Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)

A person who messaged me on LinkedIn informed me that this review concerns Automation Anywhere . In my own words, for the current client, they are in the manufacturing industry. We have various use cases including finance processes, supply chain, and vendor management. This particular client's operations are very large, spread across four continents with manufacturing plants in 12 countries and conducting business for somewhere between 400 to 600 million US dollars. We automate all these backend, mundane processes so that human resources can do something more useful.

In my previous two roles, I worked from 2019 to 2022. In that first year, I was working in Automation Anywhere  version 11, which was a legacy version that existed before 2019. Initially, it was Automation Anywhere version 11, followed by 2019 and later they rebranded it as A360. I have worked in all three versions. Version 11 was in 2019-2020 for a Singapore-based energy client in the petroleum and energy sector. In 2020, I worked for a Saudi-based client in healthcare and food industries with many verticals. Currently, I am working with a huge manufacturing unit based in the United Arab Emirates.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for two periods: one from September 2019 to March 2022 and again from November 2024 to present. The second phase from November 2024 to present is 1.3 years, and 2019 to 2021 was another two to two and a half years. In total, I have about 3.5 to four years of experience.

I just used Automation Anywhere at work today and am currently working on it. The drag and drop feature is very user-friendly in Automation Anywhere. Of course, the old version 11 was very difficult to work on, but the new A360, which has been in the market for the past two to three years, is very developer-friendly. It gives more control to the developer and is not too complicated. UiPath, the other RPA  tool I worked on, is very complicated because at each step you have to put 500 inputs and 500 outputs. Nothing of that nature occurs here. It is very simple and straightforward. You have a dropdown on the left side and an actions panel where you have packages. Under each package, you have many actions. You can drag the action into the box and it works fine. The bottom line is that it is extremely simple and developer-friendly.

In the current organization, we had trouble initially because I think the documentation and support could be better than what it is now. This is one difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA  tools such as UiPath. In UiPath, if you have an issue, you go to the UiPath website and search for it, and you get lots of help materials. In Automation Anywhere, you do not get exactly what you are looking for. You get a very large number of results when you search for something, and from this large result set, you have to filter out what you need, or only partial information will be available. User handbooks are available for each product. In that regard, I would say Automation Anywhere is lagging compared to other RPA tools.

It is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. I want to clarify that it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere. We do not know how to fix Automation Anywhere itself. Whenever we have an issue, trying to get in touch with them always takes three to four business days.

I have not experienced significant stability issues. I have been working for this long, and I have faced only one issue in the last year, which involved the VM. Other than that, in these three to four years of using this tool, there has been no crashing, glitches, or anything of that nature due to technical issues from Automation Anywhere. I would say one experience in a period of four years.

Automation Anywhere is very scalable. You have the concept of subtasks, which makes it very easy. You can highly modularize your code, and once you modularize your code, it becomes easy to scale up. This is not an issue. All the processes we are doing now, we approach from the perspective that they are scalable. We first make three business units live. The current client I am working for has 60 business units within their business. Initially, we implement the bot only for the first three business units, then we implement it for another three business units. Scalability is never an issue. If I were to provide a score, I would say 9 out of 10.

You are talking about document understanding. I am using ARI, the Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface, right now as well. I know the Co-pilot feature and have seen videos in Automation Anywhere University, but I have not personally used it in my project.

For the product, I would say eight to 8.5. For support, I would give five to six. For the overall product, I would say 8 to 8.5.

I initially worked in Blue Prism  and then transitioned to Automation Anywhere. I believe if you work in one RPA tool, transitioning to another is easy. For someone working on Automation Anywhere as their first RPA tool versus someone working on Automation Anywhere as their second RPA tool, the person working on Automation Anywhere as their second RPA tool will have an easier learning phase because they already understand RPA, business cases, and why RPA is being implemented. However, someone who is a fresher working in Automation Anywhere as their first tool will have a steeper learning curve. In my organization, in 2019, I transitioned from Blue Prism  to Automation Anywhere. I was part of the first team that implemented the first automation project for my organization, so the learning curve was very large for me. However, the learning curve was really good.

Initial deployment is somewhat difficult because we have to get the framework in place. It is always difficult. The first three to four processes are challenging. Once the first three to four processes go into production, you have a framework and something around which you can work. I think this is the same for all tools because the first time we put a process to production on the client side, we might encounter surprises. We have a dev environment from which we move to UAT or pre-production environment, and then to the final production environment. Whatever tool you are using, I believe that when it comes to RPA, you will find some surprises when you go to production, and it takes time. The first three to four processes are a stabilization phase. Once the first three to four processes go live, you know what to expect in the production environment when you deploy it, and it becomes easy.

I do the deployment personally. There are three to four developers in the current project, and each one does their deployment individually. They complete the development and then get on a call with the business team to test the various business scenarios. Once we get approval, we individually move it towards production. There is no one else involved. I myself, in the last year, have done 10 to 12 processes for this manufacturing client and moved everything myself to production.

We have roughly 20 to 30 GB of data every two months. Every two months, we are manually going and cleaning that folder because otherwise our VM space runs out and the machine becomes slower as the VM space gets lower. This is one thing which Automation Anywhere can address: why 20 to 30 GB of data gets created as junk or global cache data every two months. We ended up with 80 GB of data across the four VMs.

The deployment time depends on the complexity of the client environment. At times, their security requirements are more stringent, and many variables are involved, but usually when we are moving from dev to production, it does not take much time. One concern I have is that from dev, we have to take the package and move it to production. Every time, even with a minor change, if I take code from dev, export it and import it into production and later face an issue, I have to make a small change and repeat this cycle again and again. I think there should be some sort of linkage between dev and production. Actually, they have an option called promote bot, but for some reason, this is not working fine on my current client side. Promote bot is where you directly transfer your file from one environment to another environment, but for some reason on this current client side, it is not working fine.

We are their customer, and one thing we have faced multiple times in the last year in 2024 is that it is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. To clarify, it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere.

In the last year, we have raised at least 12 to 15 tickets for various technical issues. Some of them are answered via email, where they provide a solution when I tell them I am facing issues ABC. They will give the solution. However, at times, that is not enough. We need to get in touch with them to show them a demo of what we are facing.

Recently, they have also implemented something where when we send emails to them, they have a chatbot or an automated mailbox that sends back the solution. I would say this is very problematic because the solution coming from this automated mailbox is not the solution we are looking for. If I am facing issue A and B, it sends the solution for issue C and D, not for A and B. This automated system they have implemented in the backend to reply to customer emails could be improved.

For the product overall, I would rate this review an 8.

One of our use cases in our organization is automating our manual data processing tasks that previously required significant human involvement. We use Automation Anywhere  to process data where users had to extract data from multiple Excel files, validate it, and then upload it to our internal system.

Using Automation Anywhere , we significantly reduced the processing time, which improved our data accuracy and freed up employees to focus on higher value tasks.

The best feature we rely on most in our daily operations is the Control Room in the automation process. It involves unattended bots and an error-handling mechanism. The Control Room allows us to monitor bot execution, track failures, and manage workloads centrally, which is critical for our production stability. It is the feature we rely on most in our day-to-day work.

Automation Pilot  measures our ROI rate and effort saving, evaluates our ease of development and maintenance, and identifies our technical and operational challenges. It simplifies high-volume processes and rule-based processes such as data entry, report generation, or Excel to system uploads. It is mainly used for simplifying processes for us.

One area for improvement is the learning curve for advanced automation, especially complex error handling or integration. Debugging  could be more intuitive. Additionally, pricing and licensing could be improved to make it easier for new customers to understand the cost structure.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last two years.

We have not seen much downtime. Sometimes with more traffic, it may show minimal issues during upgrades or bot changes, but these are usually related to bot logic rather than the platform itself. Overall, it is reliable for our production workloads, and we have rarely seen downtime.

Automation Anywhere scales well as we have increased the number of bots and processes many times without major performance issues.

We contacted customer support due to a few queries. They are friendly and knowledgeable, ready to help within a few minutes or within 24 hours. However, they are sometimes limited by different time zones.

A similar solution to Automation Anywhere which I have evaluated before is UI Path. I used it for one to two months, and it is another famous RPA  tool. After evaluating UI Path and Blue Prism , I decided on Automation Anywhere.

The initial deployment is easy because of drag-and-drop functionality without needing much coding knowledge. It is straightforward for employees who are not very technical. The setup has guided instructions and clear documentation which helps make it simple, taking about one to two weeks for a basic pilot setup.

We required three employees to deploy it.

Using automation saved us a lot of time. With Selenium, it required a lot of technical knowledge and was time-consuming. After switching to an RPA  tool, it became much easier with drag-and-drop functionality, saving time. Automation Pilot  helps measure ROI and effort saving.

UI Path is another RPA tool I have used and is known for a friendly UI and enterprise automation. I appreciate the RPA tool in UI Path.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.