UiPath Platform Reviews

We're in the supply chain industry and we use UiPath for automations for purchasing and selling and to make people's lives easier within the organization. We have 20,000 users in our organization. 

We do not currently use the AI functionality in our automation program but we have in the past. I've found Document Understanding in the AI Center valuable. In the past, the action center was slow compared to some competitors in the IDP sphere, which can be detrimental if you're dealing with millions of documents but this has since been improved.

We use unattended robot processes almost exclusively and this includes approximately 130 to 140 processes. We do have plans to increase this usage and create more core automations. Certain automations have a shelf life and need to be retired at a certain point. A lot of times we're working with systems that are eventually going to be replaced. The reason why we use UiPath over strictly APIs or something programmatic is that we don't have access to something programmatic. 

UiPath has improved our organization in the sense that it has reduced our manual hours by 200,000 hours per year. This is substantial especially given the size of the COE. We don't necessarily realize these benefits from a head count decrease perspective but we definitely realize it from a time-saving perspective. 

The automations that UiPath provide free up our team members for tasks and projects that they have always wanted to do but have not had time for. There has been a shift to more meaningful work and doing work that hasn't been done before.

The Orchestration feature has been valuable as well as Studio because it makes it easier for people to develop who don't necessarily have a coding background. The UI automation when using UiPath is the best in the field, as far as RPA goes.

UiPath will introduce new features and it appears as though there is an unspoken rule that what they have released is not where it needs to be, but it'll be there eventually. To improve this solution, there could be increased transparency over licensing and consistency regarding what it costs for on-prem and what it costs for the cloud. This would make it more enticing for people to switch from one to another. 

We have also experienced some difficulty with updates and making sure that everything runs consistently. Many times, new releases are not communicated and then are released. This is included in documentation but this documentation is not always stored in the same place. Having some clarity or upgrade assistance to highlight what we need to look out for would help a great deal. 

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution but stability is dependent on your configuration. If you configure your robots in such a way that every VDI that runs or every virtual machine that's able to run a bot has a backup, then it will be stable.

UiPath's support is quite good. Whenever I've submitted a ticket, I have gotten relatively good responses within a couple of days. If you say that something is urgent and critical, they do get back to you sooner. Sometimes you get stuck between L1 and L2 support, which can be frustrating. 

I would rate the support for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The complexity of the setup depends on what you're trying to deploy. If you're deploying only the orchestrator and setting up robots, it is pretty straightforward. If 10 is difficult and one is easy, I would rate the setup a three or four. 

The certificates needed to set up the orchestrator can be confusing and frustrating during setup. For the most part, what you need to do is straightforward. When it comes to installations that require a Linux virtual machine, Docker configuration, or Kubernetes, the setup is more complex. It is more complex to set up an on-premises configuration compared to a cloud configuration.

From what I've seen, organizations will have vastly different numbers as to how hours correspond to dollars. Our return on investment has been good, even from a conservative perspective.

The way that the licensing is structured is confusing for some because there is different licensing if you're on the cloud versus if you're on-prem. There are unattended licenses and then there are non-production licenses and people get confused by that.

There's a level of buy-in that's required that makes it difficult for people to get started. For example, "If we do this, we need to get this whole package" as opposed to, "Let's get a couple of licenses and see how it works for us." There's the community for these questions but if you want to do an on-premise installation, you can't really use the community in the same way to get clarity.

As far as strictly RPA and UI-based automation solutions are concerned, UiPath really shines over its competition. The most similar comparisons would be Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I don't think that they have the same level of ease when learning how to use their solutions. Not as many users in the market know how to use those solutions and they don't have the same level of orchestration which makes them more difficult to manage compared to UiPath. 

The UiPath's user community, in terms of the value that you gain by being a part of it, is hit or miss. A lot of times there aren't responses to the high-level questions. There are a lot of responses to people who are just learning how to use it, but for more complex questions, there are no experts to field responses. It is possible to find these answers but they are not necessarily contained on UiPath's platforms. That being said, I did find the user community and academy very useful when I first started using this solution.  

I have done 16 courses from the academy and continue to review what is released to see if it would add value to me to stay up to date with the latest features. The academy provides the ability for more people to learn UiPath and learn RPA and this makes it easier to hire new team members as they can easily gain the necessary skillsets. They still do have to learn on the job to some extent, but there's a basic skillset that's pretty well established and there are certifications that are associated with that. 

I would advise others considering UiPath to start with some use cases in mind. I don't necessarily think that you're going to get value out of evaluating the solution if you don't have at least a few things to get you started. I would advise having someone with a technical skillset to assist in this regard. 

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We use it for everything. We use it for very simple things, such as moving data around in Excel, and bigger things that include using more advanced technologies, APIs, and some of the newer stuff that UiPath has had, such as Action Center, etc.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we plan to do that in the coming months.

The company is growing so fast, and we've been able to use automation to keep up with that pace. We've started rolling out to individual citizen developers. We're trying to change the whole company in terms of the way people work by using this technology.

The way they stay on top of Orchestrator is really helpful because that has been the platform that controls everything. The dedication to that is pretty helpful. Every time there's a new release, it seems there are more and more features. It's also not hard to learn.

When it comes to the UiPath Community, everybody is helpful. If you don't know how to do something or you want to learn about something, it's pretty easy to connect with other people or talk to people at UiPath to get that knowledge or learn how to do something. You can also just point somebody to UiPath Academy. They go from knowing nothing to being pretty good with things pretty quickly.

One improvement that could be made is in terms of keeping the documentation updated. Some of the online documentation is outdated. Because things are always changing, it is understandable that information becomes outdated pretty quickly, but sometimes, when you want to go use something, deploy something, or troubleshoot something, the documentation says, "Do this," but what it says to do no longer exists.

I have been using UiPath for a little over four years.

Its stability has been really good, especially lately. It has always been relatively stable, but as they've added things, it still seems to be pretty stable.

Its scalability is pretty good. Orchestrator is able to handle whatever you're throwing into it. If you need to add a bunch of processes or jobs, it's pretty easy to do. The only thing that would slow that down is if you need new servers or something from IT. So, from the UiPath side, it's pretty easy, but there are other variables.

They're pretty helpful. If you submit a ticket, somebody reaches out to you pretty fast, but usually, I'm able to just reach out to our account managers and get help within a few minutes. I'd give them high remarks. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

UiPath was pretty involved with it. So, it was pretty straightforward. We're about to move to UiPath Cloud though, and our account managers are pretty involved in that, but it has been pretty turnkey and straightforward.

Our implementation strategy was to get a platform that works and start building things. I'm not sure of the overall strategy. Some of the decisions were made before I got here.

We worked pretty closely with UiPath. They've been great and pretty helpful. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. I don't know any of the specific metrics per se, but I know the values out there. We're just getting hammered with use cases everywhere. We did something literally last week that took us three days to deploy, and it saved a team 100 hours of work.

I came to the company as they were just starting to use UiPath. I don't think they evaluated other options.

My advice to others evaluating the solution would be to compare what UiPath is doing to all its competitors, and none of the competitors would scratch the surface of what the offerings are.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10. I liked UiPath so much that I went to get a job strictly in RPA. That wasn't directly UiPath, but before I started where I am now, I was working with UiPath just a little bit, and then I was like, "I want to pursue that for long."

We provide a lot of financial services. Its use cases are specifically in banking. There is a lot of Excel transformation where we are moving data from Excel into in-house applications. That's probably about 80% use of it.

We are using UiPath to automate processes that deal with a good cause. We run a lot of charity work, and there is a bit of work going on there to automate the operational aspects of running these charitable causes and things like that.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we would love to.

We started with nothing. We now have about 150 attended automations going with another 80 attended robots effectively. So, we've had quite a growth in automation capabilities in terms of its impact on the organization.

The ease of use of Studio is valuable. In terms of features, Excel Application Scope, web automation suite of products, and screen scraping are the features I use the most.

Excel Application Scope allows you to use Excel pretty easily and graph data from there, and then you can transform it within Studio and make any changes you need to do. You can then either write it back to another Excel file, or you can read the table within Studio and write it directly to a web-based application.

We have used screen scraping a lot. If you have a web application inside Chrome, you can go to Chrome, and it can grab all the data from there. You can put it into a data table in Studio, make any changes or transformations needed, and then write it back to whatever application you want it to go to.

We gain a huge value from the user community. I'm always running into problems, and I have been going to the UiPath forums to get answers to my questions. Usually, if I have a question, someone else would have already asked it, and I can get great info and insight from there. So, the community is a very important part of the development experience.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. We recommend our citizen developers to use UiPath Academy. I've used it on and off for things I don't quite understand, and people also use it to get RPA certified with UiPath. It's another great value service that UiPath offers. There is the ease of use of videos and the breadth of knowledge. There is also the applicability of the examples to everyday problems. I definitely know people who've been able to automate processes that are more complex with the help of UiPath Academy.

Our challenge with UiPath is getting the infrastructure assets up to speed, particularly on the Orchestrator side. However, I just now came from a demo for UiPath Web, and it seems to be to enable serverless robots, which would definitely be a lower barrier to entry. 

Our pain point is just on the infrastructure side and getting the assets coming up to speed. It's a big bank problem. We have a very large IT organization, which is not always aligned with the needs of teams like ours.

I've used UiPath for about two and a half years.

The product is great. It's very stable. It's reliable. We trust it with a lot of different and very important automations. If UiPath wasn't stable, it would introduce quite significant operational risks to the firm.

Its scalability is good. It could be better, but that goes back to my pain point on our struggles with infrastructure. That has been challenging. If we could get a better handle on our infrastructure, then scalability would be a bit higher, but overall, it's a very scalable product.

I would evaluate them very highly. I work with their technical support every time our technical account managers can't get something done. They're very confident and well-versed in what they do, and they always find a solution to our problem.

Positive

The only RPA tool I've ever worked with is UiPath. Some people used Blue Prism at work, but I never used Blue Prism. They're not using Blue Prism anymore. They switched because of better capabilities. UiPath is just a better tool all around. 

I wasn't in the decision-making process, but I know they tried to do a proof of concept. The Blue Prism team was supposed to do automation of some sort, and the UiPath team was also supposed to do it. The UiPath team did it in six hours and the Blue Prism team didn't do it in two weeks. The ease of use of the Studio product really drives home UiPath's capabilities.

It was complex, but it was straightforward with the help of account managers. We have two technical account managers with UiPath who are very resourceful and well-suited to working with us and helping us accomplish what we need to do.

Our implementation strategy was a citizen development framework. It involved getting the Orchestrator set up and then empowering people within the firm to start automating their various roles or tasks. We still have the citizen development framework, but we're also moving to unattended automations from our RPA developers.

We did it on our own with the help of our account managers.

I don't have any metrics yet, but we're at breakeven in terms of ROI. That's just in terms of monetary figures. In terms of general error reduction and things like that, we have seen quite an ROI.

Its pricing seems reasonable. I know we've been able to get a good amount of value in a few years. Our breakeven was only in year two. So, we're approaching breakeven in our licensing program. It's not a cheap product by any means, but the value that can be returned on an ROI basis is quite high.

To those evaluating such solutions, I would advise taking a good look at the capabilities of the solutions. The strength of UiPath is its capabilities in a number of key areas, whereas some specialized players in the industry might be really good at one specific thing. For scalability, you want to have a wider operating area that something like UiPath can accomplish, rather than a more specialized player.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10. It's a fantastic tool that does what you need it to do. It's great for automating a wide variety of things. Ease of use is there in the various products. Any concerns I would have about having a lower barrier entry seem to be acknowledged by the product managers in the demo that I just now had with UiPath Web. So, in that regard, it's a very accessible and functional product.

I'm a web developer. This solution is used in the backend and frontend of my organization. 

The solution is deployed on cloud through AWS.

It doesn't take a lot of effort to understand UiPath's features. It saves time, effort, and increases performance.

Automation has minimized our on-premises footprint. UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation.

The solution has reduced human error due to the automation and scripts.

The solution is deployed across multiple locations. We currently serve between 50 to 80 clients. They are mostly small and medium enterprises.

UiPath has a very good user interface, and the automation is a great feature. New users can easily understand UiPath.

I would rate the ease of building automations and using the solution as nine out of ten. 

We use UiPath for automation and architecture design in the backend. It automatically generates data for us, so it saves resources and the work of extracting data.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end automation is critical for us. For the past 20 years, we have been dependent on it.

There's some latency when changing from one page to another, so that could be improved.

I have used UiPath for one year.

The solution is very stable.

It's scalable.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

UiPath's technical support is very good. When we have required information, support is available 24/7.

The setup involves load balances, and UiPath is involved in the automation and architecture of the backend. It took about one month to understand the automation feature.

We have a team of 40 people for development. Only 10 people were necessary for deployment. Some of their roles were backend, frontend, architecture, and AWS.

The solution has reduced the time our employees spend on certain tasks because of automation and scripts. We save about 60 hours per month.

We save approximately $1,000 per month with UiPath.

The solution isn't very expensive.

My team evaluated other options. They chose UiPath because of its community and positive reviews.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

I would recommend this solution because of its great technical support and its automation features. UiPath also has a great community.

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.

We're a blockchain company that provides finance and analytics solutions, so we have multiple use cases, including organizational process automation. We do some end-to-end automation and automate some repetitive tasks. In the future, we plan to target some advanced processes like blockchain and machine learning. 

One example of a specific use case is market auditing. We are auditing our sales team and plan to audit our customers. This entails inspecting data produced by two third-party platforms, Salesforce and SAE, and combining that data into one Excel workbook to perform some calculations. We perform some analytics and then export the data from Excel to our CRM. Transferring the customer data to our CRM is incredibly time-consuming because we deal with more than a thousand lines of data. It takes a minimum of two hours to upload all the data to the portal.

UiPath helps us extract the numbers from the CRM side and share them with our marketing and financial team. This involves four processes that we combine into one automated endpoint process. The reduced workload across the three involved departments translates to cost savings equalling about 2.6 FTE monthly.

Another use case is to promote our components, services, and products. We are building a promotions portal that is attached to Excel. The promotion will involve maybe 500 line items and multiple roles. While you can do this manually, there is a significant potential for human error that could mean a loss of revenue. For instance, if we accidentally offer the same customer two discounts, we have to honor that. We haven't had any errors using UiPath in the last six months. 

We have three offices in our country, but the solution is deployed on a virtual machine in the head office. If a branch location requires process automation, we automate that solution at headquarters, and all the infrastructure is centrally managed. The primary users are six people from my team, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and three consultants. There are also two people from another group managing the UiPath infrastructure. 

We use UiPath Action Center, a capability that allows us to engage businesspeople and incorporate them into our automation. In total, we have about 12 to 15 people using UiPath, but some of them have limited privileges. 

Management prepared a presentation last week detailing how we've benefited from the start of 2021 to June 2022. We uploaded 149 processes into our unattended environment, and the robot runtime is 15,028 minutes, so we saved 75,114 hours. In the last year and a half, we saved the equivalent of 43 full-time employees.

 We have automated many tasks that would've been done manually, and we are reassigning our employees to other valuable tasks. This translates into a cost savings of about $98,000 for the last two years. Performing repetitive tasks is also demoralizing. If you're constantly performing representative tasks, your motivation level very goes down, so keeping our employees motivated is an added benefit. 

I am not an experienced developer, and working with UiPath has taught me a lot. We use UiPath Orchestrator with a combination of unattended and attended bots. That functionality allows you to manage your platform virtually. You can monitor everything and assign new roles to users. 

I would like to see more native AI and machine learning functionality. UiPath doesn't cover all the options for a few tasks that we require, so it's hard to do advanced automation. For example, UiPath chatbots are one area where machine learning capabilities could help. Users ask the robot questions, triggering those kinds of processes. 

We started using UiPath in September 2020.

UiPath is a highly stable solution. We haven't encountered any bugs, downtime, or other issues since we started to use the solution. We also don't experience any instability when working with components in other projects. 

UiPath is a highly scalable solution because some of its capabilities can be used in other projects. This means we don't have to rebuild the solutions we have already developed. With the help of these solutions and features, we can reduce the development time. 

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. Technical support is generally good, but there's one thing I don't like. UiPath support's technical expertise is impressive, but the response time isn't ideal. When you raise a ticket on the UiPath portal,  customer support can sometimes take up to 24 hours to respond. 

Positive

Setting up UiPath was highly straightforward because we had help from the vendor team. Our deployment team had eight people total, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and two IT people plus two people from the UiPath side. It took approximately one month because we implemented the UiPath solution on-premises. We had one or two technical meetings with the UiPath team and we needed to build some architecture. They suggested that we leverage our existing servers on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  

Then, we integrated all those solutions on the UiPath side. We installed a UiPath solution in the dev environment where we were developing the processes and one in the live environment. We have more than 32 licenses, so we created 32 virtual machines on Google Cloud and Azure. 

Every organization needs to cut costs, and all customers try to negotiate a discount on licensing. When we initially tried UiPath, they offered a discount of nearly seven percent, but they haven't since. UiPath's price is a little high compared to other solutions, but it's easier to use and maintain. We purchased a three-year license.

We tried Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and another tool by IBM, but I didn't care for those solutions because they were too complex. UiPath is easy to use, monitor, and manage. Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism lacked some of UiPath's features. For example, UiPath allows us to maintain our environments remotely through UiPath Orchestrator. 

I rate UiPath nine out of ten. It's a great solution. I highly recommended UiPath over other automation tools I've used.