What is our primary use case?
I currently work for a data center company serving real estate clients. Our primary use case for UiPath involves large-scale automation using Document Understanding to process invoices.
I have two models running. One is for our general invoices, including everything we pay for people coming on-site at all data centers worldwide. There's a separate model for utilities. Accuracy in our utilities spending is crucial for our data center business, where power costs are passed on to customers.
Currently, we still use traditional machine learning from when we initially developed these models three years ago. However, we are creating a company strategy to implement GenAI and deal with the legal implications. GenAI is something we're considering as an enhancement to our document processing and data collection. We're still trying to figure out how that happened. We're figuring out which documents and data to include in an internal model and draw conclusions from.
When working with data, our top priority is ensuring that the data is updated, accurate, and well-maintained. There's a structure involved because a ton of our information is in SharePoint, which is a mess. We have two SharePoint sites for every employee.
How has it helped my organization?
Some large-scale invoice-related tasks were overwhelming our existing processes and attempts to handle them manually. We are in the data center industry and dealing with all these technology companies, but many processes in the real estate business are a bit more outdated. Many of our people are comfortable working in Excel, and some teams are highly siloed. One significant challenge I've faced as a UiPath developer is acting as an evangelist within the company. We want to demonstrate the platform's capabilities and get buy-in from these different teams across the enterprise to raise the level of what we're trying to do.
UiPath has been helpful with that first step of getting the information off the invoice. I've been learning and expanding my skill set on the workflow side. Many of our automations have a workflow with a human in the loop doing manual review. I look forward to automating between different departments, and that's one thing I want to develop at this conference.
We used to bring on seasonal contractors during peak seasons, and now we no longer need to do that because the existing staff have more capability. That was a big thing when we started. Our accounting team was so busy for the two weeks before and the one week after closing. There was a tiny window when they could engage with any process improvement or look ahead at what we could change because they were so busy keeping up with how things work. We've freed up these people who are intimately familiar with our business and give them more time to apply that knowledge instead of filling out forms.
We were processing about 2,000 invoices a month when I started. Now we're up to about three thousand. It took about 15 minutes per invoice to process because there were so many different elements. Working with Yardi is challenging. There was a big issue with getting these into Yardi and uploading them in batches. If one invoice in the batch failed, it would kick them all out. We spent all this extra effort troubleshooting and doing all of this.
Now, the bot can execute this work and upload them individually. If there's a single error, it can be isolated and kicked out as an exception. Someone can manually review it, and the bot can keep putting the rest of the invoices into the system. We've also had a great ROI on the monthly reporting. We generated reports from around 50 sites every week and then distributed them to a long list of different people on different projects. It's straightforward to do and only requires 10 clicks for each report, but it saves massive amounts of time for people. Now, all I need to do is maintain a list of who should get the emails and what projects need reports to run.
I love developing automations. I often directly help people by improving the part of their job that is time-consuming and dull. In addition to saving time, we reduce errors caused by manually typing things in. I've demonstrated that in different departments at our company.
We won an award for our ESG efforts. I developed an automation to help us report our ESG metrics because all of these customers want reports to give their shareholders about green initiatives. We wanted to take all the data on energy reductions in data centers and distribute it to each of our customers. We had a very complex template that we wanted to iterate on until we delivered the report. I developed a bot that could generate the source data and template of these files for our customers by data center and aggregate them.
Before I joined the company, they had no automation solution. They tried to do this with mail merge, which struggled because of the variability across our sites. We wanted to achieve greater complexity and offer this table of information when it's available or update it when the final file we're generating varies significantly. We wanted to be able to convert a Word doc into PDF format and aggregate all of those different PDFs at the site level and aggregate those per customer.
What is most valuable?
UiPath's Object Repository was huge. I could build these libraries because our industry works with many of the same systems. It's hard to integrate with Yardi's core CRM, and many of our automation efforts focus on getting information in and out of that system. The ability to build these libraries of reusable selectors has dramatically benefited me over the past couple of years.
I'm excited about all the new stuff around document understanding because I think that is a large area. We can continue expanding and delivering large-scale automations.
What needs improvement?
The messages and alerts that Orchestrator generates are a little overwhelming. I'd like them to be filtered down to the most actionable things I need to look at. For many things, we set up an automation that will send an email summarizing things to the stakeholders for the automation. With any of these types of things, you're generating notices, emails, and things, so you want to focus on some things that need your attention.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started using UiPath while interning and pursuing an MBA. I've always been a huge fan of Excel, Visual Basic, and automation in general. I've been in my current role for about three and a half years, but I began tinkering with UiPath for a couple of years before that.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not experienced any performance or uptime issues with UiPath.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In my current role, it's been challenging to demonstrate the need to grow and bring on more developers. We're processing a high volume of invoices, but the rest of the business has around 200 employees. We have large capital expenditures building these data centers but not a high volume of back office processes.
I have not necessarily been able to evaluate what it would look like to grow with 20 automations. We could keep a steady pace of new smaller-scale processes and look for new large-scale opportunities, especially with some of these new technologies. However, I don't think we'll be a large enough business to need these massive deployments.
How are customer service and support?
I rate UiPath support 10 out of 10. I have submitted tickets periodically for a specific issue, or when I'm trying to solve a new problem, I haven't faced before. I am the only UiPath-focused employee at my company. I can work on iterating, researching, and troubleshooting.
I've always been able to put in a ticket and get on a call with some people. They're able to connect me with someone and help me understand either the problem I'm facing or the fact that we've been able to have more calls recently about new potential. The online community is also an excellent resource for finding ways to approach and solve problems. Their support has been great.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to UiPath, there was no different solution implemented at my current company. At a previous company, we conducted a comparison between Automation Anywhere and UiPath and opted for UiPath due to its greater flexibility, capabilities, and entry offerings. At the start of my career, UiPath was one of the first to offer free online training and a lower entry point for businesses just starting out.
Automation Anywhere followed suit. While reviewing them, I built the same process in both systems and presented it to our executives. Automation Anywhere seemed focused on the financial industry. It had some excellent features if that's what you were what you cared about, but I greatly preferred the UiPath's general flexibility, capabilities, and breadth of integration. I've done some small-scale things with Microsoft Power Automate. That tool is hard to work with. They try to make it easy for non-technical people, but it means that I have a hell of a time trying to get it to do what I want.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward, and it was conducted in-house. We host our own virtual machines for running automations and we are a cloud customer.
What about the implementation team?
The implementation was done in-house.
What was our ROI?
We've seen the greatest ROI from large-scale invoice processing, but small-scale operations have had great returns. Before automation, we were processing 3,000 invoices monthly, which took 15 minutes each. It still requires time to review them in the Action Center manually.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
UiPath's pricing and licensing have been reasonable and manageable for us. Despite challenges in constantly monitoring SharePoint folders, UiPath has worked well within our resources. We have a fully dedicated, unattended license for our invoice processing, which needs to be a top priority and is always running throughout the day. We have another one for all of our other scheduled automations, and we've been pleased with that so far.
What other advice do I have?
I rate UiPath 10 out of 10. I'm incredibly impressed with the pace of new features that have come out. I have been working with UiPath for six years since I graduated college, and I'm blown away by what's coming out every year.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
very relatable points, especially about the library versioning issues across different Studios. We've run into similar things on our end. Good to know it's not just us!.Also agree the community forum could use more active moderation.