UiPath Platform Reviews

We use it for the automation of internal HR processes in our company.

It helps with the ease of implementing new logic from business requirements, which very rapidly change.

UiPath has also helped because fewer people are engaged in the processes we automate, and they can do more important things. It saves our staff time, on the order of 80 percent. In terms of employee satisfaction, I don't really know how they feel, because they are not in my department, but I believe that when you don't have to do such routine, repetitive work, you can have a coffee and come up with ideas on how to improve the automations. That is, by far, better than clicking and typing thousands of forms.

Also, there is less chance of a person making a mistake. If a given operation would take one person, for example, two days to do, the automation can do it in one hour, or even 30 minutes. It is very useful. We saw benefits with the first automation that was implemented, because it started to work and free people from routine work, within the first second of the automation working.

We have a lot of automations that involve filling forms on the internet and creating events in a calendar. There are a lot of fields to fill out. When creating these meetings, you have to add a description and pick the actual time. All this stuff should be done precisely, because if there is a mistake, somebody will not come to this meeting, or the information will not be applicable. Now the number of errors is zero because robots don't make mistakes.

We also don't need to involve the IT department, and we now have 15 automations. The group of people who implement it do the maintenance as well. We don't need IT and, actually, everything works fine without any maintenance. The problems come when there are updates, but the time needed for maintenance is very small.

Because we don't need to create virtual machines to install the solution on-premises, the cost is as little as it can be. Of course, we have to create several virtual machines for actual clicking, because the robot works the way a human does. But it has definitely helped with our on-prem footprint because we don't have to install the core of the system on-premises. I know, from my experience, that those kinds of core components take a lot of hardware resources. They would not require just one virtual machine; it would be a bunch of virtual machines. It is definitely very efficient to use the cloud solution from UiPath.

UiPath reduces costs because it reduces the time it takes to create automations. You don't have to write the actual code. You just build automations with higher levels of abstraction and you don't have to worry about what is done behind the curtains.

The best part is the way UiPath provides the ability to automate everything, including the architecture and Orchestrator. The interfaces are very user-friendly and intuitive. It's very easy to build automations. Someone who is not very technical can understand quite a lot and start to automate.

All automations are built starting with process analysis, then robot building, and monitoring. One person can gather the requirements, build the automation, and monitor it. This end-to-end coverage is very important. I can't even imagine how it would work if not in this way. This is the essential part of the automation: the idea, the implementation, and the maintenance.

UiPath's approach allows adding new workers, new agents, or robots to perform quicker and in parallel. For example, if you create two extra virtual machines with two extra robots, a whole bunch of operations will be performed three times faster. This kind of implementation is very convenient. And, we can change the way automations are deployed in Orchestrator and make it more efficient as well. We can do all these kinds of things really easily and quickly, like in minutes or less than an hour. That helps to scale things. You can change something in an automation in several minutes and deploy it or publish it in Orchestrator, and it already works. The challenge of implementing innovation can be addressed very quickly and very efficiently. The challenge is that we have to change our automations because other applications change with time. They have new user interfaces. But we don't need to upgrade anything to automate.

Several of our team members are studying the UiPath Academy courses at this moment. It has definitely helped because they get to know about new features that make automations more mature. One of my colleagues said, "As I read and study more in this course, I begin thinking more creatively and in more interesting ways." That means their understanding is growing and that it is changing their perceptions of what they can do with UiPath.

The information in the Academy is structured, starting with simpler concepts and moving to more advanced levels of knowledge, gradually. Also, you really learn about things you haven't used before. Thirdly, it leads you to the certification exam and getting the certificate on passing this exam. That makes you a good candidate for better jobs.

UiPath also has a very nice community of developers. When I face problems that I can't resolve by myself after several hours, I Google it in the UiPath Community and almost every problem can be solved by searching their resources. I work with different vendors and not all of them have such a big and open community. This is a real advantage. I'm not very familiar with other communities in RPA, but I can say that this community is, by far, more useful and more open than any other vendor's community I have seen.

I faced a problem when a new version of UiPath Studio didn't work with an older version of the packages that were part of our project. The problem is that when I have to change something just a bit, I actually have to rebuild the automation with new versions of these libraries. There is no backward compatibility. 

This question was addressed to an engineer from UiPath in the Community but I haven't gotten an answer. This is quite a hard question. So, I just create new automations with new approaches, which takes some time.

I have been using UiPath for about eight months.

The solution is very stable compared to other enterprise tools. Even if there is an error, if you handle it properly, everything works perfectly. From the point of view of UiPath developers, everything is done on a very high level.

It is scalable. However, to see the scalability you have to use the Enterprise Edition, because the Community Edition doesn't allow you to use more than one robot. But the mathematics are very easy: The more robots you have, the faster everything happens.

The number of automations will grow in our company.

I haven't used their technical support.

The initial setup was easy. It took a few hours.

We are using the Community Edition. The cost is only that of the virtual machines.

The pricing of the Enterprise Edition is a bit high. It's several thousand dollars a month. That's too much, because not every enterprise or organization can build such useful robots that will make it worthwhile for them to pay this much. Maybe the cost of the program could depend on the number of automations, or the complexity of the automations.

The solution is cloud-based, but you have to have some components deployed on the local computers. That is the architecture of UiPath, but the base of the infrastructure is in the cloud.

My advice is to just implement and begin automating. You don't have to even learn something before it, because everything is very intuitive.

We have a variety of projects we use it for. We have automated about 72 processes within six verticals, including sales, finance, HR, and purchasing.

It has helped our client save thousands of dollars, for sure. That is really what they have found to be the biggest benefit of using UiPath. The cost of the product is low because they're using it continuously. It saves cost and it helps them gain more returns.

Our main projects are mostly around SAP and Excel. We have used most of the features available, especially the ones that support SAP and Excel activities. Those are the ones that we have found to be most useful.

UiPath is easy to use and there is less coding. That is very helpful for the development team when it comes to building projects. It's very flexible and really makes our team more efficient. The turnaround time of development is good. 

There is some scope for improvement, especially in the area of variables. Some variables are used in specific workflows and some variables are global. It would help if there was a repository that would showcase which variable is global and which is local to a workflow.

UiPath should also help us whenever we are changing versions. Whenever we make those changes, UiPath should help by documenting the versions and sending us comments on the changes made in UiPath. If that were available, that would really help.

I would also like to see something related to auditing. That would really help the development and peer review teams to identify the gaps, instead of going through the sequence one by one. If there were an auditing tool that clearly brings out issues, that would really help.

We have been using UiPath for four years.

UiPath is a stable solution.

They are plugging in a lot of features that are really helping our teams. It is scalable.

For this year, we don't have plans to increase our usage of the solution, but it depends on our client.

The technical support is good and they respond to us all the time. Whenever we require support, they are with us.

They have a standard questionnaire that we have to complete and send in, and they come back with standard responses. At critical times, instead of the standard response, if they could do a direct call that would really help us. Instead of one or two levels of questionnaires, if they could directly get on a call, that would help us. Hence I rate them eight out of 10.

Positive

I was not part of the initial setup, but I am involved in the renewals.

The renewals could be easier. The documentation is lacking. When you are renewing your licenses, you might encounter errors but there are no proper documents available to explain how to handle these errors.

In terms of maintenance, our automation processes require some attention but UiPath, as an application, does not, other than updates.

There is ROI over a period of years. From the second year onward, it would be around 25 to 30 percent.

The pricing and licensing are okay. It's quite affordable.

There are a few things that come with additional cost. They are mostly features. For example, Document Understanding is an additional feature that you have to pay extra for.

I would recommend it to new users who are choosing among automation tools. 

Also, if a company is new to it or the users who are setting up are new to it, they should be aware of the preparations involved in setting up the environment and setting up UiPath. That can be a little challenging if they are not aware of certain things.

I rate UiPath at eight out of 10. There are a few features or approaches they could enhance, such as an option to view all the variables, as I mentioned earlier. Also, since the code can be very big, we might be searching for certain things that are not available. I'm more concerned about the debugging and evaluation parts. 

And in Orchestrator there are a lot of features they can enhance.

We suggested UiPath for one of our company's clients to automate DevOps processes. This is a part the company doesn't want to touch. They tried automating with Ansible Playbook and Terraform. We wanted to eliminate human intervention altogether. We are still transitioning from dev to staging and then production. We have done most of the research. We will move from staging to production if it works with our architecture and can be scaled.

Our client is one of the biggest companies out there. There are maybe a million users worldwide. They primarily focus on the Asia-Pacific region, but there are also users in Europe and the Americas. The client has several web applications and a hybrid structure. Some data are on the cloud, while other data is on the on-premise servers. We created solutions for them over the years. We have an SI and DevOps team working in parallel for years. Our goal was to automate everything that could happen without intervention. 

It's a massive project that will take time, and we still haven't moved out of development. We try to make the processes more streamlined. All the associates are researching it and working on their parts. Right now, I can only say how it has benefited me. I've automated some fundamental DevOps tasks. 

It saves a lot of time because you don't have to come in on weekends to provide service or troubleshoot. You can automate these tasks and schedule them to run automatically. You can optimize your work and how you spend your time. For example, some services need to be routinely patched, so we automated patching every third Sunday. However, we still needed to come in on weekends to troubleshoot after the patch was applied. 

We have shadow scripting to automate these processes, but we had to go online to see if it's up and the ports are open. I automated this with UiPath and scheduled it for the weekend, so I no longer need to come in on weekends. It saves around two to four hours per week. That is about 16 hours a month. It wasn't easy in the early stages. It took around two months to understand the tool. I was also working on other projects simultaneously.

There is a recording feature that copies each step of a task. You can automate every process via this recording. It's a cool feature that helps you define the variables. I also like their trial version, which lets you experiment with the solution and learn the capabilities before buying the license.

I still haven't used the drag-and-drop APIs, but I look forward to this feature. We currently use Jenkins for our continuous integration tools. There are some APIs from Jenkins, and we extract the job details from those APIs.

UiPath's interface and user experience could be improved. The name is UiPath, but their UI is not that great. It's outdated. It seems like a 2014 or 2015 software. They should look at other products on the market.

Another thing is that UiPath lacks online training resources. Maybe they can start their own YouTube channel. You have to rely on the documentation to learn. There are some resources, but they aren't available on the official site.

We have been using UiPath for six months.

UiPath is quite stable. I haven't seen any downtime. I can also pause the upgrade itself if I don't want the upgrades to cause instability. The long-term version is available as well.

We are still in the development stage, so we don't know whether it will be scalable. 

I have never had a need to contact UiPath support. I usually try to Google answers or figure the issues out on my own. 

I am from the build release team, so I automate the deployment and build process. I work on CI/CDs and try to automate most things. The deployment was highly complex. I was new to this project, so it was challenging for me. I was learning on the job and trying to understand the process itself because it was already partially built when I joined, and I was responsible for making some of it. 

The application takes about 10 to 20 seconds to install, but it will take around a week to build the infrastructure. We are just replacing the web service, not the whole application.

We tried a blue-green strategy for implementation. We built blue nodes and ports similar to production and shifted the web services to the new one. If it is up and running and everything works fine, then we can close the previous one, and we can redirect traffic to the new one with the help of load balancers.

We have 25 people on our DevOps team who do everything from architecture to automation. They're not just dealing with one web application. There are hundreds of applications. I worked on several applications building the architecture and helping. For example, let's say we build or add some features to a project. To automate those features, we need to understand them and how it works on Kubernetes or other platforms.

It definitely needs maintenance because we deal with a large user base. It requires a lot of maintenance and downtime to make things work during staging and development. Maintenance is always necessary, and we are the ones who maintain it. We have four or five people on call weekly to maintain the solution. They are the responsible people or points of contact for the developers or application owners if something goes down or goes wrong.

UiPath's price is reasonable. It's not so high relative to the capabilities. I don't know about different licenses or more premium versions. Prices are negotiated on the corporate level. 

We considered Automation Anywhere. However, It doesn't allow for an extended trial. We needed to purchase a license after 50 tasks, and we didn't have enough budget to experiment. Blue Prism is also there. We had the same problem. There wasn't a trial version.

I rate UiPath eight out of ten. UiPath has excellent features, but you need to be patient enough to learn.

Our use case for this solution is for hosting and deployment purposes of web applications.

We are using the latest version.

UiPath is a good solution for automation. Our time management has improved by using the UiPath solution. On a monthly basis, it reduces one week of a developer's time.

It helps reduce human error. 99% of errors can be avoided by using this solution.

It has a very good, user-friendly user interface. This is its best feature - it is very easy to use. There is not much complexity when using it. For the beginners, this is also good.

For building automations, we can use a task manager because we also have job management or support in the development phase. We can apply first-in, first-out with work in UiPath.

For the automation, we do not require anything to be manual. We only need to set up the configuration. UiPath follows the instructions given by the developer or engineer. It automatically follows the instructions from end-to-end given in a set of files. 

The unattended automation helps improve our time management.

We are using the solution's AI functionality, which helps us automate more things. Now, nothing is complex. We just need to drag and drop things to create a flow. Everything is done automatically by the automation. It reduces our effort on these types of things.

They could make the solution better by improving the latency.

The community can be increased and enhanced. That way, if we are facing an issue and need an easy solution, we can then use the community.

I have been using it for a year.

It is capable of doing various tasks at the same time.

We have not experienced any downtime or issues.

It is scalable. We can add any number of users. This is the most scalable solution that we are using.

The technical support is good. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

We would like them to increase the community. That way, if we need 24/7 tech support due to an error or issue, we can resolve it as soon as possible.

Positive

We did not previously use another solution.

The deployment was neither straightforward nor complex. Some skills are required, i.e., basic courses are required for a developer or engineer using this solution. For a person who has hands-on experience with it, the deployment will be simple for them.

The AI functionality saves time and reduces the number of errors. It also reduces our costs in terms of human resources. It has reduced our costs by thousands of dollars.

We have a team who decides the software that we use. They chose UiPath because it was better than the other competitors. They conclude that UiPath was the best one, which is why we use it.

I would rate UiPath as nine out of 10.

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.

My domain and expertise are in life sciences. In life sciences there is a process called pharmacovigilance, which involves monitoring the effects of medical drugs after they have been licensed for use. I create end-to-end automations, for case processing and full data entry. The customer will store details in an Oracle-based pharmacovigilance platform called Argus, where clinical data from the client and the product are stored. The UiPath bot has to capture the cases from Argus. Once a case has been input into UiPath, a mandatory status check, duplicate search, and case processing have to be done.

It then needs to perform full data entry in Argus. The full data entry consists of more details like patient information, product information, event information, and so on. The bot needs to validate and input those details into Argus and save the case. 

Some days there will be 1k records and on other days, there will be 2k records. On average the bot will process 12k to 13k records.

Pharmacovigilance is a big process. It would take almost 45 minutes for a human to complete a single case. By implementing UiPath robots in the customer's environment, the case processing time has been drastically reduced. The bot processes cases, end-to-end, within 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the case complexity, so that the customer is saving 20 minutes per case. The savings are equivalent to nine or 10 FTEs, which is huge. As a result of those savings, they have requested us to build more bots for them, for other processes.

The most valuable feature in UiPath is the UI interaction with UI Explorer. I have worked with other automation tools and UI Explorer is the standout feature of UiPath. For web-based applications, we can interact with every HTML element, from head to tail. UI Explorer is a valuable addition to UiPath for creating complex, web-based automation.

The AI Computer Vision and Orchestrator are also outstanding features. They make it very easy for developers.

In addition, the introduction of drag-and-drop APIs to UiPath enhances the development processes and decreases the time it takes, as well as the processing time. For example, if you wanted to read an email from Microsoft Outlook using UiPath two years ago, it would take about five steps or activities. Now, with the Graph API within UiPath, you can read an email message from Outlook within a span of five to six seconds, maximum. This API functionality is pretty easy for us to handle.

Along with this, UiPath also introduced Orchestrator access via API. It's not mandatory to log in to Orchestrator to create an asset manually in UiPath. Rather, you can use the Orchestrator API to call a bot process and the assets. This API functionality helps developers to develop components effectively, as well as reduces bot processing time drastically.

I have been into RPA for almost six years and I have worked in the three major tools: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. I have been using UiPath for four to five years. I'm an RPA developer and do development for my clients. That includes designing and deploying bots in the clients' environments, and making sure the bots are running well.

It is stable. We are using the 2019 version. The versions are continually upgraded with the latest being the 2021 version. There are frequent updates but the version we are using is stable. We don't have any errors or bot crashes or other unexpected system exceptions during development. The stability is good across all versions.

It's pretty scalable. It can be used across all major providers. If you want to automate Windows, web-based or PDF-based interactions, or do email or Excel automation, you can. We can also do terminal automation, mainframe automation, and Citrix automation. It covers almost every possible scenario for real-time data handling. 

We only have a couple of challenges, when a customer says we need to do this or that and UiPath doesn't have built-in functionality for that. We need to think differently and add some additional .NET components, for example. 

But UiPath is pretty scalable, and we can use it across all technologies for automation.

If you don't find a solution in the Community Forum, you can raise a technical support ticket with UiPath. The support team works 24 hours a day, and we can get a resolution immediately. Both the Community Forum and the technical support play a major role and both help developers.

UiPath also has partners. Cognizant is a high-priority partner and they have their own SLAs for everything. If I raise a ticket regarding UiPath, if something is not working, the response time is very quick and the resolutions they provide are pretty standard. We haven't faced any difficulties in raising a ticket. Everything has met our expectations with respect to the technical support.

Positive

The main thing that could be improved is the cost. I have worked with other tools and the licensing cost of UiPath is slightly higher than the others.

Also, UiPath has a built-in functionality called Computer Vision to extract values from a PDF. If we want to use Computer Vision, UiPath has one drawback. The cost is based on how many documents we are using Computer Vision on. That makes it difficult to estimate ROI. Computer Vision has a dynamic cost. To propose a project to a client, a project that includes Computer Vision, we need to have some kind of standard cost so that they can calculate the ROI effectively. Computer Vision should not be based on usage.

This is one of the main drawbacks that I have seen in real-life situations, when quoting a price for a client. If UiPath improved in this area, they might have many more customers who want to automate PDF interactions based on Computer Vision, because it has huge scope.

The advantage of using UiPath over Automation Anywhere is the UI interaction. Automation Anywhere doesn't have a specialized feature like UI Explorer, or any other options to click on an image or interact with UI elements. Automation Anywhere has a Capture command and we have to work with that one command to interact with all the UI-based elements. But it's completely different in UiPath. UI Explorer enables multiple clicks and interactive activities. You can mimic the HTML per your project's needs. You can't work in the same way in Automation Anywhere. With respect to web-based automation, UiPath stands tall. AA has limited functionality.

The disadvantage of UiPath is in the PDF interaction. Automation Anywhere has a bot called IQ Bot, which is included in the licensing of Automation Anywhere. It's pretty easy to train it for a PDF document within the span of a few seconds. UiPath's Computer Vision has the same functionality as IQ Bot, but Computer Vision is pretty costly.

Other than that, Automation Anywhere is cloud-hosted and it has multiple ways for a developer to code. If you want to code RPA, or you want to code in a flow-based manner, you can do so with Automation Anywhere. But UiPath has only one mode, a flow-based automation. UiPath doesn't have code-based automation.

From the developer's point of view, if you have a code-based structure then what AA offers is as good as UiPath. 

A major advantage of UiPath is that since it is a .NET-based application, you can use all the methods and the properties that are available in .NET. You don't have that functionality in Automation Anywhere. If you want to read or manipulate a string, you need to use separate activities in Automation Anywhere, but with UiPath you can use the built-in .NET methods to read a string in a single line. The complexity of the code is smaller in UiPath.  

Because I have worked in all the major RPA tools, I can say confidently that UiPath is very developer-friendly. If you are coming from a non-technical background, or you don't know coding, they have a separate portal for you to develop in, called StudioX. It's a low-code platform, a "citizen-developer" platform. Anyone who wants to use UiPath can use it without any background.

From the development, design, and testing points of view, I rate UiPath higher than other RPA tools for automation. Go directly to UiPath, rather than trying all the other tools. UiPath is number-one for development and testing.

It is mandatory in our company to use the UiPath Academy to do RPA certification. Almost everyone has completed advanced professional certification in UiPath. The Academy covers every topic extensively, as far as what developers need. I don't come from an IT background but I learned it. UiPath teaches everything from scratch. With a little bit of coding knowledge, it's very easy to learn development using the Academy portal. The major advantage is that, since it is a video-based series, you get a clear idea of the modern-day functionality. They explain everything with an example and they give you use cases for practice. 

If you want to be an architect, they have a course for that. If you want a developer diploma, they have a course for that. And if you want to learn a specific topic, like deployment or testing, they have courses for them.

For anyone with experience in another technology who wants to learn UiPath, or wants to do RPA projects, it's a matter of 10 to 15 days to go through all the videos and you can start working. That's a big advantage of UiPath. The Academy makes learning easy.

They also have a Community Forum. If we have any doubt, we can interact with other developers around the globe. It's very interactive and we can learn what things are intended to do. About 90 percent of the time, you can find a solution using the forum.

Other than the Computer Vision cost model, the features of UiPath are pretty awesome to use. As a developer, there aren't any drawbacks or difficulties when using UiPath.

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.

We have two use cases.

One is for our claim accessing process, for which I have developed a process for logging into the client's application. It includes launching the browser and getting logged into the application by entering the username and password and handling two-step verification. Handling that requires some logic. Once logged in, it navigates to the claim status feed and selects the organization's and payer's details. It then enters the required details of the patients. These details are given by the client in an Excel document that the process reads. It searches for the values, one-by-one. If there is no record for the patient whose details are entered, it will throw an error stating that there are no claims present. It captures such exceptions and records them in a separate Excel file.

If that person's claim is present, it fetches 25 to 35 key details from that record and they are written to an Excel document. Once the process is done, the Excels will be sent as email attachments to the client.

The second process that I am currently developing is one where I need to get the data from Google Sheets. This process involves four or five practice management systems. It has to log into each practice management system and, for each one, it needs to schedule appointments based on the data present in the Google Sheet. The process involves navigating to the respective screens, filtering the details, and entering them in a CSV file. Based on that file, we have all the data related to patients' records. The process checks the patients' payment records. There are exception-handling routines and any errors are noted in an Excel sheet. Once all the patients' records have been completed, it closes the application and sends the data to the respective clients. It produces a log file in Excel as an attachment, as well.

Automation has definitely saved us time and money. For example, for data entry, if a person takes around eight hours per day to complete and upload about 200 sets of data, a bot can easily upload around 3,000 to 4,000 sets per day. It reduces the amount of time to get data uploaded. If a person uploads one record in three minutes, the bot can upload the same data in about 30 to 40 seconds. The bot provides much greater time- and cost-efficiency. It speeds up digital transformation.

It has also reduced human error. Among those 200 records that a person can upload per day, mistakes may happen in 10 to 15 records. Bots don't do things incorrectly at any point in time. Values are entered correctly in each field.

As a result, it frees up employee time. If a bot runs for eight hours, a person only has to look at it for a little while, because a bot will definitely do the process perfectly. That means we don't need a human to dedicate much time watching something run end-to-end. If the bot does the process properly for four records, it will definitely do the next 4000 records correctly as well. So there is not much time required of a human to watch the bot.

On the basis of costs in India, where I work, if a person earns 30,000 per month, the cost of the process they work on is 360,000 per year. A bot for the same process may cost 150,000 or 200,000 only. Automating is more cost-efficient than hiring a person to work on the process.

Among the most valuable features is the ability to read Excel and Word documents with API calls.

In the Google platform, I need to generate security-related things like an API key and an API secure code. That enables me to get the data into UiPath. The product is built such that only if all the security requirements are properly done am I able to get the required data.

UiPath is also the best tool for a beginner or someone who has no knowledge of programming. It is easy to learn quickly and to understand. You can get working in it much more quickly than if you had to acquire a programming background.

I would rate the ease of building an automation at 3.8 out of five, as I have only been working in UiPath for the past 11 months. I am now able to understand everything and can design the kinds of processes I need to build. There are many courses available on their website in the UiPath Academy where they completely show you how to do things. Within a short period of time—I spent the first three months in the UiPath Academy—I was able to understand things clearly, including descriptions of the Properties panels and every field. I understand the uses of these Properties.

Also, many of the Activities are pre-built, but if any activities or logical processes are not available, I can get them through third-party packages that are in the UiPath Marketplace. I am able to build automations quickly. In the worst-case scenario, if it's a large project, I can develop that project within two months.

I have used the AI functionality for PDF automations. In these processes, the bot is able to capture the data properly about 70 to 80 percent of the time. But if a document is not proper or it isn't handled the right way, the bot struggles to get the required data. UiPath has to work on this aspect so that the bot will be able to completely capture the data.

There is also room for improvement in the area of third-party integrations. In the last week I have gone through a video for an integration service, but it did not show things end-to-end. Rather, they just explained the connection details only. After performing the steps they showed, I was not able to get things working properly in my process.

I have been using UiPath for around 11 months.

The stability of UiPath is quite good. In some particular areas, the bot struggles a bit and we have to implement Human in the Loop. Those cases are where the bot can't do certain validations. But overall, the solution is stable and accurate in the results.

The scalability is a four out of five. 

At a certain point, we needed support from UiPath. The solution can be integrated with ABBYY. Getting an AABBYY license doesn't happen just like that. You need to get a trial license and it's a long process. We needed support from the UiPath team to get it done.

You can try to get a solution from the UiPath forum or from the documentation sections, but the UiPath support is the best. I have raised three or four support tickets over the year and they have helped me through each issue, completely, to the end. They respond within 24 hours. When you explain your issue to them, they create a step-by-step process to sort it out. And once I solved the issues, they inspected what I had done.

Positive

I used Microsoft Power Automate. I switched because Power Automate is not very user-friendly when compared with UiPath. And when it comes to integrations in the Microsoft product, most of the connectors are still in the preview state. In UiPath, all the integrations are active and enable you to get the desired result. Also, the Microsoft community does not have many active people handling it. With the UiPath community, you get an immediate response for any issue you have posted.

I use the UiPath forums if I have an issue and I'm unable to find a solution or develop my process. If I post it on the forum, in a maximum of two minutes I'll get an email response from other UiPath users, as well as from senior users who may have two or three years' experience. They politely answer my issues. I have also provided solutions to questions in the forum over the past two months. UiPath's user community is absolutely the best one.

The initial setup is completely easy and straightforward. It is just like installing software in a system by clicking "next, next, next." At the end of it, you have Studio in your system. 

If you need to allocate a particular system to Orchestrator, even that is a very simple process and there are videos available on the internet that show you how to set up the process quickly.

Instead of giving a monthly salary to a person, you can get a bot on a yearly basis. It is cost-efficient and will save you money. You'll also get a more accurate and stable result than if you had a human work on it.

Pricing is based on your process. If your process is fairly simple, it will not cost much.

UiPath has enabled me to build automations much more quickly when compared to other tools. If you go with Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere, you need to have some programming language skills to implement things. But UiPath is completely drag-and-drop.

I looked online at which is the best tool. I looked at many details, what each product provides, and decided that UiPath is a better solution as an automation tool.

Overall, UiPath has the best user community and the best, detailed videos. It is easy to understand, there is no coding at all, and even a beginner can create a process in a short period of time. It is also easily integratable. These are the points where it stands out against any other tools.

For us, in some use cases, end-to-end automation means a need for Human in the Loop. There are certain points where the bot is not able to validate things and a human is needed to verify whether the bot has done things properly or not. But bots are able to process 90 percent of an end-to-end process. For monitoring, UiPath has Orchestrator. If any error occurs, the data is immediately updated in Orchestrator and you can easily see the error and the cause, and you can easily resolve it.

In the UiPath Academy, UiPath offers the best content for each module and, after each video, there is a quiz so that we can show we have understood what we have learned from the video. There are also activities and a practice session where we can implement the use cases by practicing them in Studio. If we are stuck at any point after the practice, they have a solution area where they explain the steps you need to implement in Studio to get the desired results. They give sample workflows as well. I don't think any other software tool does this. They even provide detailed, step-by-step videos for third-party integrations.

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.