UiPath Platform Reviews

We did AP automation. We started with AP invoice automation first. Then we did a proof of shipment delivery. That was the second concept. After, we expanded to the inputting of contractor timesheets. We moved to publish the metrics on a dashboard and log in to different databases. Slowly, the demand picked up in the last year.

This solution has reduced manual effort on our part. It's removed repetitive tasks which do not bring any value to the company. They have now been eliminated. It's saved maybe 1,000 man-hours every year on the AP side, and maybe on the metric side for a dashboard that we created, we saved 90 hours a month.

The capacity to read the emails and then understand what is out there has been very useful for us. This is extremely useful with the huge volume of transactions that we are taking. We get close to over a thousand invoices in a day. 

I would like it to be more user-friendly.

The one thing that we would really like to see is the licensing. UiPath is selling on a per-bot model. What I find with other companies is they give it as a SaaS solution and that you subscribe to it. UiPath manages how many bots you need, whatever intelligence you're using, and then you give us a total solution. Changing licensing would probably interest us in the long run.

I've been using the solution for five years. 

It is pretty stable. We have not had major issues.

We can scale it up. However, the cost again is a factor. The cost of scaling up is high.

I have not been involved with technical support. Our team would talk to UiPath if there were a problem. I haven't had personal experience.

We did not previously use a different solution.

I was involved in the deployment and initial setup. It was straightforward. 

It was straightforward in the sense that we used it in a very limited way first as a proof of concept. Therefore, it was simple to just deploy it on a desktop at first, where we didn't even use the server. We deployed it on the desktop to see if it was able to scan and to see if it was able to read the mail. In that sense, it was simplistic. 

We ran into issues as we were scanning it, sometimes it was classifying it right, and sometimes not. So we had to bring machine learning in for it to be accurate. Therefore, while we did run into some complexity, deployment-wise, it was simple.

Our strategy was simple: informing the infrastructure team that spun up a VM for us. 

We did not use any integrator, reseller, or advisor.

We have definitely seen an ROI. We compare it to the number of hours saved. For each process we do, we measure it by the number of hours we save across the globe. That's how we are measuring ROI now. We don't have hard dollar amounts.

The solution is expensive. 

Initially, it maybe was $8,000 or $10,000. However, as the number of bots increases, the pricing has to come down. That said, with volume, we don't see that. 

Price will definitely be a factor if we decide to use UiPath down the road. Even looking into this Studio Web, I was thinking, "Okay, I can upgrade immediately to the newer version." Then, if we need two or three more Studio Webs due to the development that we need to do, or even the Citizen Developer, the bot, it's going to become very expensive if we need to take off. Therefore, the volume should provide some sort of discount. 

We did evaluate Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere was offering a SaaS model, which we like. However, the cost was expensive, and also the scalability wasn't what we needed. We are just at the beginning of the automation journey. When we were evaluating it, we didn't have that many bots that could justify that cost. Right now, we are at the point where we are maybe at eight to ten bots. It is taking off pretty fast at this point. Managing it may become an issue for us at some point, and maybe with the scalability, that model may offer more value to us. I don't think UiPath offers that as a cloud.

We are still surfacing demand for automating processes based on sustainable or environmental causes. We aren't using any automation to promote any good causes just yet.

I have yet to be a part of UiPath's user community and have yet to understand what they offer.

We haven't gotten into the UiPath Academy. We partnered with a couple of vendors, and I'm not sure if they're Academy-certified people.

At this time, while we do use AI, I'm not sure if it's UiPath's AI. We are still surfacing the process. We've done a proof of concept, and we have to measure the metrics to see if it makes sense for us to move ahead. 

For us, at least, the cost is the biggest factor for us to scale up. For others evaluating the solution, they need to look at ten years down the road or what is their vision for automation. Only then can they effectively evaluate the products. 

This solution was simple, and it was easier to use, so we took this first, and now we're pretty much married at this point. There isn't anything to complain about, however, if we had the vision to see where we would be, we might have looked at other products more. I don't have any complaints as of this point. As of now, the cost is the biggest sticking factor for us.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

You have the studio licensing, and the orchestrator. The architecture is complex, at least from a business point of view. There are a lot of moving parts that I have to work with. As with any product, I would just want it to be up and running immediately without the hassle of maintenance. I feel the maintenance factor in this product is high.

Right now, we have nine production animations.

Our first use case is to convert video to audio and then upload it to a legacy system. We have another use case that takes an Excel spreadsheet of 2,000 rows and searches one row at a time on the federal court website to get the results of our cases. 

We also have another use case that generates an SAP report daily, downloads a report, and feeds a Power BI dashboard. 

The last use case monitors a client's email, and as soon as there's the form request, we open the request, and we add it to their system automatically.

Thanks to COVID-19, since everything went digital, it added a lot of manual work to employees. It helps reduce manual labor. It just saved time. The robot now does the amount of work that got created due to COVID. It went back to normal in terms of workload now that we can get help from UiPath.

I love the REFramework and the Azure Queue and Orchestrator. Those are great features. They all work well.

The UiPath community is awesome. That's one of the reasons I use UiPath. There's so much stuff available everywhere. For example, if you go on Google and search for a subject, you are going to find information on either YouTube videos or community sites. There's just a lot of information available about everything. Also, a lot of super complete documentation is on the UiPath website. Any question we get, it's super easy to find technical information on that subject.

I've used the UiPath Academy courses. It has helped me start very quickly since they're all free, and there are many courses to choose from. When I started, I used my first two weeks to just do Academy training, and that's how I started. They have a complete curriculum. It's pretty nice.

The speed of upgrades is really hard to follow. It's great that there are continuous improvements just for us; however, it's just a bit hard to keep up with all of the changes.

I wish I could use the SaaS version. Our only con is the SaaS offering is not accredited in Canada, so we're working on that. That's not a UiPath problem.

I've used the solution for about two years.

The stability is awesome. It is very stable. It recovers itself. It doesn't err. It's very easy to carry on, and exception handling is very easy to manage it. I have no problem with it.

It's super easy to scale. I'm sure there are always ways to improve, and we're a small group, so I only have six bots in production right now. However, I already have some processes that could be scaled. They're using two robots now, yet I could easily put that to four or five if necessary. If you create workflows correctly, it's super easy to scale.

Technical support is pretty good. I've used it a couple of times and had no problems.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was straightforward. 

The installation instructions were pretty easy to follow. The orchestrator was pretty easy to set up, as were the studio and the system. There's nothing complicated. I find it's just a regular install.

I was given the license information and just went along with it. We are a small department. I was in a team of one. We didn't have a real strategy. We just had to start somewhere and do a proof of concept and move on from that. That was my strategy.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant. It was implemented in-house.

I have witnessed an ROI. For example, when converting video to audio and uploading it. Each video was taking about 30 minutes to upload manually, and we produce about 280 videos per day. The robot does it in four minutes right now, and it does it across Canada. Three bots do 280 videos in 20 hours. The ROI there alone would be huge.

I don't deal with the pricing aspect. That said, I don't see it as a problem. I see that it brings a lot more value. We save a lot more than the cost of their license.

I touched Power Automate a bit. I heard about Blue Prism. However, I did not really look into it. We just started with UiPath. When I joined them, my company had already purchased UiPath. So for me, I just started with UiPath.

We do not use the AI functionality just yet, although we have plans to in the future. 

I would for sure recommend UiPath. I haven't really tried other solutions. However, I've heard that people were trying them and returning to UiPath.

I'd rate it a ten out of ten. The product is awesome. The support is great. The community is also huge. It's super easy to find information, find support, and find stuff. I find it very easy to start using the product and can show value and benefit to clients.

We started with a pilot for our payroll department. It essentially takes the transactions that come into our payroll department on Fridays and Mondays, and sorts through those transactions. If there are any discrepancies or errors based on the defined criteria, it notifies the payroll department, and they can rectify those. Otherwise, paychecks don't process. 

Other than that, we have some data migration between Excel spreadsheets that we do, and we have contracts that we host on a web server that, if they don't have transactions for the same period of time, we have the automation go in and close those contracts out so the transactions can't go against them.

This was pretty much our first experience with automation. There wasn't anything prior. As far as UiPath is concerned and how automation has transformed the agency, we've found that hundreds of thousands of hours are being saved every year now, thanks to these processes. On a division-by-division basis, hundreds of thousands of dollars are being saved every year.

The wide variety of activities that are available for third-party applications has been quite useful when it comes to APIs. It's allowed us to leverage the other applications that we use within the agency. We can actually utilize the UiPath Suite over things like Microsoft Power Apps, Blue Prism, or Automation Anywhere, where they didn't have the capability to really interact with a bunch of third-party applications. 

UiPath helps save taxpayer dollars, which is a good, socially responsible, cause.

The UiPath community is very good. Eight to nine times out of ten, if I have a question or I'm stuck, I can go to the forums, and I can find experts, or I can find YouTube videos, and I can talk to other people. The contractors that we've worked with in the past were super helpful, and everybody's cooperative. Everyone wants to share ideas. At the end of the day, we all want just to make everyone's lives easier.

I've used the UiPath Academy's courses. I was thrown right into the fire. This was thrown on my plate, and they said, "Hey, you're going to be working with the contract; you got a month to spin up an automation." 

I learned while I did; however, as our center of excellence has grown within the agency, we've decided to adopt some new developers into the program, so we don't have to run into that same issue with new people. With the two or three that are coming up to be trained for the end of this year, it's definitely proven a lot of value, since we don't have to sit around and have people sit over shoulders for projects. It allows them to take their time, go through it, and practice. For me, going through some of the advanced courses, for the most part, I found them very well run and have been satisfied with them.

One thing that I would really like to see is some migration processes between environments. Right now, we either rely on a very rough CI/CD pipeline and/or manual efforts to transfer packages from one environment to another. Having some in-suite migration process would make our lives so much easier. 

The education aspect is probably the hardest part of getting people on board. Our server administration is separate from the rest of our CoE. We have to rely on them, and they're not necessarily privy to the UiPath Suite in general. Making it easier for them would make our lives easier, thus making our customers happier.

We've used UiPath for about two and a half years. We adopted it in late 2019, or early 2020.

We host on-prem, so I can't speak for the cloud support, though I've heard only good things. As far as stability is concerned, in terms of everything that we've moved into production, the only reason anything's ever broken, the only reason anything has ever not worked in general, has been due to agency oversight of people changing things without notifying the proper teams. As far as the UiPath's concerned, I would say it's pretty close to 100% stable.

The scalability question is hard to answer. The bottleneck is the fact that we are in the public sector, and we're dealing with a lot of state bureaucracy. We're limited in scalability, due to constraints that are outside of UiPath. I will say that as time has progressed and the more this technology's been adopted - including education and business awareness - the technology itself is very scalable. What's holding it back is general knowledge and public knowledge.

Most of the technicians I've worked with have been very helpful. Even if they don't have the answers, they're usually pretty good at getting back to me within two to three days and have relatively good answers. Or, if they can't answer it, they might steer me in a direction that will help me. 

As far as our accounts are concerned, we actually just received a couple of new tech advisors that deal with our agency. The team has been nothing short of fantastic to us. There have been times when we'll have our weekly meetings where they won't have the answer for us, and they'll say, "I'll get to you by next week." There have been times he gets back to us an hour after the meeting, and have detailed everything, or scheduled a call, so we can work on something together. That's been fantastic.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

I did the development, and I worked with our administrative team to deploy that automation.

It was straightforward. The education part and trying to have our center of excellence be centralized and having people all on the same page takes time. It came down to that whole migration where we are either working with a third-party application or system, like GitLab or some CI/CD pipeline, to get those packages migrated, or doing it manually led to a lot of hiccups throughout the course. 

What could have been done in a matter of hours or maybe a day or two, ended up taking, for almost every one of our automations, about a week or two, thanks to meetings, communication, and lack of education.

We have two environments. We have our Test DEV, then we have our production.  Once the developer completes the testing, it's sent over to our BAs; our BAs test it, then they verify that information with the customer to ensure the results are satisfactory. We then contact our server administrators, migrate the package over, and discuss the run time with the customers. 

Also, all of them, up to this point, have been unattended, so they're able to select a time and a date, whether it be daily, or weekly, or whatever that case is, and a time. We settled on a Thursday implementation date, no matter what, and the server administrators above the back page, then it goes on from there.

As far as consultants were concerned, they worked with us on the initial pilot. Everything else was done in-house. We have taken a step back to readdress our statement of work and how we plan on governing RPA going forward. We are working with a consultant company now to deal with more of the administrative overhead that was involved with this. However, we do plan that moving forward all development and deployments will still be held in-house by our developers and our administration.

My understanding is we are expected to hit the ROI that we're projected to hit next year. Even this year, with only three automations running for the entire year, we were able to cover our costs in that aspect essentially.

There are no more than five automations in full swing, and we would like somewhere between 15 and 20 next year. Likely, the ROI will continue to snowball. 

One of the automations that we put live essentially monitors updates to vendor contact information and conversations that are held with the vendors in our agencies and uploads that to a web database. Then, those conversations are logged in an Excel Spreadsheet that managers like to keep updated. This is roughly saving, on average, about 40 hours a week. Multiply that by 52 work weeks, and it's a lot of savings. It's roughly the cost of two full-time salaries that we are saving.

I am not super privy to pricing information. 

In the beginning, we were choosing between Blue Prism and UiPath, and keeping Microsoft Power platforms on the side burner to possibly automate things that were specifically within Azure and AD. 

While those three were being measured and worked through, we had to go through the bureaucratic chain of state government. It turned out that the UiPath suite, in general, was covering the bases we needed to cover with the third-party application integration. At the same time, the ease of getting everything up and running, the fact that we had a one-stop shop, and we didn't have to buy all these extra additional components just to make simple automation was worth it. Then, just talking with different industry leaders, contractors, and consultants, everybody suggested UiPath when it came down to Blue Prism and UiPath. That was the route we went.

We have yet to use the AI's functionality.

If you were a company looking to expedite as well as remove the monotony of a lot of the work that gets done, especially in the public sector, this is a good option. You likely have the same thing written down probably five times in 16 different places. Getting rid of that workload to free up people for doing other things, is the way to go. 

The most important aspect of all of this isn't having an amazing developer. It isn't having your great server admins or whatever the case is. It's making sure that the people you want to work with are educated and on board before it even starts. Making sure that people understand what RPA is and what UiPath can do for them is the most important thing. Our biggest roadblocks and the biggest things that have sprung us forward are all based on that educational aspect.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten.

If you asked me that question two years ago, I probably would've been closer to a six out of ten. The product improved, and the overall competence in the industry, and within the company in general, has improved across the board. The people I've worked with, including our tech advisors or sales rep, are great. There's a lot more confidence and stability. It's definitely given our agency a sense of confidence, and it's much easier to see where this is going. The results are what we've imagined. Everything seems to be much more real at the tail end of 2022. We're hoping this will be stable for our agency in 2024 as well.

Our company uses the solution to activate machine learning and automate processes for clients in the banking, supply chain, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries.

For one use case, we instruct a bot to pull data from various sources to Excel where we manipulate it and run macros to produce output that is uploaded to other target systems. 

For another use case, we automate report downloads from Salesforce and SAP.

For a third use case, we automate invoice and purchase order processing by combining machine learning with OCR to extract information, output it to a CSC file, and upload it to the SAP finance system. 

A fourth use case involves scientific analysis for a pharmaceutical company. We collect research and clinical trial data, use a bot to conduct analysis, and produce a final report for scientists to inform their next steps. Before automation, scientists would spend four hours manually pulling and analyzing data before moving to lab work. Now, the bot does all the groundwork so data is immediately available to scientists. 

A fifth use case focuses on leveraging image analysis to study molecule or protein structures and produce predictions. We train bots in a third-party machine learning model to understand the science and then integrate it with the solution. 

For a sixth use case, we use bots to translate clinical data that is common across multiple countries. A thousand pages of data used to take three months to manually translate in 30 languages, but now bots can complete the task in four hours. This also removes the expense and security risk of a third-party translator who would need to have access to sensitive data. 

Our goal across all use cases is to speed up operations with bots that work 24/7/365 so that staff can focus on other important work. In the last three years, we have built 100 bots with 80% unattended and 20% attended. 

An important company goal is to speed up clinical research processes that have an urgent social impact to ensure treatments become available to patients. 

COVID is an example of urgent social impact. When the virus hit, it moved fast and kept changing while scientists were still trying to understand its dynamic. 

Pharmaceutical companies have a responsibility to invent products and push them to market as fast as possible. Delays cause patients to suffer. Fast results will allow pharmaceutical companies to push treatments that save lives. 

The solution connects with different services via a plug-and-play model that includes Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. We do not need to go directly to vendors for services or write custom code to integrate applications. In most cases, connectors need minimal or no code at all. 

Integration services, cloud testing, and the AI center are easy to leverage. 

The solution should offer more AI-driven services that are outside of the finance industry. For example, we work in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries so would like to see scientific-related components. 

Technical support is good but there is room for improvement because some staff are not knowledgeable enough to assist with senior-level issues. 

I have been using the solution for five years. 

The solution is stable and services 40% of enterprise customers with no issues. We feel we are in good hands with the solution. 

The solution is very easy to scale for both infrastructure and bots. 

Our company purchased premium support so we have a dedicated technician available whenever we need help. Responses are usually quick and received within one hour. 

The solution's community forum includes a huge pool of talented programmers. If we get stuck on an issue, we post it in the forum and quickly receive ten to twenty solutions. 

The Academy offers video-based training modules that are helpful and straightforward. We can easily upgrade our skills with minimum time investment. 

Freelancers also post very useful plug-and-play components in the marketplace community.

I rate the support an eight out of ten because some support staff are not as experienced as needed. We cannot expect everyone to have senior-level skills, so are understanding with staff because the product evolves every day and that requires learning new skills. 

Positive

I previously used Kofax and Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere has issues with user-friendliness because it is not a drag-and-drop model and there are times when a lot of scripting is required for complex automations.  

The solution is easy to set up and deploy both on-premises and in the cloud. 

As a solution architect, I am involved in all phases of deployment including discovery, development, implementation, and post-production. 

The deployment process includes exporting workflows as a package, saving and loading the package in the source control tool, and pushing the code to the orchestrator. The process is very simple and there is no real maintenance after deployment. 

Our company implements the solution for customers. 

I do not have exact numbers, but for every automation there is at least a 200% savings in time and cost.

The solution's pricing is reasonable and lower than its competitors. 

We selected the solution because it offers more services with lower code requirements than any other automation tool. 

Companies that adopted other automation products and built 100-200 bots are moving to the solution because of the services offered and its simplicity. With so many companies moving to the solution, the market impact is clear.

The solution has exceeded our expectations and I rate it a nine out of ten. 

I use this solution to download investor suspenses from 35 different investors in warehouses and populate those suspenses into our loan origination system. Once those suspenses are cleared, we get purchase advice to receive money and give capacity back to the warehouse lines to continue lending. 

We have 10 operational robots as well as other automations. These automations include populating interim servicing payments that come into the LOS, so we have a historic record of it. I am working on a project to reduce the amount of new folders or maintain existing ones. This helps us reduce the cost of document storage in our LOS. 

We make use of UiPath's user community to see different people's insights, exchange ideas, and identify features that could work well for our business. We also make use of the UiPath Academy.

This solution has reduced our expenses by $30,000 a month. It has helped us reduce the costs of labor and continue to grow and scale.

One of the most important features of UiPath is the transactional basis of how it works. I can see which ones are successful, and which ones are not, and then have the bot take care of 98% of it. Our staff only deal with the exceptions and this has led to greater job satisfaction.

This solution has empowered us to take care of and create new integrations and help facilitate different processes and workflows to continue to streamline and scale our business.

In the future, we'd like to make use of the machine learning capabilities that UiPath offers and AI to scrape data off of different documents, log into different websites and populate the information where relevant. 

UiPath's AI functionality enables us to automate more processes overall. It allows us to pull information from various documents and populate it into different systems. This has enhanced the user experience. 

UiPath could be improved by offering overall solutions instead of just having the RPA process. 

We have been using this solution since 2020. 

This is a stable solution. The bots in the system are stable and function according to their instructions. They only stop when they encounter a new scenario they have not dealt with before. 

This is a scalable solution. We're also looking to expand our center of excellence to be able to take on all of UiPath's functionality and features.

I deployed the software and the Orchestrator Studio. I run eight or nine virtual machines that I have our LOS on and created processes where the LOS can feed the work queues so it takes care of different processes on schedule every day. The deployment took four months. 

We worked with different contractors to complete the deployment. 

I was allocated $50,000 to buy bots and create processes. I created about six or seven processes and then we calculated the savings. For the 50 grand, we had realized $1.5 million of savings. Although we don't always achieve this, it is possible to get a $7 return on every dollar spent. 

We evaluated many other tools including Automation Anywhere. One of the things that I love about UiPath is that the whole community and the company continue to deliver new cutting-edge tech. Every month we have a preview of new releases. It's not just one thing being released, there's a whole plethora of things and functionality being released.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate UiPath's solution overall an 11. I would advise others to just get started. It'll more than pay for itself and you'll be amazed at the capabilities and functionality that you'll soon have in your arsenal to execute different projects. 

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."

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.