UiPath Platform Reviews

We use this solution for voice processing, user onboarding, offboarding, marketing, email consolidation, text form generation, text form ingestion, AP, and AR.

We are using UiPath's AI functionality although we have not been able to do much complex configuration. Theoretically, it works but as soon as we start adding different invoices, it's a very cumbersome, long, and human-centric process. Our company is planning to scale our automation efforts.

This solution is easy to use for the end user. The Academy courses make this possible as well as the community forums. I am a senior manager and my role is building the center of excellence. I learned how to write code on UiPath using the Academy and learned from my peers in community forums. 

This has been the biggest benefit. With other vendors, you had to pay thousands of dollars to learn how to use their solutions. With UiPath, you can learn on your own and expand your knowledge.

The task capture and task binding features have been most valuable. These features make it easier for a team who are not that familiar with RPA to successfully use UiPath. They generate the PDD the way it's supposed to be and capture the right screenshot.

The stability of the bots could be improved. The bots could be expanded to have more objects already prebuilt. It would be useful if it was clear to the end user that there are objects already built. It should be easily available or there should be a very simple search for objects. Many users don't know that Marketplace exists or that it gives you free bots. 

I have been using this solution for eight years. 

This is a stable solution and we have not experienced any crashes. The challenge we have experienced is when developers do not document requirements correctly but we have had no issues with the software itself. 

This is a scalable solution. 

Customer support is provided mostly by a consulting firm. We usually raise a ticket and get an answer. We would like the technical support to be sharper and faster rather than going through the consulting firm as this can take more than a week. 

I would rate the support for this solution a six or seven out of ten. This score could be improved if we had a single point of contact. 

Neutral

Before UiPath, we used Blue Prism. We switched due to the ease of use of UiPath as I could learn how to use it myself and teach the team. This training is free and also offers free software. 

If you are new to UiPath, the initial setup is not that straightforward. It is easier now that I have been working with the solution for a few years. The most challenging part of the setup is getting information on how UiPath connects with other systems. Only 1% of the community actually knows this. 

For the setup, our infrastructure team followed the instructions sent by UiPath. At that time, there was no cloud functionality. UiPath could offer better communication around the overall implementation and where data is stored.  The instructions are very easy to follow but the security approvals cause a lot of blockers. 

We have experienced ROI in two ways. Within the first three to six months, whatever we invested came back to us in terms of time-saving and money-saving. We have also seen an increase in client satisfaction in the sense that we can look up client information using attended bots. 

This tool makes it easy to build a team that can manage it because of the availability of the academy and certifications for upskilling. The courses are set up to ensure the user fully understands what the certification is about before they are awarded it. 

It's easy to use and the dashboards give me easy access to insights. This is why I always recommend UiPath to others. Some organizations can waste millions of dollars trying to set up other solutions. 

I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to automate processing of intended and unintended regulatory transactions in the banking industry. 

We are just starting to use the AI function of the solution. 

The solution has been a tremendous efficiency game for our company. 

We have delivered hundreds of thousands of hours of efficiency over 300 robotic process automations. 

The speed to market is amazing because an automation can go from the initial planning conversation to production in weeks.

Most of our automations have been without a user interface and we need the ability to interact with users directly. That should be coming in the next release for us. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The solution has been very stable across hundreds of automations. 

We scaled from dozens to hundreds of automations and are very satisfied with the solution's scalability. 

Technical support has been great and I rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution's community forums are great and help solve many issues. We can easily reference documentation for similar issues and that provides a lot of assistance. 

Positive

We previously used Pega but switched to the solution for its speed-to-market benefit. 

Our strategy is to use automation for maintainable, high-quality, repeatable processes while delivering excellent speed. 

I was not involved in the initial setup within our environment, but have managed the deployment of several hundred automations and the process is straightforward. 

It is very easy to use our CICD pipeline to deploy and monitor solutions via the orchestrator tool. 

Our ROI is saving hundreds of thousands of hours in time by automating processes that used to be managed by staff. 

Academy courses have been very helpful in preparing our developers for certifications.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are a consulting company and we work for different clients. I have mainly used UiPath for financial processes, like bank and vendor reconciliations, order management, order processing, collections, and invoice processing.

UiPath automations have saved a lot of man-hours for business people. They used to have to do simple tasks, like creating reports in Excel and calculating with formulas. We just uploaded the data into SQL Server and then connected to Power BI through UiPath. It was a small project for us, just a matter of two minutes or so to put things in place, but it saved them a lot of time. With the bots doing this "small" work, it enabled the employees to relax and work on more valuable tasks.

The employees involved have been happy and they have also suggested a few other processes that could be automated, after seeing the results.

There was also an order management project in which we extracted details, such as delivery date and quantity, from a PDF. Before it was automated, that was a tedious task. It took a lot of time for people to do it and their accuracy was lower than the robot's. The automation reduced the team size for that business and they were very happy. They saw a very good ROI. And it used to take the business much longer to do small reconciliations, but the bots are so fast. They are seeing good results. It has reduced a lot of human error. Initially there are some errors, but once you learn from them and train the bot, you get accurate results.

We have only done a few attended automations, but they have sped up processes that require approval. In those situations, they play a major role. More than the monetary savings, the benefit is that people can concentrate more on the important work, and with less stress. But unattended automation is the most important process.

The OCR makes it much easier to extract the details, as does Advance Document Understanding.

I would also rate the ease of building automations as an eight out of 10. It's quite easy in general. In some cases we need to use a coding language like Java or .NET, but we can easily build simple or medium-level tasks. It's even accessible for business people. If we try to explain the code or the architecture of our design, they're able to easily understand.

The UiPath Apps feature has helped to reduce the workload for our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. Even some of the business people have been trained to do that. They have been able to build small, attended bots.

And when it comes to minimizing our on-prem footprint, I would also rate it at eight out of 10. We have seen good results from our on-premises build.

And if we are not sure about something, we can get help from the UiPath community. I have worked throughout the whole cycle, and in all aspects we get good support. People voluntarily contribute to the community. It is a vast community and we get answers quickly. UiPath itself helps people connect and they give badges and goodies to people who are contributing well.

Initially, it was mandatory for us to get certification through the UiPath Academy. The course is free and even the business people have been interested in upskilling themselves. All the Academy courses are very good.

I have been using UiPath for over three years.

The stability is good, but they keep upgrading versions. If you want some of the new additions, sometimes you have to take a beta version.

The scalability is very good, and with the latest version it will be much easier.

Almost all our departments have used UiPath automations. Management is trying to identify what else is possible. It's spreading to all our company's departments.

Whenever we have an issue that we cannot solve, we contact technical support and they try to identify the issue and give us the best solution. If we give them our machine IDs, they try to get into the machines and resolve things. Some of our cases were really complex, and they visited our site. That was the best part.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. It is a little technical but not very complex. The deployment time depends on getting all the prerequisites in place but it usually doesn't take long, about two hours, on average.

Maintenance depends on the complexity of the automations. You have to monitor things regularly.

The ROI is very good. We have been able to deploy many processes and upper management is pretty happy with the investment they have made in the bots.

Compared to other solutions, the pricing is moderate.

We compared UiPath with other tools and then we made the decision to go with it. A few of our clients use other tools, but in our experience, UiPath is best. It is much easier to use, compared to the others.

We referred to industry reviews and we had discussions with peers and colleagues. I did some research into the market and then I chose UiPath.

Automation will enable you to concentrate more on the things that require decision-making and knowledge, rather than just doing repetitive tasks.

As we have upgraded the versions, it has reduced the time involved as well. Initially, it was taking some time. But once we and the whole business got used to it and understood how the bots work, things went way faster. The solution is improving every day. It has already moved to the cloud and it should start working on IoT because they have started with AI. That will make IoT will be much easier.

We implement automation for clients to create savings by cutting the number of FTEs. We've used UiPath for various kinds of automation, including mainframes, browsers, Excel, account payables and receivables, fixed assets, healthcare projects, HR projects, reporting robots, and IT services projects. 

Recently, we did a massive US taxation project that spanned eleven months and covered enterprise and individual taxation extensions. It was a huge project that yielded a lot of savings. 

If I want to leverage a specific UiPath use case, I build small use cases around that particular feature and try to envision a product out of it. I've had several hackathons and general discussion calls because I'm a solution architect. Everybody wants to work on apps, and UiPath is comparable to the blank canvas apps that Microsoft PowerApps provides. 

When we had an automation program that involved 200-plus automations, we created around 100-plus libraries, saving us thousands of hours of development time. UiPath is designed to save time. The object repository was liberating because it enabled us to move from simple to extendable libraries. UiPath's apps increase our business by helping us leverage the UI layer in a way we couldn't in the past.

It gives us the ability to share data between systems in healthcare applications.. However, it's still tricky because so many system controls are in place. That's not a limitation of UiPath per se, but every department has restrictions on passing data to other departments. They have their own due diligence in place, limiting data flow from one system to another. UiPath gives us the fluidity and freedom to do it, but the limitations within each domain often get in the way.

Let's use claims data, for example. The data regulation team won't be too keen on allowing the marketing department to use data from the claims division to generate new business. The data flow from one department to another isn't that fluid. Organizational controls rather than system controls bind it.

We should look at each separately in terms of AI and machine learning. If we want to do data analysis, we have to call an inverse Python script, which is a little difficult. However, we can host our own model, and that's good. The ability to use that opened some doors. 

At the same time, it's helpful to have out-of-the-box features like Document Understanding and an ML passer there. The integration is quite fluid. We can directly call a Document Understanding model and then give it to ML passer and then get the results out. It's smoother for integration. The client has to focus on one particular software or multi-stack that they're comfortable with. UiPath has opened some opportunities in that sense. It made life easier because the capability is sitting inside the platform itself. 

UiPath is a separate solution, but it can talk to other services and doesn't restrict you to the passer, but that's how the ML features within Document Understanding help us. Custom model hosting and the AI center also help. We don't have to host the custom model somewhere else and call that service then pass it and do the post-processing within the system. It isn't a third-party service, so we know it's sitting within the system. If any issues are also there, we know where to diagnose and deposit them.

UiPath Orchestrator is a treasure, and UiPath Studio includes various packages to integrate with solutions like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Excel. They also have mainframes, web automation, and the API package. 

Orchestrator contains a lot of useful apps, data services, and machine templates. From a usability perspective, the most valuable aspects are its custom activities, libraries, and object repositories. In terms of integration, I like the ability to use APIs and call automations from UiPath apps. The most valuable feature from a human-in-the-loop perspective is the action center. 

Our customers appreciate the support that UiPath provides, and they don't want to go with a third-party vendor like Microsoft Visio, Form Recognizer, or Google Cloud. They're hesitant because some integration is required. The lead times for closing queries are longer with third-party vendors. For instance, it takes me about two or three weeks to set up Document Understanding in my project. But it took us three months to establish Form Recognizer with a client.  

In addition to the out-of-the-box functionality UiPath provides, it can host our custom models. That's something that comes in handy when we need a custom model. So far, we haven't taken it to production yet, but we are still baselining the technology. At the moment, we are doing a baseline project where we try to perform four POCs simultaneously. We are baselining Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and AWS with UiPath's AI center and machine learning services and comparing the four.

UiPath's performance could be improved. UiPath's framework was built on top of .NET Core. It was a 32-bit platform initially, but they recently introduced a 64-bit version. Let's say I have a huge machine with 64 gigs of RAM. If I have a server machine and want to use multi-threading to extend my automation and multitask, the design won't allow me. I can't separate things into multiple processes. 

The platform is designed to go step by step. Parallel activities are not truly parallel, but it creates the impression that it's running in parallel. For example, if you're on the left segment within a parallel activity, and there is some wait time, it doesn't stay there. It goes to the middle and then to the right. It schedules tasks based on a time-to-completion window and then takes them from end to end. 

UiPath optimizes the time and doesn't let the CPU idle, but it doesn't give you multi-threading or asynchronous methodologies. These are available in the C# and .NET framework but absent in this platform. It's a step-by-step process where you go through each activity. A casual developer or coder who wants to leverage UiPath should be able to. I'm not saying that the working code is not there, but it's quite basic. It doesn't support functions or asynchronous methodology. 

UiPath is attempting to make it easier for a citizen developer to automate processes. They don't have to know how to code, but a citizen developer can't do it when the use case becomes more complex. When they advertise that one doesn’t need to know coding to program bots, that's only true for easy or intermediate use cases. We still need a programmer for anything beyond medium complexity.

The marketing could be improved because the methodologies went from waterfall COE to an automated operation model. However, people are trying to do automation in an Agile model, but it's not exactly executable that way. When customers see the demos from UiPath, they expect that the results will be significant, and they are. However, we might try to automate something, and we’re unsure whether it can be automated because there's a gray area. There's always a 20 to 30 percent chance automation might fail. And that gray area is something that I want UI to focus on.

They have tried this with StudioX by adding checklists. The industry is not following this practice, though. I'm not sure how they should ensure that it gets followed within the platform, but the delivery model needs to improve. It's still niche. 

Another thing to consider is the work-life balance of the developer and the solution architect. The overall challenge of automation tends to become exponentially complex over time. For example, let's look at one aspect: the account tables. I can go to the account tables from a simple PDF perspective. The PDF is readable by the board, and the solution can extract all the data and do the account tables within SAP or Ariba and mix all of it and then submit a report to the business.

This can be extended to intelligent document processing using form recognizer and custom models, then passers, pre-processing, post-processing, and sending the report to the business. The complexity of it can be extended quite a lot. There should be a framework or methodology in place to hedge the bet so that it's not too complex and doesn't disrupt the life of a developer, solution architect, or business analyst. 

If the automation becomes too complex and challenging, our support team won't be able to sustain it in the long run. Once the development team is gone, the automation will die two or three months down the line. It's a balance to manage the complexity and extent of our automation.  

We've been using UiPath for a little more than four years. 

Resource utilization is one area where UiPath is lacking. UiPath says that the solution will run fine on a machine with four gigs of RAM, and they recommend horizontal scaling, but I suggest a mix of horizontal and vertical scaling. 

I've seen implementations on giant machines with high-density VMs and five users logged into the same VM. Therefore, the resource utilization isn't optimal. The RAM and CPU are not completely utilized. It only executes processes on a segment of the resources. I think that can improve. 

I rate UiPath's support nine out of ten. UiPath's support is excellent. They triage issues based on severity, and there is a clearly defined close time and lead time. Their support engineers will follow up with you 24/7 over phone, SMS, or email. 

The scope of support isn't limited to problems with the UiPath platform. We can reach out to UiPath if we are having problems automating a third-party application. They will help us if they have experience with the app. If they don't have experience, they baseline the issue and go through the log to do whatever they can to help us. We've had a great experience with UiPath's support, and our clients feel the same. Support is one reason UiPath is dominating the market. 

Positive

Most of the RPA solutions are fairly similar. The inspiration for UiPath's object repository was taken from Blue Prism. UiPath's integration services are like the connectors in Microsoft Power Platform. I'm not saying that UiPath is exactly copying everybody, but they're taking the best features from every solution and bringing them in-house. 

Other platforms are dominating in some areas. For example, Power Apps is more mature than UiPath Apps. I'm trying to add value based on my experience, and Power Platform's connectors should also bring value to UiPath. In the end, it shouldn't be redundant.

Every time we deploy the solution, we use an automation operation model. It's a massive document with policies defined on every level, from design to development, UATS, prods, escalations, business, teams, team leads, Agile boards, and reporting. 

All of that is documented from the start. We use that model to layout deliverables needing to be fulfilled. Once deployment progresses from one step to another, we have a way to document our progress. We've gone from a theoretical model to a UI model. It's not purely Agile or KanBan, though Agile framework and KanBan breakdown structures are there. However, it doesn't follow a scrum methodology. 

We're not on a two or three-week release cycle. One sprint is the entire use case from build to development and then from development to UAT to production. It's a custom delivery model, and it's working. Still, I feel it can be improved. 

Our clients have seen significant returns using UiPath, but their marketing could be improved. 

I'm aware of how UiPath's pricing compares to other tools, but it's hard because the offerings are different. It's not apples and oranges per se, but it's comparing an average tool to an excellent one. UiPath provides enormous value, so the licensing is justified.

I rate UiPath nine out of ten. It isn't perfect, but they constantly improve and surprise me. At the moment, I give it a nine, but it might be eight in the future. If you feel like some process will cause a lot of headaches, position it later in the cycle of automation. If you can save resources by automating, you should go for it, but you should be smart when deciding your use cases.

If you're thinking about implementing UiPath, I recommend having a design team that understands automation. You need people with some experience who know how automation is done. It requires some business analysts with at least a month of experience on UiPath from a citizen developer perspective. It would help quite a lot in terms of establishing automations that are relatively complex. Try an 80-20 approach operating principle when planning your automation.

We are using UiPath for automation processes in an insurance company in the finance department.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors.

In UiPath they should improve the input and outputs of processes. I found it very complicated.

In a future release of UiPath, they could improve the OCR engine to make it better. All the RPA tools use some OCR engine, while UiPath's is the best but it is hard to configure and set up for your projects.

I have been using UiPath for approximately six months.

The stability of UiPath is highly stable.

We have approximately four people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from UiPath.

We previously used Blue Prism.

UiPath gives a return on investment, it does what it is supposed to do.

UiPath is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. You have a lot of features. 

The licenses need to be improved because when you have to use UiPath on another system, you have to set up the processes manually, and you are not able to change the process the time if you configure a process running at the system. You have to stop it and then run to the other system. It's not too easy to configure it according to the system. If you have a large deployment, for example, 10 to 20 bots, it's hard to configure.

UiPath has a lot of free training and a lot of free processes ready to go. You have to see the best practices in order to receive the best way of development. It is important to see the best practices guide.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

UiPath is great because it's highly stable, it's fast to develop, and easy to configure. However, there are some improvements to be made.

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'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.

We primarily use the solution for operations processes in our corporate investment bank. For example, screen scraping, querying from databases, or any transactional processes. Those are what we're really looking at the most.

The orchestrator is very valuable for us. The ability to have processes, especially transactional processes, be fed into and triggered from there is excellent. I really like the ease of use that allows not just typical developers to use the Studio version, but also StudioX, which allows citizen developers with little to no coding background to be able to automate their own process. Studio limits a lot of the coding you would generally do in Visual Basic and offers a pretty easy use case for people who want to get into development, who might not have that background.

I’d rate the ease of automating within UiPath at an eight or a nine out of ten. Maybe even a perfect ten. They make it very simple. It's a really good platform and for everything I've used it for so far, I can't think of how I would do this X, Y, or Z differently. I really like it.

In terms of our adoption of it, we just started using it this year. We haven't had a large volume of bots delivered and put into production, however, with what we're using, we have a lot of proof of account sets and use cases that are getting pushed along that are going to save the company time in man-hours.

It's going to save the company a lot of potential risks in terms of manual error. It's also something that can be used to automate processes that are very heavily related to compliance procedures as well, where you don't want as much manual touch for the same reason and you don't want to risk, even if it doesn't take that much time for a person. With automation, you remove the risk of somebody making an error.

We don’t have a crazy amount of metrics. We're really in the process of adopting it into the organization. I'd say within the next year, we're really going to be seeing a very large adoption of it.

We have seen direct savings in costs. Every project we deliver in time save has an associated cost reduction to it. If you're saving, for example, four hours a day on a manual process, you're saving that money. You’re also saving on anything that's related to risk. I don't have any hard numbers on the amount of time that's been saved, however, it’s been positive.

Our teams have used the UiPaths Academy courses. It’s helped make the process of getting employees up to speed with UiPath very straightforward. It's one of the better learning platforms I've seen. Between them and Alteryx, they both have very good learning platforms.

What's really important is that you don't need to wait for instructor-led training, which is infrequent. We have it sometimes, still, even when we’re having it a few times a year it gets expensive. The online training, which covers most of the same material, is a really good way for people who don't want to wait for the instructor-led training and want to immediately get their own feet wet.

The Academy is very comprehensive. It's well structured and training is easy to follow. I've used other tools that have been much harder to follow online. This one I really like.

The biggest values that we’ve seen From UiPath Academy are ease of use and ease of scalability. The solutions you make based on the infrastructure that's built around it can be made to be very scalable. There's so much that depends on other terms, such as the data that we have on our own processes, that it's going to be the yes or no, whether or not a process we build can be scalable automation for other teams. As long as we get the data and the processes lined up in the right way, we can make very scalable processes, which is good as that's more cost savings for fewer bots and that's really like what we want to see.

There are some external dependencies. When we have APIs available, UiPath does have that option that we can hook into APIs. That's really where I'd like to be down the line, more like hooking into APIs, data warehouses, so that you don't have to worry too much about the screen scraping functionality, even though that's a great big part of what it does.

I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into StudioX, if possible. Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as that's where the plugins are available. I don't know enough about the back end of what makes this feasible versus not feasible. However, at the moment, with StudioX, you can only really read and digitize PDFs. If they can bring in the OCR connectors, they'd allow citizen developers to be able to read in a larger breadth of documents that they would generally need Studio to do.

I've been using the solution for about ten months. 

The product is as stable as it can be for the processes we use to expand on that. We do a lot of screen scraping and web scraping a lot. I want to move away from this in the future. However, the stability of those bots is going to ultimately be reliant on how that webpage looks.

We're looking at very specific parts of the website, such as the HTML tags. If those stay stable and we build our identifiers on those sites to be relatively dynamic, the process will be fine. 

We do plan to increase usage.

The idea is to train up more citizen developers. We need to strike a balance between getting the tool out to the citizen developers and making sure that they're following the governance procedures as well. There's also a little bit of risk of it due to the fact that you give people licenses to build and then they can build something on their desktop. They can just, without going through the proper governance, run it. Therefore, you need to make sure things go through the correct governance. That's why we're trying to make sure we have a very good system in place so that when we grow and are training system developers, everything they do goes through the correct controls and governance process.

We're planning to keep building the users over time. We really want to start looking in the next year from more of a top-down perspective, across larger organizational issues where we can make more scalable bots rather than strictly or mostly automating one-offs. We're looking for where there's more commonality across different businesses that do similar processes, and maybe access similar data sources.

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using it across the organization currently. My guess would be at this point there are 75 to 100 users. However, I could be completely wrong. I'm just guessing, as I don't know all the citizen developers, and who in the operation's teams are using it.

I have not used technical support, however, some people who work for me on my team have. I manage a small team of developers. They have worked with UiPath consultants who are on contracts with our COE. They've been extremely helpful with working out some kinks that they've come across in their projects. 

I haven't used blueprints on my Automation Anywhere. We used to use Automation Anywhere and we are moving off it in favor of UiPath, though I never used those other tools myself. I use ALteryx and it has some RPA abilities, although I use it much more for just basic data transformation workflows. I have coded RPA bots and Python before. What I like, with UiPath, is it's still a tool that's based on code - Visual Basic, VB.NET. However, the coding is really for the most part restricted to your data manipulation, working with variables. The control flow that you normally would need to code in Visual Basic is all drag and drop. I really like that versus straight coding. It still gives you that flexibility of a lot of development environments, however, you can have that drag and drop canvas that allows you to really not need to program as much of that control flow. 

We moved towards UiPath as it's cheaper per bot and it enables more of a citizen development model as well. Automation Anywhere bots were only developed by our COE at the time and UiPath COE's going to use them also, however, they're allowing users in operations to use both Studio (if they have the taste for it) and StudioX. It gives a lot more citizen development capabilities for more advanced functions and automation-type stuff, whereas previously, you would normally need somebody on your team who happens to know BBA to do it. 

In the past, if you have someone from the team who knows BBA and makes something, and they leave and their code breaks, you're screwed. However, if you have a StudioX bot, if it breaks, it's going to be much easier to look into the issue and fix it. It's also supported by our C0E's tech infrastructure. Those are the main driving points for shifting off as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I've interacted with UiPath only as a user. I was one of the first users, however, I had nothing to do with deploying the tech infrastructure and developing the governance and controls. I'm just a developer.

We have seen a return on investment. Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI. I don't know the total ROI across the organization, however. I work in one specific part of the company and it's been adopted in a few places. I don't know the total ROI that's been delivered yet.

It's my understanding that it's delivered close to a full headcount so far, in terms of productivity of capacity. There are approximately eight hours a day of time-saving for every workday of the year. That's where we are right now, as we've really just begun adopting it. We're not really deployed into production, and the larger-scale projects aren't in place yet. So far, the projects have been smaller tactical builds that we've been using and it's been delivering up around eight hours of time saving a day. 

I don't know the pricing enough to really comment on it. I know we're getting a better deal in automation than what we had with Automation Anywhere bots, at least per bot deployment. However, I don't know what the licensing costs are.

We do not yet use the Uipath apps feature or their AI functionality in our automation processes. That said, with AI, we're bringing it in and we're definitely planning to use it in the future.

I'd advise new users to make sure you have the controls and governance structures, first and foremost, and you want to make sure those controls are going to be in place and understood before you start deploying licenses to users. I make sure that everything is going to be done and compliant with the audit. As somebody who works in financial services, which is a very heavily regulated industry, that's something that really needs to be kept in mind. You don't want to develop what are essentially just user tools that are not going through the proper controls and treat it like a lightweight software development lifecycle project. You need to make sure those controls are in place, and yet, don't do it too much to the point where it's going to deter the users. At the end of the day, we're not making software, however, we still need to strike that balance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. I know you UiPath wants to improve the stuff that has not been perfected. I'm not going to say it is a ten out of ten, even though I'm struggling to think of what I don't like. Something that would be very helpful for UiPath is to go back to try to build OCR in StudioX. That would be ideal. Also, being able to implement different types of loops in the Studio would be great. Right now, you can only do a four-loop in a repeating loop. If we could implement wall loops, that would be nice.