UiPath Platform Reviews

We're a food ingredient distribution company that receives documents on ingredients' nutrition, allergens, microbial testing, etc.  We primarily use UiPath to process these documents. It was our proof of concept for using the system initially, and we'll expand it to process invoices and other related use cases.

We operate using an enterprise operating system. It's not a technological thing. It's how you determine project priorities. Soon, we'll set up process mining. Then, the IT team and technology group will decide what we do. Right now, the business units effectively vote on the next quarter's priorities. 

We're a high-tenure organization. The average tenure is 15 years, so we want to avoid growing our headcount. We're continuously growing by 10 to 15 percent annually, so we've had to add enough staff to process the documents. Our primary concern was to stop the increase in staff. Even after we added staff, we were falling behind because they were much slower at processing those documents. 

We get documents from our suppliers and, as a distributor, send them to our customers. If the supplier hasn't sent them, we need to hound them. We were falling behind on our backlog of 250,000 documents. UiPath enabled us to avoid adding more employees. Automation was the way to go. We haven't added any more headcount, and the backlog is going down, but it isn't as much as we had hoped.

The automation has allowed us to provide customers with better-quality documents faster. It has also given employees more time to locate the documents we don't have, freeing them from mundane tasks. It's freed them from the work of typing data on a form into an ERP system. 

We are talking about using it for our environmental and social governance initiatives. We're considering bringing together some of those pieces through automation to track our energy usage or what we've spent on some of the other bits and pieces and have a better ESG profile.

I find the intelligent document processing features extremely interesting. They're fun and represent an actual practical use of AI. There are so many impractical ways to use AI, but this offers a tangible ROI, and you can see its benefits directly. 

There are small issues, such as the Action Center not auto-refreshing. The user has to keep clicking "refresh." It's minor, but if you're waiting for something in your queue, you don't want to sit there and keep clicking. Logging could be improved, and there are a few connectors where I would like to see enhancements, but nothing major.

We started using UiPath in January of this year, so we've used it for less than a year.

The solution is solid, and I've had no issues with stability. The one issue encountered was due to a version change, where the changes in that version were unexpected.

The solution is great for scalability, and we can always add more bots as needed. We haven’t found it limiting at all.

Our experience with UiPath support has been mixed. The responses take a little long, which isn't bad when we only need a question answered. However, our system went down twice, and it took four to eight hours to get our first response from support. If I submit a ticket at 2 pm, I might not get a response until 10 pm. That's still relatively soon, but I might not be paying attention that late at night or be available to respond. 

Positive

We did not use a different solution for document processing before this.

The initial setup was pretty easy and straightforward. It didn’t take much time to get UiPath running.

We implemented the solution in-house ourselves. We do have a partner, Empower dot AI, which we plan to work with on future projects.

We are probably just starting to see a positive dollar ROI versus what we spent implementing UiPath. We only started this in January, and it was fully implemented by late June or early July. Hence, we are still in the infancy phase of experiencing ROI.

UiPath's pricing is reasonable. The model of charging per AI unit makes sense, and the licensing for Action Center and other parts is good. The cost does not seem excessive.

We are considering implementing AI as we are a healthcare staffing company in the education sector. Our use case focuses on processing a large number of emails and resumes. We aim to mine resumes to determine which are best for rapid and successful placements. On the communication side, we wish to perform sentiment analysis to assess how well our salespeople respond to clients.

We want to mine, structure, and analyze data using data science methods. We also hope to use generative AI and large language models to perform some of the data analysis, saving us lots of time. My company tripled in size in the last three years, so we have a lot more people, but the backend operations haven't grown at the same pace as the number of salespeople. 

Automation helps us with operational and analytical work because we lack enough talent for that. By using AI, we can do the same amount of work without hiring more people, so we save money and improve productivity. Generative AI is part of our discussion. We had to decide whether to develop our own model or use existing software like UiPath to get things done faster and easier.

We have about 15,000 consultants working for us during the school year, and to fill those positions, we may need to interview five times that many. A lot of them might drop out by the time school starts. Using UiPath and AI, we can speed up processing and onboarding because that might be why people quit. They might leave for another job if we don't onboard them fast enough. We can save more candidates and prevent revenue loss from a potential placement by making the processing time faster.

After implementing UiPath, we automated many manual tasks. We save a lot of time, and those people who used to do manual work are doing more knowledge work. A lot of them now see what bots can do, so they're more open to the idea of developing bots. That set the stage for them to trust AI-powered bots in the future. 

The most valuable featire is the whole automation suite that helps develop automation processes. In the future, we might further explore Communications Mining and Process Mining. 

There's a push for cloud-based operations, but I prefer to develop things on the desktop. I'd appreciate the ability to develop things on the desktop and roll them out concurrently on the cloud. 

My company has used UiPath for about two years, but I've used it for about a year.

UiPath is very stable.

UiPath has kept up with our growth. However, there's a limitation with licensing.

I previously used Blue Prism in a different company. However, for the current company, they had no prior automation solution.

Our IT support company, Coretelligence's parent company, helped with the initial implementation. There were renewal delays prompting a desire to work directly with UiPath.

From a cost-saving perspective, we are seeing a lot of returns, including internal staffing cost savings and HR bot efficiencies.

UiPath's licensing could be cheaper and more dynamic. The licensing can sometimes feel high, especially for smaller companies, but generally, the pricing is reasonable when considering the time saved and corresponding costs.

I wasn't the decision maker, but my CFO considered industry leaders and attended the Forward Conference. He was impressed and chose UiPath. One thing that he liked was that it was easy to learn and use. 

I rate UiPath eight out of 10. I enjoy working with it, and it seems to have everything we need. They're adding new features at a reasonable rate while not deprecating old stuff too fast. It's a smooth transition from classic to modern activities.

We are an animal health company. We work to provide various products for companion animals, such as swine and equine. We are a global company.

The business objective that we are trying to achieve with its AI-powered automation is to reduce the effort for our business users. There are certainly a lot of tasks that take them away from some more high-value opportunities within their function and improve the overall customer experience. We would like to be able to look at the data differently and to be able to ultimately improve our customers. That is our ultimate goal.

The great thing about our function within the company is that we explore automation throughout the company and all different business functions. A lot of our use cases are for replicating some of the mundane manual tasks that users do. A lot of them are data reconciliations involving extracting and comparing data from different sources. We are also exploring opportunities to be able to understand and process data better by using some of the UiPath task mining capabilities. That is what we have at the forefront right now.

It has fundamentally changed what our organization is able to achieve. There is such a global interest in automation. Being able to be at the center of that for our company and allow them not only the opportunity to automate their tasks but also be a centralized location for answering questions and helping people learn has been great.

We have very limited use cases with which we have explored some of the AI-specific features. We have done some proof of concepts with some smaller use cases, and we certainly could see the value on that small scale. We are looking forward to much larger opportunities going forward.

Even in the proof of concept, it cuts down on our time in exploring some of the processes. There is ultimately value for our team internally while doing some of the investigative pieces on some of these processes. There is also the added benefit for the users. We are able to help them faster. It has certainly been very helpful. It is hard to quantify time savings because we are just getting started with some of the tools. For the proof of concept, it saved us about a week. It was a small use case involving looking into the process and deep diving into it. Being able to allow the mining tools to do some of that analysis saved us a lot of time. It did cut down at least a week's worth of research for sure. 

This proof of concept was a task-mining proof of concept. The valuable piece that we had from task mining was being able to look under the hood in some processes. In this particular proof of concept, it was a process that the team had done for years and years and years but never took a deep dive into what all the handoffs were. Being able to record and then get that insight and that dashboard view at the end showed us a lot. It showed us where the time was spent in each part of the process and allowed our business users to focus on what within that process could be improved, fixed, or standardized. It was certainly very helpful because it was a passive way of looking at the process. Being able to see the dashboard was certainly helpful for us to communicate or to improve.

In my particular job function, Automation Hub has been invaluable. We have set up an Automation Hub specific to what we need within our team to be able to solicit automation ideas from our business users. It helps us to be able to review those ideas, meet with our functions and ask them more questions, and build our value case as well, so Automation Hub has been huge for us. We are working on setting up the insights tool as well. 

We see a lot of opportunity there for recognizing the actual value once our use cases are live in production. We have not yet used UiPath's AI Center, but we are certainly looking to do that in the future once we are more established with the tool.

We are new to the tool. Currently, we do not have any cons. There is still a lot left for us to explore. We have heard of a lot of features at the conference today, and we will certainly build upon that. As we are exploring, some of the improvements could be in the pipeline within Automation Hub and insights, but so far, we have had a great experience with UiPath. 

My company is new to UiPath. We procured the software in quarter one of this year, and we are currently working on getting acclimated to the tool. We are doing some data migrations and exploring the ins and outs of the software.

So far, so good. In terms of stability, there are no issues or concerns.

It is absolutely scalable. We have no issues or concerns. There are a lot of opportunities for sure.

Their support has been tremendous. Anytime we have a question or anytime we want to learn something more about the tool, there is no shortage of answers. They have been very helpful. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Our company does utilize another RPA solution. Our reason for getting UiPath was the fact that it is an automation platform, so having that full end-to-end view of the use case from ingestion to implementation to gathering actual insights and having it all in one centralized location was a big selling point for us. Its task mining, plug-ins, and SAP integration capabilities made it very interesting for us.

I have a little bit of experience with Power Automate. UiPath has orchestration, whereas Power Automate does not. It is another way through which we can bring value to our business areas with our automations. Having everything centralized in one place is a very big feature there.

I worked very heavily in setting up our Automation Hub, designing our questionnaire forms, setting up our users there, and rolling that out to our company. It was very straightforward. Our UiPath account managers have been super helpful and supportive in that. Whenever we have a question, everyone is very responsive and very easy to talk to. They have been very helpful, whether that be in person or in a meeting, or pointing us towards documentation to help us guide us through. It has been great.

In terms of implementation strategy, we logically started in the way so that we understand a process. We started with setting up our Automation Hub within our entire organization and making sure we established governance and the right security. We made sure that our asset was set up correctly within our organization. In terms of the software, we got our Automation Hub set up and we got our environments set up from a maintenance standpoint, and now, we are working on getting our insights set up for us.

We have a partnership within our organization for our team. In collaboration with them, we worked on setting up UiPath. We have partnered with Persistent, and our experience with them has been great.

We are still a little bit early with our journey, but it is certainly saving time and effort for the small number of use cases that we do have on the platform.

I do not know the specifics within my role, but from what I do know, everything has been very fair. Especially with the licensing that we have for our team, we have been able to accommodate everybody on our team with the roles and access that they require. So far, so good.

We did evaluate other solutions, but I do not know the specifics within my role. I do know that UiPath was one of the leading ones out there and the capabilities that we have seen were what we were looking for.

To those evaluating the solution, I would advise appreciating the fact that it is a platform. You can track the automation idea from intake through implementation, and then you can gather the insights once it is live or in production. Being able to have everything all centralized in one place is a great way to keep your team organized and truly measure the value of your automations.

I would rate UiPath a ten out of ten. I am enjoying the tool. At the UiPath Conference, I got to know about a lot of opportunities to look forward to. I enjoyed it.

We use UiPath in various internal departments to automate our HR, financial, and IT operations, including access management and ISO compliance to control traffic.

We have UiPath deployed both on-premises and in the cloud.

Building automation with UiPath is easy. The solution is user-friendly, and we do not require technical knowledge or skills to use it. With a little training, we can start building automation with UiPath. Customer support is helpful if we get stuck at any step, and the dashboard is user-friendly and centralizes control in one place.

We use UiPath for multiple end-to-end processes.

The UiPath User Community is a good place to learn and get answers to questions we have related to UiPath.

The UiPath User Community edition is flexible and allows us to practice and learn for free before taking what we have learned to our enterprise edition of UiPath.

UiPath has improved our operational process efficiency, allowing us to schedule processes to run 24/7 and freeing our employees from repetitive tasks so they can focus on other work.

UiPath Academy courses are useful for our employees. We also have access to the enterprise learning portal, where materials are available.

UiPath has helped reduce human error. When all the prerequisites are met and the process is fully automated there is a zero percent chance for human error. For the processes that are not fully automated, UiPath was able to reduce human error by 60 to 80 percent.

Before UiPath we had one employee tied to one business process and after implementing UiPath we have one employee tied to multiple domains. Our staff now has time to work on other tasks.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is the ability to consume APIs directly from any application.

UiPath is expensive, and its cost could be reduced to make it more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses that could benefit from it. The orchestrator and licensing cost should be flexible instead of hard-coded licensing.

UiPath is limited to one application at a time and cannot process two applications simultaneously. This functionality could be improved to support dual browsing, making it more efficient.

I have been using UiPath for almost four years.

We have not experienced any crashes of UiPath. We have experienced some slowdowns three times this year, but this could be due to our internal network rather than UiPath.

The scalability is good. We can adjust our workflows according to the conditions with no issues.

Technical support is extremely helpful. We contact support whenever we need to upgrade our volumes, and by following their guidelines and prerequisites, we can easily complete the upgrade ourselves. Once the support team responds to our call they are quick to resolve our issue.

Positive

Before UiPath, we performed manual integrations, but the types of processes we could automate were limited. We faced challenges automating any process where humans needed to make decisions or where minor tweaking was required between the target and source applications. UiPath has removed these restrictions.

UiPath is easy to install, and its representatives are flexible in supporting our installation. Upgrading our libraries and maintaining UiPath security protocols is also easy, which makes the overall installation process straightforward.

Two people are enough for the deployment.

We implemented UiPath in-house.

UiPath is more expensive than other solutions on the market, such as Microsoft Power Automate.

The Flex license is around $11,000. It should cost at least half that price compared to other solutions. We must purchase an orchestrator for each platform, which is mandatory and adds to the cost. UiPath should consider this and offer a more economical license.

I give UiPath eight out of ten. The cost brings down the overall rating.

Maintenance is required when running UiPath on-premises for the server, OS, and DB. On a bi-weekly and quarterly basis. We also have to implement tools for the firewall.

I recommend UiPath for large-scale and multinational organizations because they can afford the licensing costs. Organizations should explore UiPath before embarking on a transformation journey, as transformation requires significantly more cost than automating existing legacy applications. UiPath is flexible and can integrate with all applications.

We use UiPath to make processes. In addition to UiPath Studio, the platform that develops processes, UiPath includes other applications like Orchestrator, AI Center, Test Suite, Action Center, etc. 

I had the opportunity to work with UiPath Studio to develop and deliver processes to clients and scheduled them in production using the Orchestrator. I had the chance to automate many platforms in Excel, emails, et cetera. I developed around 20 processes.

I work with many medium-sized and large enterprises and a few small ones. Typically, the clients send us their PCs, and we work on their infrastructure. My clients usually have many departments, and all of them use UiPath. I use Orchestrator in the cloud, but clients, like banks, prefer the on-prem version because of security constraints. For me, there is no significant difference between the Orchestrator in the cloud and on-prem. We can schedule and maintain robots. They have essential common functionalities.

I work with many clients who recognize the impact and return on investment from using UiPath to develop automated processes. We always use the UiPath Academy courses. You can get a certification, and when we have questions that can't be answered on the forum or YouTube, we return to the courses. The courses are a way for the developers to understand the nuances of the product or do some workshops. The Academy combines theory and practice for each application, and in the end, we get a certificate. 

The AI Center can optimize many hours and lines of code. You can train your data on the Orchestrator in place with patent code, which takes more time. I compared the custom AI model and UiPath's presets, and we saved many hours. For example, my client had a difficult process that took lots of time to develop with Python and integrate into UiPath Studio. At first, they decided not to create this process with UiPath, but ultimately, they could develop it using Document Understanding with OCR and AI Center.

UiPath cuts down on human error and has included many updates in the latest release to reduce errors. Generally, our robots are rules-based so that we can see an important reduction in human errors. Automation generally speeds up tasks by about 50% because a person can control the robots in place to do all the jobs that robots do.

The amount of employee time saved depends on the bot. For example, if the robot is scheduled daily, and the task takes three hours, it frees up three hours. It depends on the complexity of the job and the time an employee spends on it. 

Enterprise clients can potentially save millions of dollars or euros per month. It depends on the client and the complexity of the process. We have a center of excellence that develops around 100 processes in large organizations. Smaller enterprises save a little bit less. In terms of cost savings, it's about 60 percent.

UiPath has a large user community that shares information. We can help each other find solutions, and the community publishes custom open-source libraries to help other UiPath developers. Members of the community also organize many events. Throughout the year, people from UiPath present new products and updates to the community, and community members help educate us about the latest features and how to use them in our existing robots.

I like the structure of the selectors. They're robust. With other software like Automation Anywhere, we always have problems with recorders, plugins, et cetera. UiPath is more powerful and efficient. UiPath Studio has features like the Excel package, selectors, and recorders. 

There are also many types of recording features. UiPath Studio's most interesting feature is the REFramework. UiPath's frameworks help developers handle exceptions efficiently.

Another critical feature of UiPath is end-to-end automation, starting with the design part of the process with many applications like Automation Hub, Task Capture, and Task Mining. We can use Task Capture in the community version, and they help with the design and conception of products at the start of the project. 

Then, we can use UiPath Studio, UiPath StudioX, or UiPath Web to develop the process. Afterward, we can use Orchestrator to schedule and maintain our developed processes. Finally, we have other products that can help us integrate business end users, such as UiPath Insights or UiPath Apps. With UiPath, we can assist automation in many industries or areas of applications.

I used the Document Understanding feature and developed a custom model to use in the community version. I had the opportunity to test the AI Center. The AI Center can make our robotic process classic RPA. 

AI Center allows us to evaluate and add intelligence to our classic RPA developers. We can add our custom classification model with drag-and-drop functionality in UiPath Studio. I like the integration between AI Center and UiPath Studio. Many of our clients are mature in RPA and want to use the AI Center or integrate artificial intelligence into their IT code.

The reporting part of Orchestrator could be improved. For example, UiPath could automatically email us if there are errors. Adding this feature would help us.

I have used UiPath for three years.

UiPath is stable. 

UiPath is scalable.

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. They're available when you need them, and you can schedule meetings with them, too.

Positive

I also use Automation Anywhere for other clients, but I prefer UiPath because of the robust selectors and AI elements. UiPath can handle exceptions better, whereas Automation Anywhere lacks REFrameworks, which helps us handle exceptions. It's more difficult. 

UiPath has end-to-end automation, with a suite of other products that help us digitize internal and enterprise processes. UiPath has other advantages, like the community and the forum. 

Deploying UiPath is easy. It takes about 20 minutes or less to get UiPath running. You find the AI and download the latest version, then you start. The newest version is connected directly with the Orchestrator. 

One person can usually install it by themselves, but it depends on the number of computers. If you install it on one computer, that takes 30 minutes, but if we have more, you might need more people and more time. After deployment, UiPath requires some maintenance. The number of people necessary varies. For example, in some sectors, we have a team for maintenance and one for development, but developers might maintain their own processes in some instances.  

I don't have hard numbers on hand, but our clients generally see a 50-60% ROI. 

The UiPath license is a little expensive, but we get a lot of good features for the price. 

I rate UiPath eight out of 10. UiPath is the leader. It's the best automation software I've used. UiPath has rich documentation and a large user community. Developers can always find help in the forum. UiPath is a robust software solution that yields a high return on investment.

I recommend first trying UiPath Studio and UiPath products in general to experience all the features. Sometimes, we don't realize all the available features to help us solve our problems.

We use it for admissions policy and also for other financial items such as 1099 reporting from the IRS and things of that nature. There are some manual refreshes of systems and Excel documents that we have automated.

It is currently deployed on-prem, but we are looking at the cloud option. We are using version 2019, which is probably one of the oldest ones. It's pretty old. We're looking from a perspective of whether we upgrade it before we move to the cloud or whether we move to the cloud and upgrade.

We have seen quite a bit of benefit. We used to hire temp staff labor in order to do our admission policy, and now, we don't have to hire them. That would be five part-time people that would come in seasonally. For three or four months, we would have five people just cranking away the admission work. We don't need that anymore because of automation.

There have been time and financial savings. On the other side of the house, some of them are attended bots. We've saved the organization about 140,000 clicks. People don't have to click 140,000 times anymore. As a small estimate, we saved the organization about 250 hours last year. If everything goes to plan, this year, we're looking to save about 450 hours from the financial side of the house. We're only scratching the surface of it, and there is always room to grow.

We're still working through it. We recently stood up our system developer space. We have about 16 processes. We're still new at it and still in the beginning phases. We're really looking forward to pushing that envelope. Currently, we have a hybrid of attended and unattended automations. It's about an even split.

The GUI is valuable, and it's extremely stable. I've had six or seven Studios open at the same time working on different things and nothing has crashed on it. It's very stable software.

I love the community. The community is awesome. That has been very helpful. It provides value in terms of just being able to bounce ideas and understand. Sometimes, I try to do one thing, and I just want to know how to do one thing, but that's where the community can help broaden and look at it from a different perspective.

They say that everybody can do it, but not everybody can do it. You need to have some form of technological understanding about it, and just because we can automate something doesn't mean we should automate something. That's where I think there's a marketing thing. I understand where they're going with it, but it's not necessarily how real life is in my perspective.

I am not looking for any additional features. I haven't even used all the features. I'm still learning the platform as it stands and figuring out what's still available. 

I have been using it since 2019.

From a system perspective, it's stable on my end. It just works. That's the best part about it. It just works.

Scalability gets a little bit sticky. That could be just because of where we sit in the organization, I don't manage that relationship of licenses. I only get so many licenses and I'm like, "Well, can I get more?" It's definitely a limiting factor, but I don't know if it's us limiting it from a cost perspective. 

I haven't had to use their support. I go to the UiPath community for most of my questions. 

We used Microsoft Power Automate. It was okay. I totally prefer UiPath.

I was involved in its initial setup. UiPath was not complex, but we, as an organization, made it complex. 

We used a partner AKOA that got bought out by Roboyo not too long ago. So, we did use a partner to implement it. In terms of whether it was smooth or not, it was okay. Our school made it hard.

Our experience with them was good and helpful. It was a good way to go through it. Now that we know more, I would've changed the engagement slightly to get a little bit more consulting in the sense of the COE, governance, and other similar things around it. That's because for the most part, getting the system up and running was relatively simple, but now, with the whole other pieces of it, we're starting to feel some of that effect. It's now about how do we look at it from a different angle.

We definitely have a return on investment in terms of hours and soft cost perspective. We are saving 250 hours and don't have to hire five temps. I can't give the metrics for ROI, but from a time savings perspective, ROI is definitely huge.

We did evaluate other options. We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. It was about a year-long evaluation period between all of them, and UiPath was clearly the winner. It was clearly out there as the leader in that space, and that's why we chose them. 

From our perspective, the GUI was really helpful and very different from the others. Automation Anywhere touted more of just invoicing, but we didn't want it for invoicing. We wanted it for multiple things. UiPath really showed the breadth of what you can expand across.

To someone evaluating UiPath, I would definitely advise finding a partner. Find a partner with whom you can partner and who understands the use cases of what you're trying to do and achieve from an organizational perspective. Without that, you're not going to get an ROI. 

I would also advise managing expectations. It's fairly easy to use, but it still requires technical abilities. Don't think that it's something that you can just plug and play and do whatever you want. It's not going to work that way. It's more about the person and the change in mindset. If a person is open to an automation mindset, RPA is a really cool function, and UiPath solves that particular mindset. Without it, it's an uphill battle. Even from our perspective, from an education side of the house, getting our educators to be okay with automation is tricky.

We haven't yet used UiPath's AI functionality. We are definitely looking into it to see how we can start taking advantage of the AI pieces of it and advance that side of the house. Currently, we are trying to change the automation mindset. I'm a big RPA evangelist in our organization, and I am trying to promote things like automation. People are on board with the thought of it but not necessarily on board with the action of it. So, we really have to understand their process when we get into their process, and some people are apprehensive to share that information. It's the other parts of the piece that we have to deal with.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. It was useful to know the use of the product, the use of the GUI, understand how things move and change, where the checkmark boxes you need to check are, and all other uses. Now with the new versioning, it looks like a more curated function. It's a lot nicer. Previously, UiPath Academy was just a bunch of courses, and you didn't know where to start. The curation for developers or users is going to help people navigate through the UiPath Academy.

Overall, I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

We mostly use it for unattended bots. We are a construction company. Our RPA team does more of the complex processes for users. We take high-end complex items, that are redundant, off of the users' hands, then we host it on our servers.

We have a bunch of unattended processes, about 284 processes.

RPA isn't necessarily taking away tasks from employees, but rather moving them from processing-type employees to analysts. For example, if we had billers doing a very redundant task, then we moved that to RPA. Then, the billers do more customer face-to-face work and analysis, e.g., solutions through Salesforce. So, we have those employees who were previously billers move up to better positions where they can do more analysis and human interaction.

The solution has reduced human error. We don't need to go back and fix stuff. Customer representation is also huge. Quality of work is one of our mission statements. Having that repetitive test always being 100% every single day, month, and quarter, and whenever we send specific invoices from our server support, has been really helpful. It increases that quality formation.

There are a lot of job positions that we never really thought that would get created. Freeing up those experienced employees from sitting down and processing a lot of stuff throughout the whole day and moving them up to customers, we started discovering new talents and skills, especially with the younger employees since you are basically freeing up their time to discover new skills that they weren't even aware of. You are investing in them, showing customers that you have a new generation of fine employees who can do a bunch of new skills out-of-the-box.

The orchestration is the most valuable feature, e.g., how stuff can be organized. This is in addition to the fact that we try to move stuff to an unattended base where there is no user interaction. We are moving more to 100% automation rather than putting a human in the loop.

The UiPath Academy is mostly used only by technology associates and power users in each department who show interest in RPA. The academy has improved on the onboarding system that we have for RPA. So, if we see potential with someone, whether it is interns, power users, or even IT professionals around our department, then the UiPath Academy is definitely a good way to go. It kind of eases up the onboarding when determining who is outstanding or could potentially join our RPA teams.

The biggest value of the UiPath Academy is the ease of use. A lot of different platforms can be too complex. The user-friendly platform definitely helps with the ease of its steps. 

While it is the best tool ever, we decided that the user interaction might not actually be the greatest thing ever. 

I have been using the solution for three years.

I am very happy with the stability of it. 

I wish that there might be a better, easier method of updating our platform, especially for on-prem. I believe most of their customers are cloud-based. So, they don't have to worry about updating their Studio versions or Orchestrator. Being on-prem, it can be difficult because we must reach out to have that version. We can't just plan on our own. We are always at least a six-month step back versus the current version.

We have been scaling it as much as we can, especially with how we are trying to scale how big our team is as well as trying to control that specific workspace and workforce that we have.

There are currently five developers using it.

There were a couple of times with the on-premises version that there were complications, since it is not on UiPath's cloud. We have had a lot of complications where we are dead in water. There were a couple of conditions where we weren't able to get someone up to speed on whatever. The support is not as quick to respond as we had hoped. 

We did talk to our account executives about this. It is definitely a work in progress. I know that they have recommended that we move to the cloud, but it is not attractive enough for us to see if it is actually worth moving to the cloud.

We have been with UiPath from the start. We used to have a lot of in-house C# libraries that we curated. RPA was like overpowered macros similar to what we already had. That is why we knew how to deal with it. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it through the on-premises by connecting our SQL database, etc. 

The deployment took around three hours.

The initial setup was with their tech support, and that was definitely great. After that, if we had any hiccups, that was where the complications happened.

The main focus was improving efficiency. Once you focus more on redundant paths, having a bot doing it over and over again, that eliminates human error every now and then. There is definitely a huge ROI in that. Our main focus was low-hanging fruit. By low hanging fruit, I mean the redundant processes that users are just annoyed by when they go in every day and have to do it. There has definitely been a huge ROI because we are trying to free up a lot of the project managers for construction to do more focused stuff there rather than job cost details.

We have probably saved the time of 10 full-time employees. For daily tasks, we are saving an average of four hours per employee.

It is one of those things where you pay for convenience. Pricing-wise, UiPath is definitely way more expensive than other solutions that we have seen, especially since we also have Microsoft Power Automate, which is one of the latest tools. UiPath is on the higher end, but it is one of those decisions, "Is it worth the investment? How much are you getting as an ROI?" That is usually how the conversation goes.

Back then, the main competitor was Automation Anywhere, who wasn't necessarily as user-friendly. The main idea was that UiPath was more user-friendly with more forums. It seems like there was a community for it. Whereas, Automation Anywhere was a bit more complex. 

We are using a bunch of other tools to also see the differences. Everything runs so quickly that technology always needs to be up to speed. Companies, like UiPath, are always running so fast to compete in this area. We are also trying to see who is actually the best. UiPath has definitely shown us that, but it also comes with its price.

They are always trying to look for, as much as possible, in-house creation of back-end processes. This means less clicking and tapping on the keyboard for the robot, which is always better. UiPath definitely blends all that together, which is great. It is literally bridging all our platforms together, which is what I love about it.

With UiPath and RPA, the sky's the limit. There is potential for a bunch of things that you can do. When we started, as a construction company, we were thinking that RPA might not be as useful as we might think and make a bigger difference than our in-house solutions. When RPA came out, we thought it was mostly for companies like EY and PWC, e.g., more for financial auditing since there is so much data. However, we definitely benefit from it as a construction company. There is so much potential, whether it is low-hanging fruit or high complexity. It is definitely a win-win for any company, whatever industry you are working in.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of 10.

Some of our use cases for UiPath range all the way from development to operational support through to business enablement. Our biggest focus internally is to enable a business to do what they do best. We generally provide solutions through the use of UiPath to cater for streams, e.g., Procure-to-Pay, Hire to Retire, and quote-to-cash.

We are using it to build solutions that can heal themselves. So, we make sure that our operational team is aware as soon as something fails with the processes that we have built. If one of the use cases or failures has already been listed, we note the fix and try to implement that. If that doesn't work, then we hand it off to a human to look at the task. 

In terms of some of the use cases that we have in the business, we do quite a lot of ERP automation. So, we work with SAP quite a lot. We also have a lot of back-end data that we need to bring in and process as well. So, we use our SQL databases to perform tasks, e.g., allocating payments to bank accounts in our ERP system.

Because our development team is rather small, we try to create as many reusable components and solutions on the UiPath platform to make our day-to-day jobs a lot easier.

What has helped us the most from UiPath is that they haven't just provided us with a toolset or range of products, but actually provided us with a framework and hyperautomation lifecycle that we could use as a guideline throughout our own journey in automation.

UiPath has definitely assisted us in speeding up our digital transformation journey. We have been able to create a whole bunch of different components that we reuse throughout our solutions. This means that when we have great, new ideas that we want to implement into our solutions, we have now found ways to do it in such a way that we spend less time trying to implement the fixes or cool new enhancements and more time actually realizing the value. In doing so, we have also seen a reduction in cost and an increase in FTE savings.

From a development point of view, one of the most important, useful features in the deck is definitely some of the offerings that UiPath has in terms of UiPath Studio. Having the components for the Object Repository and Data Service available make your solution reusable and decrease your development time so you can go to market more quickly for products that you are offering clients. That has been really useful in our landscape. 

UiPath has gone a very long way to make sure their tools are easy to use and the products that they have in their end-to-end hyper automation lifecycle are easy to learn and teachable to people that you work with.

UiPath has a wide range of features that they have brought into their ecosystem. If I look at something quite specific that we would like to see going forward, that would be the integration between Data Service and Insights. It is great that we are able to visualize our return on investments using Insights. We can see a whole bunch of metrics and how our processes are performing. I think what would give us a lot more power is if we could link that to Data Service and actually pull through some custom information.

We have been using UiPath at the company internally for roughly just over five years. 

We have been a reseller of the UiPath product to our clients for roughly three years.

UiPath solutions are definitely very stable. It is very easy for us to build quality solutions and put them into production, then be able to trust the solution that we have put into production. For any automation center of excellence, that is quite important. You need to have a level of trust in your organization, inside of your environment and inside of your solutions. 

This also is attributed to the quality of our developers. We have strong, skilled developers. Without a product like UiPath, stability would not be such a great factor, especially if we had to go with a different approach or tool sets.

We have had a lot of experience trying to scale our solutions. Because of our automation journey, when we started out, we created processes that were very specific to the problems that we were trying to solve. They were actually quite static. The processes that we developed were aimed at addressing a problem specifically. As time went on, we started changing our design-thinking approach and our approach to designing and developing solutions, in such a fashion that we now try to create our solutions to be more dynamic. 

Because of the life expectancy of automations, and specifically RPA, a lot of experts would say that you need to go back after 6,12, or 18 months to reevaluate your solution and see if it needs to be redeveloped. What we have seen in our landscape is that if we try to make our solutions more dynamic, and actually cater for more than what we set out to cater for, having to enhance our solution later on takes a lot less development time. So, scaling out the solution has become immensely useful and our way of work.

We have roughly about 100 people within our organization directly communicating with our UiPath environment, either through our robotic assistance or bots, right down to the granular level of developing solutions. Some of the roles include our developers, operational support, and business users.

I would definitely say that the UiPath technical support is quite proficient. They help us quite quickly. Their responses always direct us to the answers that we are looking for. If they don't know the answer or can't assist us, they give us that feedback. They go ahead and find the answers or make the needed changes. They then come back to us and provide feedback. 

We have really enjoyed working with the UiPath team quite closely throughout our partnership. It has enabled our journey further. I would definitely rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

If I look at some of the other technologies and tool stacks that we have used to do RPA or automation, the adoption rate is a lot less. This is because of the way that developers need to struggle in some cases to get through the learning and usage of these tools.

I was not directly involved in the setup of the applications and ecosystem. From what I have been able to gather, we did have quite a lot of support from UiPath and the setup was quite straightforward. It took four hours maximum.

UiPath has definitely helped us realize some of our full-time equivalent savings (FTE savings) in regards to some of the reusable components that we have and have placed specifically in the business. With the offerings that UiPath has, we are able to easily see what our return on investment is, how we have structured and deployed our solutions, what we have deployed, how long it has been deployed, etc.

If we take a look at the last six months, we have about 105 processes that we have in production at the moment. If we single out a specific process that we have been working on and has been in production for quite a while, then measure that over the last six months, we can see that we have saved roughly about 380 hours on that process. Or, we have saved 380 FTE hours. That equates to roughly 77,000 rand. That has been quite a big savings. If you take the time saved across our 100-plus processes, we are looking at close to 2,100 hours that we have saved in the last six months. That has a financial value of between 500,000 and a million rand. 

UiPath definitely has reduced human error for us. Because a lot of our processes are quite focused within the financial space and we integrate it with our ERP systems, we have seen a reduction of human error come into play. We have also seen that the provisions made for human error have also been reduced.

In the RPA industry at the moment and in automation in general, UiPath's pricing model is the most consistent. So, if you are looking at year-on-year growth and pricing, or even if you are comparing solutions, each vendor has their own take on how they are going to generate profits and expand their return on investment. By far, UiPath is the most consistent with their pricing. They make it quite clear what they set out to achieve with their pricing and product. That makes their product so much easier to design for, as you don't need to change your pricing and go back to clients every time that you introduce a new aspect into the solution.

If I did have any advice or extra information that I could give surrounding the UiPath product, one of its strengths is that you know upfront what everything will cost.

We found that UiPath Academy courses that they provide, as well as the help through the forum, have greatly enabled us to more easily use this platform. Compared to other vendors and other tool stacks, it is a lot easier to use as well. 

If I look at the UiPath offering and compare it to Microsoft Power Platform, and while Microsoft Power Automate has definitely come a long way and done a great job of making its way into the market, there are still key differences between the two platforms. Because Power Platform is still relatively new, the resources and support are a little bit more tedious to get around than with UiPath. With the UiPath community, because of their extensive work that they have done within the community to build developers, you get a lot more support on forums. 

In terms of usability of the platforms, UiPath has been doing this for a lot longer. So, the user interfaces and all around user-friendliness of their platform definitely show, in the time that they have spent working on the product. 

If I look at some of the things that Power Automate offered before the latest updates in the UiPath offering, Power Automate was able to allow you to trigger processes completely differently to the way that UiPath does. UiPath has since taken a step up and released their integration services, which has helped bridge that gap quite a lot. Being able to link to a process is a lot easier than it used to be.

If I compare scalability, development time, and ease of use of Power Platform to UiPath, specifically around the RPA components of the solutions, there is definitely a noticeable difference. 

As an organization, we took Blue Prism, WorkFusion, Automation Anywhere, and those types of vendors and platforms into consideration when selecting our platform of choice when our center of excellence was formed. When making the decision at that time, the stakeholders involved decided to go with UiPath, mostly because of what they had to offer and their consistency.

The advice that I have to customers who are looking to start off their automation journey, or essentially take on a new vendor like UiPath, I would definitely say one of the challenges for us was getting our governance and standards right. As soon as we got that right, and we fixed our design-thinking approach, we realized how we could make sure our solutions were scalable. We then started seeing a higher return on investment. My advice would be to focus on the small things, make sure that you understand your processes and what goals you are trying to achieve, and then start with the beginning and end in mind. So, know where you want to end up and see how you are going to break your solution up into phases to be able to get there.

UiPath has had a very interesting impact on our environment. We have found it quite difficult to find RPA developers within our country, specifically those who have the skills that we need and can do what we do. So, we have had to rely on upskilling people as much as we possibly can to be able to deliver the solutions that we are delivering. In doing so, UiPath Academy has been quite helpful and handy, specifically because it is a lot easier to onboard a new employee or somebody who has less experience with UiPath. The training is free and easily available. If there are any issues or questions, the Academy team and the community are always around to support and answer any questions. 

What is quite impressive about UiPath is that they followed the same trend of having two major releases a year. I think those are the two most anticipated events that we have within our team as well. Because we have a roadmap, we know more or less what UiPath is planning and hoping to do. Our partnership enables us to have a closer view at that information. UiPath Insider Program allows us to see some of the previewed items as well. 

For those who aren't quite sure where they want to go just yet, keep an eye on the forums, blog posts, and UiPath in general. Look at their major releases before making any huge decisions. UiPath has a track record of consistency, and they have got some great reviews and implementations that I think we could really all learn from.

I would rate the UiPath platform as 10 out of 10.