UiPath Platform Reviews

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.

Our primary use case for UiPath is the automation of some of our processes. The main departments that have been affected are accounts payable and accounts receivable.

We are developing expertise internally. At least for the first year, we worked with an outside consultancy to provide us UiPath development. They were working with the business team here closely, but also helping to train our people.

The main parts that we've got are in the area of invoice automation, but we also have some bots that deal with the automation of some of our engineering applications within Oracle.

We run six bots, primarily dealing with invoice automation from our suppliers. That is working in conjunction with Abbyy. So, part of the process is UiPath and part of it is Abbyy FlexiCapture. We also have some engineering applications in Oracle that we also use it for. Examples of this are updating bills of materials, or printing out invoices.

The key savings and kind of the real business case of the project were to do with invoice automation.

UiPath allows us to implement end-to-end automation. We utilize the Task Capture functionality for some of the initial parts. Then, building the bots is done with Studio, and Orchestrator is used for monitoring. It's complete, end-to-end automation.

The invoice reconciliation has been very useful. We now process 80% of our invoices automatically, of which 80% of those get no human contact. The remaining 20% of the ones that are automatically processed are either exceptions or they are certain expense items or the price doesn't match up. In this case, there's some human intervention, but we are getting a high percentage of things going through automatically.

This automation has enabled us to move some headcounts into different, higher value-adding activities instead. We have freed up approximately 10 full-time employees by using UiPath. We didn't let anybody go. Rather, they've been moved into other more creative roles.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is its usability. It's very easy to understand. I think in general, some parts of the process were difficult to grasp, and there were challenges along the way. But now at this more mature part, it's definitely increased employee satisfaction. People have been able to move into higher value-added, more enjoyable tasks.

We've got a group of citizen developers that work on UiPath. These are people that weren't developers but given a bit of training and its ease of use, they have been able to utilize it.

Both members of my team and I have used the UiPath Academy, and the training has been really good. It has enabled us to utilize the citizen developer approach. It is because of the conciseness and quality of the teaching that we have been able to employ citizen developers. We didn't really envision that as something that was possible, but given the ease and usability of the tool and the quality of the training, that's been possible for us.

UiPath has definitely helped to reduce human error. The main process that has gone through automation is the accounts payable process. Now, some of our suppliers may offer discounts and stuff like that. So, it's reduced the time for us to get things into the system. We've got increased visibility, and we've reduced the number of people working on this process, ultimately meaning cost savings as well.

The one negative that this solution has is its reporting. I found it a bit confusing because it was suggested to us that we use Elastic and Kibana for reporting. To me, this seems a little bit fragmented. I understand that UiPath has the Insights feature, but it wasn't what they recommended for us and I think the reason is that it isn't powerful enough for what we want to do. Ideally, we should not have to utilize other tools for reporting.

When it comes to speeding up our process, it has not made any impact. This is because the licensing and agreement part is quite time-consuming. Where we may have wanted to scale up quicker, we've been limited by signing contracts or getting things moving in that regard. As such, it's not really sped up our procurement process or enabled us to scale as quickly as we'd like when we wanted to.

We scale up some parts of the system quicker and we were seeing large delays in processing some of the documents that we wanted. This problem was that we didn't have the hardware or software ready for us to scale. So, in that regard, we've not found the ability to scale beneficial.

The error handling is in need of improvement. We'd had a problem tracking when errors occur, and troubleshooting how things are captured in production.

I have been working with UiPath for between 18 months and two years.

My impressions of the stability are largely positive. However, I'd like to see more emphasis placed on error handling for production.

With respect to scalability, I'd like to see it be made more fluid. It was a bit slow for us to be able to scale. If it was more elastic or there was a different way of billing it instead of having to sign up we had to sign up for a year-long license, it would have been useful. It wasn't that we minded the length of the contract or the cost. Rather, it meant that there were contracts that had to be signed, etc. 

With the processes that have already been implemented now finished, we're actively looking at where else it can be deployed. There is even interest from the executive team. They would like to see it used further.

UiPath has an active community but we've not really engaged with them very much. When we were in need of help, we contacted support and our account executives, but not the community.

The technical support has been really useful. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

In general, they've been very responsive, and easy to get them on a call if required. I've been really happy with the SLAs they've provided to us.

Positive

This was our first RPA implementation.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As we are using the on-premises solution, we've had to invest in additional hardware.

We used a consultant to assist us with our deployment. We definitely found it beneficial because it gave us experience. We didn't have any experience with RPA, and they helped us to get off the ground and provided some best practices.

There are three members of our team that are responsible for bot deployment and maintenance. One is a UiPath developer, another is a support developer, and the third is a business analyst.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

UiPath has helped to both speed up and reduce the cost of our digital transformation. Compared to traditional automation approaches, it's been a lot quicker and less costly to implement. It very minorly affected us in terms of needing IT support. For example, we've had to work with our Oracle applications team, as well as our infrastructure team, in getting some of those parts set up. Overall, I've not found it to be burdensome.

UiPath has definitely saved on costs for the organization. I think that initially, there was some skepticism. Obviously, there were significant implementation costs but now, we're definitely seeing the fruits of that. 

Our total savings at the moment is between 50,000 and 100,000 per year.

The licensing fees are billed annually.

The company evaluated Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate before choosing UiPath. I can't speak to the pros and cons of the different options because the decision was made just before I became involved.

Overall, in terms of ease of building automation, our experience has been positive.

UiPath has features available for attended automation, although all of our automations are unattended. Similarly, we don't yet use the solution's AI functionality but it's something that we're really interested in starting to use.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to ensure that the processes they want to automate are standard and standardized. That was a key barrier that we realized, and it delayed things for us by quite a bit.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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 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. 

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.

We are on-prem within the insurance industry. Our use cases are in auto reports and micro use cases within that.

The biggest benefit we see from UiPath is the overall platform. It's not only the functionalities. As we started tying that all together in the platform view, with the orchestration forms and the workflow function, it'll be key, because it's been around in the industry for 20 years, but hasn't been tied to everything. 

It saves us costs but that's only one part of it. We are looking at it in terms of employee centricity, customer centricity, reducing the risk, and improving the accuracy. There's a multitude of factors that we are looking at.

We have seen a reduction in human error using UiPath. We are an audit firm at heart. We do a lot of audit and tax work, which is all related. Within use cases in those spaces, we see a change in terms of accuracy. It eliminates manual errors. Instead of just looking at 20% or 30% of the big picture, you can look at 100 of it because it's automated. 

The most valuable feature is the fluidity of the products. When I want to use RPA, I can use RPA. When I want to do process mining, I can do process mining. Those are the two top that I typically use it for. 

Building automations is easy. It's drag and drop. If you are a developer and want the full functionality, you can actually dive into it at a little bit more of an API level.

We use the Academy. I am the training and certification lead for our UI group of 200 practitioners. It's probably the only group in your partner community that's 100% certified. We are tied in into your training and certification piece and we are using and reusing the licenses to make sure that we are pushing out the updates from the platform through the training store.

Our training and certification programs are still gaining maturity. We recently signed the USN Certification with UiPath, which gives us access to brochures and AP credits. It makes it a little bit more formal because the process was there, but it was very informal. We were exchanging emails, but now it's tied together with the workflow. It's getting there. 

The breadth of the courses is the most valuable aspect of the Academy. This is my third year doing this. There has been an increase in courses being offered. 

The path forward is probably to tie this all together in a platform and look at the workflow automation. At this point, we are doing snapshot automation, point solution, and staff automations. The term RPA itself is a misnomer, it never was a robotic process, it was robotic task automation. We are automating tasks and the way to get away from that is to look at process level automation end-to-end. That won't be done with RPA tools, it has to be with the workflow tools. How do we tie in and how do we tie into, either the orchestration function or decisioning functions? They will tie into a broader transformation initiative. It'll be dual-edged.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

The stability has improved in the last two years. As they push more functionality on that and go more cloud-centric, I think it will be much more stable. We just got through an issue yesterday, but it was resolved quickly. We knew what to do. We could figure out the root cause. 

Scalability has come a long way. UiPath is probably the leader in this, but as we look at broader solutions and a process-centric automation suite, we also have a long way to go forward. We are at a midpoint in the journey. It's on UiPath and the department of community to try to hook that together.

UiPath is our biggest alliance in the automation side for my company and the plan is to increase the usage. There's a commitment from the very top on both sides. We have stepped away from past automation and stepped into the broader use of it and the transformation journey. There have been micro transformation journeys in all sectors, whether it's financial services or outside of that and commercial, national accounts, and the public sector. That's how we're looking to scale and become even bigger in the next few years.

We use Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and Pega Robotic Process. Some of it is just down to the differences between what the tools offer. I've used all four of them.

Each solution has its pros, but in terms of speed to market, and improving the quality, the partner network, the product suite, and the product roadmap itself, UiPath is a few years ahead of the rest. That's reflected in the analyst reports.

UiPath is something that people can dive into. My advice would be to take a few courses, everything is available online. It really comes down to people's aptitude and whether they want to get into this. I don't think it's very difficult.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Purely because there is always room for improvement, but it's on the right track. Product roadmaps and positioning are in the right space.