UiPath Platform Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are partners of UiPath, and we are also programming for them. We are using it internally in our group, but we're also using it to develop automations for our clients. 

In terms of its use cases, we have implemented several automations in financial departments, mostly related to preparing reports, but UiPath is not limited to that. We also had use cases in HR departments for calculating bonuses, for instance, for large companies with more than 1,000 employees or for centralizing the hours worked at certain building sites for a construction company, etc. 

We automate whatever a client needs to be automated. We will discuss possible use cases with a client and prepare a short evaluation regarding the costs and benefits, then it´s up to the client to decide.  

UiPath develops increasingly towards cloud solutions. We still have clients who prefer to have it on-prem, but new clients will mostly opt for cloud solutions. The clients decide on the cloud provider, and we basically use whatever the client wants. 

One of the most interesting use cases we had was for a carrier that has about 300 trucks all over Europe. They check the bills that the truck drivers bring back from the gas stations and compare the amount of fuel in the bills with the consumption the GPS system of the truck has actually recorded. In the past they prepared these reports manually, which was quite complicated. It took them almost half an hour for one report, and that 300 times per month. They had to compare the figures from the GPS systems with the ones that were stored in the cloud and with the figures that they had in their accounting based on the bills from the truck drivers. We automated the whole process. With the automation we could reduce the time for preparing a report from half an hour to about 35 seconds, and the process is completely running in the background. Apart from the data regarding fuel consumption, we also included some additional information in the reports that they always wanted to see, but never could implement, due to time constraints - such as when a truck is due for the next service, how much time the drivers use cruise control, and so on. This was quite an interesting and a little bit unusual use case.

Very often, UiPath has been helpful in centralizing data. TPA is a tax, audit, and accounting company, and internationally we are part of the Baker Tilly network. One of our international Baker tilly partners has to centralize the financial results of a multinational client from 40 countries every month by retrieving and processing information out of the balance sheets. Previously, they had to prepare this manually - automating it saved dozens of hours every month. At TPA, for instance we have a client with more than 200 companies. We have to integrate data of more than 200 general ledgers every month for them. That's something that we have automated internally.

In two and a half years of using UiPath, we haven't had any issues regarding its stability. It is working very well.

Their customer service is excellent. Whenever we have a question, we immediately get a response. We have calls with their teams, and being in Bucharest, where UiPath also has one of their offices, we are often able to meet them in person. That's working pretty well.

They are permanently improving their products, that´s a huge advantege compared to other RPA providers. In comparison, I have heard that Automation Anywhere sometimes has issues that remain unresolved for quite a long time, but UiPath is permanently bringing up new versions, new products, and new solutions. Until now, we did not run into any issues, we could automate anything we had agreed upon with our clients. We have not had one case where we would have reached the limitations of UiPath.

Some of the licenses, such as for Document Understanding, are a little bit expensive, and sometimes potential clients hesitate when they learn about the license fees. We hope that they will reduce the prices over time. Apart from this, I don't have anything to improve.

In terms of new features, it is already difficult for us to keep up with what they're offering because there is so much happening, and we always have to take care that we're not missing out on something.

We have been using it for two and a half years.

Stability-wise, we have had zero issues. It is working very well.

Their support is really very good. When it is about new products, such as Document Understanding, we have to understand:

• How does it actually work?
• What can it do?
• What it cannot do?
• How to sell to the client?

We often have very detailed calls with the staff of UiPath, and if the client is in Romania, we often go with somebody from UiPath's sales team to the client. When the client is abroad, we frequently include somebody from UiPath in the calls to have an introduction for the client.

Positive

When we started with RPA three years ago, we did not use UiPath. We used Foxtrot/Nintex at the beginning, which was quite unreliable, they had severe stability issues, especially with more complex automations. We stopped working with Foxtrot/Nintex after about three or four months because there was something going on all the time, and we couldn't offer it to clients.

Usually, we start with relatively simple automation. Most of the clients start with a small studio and one robot license, which is anyways included with the studio for an extended proof of concept. They have done automation where they see that it is working, and then they start discussing other more complex automations with us.

We also have clients who start right away with quite complex processes, sometimes almost too complex. If a process would need six months or more to automate, clients tend to lose patience. We always prefer to start with a process that can go live after two, three, or four weeks so that they see that it is working, and then extend it step by step. 

My advice would be to start automating something that really hurts but is not an extremely complicated use case. It should be a process that takes only a few minutes being performed manually, but is being performed frequently. These are  use cases that usually can be automated within a few days because they are not very complex processes, and automating them delivers quick results. Based on this first experience, you can have a discussion with us or the other partners of UiPath to see what else would be automatable in your organization. Many times, clients have some suggestions of what could be automated, in most cases classical RPA solutions, but there is so much more all around RPA to better understand your own organisation, such as process mining, task mining, and other solutions that UiPath has recently finalized and brought into the market. 

I would rate it a strong nine out of 10. It is not yet perfect, but then, nothing is perfect.

We have a web application, and we also have iOS and Android applications. We are automating the regression testing part for these applications. Mainly, we are navigating and interacting with UI elements, and we are verifying certain buttons. We are also verifying certain data with RDBMS outputs.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automations. UiPath has been doing well in terms of Orchestrator and how we can see the execution and the reports and results of our test cases. It is doing well in these aspects, which is very important for us. We are doing end-to-end automation and monitoring using Orchestrator, and it is quite useful. This is something that we were looking for while deciding on the automation tool that we would like to go with, and that's why we decided to go with UiPath.

It has been helpful for regression testing. We are developing a big web application, and we are expecting changes every quarter. The development and deployment have been going on every quarter for the past two years. Previously, we had a team of seven or eight people who were doing the manual testing. By automating the testing, we have reduced the team's size to half. The remaining team members are not just analyzing the executions that we are doing with UiPath; they are also providing support. It has increased employee satisfaction because they don't have to do repetitive work again and again. It has been quite good.

It has been useful for unattended automation, and it has also reduced human errors in our organization. Reduction in human errors is the best benefit that we have got from the UiPath implementation.

Automation is most valuable. When it comes to web automation, data scraping and UI-related activities, such as the Find Element activity, are quite useful.

UiPath Academy courses have also been very useful. Whenever we have to work on something new, I go to UiPath Academy and browse all the resources that they have provided. When I started working with OCR about two or three months back, I used UiPath Academy courses. They are very helpful, especially for new people who join the team. New associates need exposure to the tools that we are using, and the content that is present in UiPath Academy is quite good. It gives them an idea about the tool and the things that they can do with it. UiPath Academy has been quite helpful in training new associates.

UiPath is developing day by day, and there are certain products, such as AI Fabric, that UiPath has launched lately. These products are quite new to most of us in the RPA industry. Because there are courses available for these products in UiPath Academy, we are able to get an idea about a tool, its capabilities, and how to use it.

There is a big room for improvement when it comes to mobile automation. The Find Element activity is not present in mobile automation. There are activities to extract data, but we don't have data scraping in mobile automation. These activities are available for UI automation of web applications, but they are not available for mobile automation, which is a drawback when working on mobile automation with UiPath.

There are also so many bugs in mobile automation. I've been working with mobile automation for the past six months, and in the past six months, I have found so many bugs. We have reported them to UiPath. Some of them are posted on the forum, and I haven't seen any positive feedback in terms of whether a bug has been created or they are working on improvement. So far, there is nothing like that. 

There is also a bug related to the Pick Branch activity, and we can't really work with the UI elements in this particular activity. This issue was first reported by someone in 2019, and this post is available in the forum. It has been more than two years, and this bug has not been fixed. 

For mobile automation, there is a tool provided by UiPath called Mobile Device Management (MDM). We do the automation using that tool. In our project, we are using cloud APM services. UiPath Studio communicates with MDM, and MDM communicates with Sauce Labs, which is the cloud APM service provider for us. There is a huge gap in the synchronization of both of them. I have observed a visible difference. When I execute an app activity, it gets executed at Sauce Labs very fast. The final output that we should be getting first comes to MDM and then UiPath takes that output from the MDM, but there is a synchronization gap. There is a visible difference, and UiPath is lacking in this part. So, mobile automation is the part where UiPath can improve a lot.

I've been working with UiPath for almost two years. I'm into development, and I have worked on Excel automation, mobile automation, and web automation.

I don't have any opinion on its scalability at this time. In terms of its usage, we have to create 2,000 automations for our client, and we have already implemented more than 1,000. We don't run those automations every day. We run them as per the requirements, so there would be 200 to 400 processes once a week.

In my project, there are five people who are working with UiPath, but in my company, there are many more people. One of them is the manager, and four of them are working on development. 

There have been some bugs for which we connected with UiPath support. It was a mixed experience. There were some technical support experts with whom we connected, and they tried to get to the root of the trouble. They did their best to provide us with the best solution possible. We have also had other scenarios where there was no answer or explanation for the issue. We didn't get any positive feedback from them.

I had posted a few queries related to mobile automation on the UiPath community, but there was no instant solution. I was expecting a reply within one or two days, but there was no reply. Because this is a niche field, there are not many people working in this domain, but I got replies from the UiPath team on some of the queries. So, overall, the experience was good. I would rate them a six out of 10.

I was not involved in its setup.

It reduces the cost of digital transformation in a way. When it comes to the scenario of our automation, UiPath isn't so fast, and there is the speed issue that UiPath can fix, but because a bot has the capability of working 24/7, there is a reduction in the cost of digital transformation.

We evaluated Blue Prism. We didn't explore Automation Anywhere. After comparing it with Blue Prism, we decided to go with UiPath. As per our client's requirement, there were three applications to be automated, and because UiPath supported web automation and mobile automation for iOS and Android, we went for UiPath. We just had to buy the license for one, and we could automate all three applications.

Rather than implementing RPA on a big scale, I would advise starting at a small scale and doing good process task mining. It is very important to identify the right process to automate.

UiPath is quite an impressive tool. It was the first tool that I started learning when I got into RPA. Recently, I got familiarized with Automation Anywhere. I used to think that Automation Anywhere is better because it is on the cloud, but now that I know that UiPath also has a cloud option, I'm going to explore that option. It is a good solution, and UiPath is doing well when it comes to the improvement of the product. My experience is good overall.

We have not used AI-enhanced Document Understanding in our automation program. We are planning to implement it, but it may take a while.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We've used it to automate most of our processes. Our organization is completely technology-driven and we have been able to automate a lot of our processes with UiPath. The main thing that we are using it for is document creation with multiple fields and approval processes.

We're using it to automate daily tasks, using small bots for multiple processes. In the long-run, they're actually connected together. A lot of people have left our organization in the past couple of years and, instead of hiring new employees, we actually try to build a bot for whatever the work those employees were doing.

By not replacing employees who have left, we have been able to achieve our aim of running a lean company. We are able to save a lot of money on HR costs as well as on the costs of hiring new employees.

In addition, our document-processing time has been reduced for every customer that we are catering to, and that has resulted in great ROI as well as customer satisfaction.

We have compared the performance of humans with the bots who replaced them as they left the organization. The humans were making a lot of errors compared to the bots. The bots are not perfect and they do make their share of errors, but they are quite different from human errors. Everything is logic-based, and everything happens with triggers, so the possibility of an error is minimalistic when something is being handled by a bot. That is especially true for a bot that is created with UiPath because it's so mature. Overall, there are hardly any errors that come out of the bots made with UiPath.

Another benefit comes from the UiPath Academy courses. It saves us on training costs because we don't have to develop the content for training new employees. We're not product experts when it comes to UiPath and the Academy delivers training in a fashion that is easy to understand. There's a lot of support provided with the training courses as well. Not only does the Academy help in terms of training-development costs, but it has minimized the duration of training for each employee who starts to use UiPath. The results are great savings for the organization, both monetary, through automation, and non-monetary when it comes to training.

The AI and machine learning that are built into these bots really help us to make bots at a mature level where they're able to track with real-world customers. They also help with employee engagement and business productivity and take them to a whole new level. Obviously, we cannot develop such technology from scratch. We used built-in processes and automations in the past, but once we found, first when we were using Automation Anywhere, and now while using UiPath, this type of technology, it really took over the technology suite that our organization had been using previously and replaced it completely. UiPath is a complete suite that can handle most of our needs by itself.

Document creation is one of the most important features for us. As a healthcare company, we have a lot of documents with complex fields. For example, if a treatment is booked by a customer in another country, a lot of paperwork has to be completed. That paperwork first goes to the healthcare provider and, once accepted there, it comes to the company to be approved by the management. Then it goes back to the customer.

In addition, the process has been integrated into mobile apps. That way, a senior manager gets a request on the mobile app and to approve the transaction they just have to press the "Accept" button and everything else happens on its own. All of that happens in a matter of seconds.

Also, the UiPath Academy courses are very user-friendly and enable us to achieve a lot more. Those courses have taught us a lot, especially for our new automation employees. Once the basic courses are completed by any new employee, we actually recommend that they complete the certifications that are available via UiPath, and some of them are actually free of cost. Only after completing certification do we allow them to work on the floor. We have found the Academy content to be really amazing in terms of design as well as its functionality. We have made use of all of the courses there are.

The UiPath community has grown quite a bit, but it's still not on par with the kind of support that you would find with Automation Anywhere. That is still missing because UiPath is a relatively new entrant in the market. The community support is growing, but that is definitely one of the areas that can be improved.

Also, sometimes there are failures in the cloud during migration. Say you're migrating it from one instance to another instance. There are failures and there's not much support for such cases in the UiPath documentation. While it is a rare instance that we need to migrate, whenever we do have to migrate, we generally face some issues. I feel that there are bugs in that area.

We've been using UiPath for about three years.

The platform is really stable. There's never been a point when it's been unstable or has had runtime issues. There have been really minute server crashes, unexpectedly. But I don't think that is due to the platform. It is more due to the server environment and the hosting environment not being configured properly. There are no problems whatsoever in terms of the stability as well as the performance of the product.

The product is very scalable. It is meant for scalability. It is specifically meant for a situation where there are a lot of tasks that have to be completed by and it automates everything. Even if large volumes of data and tasks have to be completed with lightning speed, that is exactly where UiPath fits in. It does the job beautifully. That is the reason it was able to replace the whole technology suite that we were using, a suite that consisted of different products.

The technical support has been great. The only issue that we've had is that there aren't enough specialized support people who can help with the server issues. Configuring Google Cloud Platform with UiPath can be challenging. There were some errors that we were not able to figure out on our own. There are two support teams that we could reach out to, either the server support or the UiPath support. Sometimes both of them were confused about what was causing the issue. And sometimes, it takes more than the anticipated time to resolve the issue. But overall, UiPath provides great support.

Positive

At first, we were using a completely in-house technology system. After that, we used Automation Anywhere for a couple of years. But once we started using UiPath, we were able to replace that completely.

The initial setup was fairly easy. We've been using the Google Cloud Platform to host the entire automation platform and there isn't much documentation for deploying it on GCP. There are a lot of settings and configurations that are location-specific and that relate to the load and the number of bots that you are going to make with UiPath. There are a lot of things that come into the picture and the documentation is not up to the mark.

To sum it up, it is a little difficult, but not impossible to deploy it initially.

It only takes a few days but it depends on the complexity of the kinds of bots that you plan to run with the platform. Certain bots could take time. For that situation, there are consulting services. Also, there are certain bots that are already there as a template and you can customize them. But if there are processes that require a custom bot to be built from scratch, that could definitely take time. That could take from months to a year if it's a very complex bot and you're creating it with an in-house team.

Our implementation strategy was to take one step at a time. We had designed a complete project deployment roadmap, in which we had certain milestones that we planned to achieve within a few months. There were then more milestones that we planned to reach within a year. We did have to take on some consulting services from UiPath partners for the customized bots, but that resulted in the development costs being reduced, as it went a lot faster than it would have gone without the consulting support. It has gone pretty smoothly.

Apart from the consultants for the customized bots, the initial deployment was completely handled by our in-house team. There was a fair bit of documentation provided with the system itself and we found it sufficient to take care of the initial deployment.

The ROI has been really excellent. We're able to save a lot of costs that were previously paid for subscriptions to multiple suites of software. We were able to save all of that and invest it into one product, UiPath, as well as into development of the bots.

The ROI has been very positive for us. The main issue is that there is an initial investment that you have to make. Once you do that, the ROI keeps on growing year-on-year. For us, it has only been three years. If we compare our costs and ROI over a longer period, I'm sure we'll see a lot better ROI.

The costs are related to infrastructure and development and, of course, at a later stage, include monitoring and maintenance. If you compare all of that over a longer period of time, you'll see savings of anywhere between two and 15 times compared to an equivalent system, over a period of about five to seven years.

Another area with room for improvement is the pricing. Initially, the pricing was a lot more affordable. Now, it seems a bit excessive.

Get an estimate of the cost from UiPath sales representatives. Don't just include the UiPath cost, but also the consulting costs that you might have to pay, and the number of licenses that you might need as an organization. The third thing to consider is the development cost of the bots. All of that has to be considered well in advance.

I don't think there is anything that UiPath bots aren't able to do. But be aware that the budget could become excessive by using UiPath because there are so many different costs that come into the picture. You could require trained employees, people who have previous experience with UiPath, to develop bots that are a custom fit for your organization.

Cost would be one of the things that I would recommend that other organizations consider in advance to see if it suits their budgets. They should also consider whether they have the resources that can deploy and design bots that are able to automate the tasks and the processes that they want to automate.

Apart from UiPath, we also used Automation Anywhere. The reason we use UiPath far more than Automation Anywhere is because we have been using it for some time and we have some resources who are quite well-trained on it. It suits us pretty well. It has automated most of our processes and really kept our system moving. Whatever issues we have had with the product have been very well resolved by the customer support team in a very timely manner, and that is another reason we prefer UiPath over Automation Anywhere.

You need to have resources who are trained in UiPath. You could take the initiative of training employees, but you need some senior resources who have prior experience with UiPath who can be project managers and guide the development and analyst teams on how to reach the goals that the organization is trying to achieve.

UiPath was a fairly new product when we started using it. They were giving a 60-day free trial and were also providing free certifications for that initial period. That is how we started with it. Over the years, we've seen that the UiPath community has grown quite a bit. From being a new entry in the automation market, it has grown into a very mature product and it has now taken over as the main system that our company is using. We rely on technology to support our backend processes and we need a system that is very reliable in terms of delivery. UiPath has turned out to be a system that works out very well for us. The UiPath community really helps whenever there are bugs or glitches that our company is facing. You can reach out to the community where there are very senior developers as well as analysts and you can get a lot of help there, apart from the customer support.

It runs in its own private cloud in the Google Cloud Platform. We have some projects that are run on UiPath that are given to independent contractors to work on. We give a contractor a license for the system and they have to install UiPath on their computer and complete whatever work they have to complete on that. But for our internal organization and employees, we have a private cloud over which UiPath is running.

The biggest lesson would be to just take one step at a time. Make use of the partner support at the beginning. Initially, we tried to build everything ourselves and that cost a lot more than it would have if we had used consultants. There are companies that provide consulting support and there are companies that will actually build your bots exactly to your requirements. That way, you can just deploy them from day one. They also provide maintenance and support for the bots they have developed for you.

The first use case is related to our email process. We need to download multiple attachments in the form of PDF and Excel files from emails. We only accept the PDF files into a specific folder, while the Excel files go into another. We split them based on the file extension.

The second use case is related to the retail domain, in which we need to update an application with data that we get from a client. We process a few Excel operations and then update all of the invoice records in the application and generate a PDF invoice form with the client's details from Excel. That PDF is then emailed to the client.

With UiPath automations, work has been made easier for our employees. Previously, people were working on those processes manually. Now, they can concentrate on other work and on improving their skills in other areas. They have also improved their knowledge of RPA technology. There are time savings and we are more profitable. For just one of our processes, we have saved approximately 20 hours per week.

We are also able to deliver the output to our client easily. When things were processed manually, there might have been errors, but with the automation, they have been reduced as much as possible. Bots don't think about other topics while they're working.

In addition, while I haven't used the AI functionality of UiPath very much myself, my colleagues do use it, and it has enabled them to automate more processes overall.

But the main thing, when it comes to our business side, is that the solution helps to reduce the cost of digital transformation. In terms of ROI, it is helping the profitability of the organization. It has helped to reduce the employee count, has sped up the delivery of solutions, and it has helped us obtain more clients. We can generate more output, good results, in less time, enabling us to improve the overall expectations of our clients. Our cost savings have been greater than expected and the business team is more than happy with the results.

There is also the issue of employee satisfaction. Using myself, as an example, I feel very happy about developing and monitoring the results. It is satisfying to see that a process is working as expected, and that the results are more accurate compared to the previous manual work.

UiPath has enabled us to implement end-to-end processes. That's important because we don't want to depend on third-party tools. With UI Path, all the resources are within the application for generating an end-to-end process, so we don't have to struggle to develop such a process.

In addition, the solution doesn't require much infrastructure. We can easily install and operate the tool in a Windows environment.

I also did the Advanced RPA Developer course in the UiPath Academy. I learned how to create end-to-end implementations using the UiPath tools. The course helped me to develop my skills. In the course within the Academy, you learn about every command in UiPath. It is easy to learn the information very quickly, when compared to other learning resources. The Academy has all the resources for regular, advanced, and master developers.

When it comes to document processing, they could work on more accurately identifying objects from PDF files.

I have been using RPA tools, such as UiPath, for the past four years. We are using the Enterprise version.

With the help of all the dynamic options in UiPath, the stability of the bots has been very good.

We have deployed automation solutions for a lot of our clients in their environments, and they are happy with the results as well. There are more than 100 users.

The technical support has been very responsive. They provide very accurate answers to our inquiries.

Positive

Our business side has been happy with the ROI, compared to other vendors.

Our business team looked at other tools, including Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, before selecting this tool. They were much happier with the results generated with UiPath than with the others.

The main differences are that UiPath provides a more efficient implementation and it's easier to monitor the results. It's also more efficient when it comes to analyzing a process. Compared to other vendors, implementation takes less time with UiPath.

I can recommend UiPath to others. It will make their work easier. It's very easy to learn and to run the tools compared to other automation options.

We're doing mortgage loan processing. When people are applying for a new loan, we're using it to gather all loan documents and validate the property ownership and do a title search. We then put the loan documents in a package.

We are using its latest version.

It used to take two hours to take all these documents and load them in, and now, it takes 15 minutes. So, we went from two hours to 15 minutes. We're able to process a significantly larger number of documents in a much shorter time.

It had pre-built integration with the scanning solution that we use called Kodak Alaris. They use our current scanners to scan in the documents, and then they have the software that allows you to load those documents right into UiPath Orchestrator. That gave us the ability to automate those processes.

It took quite a bit of time to understand some of the document types. Some of the documents were already pre-built, but some of the documents were new, and it took us quite a bit of time to get it to train on those documents. If there was any variation, we had to re-train it. It took longer than expected.

I have been using this solution for about four years.

Its stability is very good. 

It is enterprise-ready. So far, we are very happy with everything that we have been working with. It is designed for enterprises. 

We're going to continue to use it for the next five years. It is automating the roles. It has to do more with validation than anything else. The users like it a lot, and we're very happy with it so far. 

We have a third party for support, and they are very good. They are very quick to support.

All in all, it was pretty straightforward. We had to bring in third-party consultants to get it going. We were expecting that, but the costs were a little bit more than what we were thinking at the time.

From beginning to end, it probably took about four months. It included everything that we were trying to do. We got started right away, but the actual deployment took a little bit longer than what we thought it was going to take.

We've moved from different versions over time, and we were able to do it pretty seamlessly. We had another product called Automation Anywhere, and that took a lot more effort to do the migration. So, we were happy with the implementation time that UiPath took.

We took the help of a third party. Our experience with them was good. It was more expensive than we thought it was going to be, but overall, it was good.

For its deployment and maintenance, we have a team of four people in the house, and then we have five people outside who are actually continuing to do maintenance in terms of upgrades and new forms as they come up.

We have probably saved about $6 million using the product. We were going to have to hire about 600 people to be able to process the loans, but we only had to hire 150 people. We didn't have to hire 450 people, which was pretty significant.

We did pay more than what we thought we were going to have to pay upfront. We had a third party for implementation, and the cost turned out to be about twice of what we thought it was going to be upfront. So, instead of one month, it took us three months for an ROI, but we got significant returns. 

The hardware requirements to manage this was also a little bit more than we thought it was going to be, but our ROI was so high that in a way we earned it back. So, even though the costs were more than what we were expecting, the return was much better than we were expecting. We were supposed to go from two hours to one hour. That was the goal, and we went from two hours to 15 minutes. The benefit was more than what we were expecting.

Its actual cost turned out to be about two times more than what we thought it was going to be upfront. There were hardware costs that we were not expecting. Some of the server costs and things of that nature were higher than what we were expecting but based upon the return, it was a net.

We looked at Blue Prism, Datamatics, and Signavio. We just looked at the market and how many references they had that were in our market space. We were able to talk to a significant number of companies that were already using these products for the same thing, and that's what we based our decision on.

I would advise doing the homework upfront and seeing what the full impact is going to be. You should not just look at task automation; you should also look at the full process. That's because when you make a change in one area, you need to consider how that's going to affect another area in your organization. You may get a big benefit in one area, and then all of a sudden, you have to change the way you're doing business to take advantage of that. If you correct a bottleneck in one area, you might still have another area that's a bottleneck, so you need to look at the full process. This is something that we learned in general from our experience. As we were fixing different things and automating different things, there was another bottleneck down the road. We went from doing 10 a minute to 100 a minute, but when we went to the next process, we could only do 10 a minute. It didn't really make a difference unless we fixed that one too. That's why you have to look at the full end-to-end process.

I would like them to work on the process mining solution that they have to give us a better picture of the full end-to-end process. That was what was really missing. They do have a process mining solution that you can run up front, but it wasn't very good. We ended up running into things thinking why didn't we know that. If we had a better tool upfront to give us the bigger picture, it would've saved us a lot of time and effort down the road.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

My experience in using UiPath, in general, is in developing traditional bots, assisted bots. There are the typical mundane applications that we're trying to remove in order to add value to customers. 

The solution is used for extracting information from documents and consolidating data, maybe from various Excel sheets. I've used applications, such as PDF, Tableau, and a number of different entities as well. It varies.

I haven't really followed up so much in-depth, however, I know that a lot of the end-users that I've worked with and talked to, that have removed some of the processes, think it’s great. I've got many more strategic types of tasks to do. The one thing users look forward to when they come to work is when something’s been removed from their plate, one piece at a time.

Collectively, I find the UiPath features really complement each other. If you have one tool or another resource available, you're really able to get it into a solution.

They've implemented their stuff very well, considering how fast they've come up with new tools. Usually, it’s a messy situation, however, with UiPath, I've not found that to be the case. It's pretty impressive, the rate at which new tools are released and how well they're thought out, and how usable they are.

From an employee morale perspective, the company is getting positive feedback.

We’ve seen some reduction in human errors and time savings. Depending on what it is, your time savings could be two to three to ten times more in terms of time saved. It’s easy, too. Error reduction is absolutely almost down to nothing.

In terms of cost savings, some of this was done pretty casually, so the numbers are maybe not official. We’ve got 20 data samples, and we're timing it exactly. However, when it comes to time savings, there's always been a very significant amount.

When it comes to ease of use, some of the tools they're providing are in discovery or task capture. You can go out and send this off to somebody and it's pretty self-explanatory in a half hour. Prior to that, people might be using different steps with built-in Windows pieces, which is horrible for capturing automation. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, adding in this ability to annotate the screenshots with ease, that alone in the development process helps significantly. I'm really liking the discovery tools that complement the product.

All these discovery tools are making building automation easier, from an analyst perspective. It removes the wheat from the chaff and narrows things down, and you begin to see what you need. By clicking on different elements, you can see where they can annotate. It saves a lot of back and forth and time. Not only does the subject matter expert not have to spend time away from their work, you're also not going back and forth and trying to clarify items any longer. It makes things more compact and it’s easier to get to the end goal.

I completely trained on my own as a developer with the UiPath Academy. I was able to do it for free. It's the only onboarding I received. I had nobody else to go to, except for the videos and the forums.

The greatest value of UiPath Academy is that it is free. Now, it’s completely about motivation, and not cost-prohibitive. You just need to be motivated to learn and you can jump in. You don’t have to spend something like $800 and have maybe a company sponsoring you to get started.

People, in their careers, can become relevant again. If they are in a dying industry or disrupted industry, they can get into something that's growing rapidly. If you have a computer, and a decent internet connection, you can have a new career in a fairly short amount of time.

The forum's a great place, however, for a new person, it was better some years ago. It's grown too fast, and it's not that nimble. Previously, if you asked questions, the response time was quicker.

Since I've learned UiPath, there's so many more people rushing and getting into it. With the demand for RPA jobs, the ratio of expertise to novices is very, very low. Before you had a small community and you had a lot of experts and just a few new people trickling in at a time. The influx of new people, it's just growing factor by factor. Where previously there was one person that only had a few questions to answer, now maybe that ratio is now 20 or 30 people. You're not going to get the answers that you need as fast. Luckily, the quality of the Academy is so good, if you look around, you can eventually figure things out.

The issue is that, with so many people, a lot of questions are getting asked before anyone even looks to see if an answer is already there. It tends to make it harder to find relevant, real questions that need to be answered. There are people who are not doing the due diligence and looking at the tags and spending a little extra time before throwing the question out. It makes that part hard to manage.

With people that have already been up-skilled, or already been skilled in the past, UiPath needs to find a way to send some sort of notification to them when items update or change. They need to send out a message to experienced developers to say: “Hey, look at this and push it out."

If you're not going to the Academy and looking for something new, there needs to be some sort of way to say: “Hey, you've been certified. You haven't been in this course. You should look at these things.” I started looking at the Academy and found new elements. When I mentioned something, like, "What's that?" the new guys were aware due to the fact that it was in the Academy from when they started and was not there when I finished.

Basically, just having some sort of mechanism for spreading awareness to existing developers, or pushing something out to them, maybe even through the interface, would be helpful. Whether it’s a little highlight or a little icon to alert users to “hey, here’s something new, something pushed out.” And it’s not just something where you have to go in and read some boring five or six pages of notes, to know that this thing is there. It needs to be visual.

I started using UiPath, which started with training, in the fourth quarter of 2018.

It's a very stable product. I haven't had any issues. If I found or thought something was unstable or something, it usually ended up being me, or an operator error.

I've seen UiPath scaled. Personally, I haven't had issues one way or the other, however, I've heard good things. That said, I can't speak too much on it from the perspective of personal experience.

I have had some interaction. They had a pretty good SLA, in terms of response time. Of course, that has nothing to do with actual solution time. That said, what I remember with everything was that nothing stood out. Usually, you remember some anger or something. I didn't have anything like that.

I'm certified in Automation Anywhere as well. Right now, Automation Anywhere always has two products out, in the sense of getting ready to move into their A360 with the newer product. They're just trying to get that product to maturity. Right now, we have different deployments. Automation Anywhere is cloud-native. 

While they're both RPA, they each have I think a different niche, depending on what the customer needs. 

As a developer, the learning curve in version 11, the prior version, had an easier learning curve compared to UiPath. Automation Anywhere has an edge, in terms of ease of learning for business users and citizen developers.

360 has made the learning curve harder. It's going to add more features, more flexibility. And with that comes a learning curve. Still, the learning curve might be a little easier. 

My deployment experience was not just through UiPath. If anything, I'm pretty agnostic to any platform. I was an analyst, and I was involved with, in general, putting items into production, and going back and forth with developers, and seeing if there were any issues or problems.

I've talked to other developers, and I haven't heard of any particular issues or problems, with UiPath, or anything that was more than just human error or an oversight.

If you're smart about it, you understand what your needs are, you can get an ROI out of it without having to go get the full-blown solution. You don't want to drop $20,000 on an orchestrator unnecessarily. You can ease into it, into adoption, without dropping a lot of money. Maybe some attendant bots, and an unattended locally on a large scale, in a small area.

If you do that and start easy, you'll get a return on investment. Eventually, when we start scaling, we'll pay for the orchestrator. You'll need that when you start getting a lot of bots, and it becomes like herding cats. It gets crazy. That's what you need an orchestrator for. While you can avoid a cost at a certain point, you're probably getting diminishing returns, and then it's going to be more costly to manage something all over the place. It's best to start small and then add on. 

We haven’t been using an orchestrator. It’s a bit like having your hands tied behind your back, as you're not using some of the features that are available with that. However, it still provides these workarounds. You are able to still do some really robust work. It's been great.

We are using, more or less, the more recent versions of the solution.

Before starting with UiPath, a company needs an understanding of the culture at their company. You need to ask if your employees are resistant to change. Certain companies where people are entrenched in their ways, or scared of bots taking their job will be worried. A company needs to lean in and give them an understanding of expectations and pay attention to them before starting. Just pushing it might throw people off.

The personalities of people are the biggest factor. I used to come from a lean Six Sigma background. When companies bring in these Six Sigma programs, it's the same thing - resistance. People say “oh, you're the job cutter.”

People throw that out as automation, and I say, "Hey, people have been automating since steam engines. It's been consistent. It's just the face has changed a little bit. It finally hopped back onto computers. However, automation has been nonstop." 

You just have to realign and adjust yourself. You can’t be resistant to change. Change could be a good thing. Not all things are, however, workers need to be rational and think about it. If your company doesn't move faster, adapt quicker, then your company's going to go away, and everyone will be gone. It’s competitive. That's sports. That's business.

Overall, from what I've used, and what I've touched, and some of the things I've seen without actually putting my hands on it, I'd give UiPath a nine out of ten.

I'm just not the type to give out tens so freely. I haven't gone deep and wide enough to touch everything. From what I've seen before, if you span that out overall, I'd probably put them up in the nine range, personally.

Our use cases have evolved over time. We have use cases for screening and onboarding candidates, feeding new hires into the payroll system, and timekeeping. Right now, we are working on a document understanding use case. It is going to help us read supplier insurance forms.  

UiPath has enabled us as an organization to perform an array of tasks with more proficiency and efficiency. Automation is very important to our organization now and UiPath has played an immense role.

UiPath makes building automations incredibly easy. The platform is very robust and it is scalable. UiPath also has a strong community, which has helped democratize RPA in a true sense. The community and expertise can be leveraged quickly to meet a common goal.

The UiPath Academy has helped us move forward more efficiently. It is a great source of information and knowledge for both new users and those taking the advanced courses. I see the UiPath Academy evolving in the future.

One of the features I've found valuable is UiPath Studio. We have a huge development team of about eight to ten people and they are currently working with it. We also have a citizen developer program that is leveraging StudioX. 

Orchestrator is important for us as well. 

These features are valuable because they allow different groups of people to complete their tasks. UiPath is a robust platform. It helps us cater to different audiences. 

The licensing model is sometimes very confusing and could be simplified for customers. That would help us understand, gauge the offer, and work it into our existing infrastructure. 

We started using UiPath in 2017. We have had a great journey with it. UiPath has helped us scale faster, especially with RPA implementations. It also helped us evolve through our automation journey. 

My impression of the stability is that it's like any other software. We have never had a problem with UiPath and the platform has been stable enough to enable us to scale a lot. 

We have been happy with UiPath's scalability so far. I would give it a nine out of 10. We are currently deploying about 95% of our automations through UiPath. We are very into it and plan to expand from there. 

Yes, we did use a different solution but I cannot disclose which. However, I can say this much: we decided to switch because of the community UiPath has built. Also, the platform and product are packaged correctly. Everything is laid out well and it seems like UiPath understands what businesses need. 

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. UiPath has an incredible team in place. They help us every now and then. It did not take us much time to go through the initial setup and get the solution deployed. 

We have realized savings in the millions of dollars overall.

The pricing structure is very complicated. Someone from the organization has to sit down and set aside some time to fully understand it. 

Yes, we did evaluate other options but I cannot disclose which. 

Start your journey with UiPath. Engage someone from UiPath and have them go through the journey with you. 

We primarily use the solution for our clients. 

One interesting use case we've seen is that the product team leveraged UiPath to expose an API for their customers to then fulfill a service request.

It was part of their deal that, for them to sign this large contract with one of their clients, they needed this functionality. The product team has a huge backlog, and it wasn't going to make it based on everything else they had to deliver, so they actually leveraged UiPath to expose this and give them a service they just didn't have before.

When comparing it to, for example, Blue Prism, one of the key value points is, other than the full platform in general, the ability to trigger automation on demand. Basically, when the work gets loaded into the queue, the work can then be started without having to run things on a schedule.

The solution has improved the way an organization functions. For example, in general, in the context of RPAs, it's really about the focus of picking those tasks out of people's daily efforts so they can spend more time with the customers. What you get off the back of that is dollar for dollar savings. You invest in this tool, and you get back dollars by hours, however, beyond that, there are these peripheral benefits that you get that are a little harder to measure. You’ve got to have good guys out there to capture this.

In terms of endpoint satisfaction, customer satisfaction, you have to look at it within the business and their measurements before and after you've done something to actually see what is happening and attribute it to what you've done with UiPath.

We haven't done anything that hasn't saved money yet.

At the beginning of a journey, we were looking to get maybe 1X our money back in that first year. We try to get that at least. Depending on the size of the organization and complexity, it’s possible. As you go into year two, year three, you're almost looking at a multiplier reflecting that year. For example, a four-year-old program might get a company around 4X, if not more, in return. Of course, that also depends on how far you've implemented this product. You need to put money in to get money out, in a sense.

If you've got a pipeline of X and you only have three developers, you can only chew through that pipeline at a certain current rate. You want to look at the value and say, "Well, what if we doubled our staff?"

I have a calculator that shows, for example, if you have $10 million of savings sitting on the table through 20 things in the pipeline. If I put one developer on that, it will take me three years to go through that and build that out. At the end of that $10 million of value, imagine if instead, you had everything all automated on day one. That's a total max value, and you would get somewhere around 23% to 30% of that value returned.

If you double that or if you put a staff of three developers on that same pipeline, you finish earlier and you get about 75% of the total value. If you go to four developers or five, you get closer to 83%. Now, if you put 20 developers on there, you're only going to increment it to 95%, however, then you’ve just increased your total cost as you have to try managing 25 at the same time. The main idea being, based upon your pipeline and the size of your team, you can potentially increase your total return value within a fixed time.

The ease of the use of creating the building automation is actually improving year over year. For example, there are some training programs for UiPath, and it generally takes about a week to get through it. That’s on UiPath Academy.

If you actually use it with modern design, modern objects, and all the new things that have been released recently, you actually save time on training. If that shaves 20% of your training, you can also shave 20% off of your building capability or the requirements. BY using UiPath Academy, you save time on your projects.

It's fairly easy to learn, as a solution. However, it’s not that easy where you're just going to throw non-developers into it. Your first three days of UiPath training are actually doing .net. That's the one thing the market puts out there incorrectly is that your operations team can just jump on this. You still need a developer mentality as you're still dealing with exceptions and things that aren't the way humans think.

That said, in terms of usability, it's highly useful.

UiPath Academy helps streamline and keeps employees up to speed in the solution.

The biggest value of the Academy is that it's free. That's a major piece. It's fairly well organized, and they put things into channels based upon what your role is within your RPA program or your business, and that helps you stay focused in terms of what you need to learn.

The solution needs resource locking. This kind of leads toward scaling which is one challenge. It's not major. However, it is when you have multiple bots running the same process and they need to access the same piece of information to read and write. There's not a strong capability to manage the lock and have the capability to say "I have ownership of this file. No one else can touch it" and then release it, allowing the next one to pick it up. That's a key differentiator that I see between them and Blue Prism. That one feature is lacking.

The studio design is a little different. If you go from one tool to the next, you might be a little shocked at how things are organized. I don't see them changing that any time soon. However, the design could be improved upon.

I've used the solution for about four years. 

The solution seems to be stable. I haven't had any issues yet.

The solution is very scalable. I haven't pushed it to 100 plus or anything like that. However, based upon scheduling and triggers and SLA management, it's much easier to scale.

We did work with other RPA solutions in the past. The differentiation comes from the triggers, and the attended automation. The platform now is a big part of this. 

For example, Blue Prism is one of the tools that we work with as well. If you want new functions, new features, say, process mining, you have to go to Celonis or someone else, whereas UiPath is providing this platform with new capabilities almost daily.

It also depends on what kind of COE you want to build. Looking at Blue Prism, they have a nice UI as well. It's very business-focused. With UiPath, you need to have some developer capacity. There's .net in there, and some people just might not get that. However, at the end of the day, if they don't get that, should they be building processors? There's a bit of a challenge there.

The initial setup is not that complex. It's more about the client's setup. For example, the domain, entries, things like that, would add to the complexity you face.

If everything goes well, you can get things set up probably in a few weeks. I would say a month or so is needed for deployment and implementors should set expectations. For example, security depends on how much the organization is ready to take it on as well. If you don't get their buy-in right away, then you're just going to get delays.

Most of the companies see a good ROI from the solution.

The pricing and licensing get a little complex. There are so many different options that you can choose from, and practice adds to the time to figure these things out. Whereas, with, for example, Blue Prism. It's a pretty standard basic model. UiPath gets a little hectic at times.

The customers that use the on-premises version tend to use the latest version of the solution. 

While those using the cloud version of the UiPath apps feature are in the UK, the US users are not using that functionality. Mainly most of our focus has always been on RPA and then expansion. From what I've seen, we've mainly been using UiPath. At least on the North American side, it's been relatively new. That's why they aren't using apps yet.

We don’t have any clients that are using the solution's AI functionality in their automation program yet. I’ve only played around with it myself.

From a road mapping perspective, I'd advise potential new users that your key is the business case. If there's no business case, then this solution doesn't make sense for you to get involved or do anything else. The first part is to really understand the business case. Just to substantiate getting it into the company. Once you have that, that's basically your low-hanging fruit. 

That said, the key is not to hang everything on one process, not to sit there and bank it, as the concept is a program approach. Over time, it is going to sustain itself. Companies need to be ready to look at a process and think if it's a good idea first. And as you move through the steps, you're basically doing additional checks. As you learn about the process, you're also learning what it's like behind each process and what the value add is. At each stage, users need to ensure that it makes sense to continue. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. While there's always room for improvement, market-wise they are at the top of their game. 

Our primary use cases are within the financing and HR teams right now. But of course, there's a lot of opportunities in the clinical space and with MB services. We have use cases in all of those departments throughout the organization, but right now we are engaged primarily with the HR and finance team.

We have two automations in production right now. We just started our COE and it's been exciting so far. We are building things and have identified quite big end-to-end opportunities. 

I'm not new to the automation world. I've been in this field since late 2015 and I've seen the ROI you can get with it. Some things you can quantify and others you can't. However, we are very new to UiPath so I can not comment on improvements just yet. We will know within a year. 

We have seen savings in time. One of the automations that we have in place with our finance team is a monthly reconciliation process. The first three to five days of the month are critical in finance. So, if you're able to save as little as half an hour every day in those five days, that adds up to a full day of work. This automation has helped our accountants and the finance team do their closing and be on time and have extra time to analyze things. They're not fighting fires anymore.

The partnerships that UiPath has with other vendors are excellent. Some of the applications that we rely on heavily, like DocuSign for Workday, already have built-in integrations with UiPath. This will help us scale and go to market quickly. 

I am happy that they are always listening to us and doing as much as they can to include more features. 

UiPath could work towards more engagement on the community practice side. Some of our people are having a hard time understanding how to make sense of the data that UiPath puts out. 

There could be some guidance as well on how to calculate ROI. ROI is how much money you have spent and how much you are getting back. But, how can I know how much money I've spent? Do I calculate the cost of infrastructure? Do I calculate the cost of the team I have? Where do I begin? What is the right way to look at ROI? What are some of the analytics I should be looking at?  

Utilization, the success rate, business value, and ROI have to go hand-in-hand. You cannot tell a whole story with just ROI. 

I have been using UiPath since March of this year. 

My impression of UiPath's stability is good. Compared to some other automation vendors that I've used, I would say that UiPath is more stable and better. 

We do not have a lot of experience with them but whenever we reached out to them they helped and directed us. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was on-premise and run-of-the-mill. Our team is very knowledgeable and had already done similar implementations. 

We had four people engaged in the implementation from our side. We partnered with EmiTech for the deployment and they brought in their expert and helped guide us through the installation process. 

I do not fully understand our pricing model yet, but I would say that it is fair. I cannot tell at the moment how it is going to affect us. Right now we have only six unattended bots and maybe two attended ones, so we will see how it goes as we grow. 

The ease of building the automations depends on the process, but overall I would say that UiPath is intuitive. If you understand some basic functions of logical expressions or loop functions, UiPath is intuitive enough to help you build some impressive automations. It is easy to pick up.

We have a few people who have completed UiPath Academy courses and are now going for advanced certification. I'm not planning on building any bots on an enterprise scale myself, but I am going through the training as well. 

UiPath Academy is excellent because it is intuitive. Of course, you have to have some development or SDLC knowledge, but it helps tremendously. You get so much insight on the features. You also get to build a small automation. I dedicated 30 to 40 hours to the trainings and was able to get some knowledge from it. 

The trainings are even easier for people from accounting, for example. They are used to macros, automations, and file transfers. Conceptually, they are already there and with a tool like UiPath Academy, they can start using the solution. It's important to just stick with it.