UiPath Platform Reviews

Our use case is mainly for PDF automation for invoicing. Specific data from the invoice needs to be gathered, entered into, and compared within the SAP application we use. We face challenges as the formats of the invoices change and can range in length from a single page to up to 100 pages. 

We've integrated a tool called ABBYY FlexiCapture and ABBYY will help format and be used as the source of input for the UiPath bot. This bot in turn will process each and every necessary customer detail to the SAP application. If everything is correct, and the data meets the parameters, an email will be sent to the customer, attaching the necessary invoice. If there's an exception, we'll be able to look at that too.

There are some other sets of use cases as well, which include SAP or Hyperautomation. However, we also do generic workflows where we have data from multiple domains and will need to build our XML output. The XML output will contain a lot of data (such as the date, time or name of the customer) which will keep changing and is not fixed. I built a bot using UiPath that I host on Orchestrator which can monitor this data.

Another use case is placing job descriptions into an analyzing tool to search for keywords. Depending on the sort of description which we have pasted in, it will throw out a certain set of outputs, such as if the word is feminine, masculine, how many details it contains, how long it's going to take to complete the description, et cetera. This part has been done using an API key, and therefore it's not a normal cut and paste job. 

There are a lot of processes that are, even today, done manually. I can take a simple process in, for example, ServiceNow, where issues are made into tickets and put into queues. Previously, a person would have to pick up the ticket and then assign it to a variety of people, but first, before even doing that, they would have to check in on those team members and figure out who had the most or least workload to be able to address the ticket.

This process is automated now. There's no human intervention in assigning tickets. The bot will monitor the queue and when a person raises a ticket and can monitor which person is working on which ticket number, and who should get the next ticket. The turnaround tie has been reduced by a lot and is also saving us costs when you look at it in relation to the entire project as a whole. 

The most valuable feature is the API.

It's really compatible with other solutions and it got integrated when I was working with ABBYY. There is no dependency. I just need to trigger my bot and that's it. I didn't need to go and separately trigger to work on every part of it. It is really good when we talk about the integration of UiPath with any other tools.

I am currently working through the documentation to help with understanding the solution and it is really great.

From a studio perspective, I really like the feature of debugging.

It’s making automation really feasible and ensures that it takes less time.

The ease of building automation using UiPathis great, even if a person doesn’t have a development background. Just by going to the UiPath Academy and doing the basic certification, any user can start to understand the process and begin automating.

In my first organization, there were two or three developers including me, and our challenge was that we had a lot of projects. We had certain process analysts that would run on different sets of processes. We were able to train them and make sure that they understood the processes and could start developing. We saw a lot of progress in them, and, due to the fact that the tool was really easy to use and didn’t require a lot of coding, they were able to do a lot just by drag and drop functionality.

UiPath enabled us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. It really supports the end-to-end deployment of any project or any task and makes it very easy.

The Automation Cloud has helped decrease time to value. If there was no Automation Cloud, we would need to run the bot from the studio all of the time, or we would need to create an upgraded file and trigger it via a third-party application, like VBScript or something like that. It has reduced a lot of time. It also makes deployment really easy. For example, if I am working in a development environment, I publish to the cloud, it will start reflecting in the Orchestrator and I just need to push the package. From the Orchestrator itself, I can trigger that particular package to any other machine. That makes life a lot easier - just publishing the package and testing in any other system and understanding how the UAT is going.

The deployment in production is really easy. I have tested Orchestrator and production Orchestrator and I just need to copy the package from the studio and download the package and push it back to the Studio or Orchestrator production, and the work is done. I don't need to manually copy and paste the packages again and again.

Automation Cloud, in a way, helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. There’s no need, for example, to host on different servers or a defined cloud. It has definitely reduced a lot of costs due to the fact that, instead of going for a different set of applications for a different set of projects, now we are relying on UiPath for most of our work. Whether it’s invoicing, finance, or an HR process, we can rely on UiPath to automate a particular process instead of going back and forth across multiple tools.

Automation Cloud allows us to also effectively scale up automation. It is very easy to monitor any process which is running correctly, and, with automation, you don't need to have any separate application downloaded into your system. It is just an URL. You just need to have a URL and you just need to enter the URL and you can monitor from any system and easily understand how the process is performing.

On top of that, with Automation Cloud, suppose you have 10 licenses. You can see how many licenses have been consumed by how many processes and what the outcome of the processes was.

Moreover, you can integrate your cloud with other tools and create a dashboard. With a UiPath dashboard you can see, for example, the percentage of success rates, the failure rate, and how many processes have been successfully done or what quality. From the management side, we don't need to go to the logs and check what has run. We can directly look into a dashboard and we'll come to understand how many processes are running successfully and what are the outcomes, and how many licenses have been consumed.

It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. I’d rate the level of importance at an 8.5 out of ten. It is helping a lot.

When we talk about automating a web application or we need to work on a different set of applications, we used to get integrations and we needed to have, for example, a PowerShell scripting application license. Now everything is being replaced by UiPath, or most of it is. It does not require you to have a license for a different set of tools all the time. If you have UiPath it is easy to integrate with any third-party tool and it is easy to automate a web application or desktop application or even code. If I know the coding, I can just do coding right in UiPath itself. Instead of going for multiple tools, for multiple projects, it's just a single tool for multiple projects.

We can use the infrastructure and we can also host it. Suppose there are two users who are accessing the same VM over a different time zone. They can rely on the same VM and they can use the same UiPath tool and do not necessarily need to have a separate licensing for it.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. Mostly now, everything is on the cloud instead of on-premise and it is making life easy. For example, suppose a person who is working on-premise, if he logs out, then the other person can log in and cross-verify the work he has done. With the cloud, now the transfer of files is easy. If a person falls sick or something happens that he's unable to make it then the other person who has a login or credentials with him can just directly go in and start working. If a code is being published in the cloud, we can just copy or download the code and cross-verify how it's working.

We do use attended automation. We use it relatively less compared to unattended. However, in certain cases, where the project is too critical and we do need to run all the time, it’s nice to have that option. Attended automation helps scale RPA and benefits our organization by automating specific processes that require human, robot collaboration. There are certain processes where you can't automate end-to-end. We have to rely on a human being occasionally, and it’s nice to have automation we can collaborate on. At the same time, we do largely take advantage of automatons where no human intervention is required.

We use UiPath AI functionality, although not much is being used in any of the projects which I have worked on. I’m just looking forward to it, as I am currently working on documentation understanding before diving in.

UiPath speeds up the cost of digital transformation and has also reduced costs. I started with Blue Prism and then I got my hands on UiPath. Now, I can see the transformation which is happening and I can see the comfort which we have with the tool. I can also see how it’s a lot easier to deploy the tools.

The solution has helped our company reduce human error by a significant amount. For example, when I automated the complete process and I put everything in GPL step by step and automated using UiPath, the best thing that happened is that there was one invoice that got stuck and I could see that the bot didn't process it. The bot has sworn an exception stating that there is a certain set of values that a bot should not process, if it is not matching, the quality is not matching, then the bot cannot process it. When the customer logged into the particular invoice and they saw that, okay, the value which is being mentioned in the invoice is below the threshold critical value. For the first time in over a period of 13 or 14 years, they came across a particular invoice that got stuck with this particular amount, which was below the threshold level. The bot captured something that needed to be dealt with, and the client was so happy it was caught as it saved the company a lot of money - around $1 billion. After catching that threshold, they have monitored all the invoices for the past 13 or 14 years and they came across a lot of differences. It has played a major role in saving a lot of money.

UiPath has freed up employee time. The faster you deploy, the better. We look at months instead of weeks when calculating time. If a ticket, end-to-end, takes 24 hours to resolve, for example, with automation, we’ve managed to reduce that time down to seven to ten hours. It will keep following up and sending emails until there is a resolution, and those reminders are quite helpful in moving the process forward. It’s definitely allowed employees to focus on more important tasks and there’s less time spent on follow-up.

In terms of employee satisfaction, when we are developing something and we have a proper outcome, it makes life easier.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. Not for all the processes, however. If the process is really simple, just like 10 pages or 20 sequences or 10 activities, then the cost is high for a particular license, for a particular process. That said, when you talk about the complex process, where the process takes 48 hours or 90 hours to process a particular activity manually versus what the bot can do in just five to ten minutes, it impacts the cost. Now, a single bot is taking care of that and there is only one person instead of many who monitor the process. Likely, it has reduced costs a lot, roughly 50 or up to 70%. Overall UiPath has saved costs for our organization. Processes that needed five people can now run with just one or two running things with a bot.

When the Orchestrator got upgraded and UiPath didn't get upgraded, we started getting errors regarding the managed packages, the packages were not getting upgraded. There are little things like that where we’ve had trouble. We have just made sure that if the company is upgrading and they have a license to upgrade Orchestrator and the Studio, they do it simultaneously instead of waiting for a week or two weeks or one month. If they have upgraded the Orchestrator, and they have not upgraded the studio, it will impact the developers.

In terms of the upgrading of the on-premise orchestrator, there are organizations that are upgrading their developing environment but they're not upgrading the production environment. Therefore, now, when the bot or the particular package will move from a higher-end environment to lower activities, it is not working well and it needs to get downgraded.

While delivering or providing the license, we need to explain to clients that this particular product, if you are working on a development and production environment, they have to keep them on the same packages or they have to keep your production higher, so that if they move the packages, it won't impact anything.

I've been using the solution for the past five years.

The solution is very stable. I have not faced any difficulties at all. 

Until now, it hasn't scaled a lot. From 2018 to 2021, the tool, the overview, the look and feel of the tool have been scaled a lot. It has scalability, definitely. We haven't scaled it a lot. 

In our organization, we have between 100 and 150 users on the solution.

The vendors are really helpful. Whenever we have a concern regarding any of the issues, including if there is an issue with upgrading, it gets resolved well. For example, when we upgraded the studio and didn't upgrade UiPath’s Orchestrator, there were some issues. The board was not connecting to Orchestrator. We had to raise a ticket to our support team and it got resolved. 

I'd rate them at an eight out of ten, as we've gotten a good response overall.

In the last five years, I have worked in two to three organizations. All of them have started exploring automation tools. I've used Blue Prism as the very first tool, then I got the opportunity to work with UiPath and explore the different sets of opportunities with it. 

At this company, WinAutomation was previously used. That was four years ago.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not too complex. 

We have a server we implemented the solution on. We installed the certificate to have the application installed with the Orchestrator URL.

The deployment took around two days of full-time work for us. There were multiple servers involved.

The implementation strategy was very simple. We got onto a call with the UiPath team and they had a lot of data with them, including all of the details regarding the applications. We wanted our certificates to get installed and we had our internal team involved as well. Between the two teams, it was working properly and it got installed in less than the expected amount of time. 

We have a team of 25 to 30 people that can handle deployment and maintenance. Maintenance would be, for example, if you have certain packages missing, someone would have to deal with that. Or if something wasn't working as required. Another example of maintenance might be if we are accessing multiple applications, or if we are accessing SAP, and there were tools that the bot accessed, the maintenance team would need to go and check the particular environment on which the bot is going to get deployed.

From the very first organization, I have implemented UiPath end-to-end.

We don't use a third party for deployment now. We have our own team. There's an internal team within our current organization which deploys everything.

I don't have any details in regards to the pricing.

We did POCs in the past with WinAutomation and we also looked at Automation Anywhere. At the time, we were looking to deploy more on the cloud, which is why we went with UiPath instead.

I am just an end-user of the product.

I'm not sure if the version we are on now is the latest. It likely isn't. We are in StudioPro currently.

I'm not sure about the infrastructure side of things, in relation to the cloud, as I'm more on the side of developing and deploying the project. We have an internal team that looks into cloud deployment and other stuff. While we were working on and purchasing the license from UiPath, the very first instance, then definitely the team got integrated with the UiPath team, however, after that, the internal team is capable of handling the end-to-end part of it.

We don't use UiPath as a SaaS solution and we do not yet use UiPath apps.

In the process of UiPath, speeding up and reducing the cost of digital transformation, I have never required expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support, however, we have a different set of teams that work on the licensing part and the management side of it. They likely worked with UiPath to get their issues resolved. I do not have much knowledge regarding this.

A person who's starting on UiPath can also up-skill himself with the tool as well as it is easy to learn. 

The best part about UiPath is that they provide a trial version. Any organization or any individual or any business looking for automation solutions can give it a try. There are a lot of things which you can explore and you have a lot of integration. If we have a module that is already running, which has been designed in almost any language, you can just integrate that in UiPath and keep that running.

It is reducing a lot of dependencies on other tools and it's making sure that our lives get easier from the deployment and monitoring perspective. From the licensing and the cost perspective, there are a lot of items that are really helpful. In terms of integration with third-party tools, they have a lot of packages which are available on the internet. You can download the packages and integrate it with any other tool. It really makes UiPath a better solution for organizations compared to any other tool.

The biggest lesson I have learned from  UiPath is that if a single step of the solution is not working, you have to keep trying. There are other ways of doing things. You have options. There are a lot of ways by which a user can understand and explore.

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

UiPath was used in-house in my first company for automating processes. We had deployed it on-premise. In my current company, we are giving UiPath automation as a service. We help companies with automation. We set up UiPath from scratch and help them achieve their automation goals or strategies. As a service, we have done on-premises and cloud deployments.

From a service perspective, we deal with a lot of clients who are predominantly in the oil and gas sector and energy sector. They have SAP systems for their ERP, and their use cases mostly revolve around automating SAP processes such as invoice automation, joint venture reconciliation, balance sheet reconciliation, and intercompany netting. So, the use cases usually revolve around the finance tasks, but sometimes, we have also seen use cases related to the supply chain and planned maintenance, such as purchase order closures, work order closures, and comparison of the work order plan with the deviations. 

In terms of the version, we always have the latest version. I've also used 19.4 and 20.4 on-premise versions.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring all of our automation. They have created a platform to handle everything from process analysis to deployment. If you just had UiPath Studio, you would have to procure something for your attended or unattended robots. You would also need a tool to capture the process or task itself. Similarly, you would need a tool to collect the ideas from subject matter experts. If you don't have a platform that covers end-to-end automation, it becomes very challenging, and you'll have to find ways to procure those applications. With UiPath, you don't have that headache.

It has reduced human error and saved time. These two are probably the best things that we achieved from automation. We recently did a deployment for a customer who had purchase orders and other stagnant stuff from 2011 onwards. These purchase orders were not closed even though they have been receipted and invoiced completely. We did robotic process automation to takes care of these purchase orders. It is a recurring job that takes care of all POs that were created in the last one year and closes them automatically. It used to take 5 to 10 minutes for the customer to close one purchase order and recheck everything. There were probably 22,000 to 23,000 purchase orders every year. The business benefit that the customer got was close to 1,200 hours in a year, which is a massive saving.

It has freed up employees' time. It has definitely reduced the time for our clients. The time saved varies based on the project. It has saved the time of associates in completing their tasks, and they can focus on a lot of other things. In one of the use cases, an employee was spending 10 hours every month to complete a process, which is 120 hours in a year, whereas the robot takes just one hour every month. So, the robot takes 12 hours as compared to 120 hours taken by a human, which is one-tenth of their effort. It has reduced around 90% of their time for this project. For the purchase order closure project, the robot has saved close to 1,200 hours in a year. That's a huge saving.

There are other use cases where savings were not huge in terms of the efforts or hours, but the robot was very much compliant with a company's processes. It eliminated any sort of human errors that could have occurred. For instance, balance sheet reconciliations always had some sort of issues and were prone to errors. The robot completely eliminated all those issues.

We use attended and unattended automation. We have a couple of robots on the finance team's laptops, and they trigger the process as and when required, such as for month-end clearing, which is a process where the end-users have to do some kind of clearing task in the SAP system. They can trigger it as and when required. This attended automation has helped in scaling RPA benefits. The overall benefit was in terms of the efficiency with which the robot gave them the mismatches. At the end of the day, it is giving the end-user satisfaction. They don't have to repeatedly do the same steps for every company code and intercompany code. It has definitely saved a lot of time for the end-user and provided satisfaction with the process.

With cloud offerings, UiPath handles infrastructure maintenance and updates, which saves our time as well as our clients' time. The clients do not want to worry about the infrastructure and other such aspects. We are generally the ones who provide services to the clients and deal with these things. When they use the automation cloud, it is definitely time-saving because we don't have to install patches and other things. If there is a new service that they introduced, such as data service, we don't have to install anything new on the automation cloud. It is all taken care of pre-default. We just have to enable it or disable it as per our need. That definitely saves some time for us.

Their automation cloud offering helps in decreasing time-to-value. It definitely reduces time as compared to on-premise because all that you need to do is procure an automation cloud and the licenses for the UiPath team and enable them. With the on-premises setup, there is an overhead of installation of orchestrator on the virtual machine. In this aspect, an automation cloud is better than installing everything on-premise for the client and setting up the orchestrator and things like that. The automation cloud doesn't have any other thing that reduces your time. Other solutions, such as Blue Prism, provide the same benefit when you use a cloud-based orchestrator.

It has a lot of features, but the ones that I'm really interested in and focused on are the Automation Hub and the Task Capture tool that they have created. Automation Hub helps you in gathering a lot of ideas, and Task Capture helps subject matter experts in capturing the step-by-step processes. It helps them build their SOPs or a document system wherever it is not already available. 

The Uipath Document Understanding framework is also very nice in comparison to Abbyy and similar sorts of OCR technologies. 

In terms of the ease of use, I would rate UiPath very high. If you have some kind of coding background in C#, .Net, or VBA, the development in UiPath is very easy. You can customize it as per a customer's requirements. It has an easy-to-use Studio where you can build complex automation. On the Citizen Developer side, people without much technical knowledge and coding expertise can also automate their basic processes. We have done some training internally within our management, and they found StudioX very easy to use for their developments. 

Licensing is one area where UiPath could do better and can be more competitive. It is a little expensive. Their bundling of products is a bit confusing. For instance, if we want the UiPath Apps license, it is bundled with Action Center, so you also have to procure the Action Center license. These bundles are not tailored as per our company's requirements. If we reach out to the UiPath partners who deal with the accounts, they usually take your request into consideration and see what best they can do, but it is still not easily customizable.

I've been using UiPath since the beginning of 2018. It has been three and a half years.

It has been reliable. We haven't had any reliability issues as such. Only the automation that we create could have inherent issues based on how a developer develops it. All of the out-of-the-box functionalities available in UiPath work as expected.

We have seen customers starting with PoCs and scaling up to have running production bots. There are around seven to eight bots per client, which is good. From a scalability perspective, UiPath enables you to scale things quickly. We could quickly procure all things and deploy an attended or an unattended robot from a PoC to production. So, its scalability is very high.

We have used their support. Most of the time, we reach out to the usual support logins that they have given. We also have a partner whom we keep in the loop if there is something very urgent. The support team has its own defined SLAs. If it is a priority one case, they get back within 24 hours or something like that.

We've always got a resolution for our issues, and they've always been helpful in that regard. They have got some technical guys who joined us over the phone and helped us solve some of the issues.

I have used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere at the PoC level and the initial setup level. I've not developed any enterprise-level robot using these. So, I'm not qualified to tell the differences between these solutions.

When new clients ask us to implement UiPath for them, the implementation is almost always straightforward. We know whether they have a cloud of their own, and what they need to procure. We have that very neatly outlined, and UiPath has also given us step-by-step instructions that are readily available on their documentation portal. So, if you want to install anything, everything is very well documented. It is very easy to follow the steps and install it.

If you have everything in hand, it would take a couple of days. If your virtual machine is ready, we just have to install the orchestrator. We also have to install Studio on the machines of the developers. It definitely takes a couple of days.

Its price is on the higher side as compared to the other players in the market. They are tying up with a lot of other products such as Druid, but they are independently also very expensive. That's what the customers say when we start giving them options of UiPath.

Apart from the FKUs or the licensing that UiPath provides, if you are implementing an on-premise kind of solution for a client, you have to look at all the things that would be required, such as the virtual machines and the user IDs that the robot might use. We mostly deal with SAP, and if you are using SAP, the robot would have to log into the SAP system to get some data. So, the username that you would create within SAP is also licensed. There are a lot of other costs and related things that you need to focus on. There are a lot of things around UiPath that you need to deal with.

I would also advise using best practices while implementing the solution. Every developer has his or her own way of developing automation. A lot of times, we have seen a gap in the understanding and the kind of deliveries that teams do. So, it is very helpful to understand the skills and capabilities of a developer and see how that could impact the final deliveries from an automation perspective.

We provide solutions depending on our customers' use cases. For on-premise or cloud deployment, we follow the same sort of process and project plan. There is no huge difference in whether we use cloud automation or on-premise automation. At the end of the day, a robot has to do what is expected as per the objectives.

We don't use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program. So far, we haven't seen any use case where we had to use any sort of intelligence or incorporate any sort of machine learning. We haven't had a necessity for that.

We are going to use UiPath apps in a new project that is coming up. We haven't used it so far. We did a PoC to see if we can connect the cloud apps to an on-premise orchestrator and if it is feasible, but that's about it. It is going to be implemented soon.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

I have worked on a number of use cases, and one of them that I can discuss was used in a contact center environment. This is a project that we had done for an automotive insurance company, and it had to do with incident management. Our contact center received the first notice of loss (FNOL) from incidents, such as an accident.

When an accident occurs, they raise a ticket to our customer service representative. This can either be done using a chatbot, which is integrated with our ServiceNow platform, or they can call the customer service representative. In the latter case, the customer service representative will pick up the call and get the details. This includes adding their insurance ID and a couple of other fields, and that is integrated into our system.

Our system was acting as an intermediate between their existing platform and ServiceNow. Part of the system included a database, where they were checking to see if the insurance amount the claimant is asking for is above the limit. There were other similar business rules, as well, which the bot was responsible for checking. Based on the result of these checks, the claim was automatically approved, and then a corresponding ticket was raised in ServiceNow.

There was also a manual process, where there was a person who would go to the site where the actual accident took place. They do their analysis, and then they create a review report, and that report would automatically be handled by an attended robot. The robot would take the detail from the agent and based on the review, fetch certain details like the approved amount.

The bot is responsible for sending other information to ServiceNow, including, for example, details about damage to the vehicle. If there are scratches on the front or scratches on the back, then these details are all posted to ServiceNow. At that point, ServiceNow has a workflow that is initiated.

The workflow uses the information taken by the representative and moves from the review stage to agent verification, and then to a mainframe. The system running on the mainframe is responsible for generating checks, according to the amount that is approved, and then mailing them to the claimant at the address they have on file.

In our FNOL process for the insurance company, we use unattended robots quite extensively for both chatbots and IVR. We use the AI capabilities for language understanding and based on the user sentiment, it will trigger the unattended bot. If instead, they want to speak with a representative then it will trigger the IVR process.

In terms of the robots prioritizing and correctly routing a transfer to agents when necessary, it is a work in progress. From a priority perspective, if you talk about chatbots, let's suppose a customer sale is highly urgent, the AI model can use language understanding to determine an urgent message and in turn, create an urgent ticket. It is something that we can do but it is not 100% accurate. I would say it's 80% of the way there, because of the different types of sentiment that people express during interactions. As an example, when a customer says "I need to have this resolved as soon as possible", there are a number of different things that can happen. According to our business rules, when somebody says ASAP, it should be treated as a high priority, but 20% of the time, this does not work. Overall, at this point, the AI models and machine learning models are not very accurate.

The robot-enabled self-service channels have definitely increased the resolution of issues through self-service. Prior to using the robots, 90% of the calls would need to be addressed by a representative. Since implementing the bot strategy, only 10% have to be handled by a human. We have used UiPath Apps for this and also created some web pages, but those are just to help the bots. Definitely, self-service is one use case that has really benefited because of UiPath.

The Studio is where the development takes place and the interface is very user-friendly. You have the ability to drag and drop components, and this is part of why I think that Studio is the best feature in UiPath. The next best feature is Orchestrator.

The Orchestrator is quite good because it is a one-stop shop where you can run robots after creating them using Studio. You can create queues, monitor the bots, and if there are any issues then you can debug them at the Orchestrator level.

UiPath has a low-code feature called Studio X, which is specifically for business users. They can just drag and drop activities like reading emails, retrieving email attachments, reading data from Excel, and posting data from different sources into different platforms. It is a very good platform for business users who don't know much about coding. It is customizable in the sense that business users can have the system follow a set of simple steps, although it won't do complex things.

UiPath Insights is a feature that has everything from a tracking perspective, which tells you how the bots are working at the production level. It provides statistics about the live environment including how many processes are being run, how much time the bots are being used, and the productivity in general. There is more analytics available from data services, tests, and the AI center. All of these features really help when it comes to analyzing the data, not only from a development perspective, like tracking data on how much a robot is at a log level, but also from the end-user level in a production environment. Reporting on productivity in a single day will show how much time the bot was run, for example, 80% in terms of time or 90% utilization, and other such details.

The UiPath App feature is something that we can use to create simple apps, and these can act as integrators. Suppose there is a process that uses 10 different screens, we can create an app that will be integrated with all of them. As a developer, all 10 screens are used in my workflow, and instead of going to each of them, I can create an app that uses all of the fields that are relevant to me on each of the screens. 

The speed at which we were able to create automations for our contact center was very good. One of the reasons that we choose UiPath over other tools, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, is the ease of development. When it came to setting up the contact center, it was only the connection between different platforms that took time. The bot creation and the workflow creation were quite easy. It took approximately one and a half months to create the whole automation for the contact center, which is quite good.

The AI and machine learning capabilities need to be improved.

The task mining and process capture methods are capabilities that we use, but they sometimes miss part of the task. For example, let's say that for one of my tasks, I need to open my email 400 times a day. This is something that we can automate but for some reason, probably because it is related to email, it is not accurately evaluated. In this regard, the process mining could be improved and lead to better results.

The built-in OCR is only 60% to 70% correct if you're analyzing a PDF that has images in it, so this is an area that can be improved. Different companies use their own OCRs; Google has one, and Microsoft has one. The UiPath one requires that we use a validation step between workflows in order to improve the accuracy.

I had been using UiPath for three years, up until a few months ago when I joined a new organization.

From what I have seen, the biggest factor for availability is the strength of the internet connection. Whether the deployment is on-premises or cloud-based, they both are the same in terms of stability. I have not seen any deviation between deployment types.

Scalability is not an issue. In my previous company, we started with 10 machines and then after one year, we had 85 machines. There were no issues and the implementation was not a headache.

The technical support is very responsive.

Prior to working with UiPath, I was an automation expert with Selenium for web testing. I was not able to fully automate a website because if there was an image that was used as a security check, where the person had to click an image to get through to the next page, I wasn't able to do it.

However, when I switched to UiPath, it was pathbreaking for me. I was able to accomplish what I couldn't do with Selenium and since that time, we have deployed more than 100 production bots.

The installation is pretty straightforward. We usually get issues when we upgrade to a new version but I think that is a different discussion. Strictly from an installation perspective, we have not had many issues. We had no major issues and when we contacted technical support, the team was quite responsive.

The length of time required for deployment is about half an hour per machine. However, if you have 100 machines then you can do them concurrently.

For some of our projects, we used an on-premises deployment, whereas for others, we used Orchestrator and they were cloud-based. Cloud-based deployment gives us the ability to run bots from anywhere, including outside of our network.

Our clients with the contact center did not see a very large ROI in the first year, although that was because of the consultancy costs that we charged to implement the system. From the second year, onwards, they definitely saw a very good ROI.

We had different metrics to calculate RPA implementation ROI. The first is productivity, which increased by more than 60%. If I recall correctly, their investment was between $110,000 and $200,000 after the first year. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was a huge improvement.

It was not just productivity, but also other things like a reduced error rate. The quality of the processes improved quite drastically.

We analyzed and compared the costs of RPA from different vendors and we found that UiPath was the most cost-effective in the long term. An unattended robot costs approximately $8,500 annually. 

We evaluated other RPA tools including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. One of the reasons that we chose UiPath is its ease of development.

In terms of ROI, we found that UiPath was the best when you consider the long term.

The length of time it takes to develop and deploy bots for a process depends on its size and complexity. We categorize processes as simple, medium, and complex. Based on how they are classified, we estimate the deployment lifecycle from one month to two months.

My advice for anybody who is planning to implement RPA is to begin by doing research on the vendors. You need to speak with each vendor and start planning, but don't think about clients at that moment. Rather, think about yourself. Consider that you want to implement internal automation, and consider the ROI you would garner during the first year or during the second year.

Once you choose a vendor, as we did when we chose UiPath, you need to make sure that at the very start of your project, it begins with low-hanging fruit. Don't start with all of the complex processes; start with some simple processes. That's why we have divided ours into three sets of processes. Then, don't think that you will achieve a hundred percent automation because that will never be the case. My thinking is that if you achieve more than 70% automation, that is a very good target. Keep your expectations clear.

Another thing to make sure of is that you secure your bot at the workflow level. UiPath provides very good security features that you can use, such as assigning permissions for who can access your workflow. Also in terms of security, be sure that you have all of the required certifications.

Once you have implemented some basic processes and you are getting good results, hyper-automation is something I suggest. Start expanding it to different technologies, such as AI. Also, engage all of your employees as much as possible.

Start with the community version of the software. Although this review is based on the licensed version, the community edition is free and you can create your bots for free. I always say that even one hour saved because of automation will yield a good return annually, and your results will be very quick.

If you keep all of these things in mind then RPA will be fruitful for you.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have automated tasks within our organization and are automating our marketing applications. Internally, we have automated in-person and webinar event creation for Microsoft. Whenever there is a request for creating an event that is covered on, for example, either on Jira or the Dynamics 365 application, the task makes an API and pulls data from both sources. It then creates an event on Marketo. It runs totally unattended. We have actually saved the build time that was previously around 45 minutes and we have reduced it to just four minutes.

Previously, we had a build time of around 45 minutes just to process one request. This was kind of a disaster because even in 45 minutes of build time, and this is the average build time, people were making mistakes. When these errors happened, the company had to actually pay money to the client. For example, if a company has an event at 3:00 PM on September 1st, and due to time zone issues, someone manually wrote \ 4:00 PM then people would arrive at 4:00 PM, whereas the event had started at 3:00 PM. Mistakes like that could become a very, very big issue.

Using UiPath, we were able to reduce these kinds of errors. We were also able to reduce the time by more than 90%, just by deploying the bot that could do API calls in order to complete a specific point of data gathering.

For the portion that we automated, the errors that were happening were reduced to 0% and the efficiency was up to 90%.

We've found the usability of Studio very easy. It's simple to understand everything. It's very simple to just start developing within UiPath. 

The Orchestrator is fantastic in terms of usability as all you have to do is just need to deploy your bot there. It gives you several options of how to schedule it, how to monitor it, and it also gives you the dashboard that allows you to see the performance of your bot.

I really like the fact that we have a cloud model, where we can actually go ahead and use their cloud to run our bot. That is a very good kind of feature. 

I really like AI fabric and the documented understanding model, as that actually allows us to do a couple of very complex POCs. They went very well and right now, those prefaces are currently in the pipeline. Hopefully, they will get started with them next month.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is very easy. When it comes to comparing it against other tools, UiPath might be the easiest one. It's totally subjective, of course. That said, there are scenarios where automating certain kinds of scenarios with UiPath is not that easy. Overall, it's pretty good at automating all kinds of stuff.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end coverage is very important. While working with clients like Microsoft and Google, we have to actually go ahead and make sure that you're actually providing all of these kinds of services. With services such as documentation you also need to be on top of the latest market trends. UiPath actually provides us with not only the ability to handle all of this but to also document all of these kinds of things. That is available, either as a part of some other products or is embedded within the Studio itself as a part of an extension. That is something that I really like as that actually reduces the time that I invest in the creation of the documents. That, and the client actually requires all of these documents before even we can go ahead with the contract, makes having them on hand so important. 

The Automation cloud has helped decrease time to value. Earlier, the deployment of an on-prem Orchestrator took around two to three days for proper configuration and for making sure that there's a disaster recovery mechanism. Automation cloud has everything built already within it, which makes things faster and easier. This reduces the amount of time that is required by us to deliver. Within our area of work, within marketing, time is everything. Once you have taken on the project, the client expects you to deliver it as soon as possible. The requirements that you're getting from the client are very, very time-sensitive. If you're essentially not delivering it on time, that is going to be an issue. Automation Cloud actually helps us to do that without thinking about other things. It actually goes ahead and does a couple of things for us that we don't have to worry about, such as deploying the Orchestrator on the cloud, making sure that everything is properly set up, and making sure that the disaster recovery option is there. These kinds of things actually save us days of time for installation, if not days of debugging time. 

It's very important for our company to scale up automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. There are a couple of projects that we have where we don't really care about the infrastructure. If it is handled by UiPath, it's absolutely fine. However, for example, in the case of some of our elite clients, what happens is that they actually need to know the details and how data is being propagated amongst different servers. If we're not controlling the environment, if we're not handling the entire knowledge, we won't be able to give them the same thing and the project might go away just because of this fact. Therefore, I'm not saying it's not very important. It's actually very, very important. That's why we use both services that are provided by UiPath - both on-prem and cloud. That said, if we have projects where we don't need to worry about it, it's nice to have the option not to.

UiPath has helped us minimize our on-premise footprint. Their customer service has actually helped us reduce that. UiPath was released in 2015. There are experts on this particular thing in the market, and most of those experts are found via UiPath only. When help is provided by UiPath themselves, that can actually resolve the issue in a matter of hours rather than days.

We use attended automation. We usually use attended automation within the HR department. Basically, we're using it for onboarding, for monthly salary management. It's great for automating some of the basic SAP projects as these are the places where we require human interaction, either to handle the credential part or to provide some inputs. This actually helps bring confidence into the process and also phases out the work of a particular human. Automation has integrated with some human day-to-day jobs so well that now when employees come in, the primary thing that they have to do is just to trigger the bot and start providing input. Work that they used to do for the first half of the day, is completed in the first hour of the day. That's the kind of benefit that is being provided by attended automation.

There is good AI functionality and we use it for some proof of concept projects. That said, we haven't yet used it for more complex or involved automation or processes just yet. We have one project in the pipeline that we have to start working on this month. 

We use UiPath Apps. We use UiPath Apps as a form. Essentially, we have created UiPath Apps in such a way that helps HR people to onboard individuals. For example, whenever someone has to get onboarded, they have to actually provide some details in terms of who they are, their previous company, and some other basic details. Also, HR will need to provide some extra details, in terms of who will be the individual's manager, et cetera. Finally, IT has to assign some kind of role. What we have actually done, is we have created an app where a user or a new individual has to actually provide all the information. Then, HR just needs to select the particular role. Everything is pre-configured. We automatically assign specific roles. In terms of IT, we can now automatically assign specific resources such as laptops, monitors, or headsets to that particular person. Since everything is automated, within a couple of minutes of registration the person receives his new ID password and details. Instead of waiting for an entire day, it happens in just a matter of one or two minutes.

UiPath Apps has increased the number of automation we can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Earlier, we used to create automation, in terms of forms. Those automations were types of attended automation. A person had to have specific access to that particular computer before doing this kind of work. In this scenario, the issue we had was that every time it was not possible to handle manual steps if we were onboarding ten people at a time. Everyone had to wait for their turn and that was not very efficient. What we have done is we have actually deployed UiPath Apps whose links can actually get loaded onto an individual's mobile. One just needs to open it on their mobile and get started. That's it. Everything executes parallelly. We have also made our system scalable so that multiple VMs can learn the process at the same time.

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. Doing so does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

We have found that UiPath has reduced human error. We were getting some human errors related to time zone issues and some of the other issues such as daylight savings. There were several other issues related to accidental typing or of people not focusing properly, even after several integrations. That's part of the reason we went ahead and automated processes. Obviously, a bot only follows what you have programmed it, what you have programmed within it. The errors are literally reduced to zero within that specific section.

UiPath has freed up employee time. We have actually retrained the freed-up employees into UiPath to act as support engineers. As a rough guess, I would say that we have saved around 120 hours a week just by deploying UiPath.

The additional time enabled employees to focus on more essential work. For people who were actually acting as build personnel, we have re-deployed them as a person who actually interacts directly with clients or who does QA work. This is a higher position that comes with a higher salary as well. There have been promotions simply due to implementing UiPath.

Employees are pretty happy. Initially, everyone was scared that they might lose their jobs. However, but adopting UiPath methods and retraining people, some are even getting promoted and we find that they are actually encouraging automation processes so that new work can come in and the remaining people could also get on better.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. In terms of marketing operations, for example, it has reduced the cost. Along with the help of similar investments, we need fewer people and more bots currently. That's definitely a big thing for us. We had a cost reduction of approximately 20% in our operations. This is just a ballpark. That said, overall, UiPath has saved our organization a lot of costs. I cannot speak to exact savings, as that requires business knowledge, which I do not have complete access to. 

The AI Center area could definitely improve. The StudioX model could also improve just a little bit so that the introduction of variables is better and would make it possible to pass on a similar kind of data in between multiple activities. This is a very simple concept, however, this kind of feature is not available within UiPath. 

From the business perspective, a little bit more insight on the dashboard that is currently available in Orchestrator would be ideal. I agree with UiPath having a dedicated tool for insights, however, right now, it's a paid tool. 

If I can get a little bit more data and a little bit more customization on Orchestrator, that would be really great.

I've been using UiPath for three years and eight months. I've used it for the same amount of time the company has used it.

The product is quite stable now. There are certainly some places where UiPath has to work, specifically in terms of actual stability, where there are still some unknown errors that are coming in. 

In terms of Orchestrator, I have noticed there are some places where there are glitches. Things are not very clear at first as everything is changing quite quickly, I'll say that. Even in the enterprise version, everyone wants to be on the very latest version. However, there is a drastic change between the versions themselves.

For example, 2019, 2020, and 2021 versions, all three are drastically different amongst themselves. This kind of change is definitely good for the provider in that they are doing something better. However, as a consumer, I don't really want to go ahead and go through an entire learning curve all over again along with handling my current job of handling all the work, just so that I can cope up with what changes the product team has made. It should not be necessary to go through this level of adjustment for each and every release. At this point, I have been through three to four migrations and in each migration, I have gone through some kind of a learning curve.

Automation Cloud actually helps us to rapidly scale up. We don't have to invest time now in configuring Orchestrator, or the cloud version of UiPath. All we have to do is we just need to basically request for a particular package and, maybe, either with the help of a package or with the help of the UiPath team, it is pre-configured for us. That way, we just need to utilize it. Therefore, scaling is simple.

The scalability is great. It has actually allowed us to schedule the bots or maintain the bots in multiple VMs without having any worries about how to utilize licenses, or how to actually go ahead and deploy the bots manually or install the bots manually on certain VMs. Everything is automated within the UiPath environment.

If we talk about attended users, right now, we have more than 10 people using attended bots. Their roles are essentially from the recruitment team, from HR. Some of the marketing staff are also using it in analyst positions. 

We definitely plan to increase usage and we're using UiPath pretty extensively. We have a couple of projects in the pipeline and currently, we're also working on some of the more complex projects within the team.

All the projects are having a specific date of delivery. Everything is running parallel as we also follow an Agile method. In this Agile method, if something is stuck, it will eventually impact the date of delivery. And we really don't want that. UiPath actually helps us a lot by providing 24-hour support and it helps us in setting a lot of the items we need to use. They do it quite easily and quickly.

On the scale of one to ten, it's definitely a ten. Whenever I have a doubt, they are always there. They even offer to get on a call with them and actually go ahead and resolve the issue themselves, if they know how to do it. 

Many times, there have been scenarios where the issue was unique to us. They actually presented us with some debugging steps that we can do on our end. Most of the time, those debugging steps actually helped us to resolve the issue. When none of these options work, they were very keen to figure out how they could actually improve the experience and what could be implemented by the developers within those specific parts of the product in order to resolve the issue. We have given them feedback in the past and in a couple of future versions, we were able to see those ideas implemented.

We were using AutoHotkey before this product, as well as Selenium. However, after implementing UiPath, we have not used anything along with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation of the Studio was quite straightforward. We just had to go through all the legal terms and everything. Once we went through those, we just had to install it. The same thing is true for Orchestrator as the on-prem installation of Orchestrator is pretty straightforward. You just have to get the setup, link it with the skilled server, and then install it. 

Apart from that, the configuration within Orchestrator was very simple as there is only one file that allows us to log on to everything. It made it pretty obvious.

The deployment took somewhere around two days for the entire setup. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, firstly, we decided to set up all the databases and all the dashboard-related services such as Power BI. We decided to do this first due to the fact that the dashboards and databases are the base of any application. 

We decided to implement it first in Azure. On the same day, we decided to get the cloud version of the Orchestrator as well. It was quite easy in terms of Azure. There's a three-way plugin that is available there. We just had to install that on the specific VM and we were done. Finally, on the second day, we went ahead and installed all of the Studio. Once Orchestrator is up, we could install Studios and link them to Orchestrator in order to get the license. That was our strategy and our approach.

We essentially have one dedicated resource for maintaining all the deployments and to watch if anything goes wrong. We have three dedicated resources for maintaining all the bots that are currently running as well. We don't need a big team to maintain everything. 

In one of our projects, we actually used Azure Cloud for the deployment of Orchestrator and the deployment of packages. The experience is quite good. Azure provides the DevOps side of our service that allows us to set up the pipeline and automatically deploy any kind of project to the Orchestrator as soon as it is committed.

While the company has likely been looking at ROI, I don't directly deal with those details.

A couple of our clients cannot actually go ahead with the initial investment of Orchestrator as it costs quite a lot. The thing is that we don't need that much of a license in order to automate our processes. Having a free version of a cloud or having a cheaper version of Orchestrator has actually helped a lot.

Automation Cloud helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. However, overall, if we talk about scalability, once the number of licenses that I need increases, ultimately, Automation Cloud might be a bit expensive. It depends upon the version you're using. Yet, since the license cost is increasing, what happens is if you go ahead and buy more than five licenses, then essentially you would have been in better shape if you would've actually bought the paid version of Automation Cloud and installed it on-prem. That would've been a cheaper option. It's subjective. Our scenario is just that we need two unattended licenses to do the job.

Some of the clients do consider the initial investment of UiPath to be expensive. It's seen as expensive specifically from the cost of getting a licensing for an on-premises setup. For some projects, UiPath can be overkill. However, it is the best software a company can invest in for automation purposes. 

I cannot speak to the exact cost, as I don't handle licensing directly.

It's paid per year. We get licenses not directly from UiPath. Rather, we get them from a vendor.

There are additional costs as well. For example, the cost of an SQL server is one. We are definitely using the Azure product suite as well. We had to actually invest quite a lot in SQL Server in terms of database management, just to make sure that everything gets logged properly and that the Orchestrator is functioning properly. 

We switched to UiPath after we compared multiple tools. We looked at certain parameters such as the ability to automate marketing tools, the ability to automate quickly, and how user-friendly it was. Out of all these three parameters, UiPath stood on top.

We looked at Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and PEGA.

I specifically have been using the community version of UiPath. The company has been using the enterprise version.

We do use the Automation Cloud offering.

We do not use the SaaS version of the solution. 

I'd advise users to give it a try. I started my career in UiPath and since then I've been loving it. I became a UiPath MVP as I really enjoy working with the product so much.

That automation does not need to be very complex, so you don't need very complex tools to automate any software. Tools like UiPath can do most of your job.

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

Most of the time, we work with financial services to automate financial transaction monitoring systems. We go through multiple CRM and financial systems, then query the transactions based on the KYC information. We use OCR operations, using UiPath Robot, to fetch information, such as, identification number, passport number, and their tax information. We extract this information, then validate with our financial data or transactions data to ensure that there is no fraud nor anomalies in the system. If there are any suspicious transactions or potential fraud, we do manual investigations. Those manual investigations are redirected from the robot to a human agent, then the human agent verifies the information. If there are any cost validation requests from other systems, such as Salesforce and PeopleSoft, then another bot will be triggered using UiPath Orchestrator. After that, we do the remaining processing. At the end of the processing, we use the UiPath analytics service. That analytics service uses UiPath logs, which helps us to understand how the bot is performing and how many transactions we have validated. From that, we look at how many were successfully processed and how many were manually handled, i.e., exceptions. We identify business exceptions for any transactions during the initial pre-validation stage, such as the user identification number is not valid or input data validation errors. For example, passport information must be an alphanumeric eight digit. If the bot identifies that the value is not eight digits, but four or five digits, then it is an invalid record straightaway. We can see this from the reporting and performance graphs.

We do automation for our HR processes, such as onboarding processes. On any day, there are five or six people who need to be onboarded. This is one of our standard business cases. We have a UiPath robot design using UiPath Studio and then it deploys in Orchestrator. This robot is being used by the HR admin. They can fill in the key information of the user, e.g., name, level, and their package. So, they import all this information, which includes my identity information, mobile number, email, and IDs on an Excel file, possibly along with a few other associates joining tomorrow. Once those entries are made in the Excel file, then the user can trigger a robot. They also need to keep the file in a designated folder. The robot will read the file from the designated folder. Then, one by one, it will read the records or line items from Excel and open an SAP portal. After logging through the SAP Portal, it inputs the required employee information. After that, it will go to Microsoft Azure Active Directory to QA the user, email, and ID. It will then go to PeopleSoft to create an HR record for the salary information, leave information, and the level at which the associate is joining. At the end of this process, it will update the status to, "The associate has been registered successfully." It will then send the updated final report to HR, saying, "The processing has been completed." The bot triggers information with their newly created email ID. They can then access or receive the onboarding information. This is how it works.

Depending on the client's requirements, we use UiPath AI Center and UiPath Apps for custom requirements. Most of the time, we don't need them. There are some times that we do based on the client's requirements.

I am using UiPath Studio, UiPath Orchestrator, and UiPath Robot.

Initially, I used the on-premises deployment model. For the last two years, we have also been using the cloud deployment option, UiPath Cloud, along with the on-premises. This is based on a client's requirements.

We can use the Process Mining tool to identify opportunities. We can then design the robot using UiPath Studio. After designing it, we can deploy it, using UiPath Studio, to Orchestrator. From Orchestrator, we can manage, monitor, and upgrade all the new patches within the UiPath platform.

If we have one place where we can see the end-to-end journey of our automations, then I do not need to manage multiple licenses. I do not need to spend money and expertise hiring multiple people and training them on multiple platforms. Also, when upgrading the systems, if I have a one place where I can manage all my automations at the same time, including UI and background automations, then we can build low-code apps using UiPath Apps. Therefore, I can manage everything within one platform, which is either a UiPath Intelligent Automation platform or UiPath Cloud. This is very important. Because if I have multiple systems, then I need multiple stakeholders to manage, upgrade, and maintain them. So, we do not need to think about all the things that I am using. There is one place where I can manage everything.

It has enabled us to automate more processes overall. In the initial days, we easily automated the low hanging fruit. As our automation journey matured, we needed to automate processes using more complex methods, like AI, machine learning, and advanced OCR functionalities. 

The UiPath package available on UiPath Studio is useful. Compared to other RPA tools, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, we found that this package gives us the opportunity to automate tasks in the shortest amount of time. There are multiple templates available on UiPath Studio. For example, if I need to do multi-setting processing, which means we are going to process multiple records simultaneously, we can use a UiPath Background Process as a template. Using the template, I can run multiple robots on the same system, which will not interact with other systems. It will work in the background. We have found that really valuable. This is not available with other RPA products, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This is one of the valuable things that we have found in UiPath.

We use the UiPath recorder. For the latest, modern experience, we have a recorder called App Integrations. Using that particular recorder, I can automate tasks with multiple systems without thinking about having manual integrations between multiple browsers by identifying multiple sessions. Sessions can be used by the same recorder during the entire automation cycle. For example, I have two screens, one called PeopleSoft and another one is SAP. I can do a keystroke, mouse click, and then hit the submit button within PeopleSoft. Then, at the same time, I have another window open being used by the robot. I don't want to think about separating two windows, so the recorder takes care of this.

The UiPath recorder has multiple ways of identifying. For example, it uses UI elements, fuzzy logic, and image recognition at the same time. These three methods are used by only one recorder. Whereas, with other platforms, like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I can use only one method at a time, so one command is one method for selecting or identifying objects. Whereas, with the app recorders, I can use three methods using one command. So, if one fails, another one will back up the scenario. Then, if another one also fails, the third one will help us automate. That is the ease of automation, which is a valuable feature that helps us ensure that automation works flawlessly, without having to look at if one of the methods failed.

One of the 2018 projects was built using version 18.2. We then got a report from users that it was not working. Most of the time, it failed on multiple use cases. When we took the process from the owner to repair and troubleshoot, we found that many packages were not being recognized by the new version, which is 2020. So, we had to upgrade to the latest package, then do a repair. It took a good amount of time for us to repair the package. We had to go back to the UAT environment, then do testing and get approval from the UAT. We then had to sign-off and deploy pre-production and post-production Hypercare. So, the automation cycle being repeated by almost 40% is quite costly to the business, but this is rare.

The vendor had already noticed these things were a big pain for us. With the recent versions, 2019 and onwards, the compatibility between the activity and packages is there. Prior to that, there were some issues. The UI automation package was the one that was mostly affected. Many people who were early adopters of UiPath observed or experienced these kinds of issues.

Sometimes, when we are using Remote Desktop automations, we may need to use a different approach along with the AI functionalities. For example, if I need to recognize the object on the screen, which I cannot do using native methods, then along with the AI functionality, I may need to have a backup method, such as the OCL methods along with AI Computer Visions. This ensures that it works robustly and my solutions deliver 100% results without any manual intervention. In such complex scenarios, we are using AI features along with multiple methods for the backing up of the AI features. We have to ensure that if something goes wrong with the AI features then we have another method which will ensure, if A fails, then B will back up our solution's process as expected.

I have been using it for the past six years.

We use UiPath AI Center, UiPath AI Computer Vision functionalities, and Document Understanding. These AI features came into the picture from 2019 onwards. First, we received updates using UiPath Computer Vision functionalities. Then, we received AI Center, which was not stable in its initial days. However, during the first quarter of 2020, we received version 2, which seems to be more stable. From there, we received general availability versions with integrations on UiPath Studio and UiPath StudioX. These work much better, as compared to the initial versions. So far, all the components of UiPath Computer Vision, Document Understanding, and UiPath AI Center work well. 

I appreciate other benefits, such as UiPath community support and UiPath enterprise product support, because if anything goes wrong, we search in Google or the UiPath Forum where we can find the answer. Even if the answer is not available, and I post a question, I am quite certain that within one day that I will get someone to respond to the question. It may be someone from the forum or UiPath. Most of the time, the answers are readily available on the UiPath Forums.

UiPath Forum is the one place where we reach out to research problems, do troubleshooting, or get some help. If we need some help regarding the installations or licensing, we can create a ticket. Typically, we get a response, email notifications, or support calls within four to six hours.

We hire fresh, new graduates that we are going to train. UiPath Academies offers numerous training tutorials and certifications, which helps us to train our newly hired resources who are completely new to RPA and UiPath. So, the training is really useful in terms of video tutorial practice and configuring our multilingual environment. UiPath Academy does support English, Chinese, Malay, and German. So, our associates from multiple offices, who are already working on the global initiative, can learn the same things at the same time. Or, they can get someone from an English background.

I started RPA using UiPath.

Using the tool for the last six years, the initial setup is like having breakfast every day; it is very simple. I can do it much faster than someone new who started two years back or the new guy. I know what to do and how to do it.

Because it is software as a service, the setup and configuration time are very quick. Within an hour or two, we can set up the infrastructure deployment for a starter package. Configurations can be done smoothly. The infrastructure deployment, which typically takes a week's time, can be minimized to an hour. This saves us a lot of time and money for multiple components.

In the initial days of 2016 or 2015, our automation journey was center of excellence (COE) based most of the time. Nowadays, we changed our strategy, and it is more employee involved. So, an employee can go into UiPath Automation Hub and submit their idea. If they have time and are interested, we give them the training to use UiPath StudioX features for automation. If a process is complex based on our assessment, we pick that process and do the automation so the COE and employ-driven automation work hand in hand. 

With a simple process, then the employee can automate it and do the PoC. If they need help, we are more than happy to help them. However, we found when the processes are medium to highly complex, this is something professional developers should be working on. If they are interested, they can contribute and learn, but it's less likely that a business user would be involved in a complex automation process.

UiPath has absolutely reduced human error. Infrastructure setup and maintenance are taken care of by the product owner or vendor. So, there is 100% assurance that nothing wrong will happen in the system because they are the people who built and deployed the product. Whenever we deploy, there may be a chance that something might go wrong or configurations went wrong. For example, I need to configure the Internet information services port. If I incorrectly configured the port or use a different method, there is a high chance that I might need to redirect the port to some other router or native firewall. If I use UiPath Cloud, everything is taken care of by UiPath. I just log into assistance, then allocate the license and configure our users.

For small to medium clients, those clients have an investment of about $100,000. We see around six to eight months in, they get something around 40% to 60% ROI being returned to them. Then, within a year to 18 months, they get a 100% to 120% ROI realized.

When we implement a robotics process automation solution using UiPath, and if the client's budget is limited, we mostly encourage the automation journey to be done using UiPath Cloud. UiPath ensures that it works fluidly, performs all upgrade security patches, and has 99.9% uptime.

In the initial days, UiPath was more competitive in terms of the license pricing as compared to Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere; it was much less. Currently, the pricing is quite standard compared to the other two vendors. 

We can use UiPath Cloud, which helps us to save a lot of money and infrastructure costs, if the automation journey or project is for a small to medium-sized company. However, if it is a big company, then on-premises is preferred. 

I have also used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism as well as open-source automation platforms, such as TagUI and Selenium.

The main pros to using UiPath are its user interface, user-friendliness, learning platform, and support.

We have been using the UiPath Apps feature for the last four or five months, so it is relatively new for us. Most of our technical people are experimenting with UiPath Apps. We have planned training sessions for business users to upskill them.

If you are starting or in your initial days, I advise you to use the UiPath community version. Try first to do a PoC with the community version, trying out the automation in UiPath Cloud for free. Once you realize that this is something good as well as understand the value of it, then you can start with the initial package. If you think that you can start big from the beginning, then go for on-premises and start a large-scale transformation. However, I would advise doing a PoC first with proper guidance from UiPath and selecting a proper implementation consulting partner who has good experience or a solid past track record of doing automation, RPA, the RPA automation journey, and the transformation journey, as a whole. Not just UiPath automations or building robots, but also transforming their project and processes as well as doing Lean Six Sigma, which is a crucial part of the transformation journey. So, you should consider all these factors for a successful automation journey.

Compared to the top three tools, I rate this solution 10 out of 10.

We primarily use UiPath for end-to-end automation. We develop both attended and unattended bots and we use the Orchestrator module, hosted in Azure.

Some of our typical use cases involve automating operations like downloading files online, analyzing and capturing details, saving them in another location, transferring them, and uploading them in other forms.

The app studio feature has increased the number of automations that we create while reducing the time it takes to create them. For example, we have a limitation when it comes to transferring files from one server to another server. However, we were able to resolve it by using a remote desktop on the UiPath server. I don't need to log into another system or another server; instead, I log in and use the remote desktop from my PC. It's really cost-efficient and it saves me a lot of time. It's superb.

UiPath helps us to implement end-to-end process automation starting with process analysis through to monitoring, and this is very important to us. Whether we are automating processes for external customers or internal purposes, there is an automation lifecycle that we follow. The end-users do not have much knowledge about automation, so we have to complete it from end-to-end.

It starts with analyzing the process to see if automation will work. We then develop it by trying to replicate what the user does manually. Once it has been developed and the functionality replicated, we test and tweak it for approximately two weeks. If everything goes well during this time, the process moves to production. In production, processes are continuously monitored.

The testing is a detailed process that involves finding the problems, then implementing error handling using try/catch statements and other methods. It is done in a continuous, agile fashion where we develop, publish, trial, error handling, monitoring, and then it starts again. When a process is pushed to production, when a change is made, it does through this lifecycle again.

How UiPath has improved the way our organization functions is clear when we look at one of our use cases. We need to have notifications about documents that describe the release of products. Our bot will start by filtering documents online using keywords, download the appropriate documents, then check to make sure that each is complete. If there is a problem then emails are automatically sent to the appropriate department.

From this point, we transfer the file into another folder and upload the current version to the release team. They will only receive what they need, rather than having to go through the document themselves. Prior to this, they needed to check it on their own and analyze everything. With this work being done by the robot, it relieves us of two person's workloads. What used to take three people to complete, is now done with one.

In terms of saving time, for our use case that involves the release documents, we save between 80 and 100 hours per week, so monthly, you can multiply that by four.

The time saved by our employees sometimes allows them to focus on higher-value work or in other cases, when we don't need the persons, we can reduce the workforce and then hire people in different roles, such as new developers. Overall, this helps us to improve our workforce. For example, we can branch into more areas, rather than do the same thing for many different customers.

With respect to employee satisfaction, if somebody loses their position then they may not be happy. However, it is important to remember at the same time that we may open a new position because of this opportunity. This allows the person to move, find new opportunities, focus on new things, and develop themselves. To me, this is a win-win because we are more focused on generating new types of business.

UiPath has definitely helped us to reduce human errors. This is a benefit to us because, before this, we used to get customers complaining quite often. However, we have reduced the complaints. We still need to have the customer complaints section but now, we have reduced it from five people to one. The robot is not 100% error-free, but it's between 90% and 99.9% error-free. With so few complaints, we don't need as many people to deal with them.

Overall, UiPath's process analysis and optimization have increased our productivity.

The most valuable feature for me is the UiPath Studio.

It helps a lot. I wouldn't really say it's code-free; however, I would say that it's 90% code-free. It's very easy to use, with most of the actions performed using the drag-and-drop interface. When you do write code, it's a very small amount of the time.

The library activities are really helpful. With the help of the library and with the help of the forums, developers can focus and it is easy to learn. It helps in terms of time-to-value.

I also find Orchestrator to be helpful. The Studio and the Orchestrator together are like your body and your soul. Without both parts, it won't function. You need to have Orchestrator to run the Studio. Right now, today, we have a problem with our Orchestrator and it's not working. I can't use Studio because it's connected and without access to my Orchestrator, I can't do anything.

The academy courses help in the process of getting employees up to speed with the solution by providing them with the fundamental knowledge and the opportunity to practice. When you start doing it, you may face errors and again, with the docs, you may gain more knowledge. When you start to use the forums, you get more knowledge, and it all helps. But, if you only rely on the forums, I would say that it would help only 60% or 70% of what you get compared to taking the academy courses. In the end, you will only get better by doing it, and then going to the forums when you have problems.

The testing and release schedule for Studio should be improved because we find that with two releases per year, one of the versions is stable and the other one is not. It would be better to focus on a single release, but make sure that it is stable. We have had problems in the past with this and we don't need any unstable versions. For example, version 20.4.2 was not stable but version 20.10.2 was very good.

Technical support and customer care are areas in need of improvement. 

We have been using UiPath for between six and seven months.

We are in Switzerland and normally, we use local support. When they cannot resolve an issue then it is transferred to the US team and we get support from them directly. In our experience, the support in Europe is not sufficient and we prefer to speak directly with the UiPath headquarters. We find that here, the people do not have enough knowledge.

We have had a lot of problems and for example, we have an issue right now where our Orchestrator doesn't work. We have had to wait about a week for the ticket to be escalated to headquarters, and because of delays like this, we are not always happy with customer care. The product is good but the technical support can improve.

We had issues where the first person tells us one thing, but a second person says that it's wrong and it needs to be done another way. Then, a third person speaks and presents another idea. This all takes a lot of time before a fourth person explains that everything is wrong and it has to be done another way. A lot of the time when you have these kinds of problems, you just have to start from scratch.

It can be frustrating because we had spent almost three weeks upgrading our system to the 20.10.2 version and now, we face the same problem. We have not been able to properly run our system for between three and four weeks.

I have not personally used another RPA solution but I have colleagues who have experience with Automation Anywhere. We primarily use UiPath but there are some developers in the company who regularly work with Automation Anywhere.

We did not switch from one product to another. Rather, they are used for different reasons. For example, I have heard that when it comes to performing file transfers, Automation Anywhere makes it quite easy and they do not have the limitations that UiPath does.

On the other hand, I feel that the AI in UiPath is doing better. We have lots of workflows and activities in UiPath and I strongly prefer it as a product.

I wouldn't say that the initial setup is complex, although when you are just beginning with a new environment, it is not that easy, either. Because it is a new thing, you will need to learn in the beginning.

We followed the guide and found that the installation was not very tough.

UiPath saves us costs, but there is more to it than that. It saves us in terms of time spent on manual tasks, but on the other hand, we pay UiPath. On yet another hand, with the money we save, we are open to new opportunities and new business.

Overall, I am very happy with the ROI.

The price of UiPath is a little bit high, although there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Overall, it is not too costly, but slightly high.

We have not yet used the AI functionality but we are trying to. We have not developed any uses cases yet but it is something that we are working on. We will be taking some courses on it first and after that, we may try some internal use cases.

We have advanced our technical knowledge by using this product. For example, we now use JSON config files, rather than using Excel.

One of the biggest lessons that we have learned is that it is nice to have a good solution design before starting development. There were times where we tried to do something one way but a problem occurred, so we had to solve it by trying different features, then testing and running it again. A lot of time is spent during this process. Now, we have learned to focus more during the design, then start to develop it.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that it works really well in Windows, so they have to have a Windows machine if they want to start developing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I started my RPA journey as a developer, and I first heard about UiPath as a low-code, drag-and-drop automation platform. Back then, it was very much in the beginning stages of its development. Ever since then, I've seen it evolve quite fast. I would say even faster than other RPA platforms that I've used, in just a few years.

Thinking back to when I first started using it, there are many new features and updates and it's my preferred platform for RPA.

We primarily used unattended automation, where you deploy the bots to work autonomously. This is unattended, end-to-end automation with no human in the loop, other than providing the inputs or checking the outputs.

We have several use cases, but our main one is reducing manual work. The processes that require a lot of manual input and have a lot of human error are the focus. That could be, for instance, processes that have to do with invoicing, billing, reporting, and coding, which require a lot of man-hours, are very reliant on a human being available, and are time-sensitive. Those are the ones that are on the top list to be automated.

Beyond that, I can't specifically talk about the processes that we've automated.

UiPath helps to implement end-to-end automation, although the discovery of processes, gathering requirements, and creating the design, all happen outside of UiPath. But the development, which is developing the bots, then testing and then deploying them, does happen end-to-end within UiPath.

The end-to-end development capability is important, but this is because every tool offers this and it is expected. That said, there is definitely room for improvement in that end-to-end should include process discovery. It is end-to-end, but those ends can extend further than what it currently is. In that sense, it's no different than other RPA tools.

Another way that UiPath improves the way our organization functions is that the robots can run 24/7. If you think about a human workforce, they work eight hours a day, they take days off, they get sick, they leave, and they take knowledge with them once they leave the company. But, the robots can be run non-stop 24/7, and each process can be scaled up. The same process can be run by one bot, or it can be run by 10 or 100 bots. This means that there's a lot more flexibility that the bots bring, especially for high-volume processes that perhaps even have some peaks, such as an end-of-month rush to produce invoices or meet a deadline or an end-of-financial-year crunch.

These robots have an easier time addressing and variability when it comes to volume. They really create a lot more scalability to where businesses can grow and know that they can meet the demands of the future. So, they're a lot more future-proof, whereas people are harder to rely on.

Speaking from a business perspective, it's the FTE savings. A company obviously needs to spend money on UiPath licenses and development costs, but those costs are oftentimes lower than the cost of that FTE, the full-time employee, whose work is getting automated. If you purely just think about the financial benefits, it's the lower staffing costs.

There is also the ability to free up people. This means that even if people aren't replaced and their salary isn't saved, what they can do is pivot their focus to, for instance, be a lot more customer-facing or do a lot more strategic or creative tasks that perhaps get pushed to the side because there's not a lot of time allocated towards performing them. Now, FTEs have a lot more capacity to contribute and perform tasks that still to this day cannot be automated, like creative thinking, complex decision-making on the spot, strategy, and just human interaction.

In the beginning, employees meet automation with a critical eye. They're thinking, "Well, what's going on? Why are these robots coming in? Are we going to work alongside them? How is this going to work?" But to be honest, in the end, there are winners and losers. What I mean by that is that some jobs are replaced, and that's just simply because of that FTE saving that is usually the driver to justify the cost of development. But on the flip-side, the employees that do stay and do work alongside the bots are usually a lot happier because they have to juggle a lot fewer things.

The robots are there to make people feel like people and not like robots, where they just do the same thing over and over and don't enjoy their job or don't enjoy what they do. A robot takes that away and helps people enjoy their work a lot more because they can do non-repetitive tasks. They can be a lot more customer-facing and perhaps build stronger relationships with their customers, know them better, and have more time available to work on other projects or work on other things that they may never have had the time to do.

In our organization, the robots work on multiple projects. The amount of employee time that is freed up depends on the project and what you are automating, but a pretty good estimate would be a 20% to 40% savings.

With respect to the reduction of problems related to human error, the fact of the matter is that some employees, whether you like it or not, are more error-prone. By automating a process, we were able to standardize it, and therefore, identify the cause of the human error and remove it by replacing the process with a robot that makes a more reliable judgment in terms of action. It is literally just an if-else statement. It's a lot easier to quantify and therefore it's a lot easier to evaluate, and therefore the result is a lot more reliable. Whereas with an employee, let's say the output of their work is a lot more unreliable simply because they could be working on 10 different things on the same day. There could be a deadline approaching, and the quality of work fluctuates with an employee because of it.

With a robot, you will notice that over time, in fact, the quality improves, and that's just the basic truth of RPA. It doesn't happen automatically, and it does require work. It happens because you see the results of the automation and you see areas for improvement, ultimately leading you to make adjustments. You iterate on the RPA solution and make it better over time.

Although it does not improve automatically, through a conscious effort you can be a lot more confident in the output and then be able to see unbiased results at the end of the day. Part of these results is your exception rates, which can be errors. It can be failures, whether technical in nature or decision-making business rule types of errors. Then, you can adjust your process to where it can positively improve that exception rate, and just iterate on that to where it becomes acceptable. Moreover, it's quite stable, which is not the case with the human workforce.

The automation cloud Orchestrator has its benefits and negative sides. The benefit is the fact that it's web-based. A person who has the login credentials can access it without the necessity to have something installed. The development and the monitoring of the bots are separated in UiPath, where the development happens in the Studio and the monitoring happens in the Orchestrator.

In other tools like Blue Prism, it happens in the same place. I've used both, and the Orchestrator is nice. It has a very nice UI, it's user-friendly, it has a lot of features, and I find it quite easy to use. For example, you can see all of the machines, you can see the robots, and you can schedule them. If the business wants to see a lot more across the output of the Work Queue, they can have that visibility from Orchestrator, which is great.

The downside of Orchestrator is the package deployment, which is perhaps another minus of UiPath in general. The deployment of a new package does not take a long time, but there are a lot of steps. It's not an intuitive process. If you have to release a lot of packages, which does occur, especially in the early stage of deployment, when you are releasing hotfixes, or when something goes wrong and you need to redeploy a fix really quickly to minimize business impact, it does slow you down.

I wish it would be just one or two clicks, rather than the whole importing or exporting and connecting to the desktop application and everything that accompanies it. I wish it were a lot easier. Again, it has its upsides but it's not perfect.

The best feature in UiPath is their robotic enterprise framework because that is an inbuilt processing framework for utilizing their work queues. It's plug-and-play, and already pre-built to where you don't have to start from scratch. It's enterprise-grade and ready to be used. All you need to do is populate your dispatcher, create a queue, create a performer, and you're good to go.

The highest benefit of it is that it's just there, ready to use, and you don't need to start from a blank screen. You don't have to figure out, for example, how to create an environment where the robots can check if there's anything in the queue to be worked on. The framework is already there. The other tools that I've used, like Blue Prism, don't have that built-in quite as well.

My perspective and overview are from that of a developer, and I find that the recorder feature is really good. This is because UiPath lets you record your actions on the screen. So, if you want to interact with a web-based interface, for example, then you have UiPath record your actions and then build the activities that you would need in order to replicate those actions through the robot. It makes it a lot better and although it's not perfect and it does need to be reviewed and adjusted, it speeds up development quite a bit. This is especially true when it's basic back development like populating fields and clicking buttons and navigating on a web.

Compared to other RPA tools that I have used, something that stands out to me in UiPath is that it has a very extensive library of activities. Those activities are easy to search for and use.

When you are writing code, there is a feature called IntelliSense, which autocompletes your code. More specifically, when you're typing code, if you're starting to type the name of a variable, it will show you all of the variables available and you can just click them. It's very interactive and it's reminiscent of the Microsoft Visual Studio environment, both from the UI perspective and the coding perspective. This means that developers that are familiar with Visual Studio will probably feel right at home using UiPath. It's very developer-friendly and it's geared towards appealing to existing developers.

The UiPath Academy courses definitely help in the process of bringing employees up to speed. The Academy is the go-to place for UiPath learning and I think that other RPA tools are copying this model of disseminating knowledge, being a lot more open with training, making it freely available, and providing an online classroom. These are things that UiPath has always done, and it certainly helps new developers get upskilled in RPA, and specifically with UiPath.

When it comes to ease of use, UiPath is intuitive insofar as the basic features have a low learning curve. However, if you want to take full advantage of what UiPath can do, and if organizations want to create more sophisticated automation solutions, it is more difficult. For instance, automations involving back-end access, maybe writing directly to databases such as SQL or using API, that's a steep learning curve. In fact, I think the learning curve is exponential.

If you just want to make a robot that sends an email, that's really easy to do. But, if you really want tangible benefits, like if you really want something that solves a business problem, it is a huge learning curve and it takes a while to master. Obviously, it does have that low-code requirement, but I would say that's only for entry automation projects, like proof-of-concept or something along those lines. For something that really solves a business problem, you would need code, because that just makes it a lot more robust and a lot more powerful if you can custom-code certain steps of the process.

Features for process discovery would improve the end-to-end development capabilities.

From a developer's point of view, my biggest struggle with UiPath is debugging. The debug mode in UiPath feels clunky and it is a sore spot. It feels it's hard to control the flow of the process. There are a lot of internal errors and it's not intuitive. In general, debugging is not a good experience and I don't enjoy doing it. In contrast, Blue Prism has better debugging capabilities.

Blue Prism is a little more dynamic; you can adjust variables, you can jump around the flow, and it's easier to control. With UiPath, it's a little bit of a nightmare. It becomes harder to debug the bigger your automation is, because it's quite unpredictable, and it's quite unstable. Definitely, if debugging was improved, I would say UiPath would get 11 out of 10.

Something that I noticed recently is that they have moved to paid certification for developers, whereas it used to have free certification. This is a little bit outside of the platform itself but the pain point here from my perspective is that there is a barrier to entry for new RPA developers, or ones that want to renew their certification. It has become a lot harder and that used to be a differentiator for UiPath. It had a very strong online learning offering and it offered no-charge recertification on top. This is now very similar to what other tools are doing and I see that as a negative.

My first introduction to UiPath was in early 2018 or late 2017.

The robots could be a lot more stable, which is another area for improvement. The stability issue with UiPath is a prominent one, especially in comparison to other tools like Blue Prism. I feel that there are a lot of errors that are caused by the UiPath framework, as opposed to the robot design. Sometimes it's just very unreliable and crashes unexpectedly, which creates serious issues in terms of reliability. In early deployment, it always happens that it's very late nights, and there's a lot of babysitting processes. The robots need it because you never know what's going to crash.

In comparison with other RPA tools, it is average when it comes to reliability. I would rate other tools a little bit easier to manage expectations as to what you can reasonably expect to go wrong, and what you can reasonably expect to break. With UiPath, our developers, even our experienced ones, oftentimes get errors that we've never seen in our lifetime. This is partly due to the flexibility of UiPath, with it being so easy to adapt to all types of applications and all types of environments and it being so malleable. It is one of the most versatile tools; it's industry agnostic, platform-agnostic, and tool-agnostic, but that flexibility creates a lot more room for error in the code. It means that a lot more things can break or interfere with each other, compared to other platforms that are perhaps more niche and more targeted in what they're actually trying to solve.

UiPath is definitely scalable. It is modular, where you build a workflow and that can be reused across multiple robots or multiple processes. Those processes can then be run by one, two, three, five, and 100 bots, provided that they can work concurrently in the same environment, performing the same process. It's wonderful and the scalability is uncapped. If you have licenses, then you can use them, which is great.

The only limits are how many licenses are you willing to buy, and the inherent limits of your own infrastructure and your own process. It comes down to how many robots can realistically work concurrently in the same infrastructure and in the same network without breaking it.

We have approximately 20 developers who use UiPath. We have business users, but it is difficult for me to say how many there are.

I have been in contact with technical support, and I have experienced submitting a support ticket to them. I even got on a call with them and they were very helpful. We had been having issues with automating a platform and we wanted to get their specific insight as to what was going wrong. It had to do with UiPath not being able to extract selectors from that specific interface.

I was really surprised because they spent the time to not only address my ticket and answer my questions, but also to allocate time to schedule a meeting, and really look into the platform via screen share. I was sharing the screen with them and showing them what was happening, and they really looked into it and gave it a lot of attention.

I understand they get a lot of tickets, and I really felt they provided a good answer. They responded really fast, I would say within 24 hours, and we began exchanging details through a back and forth conversation.

They provided me with the outcome that I was happy with. It was a very good experience.

In addition to UiPath, we used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath is king here, and I rarely hear anything about the other two. I would estimate that we use UiPath 95% of the time, perhaps even 99%.

The alternative to UiPath that I am more familiar with is Blue Prism. From my perspective, UiPath is geared towards developers. The audience towards which it's skewed is the developer or the technical person. Blue Prism is geared more towards business people. It's geared towards converting business people, including SMEs and subject matter experts that know the process well, into developers. You will find that the language that each program uses is one that's geared towards the target market. Consequently, UiPath uses a lot of developer language and developer concepts.

For example, UiPath works similarly to the Visual Studio Environment. Blue Prism, on the other hand, uses a lot of flowcharting visuals, as well as the language that it uses for the same concept. It's going to use a definition that's more from a business process flowcharting realm. Recently, both platforms are converging onto each other and I feel like they're becoming more and more similar, but they still have a few things that are different.

One thing that stands out for me is that Blue Prism has wonderful debugging. It's a lot better than UiPath, and it's an all-in-one tool where the monitoring and the building of the robots happen in one application. The deployment is also really easy.

Blue Prism also offers online learning, which is great. They didn't use to have that offering, and I think that they got a lot of inspiration from UiPath. Their online courses have been great because previously when I was learning RPA, I had to use YouTube. Now, they have a whole Blue Prism university, which is amazing.

Blue Prism has inbuilt version control and a lot of other great features. They have a heavy emphasis on security and encryption, which UiPath perhaps needs to improve on. Companies such as banks, insurance agencies, and finance agencies are a lot more interested in Blue Prism because of its very strong security protocols. The encryption offering is a key requirement for companies that work with a lot of sensitive personal data.

I have never been involved in the initial setup, although my understanding is that it's quite a journey.

The areas of the organization with the most ROI from UiPath are operations, finance, HR, and sales. Those are the key departments, although it's across every organization because those departments have a lot of manual work-intensive processes that are the first contenders for automation.

We have a yearly licensing model that gives us access to the development and production environments. The cost of licensing is expensive.

Part of automation is the analysis and optimization of processes because the analysis phase is a by-product of wanting to automate a task. If you want to automate something, you have to break it down into parts and really look at it and think, "How can I reduce this into a series of business rules, a series of decisions, or series of steps?" It's an exercise of process optimization in and of itself because a good practice in automation is to not just take what it is and automate it, but to think, "Does what is currently in place actually work? How can it be improved? How can it be streamlined? How can it be done in fewer steps?" It's a good chance to practice some process review, improvement, and transformation.

The idea is to make it optimal because the current process usually has unquestioned practices that maybe haven't been reviewed for a very long time. A lot of businesses say, "We've always done it this way," and they've never thought to revisit the approach. RPA gives you an opportunity to think about whether what you've always been doing will work when it's being done by a robot. Most often, the processes get streamlined through the requirements gathering phase, understanding the as-is, and then a key part of that is doing the process design, which is the to-be vision.

During that time, processes go through a few design iterations where they are optimized and streamlined because we want the robots to be as efficient as possible. This means performing as few steps as possible without sacrificing value and efficiency. It is important because any inefficiencies in a robot are going to scale with the number of times you're going to run that process. If you run a process a thousand times, and let's say there exists inefficiency that results in an extra minute being used, that could be shed if you were to review and optimize that process.

Ultimately, optimization is an important exercise because the benefits include a further capacity to run more automated processes, and less time is taken up by inefficient steps.

Something to be aware of is that updates to the platform have to be managed because any update could impact the performance of a bot that was built with an earlier version. To avoid having a newer version impact the performance of something that was built previously, all of the updates need to go through a due diligence process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from UiPath is surprising; not everything needs to be automated. It feels weird to say it because thinking, "Well, I have this platform, I have these bots, why not just automate absolutely everything?", but the truth is that there are things that can be streamlined outside of RPAs. Also, some processes can be automated through other means. Consider the very simple example of sending automated emails, or sorting out your inbox by putting the right email in the right folder, those types of things can be done with email rules rather than RPA.

If a platform already has some sort of inbuilt automation, whether that's a social media platform, email platform, networking platform, or any other type of platform, it's always better to explore that first before looking to solve that problem with RPA. There are times when an Excel Macro or an email rule will be a lot faster and a lot more cost-efficient. RPA should be directed towards big-ticket items, big problems, and large volumes to where no existing solution would provide the same level of value.

My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to try it out for themselves. The most beautiful thing is when companies take the leap to have a very small citizen developer team, where they upskill a few technically-minded people with free courses and try to build a small proof of concept to see if RPA is the right path for them. I really encourage that sort of curiosity and experimentation because all of the resources are out there and anybody can learn, as long as they're driven and passionate and curious about automation. I would really encourage people just to give it a try and see what comes out of it.

In our organization, UiPath is the number one RPA tool. Being close to the industry as a developer, and I do feel like it's the preferred tool, at least where I'm based in Australia. It is definitely the preferred RPA solution on the market. Our usage is definitely going to increase in the future. I feel like the future is bright for UiPath. That said, it isn't perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I have worked on multiple use cases with UiPath dealing with SAP, SharePoint, or a web application. We had to extract the data and do some automation of data processing. We were taking data from one environment, such as from an Excel sheet, and processing it. These were the use cases for which we used UiPath extensively.

In addition to app integration, there were use cases related to various frameworks such as REframework and State Machines. We used the REframework at the enterprise level to be able to handle exceptions and bot failures and make automation healthy, robust, and steady.

We have also done automation for a healthcare department for claim processing.

UiPath saves the execution time of processes running in the production. If a process was taking three to four hours previously, with UiPath automation, it can be completed within an hour with better exception handling capability and less dependency. It saves 50% time.

UiPath is capable of handling the complexities involved in taking data from different environments. It is also capable of exception handling. If any application has limited functionality, we can use UiPath for automation with that particular application. With advanced selectors and linked queries, we can get the data from the application or interact with the application.

UiPath Document Understanding has helped to reduce the data entry work and physical copies of documents.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. For every organization, it is very important that automation is robust enough.

UiPath can help minimize your on-premises footprint. It depends on whether you plan to deploy your automation on the cloud or on-prem. On-prem has various challenges and restrictions, but it also has benefits.

UiPath speeds up digital transformation without requiring expensive or complex application upgrades, or IT application support. App integrations are advanced and robust. It is plug-and-play. You can integrate with Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, SAP, and various databases. There are pre-loaded activities. You can integrate with GitLab or GitHub. It has inbuilt activities for enterprise-level applications.

UiPath reduces human errors, but it also depends upon the process. It depends on how much interaction is required and what exception rates are there. When everything has been identified, it can reduce errors by more than 70%.

The first feature that I like is the exception-handling capability. The second feature is the REframework provided by them, and the third feature would be the Orchestrator functions. There is also the feasibility provided to monitor the ports and deploy the code. There is monitoring, retrieving, and all those things. We can use the web or mobile application. These are the key features of UiPath.

For handling complex scenarios, REframework is good. It has good exception handling and in-built mechanisms.

The certification can be made more affordable.

In terms of features, we get regular updates, and AI has recently been integrated. As of now, I do not have an area of improvement. They have already improved the functionality of Orchestrator. As compared to two or three years ago, Orchestrator now offers different functionalities and services. There is a difference, and it has improved.

I have been using UiPath for more than three years.

It is stable. Our organization has licenses because we cannot upgrade the application in sync with the Community version. The enterprise has to stick to one version for a certain period or whatever tenure has been mentioned in the license. The Community version is the playground for UiPath. They upgrade it, and all the beta version updates are there. They come to know how things are going and what are the responses and challenges.

It is scalable. It is used in multiple departments. The size of the organizations that use UiPath varies. They could be MNCs or startups.

Their support is good. After procuring the licenses, when there is an issue, there is a dedicated support team. They respond well.

The UiPath Community is vast. It provides an opportunity to get help from others. They provide good support, and the MVPs are actively engaged in responding to the queries that people are posting when facing any challenge. We can find relevant information by searching with keywords. It is good.

UiPath Academy has been useful in learning about new topics and new versions.

Neutral

I am quite new to Automation Anywhere, but a better exception-handling mechanism and the ability to interact with various applications make UiPath more unique. The drag-and-drop interface is attractive to people who are not very technical. The user experience is more intuitive.

We have on-premises and cloud deployments. The deployment part takes about a week because we have to prepare the production environment. A week is good enough for the deployment.

The number of people involved in the deployment varies. Support teams are there. Developers are also there. There are also people from the change management team.

Like any other software, it requires maintenance.

I would recommend UiPath to others. Overall, I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. It is robust and scalable, but there is always scope for improvement.