Automation Anywhere (AA) Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would like them to include process mining.

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 in the retirement industry. We use it for application-based automation. We are trying to mimic our operations to redundant business users' tasks, like clearing claims and loans.

We are using version 10.7. We are currently trying to upgrade to version 11.3.

We use Bot Insights. Business users utilize Bot Insight dashboards to get analysis.

In the 10.7 version, the back-end port for the MetaBot password has looping. This has been a type of limitation. Now, we are upgrading and integrating the Control Room, which is a validating feature.

I would like them to add OCR features. This would help us deal with unstructured data and we can get more data out of images.

I would like to see more features related to artificial intelligence. 

The latest version is more stable. We have mostly legacy applications. We do interact with Automation Anywhere support for patches and DLLs which are compatible with our legacy applications. Maybe after our upgrade, we can expect more stability.

In couple of months, we are looking to upgrade. We have set up our environment for integrating in AWS into our architecture. We are setting this up now and planning to install Automation Anywhere 11.3 to see how it is.

It is scalable. Since we have only had it one year, we are still looking into the scalabilty factor.

The technical support is good. They are knowledgeable and don't waste much of our time. They are quick in resolving things by identifying the exact root cause. 

We try to resolve the issue from our side first because we are trained in the product. It is only when we can't solve the issue that we contact support.

The initial setup is straightforward, except when setting up with cloud-based services, like Amazon. The cloud-based setup process is complex.

Automation Anywhere came in and helped set up the tool for us since it was initially new when we onboarded it.

It has saved us a lot of hours, manual effort, and we can focus on more important tasks, which helps us with our ROI.

We purchase on a bot basis. Our costs are approximately $5,000.

There are a lot of vendors out there, like Blue Prism and UiPath. However, A2019 offers cross platform and single point, which is why I would recommend Automation Anywhere.

I have been very impressed with the A2019 version. This version is phenomenal. 

We sell Automation Anywhere to customers who want to automate their processes within the hospitality industry.

Our customers can deploy Automation Anywhere both on-premises and in the cloud.

It is easy to learn and use Automation Anywhere.

Learning to automate using the solution for simple processes in HR and IT is easy. For areas such as finance, the training takes a few months and requires a technical person to train the team.

Integrating with co-pilot is straightforward when using SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, or other international systems. However, challenges arise when integrating with in-house systems.

Co-pilot helps increase productivity for our customers.

We often integrate SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft with Automation Anywhere. There are no issues with the integrations as long as we configure everything properly.

Automation Anywhere enables our customers to achieve savings of over 60 percent in time and money. While employees may take breaks and vacations, their automated processes continue to operate seamlessly without interruption, ensuring a consistent flow of work.

The ability to automate renewals of government licenses four times a year is valuable.

The marketing for Automation Anywhere has room for improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for three years.

Automation Anywhere can provide automation to scale as long as the organization has the budget for it.

The technical support is great.

Positive

I use both UiPath and Automation Anywhere. UiPath has a more aggressive marketing strategy and a larger market share. However, our banking, insurance, and high-level customers prefer Automation Anywhere over UiPath.

The deployment time depends on the number of processes being automated.

Despite being less expensive than UiPath, Automation Anywhere remains cost-prohibitive for many small and medium-sized businesses.

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

Our customers are all enterprise-level. 

Automation Anywhere does not require ongoing maintenance and offers 24/7 support if any issue arises.

We use Automation Anywhere in the finance domain for tasks such as data reconciliation, data identification, and aviation operations.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to address our outstanding invoices, purchase orders, and quotations from multiple vendors. We utilized the IQ Bot feature, which is integrated into the OCR system.

For technical individuals, Automation Anywhere is easy to use.

The learning curve is favorable for non-technical staff, as it typically takes between two to four weeks before they can start automating with Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere's capability to deliver automation at scale is commendable. We possess the ability to scale up to multiple users across organizations. In fact, I have successfully executed this RPA using a report containing one Lakh operations, which is equivalent to one hundred thousand.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption. We were able to showcase the use cases and case studies we have completed to market our abilities and services.

IQ Bot is the most valuable integrated feature of Automation Anywhere.

For business users, the solution is complex and could be made more user-friendly.

It is not easy to integrate APIs with Automation Anywhere without a good knowledge of APIs.

The pricing of Automation Anywhere is higher compared to other solutions on the market, such as Microsoft Power Automate and UiPath, and it has room for improvement.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for five years.

Automation Anywhere is stable. We can rely on it without encountering any issues.

Automation Anywhere is highly scalable.

The quality of technical support relies on the partnership we maintain with Automation Anywhere. Gold partners receive excellent service. As long as we maintain this relationship with Automation Anywhere, we can expect consistently good service. However, if the partnership is not in place, it may take some time, but we will still receive some answers eventually.

Positive

We still use multiple RPAs depending on the customers' requirements, including UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate.

UiPath has the ability to integrate with other products, whereas Automation Anywhere has limitations in integrating with APIs and other OCR tools.

We will see a return on investment eventually, but we need to be patient in order to realize the potential that Automation Anywhere offers three years down the line.

The price for Automation Anywhere is high. I would rate the cost an eight out of ten, with ten being the highest cost.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten. The integrations and pricing model are areas that need improvement. However, Automation Anywhere is a very effective tool, offering its own internal solutions. Automation Anywhere eliminates the need to rely on any other third-party solutions, which is a significant advantage.

For organizations interested in utilizing API automation, there are several tools available in the market. Additionally, numerous BPM tools can be employed for API integration. However, if they require desktop automation or process automation, Automation Anywhere is a recommended tool.

Our IT department maintains the solution. We maintain the bots once a quarter for one hour.

We have used AA for telecom industry repetitive processes, public retirement firms processes, and financial bank processes. The development has been with local developer desktops, remote VDIs, EC2s, as well as RDP clients of sorts for the individual company preferences.

We are currently building an Azure environment for our A2019 solution internally, with a VDI as our developer/UAT environment. Production will be a separate VDI operating from our main control room instance, as we create Bot Runner agents out of those VDIs for production.

I also deal with many federated lines of business, as they often develop locally and use attended automation as their source of RPA for their lines of business. Others utilize EC2s as their developer and UAT environments and have a separate production import process that keeps the separation of duties intact. Though this is not as productive as that team expected, they use it temporarily until their control room can be migrated and upgraded into A2019 instance as part of another line of business currently building out a sandbox environment for the remainder of 2020.

I am a consultant and our RPA practice on a personal level has improved the efficiency of the payroll, PTO, and timecard submission process within our company. It has taken time-consuming daily mundane tasks off the plates of our talented finance teams and allowed them to dedicate more productive time to working with more thought-heavy and human-centric activities.

Outside of our company, as we work with clientele, several improvement instances have been evident for those. One company had a very tedious process of monitoring an email inbox for several business units to send emails notifying that their daily database update process was completed. This took many hours of monitoring after hours, but in place of that, the RPA bot was able to perform the monitoring for them of that inbox, perform the necessary follow-up or escalation emails needed, and finalize the process once all was complete. This was unattended automation, saving them precious time, improving morale, and accurately informing everyone of the completion. 

Both v11 and A2019 have their strengths but the cloud-based forms with Excel, Microsoft applications, scripts integration, and functionality of A2019 have really stood out above the way v11 can do those things.

It takes far less code to work with A2019 than v11 for the tasks we have in place. In v11, the Metabot features have proven a tremendous help to work with smaller tasks such as file and folder operations, datetime operations, as well as credential management operations.

I'd say the most impactful and heavily or commonly used ability of v11 and A2019 has been the ability to integrate other code types and operations within the process. For example, if someone needed a heavy data comparison process to take place, utilizing AA could work but often takes a good bit of time to work through a large Excel or CSV file. Instead, activating a pre-developed or partner-developed Python script would be my choice because of the speed and efficiency of that language. I currently use this method and it's a major time saver.

In terms of improvement, usually, I have found is not as general as people think. Specifically, as a use case, I am excited to see improvements in having an A2019 cloud control room working and improved on the Lenox environments. A good bit of our finance infrastructure for web-based applications is built in that environment.

There is a good bit of dashboard-type development going on in this type of environment already, so the ability to integrate some of the functionality, as well as keep the synchronicity of everything within it, would be a major benefit.

Having fewer connection instances would make it more secure, more simple to troubleshoot, and possibly more flexible with the type of applications in use.  

I have been using the AA desktop application versions since 2014 (v09-v11), approximately six years, and A2019 for about four months.

I've not had any instability issues but only environmental stability issues that come down to the company that created the environment. 

I find it very scalable, especially with smaller automations, as they can often grow once proven to businesses that the processes work. 

The technical support was very knowledgeable, very easy to understand mostly, their ability to work with us to meet the needs and being patient was a huge help. 

I did not previously use different versions but currently use both. I do know that going forward with v11 sunsetting in 2021, we are migrating and going through a learning phase of A2019 to fully adapt to that application. 

The A2019 setup was straightforward for the applications themselves. The environments in which they are set up is a different story but, that again is on a per-company basis and often lends itself to the expertise of the DevOps teams. Sometimes, those folks are not familiar with RPA or A2019.  

We implemented through AA directly. The availability of their support was very good. Several meetings and work with their folks went well. 

Our ROI has ranged from thousands to hundreds of thousands, depending on the type of process being automated.

I really enjoy the pricing options with Automation Anywhere, as they are able to flex their ability to adapt to the needs of the customer really well. I am sure the specifics for some pricing are on a partner-by-partner basis but providing the ability to scale the licenses, setup, and pricing to the customer is a huge benefit with Automation Anywhere.

Their technical support system and response times directly to a partner are really good.

We did review UiPath, Blue Prism, and Power Automate. 

I'd say, fully go headfirst into learning the A2019 platform and all it can do for a business. There is something for everyone in that platform. Large or small scale automations, migration processes from v11 is already in place and tested, and there is no more need for Metabots because they are now "packages" that can be made or modified by a seasoned developer, and a plethora of other benefits are evident. Just jump in!! 

We use Automation Anywhere to automate processes for our clients and have hundreds of use cases. 

We implemented Automation Anywhere for redundant and manual tasks that are data-heavy and do not require a lot of logical reasoning in the process.

We offer cloud-based deployment of Automation Anywhere for our clients. The specific type of deployment depends on each client's needs and preferences. Larger organizations may opt for their private cloud for security and control, while smaller ones might favor the public cloud's lower costs and simpler setup. Ultimately, the ideal deployment model depends on the individual organization's priorities.

Before Automation Anywhere, all of our processes were manual, time-consuming, and prone to inaccuracies due to human error. Automation Anywhere has transformed our operations by streamlining processes, boosting accuracy, and eliminating downtime.

Business users who have decent logical and problem-solving skills can easily use Automation Anywhere.

The learning curve is linear.

Training non-technical employees to use Automation Anywhere takes around one month.

Integration of automation into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents in Automation Anywhere is easy.

The simpler the process and the larger the volume of data involved, the greater the potential for time and cost savings with Automation Anywhere. This is in contrast to more complex processes that require data manipulation and advanced reasoning or decision-making skills, where the benefits might be less pronounced.

The simplicity and ease of use is the most valuable part of Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere could benefit from a more technical focus. As a developer, comparing it to UiPath, I find UiPath offers greater customization and integration capabilities, particularly with core languages like C#. Automation Anywhere currently seems geared more towards business users, while UiPath caters to technical users. Additionally, UiPath's free community edition appears significantly more robust than Automation Anywhere's.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for almost 13 years.

The cloud versions of Automation Anywhere are a significant improvement over the earlier desktop versions. I've been using Automation Anywhere since version five, and while the desktop versions were initially unstable, the cloud versions have been much more reliable. I commend the Automation Engineering team for their thorough testing before deployments.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide automation at scale is good, especially with the control room and the workload management features.

The initial deployment is simple, especially for the cloud version. Just create an account, log in, and install the local connector or bot. Then, connect it to our device and access the website. One technical person can complete the deployment in five minutes.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

While everyone seems eager to jump on the AI bandwagon, I believe it's not a mandatory element for every situation. The need for true, cutting-edge AI currently lies in research and development, not in everyday business processes. Current AI implementations tend to be overhyped and unnecessary for many applications.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is simple in the cloud.

There is no maintenance for the cloud version of Automation Anywhere.