UiPath Platform Reviews

The beauty of RPA is that it has many different use cases. We use the product as a standalone and as part of a bigger solution. Obviously, the tool itself is designed to automate activities that humans would do. But as the tool is getting smarter, we are able to do more types of activities.

There were two big challenges in the early days. One was the complexity of the rules that you needed to adopt for a particular task and the other was the type of data that was being used as part of the business process. As we've gone along, the product has evolved and allows us to do more of the business process.

We are able to offer more automation to a business process than we could before. It's all about the business process and how much of that can be automated and what still needs to be handled manually. UiPath gives us the ability to do more with automation and need less human involvement.

We used UiPath to automate processes for a good cause, free of charge, during the COVID pandemic. We used it to build automations that would take care of activities that nurses and doctors were having to perform, to free up their time to treat patients. Reducing the admin they normally might have had to do, rather than being front-of-house and dealing with very ill patients, speaks volumes for itself. We freed up time for our nurses and doctors to treat very sick patients.

When it comes to reducing the on-premises footprint, what we've seen over the last two or three years, with the pandemic, is the move to the cloud being accelerated. The whole digital agenda was accelerated. What we're seeing now is that most of the organizations we work with are more open to using a cloud solution. However, it depends on each organization. Some of our government organizations are not allowed to use the cloud. They have to use on-premises solutions because of strict data rules. But more companies are now open to using the cloud and that has an impact on the total cost of ownership. They're not having to invest in services and that helps reduce TCO.

AI models are now being pre-trained. There's a risk there because, obviously, you are using someone else's data and someone else's bias. But if you put those aside and use the pre-trained models, it's going to reduce the time to value because you're not having to train models. You've got something that can be run out-of-the-box. To be honest, we will always build our own models rather than exclusively use UiPath's. For instance, they have an email reader. We tend to use their model in conjunction with our own and that has helped us reduce development time on our AI models and our training.

On the subject of human error, anytime you ask a human to do an admin activity where they're typing in data, there's an opportunity for human error to creep in. And that can cause catastrophic events, downstream. Where you have an automation that is guaranteed to enter data that is 100 percent correct, you're always going to reduce human error.

Automation can also be used where a decision is made. Sometimes, human decisions can be fallible. If you have a decision being made by an AI model, it's not going to have human bias. It can have other biases built-in, but you can see an improvement in some decision-making as well. What we have to understand here is the introduction of AI into RPA is still in its infancy and there's a long way to go in this area. But there are definitely improvements being made by the introduction of artificial intelligence. It depends on how you use it and how smart your understanding of it is, as well.

Automation is all about trying to reduce the touch time of a human in a process to free up their time. If the automation is implemented smartly, it does so. If it's poorly implemented, you can end up with people being given so many exceptions that the bot actually becomes redundant. But as a rule of thumb, of course, it does free up peoples' time.

Similarly, if it's deployed smartly there are some benefits in terms of cost savings. However, we're not using it because it's saving costs. We are using it for our staff who don't want to do manual activities. It's not just about dollars and saving time. It's also about our staff and not having to do menial tasks, which can be demotivating.

It's not about the tool, it's about the business process and which component works best. The most valuable feature really depends on the use case. My favorite now is Document Understanding and the AI models that are being pre-trained. That's allowing us to do more, out-of-the-box, without having to do custom programming.

When I ask my developers which product they would like to use when we are doing RPA, they always say UiPath because of its closeness to Microsoft's .NET. Again, what UiPath are doing is enabling more out-of-the-box functionality without having to do customization and coding. The developers, and I, would say that it's getting easier to use for simple automations. It still requires planning and thinking for more complex automations, but you are able to do more with fewer skills. 

UiPath has something called Citizen Developers, which is where they encourage people to build their own robots and the functionality available is greater. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a question for governance.

UiPath's user community was one of the strongest aspects from an adoption point of view in the early days. The forums, the community, were always something that they invested heavily in, and that was a smart thing to do. The community is still strong. They have a Community addition and the feedback we get from some of our customers, when they first play with this, is that it's a friendly community. People are encouraged to play with UiPath, and if they get stuck, the community is willing to provide them with advice and guidance in a friendly way. Not all communities are the same, let's put it that way.

We actually teach the UiPath Academy courses. We are a UiPath-accredited trainer, but we have, at times, with smaller organizations, suggested that they take some of the training themselves. It's another great area of UiPath, in addition to the community. Their training is available free of charge. That has always been a strong point as well.

Their licensing is poorly constructed. It's too complicated and not well thought out. They also outsourced their support model, which sadly has become less friendly and more automated.

It's very much in the early days, but another area they can continue to look at is bots building robots—the ability to take a task capture and turn that into an automation. There are always concerns over that: Who's going to police the police?

I've been using UiPath since before it was called UiPath. It was previously called DeskOver. I worked for Capgemini and I worked with the product when the company consisted of 30 people in a room in the very early days. Capgemini adopted DeskOver and then it became UiPath as a growth partner. So I have been using it for coming up on 10 years.

UiPath is stable. Like any product in the early days, they were updating all of the time. That used to not sit well with our bigger customers because of their update plans. As the product has matured, it's become more stable and the release plan has become structured. You now get four updates a year. It has become more mature.

It's scalable.

The environments that it can be used in can be very complex, such as "multi-tenant," where a tenant is the protection of data from Orchestrator, where you have segregation or air gaps. We've done some projects with a defense ministry that are very complex and we've done some very simple ones.

Most organizations start small. There will probably be a pilot with a cut-down version of what is needed. As they grow and scale, they will invest in more tenants and in more infrastructure and more components of the platform.

I would rate their support at seven out of 10, but the dial is going the wrong way. Because they've outsourced their support, you're no longer dealing with the original product team. I had a very good relationship with the product team where I could almost pick up the phone if there were some proper technical problems.

Now, that is gone and we're having to deal with a third party. As UiPath have grown, they've needed to focus on their core areas and outsource other areas. But it's getting harder to get good quality support because my customers are no longer dealing with them directly, they're having to go through a third party.

Neutral

We started off with Blue Prism, which was originally designed, and still is, for back-office processes. What we used DeskOver for was front-office automations, almost like "your little buddy who sits on your desktop." As UiPath grew, it started to erode the Blue Prism market because it offered the ability to do both front-office and back-office automations. That's why it became number one. It recognized that there were two distinct markets: front-office and back-office. Blue Prism always has done back-office, and successfully, but never offered the ability to do front-office. Customers didn't want to invest in two different technologies as that would be too expensive. That's why UiPath stole the match and has never looked back.

Back then, 10 years ago, there wasn't much else to choose from. It was really "macros on steroids." The market was very different. It was Blue Prism or some of what were very young companies. Automation Anywhere was just coming in as well. 

But at Capgemini, we recognized UiPath, and we liked Daniel Dines, who was their CEO at the time and is now Co-CEO. We liked his enthusiasm and we liked the price point as well. They were from Romania, they were cheap, and they were eager. We were able to work with a company that, at that time, was very competitively priced. And we were able to get them to start building stuff that we wanted as well, as Capgemini was one of the big six. We had a lot of control over their roadmap in the early days.

Each organization we work with will have different design principles. As a general rule of thumb, we encourage investment in the cloud license model because it reduces the time that it takes to actually get the implementation up and running, and it simplifies things when it comes to TCO. However, there are organizations that are constrained by security, and therefore they can't go down that route.

I'm an architect by trade and my job is to oversee complex delivery and deployments. It's all about the architecture. An architect needs to work with the client, in the beginning, to come up with a plan and a solution that's going to be fit for purpose. In addition to architects, you need a project manager, some engineers to actually do the implementation, and you're probably going to need a tester to test and commission the environment.

The initial deployment has gotten better. When Orchestrator, which is the main administrative console, is built-in as part of the cloud offering, rather than having it locally, it makes a big difference. The cloud has made the time to set up a pilot and deploy into production much shorter than it used to be with on-premises.

Most IT projects probably take three to six months to deliver a success. Whether or not the payback happens straight away depends on the investment costs. The benefit of UiPath and RPA is the rapidity with which you can get automation into production and beginning to pay back. RPA has always been liked by people in the business because it is a rapid deployment rather than something more strategic that can take one, two, three, and sometimes, five years if it's a very large IT program of work.

ROI isn't just about the dollar. It can be other things as well. If a program of work with RPA and UiPath is deployed smartly, you can see a decent ROI. But that ROI also depends on the declarations by the business involved. How many times do they execute the process and how long does it take to do it? How many exceptions are there? How many people are involved in that process? 

Business often thinks that volumes are higher than they actually are, and they may forget that other people may have to be drafted in if there are peak periods. Due diligence in building a business case is important. What you also need to do is revisit it six months later or a year later: What did we declare? What did we actually hit? Did the bot fall over because of X, Y, or Z? It is a continuous improvement process, as well as ROI. If you get the two working correctly, you get a stronger ROI.

What we find is that some businesses who don't use our consultancy skills will try and do it themselves, and they will come across some of the pitfalls that we are fully aware of, but they may not be aware of because they're learning, and that has a big impact on ROI. If they try to go after a business process that's very complex, at the beginning, without the right skills in hand, they can suddenly find themselves in a downward spiral from a development point of view, where costs and time are overrunning. Before they know it, the declaration they set has passed and they've not been able to hit those targets. When that happens you start to see an erosion of confidence from the business side as well. It all comes together. It's all about strategic understanding and technical know-how.

We now have the challenge of cost. It depends on what you want to do. If you want a very simple robot to execute normal front-office transactions, I would recommend Microsoft Power Automate because it's free. If you are investing in more complex things, then I would always recommend UiPath. 

UiPath is starting to price itself out of the market. It's getting expensive. That's fine if they continue to push the envelope of what they offer, but it's all about perception. And the perception over the last two years with my customers is that it's expensive. I trust it, but it's expensive. 

We're seeing year-on-year price increases. There's a price point they're getting to that is about the value and they need to be very careful about that. 

UiPath, as an organization, has changed massively. When it IPO'ed it was a Romanian company and very much a European company. Now, it's an American company with American values, and I think there is a misunderstanding of the European market compared to the American market.

In terms of implementing end-to-end automation, it depends on the process. We can do more with the advancements that I've mentioned, but every business process is different. I always say to my team, "This isn't about the tail wagging the dog. It's not the technology, it's the business process, and whatever tool is right, whatever fits." There are still exceptions that need to be handled by people so we're probably not there yet with end-to-end automation. 

Most good-sized business processes have business exceptions that require involvement from people. It's what we call "human in the loop." Two or three years ago it was 80/20 between automation and human involvement. We're now probably at 85/15 or 90/10, with more of the process being automated without human involvement. That's because there are smarter bots using AI—the brain—to execute automation tasks that previously had to be handed back to a human for decision-making or some other activity.

On its own, UiPath doesn't speed up digital transformation. It's a tool. It helps, it's a contributor, but as a standalone, it doesn't. It needs other things.

I had a quick look back at what their offering was in 2019 and what it is today. That's a good way of looking at how well they've listened to their customers. They've been smart in not just providing RPA. All their components now are far more than just RPA.

They've recognized one of the biggest areas is process identification, that whole journey of identifying an opportunity and taking it through the life cycle, with things like Automation Hub.

Generally, the response I get from my customers is they're impressed with the number of solutions that are available under UiPath's Enterprise platform.

We have a team with a set of developers, business analysts, and managers who are constantly looking at processes within our organization that we can automate to ease the burden of our employees. Our use cases align with departments like finance, inventory management, and HR. They include all the corporate level and core processes within our organization. Most of the automations are unattended.

A simple example would be that we have sales reps who get orders from customers. Those reps have to use some of our internal systems including our ERP system which is SAP. They use the systems to create orders and generate sales order numbers, invoices, et cetera. I have worked on these processes wherein we automate all those steps for them so that they don't have to go through the basic steps and do the same things for different orders.

We have had some of our bots running thousands of transactions per day, saving between five and ten full-time employees' hours, which is huge. And that is just one process. We have over 80 bot licenses and over 100 processes that we have automated, so it's pretty significant.

And while we haven't used it to pull patient information into a dashboard, we have pulled that information together for other purposes. That way, sensitive data is very secure when it comes to processing customer orders and the like. It's made things faster. Before, accessing it could cause errors or slow down the daily functionality. With the help of UiPath, being able to pull it easily into a single view means we are not misreading information or misunderstanding it.

Our company deals with hospitals and provides them with necessary supplies in their continuum of care. Although we don't deal directly with patients, automation has improved the efficiency of delivering that care. It's done at a much faster rate, rather than slowing it down.

We have also used UiPath's artificial intelligence and machine learning and these capabilities have made things better. These are not things I experienced using Automation Anywhere when I was a developer myself. AI and ML were never on our radar when we dealt with business processes. But now, they're opening up more doors, giving us more intelligent automation. Without them, it would probably be a little more difficult to tackle a problem. They have made things easier.

It's very easy to adapt to and it's very user-friendly and robust at the same time. You don't need to have a lot of technical knowledge to use UiPath. Overall, it's a very good tool for tackling simple and very complicated business processes.

Also, UiPath is easily integrable with other systems. When we are modeling our business processes, we use Appian as a business process modeling tool and it integrates very easily with UiPath. That's a bonus for us because we're dealing with very sensitive data. UiPath is definitely easy to use with a lot of systems.

I have been using UiPath since April of this year, which makes it about six months. Before that, I was with Automation Anywhere as a developer. Now, I'm a business analyst using UiPath.

With the latest upgrade of Orchestrator, about a month ago, sometimes, when we are running our bots, the server crashes and the bot has to stop. There is a certain time limit to it. About two or three hours after it runs, it closes down and the bot stops and you have to rerun. There is some sort of a timeout issue.

It's something that we are still figuring out with the support team from UiPath. We don't know if it's something internal to our systems or if it has something to do with the upgrade. We have been in that loop for quite a while and have yet to receive a resolution.

From my team's perspective, and from talking to a few others here at the UiPath event, the area that probably could be improved is the support system from UiPath. When we have technical issues and we reach out, sometimes the support is very delayed when a resolution, or a conversation, is really needed. Otherwise, everyone is happy with the tool.

Neutral

Our company is a manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies and products. Our automation journey started with Ashling Partners as our consulting firm. They helped us to analyze our business processes and come up with some automation ideas and, after a few months, we got UiPath.

The number of full-time employee hours spent on mundane tasks has been greatly reduced, which has resulted in great savings for our company.

The other definite benefit is no more errors, which is especially important in the healthcare field. UiPath has greatly increased the speed at which we deliver our products.

For example, we have an inventory management division and we often have branch realignments happening. They would take a week to deal with the branch realignments and handle all the inventory. Now, with a process we created for them, it takes a day or two for a bot to do it for them. It's saving them time.

We have had feedback from higher-level management where they say, "We don't have to worry about these manual tasks now. All we have to do is shoot you an email that says we have a branch realignment coming up and ask you to please run the bot for us." They give us the file and then it's done in a day or two. It's easing their workload and they are able to focus on other things. Before, it was a really painstaking process for them. Weeks of effort have been reduced to days and hours. That's a big win.

For me, as a business analyst, the biggest difference between Automation Anywhere and UiPath is that UiPath gives me the ability to capture every step. Previously the way I would do it was to sit down with the business user and take notes such as, "Okay, he's clicking into this screen, going to this system," or I would have to record the process. But now it's very simple because I can turn on the recorder and have all the steps documented so I can refer back to them. I can then give that to my developer who can then use it as a benchmark when he's building his process.

The ability to get into the finest of details with UiPath is very helpful. You don't have to worry about those manual methods and can focus on the bigger things. These are some of the advantages of UiPath.

Also, the scalability across the systems that Automation Anywhere is compatible with is limited versus that of UiPath. With UiPath you can connect to different backend sources without restrictions. In the processes that I have worked on with UiPath, there hasn't been a huge complexity if I have to do something with APIs or with databases. Whereas, in Automation Anywhere, it was a little harder. It wasn't very flexible with all the different systems.

I recommend trying out the Community Edition where you can start doing some pilot projects and test its abilities. Then you can pitch it to your organization if you have not yet done any automation.

The UiPath Academy is a great place. That's where I went first, six months ago, when I wanted to know what UiPath path is and how it is different from other tools. I took courses that helped me to understand it better. The Academy is a very good website. The course was very user-friendly. It has a wide variety of subjects, so it's not just the regular certifications that you pick up. Rather, it has specific topics. As a business analyst, there are a lot of courses for me. I need not look at courses for a developer. The diversity of the courses that you can choose from is really nice. There are courses for any role that you are into as part of an automation journey. You don't have to worry about not knowing where to start. They give you a good head start. It's definitely possible to learn this tool and it's rewarding.

I was just talking to someone who said he's from the oil and manufacturing industry and they are also implementing UiPath and automations. Aside from our company, which is in healthcare, it seems that the solution is applied in pretty diverse areas, across every other industry. There are a lot of applications of the solution and a lot of success stories. It's really nice to hear those. They help us realize that we still have a lot more to extract when it comes to the benefits of UiPath.

I use this solution for mortgage loan origination, loan servicing, and IT administration. I'm currently using version 21.

We use the solution on-premises.

UiPath saves us a lot of time, which translates into operational cost savings. We saved around $40 million in operations last year by operating 140 bots in production. UiPath saves us costs, improves compliance, and helps with scaling up and down our operations.

We use attended automation but not on a large scale. We have three or four bots.

Attended automation improves our ability to automate processes that are more complex or involved. We use attended automation for use cases that involve websites that require actual users to log in. It's really helpful because a lot of use cases deal with federal websites and external websites where we need to download client information, credit reports, and fraud reports. That kind of information can only be done by a human, so attended automation is necessary for those types of use cases.

Right now, we aren't completely into AI. We explored document understanding for text extraction, and we know the capabilities. We haven't even started our ML journey, at least from the RPA automation perspective. They're still in the robotic process, so we haven't moved to include automation.

This solution speeds up digital transformation and reduces the cost. It gives leverage for the teams to transform digitally, because the traditional digital solutions take a long time to set up. It can take a few months for a solution to be in place. That requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support to support the digital transformation. If we wanted to add a new app that would have oversight of all the loans being originated, it would take between two to three months to build UIs, dashboards, and all the features around it. With UiPath, the same kind of overview can be set up quickly: within two to three weeks.

The solution absolutely reduces human error. Most of our use cases involve looking at the input data, doing calculations, and updating fields. That always needs to be done by a human, day in and day out, continuously throughout a work shift. This RPA solution reduced that piece of human error drastically. I would say that more than 99% of human error is reduced.

The solution freed up employee time so they can work on other useful tasks. That's one of the main advantages of this solution.

Some of the processes have to be performed after hours and over weekends. When those tasks are automated, it gives valuable work-life balance back to our employees so they can do something useful with their time. The main ROI is saving manual effort, which is how we reduce our operational costs.

We see improvements in saved time, cost, quality, and risk production.

Attended and unattended automation, which support web and email automation, are the most valuable features for us. Building automations is easy and quick.

The solution enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automations. 
We aren't using the complete suite, like Process Mining, Process Insights, and UiPath Insights, but we use custom tools. Having end-to-end coverage of all these processes in one platform reduces cost and makes maintainability very easy. 

We use Kibana Dashboards with UiPath Insights, which was introduced within the last two years. For process analysis, we still use a traditional business analyst type of setup, but we don't use Process Mining. It's something we are exploring.

We use the academic courses to train all of our new developers and also upscale ourselves with new platforms. UiPath Academy is a single source of training for our team and it's free. We also hire college developers and new developers from other teams who want to work in RPA. We recently started StudioX citizen development. Academy is where citizen developers can get trained quickly.

It covers all of the various products, and it's easy to search through courses. We can skip different sections and get to the part we're looking for.

The UiPath community is a big and vibrant community. I think contributors are being rewarded for their contributions, and that happens in an organized fashion. That's the reason why people are so actively involved in contributing to the community. I would say that 90% of our development queries are answered in the community forum. It's really good compared to other platforms.

There are a lot of AI and ML-based enhancements that could be included in the core product and activities. Right now, there are plugins available from external vendors like Microsoft and Google. If those AI and ML activities can be provided out of the box for developers to use, that would really help the product go from an automation RPA to one automation suite.

I have used this solution for four years.

The latest versions are pretty stable. I haven't seen any issues with stability.

It's scalable. If we have enough bots, we can quickly scale up and down. If it's on the cloud, it's easy to scale up. If it's on-premises, we need to set up the machines, which takes time.

It can take a long time to get a response from technical support. They have to go through multiple hoops to get a solution, so that could be improved.

I would rate technical support as five out of ten.

Neutral

For the initial setup, we needed UiPath's support team to be on board. On-premises setup is always really tough. I think the cloud version would be really easy to set up, but we haven't explored that.

I would rate this solution seven out of ten. 

It's a pretty robust solution. When it comes to automation, it's pretty easy to set up and easy to use. My advice is that the cloud version is the best way to go forward when you're setting up UiPath.

For a current client, we have around 22 to 25 use cases, and it's all based on the financial side of things. The client is in finance, and we have use cases all of which are comprised of different tools, including SAP and their in-house CRMs. It's about automating the process where we take some data from the CRM tool and upload it to SAP. It also involves uploading the files to the FTP server. 

For example, one use case is where the applications used are Oracle, and SAP, and STP. We just download the data from Oracle. There are different files that we download from Oracle and upload to the FTP server. From that FTP server, there is a different team that takes those files and creates a Tableau dashboard. 

UiPath Studio helped us automate many processes that have helped us save money. Even though the tool price is there and the license costs are there, it has given good ROI. For example, automating a process can reduce the work to half or maybe 60%. We divert efforts to different work. Therefore, it has been pretty useful in terms of savings and quality control.

For example, one client had a focus on quality control. There are instances where employees make some minor errors that could lead to major losses to the organization from the department's point of view. We automated that process and it gave us more return in terms of quality control. Fewer errors ultimately were made which saved the company from losses.

UiPath has a full suite of capabilities. It has, for example, an end-to-end automation suite. From a development point of view, it is pretty helpful to have access to all of the activities on offer that anyone can understand. 

The Studio as well as the process mining are great. Document understanding is another useful feature. It has eliminated the business analyst side where you have to go through each department and find out which processes are there, and take a different tool to get those all processes in one place and create a process workflow. All of this can be done with process mining. 

With document understanding, we have the capabilities of having UiPath understand and create documents, which previously was quite a lengthy endeavor. You just have to install it and follow the steps. It will automatically take a screenshot and create a document for you and then create a brief description of it. 

It’s easy to build automation using UiPath Studio. From a developer's point of view, it is easy due to the fact that you don't need much of a coding language or coding background. You just should have a clear logic behind it. If you're clear with the logic, a layman can handle the task. They do have Studio X features, which is for the layman who doesn't have any background, who doesn't have any coding or developer's background. They can automate their own work. Even an SME who doesn't know anything about automation could automate small tasks.

It’s great that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. That is very important actually. For example, scaling automation plus giving attention to the infrastructure can be a little hectic and time-consuming. If there is any way where we could reduce this work or optimize it, it would be great from the implementation point of view.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Right from the start, you have document understanding and process mining as well as the Orchestrator, which helps you with getting an overall view of the bots in our organization.

End-to-end coverage is the most important thing, due to the fact that, if it is end-to-end, we don't need to go to the market and look for any other application. If you can get end-to-end, you don't need to go for other products which simplifies everything. It's easy for us to maintain and work with it instead of having to integrate and manage multiple systems, multiple products, and multiple applications.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. It has helped us with quality control savings. We have saved many efforts previously requiring full-time employees. It’s one of the most important factors when we work for clients. If a client is hiring us to automate many processes, there are different intentions of doing it. If we are able to help them reduce cost, reduce and do some quality control, it is important for them. For example, previously, if work required ten employees, we have been able to reduce that down to six or sometimes four personnel maybe.

The UiPath Studio has reduced human error. It has helped us with quality control very often. In the past, mistakes have cost us. It has saved costs as well as saving us money related to fines or penalties.

The solution has freed up employee time. Instead of doing the same mundane work every day, we have just automated that part and now the employees have more free time to do more meaningful work. In terms of hours, from a department's point of view, we have saved around half, that is four hours per day, maybe about 80 hours per month. The additional time enabled employees to focus on more important work.

We have found that the product has reduced the costs of our client’s automation operations. With my previous client, we calculated an average of 40% in reduction of personnel and 40% in cost savings. UiPath has saved us money across the organization. The average saving is likely around 40% to 45%.

I'm pretty much happy with all of those tools. I don't have anything in mind that I could see improvement.

While UiPath Studio helps speed up the cost of digital transformation, in a way, it requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support, as it needs an entire setup. That setup requires support from different departments, and that comes with a cost.

I came across one problem while upgrading. We were upgrading from the 2019 version to the 2020. There was one thing that was not mentioned either on the website or documentation, and we had to take support from UiPath. The documentation needs to contain each of the scenarios which could occur while upgrading the solutions. As it is now, this is not the case. That said, when we ran into issues, UiPath Support helped us through it.

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

We've had outages once or twice. For that, they have a workaround. If a server goes down, we should have a backup server for it. If that's the case, it is just a few steps needed to migrate or we can take the setup from another server. That's it. It's pretty good in general. 

The scalability is fine. For example, if the bot count is about zero to 100, we have the capacity. And if it goes beyond that, then we have to increase the features of the systems and servers. It could take time if we scale beyond the limits, however, it's still possible. It just requires an upgrade. 

What's required is managing all the infrastructure and getting all the permissions from the client which is what could take time. Scalability can be an issue when it goes beyond the mentioned limit.

In the current organization we're working with, it's totally unattended bots where no user is actually using this tool. That said, the bots are in production, which works 24/7. No user is having this access to the tool. It is all unattended bots.

In the previous organization, there were 58 to 70 users as we had attended bots. They were using bots in their daily routine.

It's a routine for us to use this product every day and deploy this solution. We are definitely looking at increasing it and scaling. We have a lot of work in the pipeline.

I've contacted technical support many times and they are very helpful. Based on the severity and priority, they do help us on priority and they are very helpful in terms of responding, supporting, and maintaining. If they can't help us by email, even after giving clear instructions, they'll bump you to a different level and help. It can be just like spoon-feeding us. They are very patient and try to be very clear.

We were doing automation, however, it was just .com and .net. We used to write five lines of code just to click on one button, which is just an activity right now we have in UiPath. We switched to UiPath to do end-to-end processes which would require large amounts of code if we kept doing what we were doing.  

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

The process is quite straightforward. You just have to have the installer and just click install, and then after a few steps, it is done.

Setting up just UiPath Studio hardly takes ten to 20 minutes or maybe one hour if you're facing some complexity. Setting up an Orchestrator with all the robots could take a while.

Our implementation strategy is based on whatever the customer's requirements are. Different clients have different requirements. My previous client, for example, didn't want the cloud as they were pretty concerned about the security as they deal with financial data and they don't want the data to go to the cloud at all.

Clients have the option of on-premises or cloud. Based on that, we just go with the requirements. Some clients want attended bots due to the cost, and some want unattended bots due to the features. 

In terms of maintenance and deployment, how many people you need depends on how many processes you have with the client. Right now, with the current client, we have 22 to 25 processes that we have automated. We are just three users who are developing, testing, maintaining, and supporting this project. However, it varies and often depends on the process and client and how many bots.

For maintenance and support, you don't need many people. For development, if they're at 10 people, five or four could do the work in terms of support and maintenance.

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

While the clients might have released some reports, I don't have much knowledge about ROI. 

I do know about the prices of attended and unattended bots as well as Orchestrator. 

There are costs related to Orchestrator, Studio, and attended bots. There are also infrastructure costs, and, while implementing this tool in any organization, there are different costs attached to it.

The price for the attended bot is between $1,800 and $3,000. The unattended bot was $8,000 last year.

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, however, about five years back, where UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were the leaders in the market, at that time, just UiPath had the free training and Intuit training for their tool. The other tools didn't have any training, or if they had, it was paid. That's why we chose UiPath, which ended up being the best out of the three anyway.

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

There have been multiple companies that I've been working with. Two remain the same. I've been using different tools as well. It's been on and off with UiPath.

We are not using the latest version of UiPath. The latest version is 2021. We are using 2020. This is due to the fact that the client that I'm working with has a stated policy as to using a minus one version. They believe it could not be a more stable version for any product. 

At this time, we don't use the SaaS solution or the AI functionality. However, I have enrolled in AI training to better understand it. We do not yet use the automation cloud or UiPath apps either.

In terms of employee satisfaction, from the experience I had from interacting with the client and different users, they are happy as well as sad. They are happy in terms of moving away from the mundane work that has been taken off from their hands. They are, however, both sad and afraid that they could lose their job.

I'd advise users, if they're a layman, to go with the training. Just start with the training from the UiPath website itself, in the RPA Academy. That is sufficient for anyone to start with. They have all the courses that start right from scratch for every role, be it business analyst, solution or product developer, et cetera. In six months, even starting from scratch, you can excel on this product.

With UiPath, it really is possible to optimize so many things. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Our use cases for UiPath AI and automation are diverse and cover a number of functional areas within our business. We are doing everything from building simple to medium to complex RPAs. 

We have started utilizing communication mining and have a unique use case leveraging document understanding. Essentially, we are getting our feet wet across the board.

UiPath has allowed us to free up time for our employees so that they can engage in more value-added activities. Although cost has not been a significant driver, we focus on being more efficient and consistent throughout the organization. 

It has enhanced the overall experience for our stakeholders, including employees and customers, by streamlining processes and improving engagement.

Document understanding has been immensely valuable due to the breadth and depth of its application. Additionally, the potential of Generative AI is expected to drive significant value.

Since we are still in the early stages of using UiPath, identifying areas for improvement is challenging. We anticipate that some aspects may emerge as time progresses.

We have been using UiPath for close to a year, approximately ten months.

The solution has been stable so far.

UiPath has proven to be scalable.

We have received excellent customer service and support from UiPath. We have a good Technical Account Manager (TAM) and a strong relationship with the team managing our account.

Positive

We previously used Power Automate and other solutions. Most automation has transitioned to UiPath. We switched due to the fact that UiPath offers a broader range of functionalities and addresses our speed-to-delivery challenges.

The initial setup of UiPath was straightforward, thanks to a good partner.

We have been using an implementation partner, and they have been great so far.

While we have not yet achieved the ROI we expect, we are on target to do so. There have been some instances of ROI, although we are still in the infancy stages.

Typically, pricing is reflective of the value provided. While more value for less cost would be preferred, we do not focus extensively on costs.

We evaluated other options before choosing UiPath. It seemed best in class and fit our needs after due diligence.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

My client is a bank, and we create bots for them. They had processes that their employees used to do manually. They gave them to us to mimic the actions that they did. We automated those processes.

UiPath has increased the net worth of our organization. From UiPath, our organization has gained much more than expected.

UiPath improves the workflow. When we automate the processes, they go into the bank environment where they are used by all the employees from all the regions or states.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. It is very easy to build automation using UiPath.

UiPath improves efficiency. The last project I worked on had 1,200 people working on the process. We automated that process, and with automation, 1,200 people have been eliminated directly.

I have not used UiPath's AI functionality but my team has. It makes it easy to automate processes that are more complex or involved.

UiPath has not saved us costs. When we use AI Fabric, we have to implement it additionally to the production environment, and it costs more.

UiPath has reduced human error by about 70%.

UiPath has freed up employees' time. The time saved depends on the process. If a person is doing the same process the whole day and we automate that, he has the whole time for other activities.

The Excel activities are valuable. We can do browser automation through other sites or tools, but for Excel, using tools or options like Selenium or JavaScript is quite complicated because we have to import the file from the JSQL or other things, whereas, in UiPath, we get direct activities. We can directly perform the operations by using the activities. We can directly apply logic to it, and that is how UiPath makes Excel automation easy. This is why I like it.

We have been getting positive outcomes from the UiPath Community. Whenever I have any questions, I go directly to the UiPath Community. Most times, we get the answer from there.

Currently, we have to additionally implement UiPath Fabric. It would be easier if it is already integrated with UiPath rather than having to add it. We have to take the dependencies by searching them. We should be able to go for the default ones.

Its stability also needs improvement.

It has been approximately one and a half years.

The stability needs to be improved. The UiPath selector is consistently failing.

It is a scalable product. We have about 150 users using the solution. It is being used in multiple departments.

Technical support is much needed. It has to be there. 

Our team has used UiPath Academy and UiPath Community. Whenever we get stuck while building the solutions, we most often get a solution from there. It is quite efficient.

Positive

I have used Selenium. In Selenium, we write scripts. We use the Java language for automation. We have to write the code, which makes it more complex, whereas, with UiPath, we can use direct activities, which makes it easier to understand and write the code.

We work in the cloud. Its deployment is easier. For the older versions, it was quite difficult, but with the upgraded version, it is quite easy.

It takes five to ten minutes, depending on how many bots you want to implement. If you want to implement one, you can directly do it in ten minutes.

One person is enough for the deployment. For maintaining the bots, we have a team because the developers and users do not have access to the production environment.

We have seen a 100% ROI.

The price of UiPath is comparatively higher than Selenium. Selenium is a free tool, and UiPath is quite expensive. 

Some organizations make automation costlier than it has to be. They use UiPath, and while selling the products, they make it more costly. It depends on the organization.

Freshers can learn UiPath. They will get knowledge about logic building. 

I would recommend UiPath to others. I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.

I have done the certification in Microsoft Certified Solution Associate (MCSA) and Microsoft Azure Administration. I look after the actual environment site where we can run the bots. We watch the environment's behavior, and we operate the Orchestrator, which is connected to the AI system. We run different types of processes through Orchestrator, and I am the administrator of Orchestrator. I give the rights and assign roles to the users. 

UiPath has been performing very well. It is very easy to learn and understand. We are going to move the most work done by employees to the bots because the bots get work done in minutes instead of hours. An eight-hour job can be done in three to four hours. 

We plan to bring more bots for efficiency. We would like to add more bots and reduce the time taken for various tasks.

We can design bots in a static or dynamic way. We can use the dynamic way to perform the actions in any environment or platform.

UiPath has freed up employee time. The time saved depends on the complexity of the process.

UiPath is easy to work with and understand. If anything is confusing, we just send our questions, and we get the answer as soon as possible. Designing a process with email, Excel, and any other application can take more than 15 or 20 days.

UiPath saves costs. By using bots, we can save the costs of services provided by humans, but I do not have the metrics. We have many departments, such as finance and global compliance management, and it is hard to know how much cost it has saved.

Orchestrator and features such as Queues Triggers are helpful in monitoring the ports and looking after the performance.

I have done the UiPath Academy course to learn how to manage the environment and Orchestrator. I was able to learn many things through UiPath Academy, and I was able to work on Orchestrator myself. The benefit of UiPath Academy is that it is accessible from everywhere. You can continue watching the videos at home or in the office. The explanation, presentation, and instructors are very good. You do not have to watch the videos again and again. You can just watch it once, and you understand everything.

For UiPath Orchestrator and Studio, if I want to watch the performance of my machines at a specific time or time range, there is no option for that. There are options for one day or week, but there is no option to specify a date such as from Nov 1 to Nov 3. This option should be there for queues and monitoring.

It has been more than one year since I have been using UiPath.

I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability.

It is a scalable solution. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability.

We do not need much support to use UiPath. We are not getting many errors.

Positive

I have not worked with any other similar solution. I have only worked with UiPath Studio and Orchestrator.

We have worked on the Python scripts to design the bots, but it was complicated. We had to write more and more scripts and make them efficient. It was very hard. With UiPath, we found a very good option to perform the activities in an easy way. We do not have to code much. We can just drag and drop things and have a solution. 

It is mostly straightforward. We just need to call IT to install UiPath. I give the license via a machine key.

We have it on-premises. We have not connected it to the cloud or third party. 

In terms of maintenance, there are certain packages that we have to download for running the activities. For example, if I am using Python with UiPath Studio, I need to download a specific library.

We implemented it in-house. For deployment, there are two or three members of the team who work with UiPath and provide the infrastructure, and then we have about 25 developers. We have a development team and an operations team.

The development team develops the processes and the operation department runs those processes via triggers or manually. They are usually run on the Windows environment. There are multiple bots working at the same time, and we have the monitoring tool by UiPath, and we are also working via Kibana. Kibana works with Elasticsearch. We have all the logs and bots' performance metrics. We can view it all with one dashboard in Kibana.

RPA is the future. Every bank and organization is looking for bots to perform their jobs because bots are more efficient than humans.

It is an efficient and easy-to-use tool. If needed, you can get a lot of support through UiPath forums and other resources on the web.

We have not used the AI functionality in our automation program, but we plan to use it.

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

I have used UiPath for use cases that are both transactional and linear. It involves human resources, cybersecurity, OEM reporting, IT service management, service delivery, and examining of patents and trademarks. We work with federal agencies in the public sector. 

I enjoy the enhancement of UiPath's debugging tools. I like the IDE and integration services. There have been massive improvements. I love to work with Orchestrator. It has become more streamlined and helpful. 

UiPath needs to improve its documentation. AI Fabric's installation was an absolute nightmare. I tried to get help from the documentation portal and couldn't find what I was looking for. 

I have been using the product for four and a half years. 

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. One of my use cases involves the Patent and Trademark Office, where two GS-15 patent attorneys worked on patent suspensions. An unattended bot helped to save two full FTEs' a year's worth of work. 

We wanted to achieve less human error with AI-powered automation. We also wanted to streamline the process so that human involvement was less. Also, it helped us do more things than a human. 

AI-powered automation has increased accuracy for one of our use cases. We used AI Fabric and Document Understanding to help with reconciliations that came in PDFs. 

Automation has helped us free up our resource time by over 1000 hours. 

I last used Process Mining in 2020. 

I don't enjoy using Power Automate since its scope is limited. The environment where I use Power Automate did not purchase advanced licenses. UiPath offers more flexibility for programmers who are into API solutions. It wasn't available in Power Automate, which annoyed me. 

I run a team of developers and spend most of my time in Orchestrator. It is the best product from UiPath.