UiPath Platform Reviews

I work for an international consulting firm and we work with enterprise clients. Our job is to provide them with RPA solutions and ultimately, we would like to provide opportunities for them to have every kind of automation.

We began with use cases in accounting and controlling departments, after which we moved to automate banking, legal, and IT processes. Nowadays, we are reaching out to HR to help automate some of their minor processes.

To this point, our implementations have been in an on-premises environment. At this time, we are in the process of migrating our on-premises UiPath environment to the cloud.

When I joined the RPA team, coming from a DevOps position, I assisted them with IT-related tasks such as implementation, packages, etc. I went on to become an RPA developer and began working on business sue cases. As part of my duties, I search for opportunities, help find internal clients, and improve governance inside of our enterprise. I am involved in all of the steps in the framework.

Our first automation was an on-demand service, used internally for us. We deployed an on-premises orchestrator, also used on an on-demand basis. Once we got this experience, we started building other solutions.

We deployed an internal chatbot named Alex, and our employees can ask whatever they want. For example, you can ask Alex what your salary is. Depending on your privileges, you will get more or less information. Everything is done using robots.

UiPath makes it easy to develop automations and this is the main selling point. I can speak with a client and in the meantime, I can prepare a demo on the fly that captures the client's thoughts at the moment. What it means is that as I'm speaking with you, I can start preparing a small demo. I find the product fun to work with.

An example of how this has improved our business is when dealing with internal clients. For example, if an internal business manager wants to use BI and needs to create a report with a specific set of data, they traditionally had to reach out to the IT department. IT will first examine the needs, then discuss how it is developed. It may need a database instance or other tools, for example. Traditionally, this is how it is done. 

One of the problems with this approach is that our headquarters is in France, and they are used to having internal discussions about everything. For a use case like this, they will consider all of the needs and other points before making a decision. It can be very time-consuming.

However, if we consider the same use case, using UiPath, we are able to create reports on the fly. We can be right in the same meetings with the IT people when we do it. 

If you're from a legal department and your solutions involve HR, as well as other company departments, I can automate several processes in four hours. Then, all of the processes can run during the night. It is an amazing product in this regard.

As we automate processes, another benefit that we receive is the ability to generate internal reports comparing departments and processes. We give these reports to the heads of the company to provide intelligence, helping them to better understand the organization. 

As an example of somewhere that UiPath has saved money, I implemented automation to replace a tool that one of our clients has. It is an internal timesheet tool and although the company uses SAP and SAP HANA for these tasks, this tool handles aspects that are specific to Spain. It is a small tool but is needed for a particular purpose.

The initial development of the tool, handled by an external third party, cost €20,000 (approx $22,500 USD) and there is a monthly maintenance fee of €700 (approx $790 USD). We discussed replacing the tool with our client but they were hesitant to change because they already had the solution.

We offered to replace their tool for free because we are trying to internalize processes, so there was also a benefit for us. We explained that once it was completed, we would be responsible for performing the calculations and analysis to ensure that the replacement was working properly. They agreed and it took me only one day to complete the automation. Now, it takes only a single button click from beginning to end. At the end of the day, it brings in all of the jobs. This automation saves them €700 per month in maintenance costs and it would have saved the initial development and deployment fee had it been implemented using UiPath from the beginning.

It was very easy to see that they were wasting money, and this is happening in a lot of places. We proposed to them that for these tasks, we would charge €600 (approx $675 USD) per day as consultants, and then for maintenance, we would bill them a monthly fee equivalent to 16% of the cost of the robot. For the bot used to replace their tool, it took me one day to develop and two days to plan and design it. The initial cost would have been €1,800 (approx $2,000 USD) and the monthly maintenance fee €200. They switched from their tool to the robot, since it was only costing €200 instead of €700 per month.

After they switched, they realized the power of automation and have since asked us about automating more of their internal processes. They have presented a storm of ideas, and the potential for savings is amazing.

You cannot compare whatever you do with a robot to a traditional software tool, package, or service. This example of the tool that we replaced is only one use case, and there are others but they are all more complex. Overall, it saves a lot in terms of time and cost.

The most valuable feature is the forum, where there is lots of help available. For me, UiPath is the perfect partner to converse with. I have brought four or five topics to the forum and every time that I was stuck, the problem had already been registered. I see the comments from the internal team and they are always tuned to the issue, always looking to fix small problems that have been found. We find that after they have been pointed out, fixes come included in the next release.

The interface is intuitive and very user-friendly.

The UiPath Academy provides courses to help you get up to speed with the solution, and to my thinking, it is crucial to start with this training. Developing a report in UiPath and other RPA solutions is very different from the traditional way to learn. When I studied in university, software development was focused on data structures and optimization. This varies a little bit depending on the programming language but more or less, this is what every framework follows. It's logical and we are always trying to optimize our processes. With RPA, it's different because you base your process on the logic, and then tweak with the tools. It's the difference between painting a picture and shaping an object. For me, the training was crucial and it helps a lot to learn right from the beginning.

The basic course took me four or five days to complete. Just with that, it was enough to become familiar with the framework and quite enough to start making your own automations.

I'm always looking for new courses from the Academy. For example, I completed the architect training, as well as the course on governance. The academy is well structured and very useful, although not mandatory because you can start by yourself. That said, I definitely recommend it.

We use the AI-enhanced document understanding capabilities, as well as other related features.

UiPath is based on the .NET framework, which means that we are currently limited to Windows deployment.

The update process has resulted in several small issues for us. Sometimes when you update, there are several lines that are not included in the package. This kind of technical error, even though it's small, has to improve. I understand that they are trying to implement all of the services that they can, and this kind of thing happens when you expand your model. The same thing happens to us. That said, it needs to improve.

The .NET formwork is well known, as is C#, but it requires a lot of computing power. Everything is JSON-based, so it always has to preload all of the information. This means that there is overhead in the performance and if it were only a simple query, it might be slower with UiPath. However, with a cloud-based environment, we don't have to worry about this.

When it comes to migration, it's always painful. We have found several issues that require changes to be made from a coding perspective. In our current migration from on-premises to the cloud, we had a problem that delayed us by approximately a week. However, I don't consider this to be a pain point because it's a normal thing that happens when you try to size up your company by introducing many new services.

From a technical perspective, the migration is straightforward but we haven't completed our migration yet because we have not set up the gateways to access our services.

I have been working with UiPath since 2019, approximately three years ago.

Starting from version 20, UiPath has been very stable. Prior to this, it has not been 100% stable. That said, we have not had any troubles with the platform in general.

The problems that we have encountered were when we tried to upgrade or to migrate by uninstalling and reinstalling the Orchestrator. There were some internal issues where people didn't read the communications that we put out.

Generally speaking, Orchestrator is very well built. We have put a lot of stress on the system and haven't experienced any problems with performance.

Scalability-wise, UiPath is quite good. This is an interesting topic because, in the beginning, I didn't put much thought into scaling. I was used to building solutions, and that's all. UiPath offers special packages that target scaling up. These packages become relevant when you have more than 20 processes.

For example, you can have activities that trigger processes, and you can include one activity inside of another. With these features, you realize that a huge amount of work is already taken care of.

More to how well it scales, they have a very useful package of integration tools.

Personally, I have automated 70 processes and the total for the team is approximately 300. Within the past year, we have delivered more than 200,000 hours of automation.

Since I joined the group, we have brought a lot of RPA clients into the enterprise.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

The reason for my rating is that I have been waiting since last year for integrations that are coming. With respect to getting support for other things, I have not had any problems.

The support wants to teach us how to build an automation ecosystem inside the enterprise by combining artificial intelligence models, data analysis, and these kinds of things.

During our implementation and afterward, they have given us ideas about how and where things should go. This has been helpful but from my perspective, it is all still a little bit hard to understand. There is a lot of documentation to study. This is, in part, because they are growing and building.

I have done several RPA jobs in telecom when I worked for another company.

We first deployed version 18 of UiPath, and we found the initial setup to be quite straightforward. It was well packaged and easy to install.

The only pain point for us was issues related to implementing the solution inside our ecosystem. It contains VMs, firewalls, and other things that add to the complexity. This, however, belongs to us. From the perspective of UiPath, they gave us a package to install the Orchestrator, and another to install the runtime in every machine that we want it to work with. Things are quite straightforward in this regard.

In our case, we needed a newer version that came with some of our internal tools preinstalled. This is because we used to have access through Citrix. The installation was very easy.

It took approximately a day for each installation and within a week to two weeks, the service was working. There were five of us working on implementation and deployment. Four of us were working on installation and testing, and three people in the team were IT architects.

UiPath has saved us a lot of time. We calculate our benefit by counting hours saved and last year, we saved 200,000 hours. This means that we replaced between 120 and 140 people by using automation. This is our main metric for calculating cost savings.

When we first started with RPA, we compared UiPath with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We chose UiPath right at the beginning.

For me, it was a straightforward choice. UiPath has a lot of help available, and they have a lot of tools. The forum, for me, is the winning factor. For now and in the future, UiPath is the product that I will use.

Another factor in our decision was the ability to use the product before purchasing it. Blue Prism had a demo account so they were a little bit open. However, Automation Anywhere wasn't open at all. They wanted us to pay while we learned how to use it. For me, that was the breaking point because UiPath could be used for free and was open from the beginning.

Coming in as a developer, I very much appreciate that the platform and the code are open. They don't keep everything that they are doing a secret. They have their own business model and they provide the tools. They let you play as much with the solution as you want to.

The interface is also more user-friendly than the other products for creating automations. In fact, I didn't use the other tools very much. In total, we evaluated them for two months, although this time included installation, learning how to use the platform, and trying different automations. Ultimately, based on everything, we chose UiPath.

We tried to compare the products while we were creating simple automations and on every point, we found a huge distance between UiPath and the other tools. For example, the interface was much more intuitive than the other two products.

At the time, UiPath wasn't as big as the other two solutions. However, it had a lot of potential for growth. This was another point that my boss took into consideration when making the decision.

Since the beginning, UiPath has been trying to work out a partnership with Google, including the main tools and main services. For us, and from an enterprise perspective, that is very good. We expect UiPath to grow a lot.

If we have a server and a good investment in machines, virtual or physical, then we don't have anything to worry about. 

As I continue my career in RPA, what I understand is that it's the beginning of a new industry. It's like an industrial revolution, but for automation. When we began with use cases in accounting and banking, it was all related to numbers and we were always using structured data. However, today, we are using things like chatbots. We are also expanding into AI use cases and UiPath continues to grow to include new capabilities and functionality.

In the next ten years, I expect there to be a huge demand for automation. This will be in every kind of enterprise, as well as our day-to-day life. One example is the smart house, with implementations for domestic processes.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is, firstly, not to panic. It is a new way to develop and understand your business model. Second, do not go too fast. Sometimes, the easiest way to develop robots can lead you to forget about your basics and best practices. Third, bring a strong internal framework, including your business model, best practices, and internal documentation.

It's crucial to be able to scale up in the future, so be sure to consider your larger processes at an early stage. Don't look at things in a traditional way. For example, you can use Python for automation, which is a very open framework, but Python doesn't let you do all of the things that you can do with UiPath. You need to follow a more structured coding approach. Essentially, you always have to be organized and try to take things step-by-step. Otherwise, you will have an internal fight between robots in your Orchestrator.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We typically solve for any use cases that falls under different business functions within our company. That includes finance, supply chains, services, IT by itself, and a little bit of engineering.

UiPath has improved the way our organization functions. The flexibility with which the business processes get changed is great.

A lot of times we know the method of operation, however, certainly it'll not be the same after a few months, a few years, or longer. Our dependent script or whatever is in place (that is dependent on that business process) has to be adjusted. The flexibility with this tool has enabled us to adjust those workflows quickly and deploy them so that our business can continue using those applications or the workflows that we’ve been using before, even after changes to the underlying system.

The most valuable aspect has been the workflows. They have helped to deal with legacy applications. We have a lot of legacy applications in place, which we cannot get rid of. The processes around these legacy applications are something that cannot be automated in a typical way. The RPA is helping us to automate the business processes that have to work with legacy applications.

The ease of building automation using the solution is great as it is a low-code solution.

I'm able to create workflows. By the time I'm familiar with one process, I'll be able to automate the next one. This is the case especially with tools like task capture; I'm just working through the process. In the end, it will be a skeleton workflow and it can be used for deployment once we are done with the cleaning. It has reduced the development life cycle by about 30%. It’s done this by making use of the features that are enabled by task capture and certain other features within the Studio.

Overall, we’ve seen the solution has saved costs. That is our value realization.

Our first target metric is to bring up the number of processes that we can save. We have a formula to convert inter-dollar values in terms of the user experience we are benefitting from. That’s the user experience that is enabled by automation. Those are direct savings which can be calculated by multiplying the number of dollars that we have spent for one resource per hour. Indirect monetary benefits can also be calculated by looking into the user experience factors and adding them when we do the value realization. In the last four years, we would've saved $3 million.

The human error rate has been reduced. Initially, when we targeted some of the business use cases, they were straightforward. They were linear in nature and there the accuracy had the upper hand 99.9% of the time. The reason is that the process by itself is quite linear. It doesn't have multiple branches or exceptional routes that it has to take to complete a particular transaction. We have good accuracy, however, we have had challenges with the accuracy when the business processes get complex. If there is any human intervention or if the quality of the data is not proper, or if the user errors are low, that is where the accuracy rate used to be low. It's better now.

Due to the fact that all these are role-based bots, if there is something that is getting changed, the bot will fail. Down the line, I can see that, for linear processes, accuracy will be great. However, when it comes to some of the complex processes, that is where we have challenges that we are facing with accuracy and we are continuously fine-tuning the process in such a way so that the accuracy can get better. It's great we can continuously tweak.

The solution does free up employee time and allows for the employees to focus on higher-value work. We have a lot of examples within our organizations where they have to deal with some kind of manually intensive task, such as just reading something from the document and putting that into the financial system.

We normally take up the customization portion that comes directly from customers. Those kinds of customizations have to be updated back into the financial system in order to make sure that they are appropriate. These updates take a while as they have to do with talking to the customer, understanding what changes are needed for a given order, or based on specific correspondence from the customers. With automation, employees can focus on talking to the customer to understand what changes they have to incorporate. And they can offload all the data entry tasks to a robot. This way, they can focus on how they can engage more with users to understand the pain points faced by the customer rather than spending time taking all those inputs and then doing the data entry job. They can be more client-facing.

I’m not sure exactly how much time is saved with automation. I could say that we have around 150 purchase processes that we have automated. We don't trace back how it has replaced a team or member of a team. We always go with the number of hours saved. We go the route of checking and saying “okay, so we have done this, but it needs a constant involvement from them in order to make sure that someone is owning the process.” We still own only the work.

We have started to use the solution's AI functionality in our automation. We started it recently and we have finished the proof of concept on document understanding, which involves AI, of course.

In terms of AI automation, we will be leveraging this tool for all business functions. There is no limit with any of the business folk that we talk to. Whatever the process is, as long as we feel that it is feasible to automate, and there is a value in automating it,  or as long as we feel that we are automating the right processes, we will just take that up into our pipeline.

AI does help us handle complex and involved processes. We include a lot of use cases where the sole core RPA capability would not suffice as a purely role-based automation. We often encounter a lot of use cases where they say, "Hey, this is something where there is no logic in doing it." If there’s analysis or natural language processing, et cetera, we are making use of AI. However, the process isn’t in use yet. We’re just starting.

We have used UiPath’s Academy courses and we are also encouraging our implementation partners to refer to those materials so that they can be approved.

It’s kept us up to speed with the solution. We refer to the Academy daily. Of course, we get help from UiPath whenever we face any hiccups; we normally ask them questions and they're able to sort it out for us. That said, the materials are great for trying to sort out issues or problems on our own.

It's been four years of practice and we've matured with the traditional RPA candidates. We have a strong foundation with what we have showcased to our business folks, and we are good with the healthy background that we are building. However, when it comes to the roadmap of what's next, that is where we are not clear. While we get the concepts, bringing them to reality is looking to be quite a challenge. We are unsure as to if UiPath can actually bring our vision to life.

UiPath is very clear in defining items such as this is what the high automation needs, this is what the process planning needs. We are getting clarity into those concepts and we are able to explain that and take that back into leadership to get other approvals. They are able to understand what UiPath is talking about within these different concepts. Really, it's just figuring out whether we have the right arrangement at this point and if UiPath can get us there.

I've been using the solution for four years.

I'm impressed with the version that we have today. 2019.10 is a version that is quite stable, compared to how we did with 2018. A lot of pieces that are enabled as part of the new version, 2019, are stabilized. We have zero downtime with the tool.

Today, ith X number of bots, if we want to reuse the same solution, and if there is an appetite for consuming those kinds of robotic solutions, of course, buying more bots is going to solve the problem.

If you think in terms of scaling this platform by itself or the other business functions, that is where the discovery piece will come into play. We have to constantly talk to businesses to understand where the opportunities are to scale in the correct manner.

Scalability is possible in terms of reusing existing automations. It's related to the number of bots that we are going to purchase. When it comes to the number of business processes that we are automating, during the discovery process, twe have to engage with our customers and constantly follow up with them. When we understand more about how they're doing business, we're able to locate the kinds of tools that are going to help them.

Currently, we have eight bots in production and 150 processes are automated. I’m not sure how many users are actually on UiPath currently.

We always follow up with our business to build our pipeline. That goes hand in hand with the implementation. We off-load all automation ideas and requirements to the pipeline, to our implementation partners, so that they will be able to implement our vision.

Traditional support for the RPA is great. In terms of the help that we are getting, if we end up with some issues, running operational issues, it could be better if they can propose some fixes. It's not that automation is going to solve every other problem that the underlying system is having. However, we expect some kind of expertise from the tech support when we face issues that are related to the system. We need to understand if there's an ERP error, if it has to do with the underlying system, or if automation has to solve the issue. Often, technical support will say "Okay, so this is your error, go and solve it." Yet, due to the fact that support has seen more issues like this, they should have more insights and they need to be able to share those inputs in a way that is going to help us.

While I didn't use a different solution previously, the finance team has used Blue Prism before. They implemented Blue Prism and they engaged Blue Prism to automate the processes that they have added for automation. Now, we have aligned on a single platform. It is UiPath now, however, they initially had around 50 processes that they automated using Blue Prism.

We proposed UiPath as the one solution based on Gartner ratings.

The initial setup was quite straightforward as we understand how RPA works and we understand how UiPath is going to help, how UiPath is a tool to help us to automate things. It's quite straightforward in terms of that. Whenever we are doing some kind of initiative, like document understanding or data capture, it is quite straightforward.

However, with process planning, we didn't understand the documentation right away. That is where we used to get help from UiPath.

The pricing was great at the start, and so, down the line, we have been enhancing all these features. We are seeing that, as we are looking for opportunities to grow, the number of robots that we need to purchase and the software cost is going to go up.

UiPath has increased the cost. We feel that it's good, however, based on all the new features, which we are pursuing. That said, we expect that whatever robots that we have purchased or whatever the standard platform that we have from UiPath should continue with the pricing that they had earlier.

There will be an offset, however, when it comes to the existing platform like Orchestrator or robots, and we are expecting that the margin should be less.

Back in 2017, we evaluated three to four products. Blue Prism was already used by the finance team, however, we evaluated WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere.

Of those other three, we evaluated WorkFusion and UiPath extensively.

The two reasons that we went with UiPath were, one, the learning curve, and, two, the community edition of UiPath, which had everything we needed to dig into the solution. Whereas with the other companies, there wasn't that option. With Blue Prism, for example, we had to buy a license in order to check whether the tool was going to work for us. In 2017, we were not sure whether this was going to work or not. At that stage, UiPath was the only company that gave us the entire set of tools to try and it worked really well.

We are customers and end-users.

While we're using the on-premises deployment, we are open to moving to the cloud. There are a lot of cloud solutions that we already use in our organization. However, with UiPath, we have stayed on-prem out of concern for security. We don't have clarity on if a cloud solution is going to work securely.

The other concern is around how we are augmenting the capabilities of core RPA. We know that process mining is going to help us, however, whether process mining is already added into the RPA, do we have any solid use cases that we can start with.

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

We are a services company. In terms of how we use UiPath, we handle a lot of the financial processes, including our customer billing, our time tracking, and our time reporting exceptions - such as looking at who has not submitted a timesheet. When this exception happens, there are automatic emails that go out using the RPA, from UiPath. 

The whole process from our inventory, which is our asset, is automated. With the asset, which is the time that our people spend on clients, we make sure that we capture what we need to create and send invoices out. The whole collection and AR process, including making sure that we get the money and send reminders to clients, that whole process, is automated - with human intervention, as needed.

The solution has decreased the processing time of the client's invoices for IT. Just IT. Not the rest of the organization. That said, just there, that’s 600 hours of annual savings in one department. On top of that, we’ve decreased processing time by 90%.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership. More than that, it creates agility so companies don't have to worry about delivering the infrastructure team and setting up sellers and all the things that they need to do to get to the stage of actually installing the software and internal security. That all takes time to go through. With the cloud, you avoid all that. You basically create agility for the clients to jump onto automation and not wait for all these things. It can be frustrating sometimes in large companies. That's why we tell clients to avoid all these headaches. With the cloud, you’ll get going very quickly within a matter of a day or so.

RPA is not the only thing we do. We do a lot of ERP, CRM, all of these things. Traditionally, we are a full-service organization for clients and their journey to the cloud. Everything's going to the cloud. There are some organizations that still have on-premise ERPs to migrate from the on-premise to the cloud. When those fundamental applications are going to the cloud, automation is a no-brainer. We would always promote the cloud version over on-premise.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect. The power of machine learning and AI along with the document understanding capability that UiPath has is great.

By implementing that portion of the solution, we get clients to 95% accuracy in reading invoices for processing into the ERP. While running basic automation will continue, the world is moving towards intelligent automation, which is with all the machine learning and AI.

Overall, the solution has saved costs for our clients.

It has reduced human error. Machines can do anything faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality than humans can do. That is just a universal fact. I don't think we have measured the accuracy, however, there's no doubt accuracy has gone up. The client recognizes that the accuracy rate has improved.

We're not talking about removing errors. In some cases, errors may happen. However, when I say we’ve seen a 90% efficiency rate, it doesn’t mean the remaining 10% are bad decisions. We're talking about how it could not read those things. The confidence level is low, and therefore, it's kicked to a human to review. It did what it's supposed to do, which is to flag for human review, which is how processes should happen.

The solution has allowed the employees to focus their time on other higher-value work. That's what we pitch to our clients. We never tell clients that oh, you can lay off people. We do not tell the clients that that's what they should do. Rather, we advise clients that what they can do with automation is free up people's time. That means either freeing up a portion of the time or fully freeing time or completely reassigning a job. 

After automation, you may have to reorganize your department. However, with the freed-up time, departments can focus on the most important thing, which is what can they do to create focus on the customer and create an experience for the customer, where the customer feels they want to be connected with your brand.

I have a case where I was talking to the CEO of a big restaurant company. HR, payroll, finance, all those areas that reported to him. He also handles customer experience. I told him about automation and the power of automation and how it will free up people's time. He said, “So what you're telling me is I can free up a portion of my staff so they can focus on all these customer complaints we're receiving?" For him, that is going to be a game-changer.

UiPath has also positively affected the employees themselves. They've become a little bit more satisfied with knowing that they can focus their time on higher-value work. In most cases, initially, there'll be fear for them. They don't know what automation is, and why they're doing it, and what it's going to do to their position in the company. That fear will always be there with humans. That's why leadership needs to focus on change management and communication. Those things become very, very important. Once you do it right, people will actually feel happy. They will no longer have to say "Oh, no, I don't have to stay until six o'clock, seven o'clock every day to finish the SaaS." Now it's much easier. They can focus on the things that they truly enjoy, which has nothing to do with the heads-down work that they do all the time.

We use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program for our clients. For simple processes, you don't need AI. However, the complex process where machines need to mimic the human thought process requires AI. AI is not perfect. It's not a holy grail that is going to solve all problems. That's not the case. We have to be careful. However, if you use it right in the right way, then you can truly solve complex problems.

I’m not sure if the solution's AI functionality enables us to automate more processes overall. It's hard to say. For me, the way I look at technology is that it is not a hammer that's looking for a nail. You have to look at your business needs and then figure out what technology will best fit or solve the problem. It could be simple AI, or, maybe in some cases, you need more advanced AI. I would look at it as what's the right technology for what purpose. That's the way I look at it.

We do use UiPath’s Academy. We have several people that we've pushed through training and certifications through the academy. It’s helped get those employees up to speed on the solution.

Also for us, as we are a services company, that gives us a stamp of quality seal in order to market our services better as we are certified and qualified.

UiPath continues investment in machine learning and AI. That's one thing they have to do. The fundamental thing UiPath needs to understand is the competition, the market, is not Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism. Rather, big competition is coming from Microsoft.

It's around the corner and Microsoft is going to come in a big way. I’d advise them of the parallel of Power BI. Power BI three years back was not a good tool. Other tools, like Tableau, were the kings of the BI space. Fast forward three years and today we do a lot of BI for clients. Almost every client of ours is migrating to Power BI, like Power BI's matured to 80% of Tableau, and that's good enough for them. On top of that, Microsoft was throwing free licenses to their customers. When you do that, versus buying $2,000 a pop or $1,500 a pop from Tableau, users line up behind the free tool to reduce their costs. Microsoft is doing that with Power Automate now. I just talked to a client, a big client, a $10 billion company, where they were at Blue Prism. They just told me that Microsoft just gave them 70 free licenses. Now, they are forced to bring Microsoft Power Automate into their RPA strategy even though before, they were not considering that.

UiPath should take several steps forward to be prepared for this competition and create differentiation with capabilities that Microsoft does not have. The innovation within UiPath is going to be very, very crucial. However, the most important thing is to clear the differentiation in the messaging. That's very, very important. They should be ready and arm their partners with information about why UiPath and not Power Automate.

I've been around the industry for 35 years, and I've seen lots of incumbents getting blown away in various technologies at various times. The big power comes down hard. UiPath has got to be ultra nimble to not get crushed.

We started working with UiPath in 2018. We partnered with UiPath in late 2018. It's been about a three-year journey so far. 

In terms of stability, I've not heard anything bad at my level. That means no bad news is good news.

We do plan to scale beyond the client's IT department and to the rest of the organization. When they scale it up to the rest of the organization, and this organization operates in 25 countries, they have over $190 billion in assets in these countries that we can add efficiencies to. The scale of efficiency that we will get with what we did will be huge. That’s the next step is to roll it out to the rest of the organization.

General scalability is an issue when it comes to processing large data sets. However, with the right creativity, you can solve those things due to the fact that you can have the right infrastructure to catalyze or do whatever you have to do to create scalability. We are used to doing that. We deal with ERPs and we create architecture and design the environment in such a way that it can scale. That said, you need to know how to do that. 

Technical support is very good. We're very pleased with that. When we ran into problems with a client, with the document understanding, initially the success rate was not very high. Then we had to reach out to the support and they actually jumped in and assisted us and told us what we needed to do. Once we did that, then things took off and we got to 90% accuracy. Initially, it was only 50%. Therefore, for us, it's been good.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

We did partner with Automation Anywhere,, however, ultimately, we didn't do anything with them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We're a consulting company, and we work with several clients. For some deployments, we were able to do the first deployment in 30 days. With other clients, it took about three months or four months, depending on the use case or the initial use cases that they picked.

Different companies operate differently. I always advise clients that they need to pick simple use cases and deploy them first before they go into complex stuff. Sometimes clients make the mistake of picking their most complex use case and say, "Oh, let's try that." No, that's not a good way. It's not a good way to embark on a journey that's long-term.

You've got to think big, start small, and be agile. If you get a complex use case at the beginning, you lose agility.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. The momentum was with UiPath. I knew where the momentum was and how we needed to align ourselves. That's why we did UiPath.

We looked at where the market demand is. For example, Blue Prism. We knew that Blue Prism is a lot more IT-centric, IT heavy, programmer heavy, which defeats the whole purpose of self-service automation. It's never going to succeed in the marketplace today as we promote self-service for everything.

That's why we didn't want to waste our time with Blue Prism. UiPath obviously has the community edition, which was brilliant. Basically, they saw a gap in the market. That's a parallel to what we do, for example, in Vtech space. Also, for example, Tableau is a good tool. So many people love Tableau. They've used Tableau. You had the established players in BI space like MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, however, they were very IT-centric and Tableau came in and beat them. They sold out into the business and you could download, pay $2000 and download a license and start creating your dashboards. I was glad that UiPath took a similar approach by creating a community edition, and then letting end-users download and then play with it.

We basically help clients think through their RPA strategy, their automation strategy and figure out what the right technology would be. We are a reseller. If it makes sense, we'll resell and we'll advise clients regarding UiPath for their RPA journey. We also use the solution ourselves. We have automated certain things, certain processes within the company. That becomes a practice round and a learning ground for our people so that when we go to clients, we can take some of these ideas and do to the clients as well as reaping the right expertise.

I'm not sure if we are using the UiPath apps feature or the applications feature. In my role, I just lay the strategy and the team executes it.

A lot of times things stall. In company setups we see a lot of cases where they did a few automations, a few bots, and then things stalled. That's a problem in the industry and the way to solve that and truly embrace the art of the possible is with automation. To get there, you need to execute across senior leadership. Without that education, they just don't put their weight on their departments to do the journey. Education is one thing that is very important. They understand the art of the possible.

Another important aspect at the outset is having RPA as a corporate strategy. Pushing to make it a corporate strategy is really going to help. That way, you can stall it for some time, however, eventually, it will have to get done. Otherwise, they are left behind when your competitors take advantage of the agility. There needs to be a center of excellence and companies need to develop internal capabilities. If they don't have capabilities, then they fear not knowing how to handle something. Those are common problems. And those need to be overcome.

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

Our use cases are all across our enterprise, from HR to finance, to customer service, to laboratory operations, to logistics, to compliance, to medical, et cetera.

The unattended automation is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

When COVID hit, and we needed to manage 200,000 samples a day and figure out where they were in the world. It would take humans about half a day to get an answer. Within a week, we put together automation that pulled data within 30 seconds from every single information system across our network.

Building automation using the solution is very easy. It's super, super easy. We have a citizen developer model where I've got 60 citizen developers trained. I've got people who started out answering the phone in customer service who are generating millions of dollars of value in automation.

Overall, this solution has saved costs for our organization by as much as $10 million.

While the solution is reducing human errors, I don’t have specifics on that.

The solution has freed up employee time. It’s hard to ballpark as what we're doing mostly is consolidating time and not back-filling from there. If you had the same amount of people as before, you didn’t really save, unless you were able to have more revenue with the same number of people.

It's been incredibly instrumental in a number of brand new business paradigms that popped up over COVID. For example, pre-COVID, if you had a respiratory tract infection, you would go to the hospital to get care, however, during COVID, the hospital wouldn’t even let you in the door. Our business model went completely upside down. The average general practitioner has 2000 patients. Our order entries went up by 500 fold. There was a backlog of testing. Automation helped manage that.

We use the UiPath Academy courses. They have been extremely helpful for us due to the fact that UiPath actually allowed us to host the fundamentals foundation training on our training platform. Now, I can assign it. I can track it. And I can reward it. The advanced developers class has been great. Getting users through that is very helpful. I take all my citizen developers through advanced training. No Studio X, no halfways. They have to really know how to do it.

The pricing particularly on the bot licenses is placed to maximize revenue for UiPath and is not in the best interests of the customer. For example, if I have 150 robots, our utilization of that is about 27% as my demands come in spikes. Most of the robots sit there doing nothing, and I paid for them.

I'd say I need better error handling capabilities, however, the updated 2020 is going to give me a better interface, so that's already there. 

If I were going to wave a magic wand, I would like to see tighter integration of task capture through the PDD generation. That process is not quite as smooth as I would like right now. I haven't really deployed it as widely as I would like as I don't want issues surrounding the document. I've got the template built up, however, we have had trouble deploying it the right way. If the integration were better, the process wouldn't be such a concern.

I've been using this solution for three years.

The stability has been good so far. 

The scalability is fantastic. We learned that during COVID. Suddenly, we have to set up accounts differently. We were doing 15 to 20 a day. When I said "Oh, by the way, schools are going to start doing testing, and I need to be able to set up a hundred accounts a day" we got to a hundred.

We have 75 users currently on the solution. We do plan to increase usage. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The deployment took about six weeks.

We had the infrastructure in play in December 2019 and were functional by April 2020.

We had pieces set up already, however, we had people running orchestrators on boxes hidden in closets. We decided to centralize. Now, everything is in the data center and going on the virtual machine. Everything's under that control. Therefore, in total, it took about four months to have it properly set up.

I am extremely unhappy with the pricing model. I want a model similar to an electricity meter, whereby if I use more I am charged more. That's the ultimate model. They should also make the Studio free due to the fact that they should want developers developing. You want to maximize that capability. Why charge for that? Charge me for the Orchestrator. Charge me more for licensing if you want, however, UiPath should be maximizing my ability to create automation.

We had some experience with Automation Anywhere, Softomotive, and Blue Prism.  When we got serious about it, we did a runoff and selected a single vendor.

What set UiPath apart was their handling and selectors. The selector was head and shoulders above anyone else. We had a lot of experience with automation platforms that did not do well. Screen coordinates and scraping and control methods to move to a script, for example, were not reliable methodology.

While we are currently on version 2019.10.2, we are upgrading the 2020.10.2 version this month.

We’re just starting to use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. It’s a bit too early to comment too much on it.

I'd advise new users to get their governance together early.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

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

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

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

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

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

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

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have automated tasks within our organization and are automating our marketing applications. Internally, we have automated in-person and webinar event creation for Microsoft. Whenever there is a request for creating an event that is covered on, for example, either on Jira or the Dynamics 365 application, the task makes an API and pulls data from both sources. It then creates an event on Marketo. It runs totally unattended. We have actually saved the build time that was previously around 45 minutes and we have reduced it to just four minutes.

Previously, we had a build time of around 45 minutes just to process one request. This was kind of a disaster because even in 45 minutes of build time, and this is the average build time, people were making mistakes. When these errors happened, the company had to actually pay money to the client. For example, if a company has an event at 3:00 PM on September 1st, and due to time zone issues, someone manually wrote \ 4:00 PM then people would arrive at 4:00 PM, whereas the event had started at 3:00 PM. Mistakes like that could become a very, very big issue.

Using UiPath, we were able to reduce these kinds of errors. We were also able to reduce the time by more than 90%, just by deploying the bot that could do API calls in order to complete a specific point of data gathering.

For the portion that we automated, the errors that were happening were reduced to 0% and the efficiency was up to 90%.

We've found the usability of Studio very easy. It's simple to understand everything. It's very simple to just start developing within UiPath. 

The Orchestrator is fantastic in terms of usability as all you have to do is just need to deploy your bot there. It gives you several options of how to schedule it, how to monitor it, and it also gives you the dashboard that allows you to see the performance of your bot.

I really like the fact that we have a cloud model, where we can actually go ahead and use their cloud to run our bot. That is a very good kind of feature. 

I really like AI fabric and the documented understanding model, as that actually allows us to do a couple of very complex POCs. They went very well and right now, those prefaces are currently in the pipeline. Hopefully, they will get started with them next month.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is very easy. When it comes to comparing it against other tools, UiPath might be the easiest one. It's totally subjective, of course. That said, there are scenarios where automating certain kinds of scenarios with UiPath is not that easy. Overall, it's pretty good at automating all kinds of stuff.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end coverage is very important. While working with clients like Microsoft and Google, we have to actually go ahead and make sure that you're actually providing all of these kinds of services. With services such as documentation you also need to be on top of the latest market trends. UiPath actually provides us with not only the ability to handle all of this but to also document all of these kinds of things. That is available, either as a part of some other products or is embedded within the Studio itself as a part of an extension. That is something that I really like as that actually reduces the time that I invest in the creation of the documents. That, and the client actually requires all of these documents before even we can go ahead with the contract, makes having them on hand so important. 

The Automation cloud has helped decrease time to value. Earlier, the deployment of an on-prem Orchestrator took around two to three days for proper configuration and for making sure that there's a disaster recovery mechanism. Automation cloud has everything built already within it, which makes things faster and easier. This reduces the amount of time that is required by us to deliver. Within our area of work, within marketing, time is everything. Once you have taken on the project, the client expects you to deliver it as soon as possible. The requirements that you're getting from the client are very, very time-sensitive. If you're essentially not delivering it on time, that is going to be an issue. Automation Cloud actually helps us to do that without thinking about other things. It actually goes ahead and does a couple of things for us that we don't have to worry about, such as deploying the Orchestrator on the cloud, making sure that everything is properly set up, and making sure that the disaster recovery option is there. These kinds of things actually save us days of time for installation, if not days of debugging time. 

It's very important for our company to scale up automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. There are a couple of projects that we have where we don't really care about the infrastructure. If it is handled by UiPath, it's absolutely fine. However, for example, in the case of some of our elite clients, what happens is that they actually need to know the details and how data is being propagated amongst different servers. If we're not controlling the environment, if we're not handling the entire knowledge, we won't be able to give them the same thing and the project might go away just because of this fact. Therefore, I'm not saying it's not very important. It's actually very, very important. That's why we use both services that are provided by UiPath - both on-prem and cloud. That said, if we have projects where we don't need to worry about it, it's nice to have the option not to.

UiPath has helped us minimize our on-premise footprint. Their customer service has actually helped us reduce that. UiPath was released in 2015. There are experts on this particular thing in the market, and most of those experts are found via UiPath only. When help is provided by UiPath themselves, that can actually resolve the issue in a matter of hours rather than days.

We use attended automation. We usually use attended automation within the HR department. Basically, we're using it for onboarding, for monthly salary management. It's great for automating some of the basic SAP projects as these are the places where we require human interaction, either to handle the credential part or to provide some inputs. This actually helps bring confidence into the process and also phases out the work of a particular human. Automation has integrated with some human day-to-day jobs so well that now when employees come in, the primary thing that they have to do is just to trigger the bot and start providing input. Work that they used to do for the first half of the day, is completed in the first hour of the day. That's the kind of benefit that is being provided by attended automation.

There is good AI functionality and we use it for some proof of concept projects. That said, we haven't yet used it for more complex or involved automation or processes just yet. We have one project in the pipeline that we have to start working on this month. 

We use UiPath Apps. We use UiPath Apps as a form. Essentially, we have created UiPath Apps in such a way that helps HR people to onboard individuals. For example, whenever someone has to get onboarded, they have to actually provide some details in terms of who they are, their previous company, and some other basic details. Also, HR will need to provide some extra details, in terms of who will be the individual's manager, et cetera. Finally, IT has to assign some kind of role. What we have actually done, is we have created an app where a user or a new individual has to actually provide all the information. Then, HR just needs to select the particular role. Everything is pre-configured. We automatically assign specific roles. In terms of IT, we can now automatically assign specific resources such as laptops, monitors, or headsets to that particular person. Since everything is automated, within a couple of minutes of registration the person receives his new ID password and details. Instead of waiting for an entire day, it happens in just a matter of one or two minutes.

UiPath Apps has increased the number of automation we can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Earlier, we used to create automation, in terms of forms. Those automations were types of attended automation. A person had to have specific access to that particular computer before doing this kind of work. In this scenario, the issue we had was that every time it was not possible to handle manual steps if we were onboarding ten people at a time. Everyone had to wait for their turn and that was not very efficient. What we have done is we have actually deployed UiPath Apps whose links can actually get loaded onto an individual's mobile. One just needs to open it on their mobile and get started. That's it. Everything executes parallelly. We have also made our system scalable so that multiple VMs can learn the process at the same time.

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. Doing so does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

We have found that UiPath has reduced human error. We were getting some human errors related to time zone issues and some of the other issues such as daylight savings. There were several other issues related to accidental typing or of people not focusing properly, even after several integrations. That's part of the reason we went ahead and automated processes. Obviously, a bot only follows what you have programmed it, what you have programmed within it. The errors are literally reduced to zero within that specific section.

UiPath has freed up employee time. We have actually retrained the freed-up employees into UiPath to act as support engineers. As a rough guess, I would say that we have saved around 120 hours a week just by deploying UiPath.

The additional time enabled employees to focus on more essential work. For people who were actually acting as build personnel, we have re-deployed them as a person who actually interacts directly with clients or who does QA work. This is a higher position that comes with a higher salary as well. There have been promotions simply due to implementing UiPath.

Employees are pretty happy. Initially, everyone was scared that they might lose their jobs. However, but adopting UiPath methods and retraining people, some are even getting promoted and we find that they are actually encouraging automation processes so that new work can come in and the remaining people could also get on better.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. In terms of marketing operations, for example, it has reduced the cost. Along with the help of similar investments, we need fewer people and more bots currently. That's definitely a big thing for us. We had a cost reduction of approximately 20% in our operations. This is just a ballpark. That said, overall, UiPath has saved our organization a lot of costs. I cannot speak to exact savings, as that requires business knowledge, which I do not have complete access to. 

The AI Center area could definitely improve. The StudioX model could also improve just a little bit so that the introduction of variables is better and would make it possible to pass on a similar kind of data in between multiple activities. This is a very simple concept, however, this kind of feature is not available within UiPath. 

From the business perspective, a little bit more insight on the dashboard that is currently available in Orchestrator would be ideal. I agree with UiPath having a dedicated tool for insights, however, right now, it's a paid tool. 

If I can get a little bit more data and a little bit more customization on Orchestrator, that would be really great.

I've been using UiPath for three years and eight months. I've used it for the same amount of time the company has used it.

The product is quite stable now. There are certainly some places where UiPath has to work, specifically in terms of actual stability, where there are still some unknown errors that are coming in. 

In terms of Orchestrator, I have noticed there are some places where there are glitches. Things are not very clear at first as everything is changing quite quickly, I'll say that. Even in the enterprise version, everyone wants to be on the very latest version. However, there is a drastic change between the versions themselves.

For example, 2019, 2020, and 2021 versions, all three are drastically different amongst themselves. This kind of change is definitely good for the provider in that they are doing something better. However, as a consumer, I don't really want to go ahead and go through an entire learning curve all over again along with handling my current job of handling all the work, just so that I can cope up with what changes the product team has made. It should not be necessary to go through this level of adjustment for each and every release. At this point, I have been through three to four migrations and in each migration, I have gone through some kind of a learning curve.

Automation Cloud actually helps us to rapidly scale up. We don't have to invest time now in configuring Orchestrator, or the cloud version of UiPath. All we have to do is we just need to basically request for a particular package and, maybe, either with the help of a package or with the help of the UiPath team, it is pre-configured for us. That way, we just need to utilize it. Therefore, scaling is simple.

The scalability is great. It has actually allowed us to schedule the bots or maintain the bots in multiple VMs without having any worries about how to utilize licenses, or how to actually go ahead and deploy the bots manually or install the bots manually on certain VMs. Everything is automated within the UiPath environment.

If we talk about attended users, right now, we have more than 10 people using attended bots. Their roles are essentially from the recruitment team, from HR. Some of the marketing staff are also using it in analyst positions. 

We definitely plan to increase usage and we're using UiPath pretty extensively. We have a couple of projects in the pipeline and currently, we're also working on some of the more complex projects within the team.

All the projects are having a specific date of delivery. Everything is running parallel as we also follow an Agile method. In this Agile method, if something is stuck, it will eventually impact the date of delivery. And we really don't want that. UiPath actually helps us a lot by providing 24-hour support and it helps us in setting a lot of the items we need to use. They do it quite easily and quickly.

On the scale of one to ten, it's definitely a ten. Whenever I have a doubt, they are always there. They even offer to get on a call with them and actually go ahead and resolve the issue themselves, if they know how to do it. 

Many times, there have been scenarios where the issue was unique to us. They actually presented us with some debugging steps that we can do on our end. Most of the time, those debugging steps actually helped us to resolve the issue. When none of these options work, they were very keen to figure out how they could actually improve the experience and what could be implemented by the developers within those specific parts of the product in order to resolve the issue. We have given them feedback in the past and in a couple of future versions, we were able to see those ideas implemented.

We were using AutoHotkey before this product, as well as Selenium. However, after implementing UiPath, we have not used anything along with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation of the Studio was quite straightforward. We just had to go through all the legal terms and everything. Once we went through those, we just had to install it. The same thing is true for Orchestrator as the on-prem installation of Orchestrator is pretty straightforward. You just have to get the setup, link it with the skilled server, and then install it. 

Apart from that, the configuration within Orchestrator was very simple as there is only one file that allows us to log on to everything. It made it pretty obvious.

The deployment took somewhere around two days for the entire setup. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, firstly, we decided to set up all the databases and all the dashboard-related services such as Power BI. We decided to do this first due to the fact that the dashboards and databases are the base of any application. 

We decided to implement it first in Azure. On the same day, we decided to get the cloud version of the Orchestrator as well. It was quite easy in terms of Azure. There's a three-way plugin that is available there. We just had to install that on the specific VM and we were done. Finally, on the second day, we went ahead and installed all of the Studio. Once Orchestrator is up, we could install Studios and link them to Orchestrator in order to get the license. That was our strategy and our approach.

We essentially have one dedicated resource for maintaining all the deployments and to watch if anything goes wrong. We have three dedicated resources for maintaining all the bots that are currently running as well. We don't need a big team to maintain everything. 

In one of our projects, we actually used Azure Cloud for the deployment of Orchestrator and the deployment of packages. The experience is quite good. Azure provides the DevOps side of our service that allows us to set up the pipeline and automatically deploy any kind of project to the Orchestrator as soon as it is committed.

While the company has likely been looking at ROI, I don't directly deal with those details.

A couple of our clients cannot actually go ahead with the initial investment of Orchestrator as it costs quite a lot. The thing is that we don't need that much of a license in order to automate our processes. Having a free version of a cloud or having a cheaper version of Orchestrator has actually helped a lot.

Automation Cloud helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. However, overall, if we talk about scalability, once the number of licenses that I need increases, ultimately, Automation Cloud might be a bit expensive. It depends upon the version you're using. Yet, since the license cost is increasing, what happens is if you go ahead and buy more than five licenses, then essentially you would have been in better shape if you would've actually bought the paid version of Automation Cloud and installed it on-prem. That would've been a cheaper option. It's subjective. Our scenario is just that we need two unattended licenses to do the job.

Some of the clients do consider the initial investment of UiPath to be expensive. It's seen as expensive specifically from the cost of getting a licensing for an on-premises setup. For some projects, UiPath can be overkill. However, it is the best software a company can invest in for automation purposes. 

I cannot speak to the exact cost, as I don't handle licensing directly.

It's paid per year. We get licenses not directly from UiPath. Rather, we get them from a vendor.

There are additional costs as well. For example, the cost of an SQL server is one. We are definitely using the Azure product suite as well. We had to actually invest quite a lot in SQL Server in terms of database management, just to make sure that everything gets logged properly and that the Orchestrator is functioning properly. 

We switched to UiPath after we compared multiple tools. We looked at certain parameters such as the ability to automate marketing tools, the ability to automate quickly, and how user-friendly it was. Out of all these three parameters, UiPath stood on top.

We looked at Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and PEGA.

I specifically have been using the community version of UiPath. The company has been using the enterprise version.

We do use the Automation Cloud offering.

We do not use the SaaS version of the solution. 

I'd advise users to give it a try. I started my career in UiPath and since then I've been loving it. I became a UiPath MVP as I really enjoy working with the product so much.

That automation does not need to be very complex, so you don't need very complex tools to automate any software. Tools like UiPath can do most of your job.

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

I am a UiPath developer and my role in the company is as an automation developer specialist. I'm working mainly in UiPath Studio, not Studio X, and I also work with Orchestrator. We are using attended automation.

We are automating the processes in our company, for example, in the finance department. One of the ones that are now automated is invoice coding determination, which no longer involves humans. At this time, 80% of our processes are completed by robots. The remaining 20% is approved by humans but I think that this will improve later. 

With respect to the ease of building automations using UiPath, from my experience, when you have a basic knowledge of programming, it is really easy for you to start your journey with the UiPath environment. You can do it without this knowledge but then, you will just need to spend a little more time learning the details.

I really like working in UiPath because the programming allows me to do whatever I want. I can declare any type of variable, I can check the locals, and I can add breakpoints whenever I need to check the states. For me, it's a very professional platform.

I really like that they offer the possibility to work with it from two sides. It can be operated from the full-programming side, as well as from the standpoint where you don't need this knowledge.

UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint, although I cannot estimate by how much because I am not responsible for that aspect.

UiPath has helped to reduce the cost of our digital transformation because it really speeds up the processes. When we compare the time it takes for a human, with perhaps a one-hour task, and it only takes 30 minutes for the robot to do it, we can see the savings. You just multiply this by the salary and we also see the reduction in cost.

UiPath has definitely reduced the number of issues arising from human error. We can confirm this with 100% certainty because we have compared it to when humans were completing processes on their own. I estimate that the error rate has been reduced by approximately 60%.

In my previous company, we managed to save about 20 FTE after our UiPath implementation. It was about two years of work. Thanks to the ease of access, as well as the fact that our employees did not require programming knowledge, we were able to show it to normal employees and explain the automation. After this, they were not afraid that they will be replaced by robots and instead, understand that they are co-working with them.

The most important part of Studio is the debugging feature. It gives you the ability to watch local variables, as well as highlight elements as it is moving through the process. The results of actions are displayed and indicate whether particular actions are performed successfully or not.

Outside of the company, I am using UiPath's AI functionality and it very much speeds up processes and improves accuracy for reading data. For example, the OCR is much better than Microsoft's solution. With UiPath, I was able to read handwriting samples but with Microsoft, I was unable to do it.

The AI functionality has allowed me to automate more processes in my own projects. It adds flexibility and improves process speed. I don't have to think about boundaries when I decide how to approach a project. 

It lacks something crucial, which is a map of the variables and arguments. When we are using a lot of variables and arguments, sometimes, we get lost. UiPath should create a map that connects different files and shows the connections between them. For example, from file A, we have variable B, and file C contains variable D. However, they are actually the same variable, but it's connected by argument and we don't know it. It is something that we have to remember explicitly. In this case, it would be really helpful for me, as a developer, to have this picture of the net. It would show me what is where and how it's connected to everything.

For the on-premises solution, if we ignore any problems that may occur with the infrastructure, such as the network, then stability is very good and the platform works well.

In my experience with cloud-based deployment, I haven't faced any problems with stability.

Scaling UiPath is really easy. When you get to the point where you have to think about scalability, you use the UiPath Installer to extend the Orchestrator by another node. There is an option for it and you don't have to know much about the network to do it on your own.

I am part of a four-person development team that is working primarily with Studio. We have approximately ten processes at the moment, and it is difficult to estimate how many employees are affected by the automation. 

The technical support is very professional and they work quickly. Usually, we are able to get responses in about two hours. Sometimes, it takes one day, but I have not faced a situation that took longer than two days.

The help from their site is also very professional, and well-described.

Overall, it is really easy to resolve errors.

Prior to UiPath, I used Selenium WebDriver. The problem with this product is that you have to know the Python programming language. You have to know everything inside Python, and there is a lot more typing. In UiPath, you have some clicking, and there is some decent orienting stuff, which you don't have to define. You already have some pieces of code that you can use, and this is a really nice feature.

I have also used Kryon RPA and the problem is that it's based on the OCR. This is something that I would never accept with an RPA tool unless the OCR is fully working. Right now, OCR is not a perfect technology and it causes many issues. UiPath allows us to use selectors, so we are able to track the exact area of the display in the program that we want to access.

The initial setup is quite easy, although we faced a few issues. With the help of the UiPath service desk, we were able to quickly fix our problems. The deployment was completed in a few hours on one machine. This included checking everything to make sure that it was working fine.

We followed the documentation provided by UiPath, as well as their guidelines.

At this time, we are using the on-premises version. In the next few months, we plan to move to the cloud environment, so we are currently planning the transition.

In my previous company, I was responsible for moving to the new version of the UiPath, with the Apollo interface in the Orchestrator. Where I am now, this was already done. So, yeah. I was responsible for this transition. Right now, in this company where I'm working currently, the UiPath setup was already done but I helped with the optimization.

With respect to upgrades, once we knew what had to be done, it took about one hour to complete. Otherwise, there is no maintenance required.

I have calculated ROI for our project and it seems that we will reach our ROI point in approximately two years, which is quite good.

Price-wise, it is not the cheapest one on the market, but it provides the fastest automation and the best training that I have ever seen for RPA, through the UiPath Academy. It's really easy to set up a new developer in this environment. Everything considered, the pricing is very good.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We are currently evaluating Kryon RPA.

My advice for anyone who is implementing UiPath is to always check the documentation before you try to look for answers on the forum. Another good point is that when you have a problem, there are plenty of people in the UiPath community that can help you in a few minutes. This is the perfect solution, in this case.

From the maintenance side, you have to remember to increase your database with the scaling up of the automation because it can really slow down your process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is to always create a backup copy of Orchestrator before you update it. This was a very big lesson for us because we had an issue with the installation. It is also really important to back up the related databases.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Most of the time, we work with financial services to automate financial transaction monitoring systems. We go through multiple CRM and financial systems, then query the transactions based on the KYC information. We use OCR operations, using UiPath Robot, to fetch information, such as, identification number, passport number, and their tax information. We extract this information, then validate with our financial data or transactions data to ensure that there is no fraud nor anomalies in the system. If there are any suspicious transactions or potential fraud, we do manual investigations. Those manual investigations are redirected from the robot to a human agent, then the human agent verifies the information. If there are any cost validation requests from other systems, such as Salesforce and PeopleSoft, then another bot will be triggered using UiPath Orchestrator. After that, we do the remaining processing. At the end of the processing, we use the UiPath analytics service. That analytics service uses UiPath logs, which helps us to understand how the bot is performing and how many transactions we have validated. From that, we look at how many were successfully processed and how many were manually handled, i.e., exceptions. We identify business exceptions for any transactions during the initial pre-validation stage, such as the user identification number is not valid or input data validation errors. For example, passport information must be an alphanumeric eight digit. If the bot identifies that the value is not eight digits, but four or five digits, then it is an invalid record straightaway. We can see this from the reporting and performance graphs.

We do automation for our HR processes, such as onboarding processes. On any day, there are five or six people who need to be onboarded. This is one of our standard business cases. We have a UiPath robot design using UiPath Studio and then it deploys in Orchestrator. This robot is being used by the HR admin. They can fill in the key information of the user, e.g., name, level, and their package. So, they import all this information, which includes my identity information, mobile number, email, and IDs on an Excel file, possibly along with a few other associates joining tomorrow. Once those entries are made in the Excel file, then the user can trigger a robot. They also need to keep the file in a designated folder. The robot will read the file from the designated folder. Then, one by one, it will read the records or line items from Excel and open an SAP portal. After logging through the SAP Portal, it inputs the required employee information. After that, it will go to Microsoft Azure Active Directory to QA the user, email, and ID. It will then go to PeopleSoft to create an HR record for the salary information, leave information, and the level at which the associate is joining. At the end of this process, it will update the status to, "The associate has been registered successfully." It will then send the updated final report to HR, saying, "The processing has been completed." The bot triggers information with their newly created email ID. They can then access or receive the onboarding information. This is how it works.

Depending on the client's requirements, we use UiPath AI Center and UiPath Apps for custom requirements. Most of the time, we don't need them. There are some times that we do based on the client's requirements.

I am using UiPath Studio, UiPath Orchestrator, and UiPath Robot.

Initially, I used the on-premises deployment model. For the last two years, we have also been using the cloud deployment option, UiPath Cloud, along with the on-premises. This is based on a client's requirements.

We can use the Process Mining tool to identify opportunities. We can then design the robot using UiPath Studio. After designing it, we can deploy it, using UiPath Studio, to Orchestrator. From Orchestrator, we can manage, monitor, and upgrade all the new patches within the UiPath platform.

If we have one place where we can see the end-to-end journey of our automations, then I do not need to manage multiple licenses. I do not need to spend money and expertise hiring multiple people and training them on multiple platforms. Also, when upgrading the systems, if I have a one place where I can manage all my automations at the same time, including UI and background automations, then we can build low-code apps using UiPath Apps. Therefore, I can manage everything within one platform, which is either a UiPath Intelligent Automation platform or UiPath Cloud. This is very important. Because if I have multiple systems, then I need multiple stakeholders to manage, upgrade, and maintain them. So, we do not need to think about all the things that I am using. There is one place where I can manage everything.

It has enabled us to automate more processes overall. In the initial days, we easily automated the low hanging fruit. As our automation journey matured, we needed to automate processes using more complex methods, like AI, machine learning, and advanced OCR functionalities. 

The UiPath package available on UiPath Studio is useful. Compared to other RPA tools, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, we found that this package gives us the opportunity to automate tasks in the shortest amount of time. There are multiple templates available on UiPath Studio. For example, if I need to do multi-setting processing, which means we are going to process multiple records simultaneously, we can use a UiPath Background Process as a template. Using the template, I can run multiple robots on the same system, which will not interact with other systems. It will work in the background. We have found that really valuable. This is not available with other RPA products, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This is one of the valuable things that we have found in UiPath.

We use the UiPath recorder. For the latest, modern experience, we have a recorder called App Integrations. Using that particular recorder, I can automate tasks with multiple systems without thinking about having manual integrations between multiple browsers by identifying multiple sessions. Sessions can be used by the same recorder during the entire automation cycle. For example, I have two screens, one called PeopleSoft and another one is SAP. I can do a keystroke, mouse click, and then hit the submit button within PeopleSoft. Then, at the same time, I have another window open being used by the robot. I don't want to think about separating two windows, so the recorder takes care of this.

The UiPath recorder has multiple ways of identifying. For example, it uses UI elements, fuzzy logic, and image recognition at the same time. These three methods are used by only one recorder. Whereas, with other platforms, like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I can use only one method at a time, so one command is one method for selecting or identifying objects. Whereas, with the app recorders, I can use three methods using one command. So, if one fails, another one will back up the scenario. Then, if another one also fails, the third one will help us automate. That is the ease of automation, which is a valuable feature that helps us ensure that automation works flawlessly, without having to look at if one of the methods failed.

One of the 2018 projects was built using version 18.2. We then got a report from users that it was not working. Most of the time, it failed on multiple use cases. When we took the process from the owner to repair and troubleshoot, we found that many packages were not being recognized by the new version, which is 2020. So, we had to upgrade to the latest package, then do a repair. It took a good amount of time for us to repair the package. We had to go back to the UAT environment, then do testing and get approval from the UAT. We then had to sign-off and deploy pre-production and post-production Hypercare. So, the automation cycle being repeated by almost 40% is quite costly to the business, but this is rare.

The vendor had already noticed these things were a big pain for us. With the recent versions, 2019 and onwards, the compatibility between the activity and packages is there. Prior to that, there were some issues. The UI automation package was the one that was mostly affected. Many people who were early adopters of UiPath observed or experienced these kinds of issues.

Sometimes, when we are using Remote Desktop automations, we may need to use a different approach along with the AI functionalities. For example, if I need to recognize the object on the screen, which I cannot do using native methods, then along with the AI functionality, I may need to have a backup method, such as the OCL methods along with AI Computer Visions. This ensures that it works robustly and my solutions deliver 100% results without any manual intervention. In such complex scenarios, we are using AI features along with multiple methods for the backing up of the AI features. We have to ensure that if something goes wrong with the AI features then we have another method which will ensure, if A fails, then B will back up our solution's process as expected.

I have been using it for the past six years.

We use UiPath AI Center, UiPath AI Computer Vision functionalities, and Document Understanding. These AI features came into the picture from 2019 onwards. First, we received updates using UiPath Computer Vision functionalities. Then, we received AI Center, which was not stable in its initial days. However, during the first quarter of 2020, we received version 2, which seems to be more stable. From there, we received general availability versions with integrations on UiPath Studio and UiPath StudioX. These work much better, as compared to the initial versions. So far, all the components of UiPath Computer Vision, Document Understanding, and UiPath AI Center work well. 

I appreciate other benefits, such as UiPath community support and UiPath enterprise product support, because if anything goes wrong, we search in Google or the UiPath Forum where we can find the answer. Even if the answer is not available, and I post a question, I am quite certain that within one day that I will get someone to respond to the question. It may be someone from the forum or UiPath. Most of the time, the answers are readily available on the UiPath Forums.

UiPath Forum is the one place where we reach out to research problems, do troubleshooting, or get some help. If we need some help regarding the installations or licensing, we can create a ticket. Typically, we get a response, email notifications, or support calls within four to six hours.

We hire fresh, new graduates that we are going to train. UiPath Academies offers numerous training tutorials and certifications, which helps us to train our newly hired resources who are completely new to RPA and UiPath. So, the training is really useful in terms of video tutorial practice and configuring our multilingual environment. UiPath Academy does support English, Chinese, Malay, and German. So, our associates from multiple offices, who are already working on the global initiative, can learn the same things at the same time. Or, they can get someone from an English background.

I started RPA using UiPath.

Using the tool for the last six years, the initial setup is like having breakfast every day; it is very simple. I can do it much faster than someone new who started two years back or the new guy. I know what to do and how to do it.

Because it is software as a service, the setup and configuration time are very quick. Within an hour or two, we can set up the infrastructure deployment for a starter package. Configurations can be done smoothly. The infrastructure deployment, which typically takes a week's time, can be minimized to an hour. This saves us a lot of time and money for multiple components.

In the initial days of 2016 or 2015, our automation journey was center of excellence (COE) based most of the time. Nowadays, we changed our strategy, and it is more employee involved. So, an employee can go into UiPath Automation Hub and submit their idea. If they have time and are interested, we give them the training to use UiPath StudioX features for automation. If a process is complex based on our assessment, we pick that process and do the automation so the COE and employ-driven automation work hand in hand. 

With a simple process, then the employee can automate it and do the PoC. If they need help, we are more than happy to help them. However, we found when the processes are medium to highly complex, this is something professional developers should be working on. If they are interested, they can contribute and learn, but it's less likely that a business user would be involved in a complex automation process.

UiPath has absolutely reduced human error. Infrastructure setup and maintenance are taken care of by the product owner or vendor. So, there is 100% assurance that nothing wrong will happen in the system because they are the people who built and deployed the product. Whenever we deploy, there may be a chance that something might go wrong or configurations went wrong. For example, I need to configure the Internet information services port. If I incorrectly configured the port or use a different method, there is a high chance that I might need to redirect the port to some other router or native firewall. If I use UiPath Cloud, everything is taken care of by UiPath. I just log into assistance, then allocate the license and configure our users.

For small to medium clients, those clients have an investment of about $100,000. We see around six to eight months in, they get something around 40% to 60% ROI being returned to them. Then, within a year to 18 months, they get a 100% to 120% ROI realized.

When we implement a robotics process automation solution using UiPath, and if the client's budget is limited, we mostly encourage the automation journey to be done using UiPath Cloud. UiPath ensures that it works fluidly, performs all upgrade security patches, and has 99.9% uptime.

In the initial days, UiPath was more competitive in terms of the license pricing as compared to Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere; it was much less. Currently, the pricing is quite standard compared to the other two vendors. 

We can use UiPath Cloud, which helps us to save a lot of money and infrastructure costs, if the automation journey or project is for a small to medium-sized company. However, if it is a big company, then on-premises is preferred. 

I have also used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism as well as open-source automation platforms, such as TagUI and Selenium.

The main pros to using UiPath are its user interface, user-friendliness, learning platform, and support.

We have been using the UiPath Apps feature for the last four or five months, so it is relatively new for us. Most of our technical people are experimenting with UiPath Apps. We have planned training sessions for business users to upskill them.

If you are starting or in your initial days, I advise you to use the UiPath community version. Try first to do a PoC with the community version, trying out the automation in UiPath Cloud for free. Once you realize that this is something good as well as understand the value of it, then you can start with the initial package. If you think that you can start big from the beginning, then go for on-premises and start a large-scale transformation. However, I would advise doing a PoC first with proper guidance from UiPath and selecting a proper implementation consulting partner who has good experience or a solid past track record of doing automation, RPA, the RPA automation journey, and the transformation journey, as a whole. Not just UiPath automations or building robots, but also transforming their project and processes as well as doing Lean Six Sigma, which is a crucial part of the transformation journey. So, you should consider all these factors for a successful automation journey.

Compared to the top three tools, I rate this solution 10 out of 10.