UiPath Platform Reviews

We use it for admissions policy and also for other financial items such as 1099 reporting from the IRS and things of that nature. There are some manual refreshes of systems and Excel documents that we have automated.

It is currently deployed on-prem, but we are looking at the cloud option. We are using version 2019, which is probably one of the oldest ones. It's pretty old. We're looking from a perspective of whether we upgrade it before we move to the cloud or whether we move to the cloud and upgrade.

We have seen quite a bit of benefit. We used to hire temp staff labor in order to do our admission policy, and now, we don't have to hire them. That would be five part-time people that would come in seasonally. For three or four months, we would have five people just cranking away the admission work. We don't need that anymore because of automation.

There have been time and financial savings. On the other side of the house, some of them are attended bots. We've saved the organization about 140,000 clicks. People don't have to click 140,000 times anymore. As a small estimate, we saved the organization about 250 hours last year. If everything goes to plan, this year, we're looking to save about 450 hours from the financial side of the house. We're only scratching the surface of it, and there is always room to grow.

We're still working through it. We recently stood up our system developer space. We have about 16 processes. We're still new at it and still in the beginning phases. We're really looking forward to pushing that envelope. Currently, we have a hybrid of attended and unattended automations. It's about an even split.

The GUI is valuable, and it's extremely stable. I've had six or seven Studios open at the same time working on different things and nothing has crashed on it. It's very stable software.

I love the community. The community is awesome. That has been very helpful. It provides value in terms of just being able to bounce ideas and understand. Sometimes, I try to do one thing, and I just want to know how to do one thing, but that's where the community can help broaden and look at it from a different perspective.

They say that everybody can do it, but not everybody can do it. You need to have some form of technological understanding about it, and just because we can automate something doesn't mean we should automate something. That's where I think there's a marketing thing. I understand where they're going with it, but it's not necessarily how real life is in my perspective.

I am not looking for any additional features. I haven't even used all the features. I'm still learning the platform as it stands and figuring out what's still available. 

I have been using it since 2019.

From a system perspective, it's stable on my end. It just works. That's the best part about it. It just works.

Scalability gets a little bit sticky. That could be just because of where we sit in the organization, I don't manage that relationship of licenses. I only get so many licenses and I'm like, "Well, can I get more?" It's definitely a limiting factor, but I don't know if it's us limiting it from a cost perspective. 

I haven't had to use their support. I go to the UiPath community for most of my questions. 

We used Microsoft Power Automate. It was okay. I totally prefer UiPath.

I was involved in its initial setup. UiPath was not complex, but we, as an organization, made it complex. 

We used a partner AKOA that got bought out by Roboyo not too long ago. So, we did use a partner to implement it. In terms of whether it was smooth or not, it was okay. Our school made it hard.

Our experience with them was good and helpful. It was a good way to go through it. Now that we know more, I would've changed the engagement slightly to get a little bit more consulting in the sense of the COE, governance, and other similar things around it. That's because for the most part, getting the system up and running was relatively simple, but now, with the whole other pieces of it, we're starting to feel some of that effect. It's now about how do we look at it from a different angle.

We definitely have a return on investment in terms of hours and soft cost perspective. We are saving 250 hours and don't have to hire five temps. I can't give the metrics for ROI, but from a time savings perspective, ROI is definitely huge.

We did evaluate other options. We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. It was about a year-long evaluation period between all of them, and UiPath was clearly the winner. It was clearly out there as the leader in that space, and that's why we chose them. 

From our perspective, the GUI was really helpful and very different from the others. Automation Anywhere touted more of just invoicing, but we didn't want it for invoicing. We wanted it for multiple things. UiPath really showed the breadth of what you can expand across.

To someone evaluating UiPath, I would definitely advise finding a partner. Find a partner with whom you can partner and who understands the use cases of what you're trying to do and achieve from an organizational perspective. Without that, you're not going to get an ROI. 

I would also advise managing expectations. It's fairly easy to use, but it still requires technical abilities. Don't think that it's something that you can just plug and play and do whatever you want. It's not going to work that way. It's more about the person and the change in mindset. If a person is open to an automation mindset, RPA is a really cool function, and UiPath solves that particular mindset. Without it, it's an uphill battle. Even from our perspective, from an education side of the house, getting our educators to be okay with automation is tricky.

We haven't yet used UiPath's AI functionality. We are definitely looking into it to see how we can start taking advantage of the AI pieces of it and advance that side of the house. Currently, we are trying to change the automation mindset. I'm a big RPA evangelist in our organization, and I am trying to promote things like automation. People are on board with the thought of it but not necessarily on board with the action of it. So, we really have to understand their process when we get into their process, and some people are apprehensive to share that information. It's the other parts of the piece that we have to deal with.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. It was useful to know the use of the product, the use of the GUI, understand how things move and change, where the checkmark boxes you need to check are, and all other uses. Now with the new versioning, it looks like a more curated function. It's a lot nicer. Previously, UiPath Academy was just a bunch of courses, and you didn't know where to start. The curation for developers or users is going to help people navigate through the UiPath Academy.

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

We mostly use it for unattended bots. We are a construction company. Our RPA team does more of the complex processes for users. We take high-end complex items, that are redundant, off of the users' hands, then we host it on our servers.

We have a bunch of unattended processes, about 284 processes.

RPA isn't necessarily taking away tasks from employees, but rather moving them from processing-type employees to analysts. For example, if we had billers doing a very redundant task, then we moved that to RPA. Then, the billers do more customer face-to-face work and analysis, e.g., solutions through Salesforce. So, we have those employees who were previously billers move up to better positions where they can do more analysis and human interaction.

The solution has reduced human error. We don't need to go back and fix stuff. Customer representation is also huge. Quality of work is one of our mission statements. Having that repetitive test always being 100% every single day, month, and quarter, and whenever we send specific invoices from our server support, has been really helpful. It increases that quality formation.

There are a lot of job positions that we never really thought that would get created. Freeing up those experienced employees from sitting down and processing a lot of stuff throughout the whole day and moving them up to customers, we started discovering new talents and skills, especially with the younger employees since you are basically freeing up their time to discover new skills that they weren't even aware of. You are investing in them, showing customers that you have a new generation of fine employees who can do a bunch of new skills out-of-the-box.

The orchestration is the most valuable feature, e.g., how stuff can be organized. This is in addition to the fact that we try to move stuff to an unattended base where there is no user interaction. We are moving more to 100% automation rather than putting a human in the loop.

The UiPath Academy is mostly used only by technology associates and power users in each department who show interest in RPA. The academy has improved on the onboarding system that we have for RPA. So, if we see potential with someone, whether it is interns, power users, or even IT professionals around our department, then the UiPath Academy is definitely a good way to go. It kind of eases up the onboarding when determining who is outstanding or could potentially join our RPA teams.

The biggest value of the UiPath Academy is the ease of use. A lot of different platforms can be too complex. The user-friendly platform definitely helps with the ease of its steps. 

While it is the best tool ever, we decided that the user interaction might not actually be the greatest thing ever. 

I have been using the solution for three years.

I am very happy with the stability of it. 

I wish that there might be a better, easier method of updating our platform, especially for on-prem. I believe most of their customers are cloud-based. So, they don't have to worry about updating their Studio versions or Orchestrator. Being on-prem, it can be difficult because we must reach out to have that version. We can't just plan on our own. We are always at least a six-month step back versus the current version.

We have been scaling it as much as we can, especially with how we are trying to scale how big our team is as well as trying to control that specific workspace and workforce that we have.

There are currently five developers using it.

There were a couple of times with the on-premises version that there were complications, since it is not on UiPath's cloud. We have had a lot of complications where we are dead in water. There were a couple of conditions where we weren't able to get someone up to speed on whatever. The support is not as quick to respond as we had hoped. 

We did talk to our account executives about this. It is definitely a work in progress. I know that they have recommended that we move to the cloud, but it is not attractive enough for us to see if it is actually worth moving to the cloud.

We have been with UiPath from the start. We used to have a lot of in-house C# libraries that we curated. RPA was like overpowered macros similar to what we already had. That is why we knew how to deal with it. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it through the on-premises by connecting our SQL database, etc. 

The deployment took around three hours.

The initial setup was with their tech support, and that was definitely great. After that, if we had any hiccups, that was where the complications happened.

The main focus was improving efficiency. Once you focus more on redundant paths, having a bot doing it over and over again, that eliminates human error every now and then. There is definitely a huge ROI in that. Our main focus was low-hanging fruit. By low hanging fruit, I mean the redundant processes that users are just annoyed by when they go in every day and have to do it. There has definitely been a huge ROI because we are trying to free up a lot of the project managers for construction to do more focused stuff there rather than job cost details.

We have probably saved the time of 10 full-time employees. For daily tasks, we are saving an average of four hours per employee.

It is one of those things where you pay for convenience. Pricing-wise, UiPath is definitely way more expensive than other solutions that we have seen, especially since we also have Microsoft Power Automate, which is one of the latest tools. UiPath is on the higher end, but it is one of those decisions, "Is it worth the investment? How much are you getting as an ROI?" That is usually how the conversation goes.

Back then, the main competitor was Automation Anywhere, who wasn't necessarily as user-friendly. The main idea was that UiPath was more user-friendly with more forums. It seems like there was a community for it. Whereas, Automation Anywhere was a bit more complex. 

We are using a bunch of other tools to also see the differences. Everything runs so quickly that technology always needs to be up to speed. Companies, like UiPath, are always running so fast to compete in this area. We are also trying to see who is actually the best. UiPath has definitely shown us that, but it also comes with its price.

They are always trying to look for, as much as possible, in-house creation of back-end processes. This means less clicking and tapping on the keyboard for the robot, which is always better. UiPath definitely blends all that together, which is great. It is literally bridging all our platforms together, which is what I love about it.

With UiPath and RPA, the sky's the limit. There is potential for a bunch of things that you can do. When we started, as a construction company, we were thinking that RPA might not be as useful as we might think and make a bigger difference than our in-house solutions. When RPA came out, we thought it was mostly for companies like EY and PWC, e.g., more for financial auditing since there is so much data. However, we definitely benefit from it as a construction company. There is so much potential, whether it is low-hanging fruit or high complexity. It is definitely a win-win for any company, whatever industry you are working in.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of 10.

We are a financial services company, and our primary use is to increase daily efficiency and create automated solutions for our operations team. Our primary concern is time. By implementing a robotic solution for mundane tasks, it frees up our teams to focus elsewhere. For example, going to a website, extracting data, putting the data somewhere, and manipulating it can all be automated, freeing up the team to focus on data analysis. This makes us more time and cost-efficient. 

As a smaller company, it was very important to us that scale automation would be taken care of by the vendor. It was one of our key points in choosing a solution.

The solution saved us a great deal of time and money, while teams have been freed up to focus on more important work.

Human error has been greatly reduced and the solution saves a significant amount of time, these are the two main reasons we started to use UiPath.

The solution helps us to keep track of tickets and send notifications used within our department. It helped a lot with our back and front-end offices. Our main operations team normally had a lot of data manipulation, which is now taken care of. They can now focus on market analysis.

This product is very user-friendly, it only requires knowledge of the most basic coding and how to work with logic. They are quick to respond to software issues. They either fix them quickly or provide a workaround if there is one. Overall, UiPath makes building automation very easy.

We do use the solution's Automation Cloud offering. Sometimes we aren't informed of software updates, meaning we have to figure that out for ourselves, especially when there are issues. We mentioned this to support, as figuring out solutions to issues brought in by updates sometimes increases our workload. Overall though, I would say the solution does save a lot of time for our IT department.

The solution has increased our TTV significantly.

The Automation Cloud offering decreased the solution's TCO by taking care of infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. 

We used the Automation Cloud to build out our own pipeline and connected it to Azure. This has really solidified our SDLC, which in turn allows us to quickly put out automations whenever we need to. 

My team and I used the vendor's UiPath Academy course. The course was very effective, as none of the team had prior UiPath experience. We trained using UiPath Academy for around a month, which got us to a point where we could start to use the solution for projects, which helped us learn even more.

The community is much larger than I expected. I'm regularly on the forum or the community blog, which says a lot about how good it is, because almost any information you need can be found there. Everything is well documented, there's always UI path support, and people answer questions on there, so it's very useful.

Since UiPath is one of the bigger vendors in the RPA industry, there's a larger global community. Everyone is really helpful and I think that's great.

Technical support could be improved.

The setup documentation could be improved to make that process easier. 

We have been using the solution for two years now. 

I'd say the solutions are around 80 to 85% stable. There are some areas that we have to reach out to support for, and they work to improve these areas for the newer versions. For that reason, I can't say the solution is 100% stable all the time. 

The features provided by UiPath make it very easy to reuse, so it's very scalable.

We haven't deployed the solution to its full potential at our company yet. It's used by nine to ten teams out of a total of around 200 teams. We have a lot more to do, as we only started two years ago. We are working towards implementing for more of our teams, but we need a bigger team to push out solutions faster. 

The technical support is inconsistent, it can be good or bad, this depends on who you get connected to. 

Neutral

It was before my time at the company, but I believe they previously used Nintex RPA.

I wasn't there for the initial setup, but I do know quite a bit because we did have to set up more bots later. I'd say it's a little complex if you don't already know what to do, but once you do know, it's very easy to set up. I would say the documentation wasn't that clear.

We're a small team that consists of two developers, one tester, and a manager. This is sufficient for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We implemented the solution ourselves.

I would say the cost of the software is around 10K and we've had around 50 projects, with probably $500,000 saved per project. That's a lot of money saved that can be diverted to other areas.

The solution has sped up and reduced the cost of digital transformation without requiring expensive upgrades or support. The product has greatly reduced the incidence of human error.

The solution has saved us a lot of time. I would say it saves us an average of 900 to 1000 hours per month. The additional time has enabled employees to focus on more high-value work.

Overall, the solution has reduced the costs of our automation operations.

The cost of the software was around $10,000.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

The solution builds robots and monitors automation. There is a product called UiPath Task Capture which can do process analysis or business analysis, but I would say it's always better for a human to take care of this. For that reason, I wouldn't say the solution is end-to-end, though we could configure it to be. I would say it works very well from building to the end, and in the testing and monitoring that comes after that. 

We used unattended automation and quickly realized we need attended, because with unattended automation projects take up a lot of time. With unattended automation, we can't run two project processes simultaneously, but with attended automation, we can take out another server and give access to the UiPath cloud to our business partners to run whatever projects they need. We can do this at any time, which is very helpful.

RPA generally isn't widely used, and some people overlook it, but it can transform a business. I would say it's an essential part of any digital transformation, and UiPath is a vast vendor with a user-friendly product. 

We are an agency, and we implement it for our clients. We are not a direct reseller of UiPath. We manage the marketing services and the operations for some companies, and we provide the service of implementing it without having any contracts with UiPath. It is just a service from us.

It is being used in almost all industries and departments, but we have been focusing on finance and operations, such as handling the orders, getting invoices, reading invoices, and managing the orders. We use OCR to read invoices and process them. We also use it for the service department. UiPath is perfect for service and finance.

It is deployed on the cloud and on-premises.

It is very easy to build automation by using UiPath. It is very easy to use. It is different from other platforms, such as Automation Anywhere, which are more difficult to use. The user interface of UiPath is more smooth and easier than the rest. It is easy to build automation without any coding knowledge.

It is helpful for end-to-end automation. We can start with the automation of a simple task, and we can get deep insights and discover new tasks to be automated.

It saves time and money for us and our clients. It has improved the data entry accuracy and minimized the work, human errors, mistakes, and risks. We don't have mistakes anymore. The time saved is now being utilized for more logical things that a person should be doing. 

We are having deeper connections and relations with our clients after using UiPath and fully transforming their operations. It helps with digital transformation without needing any other tools. It can be enough to successfully do digital transformation and achieve success, which increases the customer satisfaction score and saves a lot of time and money. 

Their automation cloud offering has decreased the time-to-value. You can start seeing the effect of UiPath and the automation in the first month. Especially the businesses that have never automated their tasks and never used AI and machine learning for their operations can see the effect in the first month. It is incredibly effective in many aspects, such as time, money, operations, and risks of mistakes. We are able to speed up all the operations. It has improved our communication with the clients. We are able to resolve customer errors and deal with tickets faster.

Their automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership, but other tools also have the same benefit. It saves us a lot of money when you use it with big data or a large volume of data sets. We had an on-premises setup for other clients, but it required big servers and containers to handle a large amount of data. 

If it wasn't a cloud offering, and it was only on-premises, we would be spending thousands on other platforms on hosting and deployment. On-premises setup requires a lot of processing speed and bandwidth and large disk sizes. The cloud offering is not very heavy. So, it saves a lot.

It helps with fast innovation when it comes to automation. It has a lot of intelligence. I could find use cases that I never thought could be done with UiPath, or I never thought could be automated. UiPath helped me to discover the use cases to automate almost the entire operation.

We use the UiPath Apps feature, and it has helped to reduce a lot of workload, not only for us but also for our clients. This was one of the main features that everyone loved. We used it at the beginning for building apps for the clients to handle the workflows. We didn't need expert developers to do this because it is low code. It helps us create professional applications for our internal use and for our clients. Our workload is reduced by 250% by using the UiPath Apps.

I can use the templates to create apps in no time. I can prototype an app with drag and drop. There are multiple templates, and with drag and drop, I can easily build apps and put features and automation that are otherwise time-consuming.

With attended automation, we get the benefits of our employees and robots. The robots provide digital assistance to our employees. We can create robots to assist our employees, and we can create integrations with the ERP and other software for a fast and smooth operational workflow.

We love the AI inside UiPath and the AI center. With the preconfigured templates and out-of-the-box models and templates offered by UiPath, we can take everything to production quickly. Its AI is the main thing that helps us discover what automation needs to be done after deploying it for one week or two weeks and letting our users and our clients work normally. From the insights and the screen recording, the AI starts to learn and recommend what we can do. With the very deep insights that it provides, we are able to find automation opportunities.  We can use AI for decision-making. We are able to make better decisions based on the insights from user interactions, data, and performance.

It speeds up digital transformation. I personally find it enough to do simple digital transformation. 

The UiPath marketplace is valuable. I can easily find templates. They are easy to use, and I am ready for work. When I implement it for clients who have no experience at all, they can easily work with it by using the templates from the marketplace. They don't need to be an expert or have a lot of experience. Anybody can use it without good knowledge.

I love it for the deep artificial intelligence that it has. It has the AI to recognize the processes, analyze all the workflows through user interactions, and discover automation opportunities. It is very intelligent in these aspects.

UiPath's deployment is one of the easiest ones, which is very beneficial for us. It is the key factor in convincing the customers and clients to do digital transformation. When we explain and show them the capabilities of UiPath and the use cases based on different industries, they get convinced. They ask us to implement it for them, which opens the door to do other services for them. One of the highlights for us was being part of the Egypt digital transformation campaign. As a part of this campaign, we implemented it for three government institutions. It was a big achievement for us to be part of it and do this for them. It was based on the UiPath presentation and the explanation of its capabilities. As soon as they got convinced, they invited us to start implementing it.

The UiPath team is incredibly fast, and they are very good at handling the community and the requests for improvements and development. They do the updates frequently, and they fix bugs and listen to the customers.

I don't have critical dislikes, but there is a scope for improving it. Its deployment is easy but there is a learning curve in the beginning. Its onboarding isn't easy, and there is no onboarding guidance. They need to take more care of the onboarding guidance and improve it. It is user-friendly for me and for most people, but for people who have zero programming knowledge, it is hard. They have to turn to the community and other places for knowledge.

Its documentation is good and helpful, but it is not perfect. It is good for people who have basic knowledge about it. 

I have done UiPath Academy courses. I liked them, and for me, they were easy because I have an idea about automation and robotic processes, but most of my team had a hard time understanding and learning from the UiPath Academy courses. They didn't have a fast learning curve. It is not bad, but it is very hard for beginners and starters to learn from these courses.

When it is on-premises, a lot of times, when we are dealing with a large volume of data, it starts to freeze. It also happened once on the cloud. They need to improve the processing and workload capability of UiPath when somebody has a large volume of data. Currently, it freezes, and it is not so stable when dealing with large data.

It is also difficult to extract data from some of the things, such as IFrames. It is not easy to extract the data. 

Their customer support and licensing can also be improved.

It has been about two and a half years. I started using it at the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020.

It is useful for almost all industries and departments. We have installed it for over 40 or 50 businesses. We have installed it for small-sized businesses, and we have also installed it for enterprises. We have gone through many industries, and we have been using it for almost all the departments. 

Their customer support can be improved. Based on the experience of our team and our clients, there have always been delays in answering and resolving the issues. So, we are always the people who fix the issues for our clients. They need to improve the quality of the training for customers and for their support team.

It provides a return on investment and solves any problems of operation monitoring and recurring activities. It saves time and a lot of money, but the most important benefit is time optimization. 

In terms of time, we have saved three hours a day daily from manual and repetitive stuff. This was a total transformation that affected our return on investment. We are capable of doing more things. This was the key factor in convincing our partners and our clients to get this solution because we have seen how we are capable of getting a ton of the tasks and activities done without a high number of employees. At the moment, we are a team of 37 people, and we are able to do the work that would usually need over 100 people.

In terms of savings, yearly, we have saved over $10,000 as compared to our previous cost of using different tools.

When I was using other solutions, it was hard for me to keep paying for every individual software to manage the processing, automation, document understanding, and files. All of them were separate, and I had to pay individually for each one, but UiPath provides all of them in one license. It is not cheap, but it makes it easy for me to sell it to my clients because I sell it individually with the license, apart from my fees for implementing and managing it for them. Before UiPath, I had no service like this for clients. I couldn't sell it as a service to the clients for implementing or managing it. After using UiPath, I started selling it to the clients. Now, I have over 40 or 50 implementations, and I am managing about 20 of them. The rest of them are being managed by the clients themselves.

I like that there is one license for all basic needs, but it is still expensive. Sometimes, we don't need all the tools or capabilities. We only need basic automation and processing for certain clients, but we're required to get the full license. They can improve its licensing and provide more flexibility. They can create more plans or packages, or they can let the users choose the capabilities they need and base its pricing on that.

I personally don't find it expensive because it replaces a lot of work. The work done by 5 or 10 employees or team members can be easily handled by UiPath. As compared to other tools, its pricing is not bad. It is fair enough.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is very different from other solutions, and they are making a lot of things easier and friendly for customers.

At my company, we automate everything, including the ERP. It's for logistics as well as the production. 90% of our use case is automating SAP and the bonus software.

The user interface is amazing. If we want to look at the conditions, we can do so easily. We can just search and we can find it. It's very simple.

They provide architecture that is really amazing. 

It is quite stable. It is really good and very reliable, which is what I really want. 

You can scale the solution very well.

I have used automation. The report was helpful. It trains employees - even those that didn’t have any experience. In UiPath, it’s not as clear how you go about things or where to click. It's very difficult to change items. The best part of UiPath is the automation.

I have a downloaded code. When you ship the plan from one country to another country, there will be a lot of historical data in the item. Typically, we have to delete this manually. It is a lot of data. We have exclusively recruited people for this job in the past. Then, we came up with some designs for the automation and it has saved them plenty of time. We are able to finish all the deletion of unnecessary data in record time. That was a really easy way to help save time and human resources. Automation Anywhere is really helpful financially.

Manually, a task like this would have taken around 30 days to deal with 10,000 lines of deletion. Now, with automation, the same task can be done in two days.

In the past, our recruits have come from Ireland. I’m not sure how much labor time we’ve saved with UiPath, however, it’s significant.

I have tried UiPath’s Academy. I got certified from UiPath. The best part is that the lectures are really good. They also provide the trial motions, which is really helpful when learning.

I have watched UiPath Academy’s orchestrated videos and done the pre-development. I completed the entire video and then did the test. They have certified me for Orchestrator and the developer parts.

One really good thing about UiPath is the user community. We can just search for a term and get help with questions. Most questions will be answered by the community. That is really amazing and helpful. Participating in the community makes UiPath really easy. It's very easy to find solutions to questions you have.

The UiPath community compares well against other RPA communities out there. On a scale of one to ten, I would say that the automation ranks at a nine. It’s a helpful tool.

We use attended bots as well as unattended bots.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits in our company by automating departments or all specific processes that require human-robot collaboration. We know how to use automation with merchants so that they help you with authorization for the end-users. The robots have really helped us in specific use cases, especially around logistics, for example.

We have just started using UiPath’s AI functionality. We are exploring it now after we got some orientation from UiPath. Within one year, we'll start using it for the plans that we have created for this year.

UiPath automation has reduced human mistakes. That is the best part. If somebody, a human, does the same continuous actions, mistakes will happen. With automation, we’ve had zero errors at this point.

UiPath updates its software every year. The problem is the support for the old code. For example, right now I'm using the 2021 10.3 version. If I have developed a code three years back and I want to update the packages, it won't work as expected. They do not follow up with support for the old version. Therefore, a person has to exclusively work again with the old robot to make it compatible with the new version.

I've been using the solution for four years now.

Stability-wise, I would say, for an ERP, UiPath is good. If you are going to automate some websites, the stability is very bad, however, for ERP it is really good. 

The scalability is good. Based on the demand, we can actually scale up things. Again, it depends on how we implement UiPath in the organization.

We pay extra for UiPath support. For us, it's really good.

Since we are paying extra money for support, whenever we have a problem they exclusively send two people to our organization. They elaborate and explain the solution to the problem. That's only due to the fact that we pay extra money. We have experienced only positive scenarios with support.

While I'd rate paid support eight out of ten, when you don't pay for support the service may be only a five out of ten.

Positive

I also have Automation Anywhere and Microsoft.

Microsoft's solution is better than UiPath. However, UiPath compared to Automation Anywhere is better.

With UiPath, they should have at least some basic knowledge of .NET. It's very different from Microsoft. Somebody without any background can develop robots.

Compared to Automation Anywhere, UiPath is really good. Especially the user interface. Some of the Orchestrator functionality is also really good compared to Automation Anywhere. 

We had used an earlier version (8). We had to use that and log into the Orchestrator, et cetera. At that time, all versions were difficult. Now, they have the availability to make the setup easier and we have the entities to deploy the package. It's now very easy and very convenient.

The deployment takes about two minutes maximum.

For the deployment strategy for UiPath, we did a QA first. We had a tech that would create the instance, we'd deploy the Orchestrator and then just do the QA. We'd create another code request for the master branch. 

I have seen some ROI, however, I have only high-level ideas about what it is. Our team is in Denmark and in India. From what I heard, we are getting considerable value for money at this time.

The solution is a bit pricey.

More and more companies are coming out with similar solutions, and therefore the space is likely to become very competitive.

I have used the cloud deployment at well. Now I use the on-premises version. 

If anybody is going to evaluate UiPath, first, I would say, you need to look into what kind of automation you are going to do. If it's ERP, I would definitely recommend UiPath. If it's something, like a PDF or insurance kind of use case, then I wouldn't recommend UiPath. From my experience, what I understand is that UiPath is good for SAP. However, you can use it for any other kind of ERP as well.

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

As consultants, we have implemented UiPath for clients when they have asymmetric workloads because of COVID and they want to scale up but don't want to hire new people. We've implemented automations for clients that want to decrease their workflows. And we've seen efficiency gains as well when clients want to complement the work that humans are doing with the help of automations.

A good example of a client use case is a client that does mortgage loans. When someone comes to a loan officer, there's a lot of information that needs to be provided. There's a manual process that includes inputting the information into the system. Once the information is in the system, they need to run a lot of services, such as lien and credit checks, location verifications, inspections, flood reports, et cetera, before a loan application can be approved. 

We've automated this entire process for them. Our automations, built on UiPath, run all these services, generate all the reports, and store them in a centralized repository that can then be eyeballed by a human. That way they can make a judgment call on whether a loan should be processed or not.

Our in-house use case right now is around structuring reporting with UiPath. We have a Power BI layer and we use UiPath internally to check employee availability, as well as who is charging hours, and how many, to our projects. Overall, we use it for HR activities. We go into our HR management system, generate and download the reports using UiPath, and then modify and massage the data depending on business rules. We then publish that data into Power BI and that's used as a centralized dashboard for reporting for the organization. 

We recently did an engagement with some leaders in HR management. That organization has two kinds of certifications that they give out. We automated those processes as well as the reporting and the revenue reconciliation around them. They wanted to understand how many people were doing re-certifications, and their demographics. They wanted to see what the pass percentage was. They also wanted to be able to give the marketing team data about whom they should be targeting.

The automations we built for them using business rules produce information on whom they should be targeting. They help them understand which part of the world is doing their exams and which part of the world is not doing their exams, and where they need to spend more on marketing.

Before we automated these things, they had a team of four people doing that kind of work. Now, there is one person managing the automations instead of managing the actual processes. That was a big win for them as an organization. They were able to redeploy three people to do other work inside the organization. And in terms of savings, if the average person works 2,040 hours per year, we saved them around 8,000 person-hours of work annually.

Internally, in our company, the reporting process that we have automated used to take 45 to 50 minutes for the HR team to do. Now, reports are generated automatically. It has decreased the amount of effort that the HR team needs to do to generate reports.

There is also a lot of benefit with respect to human error. The tasks that you want to automate are usually repetitive, mundane activities—the swivel-chair activities where a junior analyst might be processing 500 loans in a day. People tend not to concentrate and they make mistakes in that kind of situation. Automation is not going to make those mistakes. There's a great reduction in human error when you implement RPA using UiPath.

In addition, as a small company, one of the biggest advantages we see from using UiPath is that they handle infrastructure, maintenance, and updates with the cloud offering. That helps a lot of small and mid-tier companies implement automation, companies whose IT practices aren't as mature. That's one of the most important features and benefits of UiPath.

The cloud version does decrease your startup time. Where you might have spent four weeks provisioning a server or a virtual machine, installing things, and then securing network assets, with this solution you don't have to do those things. It's all available directly, plug-and-play from UiPath. The time to value is decreased. Cloud instances are, obviously, a little bit more expensive than what you would pay with an on-prem solution, but because UiPath gives it to you at scale, the difference is that great.

For SMEs, the effort to stand something up themselves adds a lot of work to the automation. The ROI is quicker for SMEs when they do a cloud implementation.

The only way you're able to show true value with an automation program is if you automate something end-to-end. UiPath does end-to-end automations and, among all the other tools that are available, UiPath is the leader in end-to-end automation. 

In addition, they're growing their platform. It's no longer just an RPA program. It's a platform that gives you capabilities like AI, Computer Vision, and chatbots. It's not just about task or process automation, it's about the end-to-end life cycle. Previously, if you wanted to do a chatbot integration, there was no end-to-end solution for it. Today, UiPath offers direct integrations with chatbot services and direct integrations to some level of AI analysis on your processes. No other provider today does any of that. If you get into specific, end-to-end scenarios, UiPath certainly is a platform that allows you to achieve that end-to-end automation.

UiPath's AI capabilities are pretty good. Computer Vision is their AI functionality that helps you look into images. If you're automating inside a Citrix environment, for example, you really can't access the usual selectors or data boxes or text boxes. It's all an image. We had to do an automation in such an environment, and we used the AI capabilities of Computer Vision to build dynamic selectors. That was beneficial. I don't think any other vendor currently has that capability. The way they've implemented AI is not just a buzzword. They've really applied it in the Computer Vision feature.

And when it comes to the UiPath user community, nobody would be able to do implementations without it. It's a lot like Stack Overflow, but for RPA. It's a very strong community and it helps anyone who is doing development, management, initialization, et cetera. 

They can certainly improve their Automation Hub, which is their centralized place to gather new opportunities. The improvement could be, in part, in the capabilities. For example, it would help if there were a centralized dashboard. Maybe they could combine Insights and Automation Hub into one solution.

And they also need to revisit the pricing model of Automation Hub. It is an expensive functionality that clients don't really want to pay for. They feel that it should be part of the program and available out-of-the-box. Because it's not, clients just do things using an Excel sheet.

I started doing automations back in 2015, and I've been using UiPath since around 2017. I work as a management consultant. The company I work for provides consulting services to organizations that want to use UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere.

I started out doing development with UiPath, and now I do a lot of infrastructure initialization. I've done development and implementations on the on-prem solution, although I've never set one up, and I've set up cloud instances of UiPath myself.

As a company, we also use the free Community Edition in-house so that we can build a point of view on solutions, but most of our implementations are for clients as consultants.

Scaling is a benefit of the cloud offering because you can easily add a new license without provisioning a new server virtual machine, and you can also or decrease licenses. This is only applicable to an organization that does not have high IT maturity and does not have virtual machines that can be spun up. If a client is very mature, Fortune 100 or Fortune 50, with a very robust IT team that can easily spin up virtual machines, the cloud solution is not going to be beneficial when it comes to scaling.

They have multiple tiers for technical support. I've used all of them. With the Premium Plus Support you get immediate remediation. You have a support representative available who is like an account executive and who is the go-to person for any issues. It's very easy and very quick. 

The mid-tier is Premium Support where you don't have a direct point of contact, but you still get priority service. 

We recently had a production issue with Orchestrator. I opened a ticket on February 2nd and we just resolved it this morning, six days later. It wasn't a big issue but it took them some time. That was with the free support. I didn't expect them to prioritize it

Overall, they are responsive. The top-tier support is a 10 out of 10, the mid-tier is about an eight out of 10, and the free support is about a seven or eight out of 10.

One of the biggest advantages of UiPath is the ease of setup. Their cloud instance is probably four or five releases ahead of what Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offer right now. You can buy a license in 30 seconds and get your own automation instance set up on the cloud within an hour.

UiPath has made setting up and starting an implementation very easy because it's a service. If you're going with the cloud, there's no installation, no setup, and no server or VM initialization.

UiPath also has something called REFramework (Robotic Enterprise Framework). The REFramework is built-in and helps streamline implementations with some of the industry best practices for development. UiPath provides that to everybody as a basic template to start an implementation. Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere usually provide you with a blank slate and a junior developer might struggle a bit to actually understand how to do exception handling or logging. UiPath allows you to do that very simply with REFramework.

We have also used the UiPath Academy courses and they have been very beneficial. UiPath started giving all their Academy material free of cost to everybody. They were the first RPA vendor to do that. By doing that, they created a competency, globally, inUiPath. It certainly helps everybody. If I don't understand something about a new feature that comes out, I open the Academy and watch a video, or I read some material or a white paper that they have published, and I understand it better.

The material is really good. It helps you understand their platform in a very robust manner. There are walkthroughs where you can do implementations and developments while the course is going on. That really helps as well.

The Academy helps us build an internal understanding of new capabilities and then go to clients and tell them, "This is another new capability. It's available to you free of cost because you've already purchased the licenses. Here is what its potential is, and this is how you should implement it." As a result of the Academy courses, we can advise clients better and help them unleash that potential.

UiPath changed the way that they do licensing, starting in 2022. Any partner that has status with them is now allowed to sell licenses, because UiPath itself does not sell licenses anymore. They have a sales team that manages licenses and works with vendors like us.

They can definitely work on the way that they publish material about their licenses. Every year they change their license SKUs. They change the definitions and the naming conventions. They change capabilities and functionalities. It becomes very hard, as a user, to track it. We recently had to renew our licenses and the way that they defined the RPA developer license had changed. The RPA developer license is now called an automation developer license. The two capabilities are very different. We had to go through learning to make sure that we would have all the capabilities that we had previously, and understand what the new capabilities are.

There was no material available on their partner portal or on the internet to help us understand which licenses give you which capabilities. That's something that they need to make more transparent and not reinvent it every year. They need a level of standardization.

There is a tool called Power Automate which used to be called WinAutomation. Power Automate is available to everybody with an Office 365 license. The only other competitor to UiPath's community would be the WinAutomation/Power Automate community. It is a very community-driven solution, similar to UiPath. That community is as strong as the UiPath community.

UiPath recently got into the process analysis space. They've started doing things like task mining and process mining, but I wouldn't say UiPath is a leader in that space. They do have something called Task Capture that allows you to document processes for automation. But UiPath's process analysis piece is not yet as developed as much as something like Celonis.

The way we break down the process around automation is into three stages: advice, implement, and operate. The advice piece, which includes process assessment and building business cases is an area where UiPath is not great as a tool. It has the capabilities, but it's fairly new.

But at the "implement" stage, obviously it's a great product.

And the "operate" is where they have realized that the stickiness comes in with clients. There's always going to be a need for "operate" and they are getting into it. They provide something called UiPath Insights that gives you analysis about how your automation is running in production and to help you manage the automations. It gives you quick dashboards to present to senior leaders to show ROI and business case creations. UiPath needs to grow in the "operate" space and they are doing so. Neither Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offers anything for process mining or task mining.

In terms of innovation, I don't think that the cloud solution helps me innovate. UiPath's integration functionalities can help me come up with an innovative solution, but the fact that it's a cloud instance or software as a service, does not really help me innovate as much. I could do the same innovation with an on-prem solution.

Some of our use cases for UiPath range all the way from development to operational support through to business enablement. Our biggest focus internally is to enable a business to do what they do best. We generally provide solutions through the use of UiPath to cater for streams, e.g., Procure-to-Pay, Hire to Retire, and quote-to-cash.

We are using it to build solutions that can heal themselves. So, we make sure that our operational team is aware as soon as something fails with the processes that we have built. If one of the use cases or failures has already been listed, we note the fix and try to implement that. If that doesn't work, then we hand it off to a human to look at the task. 

In terms of some of the use cases that we have in the business, we do quite a lot of ERP automation. So, we work with SAP quite a lot. We also have a lot of back-end data that we need to bring in and process as well. So, we use our SQL databases to perform tasks, e.g., allocating payments to bank accounts in our ERP system.

Because our development team is rather small, we try to create as many reusable components and solutions on the UiPath platform to make our day-to-day jobs a lot easier.

What has helped us the most from UiPath is that they haven't just provided us with a toolset or range of products, but actually provided us with a framework and hyperautomation lifecycle that we could use as a guideline throughout our own journey in automation.

UiPath has definitely assisted us in speeding up our digital transformation journey. We have been able to create a whole bunch of different components that we reuse throughout our solutions. This means that when we have great, new ideas that we want to implement into our solutions, we have now found ways to do it in such a way that we spend less time trying to implement the fixes or cool new enhancements and more time actually realizing the value. In doing so, we have also seen a reduction in cost and an increase in FTE savings.

From a development point of view, one of the most important, useful features in the deck is definitely some of the offerings that UiPath has in terms of UiPath Studio. Having the components for the Object Repository and Data Service available make your solution reusable and decrease your development time so you can go to market more quickly for products that you are offering clients. That has been really useful in our landscape. 

UiPath has gone a very long way to make sure their tools are easy to use and the products that they have in their end-to-end hyper automation lifecycle are easy to learn and teachable to people that you work with.

UiPath has a wide range of features that they have brought into their ecosystem. If I look at something quite specific that we would like to see going forward, that would be the integration between Data Service and Insights. It is great that we are able to visualize our return on investments using Insights. We can see a whole bunch of metrics and how our processes are performing. I think what would give us a lot more power is if we could link that to Data Service and actually pull through some custom information.

We have been using UiPath at the company internally for roughly just over five years. 

We have been a reseller of the UiPath product to our clients for roughly three years.

UiPath solutions are definitely very stable. It is very easy for us to build quality solutions and put them into production, then be able to trust the solution that we have put into production. For any automation center of excellence, that is quite important. You need to have a level of trust in your organization, inside of your environment and inside of your solutions. 

This also is attributed to the quality of our developers. We have strong, skilled developers. Without a product like UiPath, stability would not be such a great factor, especially if we had to go with a different approach or tool sets.

We have had a lot of experience trying to scale our solutions. Because of our automation journey, when we started out, we created processes that were very specific to the problems that we were trying to solve. They were actually quite static. The processes that we developed were aimed at addressing a problem specifically. As time went on, we started changing our design-thinking approach and our approach to designing and developing solutions, in such a fashion that we now try to create our solutions to be more dynamic. 

Because of the life expectancy of automations, and specifically RPA, a lot of experts would say that you need to go back after 6,12, or 18 months to reevaluate your solution and see if it needs to be redeveloped. What we have seen in our landscape is that if we try to make our solutions more dynamic, and actually cater for more than what we set out to cater for, having to enhance our solution later on takes a lot less development time. So, scaling out the solution has become immensely useful and our way of work.

We have roughly about 100 people within our organization directly communicating with our UiPath environment, either through our robotic assistance or bots, right down to the granular level of developing solutions. Some of the roles include our developers, operational support, and business users.

I would definitely say that the UiPath technical support is quite proficient. They help us quite quickly. Their responses always direct us to the answers that we are looking for. If they don't know the answer or can't assist us, they give us that feedback. They go ahead and find the answers or make the needed changes. They then come back to us and provide feedback. 

We have really enjoyed working with the UiPath team quite closely throughout our partnership. It has enabled our journey further. I would definitely rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

If I look at some of the other technologies and tool stacks that we have used to do RPA or automation, the adoption rate is a lot less. This is because of the way that developers need to struggle in some cases to get through the learning and usage of these tools.

I was not directly involved in the setup of the applications and ecosystem. From what I have been able to gather, we did have quite a lot of support from UiPath and the setup was quite straightforward. It took four hours maximum.

UiPath has definitely helped us realize some of our full-time equivalent savings (FTE savings) in regards to some of the reusable components that we have and have placed specifically in the business. With the offerings that UiPath has, we are able to easily see what our return on investment is, how we have structured and deployed our solutions, what we have deployed, how long it has been deployed, etc.

If we take a look at the last six months, we have about 105 processes that we have in production at the moment. If we single out a specific process that we have been working on and has been in production for quite a while, then measure that over the last six months, we can see that we have saved roughly about 380 hours on that process. Or, we have saved 380 FTE hours. That equates to roughly 77,000 rand. That has been quite a big savings. If you take the time saved across our 100-plus processes, we are looking at close to 2,100 hours that we have saved in the last six months. That has a financial value of between 500,000 and a million rand. 

UiPath definitely has reduced human error for us. Because a lot of our processes are quite focused within the financial space and we integrate it with our ERP systems, we have seen a reduction of human error come into play. We have also seen that the provisions made for human error have also been reduced.

In the RPA industry at the moment and in automation in general, UiPath's pricing model is the most consistent. So, if you are looking at year-on-year growth and pricing, or even if you are comparing solutions, each vendor has their own take on how they are going to generate profits and expand their return on investment. By far, UiPath is the most consistent with their pricing. They make it quite clear what they set out to achieve with their pricing and product. That makes their product so much easier to design for, as you don't need to change your pricing and go back to clients every time that you introduce a new aspect into the solution.

If I did have any advice or extra information that I could give surrounding the UiPath product, one of its strengths is that you know upfront what everything will cost.

We found that UiPath Academy courses that they provide, as well as the help through the forum, have greatly enabled us to more easily use this platform. Compared to other vendors and other tool stacks, it is a lot easier to use as well. 

If I look at the UiPath offering and compare it to Microsoft Power Platform, and while Microsoft Power Automate has definitely come a long way and done a great job of making its way into the market, there are still key differences between the two platforms. Because Power Platform is still relatively new, the resources and support are a little bit more tedious to get around than with UiPath. With the UiPath community, because of their extensive work that they have done within the community to build developers, you get a lot more support on forums. 

In terms of usability of the platforms, UiPath has been doing this for a lot longer. So, the user interfaces and all around user-friendliness of their platform definitely show, in the time that they have spent working on the product. 

If I look at some of the things that Power Automate offered before the latest updates in the UiPath offering, Power Automate was able to allow you to trigger processes completely differently to the way that UiPath does. UiPath has since taken a step up and released their integration services, which has helped bridge that gap quite a lot. Being able to link to a process is a lot easier than it used to be.

If I compare scalability, development time, and ease of use of Power Platform to UiPath, specifically around the RPA components of the solutions, there is definitely a noticeable difference. 

As an organization, we took Blue Prism, WorkFusion, Automation Anywhere, and those types of vendors and platforms into consideration when selecting our platform of choice when our center of excellence was formed. When making the decision at that time, the stakeholders involved decided to go with UiPath, mostly because of what they had to offer and their consistency.

The advice that I have to customers who are looking to start off their automation journey, or essentially take on a new vendor like UiPath, I would definitely say one of the challenges for us was getting our governance and standards right. As soon as we got that right, and we fixed our design-thinking approach, we realized how we could make sure our solutions were scalable. We then started seeing a higher return on investment. My advice would be to focus on the small things, make sure that you understand your processes and what goals you are trying to achieve, and then start with the beginning and end in mind. So, know where you want to end up and see how you are going to break your solution up into phases to be able to get there.

UiPath has had a very interesting impact on our environment. We have found it quite difficult to find RPA developers within our country, specifically those who have the skills that we need and can do what we do. So, we have had to rely on upskilling people as much as we possibly can to be able to deliver the solutions that we are delivering. In doing so, UiPath Academy has been quite helpful and handy, specifically because it is a lot easier to onboard a new employee or somebody who has less experience with UiPath. The training is free and easily available. If there are any issues or questions, the Academy team and the community are always around to support and answer any questions. 

What is quite impressive about UiPath is that they followed the same trend of having two major releases a year. I think those are the two most anticipated events that we have within our team as well. Because we have a roadmap, we know more or less what UiPath is planning and hoping to do. Our partnership enables us to have a closer view at that information. UiPath Insider Program allows us to see some of the previewed items as well. 

For those who aren't quite sure where they want to go just yet, keep an eye on the forums, blog posts, and UiPath in general. Look at their major releases before making any huge decisions. UiPath has a track record of consistency, and they have got some great reviews and implementations that I think we could really all learn from.

I would rate the UiPath platform as 10 out of 10.

I am an RPA developer and I work with UiPath in that capacity.

Our current use case involves the automation of a process involving healthcare-related data. This is confidential data that is received from the customer and inserted into Oracle forms. Reports are then generated from it and these reports are then used by the organization, which is in the healthcare domain, for their analysis.

The data being analyzed includes medical and treatment history. For example, with the current pandemic going on, there are all sorts of healthcare data that is related to it, including various types of treatments. When somebody walks into any clinic or hospital, all of the treatment is entered into a database and we get an extract of it. The analysis is used to get more details.

Another interesting use case, prior to this one, involved the documenting of invoices. We were working with approximately 250 different samples of purchase invoices, many in different formats. One might be a native PDF file, whereas another could be a scanned PDF, and yet another might be a simple handwritten invoice that was converted into a PDF based on a picture that was taken from a mobile device. We were receiving these invoices from our client and they wanted to extract data from them. It was accomplished by using the Document Understanding features in UiPath.

The other notable use case had to do with issuing refunds for purchases that were made on an e-commerce site. When a customer made an order and there was a problem that resulted in them wanting a refund, there were multiple ways that the client could request one. A refund application could be received by the customer care department in the form of a simple call, which was a verbal request, or as an email written by the customer, or as an automatically-generated email that was created based on filling out a form on the website.

Regardless of which of the three input methods is used, the refund request is gathered and sent to a mainframe application. At that point, the information is extracted from the mainframe and the refund is issued using another application.

The automation of these tasks using features such as artificial intelligence and document understanding has reduced our costs. For example, with the invoice processing use case, there was a team of between 20 and 25 agents who were doing it manually. Obviously, a team of that size has a large cost associated with it. Also, the volume was very high, which meant that the team was not able to deliver on all of the work. There are approximately 250 vendors sending invoices to our customer to process the data, which translates to about 1,000 documents being sent on a daily basis, to be processed by only 25 people. It was a huge task. With this level of volume, people tend to get frustrated. 

We implemented the automation and the team size has now been reduced to only five or six people, and that is only required to monitor the bots. For example, they check to make sure that the data being fetched using document understanding is at par. We have set the minimum confidence of the documents being scanned at 90% and each day, a report is generated and sent to the customer. Overall, it was a very cost-saving implementation.

When it comes to building automations, it's pretty simple. UiPath has a lot of features, starting with Process Mining. For example, when a business person wants to start from scratch, they don't necessarily know which process to automate. They can use the Process Mining feature available in UiPath to get an answer as to whether a particular process is worth automating or not. Features like this are available to shorten the processes. Once a process is identified, we can go ahead and implement and develop the automation. Overall, it is very easy to develop automations because of the inbuilt features.

UiPath provides us with features to implement end-to-end automation, and it begins with the initial steps. They have Process Mining or task mining features to help companies that have an appetite for automation but don't know what they want to automate. Once a process analysis is completed, it can determine whether a process can be automated or not. At that point, we can proceed to the bot development.

Once the bot has been developed, there are different options, including third-party support, for deploying them. After a bot has been deployed, they have the hypercare facility to monitor and maintain bots that are in production. Taken together, all of these features facilitate end-to-end automation. This is very important to our work. 

Consider that UiPath did not always have the Process Mining feature. In those days, in order to do process analysis, companies had to hire Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for different domains at the beginning of a project to determine which processes could be automated. For example, if there were a requirement for a healthcare process then the company had to hire a healthcare SME. The SME would assist in process analysis and in the determination of whether it was something that could be automated. Nowadays, with the help of the Process Mining features, we no longer have to worry about who is doing the analysis.

From our standpoint, we have to do the recording and supply the inputs. With this, a report will be generated and it will tell us whether the process can be automated. If so, then the developers or an architect will come in and do the development. Following this, the DevOps team will come in for the deployment. Finally, the production support and monitoring are taken care of by the developers.

Using the cloud-based deployment helps reduce our on-premises footprint because we no longer have to take care of servers and local databases. There was a separate team taking care of the networking aspect, and another team taking care of the databases. For on-premises deployments, there are different teams that come into play, whereas with a cloud-based solution, we don't have to worry about anything. UiPath takes care of deployment and the databases, and everything is automatically handled. I can't estimate an exact percentage of how much our on-premises footprint has been reduced, but it has really made a significant impact in terms of substituting or replacing the on-premises facilities.

Attended automation has helped to scale our RPA benefits and in fact, in my almost five years of experience, I have not come across a scenario where the automation could be purely unattended. In the use case with the invoices where we used document understanding, there was still a minimally-sized team of five people in place after the implementation. They monitor the processes and if the criteria of 90% are not met then the invoice will be rejected and sent back to the vendor. In this case, attended automation is really helpful.

The Automation Cloud saves our IT department time because we don't have to worry about hiring different teams for different tasks. The infrastructure maintenance is handled by the vendor and all we have to do is pay for our licenses, then everything is ready.

Automation Cloud has helped to decrease our time to value. You don't have to worry about how the installation is to be done, you just have to pay the license fees and the team will do everything. They have packages, and you just have to give them the numbers according to what you need. Based on that, they will propose a solution and propose an infrastructure for you. Once that is agreed, they will do the installation within a very short time. After that is complete, your developers can start doing the development and within no time, you will start seeing the ROI.

The Automation Cloud has indeed decreased our overall costs.

It is really helpful for an organization to use the Automation Cloud when they do not have sufficient resources available themselves. In situations like this, the UiPath Automation Cloud plays a very important role. You just have to give them the number and they propose the solution including the infrastructure. You just need a few developers and everything else is taken care of by the Automation Cloud team.

We have a lot of clients who are looking at digital transformation, but they don't know what tool to use. There are a lot of vendors available in the market who provide products that are similar to UiPath, but UiPath has a lot of very strong marketing, a strong sales team, and at the same time, the product is very good. UiPath helps in doing quick installations, quicker deployments, and quicker turnarounds. Ultimately, it really helps with digital transformation for any organization.

Digital transformation requires an upgrade, but it is not very complex and not very costly. A company may have to be 25 to 30 million dollars to upgrade, which is a significant cost, but if it saves 100 million then in the end, the organization is saving money.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error to a great extent. When humans perform the same task over and over again, we tend to get bored and frustrated. Our excitement goes down day by day. However, when it comes to machines or bots, they don't get bored and they don't get frustrated having to do repetitive work. This leads to fewer errors, which has a positive impact on the business. There are fewer escalations and the customer is happier.

Our automations have helped to free up employees' time by reducing how long it takes them to complete their tasks. It leaves them time for learning or performing other jobs, and in general, it helps to reduce work hours. I estimate that percentage-wise, it saves my team between 30% and 35%. The total time saved is approximately 250 hours per month.

One of the ways that our employees benefited from having time freed through the use of automation is upgrading. A lot of people, in particular our technical staff, upgraded by learning new technologies. This ultimately led to helping the organization because they are able to work on different jobs.

Automation also leads to an improvement in employee happiness. If you ask them to do the same thing over and over again, on a daily basis, they get bored. When 30% of the time is saved by using automation, it frees up perhaps two hours a day for them to do different work or even recreational activities. 

UiPath contains a lot of very useful features.

The artificial intelligence and document understanding features are very good and have been helpful when it comes to processing handwritten or unstructured, especially when there is a high volume and it is repetitive. 

Using the artificial intelligence and machine learning features had a drastic impact on our use case. In the scenario where we used document understanding, we were able to successfully automate the use case without artificial intelligence. However, there was not a sufficient improvement. The success rate was between 78% and 80%. We did not use these features originally because they come at an extra cost and we did not have approval. When we were given approval and acquired the licenses, we re-implemented the automation and included the inbuilt AI and ML models. Our success rate went up to between 92% and 93%, which is significant.

The Orchestrator is in drastic need of improvement. Three or four years ago, the Orchestrator UI was very simple and comfortable to use but now, they have added so many features that it is difficult for new users to quickly understand it. The latest implementation that we did was so complicated that nobody was able to understand it, aside from the developers. Generally speaking, UiPath needs to improve the interface, and the overall user assistance should be boosted.

The developers are the core users of the product and it's important to make the product easy for them to use. The easier it is, the more people start using the tool. Then, as there are more developers available, more organizations start to hear about RPA tools and Uipath.

I have been working with UiPath for approximately four and a half years, across three different companies.

I have found that one or two times out of ten, UiPath Studio hangs and needs to be restarted. These types of technical glitches do happen but not often.

In the organizations that I have worked in so far, the UiPath features and the licensing available meant that we didn't have to worry about the infrastructure setup or scaling. You can start with a small number of licenses and robots, with little infrastructure requirements, and gradually, as you need more robots and more powerful infrastructure, you can scale up. It has great scalability. 

Even if somebody is using the community edition, we are able to build a PoC for them. In fact, using this approach gives us a pretty good idea of how the automation will proceed. Based on this, we get an idea of what the infrastructure will look like. Then, if everything fits into the customer's budget or request, we will go with the enterprise edition and implement the solution. Throughout the process, scalability is not an issue.

In my department, we have between 70 and 80 people working with UiPath. Out of these, 80% are developers, perhaps between 10% and 15% are business analysts, and the remaining people are solution architects or tech leads.

We use UiPath extensively because it helps with quick implementation and a short turnaround time. Deployments are very quick and easy to do. Given the current pandemic situation, I don't see the demand for UiPath or any other RPA tool going down.

I have been in contact with technical support many times and they are very good.

The issues that we typically face are related to Studio and sometimes licensing. The support has a fast turnaround time and if the organization is large, with a lot of licenses, then they have dedicated support for them. It is not necessary to deal with customer care, for example. Instead, dedicated technical support is available and they are really good.

The companies I have been with did not use another RPA tool prior to UiPath.

As a developer, I have not been directly involved in a UiPath installation or implementation. It's generally the responsibility of the implementation team that every organization has, and developers don't have the authority to simply download and install or implement UiPath. That said, I have given my input in the past.

Every company has a QA team and once they identify and finalize which automation software they want to install, the implementation team takes care of it. In my experience, the developers are given an instance of it to use after this.

It used to be a very simple installation, although, as I have seen UiPath change over time, it has become very complex. They have now Studio versus Studio X. They also have the Automation Cloud, which is different from an on-premises deployment. Somebody who is new to UiPath will not be able to do anything.

In terms of how long it takes for deployment, it depends on what process you want to automate. A very simple process can be automated, end-to-end from process analysis to deployment, in about a week. Complex automations have been taking us between six and eight months to complete. It all depends on what kind of automation you are doing.

In general, the implementation strategy is simple. Again, it depends on what kind of process we are automating. If the process is very complex and it involves a very high volume of data to be processed and stored, then it will require greater network bandwidth and more database storage. It may also need a fast server, with regards to processing speed. 

All of the implementations that I have seen have involved an in-house team. There are different departments involved, such as the networking team, the database team, or the IT department. Also, for the latest implementation that we did, involving Automation Cloud, the UiPath team helped us.

UiPath has reduced our overall costs. For example, if you are replacing 25 to 30 humans, where instead you only have to pay for licenses, the expenses are much less.

The company and our clients see a return on investment through savings in time and costs.

There are different licenses available, including variations for an on-premises versus a cloud-based deployment. For example, an on-premises installation is very easy and not very costly, and is suitable for a client with a simple optimization that does not have cloud-based requirements. Generally, companies do not have to worry about infrastructure because of the different options that are available.

Different licenses are used to activate features that the organization wants to use. For example, they offer licenses for UiPath Studio X, attended automation, unattended automation, document understanding, and so forth. They also have customized licensing and packages available. For example, if a customer requires 50 attended and 150 unattended licenses, but it does not fit into an existing package, then UiPath will create one for them.

They have an on-demand, floating license available for companies to save on costs. In this case, if a company wants 40 licenses and is only using 10 at a time then they only have to pay for the ones that they are using, with the remaining 40 triggered only when requested.

There are other automation tools on the market, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Of these, UiPath is very strong and this is because of the UiPath academy for training, the UiPath certifications, and other things that impact the RPA developers.

The company that I am with did not evaluate other products before choosing UiPath.

Over the time that I have used it, the number of resources available in UiPath has grown to a very high level. For example, with the advent of Automation Cloud, the organization no longer has to worry about protecting against on-premises failures.

I have used the UiPath Apps feature but have not yet put it into production. I have completed a PoC and done some self-learning, but I haven't yet come across a scenario or process where we have to implement it.

We completed a proof of concept where our client was looking for customized input forms for their client. In that case, if I had to write the code for this customer's input form, I would need to hire additional resources at an extra cost. It might be, for example, code that has to be written in Java. In UiPath Apps, we were able to create a customized form for our client within a span of two to three days. It would be able to handle their various survey-related inputs. This feature is very helpful because it is much quicker than writing customized code for the client.

The Apps feature did not affect my IT department's workload but it did reduce the work required by my team. This was important because our client was not originally seeking to use UiPath for this part of their project. Instead, they had confidence in us and asked how it could be done, and whether Uipath could accomplish it. When we completed the input form using Apps, it definitely helped in reducing my organization's workload and in turn, reduced the overall cost to the client.

In summary, the features are very good and there are plenty of tricks and tips available, depending on what it is that you're trying to do.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.