UiPath Platform Reviews

We are automating back office business processes focusing on business finance and tax, specifically. We are just recently starting our implementation, but we have been doing a proof of concept for the last year or so on the community edition. We recently signed the license agreement will be moving forward with implementing it full-time.

I am functioning as a lead developer. 

We just started the implementation. 

I foresee as we automated mundane tasks, it will free up time for the existing workforce that we already have to do more tasks where they can use their brain to make decisions. Then, they can think things through and work on the more complex processes that we currently can't automate.

• Its flexibility
• Anything you can do on a computer with enough effort, you can get the robot to do it.
• It is ease to use and user-friendly.
• The Academy training is well put together.

Once we've taken the data that the robot has done something with, we want to send it over to a human a lot of times. However, they need it formatted in a fashion that makes it a little more readable. It would be nice to have some activities without the developer having to do a lot of effort to make the spreadsheet look prettier. 

Instead, we should receive a list every time transactions are performed, and it would be nice if we wouldn't have to format it every time the robot sent us a spreadsheet.

This one area is lacking, but I attribute this to the constantly evolving platform. However, while there is some stability issues, they are quick to respond to them with updates. They are also very receptive to listening to feedback from the community, which is great.

The robots work where you can scale additional servers. They just need a place to work and process to perform, then you can add-on. 10 bots can easily turn into a 100 bots, then those can turn into a 1000 bots. From a scalability aspect, it's great.

I have not yet used customer or technical support.

I have interacted with the community a whole lot, and if the amount of responses that they give in the community is any indication about how fast they would be with the enterprise technical support, then I can only imagine that it would be top-notch.

UiPath Academy RPA training is well put together. It paces well, not too fast nor too slow. You are constantly given new things to experiment with and things to learn which keep you interested, engaged, and moving forward.

Our Director of Tax heard from word of mouth about RPA and decided with tax being what it is, we have a lot of areas of mundane, monotonous, repetitive tasks, return filings, etc.

It's a complex environment with all its moving pieces. However, it is well-documented, everything is, and as long as you're willing to spend a bit of time reviewing the documentation, it's not so complex that you can't figure it out. It's clearly there documented, and it tells you what to do, you have to take the time to read through it.

My supervisor and I were the implementation team. We were heavily involved with figuring out Orchestrator, how to connect the robots, how to build the process, then put all those pieces together. Eventually, we figured it out.

With the current implementation, we are a skeleton crew. My group consists of four people, who are in the financial systems group within the business, not in IT.  I hope that that will grow as the implementation grows, if for no other reason than the more bodies that we can throw at it within reason, the more benefit we can get out of it. To maximize gains, we are going to need to be more than four people, sooner rather than later. However, I am not the decision-maker, so I can only cross my fingers and hope. Right now, we have a laundry list of things that could be automated. We have to prioritize those, then figure out where the bodies are who can do the automating

One of the processes that we first implemented was simply monitoring an e-mail mailbox and pulling out the invoices from there that needed to be manipulated. The robot is not actually doing anything with the invoices yet, as much as just pulling them out and handing them off to the human. Because previously, there was a group of people who were spending quite a lot of time just looking through that mailbox trying to make sure that they caught everything and items still get missed and overlooked. 

I've been told that quite a large amount of savings has happened in the discounts from paying those invoices on time, because someone didn't just overlook something and forget to send it on. As long as it meets the criteria, the robot always catches it. So, that's great. We've definitely seen a return already, and we're just scratching the surface.

I don't see any end in sight for opportunities to leverage it, increasing our efficiency and revenues. It may not necessarily reduce headcounts, but it should cap growing headcounts. Because, as our markets expand, we traditionally increase headcounts in the back office, but we are trying to move away from that.

I would rate the performance benefits as a nine out of ten. The robots can move faster than you can keep track of what you are doing. It's astronomical the levels of magnitude the increase in efficiency that you can get. We have had humans who were taking, according to best estimates, eight hours to accomplish something that the robot can do in minutes.

They give it away in the community edition for free, so I use it at home.

I've only dabbled with the other products, but the UiPath software is easier to dive into and start working with.

We looked a bit at Automation Anywhere. I tried a trial of it. 

We looked into Blue Prism, but I've not interacted with it firsthand.

I have the most experience with UiPath. 

We did do our due diligence in investigating, if not firsthand, by at least reading about what the other offerings were from Pega to some of the other competitors.

What helped us make the decision to choose UiPath was how available the community edition is and how engaged the actual community is. I don't know for certain that some of the competitors don't have something similar, but I was blown away because they got us hooked on it. They gave it to us for free, then we used it, tried it, and fell in love with it seeing what it could do.

As long as upper management says it's okay, we're going to keep buying more of it and utilizing it until something else comes along that replaces what it can do, which I don't see happening anytime soon.

Try it out for yourself. Just go and download the community edition, install it on a computer, and within a few minutes you can have simple automation up and running using the recording tools, etc. Anyone really can do something just to see what it's capable of and see what RPA is. Try it out for yourself.

It has exceeded my expectations. Early on, I didn't have high of hopes for anything I could do which is rule based and have the robot to do it. Yet, I keep trying to come up with anything can't be done with a little bit of effort or through some other activities, especially with the availability of the community, which can leverage someone else smarter than me, who has figured out how to get it done.

UiPath can do pretty much everything another tool can do plus a whole bunch of extra things.

Most of the times, my clients use UiPath to automate really repetitive tasks. There are some complex scenarios that we have been seeing, but they are just trying to simplify their way of work through RPA.

Our clients see a quick return of the investment from time, performance, and scope on whatever their task is. This adds value for them.

• The fast development and deployment is what I like about the solution. 
• There is a lot of support from the community. 
• The product is really stable.
• It is easy to use.
• It integrates naturally with environments in most scenarios, which is good from an implementation standpoint.

I would like to see more integration with solutions, like SAP, especially because the biggest companies have a lot of SAP implementations going on. If they would have more packages to support native SAP activities or perform connectivity to some of those SAP clients in transaction codes, it would be awesome.

It is stable.

It integrates with Orchestrator and allows for faster deployment on multiple levels (small to large companies), which is good for scalability. Though, it does depends on the client's infrastructure. 

Take a look into joining the community and most of the forums. They have good recommendations of things that have happened in the past.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is straightforward. We use it for new people joining teams and for training. It's user-friendly, and if you don't have an IT background, it gives you good, explanatory ways to learn the solution and how to deploy it.

Clients usually through PoCs to determine if they need a new solution. They will define a use case that will make sense and add value to their operations. Based on that, they will ask for a PoC. We will work with UiPath directly to define that POC, most of the time, and showcase their flexibility and capabilities.

The initial setup is straightforward. There is a lot of guidance in the configuration and actual setup. It feels like installing Windows. It's simple compared to other solutions which tend to be a bit more complex. I think they are doing a good job.

For deployment and maintenance, small companies use two to three people to do the task. Bigger companies will have a huge team supporting the solutions, which might take up to 25 people to support a 1000 person organization. Organizations usually need developers, an architect of infrastructure, testers, quality personnel, etc.

Traditionally, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are the biggest things competing against UiPath. Those are usually what most of the clients lean towards, if they see a cheaper licensing option.

Most of the time, clients choose UiPath because it's easier to deploy and learn within their teams. That's what truly makes sense for them.

The most important criteria for clients when selecting a vendor is usually licensing, but also:

• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Ease of use

These three criteria help a lot when positioning UiPath.

Give it a try, especially for new people joining the RPA community. If you don't try it, you will never learn how to actually do it. That is the good thing about UiPath; it is simple and easy to learn.

It has exceeded my expectations:

• I have used other RPA tools in the past. The user interface is simple and allows people to learn from it faster than other applications. 
• It is stable when you create the bot in the first instance. 
• Its error handling process is easier to create.

Primary use case is to find the highest value add processes and automate them to allow people to work on other things, which are of higher value and more strategic.

I currently have a team of about 15 people on my team, as a central team. We are at 35 licenses, so we have about 35 developers across the company.

We are still in the process of maturing to the point where people think about RPA first. We're still running around looking for the processes, teaching and helping people to get there. Our culture shift hasn't happened yet.

The solutions has meet our expectations, even a bit more than that.

• Rapid development: If we can develop something in four weeks, then see value back, that is big for us.
• The quick delivery is good.
• The solution is easy to use.

Managing the infrastructure UiPath is running on is a lot harder than it seems. In the app development world, there's things called Docker containers that sort of help you containerize what your thing is running on, then it is in code. If we could get that, it would go a long way. Otherwise, I will have trouble scaling, because every time I scale, it's another manual setup of the infrastructure. I could automate that too, but the right solution is to have this working in containers, not a bot running around getting rid of pop-ups, and installing and uninstalling Chrome.

Working at an enterprise is harder, because we have security concerns, infrastructure, and governance. So, how do you create these virtual users? Because now someone has to own the credentials, but that's an anonymous user who has access to the credentials, and they have access to systems. All of this stuff is hard.

The stability is not that good yet for whatever reasons. We have a lot of safety critical things that have to be 99.999% availability, so we're struggling a little bit with those. For the non-critical processes, it does a great job.

As a product, UiPath is very scalable. UiPath has to run on some infrastructure, and that infrastructure and security is not scalable yet. I'm not sure what the best practices are to avoid that. 

How do you leverage a scalable infrastructures? Let's say a Windows Server 2016 version, because I know UiPath supports it. However, in an enterprise environment, there are security concerns when I have anonymous users with internet access and interactive logins to a Windows Server. As a matter of fact, my security team says, "No." 

In these areas, there is a lot of opportunity. Because, in reality, this is what is keeping me from scaling. I have the business cases. My business users want it. I have the development talent to do it. My issue is with the infrastructure. 

Their customer support is very responsive. Sometimes it can be hard to communicate, because we are going back and forth in a forum type of environment. After three back-and-forths, it should just be a phone call. 

We put everyone through the UiPath Academy RPA training courses: The foundation and advanced framework. Some people struggle with the questions being asked which aren't on the videos. 

The advanced framework is a difficult course. People take it and they don't get the concepts yet, so it needs to be thought through again. 

We haven't actualized the value. We save people time, but then they're doing something else, and you have to quantify that into the value, which gets really grey and hard to do. As far as a head count reduction, we haven't done any of that.

The performance benefits are good. Everyone is happy. When the thing is working and it's working great, they love it because we are getting value.

There is a lot of focus on new features going forward, integrating more with AI, and that's great.

Get started using the product yesterday. You're already too late.

We're doing a pilot. It's something that we trying to use to obtain more sales automatically. It's about selling tickets, and we're building the capability to do that more quickly and reduce costs.

We seen have operational cost reductions. We have improved our efficiency and capabilities. So, there are a lot of benefits.

It has met our expectations.

UiPath Orchestrator is a tool which allows to us to orchestrate all the commands, like a manager and their employees. We can do a lot of processes, not just in one department. It has flexibility, where you can do a process then to move to another process when there is nothing to do. With one robot, you can program it to do many processes.

The programming seems easy.

We are still testing stability, but it seems okay.

It provides a lot of scalability, because we can do a lot of things with it.

The customer support is not that good. You have to send a ticket, and there is no one to call and talk to. When you are talking about operations, it has to be live. Otherwise, you lose money. I would change this a little bit. I think there's an opportunity to improve.

I'm using the UiPath Academy right now. I'm trying to understand and learn, and it is good, which I like.

We had a lot of manual tasks inside the company. People were doing things manually, then they would try to do those tasks faster, which was sort of impossible. With a robot, we automate those tasks 24/7.

When you take the training, it seems complicated, but it's not. You do have to prepare in terms of knowledge. 

We are building it right now, but I will probably have three or four developers on my team.

We saw ROI in 15 days.

I would rate its performance benefits as an eight out of 10.

We also considered Blue Prism.

We went with UiPath because they have a lot of experience in the market. People really trust them. There are also a lot of use cases of success.

Check the use cases, like cases of successes that they had with other companies first. It can be useful for them in making a choice.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Product stability
• It can't be complicated.

A lot of our business development teams (end users) use it by going to a vendor's site.

For example, end users download information at the point of sale and export it to an Excel sheet, where what happens next is usually manual labor. Whereas, we can go to a site and download a file, then that file is loaded to our business data warehouse. Therefore, we are taking an element away and leveraging UiPath, so staff can do other stuff. That is how were leveraging the UiPath.

It works without human intervention. Since it has become more popular in our company, we will see how we can leverage UiPath with our supply chain, because it seems like supply chain is one of the top five ways to leverage UiPath.

There is a big community, which is very helpful and end user friendly. 

• We would like to know the prerequisites when installing bots. 
• A bot that could provide feedback would be nice.

The stability is great. The product works. UiPath seems better at this than Automation Anywhere.

Technical support has been good. I am happy with their response times.

We have not used UiPath Academy RPA training. I plan to suggest this as a training solution when I return from the UiPath conference to eliminate people asking me random questions about using UiPath.

I came from Automation Anywhere. The UiPath GUI is better for the end user, since I don't have time to develop a bot. Any user can use it.

While UiPath can be complicated, it is much easier than Automation Anywhere.

We were able to replace what we had with Automation Anywhere with UiPath, meeting our expectations. Then, it got popular within the company, exceeding our expectations. A lot of people are interested in UiPath. A lot of people weren't interested in Automation Anywhere. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not like an SAP product that takes forever to configure something. It was easy to install. 

We haven't upgraded yet because it seems like they just released the next version.

We're a team of eight business analysts. All of us try to create a bot, so we can familiarize ourselves with the process. So, if I create a bot and someone else has to support it, everybody knows at a high level what the bot does. 

We created an orders to cash department bot, which is already saving man-hours and money. Because of it, we don't have to hire an employee.

I would rate the performance benefits as a 10 out of 10.

UiPath keeps growing, so it has met and exceeded our expectations.

Look into the data web scraping. I don't think another tool has that feature and we use it a lot. Data web scraping was probably the bonus of why we went with UiPath.

To increase the efficiency in jobs that people do not like to do.

It takes a very manual, key punch-oriented job and automates it, so the user can do more intelligent work.

It has exceeded my expectations. It took a job which would take a user up to 30 minutes and decreased the time without their interaction to three minutes.

• It is reasonably easy to use.
• The FTE payback benefit.

We would like the RPA app that we developed to fall back to one of our APIs and Visual Studio and have that take off. However, I was talking with one of the guys at the conference, and he says, "It'll do that." 

We don't have a large installation, so I can't really measure this.

We use the online forum to ask questions and review user's questions. It's helpful half the time. We don't have in-house experts. My team has just been learning it for the past three to four months, and they are still hitting a wall in certain areas that they have to dig out of. I am at the UiPath conference looking for any advanced training offerings. 

It was straightforward. It was more building the initial app. I'm a developer on .NET, so it was just getting the experience with UiPath. The biggest challenge was just understanding the small, little 'gotchas' going into certain properties, what was required to make the control work. Overall, we prefer it because of the easy user interface and the open community, where you can get a lot of responses from others.

We have had an app running since July and it has been fine. The company change their websites, so we had to go in and fix the app, because the user changed their site. It wasn't because the app broke or had a bug in it, but the user changed their site, so we had to modify it.

We have two developers inventing and developing.

We're still measuring it, because these were more test apps to get to know the system, so the benefits aren't as large as we can see coming from other development.

It does what we designed it to do. It has worked flawlessly, except when somebody changes the actual website that we are reading.

I would start small. As someone in the conference said, "Don't expect in two weeks you're going to have miracles."

In the beginning, put the time and investment into it and do it right. Once you have one victory, then that's where you start looking to train people in the company on what the benefits are, so you could get ideas flowing in their minds. Stress you are trying to automate the boring, mundane, painful jobs that they wait until the end of the month to do because they don't like doing them. Stress what you are trying to automate, and show that you will automate their whole job.

We use UiPath for automating activities that which from operations, such as policy administration, claims handling, HR activities, and finance to a little bit of underwriting support.

We are still at about a year and half of implementation, so the benefits are already being realized. Because of the size of our organization, it's going to take more time for it to make a real tremendous impact. What I already see is there are financial benefits that we have been yielding. There are also operational benefits in terms of time savings and user satisfaction of not having to do the menial, repetitive tasks.

• It scales fairly easily. 
• The UI and the back-end platform are very easy to use. 
• There is a roadmap for growth in the organization: scalability-wise and additional features going forward.

Ease of use could be improved. The newer features are easy to use and positive additions, but there is room for improvement, specifically of the UI console for the developer. There are also other features that could use improvements.

I would like to see the OCR, machine learning, and cognitive package that is being discussed in the next release.

One to three years.

The customer support is supportive and knowledgeable. I tend to deal more with the account and management directors because of the relationship. They are always willing to help and support me.

The UiPath Academy RPA feedback from my team has been positive. It's real structured. One of my guys did the RPA development course, and it should have been an in-depth development and less high-level development. So, it was supposed to be an advanced training, but it wasn't advanced from his viewpoint. I think he wanted more hands-on experience.

The version that we implemented two years was probably harder to implement than what it is now. Though, I would not necessarily say it's very complex to set up. It's fairly straightforward compared to other solutions.

We're still figuring out how much staff we need for deployment and maintenance, as it has been a much bigger requirement than initially expected. We're not at the stage yet where everything is hands-off. 

At the moment, I have a team of seven people offshore that do maintenance, support, and run operations. This is helping us have a seamless experience for the user. The staff in the those roles are support analysts and maintenance level 1 support.

Make sure you have your infrastructure correctly set up and that you are ready to scale up, because it will grow.

Ease of use has met our expectations. It would only exceed them once we see the new features come in and they all work seamlessly together. Every release gets better, which is what I want.

This is now a cognitive solution. It's leading in the industry, but there's still room for improvement. However, I know they're getting there.

We work in the healthcare industry. We are trying to establish a use case for our company to speed up our processes. Because with FDA regulations, there are a lot of processes to follow. There are a lot of phases of implementation to follow. For example, if you want a drug for cancer, a lot of time is spent, but it takes more time to release to the market because of all the manual labor intensive work which is happening. 

Therefore, I am working with legislators and the FDA to see where we can cut paths. There's a lot of scope for automation. UiPath is one of the best product for this.

UiPath is user-friendly, so when we are working with the customer, if they want something immediately they will jump in. We don't have to give the level of estimation, then how much price will be (quote) at all. They don't really talk about the price or the time. They say, "There is a problem," and they are very excited about solving that problem. This excitement is good, and that's what our CEO has always said, "Immersing yourself is always important."

Everyone feels positive when they want to talk about RPA and what they want to do. When we go and explain how easy and adaptable it is, people are happy. It is not complex, because we are simplifying the way how they use it. 

If you're able to discuss and give the layout and the architecture purposeful meaning along with the training, then people can adapt to it well.

It is easy to implement and use to provide training to people. With a lot of other tools, it is more about scripting. Whereas with this solution, it has a more hands on GUI-based feature.

It is easy to use and quick to install.

With every product that we have, there are still improvements needed in some areas. There are certain areas that we need to see improvements: performance, efficiency, and complex environment. We need to work with the product manager on these, and say, "Now that everything has met the industry standards, there's a way to go."

We need to be able to span across a bigger complex network. Right now, the decision-making is based on a five step rule. It would like to see this increased, so we can take on bigger productions and work more efficiently. Also, the performance has to be improved in some areas.

For the last three years, they have been very aggressive. They have been progressing nicely. So far, the stability has been good, because of the continuous product implementation. There has been a focus on the product and everything working. 

The people who started the company are still with the company, and this is a good sign that there is stability. This can be seen in the financial markets. 

Scalability is one of the nice features, because they're able to come up with the UiPath Orchestrator. They have improved this with the 20.18.3 version, which has a lot of good scalability features compared to the previous one. Right now, it is scalable, and there are always new use cases coming out. The more use cases that we pump into the product development team, the more scalability that we will see and more features will be added on, because they can only think of what they have on hand.

Being a partner, I have my own team that I work with.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is good, but we have a good geek squad. Our people have really gone to the community research and downloaded it, so most of my team is self-learning. However, the support people are always available, if needed, when we need some help.

The initial setup is pretty easy, because now my team has been implementing it a lot. For more than a year, we have been a partner. We have been doing a lot of PoCs.

Overall, the steps, documentation, and information are pretty straightforward when it comes to the product, so there is no ambiguity.

The staff that we need for deployment and maintenance depends on the complexity of the process. Typically, we start with a couple of people for the PoC. Depending on how many parallel approaches we have to do, we may increase to four to five people. With that number, we are able to create a good sizable environment and solution. These staff members would be responsible for the architecture, one would be the lead developer, and another would be the functional expert to understand the processes, then there could be a couple of people helping in the development environment and doing all the testing to make sure whatever they have implemented follows the process.

We have use customer support for implementation of the projects because the team is really good.

Some of the return on investments are quick. Because some of the processes that we have implemented, a person who does manual labor over two weeks will see a reduction in hours. Thus, that person is already focusing on some other intellectual work. 

Our goal is not remove all the people, but repurpose their work time in better ways, therefore these people can work better and their throughput is good. So, customers are able understand ROI very quickly.

Its performance benefits are the reduced time, making it is very efficient. If someone is taking two weeks, and now it is takes them ten hours, you already have a performance benefit. 

In terms of product performance, there are still things they need to work on.

I would rate the performance benefits at an eight (out of ten).

If you want to do a demo trial, it is a 30 days free. 

However, the community edition is completely free. Then, people say, "There is nothing to lose, let me try it."

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are competitors. They have been in the industry a little longer than UiPath, which is just coming up. One good thing about UiPath is that it is really capturing the market.

1. The company culture: We are an extended family, not just a partner. Their entire team is available to us.
2. As a product, it is really coming up in the market with a different architecture, most which is .NET and C#. For a lot of my developers, it is easy condition for my team to learn more quickly. We have not really used the Academy. My team was able to learn on their own. 
3. The product has more in terms of supportability, predictability, ease of use, and overall culture of organization.
   

We have not really seen anyone moving from Automation Anywhere to displays or some other product.

Our customers want to see:

• Whether it is a viable product.
• Does it make sense for their business. 
• If it does makes sense and are there other companies, why should they go with UiPath?
• What are the benefits compared to other products? 
• What is the benefits that it is giving to the customer?

If I can layer all of those decisions, then I have walked them down the path of the realization of ROI and why they should be doing UiPath. So, it is an easy sell.