I automate data entry by receiving files from one system and making data entries into other applications. Additionally, I perform file transfers by receiving files from one system and uploading them to another application. I also have OFAC verification procedures, which were previously done manually. I enter a local application, and depending on the pending cases, execute all verification processes automatically, sending responses to other applications. Basically, I have extensive data transfer automation. Moreover, I have automation that receives a file from another system and executes a procedure or invokes a web service to upload or create other things.

The product, in general, is more stable. The latest version provides easier vulnerability management. The new version offers a better experience in recognizing objects. The Co-manager tool helps calculate saving costs. Many of the issues I had in version eleven were resolved in version 360. The cloud version of Automation Anywhere 360 eliminates all the vulnerability management, making it much easier to manage. The application replaced about three employees for the OFAC verification processes, thus eliminating the need to hire more people for those tasks.

The new version requires one project to be open at a time, making it slightly more difficult to manage tasks compared to the previous version. They sell every different functionality in too many separate packages, making the procurement process complicated as it requires paying additional licensing for more features.

I have been using the solution for about six years.

The support is good. Sometimes the technical team doesn't know too much about the situation, and they rely on knowledge articles. However, they have improved.

Neutral

This is my first RPA solution. I have other automation solutions in my company, but this was my first RPA solution.

The initial setup for the initial version, version eleven, is not too complex, medium. The latest version is easier because it requires less infrastructure.

One person was involved in the deployment.

The bot replaced about three employees, saving hiring costs.

I think it is expensive. It is not a cheap solution. Though there are other options that possibly can be less expensive, this is not a cheap solution. It's not for everybody.

My supervisor conducted research based on the Gartner reviews and decided to go for Automation Anywhere. This analysis was made several years ago.

The overall rating of Automation Anywhere is eight on a scale of one to ten. Other departments in my company use Control-M and Ansible for automation. If I did not have Automation Anywhere, we might have needed to hire more people for certain processes. I don't have any direct integrations, but I do have several project integrations via file or triggering a bot when an email is received.

I am working as an RPA Developer, and I am expected to create bots that simplify people's jobs, allowing them to focus on more important tasks. I am tasked with creating robotic processes.

Business analysts come to us with their problems and want to find out if we can address them with robotic process automation. My role is to confirm whether we can do it with Automation Anywhere. They handle the metrics calculations in terms of the impact on the business, but I am informed that with Automation Anywhere, we have streamlined processes, eliminating errors and reducing time. Previously, these jobs were performed manually, but with Automation Anywhere, they can concentrate on more significant tasks.

Its integration with Outlook and SharePoint was easy with the help of the Automation Anywhere team. After we got information about the connection strings and other things from them, integration was easy.

I like web automation and SAP application automation. 

It has a good interface. Those who do not have programming experience can easily use Automation Anywhere. It is very easy to learn. Within three months, they can start creating basic automation.

Sometimes, I find that Excel automation is not as expected. Excel automation can be enhanced. For instance, to accomplish tasks faster, I use scripts. However, if I could achieve the same speed without scripting, that would be ideal. 

For web automation, the recorder package can be improved. It is sometimes hard to catch certain elements on the web. 

The Automation Anywhere community is less active than the UiPath community, which is a downside. When I ask questions in the Automation Anywhere community, responses take a longer time. I have checked the UiPath community, where there are more active participants.

I have used this solution for a bit more than four years.

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

It is scalable. It is being used for automation for multiple departments. I am working in the RPA team. My company has more than 100 people, but the RPA team has seven people using Automation Anywhere. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

When I encounter difficulties, I raise a ticket with the Automation Anywhere team. They respond promptly and are willing to help, but some team members seem to lack the necessary skills. As a result, problems that typically should be resolved in one day may take three days.

Neutral

I only have experience with Automation Anywhere.

I have not installed Automation Anywhere.

The deployment of automated tasks is easy. I can do it in two minutes. I have used both on-premises and cloud models. In terms of maintenance, the bots usually require updates when there is an issue or there is an update from Automation Anywhere. It is usually once every three months.

I do not know the price, but I am told that it is cheaper than UiPath.

I would recommend this product to other users because it is user-friendly, and I appreciate its features, such as SAP automation and web automation. 

We have not yet used AI in Automation Anywhere, but there is an upcoming course on integrating AI, which I will attend. 

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

There are many use cases. It is simple to automate tasks or processes related to the active cycle for invoices and similar tasks. It is useful for automating processes in industries like manufacturing and banking. The use cases are correlated with the needs of the customers.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, customers are simply trying to have a more standardized process. For example, there is a better quality of data for manual inputs in various applications. They have more rapid processes, and they can free people from repetitive tasks. These are the most common situations that we solve with this technology.

We have not had any big problems with the technology. We have achieved the results that the customer expected. We are usually able to achieve the expected ROI with the processes of the project.

Automation Co-Pilot helped increase productivity. For employees, it was quite good. I did face some problems with the user interface that we had to build to interact with the user. There were some blocks in this interface that were hard to understand. From a business user's perspective, it is quite easy to use. From a technical perspective, it is a little bit harder to build a bot using the Co-Pilot features.

It helped to free up staff to work on other projects. Every time we automate a task, we are freeing user time. They have more time to focus on more complex tasks. They can achieve better results in terms of compliance of the data that they are inputting into the systems. The data is accurate and reliable, and they can do more in less time. They can easily meet timelines for various processes.

In terms of integration, we could integrate the pretty old type of browser web applications without many problems. We usually use various ERPs, such as SAP, Oracle, or NetSuite. We sometimes integrate by using APIs. We have Google Drive or Microsoft Teams folders, SharePoint, and so on. We integrate pretty much everything with Automation Anywhere. For some technologies, there are some libraries for integration, such as for Salesforce or ServiceNow, and for some other platforms, you have to build it yourself.

It is easy to understand how to use the tool. For a developer, it is very easy to understand the opportunities and how to use and learn these features. It is very business-oriented. It is very easy to understand the capabilities and the features that you can use. You should have a technical overview and a technical understanding, but it is easy to understand. A non-technical person can learn it in a month. However, this person must be involved with a technical team. A person cannot understand the implications of using this technology and its architecture on his own. A business person can learn to develop some features but to move to the next level, a business person would need some help from IT.

The main problem that I have with Automation Anywhere is the support. When I have problems that I cannot solve by myself, it is hard to achieve a good result with support. Language is another issue. From a technological perspective, I have not had many issues with Automation Anywhere, but the support is somewhat lacking compared to other technologies I use.

There are times when I have some problems with the cloud. I sometimes experience errors with the Co-Pilot feature that make me feel the system is not 100% stable.

It is able to provide automation at scale. This is one of the best features of Automation Anywhere, but if you want to scale, you need technical support.

Its usage depends on the customers. We have different types of models, but usually, it is used at an enterprise level.

It is hard to achieve a good result with their support team. The support in Europe seems to be receiving less investment, so I usually cannot have support in my language. For some customers, this can be a problem. Some customers speak Italian rather than English. 

Neutral

We have more customers on the cloud than on-premises. I am personally not involved in the deployment, but the initial setup is straightforward. It is not complex. Upgrading Automation Anywhere is easy.

The number of people required for maintenance depends on the number of automated processes. For 20 automated processes, you might need one person full-time per month. This can vary a lot on the type of process that you have automated.

You have to work at least a year on that technology, but obviously, it depends on the effort you make. If you have one developer or five, it makes a difference.

It is reasonable, but it can always be a little bit cheaper.

Those who want to use Automation Anywhere should have at least one expert on their team. This can significantly speed up the implementation process and the understanding of the problems. It can be a game changer. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have approximately 20 people using this solution.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.