UiPath Platform Reviews

My company builds software for various businesses, and we use UiPath to automate data entry, perform repetitive tasks, and develop and deploy the software. We also use UiPath for document management, reporting, and analytics.

We use UiPath in multiple departments, including marketing and analytics. There are 17 users. Most of them are software engineers and developers, but our entire executive team also has access. 

UiPath has significantly increased our efficiency by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, such as data entry, processing, and testing. This has freed up our team, giving us more time to focus on other tasks. 

It has improved accuracy because automated tasks have a high degree of virtualization, reducing human error. We used to make a lot of errors, but a robot doesn't make mistakes. It doesn't make those mistakes. I estimate it reduced our errors by around 80 percent, especially in data entry. 

We've also saved a lot of cash because we previously needed to hire many employees to do this work. We're spending much less money because most of these jobs are automated. It has improved our data management by enhancing the process of managing and organizing software documentation. Compared to what we spend on UiPath, we've saved a good amount of money. I don't have an exact figure, but it's at least a 40 percent reduction in labor costs. 

Automation has decreased our on-premise footprint, which has helped us because we don't have a sizeable in-office workforce, especially since the pandemic started. Things have been hard, but we had already adopted UiPath before COVID. It helped us during that time because we could still provide the same quality while laying off employees. 

The UiPath Academy has been helpful. The courses helped me in the beginning because I didn't have a lot of knowledge about using this kind of software. I had to go through the learning process. It took some time before we could start using it. So, the whole team went through the training first. 

The most significant benefit of UiPath Academy is that it provides a ton of information quickly. We could quickly grasp how to use the platform and learn to do so many things from a short training course. It provided significant value by showing us the platform and how we could use it. 

UiPath has sped up our digital transformation. Now everything is so much easier. Everything is fast and automated. We don't have to repeat the same things we have already done. It gets the data and processes it quickly. 

The automation capabilities allow us to automate repetitive tasks that were so time-consuming. Our data entry process is much smoother and more efficient, and testing is quick. We don't require as many people to do these tasks, which has simplified everything. 

They have robust libraries we can use to automate a wide range of tasks, and UiPath integrates with multiple technologies. It's an excellent platform with many valuable features we find useful in our business.

The UiPath community is excellent. When we have a problem, we typically don't open a support ticket first. We go to the community and ask questions to find the solution. In many cases, someone else has had the same problem, and their question was answered. The community is a good place to get help with any issues you're experiencing. There is a vast knowledge base, and you can browse the questions people are asking. It provides a lot of value. 

Handling unstructured data is challenging because UiPath works best with structured data. It could also be better at handling complex tasks. UiPath doesn't work as expected when automating tasks that require a high degree of decision-making.

I have used UiPath for almost two years.

UiPath is stable. Depending on a platform like this can be scary at times because it would greatly affect our business if it ever went down. That said, nothing bad has happened so far. It has been working well for us. We haven't had any issues, but it's important to be cautious. 

You can use UiPath to scale your business. It's scalable. 

I always go to the UiPath community to get answers, so I've never spoken to technical support.

I was on the team deciding to go with UiPath, so I've been there through the selection and everything else to this point. The initial setup was straightforward. It didn't give us much trouble. After we purchased UiPath, it was already deployed on the cloud as a SaaS product. 

We announced to the team that we would be using the platform and then onboarded and trained everyone. It took a day or two to get started. After that, we began training. The only maintenance required is when we need to change things in the automated processes. If everything is working well, we don't need to maintain anything. 

We've seen a good return on our investment. I can't quantify it precisely, but it has had a positive impact relative to the money we spent. We've reduced labor time and costs by at least 40 percent. 

It might be a little pricey for some small businesses. When we were getting started, we had a difficult time deciding to go for it because of the pricing. Our company wasn't generating as much revenue, so it was a little high for our budget then. We can handle it today. 

However, the cost might be prohibitive for small startups. UiPath should consider plans for businesses that are just getting started and would like to use the platform.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten. We have a few issues here and there, but they've done an excellent job overall. It's an innovative product. This is an excellent tool if you want to save time and money by automating repetitive tasks. 

We have done a lot of things with UiPath for different customers. I have done Java application automation and PDF automations. We use it for all kinds of automation. For example, for one client, we're working on invoice processing, supply-chain automation, and their technical services.

Going with automation is really helpful for our customers, saving them time which they can use for other processes.

For example, I'm working for a customer that has 16 different processes to deal with. For every customer, they had to spend at least three days a month to process everything. The bot is processing everything in three hours and our customer doesn't need to monitor it. They are saving many hours for every customer every month. Automation is saving them around 2,000 hours per year.

UiPath is helping us to implement end-to-end automation in many cases and in many ways. We have implemented a lot of ERP automation and we are now working on SAP auto-creation for supply chain and invoice posting, processing, and payment clearance.

It is also helping our clients to speed up digital transformation a lot. They're coming to us with more processes.

The feature that I like the most is the Document Understanding for extracting information from PDFs. I also really like the human-in-the-loop concept.

The main disadvantage that I have identified in the Document Understanding is in table extraction. If the table size is large and goes to the next page, we are unable to extract it with Document Understanding. I hear that there is a solution for that but I have to find it.

There are other extraction features that Document Understanding doesn't have and clients go for ABBYY Vantage or Google document AI and it becomes expensive for them because they have to purchase a UiPath license and the other solution's license.

With the competition in the market, they have to improve. They can't settle and say, "We are at the top." They have to improve invoice processing, that is the most important thing, and that's where Document Understanding comes in. We need to get to the point where a customer does not look at any other OCR engines. They have to improve Document Understanding for invoice processing.

I have been using UiPath for the last three and a half years.

It is a stable product.

UiPath support is very good. I don't think we have raised a technical support question, only deployment support. My experience with the UiPath team is that they have been really helpful. They have connected with me within a short time and have done a lot for me. I irritated them a lot, but they still did a lot for me.

Positive

The setup of UiPath is easy. Two months back, we did a server migration where we not only migrated the unattended and attended bots, but the whole Orchestrator setup. We moved everything and we did it within seven days. We had some queries and raised a couple of tickets, and the guys connected with us even after 12:00 AM and 1:00 AM. They stayed with us and helped us complete it. The server migration itself was easy for us, with three years of development experience, even though we had never done anything regarding server migration.

The initial setup itself takes about two hours. In the last three months, we have done that for a number of customers. Depending on one's experience the setup can be done by one person. I do it myself.

Deployment of bots is easier than that. You set up an attended bot and publish it to Orchestrator and it will work. It is very easy. Even if you Google it, you can easily find information on it.

For me, with three years' experience, it's very easy. For a newcomer, like someone with only three months' experience, it will be a little harder because he will need to do some research but everything is available on Google. And even if he doesn't find what he needs there, he can raise a request and the guys will be very helpful. They'll connect with him within eight hours and they'll fix it.

The ROI depends on the complexity of the process that a client identifies for automation. The license costs around $10,000 per year, although I'm not very sure about that number. People are buying the license but they're not completely automating everything. They have to identify where they're struggling and give that to a bot. They need to use unattended bots on a 24-hour basis. When they utilize it all 24 hours, it is helpful. If they're going for only one or two bots, the return on investment will definitely be less.

In India, where I am from, UiPath is expensive. But customers in other regions, like Europe or the US, will not find it so expensive.

Every time we have a proposal call with a client regarding UiPath, most of our Indian customers are not okay with the cost. They can't afford it. They want alternatives, but they still often end up with UiPath because of the efficiency.

I haven't used any other solution, but I have explored Power Automate. I also opened Automation Anywhere and attended one class for it and I decided I'm not going to go to Automation Anywhere. You can't compare anything with UiPath. UiPath is the top.

It is the customers who have to identify the things that they can automate. We have to promote our tools and RPA capabilities and when they understand these things they can come back to us and use us for what they need. Most customers don't know what automation and an RPA automation bot are. But when I do my first bot and show a demo, they understand: "Oh, this is how it works." And then they come up with more processes for us to work on.

Regarding UiPath Academy courses, I have done some but I haven't had a chance to do the paid certification course because I'm continually working on projects. I did a couple of basic RPA developer courses and then the SAP, Document Understanding, and Action Center courses. I haven't had a chance to explore the new features there.

To use UiPath there are no coding requirements, like knowledge of Python, but you need to have good problem-solving skills. You need to understand loops, flowcharts, and how to develop conditional actions.

Our customer had one attended robot and wanted to scale up. We used UiPath to identify possible processes that could be automated and also required the ability to scale up the architecture.

The ability to use end-to-end automation with UiPath is the key to success but it takes a lot of work.

UiPath has absolutely helped minimize our on-premises footprint by automating.

The solution has helped speed up and reduce the cost of digital transformation.

I believe UiPath has reduced human error.

The solution has freed up employee time through the automation provided. 

If we go into every specific role in every specific use case, depending on the role, we have the capacity to free up over 50 percent of employee administrative time. 

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

The entire training support package provides different paths we can follow according to different roles. Automating basic processes is very easy. The setup phase is very quick.

The possibilities with process mining are fantastic.

They offer new vendors UI Academy courses and the four-hour BA course gave me the basic knowledge I required.

The vendor can improve the solution by building up the BA path included in the UI Academy courses. There's too much focus on development, but not enough on BAs, scrum masters, and project managers alike. 

I am interested in low code as a general concept and would like to have a better methodology for how BAs and other IT professionals can be closely connected with professional developers and included in the automation process.

I would like to have integration with other programming languages. We primarily need to know Visual Basic or C Sharp to develop using more traditional development. For example, for front-end automation, it would be helpful to use Javascript instead.

I used the solution for a few months.

The stability is good. I did not encounter any issues with UiPath.

We conducted a pre-study using the solution and we saw the possibilities to scale up.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Building automation using UiPath requires some level of technical expertise. As a BA, I have some programming experience, but not in-depth programming knowledge and that is enough for me to automate some basic processes, following the training. I worked together with senior developers who would be able to automate more advanced processes, but we didn't get to that level in the project.

We prepared the information and I was involved in the UiPath training, but we didn't get to actually scale up and automate new processes because the project was never completed.

I'm currently working on a pre-study for a large company in the public sector, and they are not using UiPath presently. The organization is currently using NICE but UiPath is one of the solutions that I'll advise them to continue evaluating.

In Sweden, there are a lot of issues and different regulations around GDPR, so we always deploy on-premises.

I would recommend that anyone thinking about using UiPath should have knowledge of the entire ecosystem in order to get the full experience. The concept of intelligent automation is the track that UiPath is on right now with integrating AI solutions for identifying processes. A new user should take a more holistic approach. Focus on identifying, assessing, and not just automating processes. 

We were looking for robotic process automation and we have been trying the UiPath Community Edition. We mainly need to automate day-to-day activities related to wireless connections, such as our WiFi device registration process. We currently have three to four employees currently doing this process and it is really time-consuming. We want a bot to do these repetitive procedures.

We will be doing the same procedure for server-side configurations as well for repetitive Windows-based processes. We are looking to save most of the system admin headaches.

We have three system admins and had three to four data entry people. These people uploaded our WiFi registration information daily for the university. After this implementation, we saw a drastic change in the time this process takes. People were taking five to eight hours to do everything, but now, the task hardly takes one hour or less for a bot to do. We don't need dynamic data entry operators anymore because the robots are easily handling all the dynamic data, updating it to the server in minutes.

End-to-end automation also means a lot to us as an educational organization that is concerned about security. We prefer to have fewer people involved on the operations side. By using bots we can reduce the number of people handling sensitive data. With the implementation of the bot, it now takes only one person, the UiPath administrator, for these tasks to get done. He is the only one required. He just needs to review the activities. We have been able to considerably reduce our staff costs.

Also, RPA software does not need a break. It can operate 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. In most cases, a single RPA robot can replace two to five full-time workers. Robots can do the same amount of work in less time.

It's really a cost-effective solution. There are minimal operating costs and we can make more efficient use of IT resources. In that way, we are saving a considerable amount of our yearly budget. We can spend much more money on other productivity items, rather than giving tedious tasks to employees. Overall, UiPath has reduced our costs by about 40 percent.

Another important aspect is that it is highly secure. There is absolutely no risk of information leakage from one component to another, because each only performs a single task. Access is strictly monitored, making it highly secure.

We have been on the path of digital transformation for the last three or four years. We have purchased many new technologies to move forward. UiPath has significantly reduced the cost of this process. We don't require further hardware to automate something. It is completely a software-based solution. Even with Community Edition, we are able to use all the features of the product. The limitation is the bot count. We can only use three or four robots. Still, it is the best solution.

In addition, we were prone to many human errors and this resulted in complex issues with our clients. Regarding our WiFi infrastructure, we faced hundreds of issues daily with misconfigurations. With the UiPath implementation, these errors have been reduced considerably because everything is automated. We need much less human intervention. Errors are now negligible.

The option to record processes is the most important feature of UiPath. We can use it to record every action automatically and it is then converted to a workflow. This workflow defines the complete set of processes so that we can automate every requirement.

A related feature that is one of the highlights is the AI. We have used many other scraping solutions, but none of them was effective. UiPath, however, can easily scrape data from webpages and applications and it works flawlessly with any program including .NET, PDF, legacy, and SAP.

UiPath has three components, UiPath Studio, the robots, and UiPath Orchestrator. UiPath Orchestrator is a web-based application for deploying, monitoring, and scheduling bots. With Orchestrator we can manage everything regarding the bots. We can customize the actions, but there are also templates. For example, one of the templates enables you to upload to OneDrive from Excel sheets. We just add the parameters and the automations are done.

We have used a few of the UiPath Academy courses, basic classes, because we use the Community Edition. When we move to the more advanced version of UiPath we'll be doing more of the classes. The Academy is very user-friendly. We don't require any further lectures or other sources for learning. A user can watch these videos and start operating the next day. All the actions and features, everything, is clearly demonstrated in the videos. It has proved to be very informative for us.

We have used it with Windows and it has been perfect. But recently, we tried it with Linux and we faced some issues regarding this automation. The auto-recording didn't happen as much as in other operating systems. They need to add more user-friendly automation and templates for that. They don't have many templates for other operating systems.

I have been using UiPath for six months.

It is extremely stable. We can actually trust the bots more than humans because it is completely error-free.

We currently have the Community Edition but we are moving to the other version so that we can deploy more bots. As a testing phase, we have limited it to only the IT department of the university. We have about 25 users of UiPath in that department.

The Community Edition is not that scalable, but the Enterprise Edition is completely scalable.

We haven't had to contact them for technical help.

This is the first automation tool we are using.

The initial setup was very simple. It only required a few clicks. After the implementation, to configure it, we required more advanced help and guidance.

It doesn't require attention for maintenance or updates. The updates work flawlessly.

We have no other product with this much return on investment. We are able to save money and time. No other product guarantees saving both at the same time. Sometimes you need to compromise on money to save more time. But in the case of UiPath, we definitely save on both. 

And UiPath has features that can enhance our server team. They can actually move into becoming UiPath administrators after getting used to this product. So the return on investment is huge in terms of time, cost, and exposure.

The Community Edition is free for everyone and you get all the features, but there is a limitation on the number of bots. The Enterprise Edition is a bit costly for the advanced features.

We did not look at any other tools. We were not even planning on going for UiPath, but a friend, a peer from a different organization, suggested that I check into it. We became very interested in it after testing it.

I would recommend UiPath for IT-related implementations because it can save a huge amount of time. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, all kinds of companies can use it for automation. It reduces costs and helps with efficiency. If you are considering any other AI-based solutions, I would still prefer the UiPath Community Edition. It has a large set of features and is free. If you like it and it suits your organization, you can then go for the paid version.

Our use cases are a lot of both data scraping and data reconciliation. We tend to find that we're going into web portals, we're going into spaces that require a user interface, and extracting some kind of information or data from those places. Then, we transform them. Sometimes it's just as simple as saving it as a different type of data. Still, it can sometimes be rather complex to combine that data with SQL queries to enhance it, or even just clean up and remove extraneous data that our users don't need.

We touch on other areas, such as averting risk by double-checking things or replacing manual transcription. We find that due to the size of our team, we're relatively small, and the biggest bang for our buck tends to be in the data reconciliation and gathering.

We have about 40 bots in production right now, which is pretty good for a small team. We're only really two developers right now. We're able to get pretty good value out of those bots. They're running probably about 50% of the time, which is pretty good since, as a financial organization, we're really seeing peak hours in the early morning and late evening as we're getting in all of the morning data and closing out for the day. We have a pretty good amount of utilization when we're busiest.

It is easy to build automation. For building them, we find that there are two categories. There are some that are quite simple and some that are quite quick, and then there are some that require some additional thought, some additional background knowledge, and some additional expertise. One of the things that we like about UiPath is it really does have a lot of pretty solid integrations. They can really get us what we need relatively quickly, but we still find that there's a level of expertise required to make sure that everything matches the way we expected it to, whether that's formatting or the data types. We need a little bit of expertise to fit them all together. However, the pieces of the puzzle are all there. It's just a matter of finding where they go.

We use a lot of unattended robots. We're almost entirely unattended right now. We find that those are the best early bang for our buck. We were able to completely replace a manual step from beginning to end. That's where we focused our efforts. 

We're interested in expanding into attended; however, we're still looking for the best way to find the more business user level, or the champions who need some knowledge of RPA to be able to utilize it properly yet also have the flexibility to be doing their normal day job and their normal day-to-day tasks without it interfering.

We have about 40 automations in production. Those are business related. That said, we are also starting to add a few more now. Probably on the order of five at the moment. We're hoping to continue to expand it in what we refer to as maintenance processes, things that allow us to automatically restart our own jobs when certain restart error conditions are met, and things that allow us to monitor the health of processes and make sure that there aren't missed exceptions over the course of our day-to-day. Therefore, we have about 45 total, with 40 business related, and then we're slowly growing this number that allows us to better and more efficiently perform our automation functions.

Those five robots are dedicated to maintenance handling exceptions and things like that. One of the things they do, for example, is scraping the logs and they'll look for keywords in our logs. The obvious one is exception or error; when they see those, they'll flag them and bring them to our attention. 

We're currently working on expanding that functionality so they can be a little bit better about proactively helping us. We're currently testing the use of the API calls within those monitoring jobs to restart ones that hopefully, just a simple restart will fix. For example, a slow or broken web portal that otherwise wouldn't be an issue.

That's a big time-saver. Our bottleneck as a small team has been how we support them as we get more and more processes into automation. We decided that the best way to help ourselves is to automate some of these support and repair tasks. We see that as being a big boon going forward to us.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility it offers. It really can integrate with just about anything you need it to. It has places where it is preferable to be used; however, in a pinch, you really can finagle whatever kind of circumstances you need out of it. We found that a lot of the time, it's not the perfect tool for the job, yet, thanks to the speed and agility with which you can apply it, even if it's not going to be a solution for 12 months, for six months it might be exactly what you need to get somewhat over the hump.

The user community has honestly been really impressive to me. The UiPath forums are genuinely a spectacular resource. It's really rare to come across an error, issue, or challenge that hasn't been at least discussed to some extent on the forums. That has been a great value add for us. Even if something is eventually going to be technically possible, you can frequently at least get an idea of how difficult it will be to implement it by seeing how much people have talked about how hard or easy it is. It really gives you some flexibility to quickly assess how doable it is, and then make a decision to move forward with it or drop it.

I used UiPath Academy several years ago now, in 2019. I know it's pretty different now. My team members have also used it. The courses are very valuable. There's a lot of great knowledge in them. 

One of the improvements that could be made is the support interface. I've talked to one of the product experts today about how they could better show when there are issues with a particular job. Right now, we tend to find that everything just looks okay unless we really go out of our way to highlight issues. What we would really love is for there to be a way to flag in Orchestrator exactly which jobs had warnings, exactly which jobs had business exceptions, exactly which jobs had exceptions that were handled, and which ones had unhandled exceptions. Right now, we are forced into this success or failure state. The lack of granularity makes it very difficult for us to quickly and easily find where we need to address issues.

There is no out-of-the-box way to configure granularly. This is where our maintenance processes are starting to come in. They're trying to fill those gaps, yet realistically, it would really be better to just have those visuals right there in Orchestrator without us having to rely on making our own API calls and checking for special criteria outside of what UiPath would be able to detect on its own since we're setting it within the code itself.

The UiPath Academy courses are disorganized. We have trouble identifying exactly what we want people to learn from within the list of courses, and since they've changed so much, it's sometimes hard for me to know what my coworkers are learning versus what I learned. I don't know where either my gaps or their gaps are. I don't know if I need to assign extra training or if maybe I need to go back and take a newly added training. That can be difficult for us.

I've been using UiPath for about four years now.

The stability has been good. I don't have any complaints generally about the stability. There aren't any particular issues I could name that would cause me to have a negative opinion, which I would say is probably about as good of praise as that perspective as you can get. 

We are not using the cloud. I know that the scalability is a lot better with the cloud features. We are an on-prem using preassigned VMs. We really love the ability to bring them on and off as needed. However, I will say that I know there's a whole universe of adaptability out there that, unfortunately, I am not allowed to partake in.

I have worked with technical support a little bit. I would say they are decent to good. They have been timely responses. Still, they are not always as detailed or helpful as I would like.

Neutral

I did work on Blue Prism for about two years.

It's been a few years now, so I can't speak to the current state of Blue Prism. That said, one of the ways I really struggled with it, was it just did not have the connectivity that UiPath has out of the box. A lot of applications we use regularly, such as PDFs and Excel documents, just did not work intuitively. I remember specifically having to write the code to handle passworded PDF documents manually. And so, that lack of integration in things that you typically use in every single process was a real frustration with Blue Prism.

That was one of the first things I noticed about UiPath is they handled those integrations much more smoothly. There are many more of them, and they are much more ready. The other thing that I would really give UiPath credit for is they are much quicker to iterate and build out new helpful features. Blue Prism was frustratingly slow to fix these problems once identified. You would face the problem and be forced to solve it with your own code since you couldn't rely on Blue Prism to get a solution to you in a good amount of time, unfortunately.

I'm not involved in the infrastructure deployment.

In terms of robot deployment, it's relatively straightforward. UiPath offers good tools to allow us to do it. My company, in particular, needs to streamline our ticketing system and our release process a little bit. Our particular process makes the best use of the tools available due to internal limitations, which we're planning on working on. For example, we currently do not integrate with Git, and that's something we need to fix.

My understanding is that we have seen a return on the investment. From my perspective, we just need to continue to highlight the value add and make sure that people are aware of what we're able to do to further expand the automation. There's a lot of untapped potential there.

I don't get too much into the licensing and costs in my role, so I can't really speak to them.

We do not really use AI/ML capabilities. We're a smaller group; we just don't have the resources to learn and utilize those tools the way we could. We're in the process of moving over to some better workflow management and BPM-style tools. We're trying to build one in-house. That will allow us to take advantage of some of those machine learning and data integration features, and then once those are fleshed out, and our business teams can continue to get onboarded into the BPM workflow, we'll be able to start utilizing those tools more heavily.

My advice to others would be to go through some of the UiPath Academy pieces of training to see if any topics are covering issues they are facing. They generally do a good job of showing you how to tackle those problems. Do a proof of concept and validation of it. UiPath is a tool. It's very good at some things, yet it's not very good at everything. Like any other tool out there, it's an excellent product if you find that UiPath is the right tool for your job. That said, you don't want to shoehorn it into something that really could be done better elsewhere.

I'd rate the product a nine out of ten. UiPath does a great job of iterating on its product, adding new features, and combating the negative sides. I've really been impressed by how quickly they do that. Every time I have a criticism, I find out that somewhere in the pipeline is a new solution coming to help me with it. That said, they're not always perfect when they come out. Sometimes we don't adopt them until after they've been iterated upon a couple of times, yet, just the fact that they listen and build these solutions is really helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not super privy to pricing information. 

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

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

We have yet to use the AI's functionality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using the solution for five years. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

I previously used Kofax and Automation Anywhere. 

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

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

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

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

Our company implements the solution for customers. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using this solution since 2020. 

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

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

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

We worked with different contractors to complete the deployment. 

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

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

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