UiPath Platform Reviews

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. 

We're in the supply chain industry and we use UiPath for automations for purchasing and selling and to make people's lives easier within the organization. We have 20,000 users in our organization. 

We do not currently use the AI functionality in our automation program but we have in the past. I've found Document Understanding in the AI Center valuable. In the past, the action center was slow compared to some competitors in the IDP sphere, which can be detrimental if you're dealing with millions of documents but this has since been improved.

We use unattended robot processes almost exclusively and this includes approximately 130 to 140 processes. We do have plans to increase this usage and create more core automations. Certain automations have a shelf life and need to be retired at a certain point. A lot of times we're working with systems that are eventually going to be replaced. The reason why we use UiPath over strictly APIs or something programmatic is that we don't have access to something programmatic. 

UiPath has improved our organization in the sense that it has reduced our manual hours by 200,000 hours per year. This is substantial especially given the size of the COE. We don't necessarily realize these benefits from a head count decrease perspective but we definitely realize it from a time-saving perspective. 

The automations that UiPath provide free up our team members for tasks and projects that they have always wanted to do but have not had time for. There has been a shift to more meaningful work and doing work that hasn't been done before.

The Orchestration feature has been valuable as well as Studio because it makes it easier for people to develop who don't necessarily have a coding background. The UI automation when using UiPath is the best in the field, as far as RPA goes.

UiPath will introduce new features and it appears as though there is an unspoken rule that what they have released is not where it needs to be, but it'll be there eventually. To improve this solution, there could be increased transparency over licensing and consistency regarding what it costs for on-prem and what it costs for the cloud. This would make it more enticing for people to switch from one to another. 

We have also experienced some difficulty with updates and making sure that everything runs consistently. Many times, new releases are not communicated and then are released. This is included in documentation but this documentation is not always stored in the same place. Having some clarity or upgrade assistance to highlight what we need to look out for would help a great deal. 

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution but stability is dependent on your configuration. If you configure your robots in such a way that every VDI that runs or every virtual machine that's able to run a bot has a backup, then it will be stable.

UiPath's support is quite good. Whenever I've submitted a ticket, I have gotten relatively good responses within a couple of days. If you say that something is urgent and critical, they do get back to you sooner. Sometimes you get stuck between L1 and L2 support, which can be frustrating. 

I would rate the support for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The complexity of the setup depends on what you're trying to deploy. If you're deploying only the orchestrator and setting up robots, it is pretty straightforward. If 10 is difficult and one is easy, I would rate the setup a three or four. 

The certificates needed to set up the orchestrator can be confusing and frustrating during setup. For the most part, what you need to do is straightforward. When it comes to installations that require a Linux virtual machine, Docker configuration, or Kubernetes, the setup is more complex. It is more complex to set up an on-premises configuration compared to a cloud configuration.

From what I've seen, organizations will have vastly different numbers as to how hours correspond to dollars. Our return on investment has been good, even from a conservative perspective.

The way that the licensing is structured is confusing for some because there is different licensing if you're on the cloud versus if you're on-prem. There are unattended licenses and then there are non-production licenses and people get confused by that.

There's a level of buy-in that's required that makes it difficult for people to get started. For example, "If we do this, we need to get this whole package" as opposed to, "Let's get a couple of licenses and see how it works for us." There's the community for these questions but if you want to do an on-premise installation, you can't really use the community in the same way to get clarity.

As far as strictly RPA and UI-based automation solutions are concerned, UiPath really shines over its competition. The most similar comparisons would be Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I don't think that they have the same level of ease when learning how to use their solutions. Not as many users in the market know how to use those solutions and they don't have the same level of orchestration which makes them more difficult to manage compared to UiPath. 

The UiPath's user community, in terms of the value that you gain by being a part of it, is hit or miss. A lot of times there aren't responses to the high-level questions. There are a lot of responses to people who are just learning how to use it, but for more complex questions, there are no experts to field responses. It is possible to find these answers but they are not necessarily contained on UiPath's platforms. That being said, I did find the user community and academy very useful when I first started using this solution.  

I have done 16 courses from the academy and continue to review what is released to see if it would add value to me to stay up to date with the latest features. The academy provides the ability for more people to learn UiPath and learn RPA and this makes it easier to hire new team members as they can easily gain the necessary skillsets. They still do have to learn on the job to some extent, but there's a basic skillset that's pretty well established and there are certifications that are associated with that. 

I would advise others considering UiPath to start with some use cases in mind. I don't necessarily think that you're going to get value out of evaluating the solution if you don't have at least a few things to get you started. I would advise having someone with a technical skillset to assist in this regard. 

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We provide a lot of financial services. Its use cases are specifically in banking. There is a lot of Excel transformation where we are moving data from Excel into in-house applications. That's probably about 80% use of it.

We are using UiPath to automate processes that deal with a good cause. We run a lot of charity work, and there is a bit of work going on there to automate the operational aspects of running these charitable causes and things like that.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we would love to.

We started with nothing. We now have about 150 attended automations going with another 80 attended robots effectively. So, we've had quite a growth in automation capabilities in terms of its impact on the organization.

The ease of use of Studio is valuable. In terms of features, Excel Application Scope, web automation suite of products, and screen scraping are the features I use the most.

Excel Application Scope allows you to use Excel pretty easily and graph data from there, and then you can transform it within Studio and make any changes you need to do. You can then either write it back to another Excel file, or you can read the table within Studio and write it directly to a web-based application.

We have used screen scraping a lot. If you have a web application inside Chrome, you can go to Chrome, and it can grab all the data from there. You can put it into a data table in Studio, make any changes or transformations needed, and then write it back to whatever application you want it to go to.

We gain a huge value from the user community. I'm always running into problems, and I have been going to the UiPath forums to get answers to my questions. Usually, if I have a question, someone else would have already asked it, and I can get great info and insight from there. So, the community is a very important part of the development experience.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. We recommend our citizen developers to use UiPath Academy. I've used it on and off for things I don't quite understand, and people also use it to get RPA certified with UiPath. It's another great value service that UiPath offers. There is the ease of use of videos and the breadth of knowledge. There is also the applicability of the examples to everyday problems. I definitely know people who've been able to automate processes that are more complex with the help of UiPath Academy.

Our challenge with UiPath is getting the infrastructure assets up to speed, particularly on the Orchestrator side. However, I just now came from a demo for UiPath Web, and it seems to be to enable serverless robots, which would definitely be a lower barrier to entry. 

Our pain point is just on the infrastructure side and getting the assets coming up to speed. It's a big bank problem. We have a very large IT organization, which is not always aligned with the needs of teams like ours.

I've used UiPath for about two and a half years.

The product is great. It's very stable. It's reliable. We trust it with a lot of different and very important automations. If UiPath wasn't stable, it would introduce quite significant operational risks to the firm.

Its scalability is good. It could be better, but that goes back to my pain point on our struggles with infrastructure. That has been challenging. If we could get a better handle on our infrastructure, then scalability would be a bit higher, but overall, it's a very scalable product.

I would evaluate them very highly. I work with their technical support every time our technical account managers can't get something done. They're very confident and well-versed in what they do, and they always find a solution to our problem.

Positive

The only RPA tool I've ever worked with is UiPath. Some people used Blue Prism at work, but I never used Blue Prism. They're not using Blue Prism anymore. They switched because of better capabilities. UiPath is just a better tool all around. 

I wasn't in the decision-making process, but I know they tried to do a proof of concept. The Blue Prism team was supposed to do automation of some sort, and the UiPath team was also supposed to do it. The UiPath team did it in six hours and the Blue Prism team didn't do it in two weeks. The ease of use of the Studio product really drives home UiPath's capabilities.

It was complex, but it was straightforward with the help of account managers. We have two technical account managers with UiPath who are very resourceful and well-suited to working with us and helping us accomplish what we need to do.

Our implementation strategy was a citizen development framework. It involved getting the Orchestrator set up and then empowering people within the firm to start automating their various roles or tasks. We still have the citizen development framework, but we're also moving to unattended automations from our RPA developers.

We did it on our own with the help of our account managers.

I don't have any metrics yet, but we're at breakeven in terms of ROI. That's just in terms of monetary figures. In terms of general error reduction and things like that, we have seen quite an ROI.

Its pricing seems reasonable. I know we've been able to get a good amount of value in a few years. Our breakeven was only in year two. So, we're approaching breakeven in our licensing program. It's not a cheap product by any means, but the value that can be returned on an ROI basis is quite high.

To those evaluating such solutions, I would advise taking a good look at the capabilities of the solutions. The strength of UiPath is its capabilities in a number of key areas, whereas some specialized players in the industry might be really good at one specific thing. For scalability, you want to have a wider operating area that something like UiPath can accomplish, rather than a more specialized player.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10. It's a fantastic tool that does what you need it to do. It's great for automating a wide variety of things. Ease of use is there in the various products. Any concerns I would have about having a lower barrier entry seem to be acknowledged by the product managers in the demo that I just now had with UiPath Web. So, in that regard, it's a very accessible and functional product.

I'm a web developer. This solution is used in the backend and frontend of my organization. 

The solution is deployed on cloud through AWS.

It doesn't take a lot of effort to understand UiPath's features. It saves time, effort, and increases performance.

Automation has minimized our on-premises footprint. UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation.

The solution has reduced human error due to the automation and scripts.

The solution is deployed across multiple locations. We currently serve between 50 to 80 clients. They are mostly small and medium enterprises.

UiPath has a very good user interface, and the automation is a great feature. New users can easily understand UiPath.

I would rate the ease of building automations and using the solution as nine out of ten. 

We use UiPath for automation and architecture design in the backend. It automatically generates data for us, so it saves resources and the work of extracting data.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end automation is critical for us. For the past 20 years, we have been dependent on it.

There's some latency when changing from one page to another, so that could be improved.

I have used UiPath for one year.

The solution is very stable.

It's scalable.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

UiPath's technical support is very good. When we have required information, support is available 24/7.

The setup involves load balances, and UiPath is involved in the automation and architecture of the backend. It took about one month to understand the automation feature.

We have a team of 40 people for development. Only 10 people were necessary for deployment. Some of their roles were backend, frontend, architecture, and AWS.

The solution has reduced the time our employees spend on certain tasks because of automation and scripts. We save about 60 hours per month.

We save approximately $1,000 per month with UiPath.

The solution isn't very expensive.

My team evaluated other options. They chose UiPath because of its community and positive reviews.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

I would recommend this solution because of its great technical support and its automation features. UiPath also has a great community.

The beauty of RPA is that it has many different use cases. We use the product as a standalone and as part of a bigger solution. Obviously, the tool itself is designed to automate activities that humans would do. But as the tool is getting smarter, we are able to do more types of activities.

There were two big challenges in the early days. One was the complexity of the rules that you needed to adopt for a particular task and the other was the type of data that was being used as part of the business process. As we've gone along, the product has evolved and allows us to do more of the business process.

We are able to offer more automation to a business process than we could before. It's all about the business process and how much of that can be automated and what still needs to be handled manually. UiPath gives us the ability to do more with automation and need less human involvement.

We used UiPath to automate processes for a good cause, free of charge, during the COVID pandemic. We used it to build automations that would take care of activities that nurses and doctors were having to perform, to free up their time to treat patients. Reducing the admin they normally might have had to do, rather than being front-of-house and dealing with very ill patients, speaks volumes for itself. We freed up time for our nurses and doctors to treat very sick patients.

When it comes to reducing the on-premises footprint, what we've seen over the last two or three years, with the pandemic, is the move to the cloud being accelerated. The whole digital agenda was accelerated. What we're seeing now is that most of the organizations we work with are more open to using a cloud solution. However, it depends on each organization. Some of our government organizations are not allowed to use the cloud. They have to use on-premises solutions because of strict data rules. But more companies are now open to using the cloud and that has an impact on the total cost of ownership. They're not having to invest in services and that helps reduce TCO.

AI models are now being pre-trained. There's a risk there because, obviously, you are using someone else's data and someone else's bias. But if you put those aside and use the pre-trained models, it's going to reduce the time to value because you're not having to train models. You've got something that can be run out-of-the-box. To be honest, we will always build our own models rather than exclusively use UiPath's. For instance, they have an email reader. We tend to use their model in conjunction with our own and that has helped us reduce development time on our AI models and our training.

On the subject of human error, anytime you ask a human to do an admin activity where they're typing in data, there's an opportunity for human error to creep in. And that can cause catastrophic events, downstream. Where you have an automation that is guaranteed to enter data that is 100 percent correct, you're always going to reduce human error.

Automation can also be used where a decision is made. Sometimes, human decisions can be fallible. If you have a decision being made by an AI model, it's not going to have human bias. It can have other biases built-in, but you can see an improvement in some decision-making as well. What we have to understand here is the introduction of AI into RPA is still in its infancy and there's a long way to go in this area. But there are definitely improvements being made by the introduction of artificial intelligence. It depends on how you use it and how smart your understanding of it is, as well.

Automation is all about trying to reduce the touch time of a human in a process to free up their time. If the automation is implemented smartly, it does so. If it's poorly implemented, you can end up with people being given so many exceptions that the bot actually becomes redundant. But as a rule of thumb, of course, it does free up peoples' time.

Similarly, if it's deployed smartly there are some benefits in terms of cost savings. However, we're not using it because it's saving costs. We are using it for our staff who don't want to do manual activities. It's not just about dollars and saving time. It's also about our staff and not having to do menial tasks, which can be demotivating.

It's not about the tool, it's about the business process and which component works best. The most valuable feature really depends on the use case. My favorite now is Document Understanding and the AI models that are being pre-trained. That's allowing us to do more, out-of-the-box, without having to do custom programming.

When I ask my developers which product they would like to use when we are doing RPA, they always say UiPath because of its closeness to Microsoft's .NET. Again, what UiPath are doing is enabling more out-of-the-box functionality without having to do customization and coding. The developers, and I, would say that it's getting easier to use for simple automations. It still requires planning and thinking for more complex automations, but you are able to do more with fewer skills. 

UiPath has something called Citizen Developers, which is where they encourage people to build their own robots and the functionality available is greater. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a question for governance.

UiPath's user community was one of the strongest aspects from an adoption point of view in the early days. The forums, the community, were always something that they invested heavily in, and that was a smart thing to do. The community is still strong. They have a Community addition and the feedback we get from some of our customers, when they first play with this, is that it's a friendly community. People are encouraged to play with UiPath, and if they get stuck, the community is willing to provide them with advice and guidance in a friendly way. Not all communities are the same, let's put it that way.

We actually teach the UiPath Academy courses. We are a UiPath-accredited trainer, but we have, at times, with smaller organizations, suggested that they take some of the training themselves. It's another great area of UiPath, in addition to the community. Their training is available free of charge. That has always been a strong point as well.

Their licensing is poorly constructed. It's too complicated and not well thought out. They also outsourced their support model, which sadly has become less friendly and more automated.

It's very much in the early days, but another area they can continue to look at is bots building robots—the ability to take a task capture and turn that into an automation. There are always concerns over that: Who's going to police the police?

I've been using UiPath since before it was called UiPath. It was previously called DeskOver. I worked for Capgemini and I worked with the product when the company consisted of 30 people in a room in the very early days. Capgemini adopted DeskOver and then it became UiPath as a growth partner. So I have been using it for coming up on 10 years.

UiPath is stable. Like any product in the early days, they were updating all of the time. That used to not sit well with our bigger customers because of their update plans. As the product has matured, it's become more stable and the release plan has become structured. You now get four updates a year. It has become more mature.

It's scalable.

The environments that it can be used in can be very complex, such as "multi-tenant," where a tenant is the protection of data from Orchestrator, where you have segregation or air gaps. We've done some projects with a defense ministry that are very complex and we've done some very simple ones.

Most organizations start small. There will probably be a pilot with a cut-down version of what is needed. As they grow and scale, they will invest in more tenants and in more infrastructure and more components of the platform.

I would rate their support at seven out of 10, but the dial is going the wrong way. Because they've outsourced their support, you're no longer dealing with the original product team. I had a very good relationship with the product team where I could almost pick up the phone if there were some proper technical problems.

Now, that is gone and we're having to deal with a third party. As UiPath have grown, they've needed to focus on their core areas and outsource other areas. But it's getting harder to get good quality support because my customers are no longer dealing with them directly, they're having to go through a third party.

Neutral

We started off with Blue Prism, which was originally designed, and still is, for back-office processes. What we used DeskOver for was front-office automations, almost like "your little buddy who sits on your desktop." As UiPath grew, it started to erode the Blue Prism market because it offered the ability to do both front-office and back-office automations. That's why it became number one. It recognized that there were two distinct markets: front-office and back-office. Blue Prism always has done back-office, and successfully, but never offered the ability to do front-office. Customers didn't want to invest in two different technologies as that would be too expensive. That's why UiPath stole the match and has never looked back.

Back then, 10 years ago, there wasn't much else to choose from. It was really "macros on steroids." The market was very different. It was Blue Prism or some of what were very young companies. Automation Anywhere was just coming in as well. 

But at Capgemini, we recognized UiPath, and we liked Daniel Dines, who was their CEO at the time and is now Co-CEO. We liked his enthusiasm and we liked the price point as well. They were from Romania, they were cheap, and they were eager. We were able to work with a company that, at that time, was very competitively priced. And we were able to get them to start building stuff that we wanted as well, as Capgemini was one of the big six. We had a lot of control over their roadmap in the early days.

Each organization we work with will have different design principles. As a general rule of thumb, we encourage investment in the cloud license model because it reduces the time that it takes to actually get the implementation up and running, and it simplifies things when it comes to TCO. However, there are organizations that are constrained by security, and therefore they can't go down that route.

I'm an architect by trade and my job is to oversee complex delivery and deployments. It's all about the architecture. An architect needs to work with the client, in the beginning, to come up with a plan and a solution that's going to be fit for purpose. In addition to architects, you need a project manager, some engineers to actually do the implementation, and you're probably going to need a tester to test and commission the environment.

The initial deployment has gotten better. When Orchestrator, which is the main administrative console, is built-in as part of the cloud offering, rather than having it locally, it makes a big difference. The cloud has made the time to set up a pilot and deploy into production much shorter than it used to be with on-premises.

Most IT projects probably take three to six months to deliver a success. Whether or not the payback happens straight away depends on the investment costs. The benefit of UiPath and RPA is the rapidity with which you can get automation into production and beginning to pay back. RPA has always been liked by people in the business because it is a rapid deployment rather than something more strategic that can take one, two, three, and sometimes, five years if it's a very large IT program of work.

ROI isn't just about the dollar. It can be other things as well. If a program of work with RPA and UiPath is deployed smartly, you can see a decent ROI. But that ROI also depends on the declarations by the business involved. How many times do they execute the process and how long does it take to do it? How many exceptions are there? How many people are involved in that process? 

Business often thinks that volumes are higher than they actually are, and they may forget that other people may have to be drafted in if there are peak periods. Due diligence in building a business case is important. What you also need to do is revisit it six months later or a year later: What did we declare? What did we actually hit? Did the bot fall over because of X, Y, or Z? It is a continuous improvement process, as well as ROI. If you get the two working correctly, you get a stronger ROI.

What we find is that some businesses who don't use our consultancy skills will try and do it themselves, and they will come across some of the pitfalls that we are fully aware of, but they may not be aware of because they're learning, and that has a big impact on ROI. If they try to go after a business process that's very complex, at the beginning, without the right skills in hand, they can suddenly find themselves in a downward spiral from a development point of view, where costs and time are overrunning. Before they know it, the declaration they set has passed and they've not been able to hit those targets. When that happens you start to see an erosion of confidence from the business side as well. It all comes together. It's all about strategic understanding and technical know-how.

We now have the challenge of cost. It depends on what you want to do. If you want a very simple robot to execute normal front-office transactions, I would recommend Microsoft Power Automate because it's free. If you are investing in more complex things, then I would always recommend UiPath. 

UiPath is starting to price itself out of the market. It's getting expensive. That's fine if they continue to push the envelope of what they offer, but it's all about perception. And the perception over the last two years with my customers is that it's expensive. I trust it, but it's expensive. 

We're seeing year-on-year price increases. There's a price point they're getting to that is about the value and they need to be very careful about that. 

UiPath, as an organization, has changed massively. When it IPO'ed it was a Romanian company and very much a European company. Now, it's an American company with American values, and I think there is a misunderstanding of the European market compared to the American market.

In terms of implementing end-to-end automation, it depends on the process. We can do more with the advancements that I've mentioned, but every business process is different. I always say to my team, "This isn't about the tail wagging the dog. It's not the technology, it's the business process, and whatever tool is right, whatever fits." There are still exceptions that need to be handled by people so we're probably not there yet with end-to-end automation. 

Most good-sized business processes have business exceptions that require involvement from people. It's what we call "human in the loop." Two or three years ago it was 80/20 between automation and human involvement. We're now probably at 85/15 or 90/10, with more of the process being automated without human involvement. That's because there are smarter bots using AI—the brain—to execute automation tasks that previously had to be handed back to a human for decision-making or some other activity.

On its own, UiPath doesn't speed up digital transformation. It's a tool. It helps, it's a contributor, but as a standalone, it doesn't. It needs other things.

I had a quick look back at what their offering was in 2019 and what it is today. That's a good way of looking at how well they've listened to their customers. They've been smart in not just providing RPA. All their components now are far more than just RPA.

They've recognized one of the biggest areas is process identification, that whole journey of identifying an opportunity and taking it through the life cycle, with things like Automation Hub.

Generally, the response I get from my customers is they're impressed with the number of solutions that are available under UiPath's Enterprise platform.