UiPath Platform Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using its latest version.

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

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

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

I have been using this solution for about four years.

Its stability is very good. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We typically solve for any use cases that falls under different business functions within our company. That includes finance, supply chains, services, IT by itself, and a little bit of engineering.

UiPath has improved the way our organization functions. The flexibility with which the business processes get changed is great.

A lot of times we know the method of operation, however, certainly it'll not be the same after a few months, a few years, or longer. Our dependent script or whatever is in place (that is dependent on that business process) has to be adjusted. The flexibility with this tool has enabled us to adjust those workflows quickly and deploy them so that our business can continue using those applications or the workflows that we’ve been using before, even after changes to the underlying system.

The most valuable aspect has been the workflows. They have helped to deal with legacy applications. We have a lot of legacy applications in place, which we cannot get rid of. The processes around these legacy applications are something that cannot be automated in a typical way. The RPA is helping us to automate the business processes that have to work with legacy applications.

The ease of building automation using the solution is great as it is a low-code solution.

I'm able to create workflows. By the time I'm familiar with one process, I'll be able to automate the next one. This is the case especially with tools like task capture; I'm just working through the process. In the end, it will be a skeleton workflow and it can be used for deployment once we are done with the cleaning. It has reduced the development life cycle by about 30%. It’s done this by making use of the features that are enabled by task capture and certain other features within the Studio.

Overall, we’ve seen the solution has saved costs. That is our value realization.

Our first target metric is to bring up the number of processes that we can save. We have a formula to convert inter-dollar values in terms of the user experience we are benefitting from. That’s the user experience that is enabled by automation. Those are direct savings which can be calculated by multiplying the number of dollars that we have spent for one resource per hour. Indirect monetary benefits can also be calculated by looking into the user experience factors and adding them when we do the value realization. In the last four years, we would've saved $3 million.

The human error rate has been reduced. Initially, when we targeted some of the business use cases, they were straightforward. They were linear in nature and there the accuracy had the upper hand 99.9% of the time. The reason is that the process by itself is quite linear. It doesn't have multiple branches or exceptional routes that it has to take to complete a particular transaction. We have good accuracy, however, we have had challenges with the accuracy when the business processes get complex. If there is any human intervention or if the quality of the data is not proper, or if the user errors are low, that is where the accuracy rate used to be low. It's better now.

Due to the fact that all these are role-based bots, if there is something that is getting changed, the bot will fail. Down the line, I can see that, for linear processes, accuracy will be great. However, when it comes to some of the complex processes, that is where we have challenges that we are facing with accuracy and we are continuously fine-tuning the process in such a way so that the accuracy can get better. It's great we can continuously tweak.

The solution does free up employee time and allows for the employees to focus on higher-value work. We have a lot of examples within our organizations where they have to deal with some kind of manually intensive task, such as just reading something from the document and putting that into the financial system.

We normally take up the customization portion that comes directly from customers. Those kinds of customizations have to be updated back into the financial system in order to make sure that they are appropriate. These updates take a while as they have to do with talking to the customer, understanding what changes are needed for a given order, or based on specific correspondence from the customers. With automation, employees can focus on talking to the customer to understand what changes they have to incorporate. And they can offload all the data entry tasks to a robot. This way, they can focus on how they can engage more with users to understand the pain points faced by the customer rather than spending time taking all those inputs and then doing the data entry job. They can be more client-facing.

I’m not sure exactly how much time is saved with automation. I could say that we have around 150 purchase processes that we have automated. We don't trace back how it has replaced a team or member of a team. We always go with the number of hours saved. We go the route of checking and saying “okay, so we have done this, but it needs a constant involvement from them in order to make sure that someone is owning the process.” We still own only the work.

We have started to use the solution's AI functionality in our automation. We started it recently and we have finished the proof of concept on document understanding, which involves AI, of course.

In terms of AI automation, we will be leveraging this tool for all business functions. There is no limit with any of the business folk that we talk to. Whatever the process is, as long as we feel that it is feasible to automate, and there is a value in automating it,  or as long as we feel that we are automating the right processes, we will just take that up into our pipeline.

AI does help us handle complex and involved processes. We include a lot of use cases where the sole core RPA capability would not suffice as a purely role-based automation. We often encounter a lot of use cases where they say, "Hey, this is something where there is no logic in doing it." If there’s analysis or natural language processing, et cetera, we are making use of AI. However, the process isn’t in use yet. We’re just starting.

We have used UiPath’s Academy courses and we are also encouraging our implementation partners to refer to those materials so that they can be approved.

It’s kept us up to speed with the solution. We refer to the Academy daily. Of course, we get help from UiPath whenever we face any hiccups; we normally ask them questions and they're able to sort it out for us. That said, the materials are great for trying to sort out issues or problems on our own.

It's been four years of practice and we've matured with the traditional RPA candidates. We have a strong foundation with what we have showcased to our business folks, and we are good with the healthy background that we are building. However, when it comes to the roadmap of what's next, that is where we are not clear. While we get the concepts, bringing them to reality is looking to be quite a challenge. We are unsure as to if UiPath can actually bring our vision to life.

UiPath is very clear in defining items such as this is what the high automation needs, this is what the process planning needs. We are getting clarity into those concepts and we are able to explain that and take that back into leadership to get other approvals. They are able to understand what UiPath is talking about within these different concepts. Really, it's just figuring out whether we have the right arrangement at this point and if UiPath can get us there.

I've been using the solution for four years.

I'm impressed with the version that we have today. 2019.10 is a version that is quite stable, compared to how we did with 2018. A lot of pieces that are enabled as part of the new version, 2019, are stabilized. We have zero downtime with the tool.

Today, ith X number of bots, if we want to reuse the same solution, and if there is an appetite for consuming those kinds of robotic solutions, of course, buying more bots is going to solve the problem.

If you think in terms of scaling this platform by itself or the other business functions, that is where the discovery piece will come into play. We have to constantly talk to businesses to understand where the opportunities are to scale in the correct manner.

Scalability is possible in terms of reusing existing automations. It's related to the number of bots that we are going to purchase. When it comes to the number of business processes that we are automating, during the discovery process, twe have to engage with our customers and constantly follow up with them. When we understand more about how they're doing business, we're able to locate the kinds of tools that are going to help them.

Currently, we have eight bots in production and 150 processes are automated. I’m not sure how many users are actually on UiPath currently.

We always follow up with our business to build our pipeline. That goes hand in hand with the implementation. We off-load all automation ideas and requirements to the pipeline, to our implementation partners, so that they will be able to implement our vision.

Traditional support for the RPA is great. In terms of the help that we are getting, if we end up with some issues, running operational issues, it could be better if they can propose some fixes. It's not that automation is going to solve every other problem that the underlying system is having. However, we expect some kind of expertise from the tech support when we face issues that are related to the system. We need to understand if there's an ERP error, if it has to do with the underlying system, or if automation has to solve the issue. Often, technical support will say "Okay, so this is your error, go and solve it." Yet, due to the fact that support has seen more issues like this, they should have more insights and they need to be able to share those inputs in a way that is going to help us.

While I didn't use a different solution previously, the finance team has used Blue Prism before. They implemented Blue Prism and they engaged Blue Prism to automate the processes that they have added for automation. Now, we have aligned on a single platform. It is UiPath now, however, they initially had around 50 processes that they automated using Blue Prism.

We proposed UiPath as the one solution based on Gartner ratings.

The initial setup was quite straightforward as we understand how RPA works and we understand how UiPath is going to help, how UiPath is a tool to help us to automate things. It's quite straightforward in terms of that. Whenever we are doing some kind of initiative, like document understanding or data capture, it is quite straightforward.

However, with process planning, we didn't understand the documentation right away. That is where we used to get help from UiPath.

The pricing was great at the start, and so, down the line, we have been enhancing all these features. We are seeing that, as we are looking for opportunities to grow, the number of robots that we need to purchase and the software cost is going to go up.

UiPath has increased the cost. We feel that it's good, however, based on all the new features, which we are pursuing. That said, we expect that whatever robots that we have purchased or whatever the standard platform that we have from UiPath should continue with the pricing that they had earlier.

There will be an offset, however, when it comes to the existing platform like Orchestrator or robots, and we are expecting that the margin should be less.

Back in 2017, we evaluated three to four products. Blue Prism was already used by the finance team, however, we evaluated WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere.

Of those other three, we evaluated WorkFusion and UiPath extensively.

The two reasons that we went with UiPath were, one, the learning curve, and, two, the community edition of UiPath, which had everything we needed to dig into the solution. Whereas with the other companies, there wasn't that option. With Blue Prism, for example, we had to buy a license in order to check whether the tool was going to work for us. In 2017, we were not sure whether this was going to work or not. At that stage, UiPath was the only company that gave us the entire set of tools to try and it worked really well.

We are customers and end-users.

While we're using the on-premises deployment, we are open to moving to the cloud. There are a lot of cloud solutions that we already use in our organization. However, with UiPath, we have stayed on-prem out of concern for security. We don't have clarity on if a cloud solution is going to work securely.

The other concern is around how we are augmenting the capabilities of core RPA. We know that process mining is going to help us, however, whether process mining is already added into the RPA, do we have any solid use cases that we can start with.

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

We are a services company. In terms of how we use UiPath, we handle a lot of the financial processes, including our customer billing, our time tracking, and our time reporting exceptions - such as looking at who has not submitted a timesheet. When this exception happens, there are automatic emails that go out using the RPA, from UiPath. 

The whole process from our inventory, which is our asset, is automated. With the asset, which is the time that our people spend on clients, we make sure that we capture what we need to create and send invoices out. The whole collection and AR process, including making sure that we get the money and send reminders to clients, that whole process, is automated - with human intervention, as needed.

The solution has decreased the processing time of the client's invoices for IT. Just IT. Not the rest of the organization. That said, just there, that’s 600 hours of annual savings in one department. On top of that, we’ve decreased processing time by 90%.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership. More than that, it creates agility so companies don't have to worry about delivering the infrastructure team and setting up sellers and all the things that they need to do to get to the stage of actually installing the software and internal security. That all takes time to go through. With the cloud, you avoid all that. You basically create agility for the clients to jump onto automation and not wait for all these things. It can be frustrating sometimes in large companies. That's why we tell clients to avoid all these headaches. With the cloud, you’ll get going very quickly within a matter of a day or so.

RPA is not the only thing we do. We do a lot of ERP, CRM, all of these things. Traditionally, we are a full-service organization for clients and their journey to the cloud. Everything's going to the cloud. There are some organizations that still have on-premise ERPs to migrate from the on-premise to the cloud. When those fundamental applications are going to the cloud, automation is a no-brainer. We would always promote the cloud version over on-premise.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect. The power of machine learning and AI along with the document understanding capability that UiPath has is great.

By implementing that portion of the solution, we get clients to 95% accuracy in reading invoices for processing into the ERP. While running basic automation will continue, the world is moving towards intelligent automation, which is with all the machine learning and AI.

Overall, the solution has saved costs for our clients.

It has reduced human error. Machines can do anything faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality than humans can do. That is just a universal fact. I don't think we have measured the accuracy, however, there's no doubt accuracy has gone up. The client recognizes that the accuracy rate has improved.

We're not talking about removing errors. In some cases, errors may happen. However, when I say we’ve seen a 90% efficiency rate, it doesn’t mean the remaining 10% are bad decisions. We're talking about how it could not read those things. The confidence level is low, and therefore, it's kicked to a human to review. It did what it's supposed to do, which is to flag for human review, which is how processes should happen.

The solution has allowed the employees to focus their time on other higher-value work. That's what we pitch to our clients. We never tell clients that oh, you can lay off people. We do not tell the clients that that's what they should do. Rather, we advise clients that what they can do with automation is free up people's time. That means either freeing up a portion of the time or fully freeing time or completely reassigning a job. 

After automation, you may have to reorganize your department. However, with the freed-up time, departments can focus on the most important thing, which is what can they do to create focus on the customer and create an experience for the customer, where the customer feels they want to be connected with your brand.

I have a case where I was talking to the CEO of a big restaurant company. HR, payroll, finance, all those areas that reported to him. He also handles customer experience. I told him about automation and the power of automation and how it will free up people's time. He said, “So what you're telling me is I can free up a portion of my staff so they can focus on all these customer complaints we're receiving?" For him, that is going to be a game-changer.

UiPath has also positively affected the employees themselves. They've become a little bit more satisfied with knowing that they can focus their time on higher-value work. In most cases, initially, there'll be fear for them. They don't know what automation is, and why they're doing it, and what it's going to do to their position in the company. That fear will always be there with humans. That's why leadership needs to focus on change management and communication. Those things become very, very important. Once you do it right, people will actually feel happy. They will no longer have to say "Oh, no, I don't have to stay until six o'clock, seven o'clock every day to finish the SaaS." Now it's much easier. They can focus on the things that they truly enjoy, which has nothing to do with the heads-down work that they do all the time.

We use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program for our clients. For simple processes, you don't need AI. However, the complex process where machines need to mimic the human thought process requires AI. AI is not perfect. It's not a holy grail that is going to solve all problems. That's not the case. We have to be careful. However, if you use it right in the right way, then you can truly solve complex problems.

I’m not sure if the solution's AI functionality enables us to automate more processes overall. It's hard to say. For me, the way I look at technology is that it is not a hammer that's looking for a nail. You have to look at your business needs and then figure out what technology will best fit or solve the problem. It could be simple AI, or, maybe in some cases, you need more advanced AI. I would look at it as what's the right technology for what purpose. That's the way I look at it.

We do use UiPath’s Academy. We have several people that we've pushed through training and certifications through the academy. It’s helped get those employees up to speed on the solution.

Also for us, as we are a services company, that gives us a stamp of quality seal in order to market our services better as we are certified and qualified.

UiPath continues investment in machine learning and AI. That's one thing they have to do. The fundamental thing UiPath needs to understand is the competition, the market, is not Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism. Rather, big competition is coming from Microsoft.

It's around the corner and Microsoft is going to come in a big way. I’d advise them of the parallel of Power BI. Power BI three years back was not a good tool. Other tools, like Tableau, were the kings of the BI space. Fast forward three years and today we do a lot of BI for clients. Almost every client of ours is migrating to Power BI, like Power BI's matured to 80% of Tableau, and that's good enough for them. On top of that, Microsoft was throwing free licenses to their customers. When you do that, versus buying $2,000 a pop or $1,500 a pop from Tableau, users line up behind the free tool to reduce their costs. Microsoft is doing that with Power Automate now. I just talked to a client, a big client, a $10 billion company, where they were at Blue Prism. They just told me that Microsoft just gave them 70 free licenses. Now, they are forced to bring Microsoft Power Automate into their RPA strategy even though before, they were not considering that.

UiPath should take several steps forward to be prepared for this competition and create differentiation with capabilities that Microsoft does not have. The innovation within UiPath is going to be very, very crucial. However, the most important thing is to clear the differentiation in the messaging. That's very, very important. They should be ready and arm their partners with information about why UiPath and not Power Automate.

I've been around the industry for 35 years, and I've seen lots of incumbents getting blown away in various technologies at various times. The big power comes down hard. UiPath has got to be ultra nimble to not get crushed.

We started working with UiPath in 2018. We partnered with UiPath in late 2018. It's been about a three-year journey so far. 

In terms of stability, I've not heard anything bad at my level. That means no bad news is good news.

We do plan to scale beyond the client's IT department and to the rest of the organization. When they scale it up to the rest of the organization, and this organization operates in 25 countries, they have over $190 billion in assets in these countries that we can add efficiencies to. The scale of efficiency that we will get with what we did will be huge. That’s the next step is to roll it out to the rest of the organization.

General scalability is an issue when it comes to processing large data sets. However, with the right creativity, you can solve those things due to the fact that you can have the right infrastructure to catalyze or do whatever you have to do to create scalability. We are used to doing that. We deal with ERPs and we create architecture and design the environment in such a way that it can scale. That said, you need to know how to do that. 

Technical support is very good. We're very pleased with that. When we ran into problems with a client, with the document understanding, initially the success rate was not very high. Then we had to reach out to the support and they actually jumped in and assisted us and told us what we needed to do. Once we did that, then things took off and we got to 90% accuracy. Initially, it was only 50%. Therefore, for us, it's been good.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

We did partner with Automation Anywhere,, however, ultimately, we didn't do anything with them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We're a consulting company, and we work with several clients. For some deployments, we were able to do the first deployment in 30 days. With other clients, it took about three months or four months, depending on the use case or the initial use cases that they picked.

Different companies operate differently. I always advise clients that they need to pick simple use cases and deploy them first before they go into complex stuff. Sometimes clients make the mistake of picking their most complex use case and say, "Oh, let's try that." No, that's not a good way. It's not a good way to embark on a journey that's long-term.

You've got to think big, start small, and be agile. If you get a complex use case at the beginning, you lose agility.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. The momentum was with UiPath. I knew where the momentum was and how we needed to align ourselves. That's why we did UiPath.

We looked at where the market demand is. For example, Blue Prism. We knew that Blue Prism is a lot more IT-centric, IT heavy, programmer heavy, which defeats the whole purpose of self-service automation. It's never going to succeed in the marketplace today as we promote self-service for everything.

That's why we didn't want to waste our time with Blue Prism. UiPath obviously has the community edition, which was brilliant. Basically, they saw a gap in the market. That's a parallel to what we do, for example, in Vtech space. Also, for example, Tableau is a good tool. So many people love Tableau. They've used Tableau. You had the established players in BI space like MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, however, they were very IT-centric and Tableau came in and beat them. They sold out into the business and you could download, pay $2000 and download a license and start creating your dashboards. I was glad that UiPath took a similar approach by creating a community edition, and then letting end-users download and then play with it.

We basically help clients think through their RPA strategy, their automation strategy and figure out what the right technology would be. We are a reseller. If it makes sense, we'll resell and we'll advise clients regarding UiPath for their RPA journey. We also use the solution ourselves. We have automated certain things, certain processes within the company. That becomes a practice round and a learning ground for our people so that when we go to clients, we can take some of these ideas and do to the clients as well as reaping the right expertise.

I'm not sure if we are using the UiPath apps feature or the applications feature. In my role, I just lay the strategy and the team executes it.

A lot of times things stall. In company setups we see a lot of cases where they did a few automations, a few bots, and then things stalled. That's a problem in the industry and the way to solve that and truly embrace the art of the possible is with automation. To get there, you need to execute across senior leadership. Without that education, they just don't put their weight on their departments to do the journey. Education is one thing that is very important. They understand the art of the possible.

Another important aspect at the outset is having RPA as a corporate strategy. Pushing to make it a corporate strategy is really going to help. That way, you can stall it for some time, however, eventually, it will have to get done. Otherwise, they are left behind when your competitors take advantage of the agility. There needs to be a center of excellence and companies need to develop internal capabilities. If they don't have capabilities, then they fear not knowing how to handle something. Those are common problems. And those need to be overcome.

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

Our use cases are all across our enterprise, from HR to finance, to customer service, to laboratory operations, to logistics, to compliance, to medical, et cetera.

The unattended automation is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

When COVID hit, and we needed to manage 200,000 samples a day and figure out where they were in the world. It would take humans about half a day to get an answer. Within a week, we put together automation that pulled data within 30 seconds from every single information system across our network.

Building automation using the solution is very easy. It's super, super easy. We have a citizen developer model where I've got 60 citizen developers trained. I've got people who started out answering the phone in customer service who are generating millions of dollars of value in automation.

Overall, this solution has saved costs for our organization by as much as $10 million.

While the solution is reducing human errors, I don’t have specifics on that.

The solution has freed up employee time. It’s hard to ballpark as what we're doing mostly is consolidating time and not back-filling from there. If you had the same amount of people as before, you didn’t really save, unless you were able to have more revenue with the same number of people.

It's been incredibly instrumental in a number of brand new business paradigms that popped up over COVID. For example, pre-COVID, if you had a respiratory tract infection, you would go to the hospital to get care, however, during COVID, the hospital wouldn’t even let you in the door. Our business model went completely upside down. The average general practitioner has 2000 patients. Our order entries went up by 500 fold. There was a backlog of testing. Automation helped manage that.

We use the UiPath Academy courses. They have been extremely helpful for us due to the fact that UiPath actually allowed us to host the fundamentals foundation training on our training platform. Now, I can assign it. I can track it. And I can reward it. The advanced developers class has been great. Getting users through that is very helpful. I take all my citizen developers through advanced training. No Studio X, no halfways. They have to really know how to do it.

The pricing particularly on the bot licenses is placed to maximize revenue for UiPath and is not in the best interests of the customer. For example, if I have 150 robots, our utilization of that is about 27% as my demands come in spikes. Most of the robots sit there doing nothing, and I paid for them.

I'd say I need better error handling capabilities, however, the updated 2020 is going to give me a better interface, so that's already there. 

If I were going to wave a magic wand, I would like to see tighter integration of task capture through the PDD generation. That process is not quite as smooth as I would like right now. I haven't really deployed it as widely as I would like as I don't want issues surrounding the document. I've got the template built up, however, we have had trouble deploying it the right way. If the integration were better, the process wouldn't be such a concern.

I've been using this solution for three years.

The stability has been good so far. 

The scalability is fantastic. We learned that during COVID. Suddenly, we have to set up accounts differently. We were doing 15 to 20 a day. When I said "Oh, by the way, schools are going to start doing testing, and I need to be able to set up a hundred accounts a day" we got to a hundred.

We have 75 users currently on the solution. We do plan to increase usage. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The deployment took about six weeks.

We had the infrastructure in play in December 2019 and were functional by April 2020.

We had pieces set up already, however, we had people running orchestrators on boxes hidden in closets. We decided to centralize. Now, everything is in the data center and going on the virtual machine. Everything's under that control. Therefore, in total, it took about four months to have it properly set up.

I am extremely unhappy with the pricing model. I want a model similar to an electricity meter, whereby if I use more I am charged more. That's the ultimate model. They should also make the Studio free due to the fact that they should want developers developing. You want to maximize that capability. Why charge for that? Charge me for the Orchestrator. Charge me more for licensing if you want, however, UiPath should be maximizing my ability to create automation.

We had some experience with Automation Anywhere, Softomotive, and Blue Prism.  When we got serious about it, we did a runoff and selected a single vendor.

What set UiPath apart was their handling and selectors. The selector was head and shoulders above anyone else. We had a lot of experience with automation platforms that did not do well. Screen coordinates and scraping and control methods to move to a script, for example, were not reliable methodology.

While we are currently on version 2019.10.2, we are upgrading the 2020.10.2 version this month.

We’re just starting to use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. It’s a bit too early to comment too much on it.

I'd advise new users to get their governance together early.

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

For a current client, we have around 22 to 25 use cases, and it's all based on the financial side of things. The client is in finance, and we have use cases all of which are comprised of different tools, including SAP and their in-house CRMs. It's about automating the process where we take some data from the CRM tool and upload it to SAP. It also involves uploading the files to the FTP server. 

For example, one use case is where the applications used are Oracle, and SAP, and STP. We just download the data from Oracle. There are different files that we download from Oracle and upload to the FTP server. From that FTP server, there is a different team that takes those files and creates a Tableau dashboard. 

UiPath Studio helped us automate many processes that have helped us save money. Even though the tool price is there and the license costs are there, it has given good ROI. For example, automating a process can reduce the work to half or maybe 60%. We divert efforts to different work. Therefore, it has been pretty useful in terms of savings and quality control.

For example, one client had a focus on quality control. There are instances where employees make some minor errors that could lead to major losses to the organization from the department's point of view. We automated that process and it gave us more return in terms of quality control. Fewer errors ultimately were made which saved the company from losses.

UiPath has a full suite of capabilities. It has, for example, an end-to-end automation suite. From a development point of view, it is pretty helpful to have access to all of the activities on offer that anyone can understand. 

The Studio as well as the process mining are great. Document understanding is another useful feature. It has eliminated the business analyst side where you have to go through each department and find out which processes are there, and take a different tool to get those all processes in one place and create a process workflow. All of this can be done with process mining. 

With document understanding, we have the capabilities of having UiPath understand and create documents, which previously was quite a lengthy endeavor. You just have to install it and follow the steps. It will automatically take a screenshot and create a document for you and then create a brief description of it. 

It’s easy to build automation using UiPath Studio. From a developer's point of view, it is easy due to the fact that you don't need much of a coding language or coding background. You just should have a clear logic behind it. If you're clear with the logic, a layman can handle the task. They do have Studio X features, which is for the layman who doesn't have any background, who doesn't have any coding or developer's background. They can automate their own work. Even an SME who doesn't know anything about automation could automate small tasks.

It’s great that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. That is very important actually. For example, scaling automation plus giving attention to the infrastructure can be a little hectic and time-consuming. If there is any way where we could reduce this work or optimize it, it would be great from the implementation point of view.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Right from the start, you have document understanding and process mining as well as the Orchestrator, which helps you with getting an overall view of the bots in our organization.

End-to-end coverage is the most important thing, due to the fact that, if it is end-to-end, we don't need to go to the market and look for any other application. If you can get end-to-end, you don't need to go for other products which simplifies everything. It's easy for us to maintain and work with it instead of having to integrate and manage multiple systems, multiple products, and multiple applications.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. It has helped us with quality control savings. We have saved many efforts previously requiring full-time employees. It’s one of the most important factors when we work for clients. If a client is hiring us to automate many processes, there are different intentions of doing it. If we are able to help them reduce cost, reduce and do some quality control, it is important for them. For example, previously, if work required ten employees, we have been able to reduce that down to six or sometimes four personnel maybe.

The UiPath Studio has reduced human error. It has helped us with quality control very often. In the past, mistakes have cost us. It has saved costs as well as saving us money related to fines or penalties.

The solution has freed up employee time. Instead of doing the same mundane work every day, we have just automated that part and now the employees have more free time to do more meaningful work. In terms of hours, from a department's point of view, we have saved around half, that is four hours per day, maybe about 80 hours per month. The additional time enabled employees to focus on more important work.

We have found that the product has reduced the costs of our client’s automation operations. With my previous client, we calculated an average of 40% in reduction of personnel and 40% in cost savings. UiPath has saved us money across the organization. The average saving is likely around 40% to 45%.

I'm pretty much happy with all of those tools. I don't have anything in mind that I could see improvement.

While UiPath Studio helps speed up the cost of digital transformation, in a way, it requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support, as it needs an entire setup. That setup requires support from different departments, and that comes with a cost.

I came across one problem while upgrading. We were upgrading from the 2019 version to the 2020. There was one thing that was not mentioned either on the website or documentation, and we had to take support from UiPath. The documentation needs to contain each of the scenarios which could occur while upgrading the solutions. As it is now, this is not the case. That said, when we ran into issues, UiPath Support helped us through it.

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

We've had outages once or twice. For that, they have a workaround. If a server goes down, we should have a backup server for it. If that's the case, it is just a few steps needed to migrate or we can take the setup from another server. That's it. It's pretty good in general. 

The scalability is fine. For example, if the bot count is about zero to 100, we have the capacity. And if it goes beyond that, then we have to increase the features of the systems and servers. It could take time if we scale beyond the limits, however, it's still possible. It just requires an upgrade. 

What's required is managing all the infrastructure and getting all the permissions from the client which is what could take time. Scalability can be an issue when it goes beyond the mentioned limit.

In the current organization we're working with, it's totally unattended bots where no user is actually using this tool. That said, the bots are in production, which works 24/7. No user is having this access to the tool. It is all unattended bots.

In the previous organization, there were 58 to 70 users as we had attended bots. They were using bots in their daily routine.

It's a routine for us to use this product every day and deploy this solution. We are definitely looking at increasing it and scaling. We have a lot of work in the pipeline.

I've contacted technical support many times and they are very helpful. Based on the severity and priority, they do help us on priority and they are very helpful in terms of responding, supporting, and maintaining. If they can't help us by email, even after giving clear instructions, they'll bump you to a different level and help. It can be just like spoon-feeding us. They are very patient and try to be very clear.

We were doing automation, however, it was just .com and .net. We used to write five lines of code just to click on one button, which is just an activity right now we have in UiPath. We switched to UiPath to do end-to-end processes which would require large amounts of code if we kept doing what we were doing.  

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

The process is quite straightforward. You just have to have the installer and just click install, and then after a few steps, it is done.

Setting up just UiPath Studio hardly takes ten to 20 minutes or maybe one hour if you're facing some complexity. Setting up an Orchestrator with all the robots could take a while.

Our implementation strategy is based on whatever the customer's requirements are. Different clients have different requirements. My previous client, for example, didn't want the cloud as they were pretty concerned about the security as they deal with financial data and they don't want the data to go to the cloud at all.

Clients have the option of on-premises or cloud. Based on that, we just go with the requirements. Some clients want attended bots due to the cost, and some want unattended bots due to the features. 

In terms of maintenance and deployment, how many people you need depends on how many processes you have with the client. Right now, with the current client, we have 22 to 25 processes that we have automated. We are just three users who are developing, testing, maintaining, and supporting this project. However, it varies and often depends on the process and client and how many bots.

For maintenance and support, you don't need many people. For development, if they're at 10 people, five or four could do the work in terms of support and maintenance.

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

While the clients might have released some reports, I don't have much knowledge about ROI. 

I do know about the prices of attended and unattended bots as well as Orchestrator. 

There are costs related to Orchestrator, Studio, and attended bots. There are also infrastructure costs, and, while implementing this tool in any organization, there are different costs attached to it.

The price for the attended bot is between $1,800 and $3,000. The unattended bot was $8,000 last year.

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, however, about five years back, where UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were the leaders in the market, at that time, just UiPath had the free training and Intuit training for their tool. The other tools didn't have any training, or if they had, it was paid. That's why we chose UiPath, which ended up being the best out of the three anyway.

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

There have been multiple companies that I've been working with. Two remain the same. I've been using different tools as well. It's been on and off with UiPath.

We are not using the latest version of UiPath. The latest version is 2021. We are using 2020. This is due to the fact that the client that I'm working with has a stated policy as to using a minus one version. They believe it could not be a more stable version for any product. 

At this time, we don't use the SaaS solution or the AI functionality. However, I have enrolled in AI training to better understand it. We do not yet use the automation cloud or UiPath apps either.

In terms of employee satisfaction, from the experience I had from interacting with the client and different users, they are happy as well as sad. They are happy in terms of moving away from the mundane work that has been taken off from their hands. They are, however, both sad and afraid that they could lose their job.

I'd advise users, if they're a layman, to go with the training. Just start with the training from the UiPath website itself, in the RPA Academy. That is sufficient for anyone to start with. They have all the courses that start right from scratch for every role, be it business analyst, solution or product developer, et cetera. In six months, even starting from scratch, you can excel on this product.

With UiPath, it really is possible to optimize so many things. 

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

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.