kept building out. Now we're a team that's 40-strong.

The learning curve is pretty quick. Automation Anywhere provides a lot of training courses to support you and there are individuals assigned to your account. The learning curve is short from our standpoint. We spend two weeks with anyone who comes in, whether they're a previous developer or a business person. We find that simple automations can be completed within that training period. Within six months, some of the most complex items people are able to handle.

Right now, our 324 automations touch around 120 different systems. Our core platforms are integrated. APIs are being used for SharePoint or imaging systems so  thatwe don't really have a reliance on the UI. With the integrations, we just continue to grow. 

The integration of Automation Anywhere into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents is great. There are several phases to this one. Automation Anywhere, just the design, the tool, allows you to jump in with workflows initially and lay out the complete automation, and then you can get into the details. For us, it's particularly powerful as it aligns with the different systems that we work with, as well as providing connectivity to the underlying systems, seeing the screens to get into the details of that workflow, making for a great design process for our automation.

Our automation program has positively affected our business in terms of employee capacity and compliance. It's affected all areas. When we think of the capacity, I can go back to 2020 in the early days of COVID and with a payment protection program specifically. We had 9,000 tellers who no longer were going into the bank. We pivoted to an SBA program and had those 9,000 tellers calling a variety of small businesses. We still needed 1,000 more people to do the due diligence. That's where RPA shined. We were able to fill that capacity gap and immediately become one of the top three players in the space. 

When I think of just day-to-day employee engagement, we're focused on the controls of the bank. Those happen maybe once a month, once a quarter, once a year. So those are activities that you really have to prep for and document really well. RPA does the same thing over and over really well, and those controls are assured to be done and executed in the same fashion over and over.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save on both time and cost. When we think of we run around 750,000 hours of runtime on bots per year. That would be a significant amount of employees. That's about 450 to 500 employees' worth of work done every day. Just the overall capacity provided by automation would be hard to replace.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide Automation at scale is impressive. We've obviously pushed that limit. We're at 324 automations. That's over 4200 tasks executed every day. From a scale and monitoring perspective, we know which bots are running, which ones may be going slow, and which didn't run. The ability of the control with room to monitor allows us to jump in and help out when necessary. That is paramount to our success. 

Automation Anywhere helps us find value. We do use professional services from time to time to augment both our capacity and capabilities while finding new ways of doing things. This is a very fast-moving environment. The things that we did five years ago are gone. We threw them away. We upgraded to new versions and have new capabilities. Keeping up with the latest and greatest is always a challenge. There are also new ways of development and sharing those findings, whether it's a webcast or part of the Pathfinder program; we're always curious about what's next with the product.

The tools are fundamentally solid. However, when I think of self-healing, such as automation with a new prompt or a new Windows patch occurring, being able to handle those kinds of things on top of what Automation Anywhere already does and that automatically click through and do the reboots that are necessary to just have a clean run would be ideal. That way, no one has to wake up in the middle of the night and adjust something. That would be amazing. 

Our company has been using Automation Anywhere for seven years. I've been using Automation Anywhere since 2017.

From a stability perspective, whether it's servers or virtual desktops with agents, we have very few issues. We have multiple servers and have never experienced downtime. We have had one or two nodes go down based on hardware issues, however, it's resilient. 

We're now at 324 automations, and it definitely scales. The screens prioritize things, and you have dashboards that say what's working and what isn't. Those types of activities help drive us to where the problems are and show us what we need to resolve them.

Technical support is solid. We pick up the phone and call and create tickets. We get responses almost instantly. We've had many nights trying to figure out how things work on our network or looking at logs. They've been great about jumping in any time we've asked for help. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Throughout the history of development, people have tried to automate things. We've never used a tool that had the control room and the features, the scheduling, and the complexity that it could handle. When Automation Anywhere packaged the whole bundle together, that was the differentiator that really drove us to it.

When we think of ETL, all the standard tools, whether it's SQL or Oracle, we still have all those. However, for speed and simplicity and getting things to production fast, we'll leverage Automation Anywhere.

Many other options often require a data expert. You have to go to database tables to do automation or ETL-type activities, and you have to schedule that and know if there are conflicts within other systems. Plus, if there's downtime, you may not be able to run pieces. It's true coding. There is testing that's also required and the delivery time is not measured in weeks. It's measured in months. We'd all like everything to integrate seamlessly. That said, the real world comes into play, and I'm glad we have Automation Anywhere to fill everything out. 

Setup for us was probably the longest lead time. We're a bank, so we always have to scan the code base. We want to jump in, understand the connectivity, and understand how things are going to happen. There are a lot of planning-type activities before the install. We started in 2017 with version seven of Automation Anywhere. We went through version ten, then moved on to the A360. Each experience became better and better.

We have a PCI-compliant installation as well as our normal normal network.

Our experience deploying Automation Anywhere was seamless. From a server perspective, we run about a dozen servers in four dev IT QB production environments. We'll continue to do the first servers in dev and move to migrate them all the way through production. For any issues that we have along the way, customer service is right there with us to troubleshoot.

We've seen an ROI via hard saves. We define a hard save as someone having to leave the bank or a contract has to leave. We are net positive in our spend. We've managed to prioritize the highest use cases from a cost-saving perspective.

We find it comparable to other products out there. I wouldn't say huge differentiators from that perspective. 

We looked at autoIT to look at for specialty use cases. 

The very first bot that was rolled out was on my team. I've been able to see the control room and the code in progress and evolve over the years has been a pleasure. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

From an RPA perspective, it has all the core functionality. We can automate the bank's systems. The reliability, performance monitoring, and development time are excellent. In 2017, it used to take us six to nine months to develop. That was slow. Fast-forward to 2024, and it takes six weeks, plus or minus two weeks depending on complexity, to deliver an automation. 

I have many use cases for Automation Anywhere, including multiple use cases. We are automating SAP finance processes, commercial processes, and distribution processes. So many processes are there.

Automation Anywhere is very easy to use. It's a low-code platform that a person who doesn't have any technical knowledge can use. Automation Anywhere has a single control room where everything exists in a single platform.

In other tools such as Power Automate and UiPath, Power Automate has two components: desktop flow and cloud flow. To do end-to-end automation, including cloud applications and desktop applications, we have to use two things: Power Desktop Flow and Cloud Flow. Similarly, in UiPath, we have three interfaces: Orchestrator, Desktop Flow, and Cloud Flow. However, in Automation Anywhere, there is a single control room where we can do everything: cloud automation, desktop automation, everything.

It would be good if they could make a direct connector with Microsoft applications, such as Teams and SharePoint.

I have been using Automation Anywhere in my career for three years. I am using this for four projects.

I have not seen any problems regarding stability and performance. However, the community control room, which they provide free of cost, sometimes causes problems. When we purchase it, it doesn't create any problems.

The scalability depends on our project and how long it is. We have a project that started in July 2022, and we have many use cases in there. We can say that we can still run. We are still developing some automations there. The scalability depends on the project.

The technical support is structured based on the sensitivity of the ticket. I have created many tickets on the support portal since we have a purchased support portal. We get responses according to the business impact. For example, if we mark it as one, they call us within two hours. If we mark it as three, they just mail us and give the solution. Most of the time, I find that our internal team finds the solution; the support team isn't able to provide a perfect solution.

Positive

I have used UiPath, but I don't work on UiPath. My team members are working on it. As a manager, I used to use UiPath before, but now I am managing everything at the admin level.

The installation is easy. It's not too difficult. There is a provisioning of the control room where we have a customer portal. We can go there, put our licenses, provision our control room, and they can provision within fifteen minutes. After that, we can use the automation engine. The installation part is just installing a small EXE, and we can start the automation.

To deploy a solution from end to end, there is the discovery phase where we identify the use cases. Then we have some documentation phases, such as the design documents. After that, we can start the development. It depends on the use case and its complexity. On average, it takes four to five weeks to complete automation end to end.

If a person has knowledge of everything, they can do everything from development, requirement gathering, to production deployment. But according to our role-based access control, we need at least three people to do these tasks. One can do development, another can do QA testing, and the last one can do deployment.

For pricing, I don't have any idea about the pricing of Power Automate. Power Automate costs fifteen dollars per month for a single creator license. Whereas Automation Anywhere provides a package where we are getting one attended license, creator license, and one control room. It costs seven hundred fifty dollars per month. We can say Automation Anywhere is more expensive than Power Automate.

Automation Anywhere has their own university, which is on an online platform, and all the courses are free. Anyone can make their account on the Automation Anywhere University, get registered in the courses, and take all the training sessions.

It is easy to use for business users who don't have technical skills. There is a license called Citizen Developer. I have a scenario where, six months ago, our client's manager wanted to do some automation, and he didn't want to disclose these things with anyone. He asked me to give him a Citizen Developer license, where he can do his automations. He automates things such as Outlook and some Excels.

I used the Copilot. It allows the user to interact with the live running boards. Before the Copilot, unattended boards were there. When we trigger the board, we cannot give any input at runtime. But with the help of Copilot, we can give input at runtime whenever we want to change the value of any variable.

I would rate the solution overall as nine out of ten.

Get manual tasks done by automations wherever possible. For now, we only use task bots. We use them across whole EMEA at RICOH for different departments like: Business Services, SCM, Annuity & Services, Data governance, Finance and Sales. When I joined Ricoh, there were 30 processes in production and now we scaled up over 50 processes in production and counting.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to get rid of the mundane tasks. They are better to be carried out by bots so that the employees can focus on tasks that need human decisions, not repetitive tasks. We also wanted better customer satisfaction.

We also have an email automation where people can write emails to us 24/7, and we create service requests inside Siebel. It is an Oracle app. 

With all process in production so far, we reduced the manual effort which led to more satisfaction by employees to get rid of the mundane tasks and focus more on tasks which need human decisions. Especially for our Annuity & Services department we have a quicker response time, and this led to more customer satisfaction.

Automation Anywhere constantly bringing new features in their product. Which will open more possibilities for automation out of the box.

The integration of coding languages like Python, JavaScript an VB Script will allow to extend the capabilities.

The bot store is also a good point to explore pre-built automation to integrate in your tasks.

To keep yourself up to date they provide Skill Booster learning trails for the new features and product updates.

The website has a lot to provide, but with this whole variety of information it is hard for me to keep track and navigate through.

AI agents need constant improvement, but this is by the nature of AI.

We had a use case for handwritten documents, which we were not able to extract safely, so some improvements on document automation would be great.

I am using Automation Anywhere as a developer since September 2021, so for almost 4 years now.

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

I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability because we can use the workload management feature.

We have approximately 20 people using this solution.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Prior to Automation Anywhere, we were doing almost everything manually. We started with Automation Anywhere version 11 and later migrated to A360.

We have a separate team that handles the integration and setup. We are still on the on-premises version of Automation Anywhere. We are not using the cloud version. We have virtual machines running for us developers. We have a development environment where we use our own dedicated VMs. We develop automation on these VMs, and then we push it through the UAT and the last life cycle for production.

As far as I have heard from our team, they said it was easy to implement.

We started with version 11 of Automation Anywhere back in 2019. When I joined the team in 2022, we were migrating from version 11 to A360. I directly started in the migration phase where I could help with my fresh knowledge, because I was one of the first ones certified in A360.

Our central RPA team, which handles resources, currently consists of five people. I am not sure how many people from the service provider are involved, as they handle on-prem resources. On our side, we have five people pushing these things to production. As a developer, not much maintenance is required.

I am not involved in the pricing, but based on what I hear from our central RPA team, it is not very expensive; it is also not cheap. Its price is in the midrange.

We are not using the AI tools from Automation Anywhere, but we have created some of our own modules, which we are triggering in combination with Automation Anywhere in Python scripting language. We are using this combination for text analysis and problem descriptions from our customers. We are getting the sentiment score to categorize these service requests so that our agents can handle them better. We will, for sure, investigate if we can use Automation Anywhere's AI capabilities in the future.

I am responsible for showing and teaching new joiners how to work with Automation Anywhere. We also have some new citizen developers. We have asked different departments if they have some people on their team who are interested in this. They are not professional developers like me, but I teach them the basics. I also recommend they join the citizen developer training provided by the Automation Anywhere University. They take that training first, and then we do in-depth training tailored to the RICOH processes. It takes them three to six months, but it also depends on how much time they can spend on the training because they also have their regular work.

If you start using Automation Anywhere I highly recommend the Automation Anywhere University platform to start with the learning trails.

These are focused on three roles: Automation Lead, Automation Developer and Citizen Developer.

Also, great content on the Skill Boosters which will give you in depth training on a particular topic.

To scale your automation journey, good practice is building central tasks like “switching a responsibility” in Oracle with proper error handling that not every developer needs to implement these by his own. With these generic central tasks, it will also save time in terms of maintenance.

For any questions you might have, you can ask them in the Pathfinder Community where you get answers from Automation Anywhere’s global community of Pathfinders.

For companies starting new process automation implementation, I would advise not to tackle the largest processes at the beginning. Start with small ones to track benefits and demonstrate to the board what process automation has achieved in a short time. In the past, we tackled larger problems first and spent one or two years getting them to work end to end as expected. This was not the best strategy.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.