Our clients use it for different things. One uses it for invoice processing and another for the aggregation of documents based on certain characters. Another uses it to automate processes for the admin department. That company has seasonal workers, and they have to create passes for those seasonal workers. Most of the document uploading and validation is done by Automation Anywhere. Most of those documents are issued by the federal government, and they have a standard format.

One thing I really like is the recorder where you can connect with multiple systems. The OCR is also good. In one case, we used a different OCR than Automation Anywhere, but in document processing, using the OCR engine is good.

And providing automation at scale is something I feel is a strength of Automation Anywhere compared to most tools. It depends on the segment we are dealing with. There are small organizations that might not need robust applications, but for mid-sized and large customers, we usually propose automation anywhere. It's quite robust, and the performance is good. When we are proposing a solution, the automation at scale makes it much easier for us, post-sales and post-implementation.

Also, the integration of the solution's bots with APIs and business applications is good. There are certain prebuilt integration APIs in Automation Anywhere. That's especially true when you're connecting with SAP. There are issues with SAP, but in general, they have connectors with most of the popular CRM tools. The API connectivity is much easier.

We only faced some problems when integrating it with SAP, and Oracle integration was a bit challenging, especially with Oracle Fusion. We had some issues when we were trying to connect some of the applications on the API level. But, in general, integration using Automation Anywhere is fine.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere since 2019, or about four years.

In the last year, the cloud has become bigger, but before that, it was implemented more on-prem only. 

From our side, the number of staff needed for an implementation depends on the number of processes we need to deploy. For the initial configuration, we may not need many people. But, for one of our customers, there are 70 processes that need to be developed over the next 18 months. Obviously, the number of people involved will be much greater than in a project where we're looking at 10 or 15 processes to be implemented. But on average, each process takes at least two to three resources, depending on the complexity.

Once you have deployed an application, you need to maintain it. Compared to other products, it takes slightly fewer people. Maintenance on the admin side requires one to two people. We always assign one FTE for this, at a minimum. Depending on other factors, we might go for two.

Automation Anywhere is more stable compared to some of the other tools on the market. And, post-implementation, we have very few issues with it compared to others. For me, it's all about post-implementation and why customers are happier with Automation Anywhere.

For small and medium-sized customers, we may not suggest Automation Anywhere because of the cost difference.

UiPath has gotten much better in the last two years. They have really grown in terms of overall performance and bot capabilities. There has been a huge improvement there.

As for non-technical users, it's not a low-code type of solution where you draw and drag and drop. Still, it's okay, to some extent, if they at least have some understanding of technology. Generally, it's easy to learn. If you have access to Automation Anywhere University, you can really learn it. But because I am from a technology background, it was much easier for me. We give our customers 13 or 14 sessions to bring them up to speed, and that might span over the period of a month to two months.

In the discussion about RPA versus API integration, one definite advantage of automation is that scheduling, bot management, and those kinds of things are automated. It's more about the customer and their perspective. With automation, you already have something cooked up, and you don't have to worry about much at a later stage. That makes automation much easier for them than using an API integration. You have to maintain an API integration, and there is the cost of maintaining it. With all those factors, automation becomes much easier for the customer.

We have been proposing Automation Anywhere to multiple customers. It's good. It's robust. But it's a bit expensive compared to other RPA tools on the market. Sometimes, it's too heavy for customers, especially if it's on-prem. Also, maintenance is slightly higher.

Our clients' use cases for Automation Anywhere are primarily finance and accounting, including accounts receivable, payable, reconciliation, and invoice processing. They also use it for supply chain and HR processes, IT, and contact center functions, among others.

Four or five years back, clients were looking to gain more accuracy and efficiency. Later on, they became more informed and educated about RPA technologies, and in the past couple of years, they have wanted one-stop solutions. They do not want multiple technologies or to deal with multiple vendors. They want a vendor or an OEM that can provide multiple technologies. That means not only RPA but something to handle integration document processing. They also want analytics and contact center solutions. 

It started with a technology through which a customer would gain efficiency and accuracy. Later on, the paradigm shifted and they wanted to deal with vendors who could provide all sorts of solutions to them.

The number-one feature is that Automation Anywhere can interact or integrate with all sorts of business applications.

The next most important feature is the cloud. That has been a game-changer. Currently, everyone wants to experiment more and more with cloud offerings. They don't want to spend money on setting up their internal hardware infrastructure. Automation Anywhere is the only tool that provides a pure cloud to customers. That is one of the key features. In the past couple of years, 70 to 80 percent of the deals I have closed have been for the cloud.

It's also very easy to use for non-technical business users.

Automation co-pilot integrates pretty seamlessly with day-to-day applications. The Automation Anywhere folks have added some advancements to that technology. I'm currently working on a couple of deals and we are using it as a solid unique selling proposition against other tools. For large organizations such as contact centers, automation co-pilot is going to fly for sure. It has already helped organizations increase productivity in the range of 30 to 40 percent, as a bare minimum.

Automation co-pilot has definitely helped to free up staff to work on other projects. That's one of the focus areas: Let computers do what they are supposed to do and what they are good at doing so that employees, associates, and analysts can focus on the things that they are good at doing.

In addition, the integration of RPA bots, APIs, business applications and documents in Automation Anywhere is seamless; it's very smooth.

They are already working on this: The boom of generative AI, the next-gen technologies, including advanced AI and ML technologies, are in the roadmap. I would like to see more and more AI integration and a bit more analytics. That would be great.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for about six years. I am a reseller of the solution now, but prior to that, I was with Automation Anywhere.

The stability is a 10 out of 10.

It is definitely a very good technology. Automation Anywhere is a fantastic tool. But you need to have the right skill sets or the right partners to scale the journey. It's like having a Rolls Royce or a Mercedes. If you know how to drive it, of course, it is very easy to use it, but having an expert partner is crucial.

In terms of providing automation at scale, back in 2018 or 2019, the top five or top 10 customers of Automation Anywhere had more than 3,000 to 4,000 bots running in production. I don't think any other OEM had that sort of success story. Scaling up the journey with Automation Anywhere is pretty robust and a tested and proven technology.

Our customers deploy it in multiple locations and multiple departments. There are all sorts of models. I would rate its scalability at nine out of 10.

Their technical support is good.

Positive

I have worked on UiPath, Blue Prism, and a couple of projects on Power Automate as well. The number-one advantage of Automation Anywhere is ease of use. Number two is the success stories. Number three is that it is a mature overall ecosystem.

Deploying it is very straightforward, although I am not too involved in the nitty-gritty of implementation. My job is to prospect customers and work with them until the deal has closed. After that, I let my delivery team handle it.

We have a maximum of two people involved in deploying it. There is not much maintenance involved.

For technical employees, it takes about six weeks, and not more than that, to be trained to use Automation Anywhere. For a person without a tech background, it takes a couple of months, max. The learning curve is pretty steep for Automation Anywhere.

I have dealt with all sorts of customers, from small and medium-scale enterprises to large conglomerates. Across all of them, one commonality is that after the first year, they have all doubled their license count. 

They get a return on their investment very quickly, probably within six months the majority of customers get their ROI. After that, it is just a mushrooming effect. 

It is not only about cost savings. This technology impacts the top line as well as the bottom line of a company's P&L and balance sheets. Once they also realize its value, they come up with more asks and we scale up the journey.

Initially, they charged a premium, but now the rest of the vendors have increased their overall pricing and Automation Anywhere is not that high at this time. It's pretty viable.

I work in APAC, India and Asia Pacific countries, and customers here are very price-conscious. Every time I get a chance to work with Automation Anywhere, I tell them that I want a starter pack at a relatively low cost so that the customer can get started. But for customers based in Europe, The Middle East, or North America, Automation Anywhere is pretty competitive.

A couple of hours ago, I had a meeting with the group CEO of a multi-national corporation and he asked why he should use RPA when he can do automation using APIs and Python. That can definitely be done. If a customer has only a couple of processes to automate, I'll be the first person to tell them they don't have to invest in RPA. They can use scripting technology or API integration. But when we talk about scale, API automation with Python or any other type of scripting automation will not be the right choice. The reason is that it consumes a lot of time and is not that agile. That approach also becomes "person-dependent", meaning you have to keep the guy who developed that script around. If he is gone, your automation journey goes for a toss. When a customer wants to scale, they need a mature, solid, RPA platform such as Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is similar to Blue Prism. We do a lot of process mining and RPA tasks. We've used it in some very large companies. It's for automating activities in large service centers like home loan originations, insurance claims, or for service desks for utilities for telephone companies.

Companies were trying to eliminate a lot of manual processes that were being handled by people at keyboards and some of the repetitive nature. A lot of it is the front-end handling of incoming phone calls or incoming service requests that might be sent via email or text. Rather than having people look at the request on a green screen or on a website, the robots would actually handle some of the routing of the requests or the routing of the documents. For example, for a home loan application or some kind of claim. A lot of the time, most of the companies have people sitting in a service center, receiving those requests and reviewing them. However, now, a lot of the inputting of the data can be handled by the robot.

The solution is easy to deploy. It scales. It's easy to configure. They are pretty generic. There's not a lot of difference between any of the three big RPAs. 

Automation Anywhere is very focused on the Microsoft world. They don't do anything other than Windows and Microsoft, whereas Blue Prism and UiPath compete with other platforms.

The learning curve is low. It's faster to learn than the others.

Some people in my company have used the Co-Pilot functionality. Right now, they use Salesforce, although they have their own RPA now and they are going to replace it with MuleSoft's automation.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide automation at scale for Microsoft is excellent. 

The integration of RPA bots, APIs, or business applications and documents is pretty robust.

They should consider being more multi-platform.

I've used the solution since 2018. I've used it for about five years. 

I've never used technical support.

I've also used Blue Prism in the past.

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The project would dictate how long it would take to deploy. It could take a couple of days to a couple of months. There's a question of governance proliferation and compliance that needs to be considered in RPA. The internal policies would affect the overall setup. 

There is maintenance in the form of updates. It doesn't take much maintenance. We don't use bots and therefore do not need to maintain them.

I don't have any thoughts on pricing or licensing. 

For someone who wants to use an API integration instead of a robust process automation solution, I'd advise it depends on the culture of the company, and the complexity of the integration that one wants to do. Depending on the culture, on average, it's a 50/50 split. There are some environments where RPA is the right thing to do since it's quicker. It's faster. It's easier to manage them from the perspective of just configuring the conformance and compliance with internal policy. However, in other parts of the same organization, you might need API integration depending on what you're integrating.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Nobody gets a ten. Nobody's perfect.

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.

We use Automation Anywhere for web scraping, PDF automation, Excel automation, and API automation.

The most valuable features of Automation Anywhere are Excel, periods, database, and email action.

Automation Anywhere should improve its OCR capabilities.

I would like to see more communication between other technologies. We can directly implement some coding scripts. We already have Python, JavaScript, and VBA, but having some programming languages like Java and dot Net would be great.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for five years.

Automation Anywhere is a stable solution.

Automation Anywhere is a scalable solution.

Our company has different teams, and more than 500 users are using Automation Anywhere in our organization. More than 20 administrators use the solution.

The solution's technical support team gives you different solutions. Some solutions work, but others seem irrelevant. It would help our organization if they gave accurate solutions instead of tentative solutions. They have to improve the speed of their response time.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is easy and not very complex.

We develop the bot, test it on our local environment, and then take it to UAT and production. For simple usage, the solution's deployment may take around 30 days. We implement the solution through an in-house team.

We need only one resource for the solution's deployment. When everything looks good after the testing and peer review, we deploy the bot into production.

Automation Anywhere is easy to learn. I'm also looking at UiPath, but I'm not finding time to explore that RPA tool. Automation Anywhere is a hybrid tool, which we can see in the code view as well as in the flow chart view. On the other hand, UiPath has only flowchart diagrams. UiPath is ruling the RPA industry, but Automation Anywhere is next to UiPath. It would be great if Automation Anywhere had all the capabilities that are present in UiPath.

People who don't have technical experience can learn to use Automation Anywhere quickly because it's easily understandable. They can easily build bots by going through the documentation and videos in Automation Anywhere University. Normally, business users will run the bots and know the functionality, but if they want to learn Automation Anywhere, they can easily learn it in a couple of days.

Currently, we have more than 10 bots in production and more than 20 bots under testing.

If anyone wants to use Automation Anywhere, I won't say it is a 100% perfect automation tool because it depends on the developer and logic. Users may sometimes face hiccups in running end-to-end automation. There are chances of the bot getting hampered while working on some websites.

Automation Anywhere fails to load some objects for some old technologies or websites. It would be helpful if the solution could read every technology and clone every object on the website, even for legacy technologies.

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

I use Automation Anywhere for the reconciliation process in the finance sectors, telecom industry, and banking and insurance sectors. Mostly, I use it for reconciliation and data feeding for SAP and Oracles applications. Sometimes, I use APIs, too.

Automation Anywhere has improved the way our organization functions. With every release, the tool improves its standards and technical aspects. They have also improved a lot from the security point of view. IQ Bot structures the unstructured document. It is very important to our organization. The time taken to realize the benefits of the solution depends upon the process. If it is a simple process, we would need one month.

Document understanding,Bot Store, AARI ie co-pilot are very useful.

The product has to improve document understanding. It must also provide more training.

I have been using the solution for more than eight years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The product is deployed across multiple departments and teams. More than 200 people are using the solution in our organization. I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten. We faced some problems while scaling the tool. Once we upgrade the package, it doesn’t work. When we update the package again, the issue gets resolved.

It is very easy to contact the support team. The team responds to our queries within a day. The product provides different levels like Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. If we enroll in the Bronze level, the support team will help us, but the time will be delayed. They'll reply within a day.

If we choose Silver, the team replies within two working hours. However, we get a response from the team within a day. The team reaches out to the customers who have raised tickets. The support team responds quickly. The team shares the documentation with us. If it doesn't work, they will immediately set up a meeting, look into the issue, and try to help us with the steps to follow.

The support team follows certain steps. If we raise a ticket, they provide some steps in a document containing the solution to our issues. We can immediately connect with the right person if it doesn't resolve our issues. To save time, if we raise a request to connect with the support team member, instead of sending a document, they should immediately connect with us to provide support.

Positive

It's very easy to deploy the tool. We just have to export it from the development control room and import it to another control room. We can select the files we need and export or import them. It is very simple, like a file upload or download.

The time taken for deployment depends upon the number of files or packages since we use multiple workflows and tasks. It depends on the file size. However, it should not take more than three minutes. Even if it is complex, the deployment is completed within three minutes. If it is simple or moderately complex, depending on the file size, it uploads within 30 seconds. While deploying the product, we can see the progress in the control room.

I have experience in deploying the solution. Whoever has the right to deploy can deploy the product. We can deploy it parallelly. The number of people required for the deployment depends upon the process. If it is five to six processes, one support team and one deployment team member is enough. We have five administrators. We also have 15 members in the support team.

The infrastructure team has some upgrade or patch activity every month. The team informs us about it. Usually, it happens only on weekends. Most of the bots will be idle on Sunday. It will run only for a few cases. Maintenance takes three hours monthly.

I have seen an ROI on the solution. The ROI depends on the use case. Some use cases have more documents we have to read, and we need to feed them into some applications. We check the FTE benefits and calculate the ROI based on it.

The product’s pricing is reasonable. The pricing depends upon the partner. We can get Runner, Attended, Unattended, IQ Bot, and Bot Insight licenses. The price is reasonable if we can get whatever the organization needs. There are no additional costs.

The product fails in some environments. In some applications, the product behaves weirdly. UiPath is mostly accurate, and we are able to automate it. Automation Anywhere has to improve its technical features. It doesn’t work in some applications without any workaround. UiPath has better stability than Automation Anywhere. Everything works perfectly in UiPath. Sometimes, some controls don’t work after an upgrade in Automation Anywhere. We must update the package again to make it work. Compared to Automation Anywhere, we might have to wait longer for UiPath’s support team.

Currently, I am using Automation 36O. The solution has added Google, Microsoft, and forms recently. We can easily integrate them. We can build a custom form for an Attended bot. The user can feed data, and the bot can pick it up and run it. Most of the tools have integrated this form. Instead of creating custom forms, the product provides an in-built forms section.

The solution has drag-and-drop features. There is no coding. If a person is well versed in coding like Java, Python, and VBScript, they can integrate the product. Even if we have no technical skills, it is very easy to drag and drop. It will work. We just need logical thinking.

The time taken to train non-technical employees depends upon the employees. Within two weeks, the employees would be able to understand the tool. They would also be able to develop simple processes. It is easy to expand the product across an entire company.

Integrating RPA bots, APIs, business applications, and documents into the solution is not hard. It is user-friendly. Integrating any web application or third-party application like Salesforce is very easy. I have used Salesforce API and some third-party web applications. The tool also provides some in-built APIs developed by the web application team. When I face some restrictions, the team provides me with APIs, which are easy to integrate. If something is not possible to automate in GUI, we choose a different solution for API building. Everything can be done within Automation Anywhere. It is easy to integrate the solution with third-party products.

We haven't explored more opportunities. We are using only simple processes. I would choose an RPA solution over an API integration. We need to have some security controls and approvals before we can integrate APIs. In RPA, we can not only integrate API but also have other in-built action items.

People can definitely choose Automation Anywhere. We will see a lot of changes and improvements in the upcoming versions. Based on these updates, organizations will get more benefits from the tool.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use it for doing automation inside of Citrix. It's for image-based automation.

It's very easy for business users to learn Automation Anywhere. You do not need to have technical skills in order to leverage the product. It is pretty easy to learn how to use it.

The learning curve in terms of making automations is low. It's a low-code platform. People are finding it very easy to learn how to do things. 

It might take six to eight weeks in order to train non-technical employees to use Automation Anywhere. 

It has been good for our financial management reporting. 

Using RPA bots and APIs is easy. It's easy to integrate.

Automation Anywhere has helped us increase automation consumption. We do a lot of financial reporting, even on SAP. We've done a lot of automations around ERP and our SAP database.

Automation Anywhere was difficult with certain applications with respect to Java platforms. For these, we'd likely use UiPath instead. Handling Java-based applications or browser-based applications could be better. 

Automation Anywhere should have more Excel-related functionality. 

I've used the solution for four or five years. 

The product is not at all stable. They should improve the stability.

The solution scales enough. We haven't faced any scaling problems. 

The product has a very good support team. We have not had any major challenges with them.

Positive

We also use UiPath.

We migrated to a gateway situation. It was challenging as the architecture was different. We faced a lot of issues and it took time to migrate. There were a few functionalities that were not working and we needed to recreate the workflows. When we started, most of the ports were not working. The migration did not go as expected. Then, there was a new version of my initial VPN. It took more than a year to migrate.

The solution does require some maintenance. You do need to maintain the bots. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using Automation Anywhere. 

The pricing is still high. For every new feature, there is an additional charge.

I'm an Automation Anywhere customer.

We have not yet started using Co-Pilot.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It's good for automating processes. 

We use it for processes related to IT operations in the manufacturing industry.

There are hectic IT processes, jobs that run overnight, weekly, and monthly. We can optimize, rewrite, and automate them. They represent the most important use cases that I have been involved with: IT operations and software for manufacturing.

It has helped our organization increase automation consumption by 20 to 30 percent.

The most valuable feature is the Control Room.

Also, the integration of RPA bots with other processes and documents is good. We don't have any issues there. We could have more connectors, but it's fine. I have used it for SAP and for direct API-to-API, and that went well.

It is good for standard procedures with an SOP. For those, it works well. But there are processes that are tricky and need human intervention and intelligence. In those cases, the process gets stuck. Something that is a straight-ahead process—you do A, B, C, and D—is fine. But when you do A and then have to decide whether to do B or C, where there is a need for logical thinking and human intervention, we find it difficult to automate those cases. We have to break down those processes and do that tweaking.

We would like to see a more seamless UI, and we would like AI help. Wherever we are stuck or there is a logical error, AI help, with prompting and suggestions on what to do, would be good. If I have dragged and dropped something in the wrong logical sequence and it fails during execution, there should be automated AI help.

We use NetBeans IDE where we get something like automated help, but that's a platform for doing standard Java and PHP development. Automated help is coming up more and more in many tools. For example, Microsoft is providing it. We would like to have something like that in Automation Anywhere, with automated debugging and self-help.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two years.

Overall, the product is stable for SOP-based use cases. It is not very stable for complex use cases.

It is not very scalable for complex use cases.

Their technical support is good overall, not excellent. They can improve the response time and on-call support. We have SLAs, so we need support to be immediate.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

Recently, automation has gone to the cloud, and that has been most beneficial because installation was quite hectic before. On-prem was quite difficult, but the moment they launched the cloud version, it became easy.

With on-prem, there were issues with installation over production as well as the setup of the Control Room. Often, the Control Room would go down or hang, and we would have to do restarts. It was not seamless.

The licensing cost could be improved. It costs a lot. At the very least, the developer licenses and the control panels should be made free to enterprises, and the production environment licensed. Production should bear the cost; we would be okay with that, but not the development side.

Business users didn't find it that easy to use, but for developers who are building the use cases, it's quite easy. For the business users, the issues were standard ones, such as navigation, user friendliness, and the terminologies that they needed to understand. They often require training before using it, and not just one training session, but training and retraining. On a scale where 10 represents a low learning curve and one is a large learning curve, Automation Anywhere is a seven. For non-technical people, it's difficult. For them, the learning curve is a four or five. It usually takes four to five months for them to be able to really use it on their own.

We have developed solutions for IT back-end processes, so there are no end-users. These jobs run weekly, fortnightly, and monthly. There are two or three people involved with it, but it's the jobs that we have automated.

We need three to four people to maintain the solutions, but that doesn't take a lot of time—about four hours a week. It's not something that needs to be done every day. Before the jobs run, they check to make sure everything is okay, that no errors or notifications are coming up. The maintenance is very low.

Automation Anywhere is good but not exceptional. It's good because, for simple use cases, we use it with different technologies. For complex processes, automations should perform better.