UiPath Platform Reviews

I have worked on a number of use cases, and one of them that I can discuss was used in a contact center environment. This is a project that we had done for an automotive insurance company, and it had to do with incident management. Our contact center received the first notice of loss (FNOL) from incidents, such as an accident.

When an accident occurs, they raise a ticket to our customer service representative. This can either be done using a chatbot, which is integrated with our ServiceNow platform, or they can call the customer service representative. In the latter case, the customer service representative will pick up the call and get the details. This includes adding their insurance ID and a couple of other fields, and that is integrated into our system.

Our system was acting as an intermediate between their existing platform and ServiceNow. Part of the system included a database, where they were checking to see if the insurance amount the claimant is asking for is above the limit. There were other similar business rules, as well, which the bot was responsible for checking. Based on the result of these checks, the claim was automatically approved, and then a corresponding ticket was raised in ServiceNow.

There was also a manual process, where there was a person who would go to the site where the actual accident took place. They do their analysis, and then they create a review report, and that report would automatically be handled by an attended robot. The robot would take the detail from the agent and based on the review, fetch certain details like the approved amount.

The bot is responsible for sending other information to ServiceNow, including, for example, details about damage to the vehicle. If there are scratches on the front or scratches on the back, then these details are all posted to ServiceNow. At that point, ServiceNow has a workflow that is initiated.

The workflow uses the information taken by the representative and moves from the review stage to agent verification, and then to a mainframe. The system running on the mainframe is responsible for generating checks, according to the amount that is approved, and then mailing them to the claimant at the address they have on file.

In our FNOL process for the insurance company, we use unattended robots quite extensively for both chatbots and IVR. We use the AI capabilities for language understanding and based on the user sentiment, it will trigger the unattended bot. If instead, they want to speak with a representative then it will trigger the IVR process.

In terms of the robots prioritizing and correctly routing a transfer to agents when necessary, it is a work in progress. From a priority perspective, if you talk about chatbots, let's suppose a customer sale is highly urgent, the AI model can use language understanding to determine an urgent message and in turn, create an urgent ticket. It is something that we can do but it is not 100% accurate. I would say it's 80% of the way there, because of the different types of sentiment that people express during interactions. As an example, when a customer says "I need to have this resolved as soon as possible", there are a number of different things that can happen. According to our business rules, when somebody says ASAP, it should be treated as a high priority, but 20% of the time, this does not work. Overall, at this point, the AI models and machine learning models are not very accurate.

The robot-enabled self-service channels have definitely increased the resolution of issues through self-service. Prior to using the robots, 90% of the calls would need to be addressed by a representative. Since implementing the bot strategy, only 10% have to be handled by a human. We have used UiPath Apps for this and also created some web pages, but those are just to help the bots. Definitely, self-service is one use case that has really benefited because of UiPath.

The Studio is where the development takes place and the interface is very user-friendly. You have the ability to drag and drop components, and this is part of why I think that Studio is the best feature in UiPath. The next best feature is Orchestrator.

The Orchestrator is quite good because it is a one-stop shop where you can run robots after creating them using Studio. You can create queues, monitor the bots, and if there are any issues then you can debug them at the Orchestrator level.

UiPath has a low-code feature called Studio X, which is specifically for business users. They can just drag and drop activities like reading emails, retrieving email attachments, reading data from Excel, and posting data from different sources into different platforms. It is a very good platform for business users who don't know much about coding. It is customizable in the sense that business users can have the system follow a set of simple steps, although it won't do complex things.

UiPath Insights is a feature that has everything from a tracking perspective, which tells you how the bots are working at the production level. It provides statistics about the live environment including how many processes are being run, how much time the bots are being used, and the productivity in general. There is more analytics available from data services, tests, and the AI center. All of these features really help when it comes to analyzing the data, not only from a development perspective, like tracking data on how much a robot is at a log level, but also from the end-user level in a production environment. Reporting on productivity in a single day will show how much time the bot was run, for example, 80% in terms of time or 90% utilization, and other such details.

The UiPath App feature is something that we can use to create simple apps, and these can act as integrators. Suppose there is a process that uses 10 different screens, we can create an app that will be integrated with all of them. As a developer, all 10 screens are used in my workflow, and instead of going to each of them, I can create an app that uses all of the fields that are relevant to me on each of the screens. 

The speed at which we were able to create automations for our contact center was very good. One of the reasons that we choose UiPath over other tools, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, is the ease of development. When it came to setting up the contact center, it was only the connection between different platforms that took time. The bot creation and the workflow creation were quite easy. It took approximately one and a half months to create the whole automation for the contact center, which is quite good.

The AI and machine learning capabilities need to be improved.

The task mining and process capture methods are capabilities that we use, but they sometimes miss part of the task. For example, let's say that for one of my tasks, I need to open my email 400 times a day. This is something that we can automate but for some reason, probably because it is related to email, it is not accurately evaluated. In this regard, the process mining could be improved and lead to better results.

The built-in OCR is only 60% to 70% correct if you're analyzing a PDF that has images in it, so this is an area that can be improved. Different companies use their own OCRs; Google has one, and Microsoft has one. The UiPath one requires that we use a validation step between workflows in order to improve the accuracy.

I had been using UiPath for three years, up until a few months ago when I joined a new organization.

From what I have seen, the biggest factor for availability is the strength of the internet connection. Whether the deployment is on-premises or cloud-based, they both are the same in terms of stability. I have not seen any deviation between deployment types.

Scalability is not an issue. In my previous company, we started with 10 machines and then after one year, we had 85 machines. There were no issues and the implementation was not a headache.

The technical support is very responsive.

Prior to working with UiPath, I was an automation expert with Selenium for web testing. I was not able to fully automate a website because if there was an image that was used as a security check, where the person had to click an image to get through to the next page, I wasn't able to do it.

However, when I switched to UiPath, it was pathbreaking for me. I was able to accomplish what I couldn't do with Selenium and since that time, we have deployed more than 100 production bots.

The installation is pretty straightforward. We usually get issues when we upgrade to a new version but I think that is a different discussion. Strictly from an installation perspective, we have not had many issues. We had no major issues and when we contacted technical support, the team was quite responsive.

The length of time required for deployment is about half an hour per machine. However, if you have 100 machines then you can do them concurrently.

For some of our projects, we used an on-premises deployment, whereas for others, we used Orchestrator and they were cloud-based. Cloud-based deployment gives us the ability to run bots from anywhere, including outside of our network.

Our clients with the contact center did not see a very large ROI in the first year, although that was because of the consultancy costs that we charged to implement the system. From the second year, onwards, they definitely saw a very good ROI.

We had different metrics to calculate RPA implementation ROI. The first is productivity, which increased by more than 60%. If I recall correctly, their investment was between $110,000 and $200,000 after the first year. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was a huge improvement.

It was not just productivity, but also other things like a reduced error rate. The quality of the processes improved quite drastically.

We analyzed and compared the costs of RPA from different vendors and we found that UiPath was the most cost-effective in the long term. An unattended robot costs approximately $8,500 annually. 

We evaluated other RPA tools including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. One of the reasons that we chose UiPath is its ease of development.

In terms of ROI, we found that UiPath was the best when you consider the long term.

The length of time it takes to develop and deploy bots for a process depends on its size and complexity. We categorize processes as simple, medium, and complex. Based on how they are classified, we estimate the deployment lifecycle from one month to two months.

My advice for anybody who is planning to implement RPA is to begin by doing research on the vendors. You need to speak with each vendor and start planning, but don't think about clients at that moment. Rather, think about yourself. Consider that you want to implement internal automation, and consider the ROI you would garner during the first year or during the second year.

Once you choose a vendor, as we did when we chose UiPath, you need to make sure that at the very start of your project, it begins with low-hanging fruit. Don't start with all of the complex processes; start with some simple processes. That's why we have divided ours into three sets of processes. Then, don't think that you will achieve a hundred percent automation because that will never be the case. My thinking is that if you achieve more than 70% automation, that is a very good target. Keep your expectations clear.

Another thing to make sure of is that you secure your bot at the workflow level. UiPath provides very good security features that you can use, such as assigning permissions for who can access your workflow. Also in terms of security, be sure that you have all of the required certifications.

Once you have implemented some basic processes and you are getting good results, hyper-automation is something I suggest. Start expanding it to different technologies, such as AI. Also, engage all of your employees as much as possible.

Start with the community version of the software. Although this review is based on the licensed version, the community edition is free and you can create your bots for free. I always say that even one hour saved because of automation will yield a good return annually, and your results will be very quick.

If you keep all of these things in mind then RPA will be fruitful for you.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I have been using it for a couple of different things, mainly insurance-related. As of now, we are using it mainly in insurance platforms, insurance portals, and doing some admin support in terms of the backend insurance tasks.

I've used it before in payroll where it was processing the payroll, generating the payslips, creating the payments for our outsourced invoices, processing invoices, making payments, sending reports to banks, and more.

In terms of improving the functions, we had to have a lot of time-critical tasks, which we have seen improvement on. In insurance, it is mainly around the claim processing and then paying the invoice to the third parties or doing the payments to the end customer. Most of the time it is missed, and then there are SLA penalties involved. This solution offers good savings for us in all those areas. On top of that, there are fewer errors now. Previously, there were many manual errors due to the time-critical aspect of the tasks. People were trying to put in their best efforts while working quickly against time, which caused them to work too fast and make mistakes. We get savings on two fronts now. One is mistakes. There are no mistakes anymore. The second thing is we are doing tasks faster and can run 24/7.

The orchestrator is one of the good features they have.

Internally, internal queue management is another feature that is really helpful when it comes to managing the work and checking the workload.

The latest thing that they added is reports that show the handling times and all those things.

The ease of use of building automation using UiPath is good and I would rate it and an eight out of ten with the version I am using. If we move to the latest version, there may be a couple of new features, such as modern variable management, that would bump it to nine out of ten. 

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. With the new versions, it does, at least. We are not using those features in my current organization, as we have some other tools in place. 

End-to-end coverage is important to us. We use the older version. We started using it three years ago, which is why we build a lot of items ourselves. If the features were released two years ago, we'd likely use UiPath for everything.  

It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to the infrastructure of the automation. We're very interested in the cloud. It offers many benefits. Even though we are on-prem now, in terms of managing the infrastructure, it will likely be really helpful to move to the cloud, so that we don't have to bother about all this infrastructure stuff in the future.

It reduced the cost of digital transformation and it is allowing us to actually move to digital items, as, most of the time, when we were trying to present things and things were not digital, it helped us to advance very much into a digital space easily.

It does not require any expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support. For some applications, it requires some modifications. Even if it's 10% or 20% digitized, we are trying to use UiPath to do the stuff for us instead of doing the application, upgrading, all those things. In most cases, it's not very costly for us.

UiPath has reduced human error. It does all the time. In claims, there used to be a lot of human error. Especially in payments, sometimes it would pay more or less or the wrong person, and now, it's all automated and errors have stopped.

The solution has freed up employee time. It depends on the process, however, if I had to take an average, it is probably freeing up one full-time person, which is eight hours. On a monthly basis, around 150 hours are saved for a medium process.

This additional time has enabled employees to focus on more important work. Employees are happier, and, depending on the process and what they were doing, what kind of involvement it requires, the solution is motivating employees. 

The product is reducing the cost for other operations, as it's an automation tool. While we are paying for automation, it is reducing the overall operational cost. Not specifically automation operational costs, but other operational costs. We are seeing an average savings of around 30%.

UiPath hasn't really helped us minimize our on-prem footprint. We are still using the on-premises deployment and everything is on-premises for us. We have, however, used some machines on the cloud. Still, the on-premises footprint in terms of UiPath is not lower.

There are a couple of minor items that could use improvement. Overall the tool roadmap looks fine. They have improved a lot from 2019 to 2021. In two years, there have been lots of additions. It seems like there's no particular improvement which they need to make. They have already improved a lot in the 2021 version, which is adding a modern framework and then modern folder structures. 

They can probably focus more on attended stuff or creating a UI around that. We are not using the attended bot a lot, however, I have seen some use cases in other organizations, as I'm working in consulting. I've seen in some other areas where an organization wants to use attended automation, however, the feature is not very well designed which makes it difficult to use.

I have been in automation for almost four years. I'm using all of these different tools, not only UiPath, and moving around within tools. For example, I'll use UiPath for six months, and then do three months on another tool, and then eight months again on UiPath.

However, overall, in terms of automation, I've been familiar with various solutions for three to four years.

It is very stable. It can perform very well for small to medium complex processes. It takes a little bit of time to adjust for very complex processes, however. It takes some time to build and to develop and deploy for very complex processes. That said, it is very stable overall, with the caveat that, for very complex processes, it's difficult to build or manage.

Scalability-wise, it is good in terms of connecting the bots and the Orchestrator can support thousands. 

In our case, we have around 137 to 140 registered users on the Orchestrator. Most of them are developers. I would say it's around 20 odd VAs or other staff, however, most of them are developers. Around 100+ developers, with the remaining users being process analysts.

We are always trying to find new work in the pipeline, and, as of now, it is not used across the entire organization. It is currently used by 50% of the teams and the plan is to take it to 100%. 

I would rate technical support at an eight out of ten as of now. They're not always right on the first try, however, most of the time we get what we need on the first or second try.

I'm constantly jumping back and forth between various automation tools. 

I previously used Automation Anywhere. I'm working in consulting, so I switch between tools, and for one of the clients, it could be Automation Anywhere, for another it could be UiPath.

Each tool has its own pros and cons. An ideal tool could be probably a mixture of all of the tools on the market as some have some great features. UiPath is great for its ease of use. Anyone can quickly jump in and start learning it. Some of the tools take a little bit more time to understand and probably need more time to deploy or build code. Some others have better debugging. I would say UiPath debugging can be better. This is one of the things which can be improved. It is improved in the latest version, however, if it can be compared with others, such as Pega robotics, it can be improved. That said, Pega robotics is not an automation or RPA tool. It's basically RD. It's a front-end tool.

I have set UiPath up from scratch for one of the companies I worked with in Sydney, Australia. It was in 2017 or 2018 when I was comparing the tools, and deciding which one is better based on the roadmaps. At that point, I set it up from scratch.

The time when I did a setup, it was very complex. 

When I started doing it in 2017 or 2018, there were a couple of issues with installing the SQL server and configuring everything for the Orchestrator machine, et cetera and it was very complex.

Now, they have simplified it. It's a one-time installation, and the cloud makes things really easy. With the new versions, it is better. For me, the support was not very good at that time.

The deployment took us a couple of days. It was complex. The documentation was not really very great, and the support was also not very good. It took us a couple of days, maybe five to ten days, to implement it end-to-end and then set up multiple instances.

In terms of the strategy, we have followed the guidelines, whatever the document said, and then took help from UiPath support. Other than that, it was a standard installation.

For deployment and maintenance, it depends on process counts. Usually, when processes are stable and running for a long time, one person can support four to five processes in general. In our case, we have a mix and match model for supporting production. Overall, I would say that there is a different team for each different support platform. A platform team is just supporting the infrastructure, and overall there are around 20 people, which offer support.

I did not use an integrator. I work with a consulting company, and we help with the installation. However, at the time, UiPath didn't have a very good presence in Australia, which made it difficult.

I'm not very involved in pricing or licensing.

We are mostly using developer licenses and they have unattended, attended pro and developer licensing. We also have development and production licensing as well as licensing for the orchestrator. Different licenses have different costs.

We pay our licensing fees on a yearly basis. 

I'm not using the latest version. We're a little behind. We need to update it.

We do use a bit of attended automation, however, it isn't very much. It is helpful, however, we are getting better benefits with the backend automation. For us, the level of importance in terms of having attended automation is five out of ten.

We have done a couple of POCs with AI. We don't have anything which is in production. It's all POCs and a couple of minor display things. We aren't using AI very much at all. Therefore, we don't have proper use cases. We haven't solved other processes. The first priority is to solve everything practical instead of moving to experimental tasks.

At this time, we do not use the UiPath apps feature. I haven't seen it and I'm not aware of it.

The support is really good now compared to what it was a couple of years back. Support teams are really helpful when it comes to upgrading or installing the new versions, and it is very straightforward compared to what it was. I would say planning is important however, UiPath support is always there when they are required to be.

The biggest lesson we have learned is it's important to have a roadmap. We've connected a lot of tools and built a lot of things. We invested a lot. However, it's important to be flexible enough to adjust so that you can change if you need to, as it's hard to predict the future.

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

I am an API developer and I use UiPath for development. I use it to develop solutions for banking problems, like banking automation.

For example, in my previous company, I used the API for developing automated reporting solutions that take a lot of Excel files, check their data, and try to generate a web page containing many graphics based on the Excel data. It's basically translating the data on the web and it's made automatically every month. 

For my current company, it's a banking company, and I'm working on the banking solution. It's a process of verification of the user identity or the client's details. This process is based on taking the ID card of the person and digitalizing the data. It's a technology meant for reading data from documents. After reading this data, we automatically take this data and put it into the database and create accounts for the user or do a lot of automated things. 

At my current company, the use case is for the process of managing the relationship between the client account and any fees. A robot always checks if there is something to pay for the client and can take the fee automatically if that is the case. Then there is a transfer of money based on the request.

For example, when someone wants to do a transfer they add the money and sign a paper. This paper contains the information of the client's account, including details such as the client name, the account number, and the amount of the transfer. We take the data and the robot automatically takes the data and, via the web, goes to the apps of the bank in order to search for the client, search for the account, say the amount, and take the proper amount from his account, et cetera. We're able to save steps as everything is automated.

The actual company has three environments. There's one for development, one for pre-production, and one for production. Every element has two UiPath robots and one Studio. We have in total three studios and six robots, and each one has its own lessons. 

In the first, there was only one robot and one studio. They upgraded the solution from one studio one robot to three studios and six robots and they have found a good benefit in that. They know that it will give them more opportunities and more advantages within the banking environment. They made an investment in this technology to make their work easier so that they could be the best in the market of banking. It's helped them become more efficient.

There is an additional library that I discovered that allows me to work with the previous version of UiPath. There are some libraries that are new on the UiPath Studio, which are also helpful.

In terms of the ease of building automation using UiPath Studio, I must say that I used Automation Anywhere once as well. However, the way the UiPath connects the idea for development makes it so easy to build with the components that we can just drag and drop in. It's the easiest way to develop a solution and is an easier tool to use.

UiPath helps implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automation.

Being able to implement end-to-end automation is important for me. As much as they make me work, they make the work easier for me. For example, I use it to make the connection between ABBYY Studio, a solution for OCM, and writing scripts inside. I try to launch the script and take the output of the file and try to do a lot of things to make a connection between UiPath Studio and ABBYY Studio. UiPath Studio has given us a strong and new plugin, that we'll put some parameters around and we are done. It makes things easier like that. The features added into the latest update are helping a lot.

UiPath Studio has helped minimize our on-premise footprint in that there's less staff required. Previously, the company had three or four people doing the same thing. Now, only the robot does it. The four people are doing something else now. It's allowed them to focus on other tasks. The robot did not replace them, however. They still work in the same company, however, they are focused on doing different jobs - specifically jobs that can't be automated. They work on jobs that require a human operation, human intervention, and that's it.  The employees are happier too. The current company recently won an award based on employee happiness. In 2021, they were awarded excellence in employee condition. Automation hasn't made them bitter or changed their work ethic.

Robots started doing a lot of tasks that four people take one week to finish, except they can do it in one day. It's saved lots of time. For example, if we have 52 weeks, every week the robots can do a week's task in one day. A human may only be able to do 52 tasks in a year, whereas a robot can overperform by roughly 86% over the course of a year. 

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. The robots are extremely helpful, as they can work 24 hours a day, every day. They can do processes faster than people. It makes everything ultimately speed up.

The product has reduced human error. Even the robots make some errors, however, at least we are aware of them. The errors end up being fewer than that of a human counterpart. The issue with human errors is that we can't know if and when an error is made. At least with the robot, if it makes an error, the person is blocked somewhere and therefore we know that the robot missed something or it found a wrong account number, for example. The robot will notify us of an error whereas a human might miss it completely. 

Between version 19 and version 20, the Orchestrator tool interface has changed a lot. It totally changed. The menu changed, the place of the button changed. It took me a week to understand and to make myself used to this new interface. In the end, I found it's a good change and it's helping so much in understanding what the robots are doing in terms of checking logs, extracting some data there to make some analysis, and giving reports to the director.

The scaling could be better. There are so many parameters and options to check and so much to do before the solution is ready to use. Not everyone knows what to do at the outset and it's all a little bit complicated.

I've been using UiPath for one year and a month. The company may have been using it for longer than that.

While the stability is fine, with a license that needs to be paid yearly, UiPath will put out a new version annually. That way, when companies go to renew, they often need to upgrade or pay for a new license. The product does this to keep earning money year after year. 

For me, having the ability to scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure is okay, generally, however, even though I find that the company can use the tool to make the process automate well, I don't have so many people working with process automation. There are now just a few people developing in the APA and the licensing is still expensive and clients aren't excited to do anything even if it's a good solution for automating the process.

If you have a lot of money, you can put it all in UiPath and make the robot far bigger. I heard about a company located in Qatar that has 3600 robots. They buy it every year. It's a banking company and every year they pay for it. They are not using all of the robots, however, they've given their developers full reign of the environment.  

In my current company, I'm the only one using it. Many companies actually spend a few years testing it before they officially start using it. However, the company does plan to increase usage and does plan to add three or four more people to the team who would be working with me. I would manage them and provide training as we expand. 

There's a third party that takes responsibility for troubleshooting. They made the environment, and they are in charge of everything. Personally, I go first to the UiPath forum if I need help. I've found a lot of answers there. If I don't find something useful or helpful, I write an email to the third-party provider so that they can take charge of the problem and solve it.

They are good. There are three people who assist me typically. One is from the Middle East, one is French and the other is from India. Their way of communication, their way of giving information, and giving support have been great.

Both companies I have worked for that use this product have never used an automation solution before. 

I have worked with the solution for two enterprises. One was a Canadian company. I implemented the solution for them. I met the organization's boss, and I also put the training together too. I made the environment and I developed the solution and did the full implementation. 

The second, which I am actually working for, is a combination between Europe and Africa on the main. In both companies, the solution is already implemented and I work with it. The solution was started by another department. We don't share or manage the site of escalation or choose which kind of installation. The installation in this case is on-premise. We have constructed on our IAS, local server, and that's it. It's on the server, and we're not using UiPath's cloud.

The initial setup is good. There are no problems. Setting up the robots is also good. For the Orchestrator, sometimes I face some issues surrounding not UiPath, but the OS. For example, installing the Orchestrator on Windows 10, version 19.02, it's not the same process as it would be with Windows 10, version 20.82. Sometimes the visuals of the operating system change and it affects the installation too. This is well documented in the UiPath community. You'll find that many people face problems while working with the Orchestrator.

The deployment sometimes took me two hours. Sometimes I come across an issue and it takes more time. However, often, it can be deployed in 30 to 50 minutes if all goes well.  

With the installation for a Canadian company, I have a very simple installation experience. The environment was already prepped and ready and I just needed to start the installation. 

There is an IT team that does perform the maintenance as required, for example, if there are any updates or upgrades. I don't handle that aspect. I'm only a developer.

We might study potential ROI in the summer of 2022. We're still on the development part and therefore we still can't make reports. We don't have statistics.

There can be costs related to digital transformation. There are two ways this can happen. The first is when the robot is using an internal application, the application made by the company. There often is some modification to the interface of this app. There are some options that become available only for the robots. The second is when the robots use the websites of external companies. Internally, we made some changes to the robots to ensure they work well. In terms of the expense and how much it costs, the information is managed by another department. I don't have information about that.

I can't speak to the exact price, however, recently I heard in a meeting that one license for Studio Path costs 2,825 Euros per year. This price is approximate and may fluctuate.

The license is always per year. They don't show the pricing on the internet. You must contact the support or a seller. 

For the company I currently work with, I was in the meeting that chose the automation solution and they put the UiPath blueprint and Automation Anywhere on the table. The company wanted to choose between them. They found that, in terms of money, performance, and popularity, UiPath was the best. That is why they choose UiPath.

We are not resellers. We are customers and end-users.

For now, I am fine with UiPath Studio and I will likely keep developing automation solutions on this tool.

For the attended robots, we are not using them yet. We are only using unattended robots. First, we must make the financial employees understand how robots work. They need understanding or training as a first step before we can use attended robots in development. We are going to use attended robots in the future, however, for now, we're focused on unattended robots.

We don't yet use AI functionality. We're going to start using artificial intelligence and also the machine learning solution of UiPath via AI sensors. We'll use it to measure credit and to gauge the likelihood of clients paying, however, for now, we are not yet using AI features.  

We are also not using UiPath apps.

UiPath Studio has reduced the costs of our automation operations, although I don't have an exact statistic that reflects this.

Sometimes, when you come to a company and you tell them that you will make a robot to do their job, the first thing they will start thinking is "we're going to lose our job. They're going to fire us." With that mentality, they often aren't cooperative. 

For example, in a Canadian company I worked for when I was working on the process, the parts of the activity for Excel automation, I kept notifying them that they should keep using the same name of the file so the robots can read the file. However, I would get files in different names with letters off or symbols in them as if the staff was trying to get the project canceled by trying to show the robot wouldn't work. However, over time, as they came to understand no one would lose their position, they became cooperative. They weren't happy at first, however, they came to embrace the project.

UiPath has a huge marketing strategy, and they have been the first in the world with a lot of this technology. If a company wants to integrate automation into its processes, it will likely start looking at UiPath first.

If a company is considering UiPath, they should know exactly which process should be automated. When you know what kind of processes will be automated, they will understand better if they need attended robots or unattended robots, and then can proceed with a purchase. What one recent company did is they went and bought one studio and one robot. Then, later, after understanding which process was going to be automated, they figured out that they needed three studios and six robots. It's better to know which process to develop to make it automated, then later go to buy solutions for it.

We will still always need human workers. Of course, there are some tasks that can be automated 100%. However, in the end, and specifically in the banking domain, we always need humans to understand some things that make the work easier. if we combine automation, things like robots, and human intervention, then we can get great results.

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

We have a cross-platform infrastructure, where two servers are sitting. We have Orchestrator, which we connect to our virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In the VDI, we have a UiPath stationed. 

From India, I work for an Australian client. Previously, I worked for a European client. In order to work with the client network, we have a dedicated Wipro laptop. In that Wipro laptop, we log in and connect via the VDI. In that VDI, we have UiPath Studio. Using UiPath Studio, we are doing development for the client and automating functional business processes.

We are extracting data from Salesforce using a particular report that is sent by the business SMEs. We pick exact fields end-to-end, then we put these values into Salesforce. Next, we extract the value and data from Salesforce, putting that into an Excel application. After putting the return to Excel application, we generate a service request for the business and send transaction reports of the bot's performance and accuracy at the end of the day. The business was taking around four to five hours. Our robot takes around eight to nine minutes in order to automate this end-to-end automation.

For another use case, there is an application that submits invoices for an insurance client in Australia. Right now, the business is doing this. Whereas, the bot operations reads a file on the hard drive, picks up that file, and puts it into SharePoint where the bot performs some operations. After doing those operations, the bot will report the status, whether it is valid, invalid, or an exception. When we get the file, we develop the application that submits the invoice. After that, we capture the data from the Excel application and submit a request. This is an end-to-end process. This bot only runs after business hours, five days a week, so it doesn't impact the application. With this process, we send daily transaction reports, the success ratio to the client, and present the entire picture to our peers and business holders.

We have set up our own cloud, which is internal. UiPath has a different cloud. Per our governance, we are not allowed to use another cloud. We are using our hosted internal cloud, which is hosted on our internal servers in Australia.

With our rule-based tasks, we pick the processes which involve a higher transaction volume and run many times in a week or month. Next, we analyze how much time the subject-matter experts (SMEs) uses to do their end-to-end journey. We calculate that, then decide the scope of the operation and whether to use an attended bot or unattended bot. We do analysis to determine which parts of the operation can be attended and unattended. Our preference would be the unattended bot, because it handles a lot of volume and is uninterrupted. 

In our analysis, we thoroughly check the scope of the application, whether it is a legacy or new application, and the dynamic nature of the data. Based on this, we define certain rules. Combining these rules, we design a complete end-to-end solution and give a presentation to the business that this is our commitment, e.g., this is the amount of Average Handle Time (AHT) and FTE that the bot will do. FTE means that if four people are doing a task, then it will give me back four FTEs. We then calculate the cost, meaning how much they are paying to that FTE and the cost of the bot. We compare the two and present our case. If the numbers are good, and the business agrees, then we proceed further in our discussions with them. This is the power of analytics.

We don't need that much infrastructure. If an analyst is doing reporting with an Excel sheet, then we can give him a bot and capture what he is doing without paying attention to the infrastructure. From the captured information, we give them a bot that will help them to do their regular task. This process helps them to understand automation while not investing in infrastructure. 

We design end-to-end solutions. We have different roles, teams, and divisions. I am part of the technical department, so I design the solution. I am responsible for analyzing and developing the solution. Once I develop the solution, I monitor the bot for two weeks, which is the "hypercare period". After the business is satisfied that the bot is performing, we give it to the support team. This is how our RPA lifecycle flows. It has around nine stages, including discovery, analysis, design, development, support, presentation, and solution. 

We have developed a bot process called "Padlock". In "Padlock", there is security development. It is very important that the user input his credentials. Per the governance of the process, we are not allowed to store the credentials on the cloud. It is very dynamic and encrypted. We have deployed about 25 robots for this particular process. The robot does its job after the SME. After a certain point, there is a CAPTCHA. The robot helps the SME do things, and they need to input their credentials and click the CAPTCHA, which happens in real-time. They verify all the information, giving them more confidence in their regular processes. We have deployed a large number of bots using this process. This has brought a lot of value because we have saved on a good number of costs when it comes to attended automation. 

I have found Orchestrator is UiPath's most valued feature. It has the ability to automate different applications, such as, mainframe automation and Excel macros. It is so efficient. We can download up to seven days back in just one click, monitoring errors.

It gives you the ability to efficiently monitor the bot.

With the new updates, a lot of analytics have come from AI Center.

Its features help us showcase what the bot has done and efficiently delivered to the business.

They are improving the OCR feature for reading text and images as well as the operations for automating that. They have integrated third-party OCRs, such as, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and mainframe automation.

The advantage of using StudioX is I can see how long the bot will take or what went wrong for any particular use case.

In the future, I would like new services that can utilize robots as a service (RaaS).

Our legacy applications are a bit old, so we get issues sometimes in automating those. However, modern applications are very compatible with the UiPath tool.

We have seen that UiPath doesn't have the capability to identify unknown pop-ups. This needs improvement.

The API needs a lot of improvements because it does not give proper results. There are always some issues with the logs.

When it comes to real-time scenarios, we see in production that Citrix automation always crashes. This integration could bring a lot of value to UiPath. Our business could save a lot of time and money if we could automate Citrix effectively.

All of our code resides in GitHub, which is our central repository for managing the code. There was a performance issue using GitHub with UiPath; it was slow. They have recently upgraded the performance so we are happy with it now.

I have been using UiPath for more than four years.

We always design a stable unattended solution that helps the business.

If fields are scattered, then the bot might get confused. 

Maintenance is handled by our support team. When something crashes, our dedicated support team monitors the bot. If the application crashes in production, the bot will send an application link to the support team and business stakeholders because the bot has faced some downtime in the application and kindly look into that issue.

Because I have automated a lot of enterprise solutions, I would go with the UiPath tool. They are frequently rolling out updates to the software. It is very stable compared to other tools in the market.

Infrastructure is quite important at an enterprise level. There are a lot of mundane and repetitive tasks. Once we have the infrastructure, then we set up best practices and governance. Based on that infrastructure, everything can scale up. Though, if we are going to build a lot of bots on a personal laptop to automate something small, then infrastructure is not as important with that.

We started with two to three bots. Now, we have around 25-plus bots. There are around 300 to 350 using both attended and unattended automation.

I have spoken a number of times with the UiPath product team. Initially, we were not able to use Excel, so we contacted the UiPath team. They provided a solution. They support the product well. I would rate the tech support as seven out of 10.

I have previously used Selenium. We switch because of scope. The Selenium tool was good with bot automation. With UiPath, we can do various automations, like mainframes, ServiceNow, SharePoint, etc. In order to increase implementation of automation from my end, I started with UiPath. I liked it because of its ability to automate applications. Those are the main reasons that I switched from Selenium to UiPath and SoapUI to UiPath.

The initial setup and deployment are pretty straightforward. They provide free training, which is a good thing. We do the training correctly and religiously. Once we are good with the training along with a little programming knowledge that we have acquired over the years, it is easy to adapt and work on UiPath because it is structured and organized. 

Our setup is a mixture. Orchestrator is hosted on a server and the application is installed on a desktop or system.

In order to use UiPath on servers, we need to set up two servers: one in Australia and the second in New Zealand. 

The implementation is not that big of a task. It is very organized.

It has been a huge monetary benefit. Since the bot has been running for two and half years, it has given my organization a lot of business. When I joined Wipro in 2019, there was one guy who was developing the bot. We named the bot, "win-back". As the name suggests, 'win-back' means winning customers back. That was a maintenance bot which possessed a lot of qualities. If a person was physically doing the task, then we might need to spend $90,000 on them. This is the difference. While the robot has some costs, they are not huge when compared to the salary or compensation that we give to an SME. This is how an organization can scale up, because the bot works accurately 24/7 without any maintenance. Also, seeing the bot's accuracy, as well as the volume that it handles, motivates other business holders to go for automation.

We automated an internal solution because there were long keywords that led to spelling mistakes, since spelling mistakes don't look good on invoices. Therefore, we input this extracted data to an application, using end-to-end automation. This reduced human errors tremendously. For example, with the "win-back" solution, errors tended to happen because the volume is high. Therefore, we wrote a code that has reduced errors for the "win-back" solution.

Because of the bot's accuracy, it has saved us a lot of time and money, making the life of the subject-matter experts easier. It is a win-win situation. They are making the most of the bot, running it continuously. They don't need to wait for a particular report. For example, people, in our organization, work eight hours then send a status mail, which says, "I have done all these tasks." Instead of having us create the report directly, the bot saves a lot of time. 

The bot marks in the report what is successful and unsuccessful as well as the reason for not being successful, e.g., if it was an application, data, or particular element issue. There are a lot of areas that we call "exceptions". Every day, we are getting all these details in one go. Whereas, a person would be frustrated or bored providing all these figures. That is the cost of human error. If you are not paying attention to a particular task, then errors will happen naturally. 

The bot currently performs four times faster than the SMEs for the tasks that we automated.

After three or six months, we send out a survey to different SMEs in various production areas, asking how the bot is doing. From the survey, we have found that the bot is helping them out a lot. They are very satisfied with it.

The solution has reduced our costs by approximately five percent.

I have seen very high ROI from the processes that we automated. It is very good to invest in automation.

There are three leaders in the market: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. UiPath is in-between the two. BluePrism is on the higher end when it comes to pricing. Automation Anywhere is on the lower side when it comes to pricing. When comparing the automation of business processes, analyze the amount of work that your organization will save using automation, particularly compared to the pricing.

You will be compensated for buying the product when you see processes automating.

I also evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and EdgeVerve (which I used in a previous organization).

The trend of the other technologies is moving to the cloud. Other competitors of UiPath, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, have already moved their applications onto the cloud. This brings more robustness to the product, because its performance is significantly increased. It is also very scalable when putting in new features. 

I have attended a lot of UiPath's webinars.

We are in the initial stages of using the AI functionality.

The RPA technology is part of our digital transformation. For example, we are doing digital transformation by automating the Salesforce application.

They roll out an update every three months. With every update, we see a lot of new features. We are always exploring using those features so we can automate the stuff.

Don't rely completely on the UiPath tool to achieve automation. You should have some background and knowledge to understand what can be automated. There isn't a magical algorithm for building robots. You educate the robot on what can be automated.

We always rate a product based on other products. I would rate this product as nine and a half out of 10.

We have licenses for 15 robots and they are running internal processes. We develop them using UiPath Studio and we only use unattended automation.

Our primary use case, which is 70% of what we have automated, is related to our booking system. Instead of having 10 agents who handle the booking or creating the reservations, the work is done by the robots. Sometimes, bookings are very simple where you have just airfare or the hotel, but in our case, it's quite complex. We call it dynamic packaging, which will have a flight component, you can have a hotel component, different attractions, meal options, a rental car, and more. Instead of entering all of the options manually, which can take up to 10 minutes or 15 minutes just to create a single booking. It is similar when we perform other tasks, such as making a payment. These things are normally done in our target system. I have created robots and workflows in UiPath that are triggered by the database, and they complete these tasks automatically. We have 15 robots conducting the job.

The second use case replaces the agent when once we get all information from the outside system using a .NET application and store it in the database, it creates parameters for the robots to make a booking or reservation at Universal Studios for attractions.

The third use case covers all of Europe and it is a completely automated car booking system. 

Basically, our use cases are all about travel and booking systems for Universal Studios, general dynamic packaging, and car rentals.

UiPath has definitely improved the way our organization functions. It normally takes one agent approximately six hours to create reservations in the booking system manually, and now the job is left to RPA with UiPath workflows. It saves between 40% and 50% of the agent's time, leaving them time to work on something different.

The accuracy of tasks has been improved because everything is data-driven, and there is no problem that comes from human error. The system is almost bulletproof; if you send garbage in then you get garbage out but definitely, there are no human mistakes. For example, instead of entering the name of the customer, it comes straight from the database. The same is true for options like the times of picking up and dropping off your car. The only problem that we have is not related to RPA; it's the case where the target system is not responsive. For example, if you're moving from one screen to another and the system doesn't respond, then we are notified via an alert. 

The improved accuracy and shorter time to complete tasks, freeing up resources for other jobs, translate to money saved. Given that our processes are complex, the automation of them takes a load off of our end-users. In some cases, they have to perform data entry in several different systems. For example, in order to make a booking, they have to use three different systems with three different interfaces.

With RPA, in general, there is also a fear that jobs will be lost but when you're always swamped at work, including overtime, night shifts, and working on weekends, RPA is a big help. 

UiPath has helped to reduce our hardware footprint by between 20% and 30%. We now have only 15 virtual machines running instead of 15 physical desktops. The amount of hardware required to operate the business is directly correlated to the number of human operators and the software that is running.

UiPath has saved us significantly in terms of costs, primarily because of the manpower we used to have for the booking reservation system. It frees up resources for the agents, IT staff, and people from various departments. For example, we have group reservation systems for car booking, flight booking, and others. UiPath has made an impact in all of these places and the cost saving is very beneficial. In the first year, we saved over $100,000 on the booking systems. After the initial project in the first year, two or three more systems were built, for a savings of $300,000 annually before COVID.

In terms of the time we are saving, it is quite low these days because of the COVID-19 travel restrictions. Pre-COVID, we were saving approximately 80 hours per day. The reclaimed time for our employees is now available for them to work on higher-value work. The savings is not only from the data entry but for troubleshooting errors, which no longer needs to be done.

We have offices in Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto, and the majority of agents are stationed in Montreal. I am working in the Toronto location, so I cannot comment on the majority in terms of how employee satisfaction has improved. What I have heard from the executive management is that more people are happy because they are able to better focus on what they want to do. This is especially true because they do not have to spend many hours troubleshooting trivial issues. Instead, they are concentrating on higher-value work.

We are using approximately 70% of all of the activities that are available in UiPath. These include web scraping and data entry, where the information is stored in a database. We also perform database queries.

The biggest benefit that we have from UiPath comes from using the API.

The features that we use most often are database communication, scraping, and PDF functions. The only features that we don't use are those related to Excel, for spreadsheets.

For smaller projects, we are only passing parameters from .NET applications but in the newer projects, we are using features such as database communication and data scraping.

The ease of building automations is great. When I talk about UiPath, I am usually referring to Studio, which has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface, yet it is very powerful. This is something that has improved with the help of forums and tutorials. In 2016, it was more difficult because there were really no forums so we had to contact the head office in Bucharest, Romania when we needed help. Getting a demo had to be done in the very early hours and there was lots of communication back and forth. It was a struggle to find solutions, although to be fair, they've been very helpful. These days, it is very easy to use because there are numerous examples, and UiPath Academy is available, along with other resources.

We have been using the UiPath Apps feature and it has helped with the ease and time required for creating automation. Everything has improved over the past several years, as in the past, there were no examples or tutorials available. There was no manual and it was very technical. At the time, you definitely needed programming knowledge in order to handle some of the scenarios. It was at times like this that we relied on support from Bucharest.

Even today, there are only a couple of programmers in the company who develop the bots. Even with the Apps feature, I don't think that the end-users are ready, although this may be because of the way that our organization is structured. Everything is given to the IT department because our scenarios are very complex, and not a simple case of data entry or something like that. With such complex solutions, it is definitely too difficult for our end-users.

There are a few areas that need to be improved, one of which we have already raised with the salesperson and technical team.

The first area that needs improvement is backward compatibility. If you have a newer version of the UiPath Studio or any product, then quite often, if you're a year behind or so, you cannot compile the whole project. This means that you have to rebuild system modules. It's not like a Microsoft product that is always backward compatible. For us, that is a huge obstacle because sometimes, we have to rewrite entire workflows. In our case, this is a massive undertaking that will take three or four months to complete. This is the main issue for us and it doesn't happen with minor release updates, but with major ones, we have to rewrite the entire project because it doesn't compile.

The licensing should be more flexible and more affordable.

We used to be able to integrate with .NET applications, where all of the business rules reside, and then invoke robots or workflows from there. Now, that capability has been removed, so we have to use Orchestrator. Converting our projects requires a lot of work because we have to move all of the business logic to the UiPath workflow. It is not an ideal situation for us because keeping the business logic inside our .NET applications is more flexible and more scalable.

When I was taking some UiPath Academy courses, I noticed that they gave us more complex tasks. There were expert-level examples, but the junior examples are missing. Furthermore, they give you high-end, very technical guides, but there are not really any examples. This means that you really have to dig and use the forums and ask people questions. Essentially, you have to try and find the solutions by yourself.

In general, if you have very large and complex solutions as we do, the overall workflow layout could be improved because navigating through the network components can be very inconvenient. You can still see the high-level of the workflow, but not a detailed one. It may take you several minutes to get to the component you were looking for. In terms of navigation, the mapping solution could definitely be improved. There are always workarounds. What you can do in this case is use the flow charts with the sequencing module to break it down to a more general view. This makes it faster to get to the module that you want to improve or fix.

I am a Senior Lead Developer in my company, and I have been using UiPath since 2016. I was one of the very early UiPath users.

Stability-wise, we haven't really found any issues lately.

In the earlier versions, from 2016 and 2017, there were some issues that were never resolved by the UiPath team. The newer versions, especially while performing web scraping, are much more stable. Once it was deployed, we haven't seen any issues with the .NET applications.

Instability in our use case is the result of the target system; for example, the one that is operated by Universal Studios. If they are unresponsive for perhaps 20 or 30 seconds and the robot is expecting to see a certain screen, especially when it normally only takes two or three seconds to move from one screen to the other after submitting a request, it is going to cause a problem. However, that's not the fault of UiPath or RPA in general, but a fault of the source or target system.

I estimate that with all things considered, UiPath is 99.9% stable.

UiPath is very scalable. We are a mid-sized company with approximately 200 to 250 employees.

There are three or four of us who have hands-on experience with the product, and there are between 100 and 110 end-users. This includes four or five departments spread across three different locations. Our end-users are primarily business users.

Our goal is to increase our usage of UiPath but we are currently downsizing due to the COVID situation. We have some projects in mind, but we have to wait to see what happens with the travel industry. With approximately 50% of our employees laid off, no progress will be made. However, down the road when we get back on track, we plan to use other areas of the system. That will include manipulating spreadsheets, data entry, interoperability with other systems, and interfacing with it.

The technical support is definitely good, although there were some issues that never got resolved. The situation is that we are based in Canada and our salesperson from Toronto organizes the meeting with the technical staff from New York in the US. There were times when they couldn't help us because the majority of them had been with UiPath for two to three years. They didn't understand how things were working back in 2016, '17, or '18, well enough. Ultimately, they never found a person who could help us and to me, that is not really acceptable in terms of finding a workaround or the fastest approach to resolve the backward compatibility and .NET Integration.

What we needed was somebody with five or six years of experience and they could simply not find one.

We had some basic automation running prior to UiPath, but it was native SQL and .NET applications. An example is that we were using scaping options available in Microsoft applications, but it wasn't really RPA. UiPath has definitely helped us to reduce the costs of our automation operations. Everything is now run from one application, and you can use the workflows to collaborate between databases, spreadsheets, and booking reservations. Basically, it's end-to-end in terms of the development lifecycle because originally, our tasks were only partly automated.

If you consider automated testing solutions then we were using Selenium for things such as load-testing, in a previous company. I had no experience with a full RPA solution before UiPath in 2016.

In our early stages of automation, the task would start and then only get to a certain point before a different application had to pick it up. We had a scheduler that was responsible for this. The scheduler would see the partly completed task, then take it and put it somewhere else for a third application to take over. Now, all of this is done using the UiPath API.

Specifically, in terms of overhead operations, UiPath has saved us approximately 80 hours a day, which translates to between $4,000 and $5,000 per day, just in one department. If you multiply this by 30 days then it is a lot of money. Given that it is a ballpark figure for just a single department, it could be even more.

Back when we first installed UiPath, it was complex. But now, it is much easier because they have grown. It is much easier than it was five years ago, although, at the same time, we haven't had many issues in the process of implementing and rolling out our solutions.

Our deployment is on-premises and entirely private.

These days, it takes less than a day to deploy. In 2016, it took us almost a week for much simpler deployments because there was no proper documentation. Fortunately, at the time, we got lots of help from the technical staff in Romania.

When we first started with UiPath, it was not even close to what it's today. It was much difficult to create a strategy because it more or less was a black box. We purchased the product and there was only UiPath Studio, nothing else. There was virtually no documentation and more or less, everything was left to us, our team, to develop this strategy.

Implementing it was more of a trial and error process than it is today. Finally, we did it. We moved our automations from the development environment to the staging environment, and then finally into the production environment. Now, it's pretty stable. At the time, however, it was pretty cumbersome and difficult because there was no proper documentation or guidance from UiPath. Nowadays, it's pretty simple.

There are three of us in the company who are responsible for deployment and maintenance. We also handle the monitoring, implementation, troubleshooting, and updating of the product and robots.

We also have an infrastructure team that is outsourced from a company in Toronto, Canada, called Carbon60. Our experience with them has been a little shaky, but we are handling it okay. They could not really help us as much with the initial setup of UiPath because they did not have experience with RPA. We gave them the specs required for our infrastructure, and they set it up. Overall, approximately 90% of the setup was our responsibility.

Compared to four or five years ago, the licensing in terms of price is less flexible and less affordable. Recently, because of the COVID situation, we need 15 robots. Ideally, we could use five robots and Orchestrator instead, and pay the difference, but the vendor refused to take this offer.

We are currently using the Community Version of Orchestrator for training purposes.

When we started looking at UiPath, they had less than 100 customers in the world. We had been looking at three different options that included UiPath, Blue Prism, and one other one. In our case, we were using a legacy application that was Java applet-based, and the other products were not able to handle that well.

From what I recall, back in 2016, UiPath was the only option that supported Java applet-based automation. We needed the functionality because one of our internal applications was not web-based, but Java applet-based, and depended on it. It did not work immediately and there were some workarounds, but with some help from the UiPath technical staff, we were able to handle it. This is the main reason that we ultimately chose UiPath.

Essentially, UiPath was the only option that was able to handle Java applet automation. With that covering the front end, we automated the whole process.

In the future, because UiPath was not able to handle the legacy projects that we developed in RPA, we might consider another product like Blue Prism. We would assess potential solutions based on backward compatibility.

We have been thinking about using the Orchestrator with the cloud option, but because of the current world situation, especially because we are in the travel industry, our income has been significantly reduced. At this point, we are more or less in survival mode, so we decided to stay as-is.

We were also supposed to get Orchestrator, the latest web developer, and a production license but we gave up because we cannot afford it at the moment. Travel may be idle right now but post-COVID, which hopefully is next year or by end of this year, we're going to get the official Orchestrator license.

Originally, we were using .NET applications, which is the technology that has driven the business. It's huge, and with the newer versions of UiPath, it is no longer possible because we have to use Orchestrator. At this time, we are more or less working on a workaround and it's a massive project that is probably going to take six or seven months to complete.

We are not using the AI functionality yet, although it is something that we're planning to look into, eventually.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is how much time was consumed by our manual processes. Definitely, we have freed up resources for our business team. In terms of accuracy, there are no human errors anymore. Consequently, we can free up between 30% and 40% of our agents' time in terms of analysis and billing. In summary, the biggest thing that I have learned is that using RPA is about improving accuracy and reliability.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is to start with the training. These days, especially younger developers, people are very keen to jump on developing RPA and they're doing this stuff without using Academy or other training. Rather than do that, I suggest people get familiar with the product and use the training material first. Use the examples that are provided because the UiPath Academy is amazing in terms of that.

In summary, this product has a very intuitive and powerful interface. There are very good examples and scenarios on the UiPath Academy website, and technical support is very helpful. You can also find lots of good examples in the community forums. There used to be only one OCR option, and now there are two different flavors of OCR, which is definitely one of the pros. However, the major cons are backward compatibility and licensing in terms of flexibility and affordability. We also lost some of the functionality for .NET integration, which was a problem for us because the capabilities are simply gone.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I have worked on multiple use cases with UiPath dealing with SAP, SharePoint, or a web application. We had to extract the data and do some automation of data processing. We were taking data from one environment, such as from an Excel sheet, and processing it. These were the use cases for which we used UiPath extensively.

In addition to app integration, there were use cases related to various frameworks such as REframework and State Machines. We used the REframework at the enterprise level to be able to handle exceptions and bot failures and make automation healthy, robust, and steady.

We have also done automation for a healthcare department for claim processing.

UiPath saves the execution time of processes running in the production. If a process was taking three to four hours previously, with UiPath automation, it can be completed within an hour with better exception handling capability and less dependency. It saves 50% time.

UiPath is capable of handling the complexities involved in taking data from different environments. It is also capable of exception handling. If any application has limited functionality, we can use UiPath for automation with that particular application. With advanced selectors and linked queries, we can get the data from the application or interact with the application.

UiPath Document Understanding has helped to reduce the data entry work and physical copies of documents.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. For every organization, it is very important that automation is robust enough.

UiPath can help minimize your on-premises footprint. It depends on whether you plan to deploy your automation on the cloud or on-prem. On-prem has various challenges and restrictions, but it also has benefits.

UiPath speeds up digital transformation without requiring expensive or complex application upgrades, or IT application support. App integrations are advanced and robust. It is plug-and-play. You can integrate with Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, SAP, and various databases. There are pre-loaded activities. You can integrate with GitLab or GitHub. It has inbuilt activities for enterprise-level applications.

UiPath reduces human errors, but it also depends upon the process. It depends on how much interaction is required and what exception rates are there. When everything has been identified, it can reduce errors by more than 70%.

The first feature that I like is the exception-handling capability. The second feature is the REframework provided by them, and the third feature would be the Orchestrator functions. There is also the feasibility provided to monitor the ports and deploy the code. There is monitoring, retrieving, and all those things. We can use the web or mobile application. These are the key features of UiPath.

For handling complex scenarios, REframework is good. It has good exception handling and in-built mechanisms.

The certification can be made more affordable.

In terms of features, we get regular updates, and AI has recently been integrated. As of now, I do not have an area of improvement. They have already improved the functionality of Orchestrator. As compared to two or three years ago, Orchestrator now offers different functionalities and services. There is a difference, and it has improved.

I have been using UiPath for more than three years.

It is stable. Our organization has licenses because we cannot upgrade the application in sync with the Community version. The enterprise has to stick to one version for a certain period or whatever tenure has been mentioned in the license. The Community version is the playground for UiPath. They upgrade it, and all the beta version updates are there. They come to know how things are going and what are the responses and challenges.

It is scalable. It is used in multiple departments. The size of the organizations that use UiPath varies. They could be MNCs or startups.

Their support is good. After procuring the licenses, when there is an issue, there is a dedicated support team. They respond well.

The UiPath Community is vast. It provides an opportunity to get help from others. They provide good support, and the MVPs are actively engaged in responding to the queries that people are posting when facing any challenge. We can find relevant information by searching with keywords. It is good.

UiPath Academy has been useful in learning about new topics and new versions.

Neutral

I am quite new to Automation Anywhere, but a better exception-handling mechanism and the ability to interact with various applications make UiPath more unique. The drag-and-drop interface is attractive to people who are not very technical. The user experience is more intuitive.

We have on-premises and cloud deployments. The deployment part takes about a week because we have to prepare the production environment. A week is good enough for the deployment.

The number of people involved in the deployment varies. Support teams are there. Developers are also there. There are also people from the change management team.

Like any other software, it requires maintenance.

I would recommend UiPath to others. Overall, I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. It is robust and scalable, but there is always scope for improvement.

I've been making some accelerators using it. Each Customer Relationship Management page in the telecom industry has a similar kind of structure, so things do not change a lot. I'm creating an accelerator that can log into a CRM and quickly perform specific tasks as per requirements. For example, the robot will log on to a CRM page, will add updated user information, and check the details of user requests. Another case could be creating specified user service requests and monitoring their status for service efficiency. 

We're automating a bunch of processes in the telecommunication industry. We’re implementing RPA solutions in the biggest telecommunications company in my country. Our main focus was to increase the return on investment. What we tried to do was reduce the time, reduce the manual labor costs and errors, and increase efficiency.

The big picture is to work towards reducing labor costs and creating solutions that are required to enhance your efficiency. This also streamlines process workflows when handling robot exceptions.

The drag-and-drop features and the activities that are pre-made are useful. It's a big plus for UiPath. Whenever I use it, I can do all kinds of work with it and it's really easy. For example, if you have to store data in a dictionary or make a list, there are all kinds of ways to do it. You can do almost anything using UiPath.

The community is very good. I get 90% of my questions answered there.

There’s a good level of maturity in the UiPath framework. Once you get hands-on experience with it and once you are a little bit familiar with it, it becomes really interesting to make automation.

Another thing to add would be queues. It gives you the power to assign multiple bots to any item in the queue and you can monitor the activities and status in the queue.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Once you have hands-on experience with it, you don't even have to think about the steps. There are hundreds of activities to help you to carry out any solution. It enables you to perform endpoint processes really efficiently.

When you compare the solution to other automation companies, like Automation Anywhere or Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath has the biggest community, and that really helps you a lot. Whatever questions we have will get answered due to the extremely helpful and active community. You get answers pretty quickly as well. Most questions I have are already addressed there. It adds a lot of value to UiPath and plays a major role in our success.

I have done a few UiPath Academy courses. I have not gotten certifications, however, UiPath has advanced certifications and material on the website that lays out those certifications. They have a lot of tutorials to let you get deep into the product.

It's helped speed up our digital transformation. Our main focus has been on automation and increasing efficiencies while reducing errors and costs. Automation helps significantly reduce human error. 

The ease of building automation using UiPath is appreciable. In the beginning, it was a bit difficult as you have to know about C# and VB Script. I come from a Python background. If you are making a list, for example, in Python, it’s very simple. There isn’t that much complexity. If you're doing list manipulation and dictionary manipulation, you have all kinds of data structures. However, when it comes to UiPath, it is not as simple since you have to be very certain about what you're writing.

There are some things missing in UiPath. There used to be an activity where you could just add an item. This activity is now gone. Some of the things in UiPath are changing. This is a bit difficult due to the fact that, if a beginner is trying to add something to a dictionary, they'll have to look through the community's communications and then they might figure out that the old ways are gone. But that is not always the case, there have been better and newly modified activities like ones that help choose selectors for UI Automation.

UiPath is not that fast. They do have an option to increase the speed of processes. You can increase their speed in the settings. However, whenever you do that, the chances of it curbing the flow at some point is higher. 

I've been using it for the last three months. I jumped into this field of automation about six months ago. I have explored Power Automate, Robocorp, and Automation Anywhere during this time. UiPath, however, has been a good experience so far.

The stability is okay and chances of bottlenecking are not much. Occasionally there are some errors and the robots do crash but overall that is not an issue. 

It's a mature product; it can scale well. It's pretty sophisticated so you can get a lot of scalability in the automation process. 

I have not contacted technical support. I'm a beginner, and usually, I turn to the UiPath community forums. Many problems are answered right in the community itself. 

I was using Autosphere before UiPath. I've also used Automation Anywhere and Robocorp. UiPath is for developers and business users. UiPath is far superior to Automation Anywhere, however, when it comes to speed, I feel that Autosphere and Robocorp are faster than UiPath.

I was not involved in the initial deployment. 

They do give a bit of support with processes. However, after a few months, the solution does require some maintenance. We also supply support and our clients hardly need it anymore. 

The cost used to be fine, however, Microsoft has reduced its costs significantly and that's going to be a challenge for UiPath. In comparison to other automation products, UiPath is reasonable. 

I'm an end-user and an administrator. 

I'm not using the AI functionality apart from OCR-related solutions. However, there is a huge market for it. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. This solution offers a lot. It's a good product to try. 

We primarily use the solution for automation.

UiPath has been quite useful for the organization. It's helped reduce workloads.

The processing time is the best aspect of the solution. There are also fewer coding requirements. It takes less time to develop and implement projects using UiPath for this reason. 

It's easy to build automation. The organization has a variety of projects and we can complete the projects faster using automation using UiPath.

The product enables us to implement end-to-end automation.

We use the UiPath user community. If you have any doubts about what you are doing, you can turn to the community and they'll answer your questions - which is very helpful. 

The Academy courses are very useful. If you want to do any certifications, it's very simple.

We use the AI functionality. It helps automate processes that are more involved. However, it's something the team works on; I don't know much about it. 

The solution helps us reduce human error as we can run many projects without much human involvement. Once we reduce human interactions, we can reduce human error quite significantly.

It's also helped us free up employee time thanks to the automation. It's freed up maybe 30% to 40% of our time since we started implementing automation.

We've tried to use test automation, however, I'm not sure how well it works.

I've been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We took about three or four months to deploy the solution. The process itself is moderate. We were able to manage the process ourselves. While it's rather easy, it does take some time.

The licensing cost is quite high. It could be reduced. 

I'm an end-user of UiPath. I'm an RPA developer. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. There should still be more opportunities to make the solution less expensive.