UiPath Platform Reviews

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.

Mainly, we are using this product for automation, the kind of automation that a human usually does.

For example, if we process where 10 people are working manually, which we can automate using RPMs (Revolutions Per Minute), we can reduce this up to eight people. We can't reduce the human manpower 100%, but we can reduce up to 80% of the manpower. But, for the remaining 20% we need human interaction. Manpower is still needed for checking the report and verifying information. For these tasks, it is still key to have a human take charge of the process.

The specific feature I find most valuable is its ability to access a database, automating inquiries, and sending emails. This is very useful. Now, spreadsheets and ledger books can be done within five seconds.

I want to improve machine learning. 

I have used this product since 2016, and uploaded three different versions. It is very stable. 

It is scalable. There are no issues with scalability. 

There is a good support network. Their response time is good. They will find a solution within two days.

It was very simple to set up the solution for our company.

It's kind of like a process which can be done easily by anyone. There is no human involvement required. It is a very easy model to work with, and it is a win-win situation for both business owner and user.

The pricing differs on the requirements. If there is a huge purchase, then we get a discount.  There is not a fixed pricing of the product. 

Blue Prism is a competitor that has benefits, but we chose UiPath. 

It is very easy to learn and easy to adapt. For example, if we have to open a browser, we need code. If we are using Selenium, or some other programming that you have to write code for, it could be 30 or 10 to 15 lines of code. But in UiPath, there's true ease of use. It is as simple as dirt.

We are accountants and consultants and there are many mundane processes in auditing. Using RPA to automate not only allows us to be more precise, but we can also audit a larger population of material. We get accuracy and speed, and those are our main goals.

We have been able to do our work in a more timely fashion, more accurately, and it opens up other paths of customer use cases which will enable us to expand our business as well. 

In terms of performance benefits, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

• The OCR capabilities, to take somewhat structured data and put them into more structured data so that we can do our analysis.
• Screen scraping.
• The overall process of integrating it with other applications that we use in our analysis.
• It has also exceeded our expectations in the fact that it's a lot quicker to implement than we thought it would be.

It's easy to use but I think it will be a lot easier as it continues to develop. Right now, we do need some development capabilities, to understand certain computer languages, to put in the bots. They're on the right roadmap to make this even easier to engage so that anyone, even people without programming language experience, will be able to use it.

I would like them to continue to build and make Studio easier to use for non-technical people.

Looking at it as a marketplace, I think it's very stable.

We have used their customer support. It has been good for us, although it hasn't been perfect because they're growing so fast that there are a lot of new employees coming on board. That's a challenge to manage for any company. Certainly, the online tools, the Academy training, allow for a nice implementation. It's more an issue when it comes to getting in touch with someone, where we need something customized and we have questions.

I have used UiPath RPA Academy training. It's been great. I think it is developing as well. They continue to add training, change and modify some of it, which is great. You can feel that it is evolving.

With most of our clients, generally, it's humans who are doing manual, mundane tasks - what I refer to as the "low-hanging fruit" side of it. They see right away, when we take their current process that they're doing, how the automation can handle it and be more accurate than what the human employee is doing right now.

The important criteria for our clients in selecting an RPA solution are price, that is always one, but also accuracy and security are factors they're most interested in.

I was involved in the initial set up of UiPath in my company. On a relative basis, it's straightforward. There are certainly some complexities to it, but it is definitely less complex than I expected it to be.

Our clients have seen considerable ROI from using UiPath. Once our customers get their heads around it, and then we implement it, they see the benefits of using it straight away.

Scalability is there. There are so many use cases, certainly for our company. There are many opportunities. We're essentially automating what I would consider to be the low-hanging fruit, and there are so many things to build on top of that, as we get that foundation.

UiPath absolutely is capable of scaling.

Usually, it's Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

One of the main reasons that clients go with UiPath is the Academy, where they can get free training, where they can send their internal people to get the training. Having access to it and learning about it is a big hurdle a lot of times. Having access to the learning is a great thing.

I think it's the best RPA solution that I've looked at and I would suggest that you take a hard look. It's easy to start working with it. You can get it stood up pretty quickly and you're going to reap benefits right away.

This is a fast-growing industry, so staying on top of, and executing, plans is important. So far, from what I've heard regarding the roadmap, UiPath is certainly on their way to doing that.

Right now, we're in an interesting spot where a discussion point is how much our customer will own of what we sell to them. We're developing bots right now. The infrastructure, in our use case, typically, is owned by the customer. For us, it's about educating our customers on what we can help them with in terms of infrastructure: We can run it ourselves or they can own it. A lot of our customers want to own that infrastructure.

I think of all of the things it can do - the integration with different applications, solving what are important problems, and saving many labor hours for those who are using it  - and they are the main reasons I rate it a nine out of ten. The only reason it's not a ten is it's not totally done by someone that doesn't know technology and programing. I think they'll get there but you still need some skill sets in your organization.

We use it across all functions, but our major groups right now are accounting followed by tax.

There are man-hour savings. Some of that equals headcount reduction, but we've also been able to redeploy people to more value-add activities. It has met our expectations. We wanted to automate manual tasks and it has successfully done that, across multiple systems. I would rate the performance benefits at nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature is automating tasks that are highly repetitive, such as Accounts Payable. It is also easy to use.

I would like it to better handle updates from other systems, whether it's SAP or a website. That's the thing that we struggle with. Anytime a system changes, we have to go in and modify the code.

Stability has been an issue. It has taken about three months for a task to become stable. That was not a huge surprise, but anytime there's an upgrade of a website, things change on a website that we're using as part of the automation task, we have to go in and make those changes to the code.

It's very scalable. That's been a nice feature of the tool.

We have not used technical support.

Dive in and get going.

We have used UiPath RPA Academy training and we like it. It gets us about 80 percent of the knowledge that we need, and then we have a group of in-house folks that will teach people who complete a class how our policies and our procedures are rolled into the tool.

It's changing daily but we have about five developers. We have business users who are now being trained to do development. They're actually working on developing their own task now. In just a few months, we'll probably have 15 to 20 developers.

We've been pretty pleased with the product. The lack of stability is our biggest issue. There are external issues that cause that, so we're not surprised by it. We were expecting it, but that's the biggest issue.

As a partner, we see many use cases. Our clients are really looking to UiPath or RPA as a means of digital transformation. Some of the areas we see them use it are in finance, supply chain, human resources, IT automation, and tax functions.

The way we tell our clients to look at UiPath is that everywhere they have repetitive functions happening, they should explore RPA as an opportunity.

We see the real value coming out of UiPath in the ability to transform our clients' businesses: Produce rapid time to value and a very good return on their investment as well. That's the real value UiPath provides to our customers.

It is transforming our clients' cost structures but, at the same time, it improves their time to market. It helps them to improve their employee morale, make sure that employees stay longer, and it helps them improve their customer experience.

We see that the speed of business functions has improved by as much as about 70 to 80 percent. A particular process that, at times, would take about ten minutes to execute, has gone down to just two or two-and-a-half minutes. I would give performance benefits full marks with UiPath.

The way we look at it is that features are a commodity. We prefer to look at the value it provides.

Having said that, it is very easy to use. We have seen new developers becoming productive in a matter of weeks, not months. The entire solution is structured in such a nice way that clients can start seeing benefits in six to eight weeks.

One of the things that many of our clients ask us about is security. Some of them are really struggling with how to do multi-factor authentication. A robust and solid approach for dealing with multi-factor authentication would be one of the things we would like to see.

Also, some of the IAM tools have features that have somewhat segregated duties. For our clients, this is a big challenge in terms of how they do SoD. If there were some features related to SoD that were added to the tool, that would be really great.

It is fairly stable. We have not seen any major issues in terms of stability.

The scalability has been good.

We have not used technical support.

The setup is relatively straightforward. It is easy for our clients' security groups, their IT departments, their compliance departments, to understand. They know the key steps that need to be taken. From that perspective, it is relatively easy.

Many of our clients have used UiPath RPA Academy training and have found it very helpful.

In addition to UiPath, the top options are Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. In addition to that, we have seen some interest in exploring solutions from Pega and Kofax.

One of the reasons our clients select UiPath is that it now has a very well-established customer base. Those success stories help UiPath. A second factor is the ease of use. Our clients find it is easier to train their developers and access the necessary workforce. Thirdly, the licensing model is where clients see that it is among the best-of-breed.

Focus on your objectives. Don't consider UiPath or RPA as just a shiny technology. You need to know what is it that you want. What are your business objectives? That is the first thing you need to determine. Second, you need to set very realistic goals regarding what you want to accomplish. Thirdly, don't wait for a long period of time. Get started. You need to get into finding success as soon as possible. Find the low-hanging fruits, create a few bots, demonstrate the value for people, and then look at scaling up.

The pitfall I see with many of our clients is that they want to think big, do automation for 50 processes at once. But they get a lot of organizational resistance. The key here is to start small, show success, and build on top of those successes.

Almost all companies recognize that there is a need to invest in automation, both RPA-type automation and cognitive automation. When we work with them we try to understand what their strategic objective is. Is it about improving time to market? Is it about improving efficiency? Is it about improving customer experience? Or is it about improving the cost structure? In some cases, it is a combination of all of these. Determining that is usually our starting point. Then we can deep-dive into what the process areas are where we can get the maximum benefit.

All the companies we deal with are focused on improving their cost structure, so cost-saving is the most important criteria that our clients articulate. But in many cases, clients talk about improving the efficiency of their workforce or being able to respond to their customers' needs.

From there, we do an opportunity assessment, identify some of the key, low-hanging fruit where they can benefit. We prepare a value case which could be anything, depending on the client. It could be related to cost savings, it could be related to time to market, etc. Then, as we implement, we set up a value-realization office to track the benefits very closely.

Despite all the new hype happening around upcoming RPA and automation tools, what we have seen is that clients usually do not have the internal workforce that is trained and that really knows the best practices that are involved. That is where they look to partners, like us, to bring in their skills. When we start working with the clients, we start in a 70/30 model where 70 percent of the team comes from Accenture and 30 percent of the team comes from our clients.

To begin with, when our clients start a proof of concept, on average the team size is usually about six to seven people, including the IT support functions that are involved.

I rate UiPath a ten out of ten because of multiple factors: ease of development, ease of maintenance, robust security, and a very good installed client base. These are the factors that actually lead to a perfect score.

I work in the healthcare domain. We've automated a lot of financial and invoice-types of business processes, bringing in efficiencies in terms of saving time spent by field representatives in processing requests.

The time saved is anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes, on average, because a human would have at least that long, and up to 20 minutes, to do these tasks, while a bot takes just 4.3 seconds, which is huge efficiency.

Also, the time to market is very quick compared to other applications out there. RPA is very quick. My team has produced bots in as little as two days, from discovery to development and go-live.

Performance benefits rate a nine out of ten, because of a Citrix automation fragility concern. Otherwise, I would have given a ten out of ten.

It's easy to use and it's easy to host.

The most valuable features are the ease of use and the UI. It's much better compared to all the competitor applications out there. I've literally used all the applications that are in the market, and UiPath has been, by far, the best.

Another prime factor is that it scales up horizontally and is on the cloud, on AWS cloud. That's where we host our processes and our services. That connectivity feature, the availability, is a primary winning element.

The Citrix automation - the way that it's fragile right now - if that could be made stronger and more stable, that would be icing on the cake for UiPath.

When it comes to stability, it all depends upon what kind of touchpoints it has with third-party applications. Citrix automation is always a little bit fragile compared to non-Citrix automations, especially with UiPath. But I'm sure the 2018.3 version, which is going to come out, is going to fix that. I'm hoping that it fixes the issue.

Scalability is tremendous. My organization has been pretty happy with the amount of scalability that it has provided. One bot can literally run multiple processes, and process millions of records.

I feel customer support can be improved a little bit. I raise service requests day in and day out with UiPath. Compared to the competitors, support is very good. Still, the average SLA is around three to four days, which I think can be reduced to one to two business days. It would be very good if UiPath Support could do that.

I was involved in the initial setup: discovery, setup, and development stabilization, end-to-end. It is straightforward. It's a no-nonsense, plug-and-play type of application where you don't have to code something for it to start up and work. It's already available there. All you have to do is build flows in Visio or BPMN flows, as they can be directly consumed by UiPath. And then the solution is working.

It costs much less and it does much more than the competitors' solutions.

The only solution that is close to UiPath is Automation Anywhere.

There are three points that I always have my clients identify to determine if this is a good approach for them:

1. Does your process have a lot of manual steps involved?
2. Are they repetitive in nature?
3. Are they rules-based?

If these three are checked off as "yes," then they qualify for RPA. It's as simple as that.

Regarding UiPath RPA Academy training, I myself am certified by UiPath at all levels of certification which are offered by the LMS system. All my workforce is certified by UiPath as well. It's very intuitive and very easy to follow through and complete the courses, compared to the competitors.

In terms of staff required for development and maintenance with UiPath, for a small to medium-scale bot, we have around two developers working at any given point in time. Developers, here, also play the role of testers because it's an Agile implementation and a single person wears multiple hats. So there is one business analyst, there are two developers, and that's pretty much the team. We are very lean.

The important criteria when selecting an RPA vendor are the scalability, stability, and hosting and licensing costs. Hosting and licensing costs come at the end of the list because people are more concerned about whether the solution works or not. They always want to see a proof of concept and see that it's working. Then they get that sense of trust.

I've been using RPA for almost five years now, pretty much from the time where North America did not know what RPA was. UiPath has stood out and exceeded expectations, always. It's the best. Hands-down, go with UiPath. Don't even think about others.