UiPath Platform Reviews

Our primary use cases are in our financial department. We had a bit of a downturn, but we still had work that needed to be completed. So we developed several automations to manage a lot of the financial work and a lot of our payment processing systems. We expanded that out to include more of our traders' work processes, just because we saw there were a lot of workloads coming in and a lot of repetitive work. So we used UiPath to eliminate a lot of that for our commercial traders, then we did the same thing for our operations and production teams so that they have their own automated processes.

We plan on scaling it and using it in more functions.

Our biggest metrics are in our financial org, they have more of a cost avoidance where we don't have to backfill those positions. It's around $2 million a year because we don't have to bring in personnel to complete the processes.

It has helped solve certain human errors but that's an unintended bonus because we're automating a process as it is that a machine is going to repeat. We don't really have a person to do it.

UiPath has helped to free up employee time. The additional time enabled us to focus on higher-value work. By removing a lot of the repetitive work, it's given them the ability to do more analytics and to dive into the data science realms of their job to do more data-driven analysis of what they're doing.

The ability to do citizen development is the most valuable feature. That initiative has helped us to expand it because that gives folks that are closer to the business the ability to develop their own solutions that are tailored to what they need to do, as opposed to waiting for someone in IT to contact them to build it out. Or to wait for a business analyst to provide some type of value metric, but they can actually go and build it themselves.

My job is to actually be the evangelist to these groups. I'd say we've been pretty successful. My developers are working with the citizen developers who help to guide them and to teach them how to build their own automations for their business process.

It's pretty easy to build automation. The no-code process has really driven the adoption by the business people so that they don't have to skill up and learn how to code anything. They only need to know how to click a button and build it out. That's the best component.

We used the UiPath Academy course. It's our training regimen for our business users. We have to introduce them first to the platform and understand how to work through the platform. It's a pretty straightforward and easy course. With our citizen development program, we also have the Academy where they can either do hands-on learning or use the Academy to get some video training as well.

The biggest value of the Academy is the ease of being able to access the training. 

Governance has room for improvement but that's more of a cultural thing. It depends on your company. We have the reference architecture that we have in place, but it's easy for someone to say, "Okay, I need to make an adjustment here outside of that reference architecture." Because it's so easy for them to do that, they leave the company now that a non-compliant bot is out there running a production process, we need to be able to rank that in. There needs to be footwork that we have to do as an organization for my team as opposed to a true problem with the platform.

We have been using UiPath for around five years now. It's the on-prem version, but we have it deployed in the cloud in our Azure tenant. We started on-prem then we migrated it about three years ago.

It's pretty stable. It's more of the architecture and how it runs because it has to leverage VDIs and as Microsoft releases an update, we have to be watching that process because it'll make the box really brittle. Any change to the UI anywhere will break and that's where we have to step in and fix it.

Every corner of the business except for folks out in the field uses UiPath. It's around 200 people or so.

We've had a little bit of back and forth whenever we have an issue and some of the solutions we got back were pretty boilerplate-type answers. We had an issue with a Microsoft update. They said, "Well, could you potentially reach out to Microsoft and have them let you know." 

They're just going to release the update. We need to be a little bit more proactive on the software side. Our account executive took care of it for us. He stepped in and enabled us to not have that response again. 

I wasn't there for the initial setup but I heard about it. It was complex, but that was more of a cultural thing.

The deployment took around a year to get that through planning, discovery, and implementation.

Our biggest return is our cost avoidance and not having to backfill personnel.

I think the pricing is comparable. It's fair pricing for the size that we're deploying.

My advice would be to make sure that you have a really good understanding and a really good culture in your company that understands and wants to get on board with automation because it will require that type of mindset of understanding what you're doing before you do it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for automation of the back office. When speaking about our customers and use cases, I wouldn't highlight one specifically, however, mainly, we are using UiPath to build a center of excellence. The aim is to automate a majority of the processes in the company, and that includes Order-to-Cash, HR, supply chain, and even IT, among others. We are not approaching needs for one or another specific process. We want to automate the enterprise end to end.

There are many great features in UiPath that our clients consider valuable. I definitely like Studio. The Studio's a very powerful product, which helps very easily to build automations. Nowadays, there's also a StudioX for citizen developers, which doesn't require coding.

Orchestrator, which helps users monitor and schedule robots, manage assets, credentials, et cetera, is also very useful.

The third feature worth mentioning, I would say, is Insights. It is reporting and dashboards. Once the robots are running, it is quite valuable to see how those robots are performing. You can see KPIs and other aspects of both robots and processes.

Worth mentioning is the Automation app, which helps to manage the automation initiative end to end, especially building the pipeline and collecting the ideas.

It is quite easy to build automations with UiPath, especially now that they are segregated depending on seniority, meaning that you have the regular Studio and Studio Pro, which are truly for developers, however, you also have StudioX, which is more for people without a previous coding background. That makes it quite easy to use. People with a business background find it quite easy to pick a tool up and use it in daily automation. They didn't have any previous experience with programming or making macros or whatever else, and still, they have no problem with UiPath.

UiPath enables users to build end-to-end automation, and this is what we are doing on a daily basis. UiPath enables mainly our clients (through us) to build end-to-end automation in their processes. When I mean end to end, I mean that we help them to automate the chain of processes and do not focus on the single practice itself.

End to end coverage within UiPath is a great advantage and offers great possibilities. It is really important to have the ability to do end to end. Though it is not applicable all the time, it still is a nice option to have and use when needed.

Very soon after starting the RPA journey, customers realize much more important benefits than time-saving itself and FTE saving or FTE reduction. There are things that happen, like quality improvement. Whenever the work is done by robots, it is running in a much more stable manner and without any human mistakes and errors. It is also sustainable, predictable work, meaning that robots do not get sick or have a bad day, or face conflicts with each other, et cetera. They just do their work. They also can’t get viruses, such as COVID which means that we don’t have to worry about losing staff.

We have a customer speech workload that was growing dramatically in relation to COVID and having processes already automated, it was very easy to sustain and even upscale the delivery. The customer experience is better as well. It is not only important to spend less time or fewer resources in delivering the service to the customer, it is also important that the customer gets a quick response. Overall, the customer experience can be much improved when using robots in the processes.

In terms of the Automation Cloud offering, UiPath handles infrastructure maintenance and updates to save time for our client's IT department. Having UiPath in a cloud enables enterprises and customers to focus more on the automation initiative itself, instead of managing all the hardware and dealing with all their hardware problems and having more or giving more time to the IT department. Instead, you can use everything out of the box from day one and focus on bringing benefits to your end customer or end employee.

The Automation Cloud offering has helped to decrease time to value from UiPath. I would say that Automation Cloud increases time to value dramatically in the sense that you can start from day one. Literally day one, you can go and start automating the processes without bothering with all the infrastructure topics. The time required to deliver the first benefits is reduced dramatically.

Automation Cloud’s offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates. It helps to reduce the cost of infrastructure maintenance, especially in the early stages of the projects, as well as on small and medium projects (for the long term). Not all customers or enterprises have strong IT departments or strong infrastructure in-house nowadays. Even large enterprises are moving more and more towards cloud services, even though they have strong IT infrastructure teams in place.

Automation Cloud is able to scale well due to the fact that we can, in a matter of minutes, or, in the worst case, hours, double the capacity. I would say that it positively and dramatically affects the scaling factor.

UiPath is a SaaS offering. It enables our customers to really quickly adapt and start using the technology almost from day one. It is very easy to start developing. It is very easy to start.

We are using UiPath Apps for our customers. However, this feature has not yet helped to reduce the workload on our IT department, or on our client's IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. Mainly, we are still involved as a service provider in the creation of the apps for the end-users. That said, where it brings added value is it reduces the limitations or the need to have an additional user interface, as you can create this app or user interface directly in UiPath to have an even better user, employee, or even customer interaction.

UiPath apps definitely increased the number of automations created. You can take more into the scope, what wasn't there before, with just attended or unattended automation, considering the fact that you can build a better user interface or any user interface from the very beginning. Before, there were only simple message boxes and prompts. Now, you can build really nice forms to interact with your end-users. It helps to accelerate initiatives.

Our teams have used UiPath’s Academy courses. Every team member of our company went through UiPath Academy. We always start with and actively involve UiPath academy.

UiPath Academy courses are a part of our standard onboarding procedure in the company, especially if we onboard junior developers. The very first thing we direct them to is UiPath Academy. Everyone starts with a basic foundation and goes through to a diploma and certification, and only then will we build on top of that more specifics about our standards, of our delivery approach, et cetera. I would say that UiPath Academy is a core and basic start for each and every employee in the company. Based on that education, we will later elaborate on different topics.

The biggest value I see behind UiPath Academy is its simplicity in terms of delivering the information. Even if you don't have any previous development experience and coding experience, all the explanations, videos, practical tasks, and reading material is formed in a way that is really easy to understand. The biggest value I see is its ability to bring people up to speed from really different levels, including very, very junior people with no previous experience in coding, programming, or the creation of robots.

UiPath's user community is excellent. Being an MVP, for me, the community has huge value in the whole end-to-end journey of RPA. Meaning that, at the very beginning, whenever you need to learn new things, you can always find a lot of useful hints in the forum and in the community. Later, when you already have delivered some solutions, you might face some problems. Luckily, very likely, you are not the first person to face those problems. There is always someone who already has had this problem and may have even raised it in a forum or on YouTube, et cetera. Even when you are already deep in delivery, sooner or later, there will be a point where you reach out for help to the community. The community, therefore, plays a crucial role for developers and automation specialists - be it business analysts, developer architects, et cetera. Having a strong community is definitely one of the most important factors that sets UiPath apart.

I'm not actively involved in other communities, and therefore wouldn't be able to compare UiPath to other similar communities. I can only say that the UiPath community is very supportive and very active in responding to any queries. The way it’s organized, it’s inspiring the next generation of forum members to help others and pay forward with insights based on the help they receive. UiPath’s community is really responsible and supportive.

In terms of reducing human error, at the very beginning, almost every company when starting the RPA and automation in Germany thinks of FTE saving as the main benefit. However, very quickly they recognize how huge the value is behind the quality improvements that happen after automation. It is quite obvious that robots are not doing human-like mistakes that may be caused by, for example, not paying attention or not getting enough sleep et cetera. Robots also cannot get bored. Very often, and whenever you have to process 1,000 or 10,000 records in more or less the same manner, it just becomes super repetitive. A mistake can appear in manual work as humans can lose focus on redundant tasks. This is not so when robots are involved.

In terms of time savings and error reduction, usually in our initiatives, we can see not higher than 5% of error rates when executed by robots. Even in those cases, I wouldn't say they are errors and more likely exceptions, which are documented and later handed over with specific explanations. A good KPI for our robots is to have less than a 5% exception rate. Related to this is that, by improving quality, we still save a lot of time as it can reduce the number of reworks which we might have afterward. For example, in one of the projects we were delivering, it reduced by eight times the amount of reworks or fixes, which the customer needed to process due to human-directed errors. Mistakes and fixes, therefore, were reduced by eight times.

What I would improve in UiPath, or I would just say, keep on improving, is the other products in end-to-end automation. UiPath started with Studio and Orchestrator as a core product, and still, we are actively co-operating UiPath and suggesting improvements for the other products. 

One of the products where I would definitely see a need for improvement would be a Task Capture. It is already good, however, there are many aspects and many ideas, which, for example, our business analysts have, which can be improved.

I've been using UiPath since 2016. It is already over five years. I'm familiar with the product.

Both on-prem and cloud solutions are very stable. The cloud is stable thanks to the UiPath team and on-prem, in our case, is stable thanks to our customer IT infrastructure team. Between the product itself and the infrastructure, be it Azure Cloud or on-site infrastructure, the stability is good. If there's any instability, it could be related to the people involved in using it as I've had a good experience with both cloud and on-premises stability.

The scalability of UiPath is one of the main competitive advantages, compared to other products. The software and the solution give you the opportunity to stably run it and scale it. With stable operations, you can focus on the new automation instead of maintaining already existing solutions. UiPath is very good at scaling in a friendly way and has good support that can help too.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I never give ten, just to keep the motivation to improve high. I still believe that there are areas of improvement, though I really rate UiPath's support very high. The response time can always be shorter, the specification on solving problems can always be better, et cetera. Overall, I am extremely happy with the support UiPath provides in over 95% of the cases. For the remaining 5%, we still received the needed support, it only takes another iteration to move through another team and have a look at the problem.

Comparing the initial setup on cloud versus on-premise, the cloud configuration is much easier. This is one of the purposes of the cloud solution. It's meant to be easy to deploy and easy to scale. Documentation for the cloud is definitely straightforward. In terms of on-premise deployments, it is also quite straightforward, especially at the start, however, the complexity grows with the demands and requirements from the customer. If we have to get into the area of high availability and more of a complex server setup, it takes some effort to establish everything.

The simplest deployment on the cloud would take a matter of 15 minutes or maybe even as little as five. After five minutes you are ready to go and can use Studio and the cloud Orchestrator. It is very fast. You still need to have your admin rights available on your PC, however, that's the only prerequisite. 

For deploying on-prem, it's nearly the same for a simple deployment. If you only want to use the Studio and attend the job, it is very easy to configure in a matter of 15 minutes. Whenever you get into Orchestration, it will require more complex setups. It might take one or two days to set up, depending on how good of an infrastructure team you have to onboard.

The strategy in implementation remains the same no matter which deployment. In the end, you still have the same setup of products, be it Studio, Orchestrator, Task Capture, or whatever else. You have the same configuration of the products. It is only on the backend that is slightly different as it is hosted in another place. You don't really recognize the difference between cloud and on-prem hosted services.

At the very beginning, when we started the RPA journey, we were always tasked with understanding and looking at the potential return of investments. Therefore, we don't start automating the process before understanding the savings. For each and every process which we automate, we start with understanding what it will bring to the end customer. Even if we see minimal savings in the processes, we automate these. The biggest processes which we were automating were saving more than 20 FTEs (Full Time Equivalents). We are speaking to just about one process.

For us, FTE saving and time-saving are the same thing. It’s just different units of measure. You can measure it in people equivalent or in an hours per year equivalent.

The good thing about UiPath is that they are very active when it comes to listening to feedback. Every release incorporates some of this feedback into the product life cycle.

We are using both UiPath's Automation Cloud offering and the on-premise solution. We have customers, which need on-premise as well as customers which are running it in the cloud. On-premise, we have clients using different versions, however, it's my understanding that we are using version 2020.10.

I would definitely recommend, when starting the RPA journey, to start to use UiPath. Think about RPA as a robot factory, as a strategic thing, however, do not focus on one or another process. Think big and aim for automating all the manual processes in the corporation and from day one, and work to adjust all your procedures and infrastructure, the way that you've been able to get to this point. Do not get stuck at some point and feel you need to rework anything. Rather, change your standards in order to scale. In fact, aim for scalability from day one.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We are a happy partner of UiPath and we have had many successful implementations with our customers. I can confidently say, after five years of experience using UiPath, that I've been happy with it. I still believe that there is always space for improvement. However, I really do have an appreciation for the tools. They're making a really good product and they should keep on improving at the same great pace. We plan to keep on using this product to deliver the same great services to our customers.

Currently, we are using it for reading emails. We download the attachments that we get in emails. After downloading those Excel sheets attachments, we process the data based on a few rules. The processed data is input into the SAP application. In the SAP application, based on the business rules, we process the data and commit.

It is very user-friendly in terms of building automation. We don't need to be experts in coding. We can learn it easily and build complex business tools in UiPath. We don't need prior coding experience.

It reduces the cost of digital transformation. Every day, we get 10 Excel sheets, and somebody has to sit and read the Excel sheet and load the data manually into the SAP application. Three to four employees are required for the same job, but if we automate this process, it can be done in a minute. It is easy, and we save time and cost.

It reduces the time taken for a task. If we are manually filling timesheets, we need to open the website, fill the timesheet, and submit it. It can take 10 minutes. With automation, it will take just a minute.

Orchestrator is very useful for deployment and publishing, maintaining queues, and running jobs.

In UiPath, REFramework is useful for different use cases with predefined code templates. There are well-established steps. There is a step for code marginalization. Similarly, there are separate steps for initialization and processing. For closing an application process, a step is there. So, it is very well modularized for getting the transaction data. If there is one exception or anything wrong happens with an application, it will log the exception in the orchestrator and send an email. It can also close your applications and end data processing. So, everything is well organized and separated, and we can log the exceptions separately in the queues as business exceptions or application exceptions. We can have the complete report of a particular queue.

For document understanding, there are so many features. I haven't used them practically, but to read a PDF, there are patterns and semi patterns. A wait option is also there for somebody to come and correct it. It can wait until somebody comes and corrects it, and then it will do the processing. So, all of the features are very useful in UiPath.

In exception handling, wherever exception occurs, the out arguments are not being passed. It would be good if there is a way to pass the out arguments. 

Sometimes, when an element is not there, UiPath gets stuck, and it doesn't even throw an exception. It stays stuck for hours until we go and check the logs. When this happens, we have to kill it. It happens in some cases, so an improvement is needed there.

I have been using this solution for three and a half years.

Other than the issues related to the exception handling and UiPath getting stuck, it is very stable.

It can scale well, but we don't really have a need to scale it. Currently, we are automating 15 projects. We are planning to use other functionalities of UiPath to automate extra things.

Currently, we have 1,000 people who use this solution. They are consultants, developers, and business analysts. A business analyst takes care of making design documents and solution documents. The RPA developers develop the code and test it. After that, for deployment, someone is there to take care of all technical things. After that, the support team is there to look after the deployment.

I didn't call UiPath support, but I know about them from my friend. We had called them for some issues, and they answered those very well. I would rate them a nine out of 10.

I have worked only on UiPath.

Its initial setup is straightforward. It is not that complex. We need to install UiPath Studio, and then we connect it to Orchestrator for getting logs, etc. It doesn't take more than an hour.

I took the help of my colleagues.

I'm not sure about licensing and pricing, but the pricing for their certification is a little bit more. Previously, we could do it for no price.

I would definitely recommend it to my colleagues and others. It is very user-friendly.

In terms of reducing human error, it is not up to the mark. It detects human errors, but it waits until we place the correct files for processing. For example, when comparing files, a human can detect two almost-similar addresses as the same, but a UiPath bot cannot do that. So, in some cases, it won't work as humans. It cannot decide. It works on predefined rules.

Considering its areas of improvement and the cost of certification, I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

There are lots of use cases. Mostly, there are many gaps in organizations that buy a lot of software and a lot of automation platforms like ERPs, however, they don't know how to actually create an end-to-end process and connect those systems. In those cases, they end up like small islands in a big organization. What I started doing was filling those gaps. After that, we use the RPA to fulfill that. For me, a lot of processing in Excel or some processes that needed multiple users to interact is what we use the solution for. We just capture those tasks and convert them to RPA bots. Basically, we've automated a lot of manual tasks.

We do not use UiPath in the contact center environment. In our case, contact centers here are really dependent on CRMs. Even using chatbots in contact centers is still very new in Iran. These foreign branches, these foreign companies that are in Iran, do not see any potential to use RPA in this scenario. 

Mostly, UiPath has improved my career. I am an RPA Developer, and without UiPath my job wouldn’t exist. UiPath changed my career. Due to UiPath (not Automation Anywhere or not Blue Prism), there’s a noticeable increase in the speed of development. I was a C# Developer and it's helped me a lot. Generally, UiPath is in the top 10 and has offered a lot of new technological shifts and people are talking about it more. When people are talking, there are great opportunities. There are now new voices that can be heard. 

UiPath is constantly listening. That's a good point for UiPath - it's always listening from its community to its top customers and interacting with comments. Due to the fact that it listens, it integrates new software, goes into end-to-end automation, and changes for the better. Someday they will have Autonomous RPA, a real Autonomous RPA that can actually decide like a true robot, not just a robot that works on a script. One day they will offer a true robot that can finally decide what to do in certain situations, not by just using something like document understanding that we call Machine Learning. UiPath is very, very good at giving true innovation to people. It’s a win-win for everyone.

RPA is actually something that can be executed, that can be used side by side with many programming technologies.

The speed of development in UiPath is very fast. For example, sometimes you want to do many frameworks and the budget is low, with the timeline being very crucial. With UiPath Studio and with the whole UiPath platform, it can be very fast to develop and deploy. That's the main advantage for me personally - that the speed of development is great.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring. They are all there. The one exception I’ve noticed is that end-to-end automation is still lagging, I have reasons for that. However, the monitoring of the robots or even using insights is there. They are the prerequisites for an RPA platform. They are great suites. They are necessities.

I like parallel processing. I like that a robot can do some parallel stuff while the user continues to do their own thing. If it needs interaction, we can just pop up a clear window or apps, for example, or through email, in order to inform the user about the robot's request.

AI Automation overall has enabled us to automate more processes. However, when we go forward and move forward, we see that we can digitalize those documents before it needs to be processed by an image machine-like OCR or even Machine Learning. For example, there are still handwritten documents. We’ve convinced many organizations to drop those handwritten documents and use digital products for us. Those are immediate time savings for the process. We are not using document processing anymore, for example, in a specific organization. For processes that still need to have handwritten or printed out documents, document understanding could be fine. I really hope, however, that they shift to AI, which is what RPA lacks. RPA lacks Autonomous Automation, that's something that everyone is waiting for. We’d like to have a robot that's actually using the computer with its own mind, not just the workflow we give it.

For end-to-end scenarios, UiPath is still growing. I'm not saying that UiPath isn’t good. There is a lot of potential. They're using UiPath Actions or Apps, for example. Dashboards ensure that end users can interact in a new way with robots or with the whole end-to-end automation. RPA is a technology that hasn't maxed out yet.

Someday, there will be no legacy software or very intelligent processes that will use APIs. It’s my understanding that UiPath bought some company that specializes in API Automation. For end-to-end automation, UiPath needs to integrate all those components, rather than task automation to process automation, real process automation. With RPA, if you read the HFS report, you see that the process version is actually not a process. It's tasks. Perhaps in their next LTS release, UiPath will actually gain to that point.

There are minor bugs. Every major software has bugs. That said, all are solvable, all are resolvable, and it's not a very bad thing.

Mostly, licensing must be improved somehow. Licensing is very expensive. Even in many industrial countries such as the USA or UK, UiPath is still very expensive. For example, Microsoft now owns its own RPA, Power Automate, and the pricing is much more reasonable than UiPath. UiPath licensing is very vague and expensive. There are some ways that they can reduce the cost to make everyone benefit from an RPA.

UiPath needs a lot of maintenance. Every RPA vendor, every RPA on-premise software, needs a lot of maintenance. The cloud version has reduced that, as far as I know. It’s resolved the maintenance issue so that users can focus more on other things. Every new feature will be first on the cloud version and eventually, we can benefit from that.

We use document understanding. For English documents, it helps, however, for Persian documents, due to the fact that the models, the Machine Learning models, that are pre-built, are based on English or other common languages. If we want to actually use Persian, we need to use AI Fabric and build our own models. It's now out of our budget to do something like that here.

It's almost been three years since I first started using UiPath.

I don't like the stability very much as it has minor bugs.

You see that processes break without any reason. When you check the system, check every log, even view robot logs or logs in the network level and you see that it has, it's only then that you realize the issue was a bug from the UiPath platform. Once that happens, you must go to the community and explain the situation to each other. The good thing is, there is a community right there and you can learn from each other. 

Scalability is great. UiPath has many capabilities. Anyone, via a simple search, can go through UiPath and even try the enterprise version and just see for themselves that there are many, many, many capabilities. You can use .NET and there are many NuGet packages that you can use or you can even design your own custom package. There are many great platforms, such as Insights, Action Center, UiPath platforms, and so many different types of robots.

In terms of technical support, I do not have the opportunity to speak with them, as we are in Iran, and, due to sanctions, we do not have a direct opportunity to speak directly to UiPath's support. Therefore, I cannot have an opinion on their services.

I'm familiar with other RPA solutions such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.  

I saw a lot of people that are going to RPA. I put myself in their shoes. However, from my perspective, UiPath has a great community. The UiPath forum is very good compared to Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Every technology can be learned, sooner or later. That said, the first thing that any kind of technological software needs to have is a good community to facilitate that learning. Without community, you cannot spread the word, you cannot spread the knowledge. It's the first thing that UiPath has over both of these other solutions. 

And the second thing is, as a technological matter, UiPath is much better. The other two lack the connection, lack the integration. The user interfaces of both Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are terrible. I do not like them. They're not very intuitive and they are not easy to learn. UiPath is using Workflow Hosting Foundation from Microsoft and great integrations with .NET, which is so much better than the other ways that other vendors are approaching things.

I'm typically involved in the setup. I'm involved in every phase of the process. 

The setup is straightforward. They're using .NET Core now and before that, they were using ASP.NET's Standard Framework. The company has relied on default application configuration as far as, for example, in web.config or .JSONs. Most configuration must be done in the UI itself. I don't really like to just manipulate files at the system level just to do something. I believe that's the way now, however, that can be improved. It could be just in the UI and the certainty would be much better.

The length of time it takes to set up a robot deployment depends on the project itself, however, for a small project, it can be in one month to 45 days.

The initial deployment of UiPath is not more than three days.

Setting up UiPath doesn't have any standard process. There's just documentation. We are always using its documentation.

We do not have any relationship with UiPath directly. We are just a contractor doing RPA for foreign companies that are based in Iran.

Iran has sanctions against it, and there are a few companies that are local branches of foreign companies, and those that have licenses from UiPath all use on-premise deployments. We're always using the latest versions of the solution. Right now, we are on version 19 and it's in the 2010 LTS.

I didn't have the opportunity to use UiPath Cloud. I'm in Iran and I don’t have access. There are some capabilities that are still in the cloud version, like Apps.

While it depends on the project requirements, much of our work is on attended automation. I see attended automation as a gateway to an RPA solution as users are very busy and we cannot just pop-up in some programs, random programs, and stuff so they end up having to wait. I do not believe that attended automation helps users as much as an unattended version can help. This is due to the fact that at some point, someone still has to be involved in the process.

RPA is a new technology and a new shift that there's no good book on how to manage. Maybe there are some, however, they can be obsolete rather quickly, as the technology is changing and with every new version. That's why hands-on experience is the best way to learn. Even for UiPath, without any practice, without any hands-on experience, and without any good community, you cannot do anything.

If someone wants to learn UiPath, first they must sign up within the community and then go to UiPath Academy. Start there. Practice. Get in touch with people in the community, and then create a small use case and do some hands-on work. Practice is very crucial in RPA. Don't forget to review official documentation as well, as it will save you lots of time. 

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

I've created an app for conversions and exchange rates. Every day I need the exchange rate of a certain currency and I use the API free exchange and UiPath.

It's also used for the reconciliation of invoices.

I've used it for the creation of an onboarding bot for employees to be onboarded onto a website with a remote system. I used AWS and a virtual machine and created a Google Form from there, and used UiPath's computer vision to do onboarding activities and extract data from files. PDF files can then be entered into the remote system. UiPath can be used to fill the forms.

It can be used for web extraction tasks as well, for example, for booking flights, where you can extract the flight details for particular search criteria and place them into an Excel sheet.

It can also be used to extract data from invoices in order to populate an Excel sheet, for a portable format. I've created a process that used documents as a learning model and extracted the invoices, using logic to output the transactions. 

Another use case I tried was extracting data from Amazon based on exact data. The same can be done on Linkedin using the Linkedin API. I'm fine-tuning and extracting data, putting the outputs on Google Sheets.

I've experimented with many use cases and automated many processes. 

It's low code/no code which makes it very easy to work with. 

Building automation using UiPath is easy. If I see a video or some instructions, I can do it. Things are doable. You learn. If there are use cases or there is information online, you can replicate the process.

Adding activities is easy. All of these partners are integrated into UiPath now - including AWS and G-suite. You have activities already built right into UiPath and they are working to make everything as low-cost as possible.

Then you have OCRs which offer the Document Understanding. I can do a PDF extraction using just OCR in a normal way.

I love the Document Understanding. You can see whether a document is valid or not. You can accept or reject. I came up with a .NET background. I used to write so many lines of code for doing a certain thing. Here, you have a for a loop. You don’t need so much code.

I remember when I used to work for a UK client, a gas utility, and at that time we used a read-through data driver, and got the Excel data, and again validated everything. However, for that, we used to write around two, three pages of code. Now, using UiPath, you just do a real Excel activity and you get the entire sheet. Automation has made our lives easier.

I can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. Now, since the cloud has come into the picture, everyone is going to the cloud and everything is easier but with the new cloud partners like Google, AWS, Azure, and Oracle. A company may not have its own on-premise orchestrator.

Earlier, you needed three servers for production, testing, and development. Since UiPath has both cloud orchestrated and on-premise, it's easier for organizations to use less physical space. For smaller organizations, they can go to the cloud. For larger they can have their on-premise orchestrator. It’s flexible.

UiPath enables me to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis and then robot building and finally monitoring of automation. There are many process mining tasks, capture tasks, mining, et cetera. More things have to be automated - such as deploying, managing, and enhancing for continual improvement. It has all the components.

For a beginner, end-to-end coverage may not be essential. When we talk about automation, we should know what can be automated so that we ease our lives and that doesn't mean we have to remove the resources. You don’t have to involve the employees. You just need to simplify the task so that there is continual improvement. Users should consider not only, how to automate but what needs to be automated. If it is automated, how it can be improved gradually and what are the returns? Sometimes that doesn’t necessarily mean you need end-to-end. You just need simplicity.

I do use the attended automation. For some processes, I use the attended automation for testing purposes. I use the attended if I'm using UiPath assistant, otherwise, it's normally background processes that are unattended.

Attended automation will be for Document Understanding when I'm training a robot, for example, for what is the format or validating the time I'm using attended one. If I'm asking a user for particular search criteria, or for currency exchange it's mixed but mostly unattended.

Both attended and unattended work together - the human as well as the robot. However, it depends on the scenario. Unattended means you are not dependent on any human resources.

The orchestrated cloud, which is a SaaS, it's quite helpful. If I just want to install UiPath studio in my system and I'm least bothered about what environment it should be, what infrastructure should be, where I'm going to deploy, it is quite useful and quite easy when there is a SaaS option available.

I’ve used the AI functionality for sentiment analysis such as getting reviews from the websites about a particular product or service.

UiPath offers great object detection where you have a magistrate and you can detect whether you want to detect the people. If you want to extract how many people are there in that image, for example, during a social distancing sort of event, that can be used for object detection. I've used object detection for images in terms of extracting a number of people.

I’ve trained the system to read different types of invoice formats. I've used the email or Document Understanding that can read separate invoices, receipts, utilities, et cetera. I’ve used the solution to create processes for invoice reconciliation.

The AI functionality is quite easy to use. For tollgates, for example, when they charge for tolls, the solution can be utilized for seeing the number plate, and through the image, get the data, extract the number of data from the numbers plate, use the driver information from the number plate of the car, et cetera. It becomes a very easy AI model. Without any type of knowledge in AI, you can use those out-of-the-box functionalities.

The more training you do with machine learning, the better results you get in the end.

I use the automation cloud feature.

We are not bothered about any patches or any work that has to be done to maintain the infrastructure; the vendor does it.

The automation cloud offering has helped decrease time to value, however, since I have not deployed real-time projects, I cannot give exact numbers on the decrease. That said, from my experience, I feel that it is true.

It’s my understanding that the automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's overall cost of ownership, however, at this time, I just use the free version.

The solution enables you to be better and better with cloud features that are quite accessible.

In terms of UiPath Apps, I have used them, however, just for my own purposes, for my own training purposes, as I was learning. It is easy to use and pretty much drag and drop. For the basic things, the user can do a lot with minimal training. You can do everything with low code and less coding knowledge as well. A person may not be technically sound, however, even with minimum knowledge, they can create apps using UiPath apps. That's the interesting part of UiPath apps.

UiPath reduces the cost of digital transformation. It does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

UiPath has reduced human error. For example, let's say I'm filling a form using a document. Typos, errors, spelling mismatches, et cetera, are reduced when it is handled by automation. When we automate this process, the robot minimizes the error since a human is not involved in this case of data entry. It will extract whatever data there is in that document and it will fill in the form. Similarly, for calculating Excel data, we can avoid calculation errors.

More videos are required. There are basic videos that can help you learn about the product, however, there need to be more in-depth videos to help you through certain tasks. For example, I was trying to use an API for conversion. I was doing it for a single transaction, one by one. There can be cases where it will not go for a simple conversion or simple transaction, and it will be a bulk action. In that case, I may need to upload a file. I was searching for an upload control however, I could not find anything to assist me.  It would have been helpful to find some sort of instructional video for this task. The file upload, where you upload a file and select a file so that you can extract data all those things based on that file is a commonly used feature - and yet, that was missing. 

UiPath apps may be able to increase the number of automation I can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. However, they need to elaborate on the process. I need more articles on that. From the point of view of the person developing the automation, I need more details on writing the correct code or doing the automation, which I hope will be coming in the next releases.

They require an improvement in the IEP. I don't know whether it's a bug or something. I find that, with drag and drop, you have to drag it in a particular fashion. 

When they add new features, they should offer some in-depth sessions on them to help people get comfortable with the changes. 

It would always be helpful to have new partnerships between UiPath and different cloud vendors. 

I started using the solution in February of this year.

I am on a gap year. I used to work for an IT company, and I have taken a gap. To re-skill myself I started learning UiPath. 

The stability is quite good. You have other options, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. UiPath will be like coming out with new revisions in the coming years that will continue to compete with those.

Even now, it's quite stable and quite reliable, even if the changes which are coming, in the much of the deployment, are felt good. There are frequent revisions. I have no experience in other automation, however, from what I've seen, even as it changes, it's stable.

Scalability is quite good. It has alliances with different cloud vendors so that you can scale your robots. You can have different instances, different new virtual machines, and in the cloud. You're not concerned about what to install and you just pay as you use. The cloud vendors make it very scalable. 

Once I am employed, I do plan to increase usage.

I use the forum for any queries. I didn't face user technical problems for any robots that I am using. I have not been in direct contact with technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

You just go to UiPath.com and register with your user ID or any email ID. From there, you install the UiPath Studio and you set your workflows. Once you publish, you get it in your orchestrator, attach the process, create a job. And then you run it. 

It's quite easy to create a workflow, publish it, and deploy it in the orchestrator. Next, you have to tag the correct robot, the correct machine, and the correct sponsor. In any environment you want.

For small processes, the deployment would hardly take a few minutes to deploy.

Maintenance is light for the cloud instances and really does not need much. The cloud vendors do the work, however, users need to pay for the services which they use.

I handled the initial setup myself. I did not need an integrator or consultant. 

I can't speak to the exact pricing of the product as I am using a free version of it right now. I'm not paying any licensing fees to UiPath.

I shouldn't say you need licenses for many things for today, however, for working on Visual Studio, if you want to automate something, you need a license, which costs you around 5,000 to 6,000 Rupees. If you want to do some extra Microsoft office activities. You need the maximum office license, which is 70,000 Rupees. That said, with UiPath, you need not have Microsoft Office installed. You can still read the data and extract the data in an Excel format. You can then share the data from those automation activities with no third-party license cost and no software licenses.

UiPath can help save costs in an organization. There are so many legacy systems wherein you have so much data migration, and many things which are done manually can be automated and you can save resources while doing something new. 

I'm just an end-user. 

My first experience with automation was, "Okay, which product to learn?". After all the reviews and reading, I decided to start with UiPath. My previous background was .NET web development. I was a full-stack web developer with seven-plus years of experience and I found that I really like when a product is built on a .NET framework. I realized that "Okay, it's better to do something, learn something and I have a background of the platform so let's start from there".

When I started using this product, I found the academy was quite open, and in the forum, there were people who were training as well. I found that while I may not get 100% of the answers I need, 85% to 90% of the time the answer is there if you search. 

Many people do not know RP automation, and it's great that they have these free resources - which is rare for such a product. Each region has a chapter where people working in this area come and share their knowledge and experiences.

Currently, I'm using the 2019 version of the solution. It's not the latest, however, it's not much older. I'm using the enterprise as well, which is free for 60 days. I started using UiPath apps as well. I'm learning so I use the cloud orchestrator to deploy my processors. 

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

My use case is to automate a bunch of office processes. It helps my team and finance organization save time and money.

There's a monthly upload process in my order management team. Every month, this team uploads a bunch of files to SAP. Now they don't need to do that because the bot does that for them at a given time period. The team members need to just upload a file to SharePoint and then the bot will pick it up.

It reduced human error. It saves us time redoing work and allows our humans to do other stuff.

It has freed up a couple of hours in a month. If you scale it, I'd say there are some processes that are daily. It has been at least 2,000 hours so far. This additional time enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. Bots can be tricky to debug. So, sometimes employees get frustrated there but overall they're happy it's there in the first place.

UiPath reduced the cost of our automation operations. Right now it's breaking even, but over time there'll be more. It has also reduced overall costs. 

The Studio and Orchestrator are pretty valuable. They seem to have a lot of connectivity and usability. It's pretty easy for people without a coding background to use it.

It's pretty easy to build automation using UiPath. It's a little hard for some activities because there's not enough support. There's not a lot of adoption with that activity, but the ones that are commonly used have pretty good support.

Its end-to-end coverage is important to us. If we have it all on one platform, we don't have to bounce around other software. But, we ended up doing a little bit of both.

Capturing ROI needs improvement. I would also like for it to have more logging mechanisms in Orchestrator.

I have been using UiPath for about two years now. 

It's stable now. 

We mainly use Unattended Automation but it has helped to scale RPA benefits by automating departments for the very few Attended Automations we have. It's important to me because my job pretty much depends on this software. Changing from this product to another RPA product is going to be extremely costly and time-consuming.

It is scalable. We have about 30 users on it now that are entry-level/senior associate-level people.

It requires four developers to maintain. 

We plan to increase usage in the long term. But right not we still have enough capacity in our existing Orchestrator.

I would rate their tech support a six out of ten. Most of them don't work in U.S. time and they're not always very responsive. Sometimes they give an answer that is pretty generic and can be found in the online article, even though I referenced the article already.

We also use Automation Anywhere. 

The initial setup was not too hard and not too easy. Some documentation wasn't very clear, and for basic features it handled it pretty well. But, if you wanted to go more granular and customize your deployment, it would be a little hard to find out the answer.

The deployment took about a month. We involved the UiPath support to help us implement it and upgrade our systems. Other than that, we got our PAM software lead that uses CyberArk to configure the Orchestrator with us.

We have seen ROI. I don't know the max number of hours but I'd say we've saved around 2,000 hours so far.

I think pricing could be better. I think it should be more visible.

The license system with Studio licenses seemed a bit redundant and not necessary.

We looked at other solutions but went with UiPath because of the cost. Another reason was that we have more developers that are specialized in UiPath, as well as management, who seemed to like UiPath more.

I still have to pay attention to the infrastructure a little bit because it's still On-premises. I'm using the On-premises products more so, but the support has been pretty decent. And then, there are community forums to look up how to debug some stuff.

The upfront cost is always going to be more than trying to keep it to the human process, but over time we'll realize more return.

My advice would be get UiPath support to do this for you and involve all your IT firewall security team.

You need to know more about security and cybersecurity in order to fully deploy your automations. Some of that is kind of missing in the Academy where they focus mainly on building automations, but not really securing it.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We do use the Automation Cloud offering.

We do not use the SaaS version of the solution. 

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

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

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

I have been using it for a couple of different things, mainly insurance-related. As of now, we are using it mainly in insurance platforms, insurance portals, and doing some admin support in terms of the backend insurance tasks.

I've used it before in payroll where it was processing the payroll, generating the payslips, creating the payments for our outsourced invoices, processing invoices, making payments, sending reports to banks, and more.

In terms of improving the functions, we had to have a lot of time-critical tasks, which we have seen improvement on. In insurance, it is mainly around the claim processing and then paying the invoice to the third parties or doing the payments to the end customer. Most of the time it is missed, and then there are SLA penalties involved. This solution offers good savings for us in all those areas. On top of that, there are fewer errors now. Previously, there were many manual errors due to the time-critical aspect of the tasks. People were trying to put in their best efforts while working quickly against time, which caused them to work too fast and make mistakes. We get savings on two fronts now. One is mistakes. There are no mistakes anymore. The second thing is we are doing tasks faster and can run 24/7.

The orchestrator is one of the good features they have.

Internally, internal queue management is another feature that is really helpful when it comes to managing the work and checking the workload.

The latest thing that they added is reports that show the handling times and all those things.

The ease of use of building automation using UiPath is good and I would rate it and an eight out of ten with the version I am using. If we move to the latest version, there may be a couple of new features, such as modern variable management, that would bump it to nine out of ten. 

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. With the new versions, it does, at least. We are not using those features in my current organization, as we have some other tools in place. 

End-to-end coverage is important to us. We use the older version. We started using it three years ago, which is why we build a lot of items ourselves. If the features were released two years ago, we'd likely use UiPath for everything.  

It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to the infrastructure of the automation. We're very interested in the cloud. It offers many benefits. Even though we are on-prem now, in terms of managing the infrastructure, it will likely be really helpful to move to the cloud, so that we don't have to bother about all this infrastructure stuff in the future.

It reduced the cost of digital transformation and it is allowing us to actually move to digital items, as, most of the time, when we were trying to present things and things were not digital, it helped us to advance very much into a digital space easily.

It does not require any expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support. For some applications, it requires some modifications. Even if it's 10% or 20% digitized, we are trying to use UiPath to do the stuff for us instead of doing the application, upgrading, all those things. In most cases, it's not very costly for us.

UiPath has reduced human error. It does all the time. In claims, there used to be a lot of human error. Especially in payments, sometimes it would pay more or less or the wrong person, and now, it's all automated and errors have stopped.

The solution has freed up employee time. It depends on the process, however, if I had to take an average, it is probably freeing up one full-time person, which is eight hours. On a monthly basis, around 150 hours are saved for a medium process.

This additional time has enabled employees to focus on more important work. Employees are happier, and, depending on the process and what they were doing, what kind of involvement it requires, the solution is motivating employees. 

The product is reducing the cost for other operations, as it's an automation tool. While we are paying for automation, it is reducing the overall operational cost. Not specifically automation operational costs, but other operational costs. We are seeing an average savings of around 30%.

UiPath hasn't really helped us minimize our on-prem footprint. We are still using the on-premises deployment and everything is on-premises for us. We have, however, used some machines on the cloud. Still, the on-premises footprint in terms of UiPath is not lower.

There are a couple of minor items that could use improvement. Overall the tool roadmap looks fine. They have improved a lot from 2019 to 2021. In two years, there have been lots of additions. It seems like there's no particular improvement which they need to make. They have already improved a lot in the 2021 version, which is adding a modern framework and then modern folder structures. 

They can probably focus more on attended stuff or creating a UI around that. We are not using the attended bot a lot, however, I have seen some use cases in other organizations, as I'm working in consulting. I've seen in some other areas where an organization wants to use attended automation, however, the feature is not very well designed which makes it difficult to use.

I have been in automation for almost four years. I'm using all of these different tools, not only UiPath, and moving around within tools. For example, I'll use UiPath for six months, and then do three months on another tool, and then eight months again on UiPath.

However, overall, in terms of automation, I've been familiar with various solutions for three to four years.

It is very stable. It can perform very well for small to medium complex processes. It takes a little bit of time to adjust for very complex processes, however. It takes some time to build and to develop and deploy for very complex processes. That said, it is very stable overall, with the caveat that, for very complex processes, it's difficult to build or manage.

Scalability-wise, it is good in terms of connecting the bots and the Orchestrator can support thousands. 

In our case, we have around 137 to 140 registered users on the Orchestrator. Most of them are developers. I would say it's around 20 odd VAs or other staff, however, most of them are developers. Around 100+ developers, with the remaining users being process analysts.

We are always trying to find new work in the pipeline, and, as of now, it is not used across the entire organization. It is currently used by 50% of the teams and the plan is to take it to 100%. 

I would rate technical support at an eight out of ten as of now. They're not always right on the first try, however, most of the time we get what we need on the first or second try.

I'm constantly jumping back and forth between various automation tools. 

I previously used Automation Anywhere. I'm working in consulting, so I switch between tools, and for one of the clients, it could be Automation Anywhere, for another it could be UiPath.

Each tool has its own pros and cons. An ideal tool could be probably a mixture of all of the tools on the market as some have some great features. UiPath is great for its ease of use. Anyone can quickly jump in and start learning it. Some of the tools take a little bit more time to understand and probably need more time to deploy or build code. Some others have better debugging. I would say UiPath debugging can be better. This is one of the things which can be improved. It is improved in the latest version, however, if it can be compared with others, such as Pega robotics, it can be improved. That said, Pega robotics is not an automation or RPA tool. It's basically RD. It's a front-end tool.

I have set UiPath up from scratch for one of the companies I worked with in Sydney, Australia. It was in 2017 or 2018 when I was comparing the tools, and deciding which one is better based on the roadmaps. At that point, I set it up from scratch.

The time when I did a setup, it was very complex. 

When I started doing it in 2017 or 2018, there were a couple of issues with installing the SQL server and configuring everything for the Orchestrator machine, et cetera and it was very complex.

Now, they have simplified it. It's a one-time installation, and the cloud makes things really easy. With the new versions, it is better. For me, the support was not very good at that time.

The deployment took us a couple of days. It was complex. The documentation was not really very great, and the support was also not very good. It took us a couple of days, maybe five to ten days, to implement it end-to-end and then set up multiple instances.

In terms of the strategy, we have followed the guidelines, whatever the document said, and then took help from UiPath support. Other than that, it was a standard installation.

For deployment and maintenance, it depends on process counts. Usually, when processes are stable and running for a long time, one person can support four to five processes in general. In our case, we have a mix and match model for supporting production. Overall, I would say that there is a different team for each different support platform. A platform team is just supporting the infrastructure, and overall there are around 20 people, which offer support.

I did not use an integrator. I work with a consulting company, and we help with the installation. However, at the time, UiPath didn't have a very good presence in Australia, which made it difficult.

I'm not very involved in pricing or licensing.

We are mostly using developer licenses and they have unattended, attended pro and developer licensing. We also have development and production licensing as well as licensing for the orchestrator. Different licenses have different costs.

We pay our licensing fees on a yearly basis. 

I'm not using the latest version. We're a little behind. We need to update it.

We do use a bit of attended automation, however, it isn't very much. It is helpful, however, we are getting better benefits with the backend automation. For us, the level of importance in terms of having attended automation is five out of ten.

We have done a couple of POCs with AI. We don't have anything which is in production. It's all POCs and a couple of minor display things. We aren't using AI very much at all. Therefore, we don't have proper use cases. We haven't solved other processes. The first priority is to solve everything practical instead of moving to experimental tasks.

At this time, we do not use the UiPath apps feature. I haven't seen it and I'm not aware of it.

The support is really good now compared to what it was a couple of years back. Support teams are really helpful when it comes to upgrading or installing the new versions, and it is very straightforward compared to what it was. I would say planning is important however, UiPath support is always there when they are required to be.

The biggest lesson we have learned is it's important to have a roadmap. We've connected a lot of tools and built a lot of things. We invested a lot. However, it's important to be flexible enough to adjust so that you can change if you need to, as it's hard to predict the future.

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