UiPath Platform Reviews

My company has multiple processes across various lines of businesses like finance, contact center, HR, tax, etc. Our use cases are based on the business corporation. They have to agree with the use case and what they want to automate. They have to provide the business details about the exact process. The developer or the lead will design the solution accordingly.

For example, in the revenue accounting area, we have around 5,000 to 15,000 requests in a day. It's all based on the number of sales that they made. We have implemented a multi-board approach, where the process can simultaneously run in almost 15 to 30 missions, whenever there is a requirement. We can increase the number of licenses based on the requirements.

We use Automation Cloud and Task Capture. They're trying to implement Task Capture with a couple of lines of businesses right now. We did not implement it completely, but it's in process.

If a person is spending eight hours in a day on a job, we can automate that process. He can validate it in an hour and the rest of the time he can spend doing other things. Our overall experience is good with automation. There are a couple of businesses that are really happy with our support on their daily tasks. 

If revenue accounting wants to do their responsibilities, they need 100 employees. Automation made their life easy and they can now validate quickly with 5 or 10 agents and get it done.

UiPath has saved costs.

We use the Apps feature. It helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps.

The Automation Cloud offering will help to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership, by taking care of things like infrastructure and maintenance. We are on-prem now. We are going to migrate this year.

We have various automations in various applications like desktop, mainframe-based, and SAP-based applications. I work with almost all of the applications. I see good progress no matter what we do. The most valuable feature is that UiPath works with all these solutions.

Building automations is easy based on whatever automation you develop, just drag and drop. It's easy to maintain.

We use the Academy. If you don't know anything about UiPath, you can go to the UiPath Academy and start using it. It will give you an overall idea of what is what. 

The greatest value from the Academy is that I don't have to go to a person for learning. I can learn on my own time, night or day. The portal is also good. 

They're planning to look into machine learning. They have a vision; they have a plan.

When we raise a ticket, they'll ask a number of questions to analyze the problem. It would be better if they connected quickly and it was a call so they can understand the issue and then schedule a follow-up call. 

We can't explain each and every thing. When it's on a call, we can explain it in a few minutes. 

The stability is good, but when we migrate to a newer version a few issues can emerge. We just have to do our best and make sure everything is up and running. Overall, the stability is okay.

We previously used Blue Prism. It is process automation. The user interface is different. How we interact with the development environment and how we manage the solutions is different. Overall, Blue Prism and UiPath are both good. 

I wouldn't say the setup is difficult. We need to work with various teams to get everything going.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the complexity. If it is complex, based on the developer and urgency, we'll split it into two parts, test it, and quickly deploy it. We have deployed on an emergency basis in one to two days. It's a complex process, but there are five or six developers who work without any sleep around the clock.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

With federal governments, a lot of the use cases vary around what they're doing, however, it's just a lot of PDF, Excel, and Microsoft Suite automation and then interacting with their custom and web-based tools for subject information.

We don't use it a ton internally. We do more consulting services where we help other organizations get it set up. We're trying to look at maybe more internal ways to use it, however, most of what we do is external. That's just our entire model.

The typical spiel with UiPath is you're getting rid of the tedious and redundant work and you're saving time for people and bringing them up to do more human-oriented tasks.

Anything and everything under the solution has been very helpful for us. UiPath Studio is the most valuable for what we're doing simply due to the fact that it’s development software.

The most valuable part is how it interacts with the websites. A lot of the other automation solutions aren't doing that. A lot of what we do is involved in web-based automation and that's pretty key.

As a developer, the ease of building automation is great. I don't know if it's easy for the typical business user that I interact with. That's why there are professional services to develop and things like that.

We do use the UiPath Academy courses. UiPath Academy is great. It's one of the best online training platforms I've seen. That said, it’s an average user base that we're working with. I've had to teach people how to copy and paste. That level of user is not going to learn how to do variables and selectors and things like that.

The science of the software's easy enough to pick up if you know how to develop and I thought the Academy was fantastic at helping the learning process along.

The biggest value that the UiPath Academy offers is just the ability to train somebody up and know how to use UiPath in roughly a week.

The solution has saved costs for organizations. The exact amount is very tricky to quantify as I have multiple clients. It depends on which client we’re talking about. A lot of them are coming up in the beginning stages. My first client saved around 200,000 hours, which was significant. More recent ones may be in the tens of hours at this point. Those numbers relate to nobody specific, just a fledgling RPA program.

UiPath has reduced human error. That said there's plenty of bot error that occurs. You have to be aware of that if you are going to replace humans. I haven't honestly tracked it to see what the percentage is on errors on any of my projects, however, I would assume it is a reduction, and yet not quite 100%.

Right now, reducing errors is not yet important for our business and the businesses that we consult for. We don't really come across processes where there are so many errors. That's what we need to fix. It's not why people are using it. They're using it for the ROI value.

The solution has freed up employee time. It generally allowed the employees to focus on higher-value work and their level of satisfaction with the job.

I’m not sure if the Academy fulfills all of our needs in terms of staying up to speed with the solution. I haven't really gone back to the Academy after I first got through the development training to look at other solutions and stuff. I usually just rely on meetings with UiPath.

The stability needs to be improved, as does the scalability. 

We've used the solution for four or five years.

In terms of stability, that's where there's room for improvement.

It just comes down to a lot of selectors and items of that nature. Selectors can fail randomly and then start working again and can cause issues. That's been our issue with stability.

The scalability is directly tied to the stability. It's a lot harder to scale the solution to run on a lot of computers. Each of these has some unique issues when it comes to deployment.

With my current client, we have probably around ten users at this time.

Technical support is great. Also, the UiPath forum is super helpful, however, when I've used the license key, you got actual support and that's been really good.

I'm not aware of the company using a different RPA solution previous to UiPath. I personally only use UiPath.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployments have taken six months to a year.

We have seen a return on investment from the companies that are utilizing this solution.

The individual robot and studio licenses are good. Usually what I see clients shake their heads at is the add-ons, the AI capability. Insights, for example, was very expensive. My client didn't want to get it due to the price.

Orchestra is usually acceptable as it's part of the package, however, the other stuff that's not studio or robot, usually, clients aren't, in my experience, interested in paying more.

We are primarily focused on UiPath due to the fact that that's what our clients are using, however, we're vendor agnostic. We support UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere as well. We have developers that are all trained in each of their usages. Whether we use them all at once or suggest them depends on the client. We have one client where they're using a bunch of them, however, most of our clients use UiPath I'm with the federal government, and UiPath is the only one that's really approved to do that. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

We do not yet use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program.

I would advise new users to be patient due to the fact that it's going to take a while for it to get stood up. Also, when you are working with the federal government, there are lots of approvals. Other than that, new users should make sure they get use cases and have everything very well documented. Users need to understand all the decisions and the logic behind it. That's the main advice I'd give.

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

Often, the solution is used for a lot of connecting data from different systems, et cetera. Also, a lot of tasks involve taking data from Excel or an email and putting it into different PDFs at high volumes and then saving everything in a certain spot in the file directory.

With UiPath, people can do more knowledge work and don't have to spend as much time doing menial tasks. For example, connecting the different systems and handling large volumes of Excel and PDFs. From what I've seen with clients, that's really common. Typically, tasks with data like that would take like a lot of time. The same with pulling reports from a website and then having to run a tableau dashboard and refresh R code. There are a lot of different layers that RPA is able to connect to and with, which is cool.

I like that you can automatically take a picture of what you're getting the selector for. For example, the next developer can tell what was on the screen. That way it’s easy to transfer from developer to developer, which is sometimes difficult.

I also really like being able to put notes on each of the activities. That's really valuable for me. Even if I'm not passing it to somebody else, it reminds me of what I was doing.

On a grander scale, there's definitely other stuff, however, those are just little things that I find valuable.

The one bot that pulls reports runs the R code and then refreshes the Tableau dashboard saves a lot of time. I can't recall the number exactly, however, without the bot, it takes a long time to pull those reports manually. I’m talking half a day for one person. And we may need to pull 20 or 30 reports per day. The website takes a long time to load, which means for a person it's just a lot of sitting time, which is very annoying.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. It’s well-known that UiPath's training is the best of any of the tools, including Blue Prism, Power Automate, or Automation Anywhere. Power Automate in particular doesn't really have as much specific training. With UiPath, the pictures and the hands-on nature, and just the scrolling is cool. The training looks cool and it's very helpful. After you take the training, you can actually go and do something. It's not like you've just read about it.

The biggest value in the Academy is the paths. You can choose to go down a certain path. It's nice to have it curated. Also, there’s definitely the hands-on piece that sets it apart. In some other solution’s training, they just describe the different features of the tool. With UiPath, it’s interactive and you have to do it. Part of the assessment is you have to do that big RA framework process, which is good due to the fact that, with just training, you've already done it. You’re already using the tool.

Building automation with UiPath is very easy. It has a good interface. I like how you can nest certain activities. It makes things more visible. The modular approach of having different pages and then invoking them is very intuitive.

We just use attended automation right now as there is a lot of proof of concepts going on. We're hoping to get to more unattended automation soon since that seems to be a big, high-value area.

In general, and maybe this is not the tool's fault specifically, however, more awareness of the limitations for federal clients needs to be considered. There is a lot of the cool stuff that we've heard about, and I'm probably going to hear about today, that we can't really use due to security.

A particular part of the platform hasn't been ATOD. If there's any way that UiPath could help support even more the federal clients by saying "hey, this is not going to break your system" that would be really helpful as some of it would be very valuable to them. It's just getting it past the review process that is the challenge right now, and security is the main concern.

For citizen developers, Studio is difficult. It's just too over their head. They don't want to finish the training. They're getting fed up. They already have their own job and they're just not as bought in on the process which is the tone set at the top. Their management has to deal with that. It just doesn't seem very realistic overall sometimes for a lot of clients to have citizen developers.

I've been using the solution for about two years.

Sometimes clients think that they can just do something and then it runs forever. People who actually work with it know that it's going to break and you're going to have to fix it. However, that's part of the process. When it first starts running, you're going to have to make it better. There needs to be managing of expectations. It's going to give you value, however, it's not going to be perfect the first time, which is just not even the automation's fault. It's sometimes the systems. You have to learn the quirks of the systems and the systems that it works with. For example, a website might have a pop-up that you wouldn't expect. It'll break, and clients will ask "why is this broken?" You have to explain the bot doesn't know how to handle everything.

In theory, the scalability is great. In practice, if clients hear "oh, you can just build a bot and then put it out to everybody" - that's not really the case. There's going to be that deployment and configuration process where you have to work with each of the analysts or whoever you're working with to actually make it work on the computer. There might be more expectation management needed. Sometimes, for example, a computer has quirks, and we have to do this and that. That said, overall, after you get situated, it's very easy to manage from the orchestrator new packages, et cetera. My assumption is that it is good.

The responsiveness was quick, however, in my case, I wasn't really able to get the question answered. It was actually about licensing for one client. They were not as immediate in terms of their service, however, it was still good. We got an outcome. It just took a little bit longer than we expected to come to the conclusion.

The initial implementation was pretty straightforward. It wasn't specifically at my organization, however, one of the clients did an implementation from the ground up and we helped them get UiPath. It was us coordinating with UiPath reps, and it was pretty straightforward.

For our part, it was just knowing what licenses to get and working with, and knowing the client's situation. We were working closely with the UiPath reps to say "this is what they need" and then we just got it for them. I thought it would be a lot more complicated to know what license structure they would need, however, it turned out just fine.

I don't remember the length of that project. Deployment might have been around eight months for the whole thing to get situated and start being used.

We worked with UiPath to help our client set up the solution.

We've seen an ROI in UiPath. We just had a bot challenge with one client where they showcased different automation that they've made throughout the organization, and the numbers were great. I cannot remember the exact numbers, however, they were impressive.

The whole UiPath model is a bot for every person, so the attended licensing is obviously where the money goes. I don't know how realistic that is for a lot of clients. It makes a lot more sense to focus on making the process mining, task capture, and those type of tools, very user-friendly for people who would otherwise want to consider citizen developers.

You have to identify like the people who want to be citizen developers. There are really not many of those people, in my experience. One time I was working with somebody, and she didn't know where the start button was - and she was one of the people they had identified as a citizen. For her, this solution is not going to work.

Companies need higher-up people who know their organization and can identify those people. That's an internal thing. Overall, I would love to see UiPath figure out their financing to re-pivot and focus on citizen developers and get really good at identifying processes. Either way, we're still going to have dedicated people who actually develop and perfect as StudioX even is way above a lot of clients I've worked with. Taking into account all of my clients there has been one guy who could use Studio.

I've looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

With Blue Prism, the pro is that the grid in the development environment makes it easy to align and then see from a very high level what your process is doing, which UiPath is lacking. Even though you have the workflows where you don't have to have everything on the page, you can invoke stuff from other pages. That's nice. However, it's still not as visually apparent in terms of what's going on, unless you put a lot of notes, which some people just don't do. Blue Prism is good at the high-level view. I don't like them for almost everything else. It's very antiquated. I know they came up with RPA, the name and everything, however, I don't think they've kept up with the current energy of the industry. Also, their training is not good and the online community is not at all as strong as UiPath. 

With Automation Anywhere, the development, everything about that has gotten better recently. It has mostly improved due to the fact that they were coming from a really low place. I did not like that tool a couple of years ago. Then, they redid their training, and the interface became a lot different. They've gotten better. However, they are still not my favorite tool. The use cases that the tool is geared toward are not always as broad as what UiPath can handle. I do not like the search functionality for the different activities. If you type into, which is a UiPath phrase for an activity, in Automation Anywhere it won't recognize the phrase. They don't use it as a search function. You have to type exactly the name of the activity. I understand that they don't want to accommodate the exact verbiage that UiPath uses, however, it's annoying. In UiPath, if you type in something similar, it'll still bring up similar activities, even if it's not exactly the name, which is nice. Sometimes you can't remember the exact wording and it's good there's an option to search in a way that will show you the closest options.

With UiPath, the pros are the training. With getting new people up to speed, you would never say "let's start you on Blue Prism." It's too complicated. The UiPath training is really good,  and the developer community and online forums are usually accurate, which is more than you say for some other stuff. Overall, the usability of the UiPath tool, the deployment, and the interfaces of everything we've seen are a lot cleaner. Even on a basic level, the solution just looks cool. The main downside is the lack of awareness surrounding what government clients can use and what they can't and then work to tailor to that.

We are a UiPath partner. 

We have one client that is on version 20.4.3, however, most others are on the latest version of the solution.

We do not use the UiPath apps feature or UiPath's AI functionality right now.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. 

I would love to see a change in the process mining and differentiation on how they're catering toward the citizen developers. That would be outstanding and would show a lot of self-awareness for the company. Maybe I'm just totally cut off from the commercial sector and maybe they have brilliant people who are just ready to develop immediately, however, that is not what I've seen across all of my clients.

We have 12 bots in production right now. I can't speak exactly to all the bots. My role is in process mining. With process mining, we're using the PDP process and we're building out a model for sales orders.

The most valuable features of UiPath are the possibilities. For example, we're excited about what's coming and we've saved some time with the bots, however, we're still learning. The idea is once we get really good at process mining it will be really good at building bots. We'll be able to uncover those opportunities and then execute on capitalizing on them.

I'm not sure of how much time we've saved, in the tens of hours per month. While it's not nothing, they've been small use cases to build up the capability. We are still figuring out how to build bots, and how to get the orchestrator all set up. 

We're doing a crawl, walk, run, taking our time and doing it right. We are building up the center of excellence. We're out of crawl and we're in to walk, however, we're not running yet.

So far, the conversation around automation and cultural change has been really powerful in terms of re-thinking our processes and asking if there's a better way to do it. right now, we're beginning to understand that we don't have to be stuck where we're at.

It's changed the dynamic of how we look at our processes and how we talk about why and how we do what we do. That's been tangible.

Our teams have used UiPath Academy courses. It has been instrumental and we couldn't do it without those courses. That was one of the reasons why we selected UiPath. They're robust and it is easy to access training modules.

The biggest value that we've realized from the Academy is confidence. Just getting over that initial hurdle of understanding what we're doing has been huge.

In terms of the ease of building automation via UiPath, it takes a long time to set up the environment and get the training and be able to do it.

The overall ecosystem and platform, which I know that they're working on, needs to be better. Being able to connect idea generation and opportunity into discovery and then into automation needs to be seamless. It needs to be end-to-end and also more robust. If I had to give them a piece of advice, it would be that the RPA is one component of process improvement, and they own the RPA space, so I realize that's their bread and butter, however, RPA isn't the only tool in the toolbox. I'd like to see more in relation to how we can eliminate waste and how we can lean out our processes.

Maybe the improvement solution isn't RPA. I'd like the solution to address how can I see more opportunities and capitalize on the improvement of any kind with an obvious focus on RPA. That's where the real power is going to come from. That said, it's not the only focus.

I've used the solution for over a year. 

The stability has been great. I don't have any issues or comments there. I don't have any concerns with the stability of the company or the platform's software. We haven't experienced many bugs or anything like that. We're happy with the stability.

The scalability is where the solution is going to come into play. Likely, it will, as we have learned the possibilities are ripe and endless. 

Right now we're using it extensively, however, we're only building bots and deploying process mining within our controller and finance area. That's our learning curve and it is probably the ripest ground for automation. We plan to increase usage. We've just scratched the surface there. We've only done maybe 5% of controllers. Then, we have the whole rest of the organization and the whole supply chain.

Technical support was great. They helped a lot during the implementation. I would rate them at an eight out of ten simply due to the fact that the premium support person was very, very helpful and honestly I don't know what we would've done without them. However, that did come at a price.

Making that service standard as part of the implementation process would probably pump my technical support rating up to a ten in that, while the experience was a ten, we paid for it.

In terms of the initial setup, once you have people that are familiar with the software and you have all your environments and connectors set up, the Building Box is very user-friendly. That said, it doesn't happen overnight.

From contract signing to putting our first bot into production, the setup and deployment were about six months.

Being on-premise, there was added complexity. Had we opted for the cloud version, it would have been a simpler process. We had the standard provisioning servers and had to get them set up and installed the software, et cetera.

The process was complex simply due to the fact that it's an advanced technology, however, UiPath is really great at helping out. We had a premium plus support person.

A lot of the details and things that we'd never done before, they were there to help us on their end and give us pointers and tips on our end.

We have not yet seen an ROI. When we look at the savings we have realized versus the upfront costs and the time investment, we're probably still under water, however, we recognize that this is a long game.

For the quality of the product that we get,  it's a fair price. I'm a believer in you get what you pay for. You always want to maximize your value, however, that doesn't necessarily mean a lower price.

Before choosing UiPath, we did look at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were the ones that we actually did full demos of. We also looked at the websites of some of the smaller players.

The main one that we really looked at where and it came down to a head to head was with Automation Anywhere. The key difference for me, with my focus, was process mining. Automation anywhere had some capability there, however, it was a recording device and it was intrusive to the end-user. You also couldn't go backward in time. When you got everything plugged in and turned it on, you could start recording and building your processes. You could see last week's processes next week, however, the UiPath solution uses the audit tables. Therefore, when I turn it on, I can go back in time, for not just a week; I can go back two years. I can go back that far to see how the process has evolved and where we're at. I can build a more robust baseline to change from today rather than having to wait for six months to build my baseline.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. We just installed it earlier this year, therefore it's probably the latest and greatest.

We do not use AI functionality in our automation process. We also do not use UiPath apps features. While we're learning about some of those new things, we're not using them today.

The main thing that I would advise others is to get leadership on board and get their ducks in a row in terms of the culture that they want to create and the long-term vision that they have for this.

You can't capitalize on it in six months. If you're going to throw in the towel if you're not seeing ROI in your first calendar year, then don't even start. It takes some leadership fortitude and some stick-to-itiveness. It doesn't happen organically or on its own. If a company is not dedicating the resources or not freeing up people's time, they won't get far. The bots aren't going to create themselves yet. Maybe with AI, in the future, that will be possible, however, that's way off.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine for now. I'm really happy with the program that we're building up. I'm happy with the solutions that they offer. It'll jump up to a ten when we get to scale and it's paying for itself. 

It's widely used across the bank. Some are dealing with regulatory issues, for example, taking documents out of one system, moving them into another. Others are opening new accounts for clients. Some are doing payment transactions and that involves looking at emails that come in and determining what type of document that is so it gets routed and processed correctly. We've touched every line of business within the bank.

The solution has improved our organization, specifically around all the operational aspects of the bot. Once we deploy them through the orchestrator we use insights to see how the bots are performing, what errors are referring to, and just the general health insights would be the biggest lift that we've gotten out of the solution. Building the automation is a little bit easier and quicker on the platform than where we were before.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

We are really getting into using AI Center and we use Insights.

The solution saved costs for our organization. That said, I can't quantify it.

UiPath has reduced human error.

In the initial automation that we're doing, we're migrating the ones that have run on another platform. Therefore, we already know how valuable they are to the bank. Sometime in 2022, we'll really be getting into new opportunities.

UiPath has freed up employee time. In my specific job, I’m responsible for the running of the platform, making sure it's up and available. The other teams actually take care of the delivery and are more in tune with the business side and can speak more to the freeing of time in quantitative terms. I’m a degree away from that. I'm aware of what's going on over there, however, I don't track it so closely.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. The Academy is a really good platform to start training on. It really gets you into the platform and allows you to start exploring other things. Generally, they're really good courses.

The number of courses and the variety of the topics all seem to touch on whatever aspect you're looking to do with the platform.

With all the different tools that they have in their arsenal, sometimes it's hard to know how we can get the most out of them. We see it as a kid going into a candy store. There are all sorts of choices. However, we don't necessarily understand, you would take this, but not that? You seem to need to mix and match certain things. We don't necessarily understand that. We need them to be more clear in saying, for example, "if you want to do process mining, great, however, these are its strengths and these are its limitations." If we know the pros and cons, then we can make a decision about what we need to adjust in terms of how we go after new opportunities. Basically, we are seeking better guidance on how to use the suite of the products together.

I've been using the solution for a year. 

The solution is very stable. 

The scalability is good. 

We have a team collectively between developers and product owners and general users, so the users are comprised of roughly 100 different people. At different points, our in-orchestrator has 30 or so developers across several teams. In general, in terms of human people using it, it's likely 80 to 100 users or somewhere in there.

We are looking to increase the usage.

Technical support is okay. They have some gaps that they need to close. I know some of their folks from firsthand experience aren't necessarily used to using the new modern folders. Therefore, when we get on the phone and say "Hey, we're having this problem". The support staff will say "Oh, well you're a modern folder set up. I mostly work with classic." That doesn't matter from my perspective. I still need help.

We used to use Blue Prism. Blue Prism only does RPA. Our goal was to consolidate, to have one platform for automation as a long-term solution for the bank. We went through a selection process and UiPath came out on top.

I wasn't directly part of the setup team, however, from the outside looking in, it seems it was a little more involved than we had initially thought.

Some of it may have been internal. Bank processes and having to have so many different people involved to install a server and configure it on the network and all that could have added difficulty.

The deployment was probably close to three or four months. We have four environments. Over the course of about three months, all four environments eventually got stood up. The first took the longest. We noted what went right and wrong and went from there. 

We probably have seen an ROI, based on the initial cost to stand it up. That pricing structure is increasing now from the initial offering, however, overall, we're probably seeing some benefit out of it.

The pricing is pretty fair for the size per the number of licenses. It's my understanding that part of that was influenced by the fact that they won their business from one of their competitors, Blue Prism. That probably helped.

We looked at Automation Anywhere. They had recently upgraded from their desktop to a web-based client. In the meantime, they dropped functions in the conversion and when I used it on the desktop, I noticed that there were certain functions that they didn't bring over onto the web version yet, which kind of surprised me. As far as just overall usability, integration with other technologies, whether it's Python or writing .net custom code, UiPath just kind of seamlessly works within the platform.

We are not yet utilizing AI.

I'd advise potential new users to do the due diligence and don't expect that UiPath is going to always outline the best ways to use it. A company just has to understand there's a lot there and try to be as specific in what they want to do. 

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine.

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. I'm more of a functional person who understands the design and the processes but not the programming, coding, and details. 

I am using their automation cloud offering.

One of the best benefits is that instead of just doing their single task, it gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them; for instance, for PO distribution, we had to think about where our suppliers' lists are and what do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as much as now because we are trying to automate it. What you find is that the challenge isn't just in the robot. It is what you do before you get to the robot that is critical, and if it forces us to fix that, it has been a success. It helps you to realize some efficiencies in your current processes.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership of UiPath by taking care of things such as infrastructure. We have gone and moved many more things to the cloud. We have a Hyperion solution in the cloud that we use for consolidation. We have FCCS cloud from Hyperion.

I anticipate that there would be a reduction in human errors and also time savings within these five processes. Inherently, it has to improve the accuracy. That's because now you're focused on a particular thing, and you're testing it. If it is not a hundred percent accurate, it is not going to production. 

The ability to follow and orchestrate what the robots are doing has been very valuable. I've been working on the automation hub because that's the next step after our test case of five robotic implementations. So, it is orchestrated to see how they're doing.

UiPath Academy is helpful in terms of the ability to connect the software to the processes that you're trying to automate. It has been helpful in understanding the functions, and it is where you would go to get a better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial with examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

I'm learning it for the training for the RPA associate, and I'm about 70% through there. UiPath's academy courses have been helpful in onboarding or being up to speed with UiPath. However, it has been tougher because the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. I am sure the younger people will pick it up much faster. There is so much out there, and there is so much to learn because it is not one software package. It provides the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. So, the opportunities are amazing but also intimidating.

I started with UiPath training in July 2021.

I am not worried about the stability. I may be naive, but if others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than what we are automating, it is not really a concern.

It is being used by accounting and IT. Finance is learning that, and they're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% on that journey.

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, etc, but right now, we're just in finance. Payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field that they do every day will take adoption and interest. Raising four kids, I realize you can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. So, that will be the challenge. The challenge is not whether you can automate something. It is more like will they let you automate something.

I have not really had to use the support, but I will. I've gone back and forth, and I've lost some of my training. I'm a tenant who is just in the training phase. So, everyone has had issues with getting in, and it's more whether they're using Google or Explorer, and how they're accessing it. I am getting that standardized and having them do that. I am also a victim of the same thing that I'm teaching them, and what I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig.

Before UiPath, we didn't use any other RPA solution. We went for UiPath because it was really a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning, reporting, etc, but the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in, and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes. They took Rally and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. There is a team of five members who went and looked at processes that we were doing and then told us about which ones we can change and do better with. By using his experience in other companies and having discussions with other people, along with the KPMG group, they did an analysis. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They're doing that by looking forward to five or 10 years and then coming back, which is really nice.

I will learn more about that. The workflow was nice, and the implementations that we have are relatively easy, but it is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. With reporting, it will be helpful for us to understand which things are best to automate and which ones are the easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from five implementations.

We are doing consulting with a collaborative effort with KPMG. So, they actually know more of the technical details, and they're supposed to be transferring data. 

KPMG did a sprint on the implementations. The sprints were such that it was really six week turnaround time, and that involved actually going backward and doing the assessments from those. By doing the cost benefits backward, we can set things upright and see what we do going forward. The key is not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it, and how quickly the people in the field can adopt that and have a robot actually be their assistant. I believe you call that the citizen developers.

Right now, it is way too big for me to even understand it. I feel like it's a universe. I'm just trying to get directions. The area that I'm looking at right now is analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing, and that's what is going to make management invest further into our idea. I come from a reporting background, and that's what I focus on in other financial packages that we have with PeopleSoft, Hyperion planning, and the FCCS cloud. In many of these automations, the need part of it is that you're not stuck within the software that you had; for example, a macro within Excel can only help you with what you're doing in Excel. It can't help you with an email. It can't help you with a PDF form, but you can bring these together, so the automation opportunities are endless.

So, at this time, it hasn't saved us money because we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do reporting so we can see. The decisions you make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. You should go to where you want to be five years from now and go backward. What you are doing today is going to make that five years strike. So, it is an investment.

It is pricey at the beginning, but we'll have to see going forward what we get for the tools. It is always expensive to buy a really nice car and not drive it very far and very much. So, it is about utilization.

I believe my company did evaluate other solutions, and they definitely liked UiPath best. The primary differentials were reputation, experience, and the level and quality of the tool.

I would advise others to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if you didn't use it going forward, with the basic principles, you'll probably fix things and then come back to it. Some people just have bad processes, and it would be very frustrating to use them because they haven't fixed their processes. You have to get your processes aligned first and then take them to the point that they're standardized and understood by different people using them, and then you can automate across different software packages.

In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team, but what I do like is once you do something, you store it in a library, and then you have plug and play automation that you can add to others. So, you don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again, and that's going to be a huge benefit.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I'm learning it, but have to inject experience. I have to learn and understand, and then I have to utilize t. Like many solutions that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, but there is the best way. I always wish you'd just teach the best way, but I understand that you want to make people agile and have an understanding of using it in different ways. However, learning all three ways is very cumbersome. You really want to learn the way you're going to use it.

We were with the Air Force and had really a lot of different use cases including finance, credit card transactions, flight authorizations for training missions, et cetera. There are a few hundred use cases.

UiPath has improved the way our company functions. For our customers, for the Air Force, they've seen a lot of enthusiasm around the ability to develop their way out of mundane work. For those individuals, it's been a good cultural improvement. That's really been the biggest thing for them.

The developers like the studio interface better than other RPA providers that they've used in the past and find it easy to use and can provide a lot of impact.

The ease of building automation using UiPath has been great. We actually have done them with airmen, with people that are in the Air Force. We've done training and workshops such as one-week workshops with about 250 airmen. Most of them, 80% to 90%, have built bots that work in production with basically little to no training. They can do a lot without any development experience whatsoever going into the solution.

The solution has saved costs for our customers. Overall, it's tens of millions of dollars there for a potential return. They're still working on scaling that out. However, bots that have currently been built could be spread out across the entire Air Force, which is 650,000 employees, and would have about $30 million worth of potential benefit.

UiPath has reduced human error. With one particular use case, we did with flight authorizations, they had to compare your names off of a PDF to a 40,000-row spreadsheet. That not only saves time, it also reduces that error dramatically as the bot can go and find the row in the spreadsheet and then match it exactly as opposed to somebody looking for it manually.

It has saved time for our customers, equally likely $30 million in potential savings and allowing for a shift to higher-order work.

We’ve used UiPath Academy courses. We actually have a new employee training right now using UiPath Academy, and we recommend it to our customers as well. It's fantastic due to the fact that we're not spending very much time onboarding new employees. We're letting them go do the academy and then help them in assisting where needed. That's a huge benefit for us as we can continue to do our job rather than focusing on onboarding. Users can also self-lead, and new developers can go and utilize it without a lot of interaction from others or a lot of help from others.

The functionality where you can quickly convert your code from Studio X to Studio is really nice.

The StudioX interface is too different from Studio. We have a lot of people and we'll go in and start people with StudioX and they have trouble mapping to StudioX from Studio.

I've been using the solution for 18 months.

The stability has been very good. We've had no issues with stability at all.

I haven't seen any issues surrounding scaling. We're looking at one of the larger implementations of UiPath that exists right now. We were looking at a 250,000-user solution, however, we haven't done it yet. Therefore, it's hard to really comment on that.

In terms of technical support, our people have used it, and I haven't heard any complaints, although I have not used it directly.

We did previously use Blue Prism and Robocorp.

I prefer UiPath due to the sales support for this specific Air Force opportunity. We started with Blue Prism. We switched over to UiPath due to the fact that they were getting some traction inside the air force, and then we got really tightly in the line with UiPath. For me, it's not as much a software bake-off to determine which software is better or worse. It's really the attraction the customer has, and UiPath is the market leader. That support is really what's driven us to UiPath.

UiPath has a good attendance solution, which helps to ease the adoption. Our developers' feedback is that the user interface and development methodology are better in UiPath. That's why they don't want to go back to the others.

I am usually involved in the initial setup of UiPath. Our initial setup is really unique due to the fact that we're installing it in a government cloud. That is fairly complex, however, that’s very specific to that use case. Therefore, there are lots of challenges with that, however, that's more of a government problem than UiPath.

On average, for us, the setup takes a long time. It's taken us months as we have to get through these approval processes and things like that. In terms of the actual setup itself, it’s pretty fast and takes maybe half a day.

In terms of pricing, UiPath is fine. It is what it is, and I don't find it unreasonable.

Our situation is really unique due to the fact that we're trying to sell an enterprise license agreement through the Air Force. It's a pretty unique licensing situation.

It's my understanding that we are using the 2020.10 version.

We are just using the studio and the automation. Due to the fact that it's the Air Force, we're really focused on just the pure RPA piece of UiPath.

Our clients do not use AI functionality from UiPath right now.

I'd advise anyone considering the solution to go fast. What we see a lot is a lot of go fast and plan for scalability from the beginning. There's a ton of potential out there, however, we see people getting bogged down in a lot of different things instead of really just automating and developing automation as quickly as possible.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Any software product is really difficult to be a ten, to be perfect. An eight is probably as high as I would go for any software product. It does a really good job and it's easy to use and scalable. I've had no complaints about any of it.

I am a software developer and I am a full-time RPA developer for my company. We create automation for internal purposes as well as for our clients.

I have implemented 15 to 16 processes end-to-end that cover use cases including Excel, front-end web-based applications, backend Windows applications, and sometimes Citrix. I have also done some Adobe Flash Player automation.

The REFramework (Enhanced Robotic Enterprise Framework) is what we use for most of our use cases.

We are using Studio for development on-premises and we use Orchestrator in the cloud.

UiPath has helped to improve our organization in several ways. Prior to UiPath, the company was using legacy methods of automation. These were time-consuming and required that more code be written. With the ease of use and speed at which automations can be developed using UiPath, the company is bringing on new clients and therefore, more business.

UiPath and the automations that we create help us to better utilize our resources. For example, a manual task that used to take between seven and eight days can be completed in one or two days with automation.

This product is bringing new clients to the business and nowadays, all of our clients require something to be done in the domain of robotic process automation. 

With respect to ease of use and building automations, UiPath is very good. I would rate them at least a four out of five in that regard, especially when compared to other products on the market. The ease of building automations makes them quick to create and it can be accomplished by people in the business sector.

UiPath enables and helps us to create end-to-end automations, and it divides all of the subtasks up in a good way. For example, monitoring processes is different from developing code, and each of these is separated such that they are independent, but we can link them together for the benefit of the process. This is important because I am a complete process developer, so having all of the different subtasks available in one tool allows me to best develop automation for our clients.

This solution has helped to decrease our time to value, which is something that is evident when you look at the automation we were doing previously. Our technologies included Python, VBScript, and other ways. These approaches took more time to develop and are a little bit more complex. With the help of this tool, it takes less time to build the same automation. It allows us to focus on building the logic and algorithms, without having to deep-dive into things like syntax. By allowing us to focus on the business logic for each process, it leads to significant time savings.

We use the attended automation feature and it helps us when it comes to tasks that require interaction between user and application, such as the necessity to enter credentials. It is quite helpful, in particular for BPM processes, and this is something that is important to us. The typical case is when somebody is doing repetitive work as part of their task. In other words, they are working on one task, and the bot is working beside them but needs the occasional input from the user. In these processes, the bot is doing 80% of the work and the user is doing the remaining 20%.

We use the AI functionality because it makes it feasible to automate processes that are quite complex. For example, Document Understanding and NLP from the UiPath Cloud are things that we use. 

The AI features enhance UiPath's capabilities and allow us to automate more processes overall. Previously, when we were doing a specific task, we may not have been able to fully automate it. With the help of AI, we can do more.

In previous iterations of our bots, before the AI features were used, we were not able to get all of the information that we needed from PDF files. This is specific to certain use cases, to present an example. The AI functionality generally gives us more data, whether from document understanding, computer vision, or otherwise.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error because the bot is doing everything and eliminates the opportunity for people to make mistakes in the process. UiPath has had a positive impact in this regard, although we have had successes with other similar tools as well.

UiPath and automation have helped to free up employee time and nowadays, they are more creative because of it. With many of their tasks automated, they have time to work on things that are more creative and have a higher value.

For example, for a task that used to take an employee 10 hours, they are now spending between three and four hours on it. In the remaining six hours, they can be more productive and work on more important tasks. This not only helps the employee but adds value to the company as well.

The selectors work to help automate at the front-end or backend of applications, and they are quite useful. If you use selectors correctly then the automation can be done in a systematic way. For example, selectors can be used for clicking tabs in an application, and what we do is create an algorithm with the correct logic to go with them.

UiPath has good recording features that help to create automations.

We use the REFramework as a template, which divides things such as the opening of applications, applying the business logic, using the queues, and closing applications. As part of this framework, UiPath provides a systematic architecture to us. We just have to understand and work with it by applying our business logic and coordinating effectively to create end-to-end automations.

I would like to see more AI-related features added. Improvements could be made to the models so that they are more compatible with data science and machine learning.

Better support for databases should be included. For example, interacting with SQL Server and SQL Developer would be beneficial features.

I have been working with UiPath for more than three years. The company started using it before that.

Stability is something that UiPath is working on. The new versions have added more stability and important features like test suites and the workflow analyzer. Adding features and improving stability is a continuous process.

In my previous company, which is a large MNC, there were between 700 and 800 people working regularly with UiPath. In my current company, we have between 400 and 500 people working with RPA using UiPath. As we continue to take on more clients, we will expand our usage.

There are a variety of roles for the people that work with UiPath. Some are developers, whereas others are set up or support teams. Our company is very heavily focused on this domain.

The number of people required for deployment and maintenance depends on the size of the process. A larger and more complex process requires a larger support team to maintain it. For example, a simple process can be deployed and maintained with a two-person team, whereas four people are required for a medium-sized process, and a six-person team would be used to handle a complex process.

I would rate the technical support between seven and eight out of ten.

In general, we express whatever concerns we have and then within a few days, we get updates from them. However, sometimes we have to elaborate a lot before we receive an answer. The documents and repository that they use for analyzing and improving our processes could be organized in a more systematic fashion.

We were using a variety of legacy tools that were more time-consuming and needed code development to a greater degree. These included things like Python code and Visual Basic scripting. There are still other tools that are being used, in addition to UiPath.

Prior to UiPath, approximately 80% of our costs were spent on developing automations. With the benefits that come with UiPath, the RPA costs are now only 45%. As the costs have decreased and the volume of automations increased, it improves company profit.

I have worked with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, and I find that UiPath is easier to use. However, to capture more market share, UiPath has to continue expanding its machine learning and AI features.

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are still being used for some processes in the company. We have switched away from them in some cases, opting instead for UiPath, because in general, it is easier to implement automation tasks using UiPath.

We have a setup and deployment team in-house that is responsible for implementation. They take care of the deployment for our clients and bring things into their production environment. 

The team does their best to keep updated on what UiPath features are available and what the current version is. If updates are pending then they will be aware of them.

The company is experiencing quite a good return on its investment in UiPath.

I began learning UiPath with the Community version, which is available free of charge.

Before choosing UiPath for any particular job, the company examines the process to see how complex it is. Based on the time that it will take to implement it, as well as the number of resources, whether in UiPath, Blue Prism, or something else, the decision is made. Different tools are used for different processes based on these assessments.

I started my UiPath journey using the Community Edition, version 2018.4. After I spent some time learning UiPath personally, I began using it full-time in my company.

We have several different teams that use UiPath in different ways. First, we have the developers, who do the coding and create the bots. Then, we have the testing team, who ensure that the bots perform correctly. Next, we have the deployment team and after that, there is the support team.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that they need developers who are good with logic. They should come from a coding background with experience in logic, algorithms, have some knowledge of C#, and have some knowledge of HTML tags.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is that technology can be made more efficient by using these tools.

UiPath has all of the features that are required to make automation successful. It is currently just ahead of other similar tools on the market and if they continue to add features then it could be the market leader.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.