What is our primary use case?
We're focusing heavily on document understanding processes. We use it to extract invoices, data tables from PDFs, budget, and PITBULL automation that's heavily focused on UI navigation and PDF manipulation. That's our main focus at the moment.
We've had a few calls with UiPath where they've shown demos on how they use the AI Center, but we've yet to find something that we can look in and see because we are a financial institution. We want to trust AI. We need to build our confidence in that before we actually implement it. It's at an experimental stage for us.
How has it helped my organization?
It started off as optimizing redundant processes to make sure that we enhance department abilities. We moved into the research sphere last year, where we focused on taking large datasets and throwing them up into data tables, and getting that data from PDFs or web pages. We started using data extraction and table extraction, and that's what drove our projects from that point.
What is most valuable?
Document Understanding is a key feature for us. We find that really useful because the OCR technology, the RedJack extraction that it uses, is easy to implement with a very level structure involved, even for unstructured PDFs and structured PDFs.
We mainly use Studio and Action Center.
In some cases, we use Task Capture to build outflows.
We started off as pure RPA, focusing on building out a citizen developer program with low code person-by-person automation that users can trigger by themselves. That then evolved into unattended automation. We started looking into document understanding processes and trying to get involved with the AI Center as well.
From the start of the citizen developer program, it went really successfully. We moved into the unattended sphere, and we're looking into big data.
What needs improvement?
The document understanding has room for improvement. The handwritten documents need to be optimized further on the OCR extraction, making sure that we extract accuracy above 80% because we do see a lot of failure rates when it comes to handwritten documents. There's a lot of room for improvement there.
UiPath has referred to the fact that they are still building upon OCR and document understanding. But with the use of Generative AI, we're hoping to see improvements. We're hoping that might be something that we start later on.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using UiPath for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of UiPath really depends on who builds the automation.
However, the latest version releases, such as 2023.4.4, have been known to contain bugs. For example, we recently upgraded to 2023.4.4 and faced a lot of studio bugs, which forced us to downgrade to 2023.4.2.
The upgrades on other orchestrators were fine, but there was a bit of a change to the UI that took some time to get used to.
Upon their version releases, there should be a bit more due diligence before they are pushed to customers because almost every time we're given the opportunity to upgrade, there are issues where we have to scale back, wait a while, and then upgrade again.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability depends on the team. It depends on your vision, but UiPath definitely opened the doors for making sure that the framework is in place and that they are aligned with our vision so that they can help us in terms of scaling the automation to the degree that we want.
When we are looking to scale up the automation that we have, the customer support guys are very much on hand to give us the technical support that we require. UiPath's scalability is pretty enhanced.
How are customer service and support?
When you buy the enterprise licenses at the tier that we're on, you're provided a technical or client manager, and we find that we can easily contact them.
We have a weekly call with our team, and any support question is rerouted through them because their portal can be a bit slow at times.
UiPath's endorsement of the community has helped drive the success of UiPath because no other RPA vendor really has the community of support that UiPath has. That's a big one for us.
UiPath does have a good community, but the support portal is probably something that they need to work on.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We use Power Automate as well. It is something that we try to marry with UiPath, especially when it comes to office app integration and things like that. Power Automate is simpler to use.
We previously had some free Prism automation, and then we decided to switch over to UiPath simply due to the fact that the cost savings were a lot better.
Orchestrator was a selling point for us because our control room is something that we would be very interested in in terms of monitoring insights and transactional items. That's why we switched over to UiPath.
We've tried to take both tools and get the best out of both worlds. Anything that any of our automated processes involve Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, or anything like that, we tend to use Power Automate simply because of the ease of use.
How was the initial setup?
We're using the local installation. Everything is localized to our premises. We have a lot of strict protocols, being a financial institution, so, we don't really want to open ourselves up to any sort of cloud orchestration.
What was our ROI?
We tried to utilize Automation Hub to predict our ROI. The reason that we're using automation is to assist teams rather than just kick the task away from them. It's just very robust.
We haven't seen any major cost savings, but we're an early team at Cowen. Maybe later on down the line, we'll get some solid figures.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is a bit convoluted. We have an overallocation of licenses at the moment. Citizen developer licenses are something that we probably need to refine.
They probably oversell it a bit to the point where we would propose that we may use x amount of licenses but in reality, we're probably only using a fraction of that.
There's room for improvement in how they sell their product.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. Out of all the RPA vendors that I've had access to, UiPath is the easiest to use. It's the most in-depth when it comes to being able to have automation and it works in the way that you want it to work. Other vendors like Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, or Power Automate have rigid models. Some of them are web-based, which we don't really like because we're a financial institution, so we like local installations. UiPath tops them all.
For anyone looking to enter the world of automation, UiPath should be the first point to call. They have a much better idea of how to generate a productive automation team for companies.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.