UiPath Platform Reviews

The solution helps our organization with filing sales and use tax returns. We mainly copy and paste data from Excel and process it in the solution. 

We do not use AI yet, but want to start looking into it. 

The solution has helped by decreasing the manual work required to file certain tax returns. A manual return takes about an hour but bots can complete the work in twenty minutes. This time savings has been a big help for our organization. 

The Studio is valuable because it helps us to build bots.

The Insights have been super valuable because they help us determine the benefits of our bots.

The Insights could be improved to be more user friendly and less reliant on code for building specific dashboards.

The Orchestrator could be improved to make it easier to manage folders where bots are stored.  

I have been using the solution since July of 2021. 

The solution is stable and we have no problems running bots. 

The solution is scalable and it is pretty easy to see how processes can be applied across multiple teams. 

The Community is very cool and it has been interesting to see all the various companies involved with the solution. There are many good ideas and it is valuable to hear from speakers. 

The Academy offers courses that are very helpful and assist in getting up and running. Instead of having to figure everything out, classes are available for learning Studio, StudioX, and Insights a bit quicker.  

Technical support has been fine but nothing special. I have only opened a few cases so far and support resolved those problems. 

Neutral

We did not previously use another solution. 

The setup and deployment was pretty straightforward. 

Many things come with the cloud platform so they can be a bit complex until you learn about them. I feel like we are learning new things on the platform every day. Once we learn a product, it is relatively straightforward. 

We implemented the solution in-house. We wanted to cover the lowest hanging fruit that would give us the most immediate benefit. 

With initial deployment completed, we have moved to taking our time to learn Studio and expand to more complex automations. We work with Tquila Automation who has been very helpful with development and learning. 

We have realized ROI because we have saved over 1,200 hours that would have been required for manual filings. This has been a big help because staff can instead focus on other things. 

The solution is definitely expensive but is a powerful technology that we do not expect for free. It is important to justify the business cost by explaining the ROI to stakeholders. 

We evaluated several options before choosing the solution, including Blue Prism. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are a service-based development company and we implement automation for our clients. UiPath is one of the RPA solutions that we use for this.

A recent use case that we implemented for a client involved a macro in an Excel sheet. The macro contained approximately 1,000 lines, and it was being used in an Excel spreadsheet about 10 pages long. They had dropdowns within the sheet that had to be set, depending on the action. They also had to work with some of the logic themselves.

With UiPath, we implemented a solution where the bot will create a task. It first checks to see if all of the necessary conditions are there. If they are, then the bot will automatically run the macro. If instead, some of the values are missing and user input is required, then the bot will create a new task to request the missing items from the user. It uses the UiPath forms and the client will receive an email to say that a task has been created and that it will be completed once the necessary values are selected.

Finally, once all of the values have been selected, the bot will run, use the input, and complete the execution of the macro.

A second use case for us was done using the Action Center. In this case, our clients send emails, and we have API calls that are done in response. Once an email comes in, a message ID is created and assigned to it, then it is turned into a Queue item. At that point, the user is presented with different actions that are dictated by the content of the email.

Depending on the user's selection, there are three or four paths that it can take. Ultimately, the bot will send an ETA and some request data to the appropriate parties, which is controlled by yet another process.

Using UiPath for automation is a little bit costly but it saves a lot of time, and it also reduces human error. When humans perform tasks, there are a lot of errors that come about. However, when a bot performs the same task, the number of errors is significantly reduced. This is the reason that companies are implementing UiPath and undergoing a digital transformation.

In our experience, bots run with minimal errors, in the one or two percentage point range. Of the thousands of items that they process, very few will result in an error. Humans, by contrast, normally have an error rate of 5% or 6%.

It is very easy to develop automation using UiPath, and I would rate it a four out of five in this regard. This is true whether it is IT automation, UI automation, desktop automation, or otherwise. We have even performed Citrix Automation recently, where we used remote runtime. In that case, we had access to a lot of features and this made our work very easy to do.

This product enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Some of our clients use the process mining feature, which includes task capture. Then, based on that, they generate the process design document (PDD). After they have the PDD, the bot is designed using Studio, and then it is ready for deployment. Deploying a bot includes publishing it using Orchestrator, and once it is running, Orchestrator monitors it. From end to end, UiPath is part of the process.

This is important to us because some of our clients are not very technical. They have ideas of what they want to do, so they walk us through the steps in a process. During that time, we will begin using the task capture capability to record what they do, making it easier for us to gather ideas and requirements. The whole process is an easy way to capture good use cases for the client.

Most of our clients are now opting for cloud-based deployment. This is important to them because they don't have to store everything on their on-premises servers. Essentially, they don't have to waste any space.

One of the features that I like is that the bot will continue to work on other tasks, even if one task is blocked because it is waiting for user input. For example, it's very good because whenever we need to have user input, we don't need to use the attended automation. Just because the user is not available to select the actions, it will not break the bot. Rather, the bot will work on other tasks. Once the person manually completes the required action, the bot will resume the pending task.

It is very easy for us to get selectors by using the UI Launch Explorer. I have used other tools that require we visit the webpage and get the selectors manually. This means that we have to inspect the page and find the elements. However, with UiPath, we have the selectors readily available using UI Launch Explorer.

Another good feature is the UiPath Academy. Whenever a new feature is released, we learn about it from the Academy. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of helpfulness for getting employees up to speed. When we review the new courses that they release, we can quickly get a complete idea of the feature that they are presenting.

The UiPath forum is very helpful. It is the best forum available for any of the tools that we have. I would rate the UiPath forum a five out of five.

One of our clients is using the UiPath Apps feature, and although it is easy to use, they are having some issues with it. For example, when they deploy an update, it is pushed to the cloud and then it will break an hour later. There have been two or three such issues and ultimately, they result in a high priority ticket to fix the problem.

I have been working with UiPath for approximately four years.

With respect to stability, the general system is stable. This includes the robots, Automation Cloud, and the Action Center. However, we have had a lot of downtime with UiPath Apps. It had been one or two days per month when our processes were getting blocked and although many of these issues are resolved, last month we had recurring issues with downtime.

The technical support team is very helpful. For anybody with a license, there is an option to raise a ticket based on priority. The support team tries to fix such problems very quickly.

Overall, the support team is very good and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have explored two or more other RPA solutions. One of them is Automation Anywhere, and another is Microsoft Power Automate.

When I explored Power Automate, it didn't have many features. It is a product that is still growing but when I looked at it, UiPath had more features.

In the case of Automation Anywhere, it's a little bit more difficult to work on. As an example, Automation Anywhere does not have ready-made selectors. There is no equivalent to the Ui Launch Explorer so we have to go to the webpage and find the elements by ourselves.

One advantage to Automation Anywhere is that it's a little bit less costly.

Using the Apps feature for one or two of our clients has sped up the time required to develop bots for them. Also, because it is a drag-and-drop interface that only requires a small amount of coding, making it work is much easier.

Our clients dictate the deployment model, whether it is on-premises or cloud-based. One of our clients uses Amazon but the majority of them work using virtual machines that are running on their in-house servers.

The automation saves time and money for our clients, although the amounts vary and are based on the specific solution. As an example, in an email task that we automated, the bots replaced a team of people. On average, the automation saved 28 hours per day for that task.

In general, several hours can be saved per day for each automation.

Due to the reduced costs and other benefits, our clients are ready to create more bots.

UiPath is a little more costly than competing solutions such as Automation Anywhere. 

The cost for licensing is handled by our customers that use the bots.

I have not personally used the AI functionality when creating automations, although some of our clients use features such as Document Understanding for invoice processing. They also use the ML Trainer. These features help them to automate processes that are more complex. For example, when they have 20 or 30 invoices coming in each day, the bot is trained to look at them and it makes the job very easy to do. Also, when the accuracy drops, the bot can wait for input in an attended fashion. This has helped a lot of our clients.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I use it for automating activities and processes in my company, and for discovering new automation opportunities. UiPath is my main tool for automating every process in business operations.

One of my main use cases for UiPath is around service desk and support center operations. I use it to take tickets from customers and users and automate answers using UiPath's machine learning. It links the questions to documentation where we already have answers.

I also use it for automating invoices with the pricing and other information and sending them to customers when they buy an item.

In addition, when somebody subscribes to a newsletter I have set up a process to send an email in reply.

Using the solution we can do task mining and process mining. The automations make everything easier for my business and for the other businesses where I implement them.

For example, one of my use cases is for a doctor's office to help manage the patients by handling their inquiries and automating the invoices. I have also set up processes to help with research and prescriptions. All these processes are automated and run without any human involvement.

And it has helped my business operations a lot. It's helping us detect all the performance issues and data threats. UiPath Insights helps us to prevent these issues from happening again. It's powering up our operation. We can analyze all our departments in one place and get the best usage from them using Insights.

We fully depend on UiPath for the three departments: sales, marketing, and service. Many of our sales operations are done by UiPath, such as generating invoices, research, and engaging with clients through the help tickets they submit, as well as through the email communication we do. 

And one of the most important benefits is the ability to identify new opportunities in my employees' workflows. It is able to record and discover what my employees do and we are able to create automations as a result. 

Digital transformation is another main focus. Through the UiPath Marketplace, I can get expert virtual employees who do very expert jobs and tasks without having to hire somebody or bring them into the office as an employee. It's all automated by the software. I can discover, build, manage, and engage with the robots. My employees can easily manage all the robots and the processes, increasing the collaboration among us.

All of this makes it easier to store and move data from Google Sheets to my own sheets or my CMS on WordPress.

It saves a lot of time. It has really transformed my operation from a situation where we were always pressed for time and had slow response times to customers. With UiPath, we have increased our customer satisfaction scores and get tasks done faster than ever. My employees are now using the time they used to spend on certain tasks for things that require more thought. It has transformed business operations 180 degrees, making everything easier, helping the business to grow faster, and improving performance. We have control of the front-end work as well as the back-end processes.

For me, the most valuable feature is the solution's ability to discover automation opportunities.

The Document Understanding feature for extracting information from documents or images helps reduce manual work, saving people from having to scrub data from PDF files or images. UiPath extracts all the information and stores it.

In addition, its AI and machine learning make everything easy, as do the Data Service tools, because they don't require coding to create automations. I can do everything without coding knowledge.

And the UiPath user community is the best. The people there are very friendly and helpful, and engage with each other. UiPath has done a good job building a good forum and a good blog, and making the community members interact with each other. The community is one of the reasons UiPath is my choice. It is a strong community.

I like most of the UiPath tools, but the UiPath Academy, in particular, wasn't my favorite part. It didn't have enough onboarding guidance when I started. The learning curve for the courses in the Academy was very difficult in the beginning. I had to turn to Google and YouTube to learn from other people, experts, and the community. The community was friendly, but the academy wasn't that helpful for me. I think it needs to improve on the information it provides to make it easier for beginners to learn, to help decrease the learning curve.

Also, the user interface needs to be more customizable, and the debugging tool doesn't work well enough. It needs some improvements.

I have been using UiPath for one year and eight months. I have several websites and three startups, and I also implement UiPath and automations for other companies.

It's stable. It has 99 percent uptime. 

Sometimes, when we are dealing with a large set of data, it becomes slower. I don't know if it is something to do with UiPath or something else, like the operating system or the connections. It is almost always stable, but when dealing with large data, it becomes a little buggy and slower. Sometimes it freezes and I have to turn everything off and restart it.

Their support staff has good knowledge about whatever I raise, but they are late in responding, at times. I have had to turn to the community more. When I can't find an answer, I turn to them and only after them to support. It should be the other way around. I should be turning to the support group and then, if needed, to the community. 

One good thing that I have found is that UiPath responds to the community and the recommendations of users. When we recommend something, they put it on their roadmap and they make plans for it in their app. They are engaging and friendly with users and the community, but they are late in responding.

Positive

I started by using Blue Prism but only for three or four months and then I left it and turned to UiPath. I couldn't find answers to my questions when I was using Blue Prism. I couldn't find a professional community to engage with or to get help from. This was the reason I started turning to UiPath, after reading a few reviews from several websites and some of the community posts. The UiPath community was providing good information about every capability of the solution. In my experience with Blue Prism, I couldn't find any valuable communities out there. With UiPath I found the opposite. 

Even now, I find it good to engage with the UiPath community. Whenever I need an answer to something or an explanation about a use case, I always turn to them.

They have to reduce the price a little bit for basic users, startups, and small companies.

We are partners with UiPath and Automation Anywhere. We use this solution for IT services and for the education sector.

OCR Tesseract, by default, is the good OCR search engine to extract data from a digital PDF. For any Unstructured document with a normal noise, background letters, either UiPath Document Understanding or AbbyyReader fails to extract the exact values. Very difficult to depend on Computer Vision too as a third party tool for small to mid-range business purpose. Hence, a combination of AI/ML with a good OCR Engine is required for UiPath to go forward.

UiPath Orchestrator is definitely a plus point in the product. This helps in all formats of UiPath version ranging from PoC till Product Deployment.

The OCR functionality for this solution could be improved. It should have a better capability to read unstructured documents. The next generation of OCR is ICR and UiPath does not have this. This would enable us to read and search through documents.

We have used this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support is not that satisfactory. We have to find the answers by ourselves through non-community groups. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment was easy. 

It was implemented in-house. 

The return on investment is really good. I would rate it a three out of five.

We're an official partner of both AA and UiPath and both of them carry the same weight with a very marginal difference but there is a difference in cost. Currently our clients are looking for cost optimization post-pandemic and UiPath comes at a high price point. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The solution has provided assistance with the removal of repetitive human transactional activities; document to text solutions; complex data extractions; cut and paste operations; information content management. This is either supported in promoting strategies with our business partners, or implemented at our clients, or included in products we develop for our clients. 

We use it in our own operations that have been migrated to other products or solved with coding or third-party software offering solutions to specific needs. Solutions are based on client sites and our clients pay for their own licensing.

The costs involved and the licensing model have forced us to recommend other solutions to our clients and to stop using UiPath internally due to constraints imposed on small businesses (specifically around the community edition). 

For our clients who can afford the licensing costs (Blue Chip Clients), the benefits have been to remove some repetitive activities from the target areas. 

In most cases, where there is a high-value resource impacted by these repetitions, there has been a cost-benefit in doing so, however, where the labor cost is below a certain threshold, the benefits are contained to error avoidance and reliability only with (additional) costs being migrated to support the technology and increasing overall IT OPS costs - particularly now with the increased fees and current licensing model.

The product as a whole is a valuable contributor to efficiency improvement. It integrates with ease (although some coding experience is required for higher/involved functions). We use it to streamline and support our customer operations primarily, but also to do internal acceleration on human-dependent (simple) tasks.

Simplification of complex task creation by introducing pre-coded objects is the single most attractive feature of the product. The choice between attended and unattended Bot applications with similar functionality is an advantage. 

Features are on track, however, service and cost models need to be reviewed to be market sensitive and related to the industry. Providing a great product at the wrong price without consideration to the economic conditions of the markets within which it is being offered, creates barriers and another product is sure to fill the void.

Closer integration with machine learning frameworks and matrix processing can be improved and will benefit low-cost/entry-level uptake and activation for some clients. Although pass-through options exist and have been activated, this is not sufficient to create encapsulated learning within the organizations and serves to improve third-party algorithms with added exposure to privacy (information systems security management) risks. 

I've been involved with UiPath since the launch in South Africa with Larc Technologies as the first UiPath solutions partner and reseller for the country.

No robotic solution can ever be classed as stable unless there are no change dependencies. It will always require more support than any other core technology - its the nature of the beast.

Running multiple robots in an environment requires orchestration, which is another expensive modality in the UiPath stable.

Consultations outside the normal service environments are strained, authoritative, and inflexible and there is little consideration for anything outside their immediate scope of vision and there is zero hesitance to move against initial strategic positioning and commitments. 

Neutral

We have been involved with and supported UiPath from the onset. We have also delivered enterprise solutions with BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath has proven to be capable, but costly and inflexible from a pricing and support model viewpoint.

It depends on the nature of the requirements and can be super complex or super easy. Supporting the bots are always a challenge and supervision (alerts, monitoring) is essential.

We work with excellent vendor implementation teams and have in-house competence in design and delivery. In most customer environments, there are competent implementation and maintenance resources for bot environments. Over the past 5 years, bot development, administration, and maintenance skills have improved, however, there is still a significant gap in proper orchestration and optimization within bot frameworks - which affects the overall cost and effectiveness of automation strategies.

At present, the ROI is negative for us as a company. For our clients, it varies. When all costs are considered (TCO) over a two-year period, financial breakeven is mostly attained with some negative ratios (if it's the wrong tool for the job). 

In most cases, there are intangible benefits. In all cases, IT operations cost increased and, in worst-case scenarios, the business benefit was short-lived as the technology costs escalated and the resource reduction potential was never attained.

HA and DR planning are essential when determining actual resource reduction potential.

UiPath is becoming expensive and will be outpricing themselves if they continue to enforce their current service configuration (model). Many clients have been impacted by the pandemic and instead of assisting to breach the gaps, there is a sense that UiPath is monetizing on the disaster.  

We looked at BluePrism, Automation Anywhere and we are now moving on to Open RPA - a viable option if you have the right skills to plug gaps. 

We primarily use the solution for legacy data transfer, UI automation, CRM and ITSM automation, and call centers. Specifically, in call centers, using UiPath forms and form render has been really helpful.

I love developing in Studio. For my clients, the approachability of the orchestrator is really valuable. It takes a little bit to learn the licensing structure and layout at first, however, once they get it, it's pretty smooth sailing from there. The modern folders have become a great thing for any enterprise that's looking to automate using an orchestrator as a server.

I like to automate in Studio as I'm familiar with it. I honestly just like the platform so I like automating with Studio.

I really enjoy Document Understanding. I like how it all integrates together. Some of the stuff I've seen now with just the connectors and the way you can scale implementations is really exciting. While I do like Studio, I also like how it works with the rest of the platform.

We most recently built an unintended bot that saves them about $500,000 a year worth of GS 14 labor.

UiPath saves costs for our customers’ organizations. That would just be the cost savings from RPA bots. I haven't really dug into the cost savings of the ancillary products, however. I know that one of my clients is using the test suite now after I had built a proof of concept for it, and they've fully implemented it. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of cost savings there as well.

In terms of ease of building automation, it depends on the process. For anything that's ultra-low or a low-level complexity, it's very simple. Once you start getting sprawled out into larger automation that very much becomes object-oriented programming and is basically making a workflow. That's when you really need to take hold of programmatic concepts. You need to be a strong scriptor to be able to make the best RPA bots.

Our clients have reduced human error. That's one of the things that I tend to talk about the most. The bots can get work done faster, however, the reduction of human error is probably more valuable in some cases than just speeding up work.

In terms of UiPath Academy, everybody's used it. I've used it myself. My entire team has used it. All of our engineers are some sort of Pearson VUE certified now. Most of us have the Advanced Developer. A few of our younger junior developers have the associate, the RPA associate, however, they're working on getting the Advanced Developer and they lean on the Academy pretty heavily.

The biggest value in the Academy is the videos, which are pretty helpful. Sometimes you have to slow it down, however, for the most part, the way it goes through concepts, especially for somebody that doesn't have much programming experience, the videos tend to go through some of the more elementary things like variables arguments. That can get a little bit boring for programmers since they've been through that 100 different times. That said, that’s really where the strength lies as it does target a large group of different employees. As an engineer, I might pass by some of the boring stuff, however, I will still find things later on in the training where I'm like, wow, I actually never knew that.

The license model changing every year can be a little bit frustrating. It's hard sometimes when things go from being robot-based to being runtime-based.

Some federal users are still on the 2019 orchestrator or even a 2018 orchestrator. However, by being on them, they can't take advantage of modern folders. This issue is, once they get upgraded to 2020, and they start using modern folders, essentially you shouldn't really be using plastic folders anymore. Some of their frustrations aren't really long-term frustrations. Orchestrators have gotten really popular over the last few years. There are certain things that have made it so much better. That said, we're still in that transition where clients have been using classic folders and then they upgrade and they're going to have to change everything. Hopefully, they don't have to do it more than when they upgrade past 2020.

One of my clients upgraded their production environment from the 2019 orchestrator to the 2020 and everything was in plastic folders and I advised them to switch to modern folders and it was a pain. Once it was taken care of, it was great. It's just that it took a lot of convincing to tell them why it was better.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

It's pretty stable. The biggest issue is just that more companies need to really adopt a change management system, whether that's through Service Now or is built-in change management, those alerts need to be going to the RPA center of excellence. 

There are things that will change or break the UiPath bot sometimes. They're very stable and they've become more stable if there's a change management system. Automated testing can make it so you can catch things that have changed with applications with RPA testing before they've occurred and then you can fix things quickly.

The scalability was tough a few years ago, however, now it's exponentially easier with modern folders and the orchestrator.

I've worked with UiPath support. I would put them at a seven out of ten as they need to be a little bit more timely. There have been issues with a client where support has taken a really long time to get back to us or they haven't updated our support ticket, even though we've advanced. Maybe it was an isolated incident. I have worked with support before where that hasn't happened. I felt like I got in a bad run of working with the support folks and the client was definitely not pleased.

I actually don't have experience with other RPA solutions. I came from a web development background and I went straight into UiPath and now the way that it's scaled out and now that I work in the federal government, UiPath has such a large piece of the market share. I've never really seen a need to learn any other automation solutions. I may learn Power Automate at some point, however, I would really prefer to stick with UiPath.

The solution is pretty straightforward. I've run through complex issues, mostly the NuGet package and it's different with every customer. As far as the UiPath platform goes, it's pretty straightforward to deploy bots. It all depends on how an agency has its group policies set up for security and sometimes that causes issues. It's just about learning new ways to solve different problems that may be unique to an agency or may not be.

In the government, deployment takes a little longer. I would like to think development usually doesn't take that long, however, it's like going through ATO, especially if it's an unintended bot. Sometimes it can take like a few months. It just depends if they've got a center of excellence stood up or not. For example, if they've got an CI/CD pipeline or just a standard development life cycle, a lot of people don't have that set up and then it ends up taking longer as they have to go through ATO. It’s variable. Unfortunately, it's just a lot slower to get them deployed than in the private sector I think.

That’s no fault of UiPath. It's usually group policy security systems and things like that. I've had to talk to a lot of security folks and help walk them through things that need to be changed.

We've been implementing our UiPath as well.

I don't really have too much to offer about the pricing part of it. I don't really work on that side of the business. I would say my only gripe about the pricing would be something like a Studio Pro license being more expensive than a Studio license, just to essentially get something that links Test Manager. Some people might've found that a little bit hard to swallow. From what I've heard, Studio Pro is going away and Test Manager is just going to come into Studio. That would be the only thing I've noticed that I thought was a little silly. Everything else is typically not really my side of the business.

We have everything on-prem in our demo environment and the customers I work with typically have the on-prem offerings as well.

I have used UI path apps in our demo environment. I do not have any clients that are using it.

We have an AI center in our demo environment, however, I don't have any clients that are using it. I do have a client that's actually in the process of installing it right now and getting it through their governance model. That's as close as it would've come for our customers using the AI center.

To those considering UiPath, I would say, just go ahead and do it. RPA is pretty awesome. It's easy to get solutions out. There still needs to be a good bit of work done on the Citizen Developer Model, however, at the same time, as far as getting a team of engineers in there to automate things, if you get good RPA developers, you can get things automated really quickly. People can help you with your standard development life cycle. You just need to jump in.

I would rate UiPath solutions at a nine out of ten. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is that, in terms of the installation of the product, sometimes the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes it's tough to work through installation issues without actually contacting support. I do wish that was a little bit more streamlined.

We have multiple accounts sellable, accounts payable, corporate finance, and supply chain use cases. We have started some use cases at the factory floor automation as well.

There are so many benefits to using UiPath, but getting the buy-in is very important from the end users. We are seeing many hours saved with respect to automation. Automation should be on every project's agenda. 

Scaling at pace with regards to the industry has been the most valuable UiPath feature for us. I would also add that there are so many features in RPA. 

We are leveraging the UiPath Academy for our citizen developer program. We are asking them to train at their own pace. The courses are straightforward.

The adoption rate for this program is low, however. Out of the 150 citizen developers that started, only 10 decided to continue the process.

One way to improve the UiPath Academy, I think, would be to add some real-life use cases and take the students through the automation process. These would be good for citizen developers to start with.

We started our UiPath journey early last year. It has been a year and six months. 

UiPath is stable. The automations we have in place right now are stable. 

Over the past two years, I've reached out to them maybe twice. 

The initial setup was straightforward. When we started this automation journey, instead of going with complex use cases, we picked three simple ones. We started with the accounts receivable processes. 

Deployment took us six weeks. 

As of now, we have automated 160 processes using UiPath and saved many hours. We have saved around 60,000 hours. Although we are not directly reducing costs, we are avoiding the cost of hiring new people.

The solution is very expensive. It's getting harder for me to convince my management about licensing costs. 

Yes, we considered Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We created an automation using both of these and UiPath and ultimately decided on the latter. UiPath is more compatible with the other applications we were already using. Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is our ERP and they partner with UiPath, so that was a major plus for us. Also, UiPath has very straightforward coding courses.

It is usually not easy to build a complex automation. The whole process takes about four to six weeks for a complex automation. Most of the time is spent on gathering the requirements. The development itself does not take much time.

We used it to orchestrate the transfer of data across authorized systems of record, such as Salesforce and we use it to authorize systems or artifacts like Google Sheets and Spreadsheets. We also use it to have a dashboard view and to automate manual user behavior to cut down the time it takes to process specific transactions.

UiPath has reduced human error. With the very manual nature of formulas in Google Sheets and Excel that now can be performed using UiPath and so Spreadsheet controls have been tightened.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates.

We were able to significantly cut down time and hours on some of the key processes which then frees up people to focus on their day jobs as opposed to manual routines with predictable processes. We see 75% time savings. 

The use cases revolve around polling data from multiple systems, but when that has been automated using a bot then that takes that time away. You spend less time gathering the data points and more time doing exception management and reviewing the data.

Those manual hours translate to cost savings and that definitely can help us scale and grow. We were able to see at least one full-time employee equivalent savings.

Saving employees' time has allowed for employees to focus on higher-value work. Rather than spend 80% of their time looking for data, they are now spending 80% of their time really addressing the nature of the data, like what went wrong and trying to gain actionable insights as opposed to trying to figure out whether the data was complete, to begin with.

This has impacted employee satisfaction. One of the key challenges with remote, work from home has been the higher probability of employee turnover and burnout. Also, as part of job satisfaction, working on the right things at the right time and marrying professional and personal endeavors and aspirations, from that respect, UiPath has freed up a lot of employee hours spent on manual routine tasks. That really gave them a human element in everyday work, which revolves around getting value as opposed to merely collecting data.

AI helps to automate processes that are more complex. Part of it is that it is very precise with attended versus unattended elements and it also really understands that the key is not to give everything away to the bots, but it's almost always trading off and achieving a balancing act. Where human intervention is still needed by only at the right time and looking at a small sample as opposed to the entire population.

The AI functionality enabled us to automate more processes overall. We've been able to venture from beyond regular G&A processes to more HR processes. From applicant to hire, it elevates the employee experience and does not just look at scaling.

I'm a big fan of the Academy because it has let me self-serve in a way that I was quite accustomed to.

The point-and-click approach is a great sell. I'm not proficient with Studio but I found it easy to spin up a concept, prototype a demo with stakeholders, and be able to demonstrate value add right away.

Venturing more outside of our Windows environment and more towards OS will help. 

It should be less focused on the howtos and more on demonstrating business value add. A business outcome should be that I was able to approve something in however many days or hours compared to my peers when I benchmark across my peers. That would be a business outcome as opposed to a technical outcome, which is all about how many hours did you save? What were the exceptions you saw? Were you able to shut the bot down? They're very different paradigms. UiPath needs to flush out that business element because a lot of us make decisions on ROI. It's hard to convince executives and management if we only focus on the technical.

It's a hard place to balance because there are people who are business savvy, who are looking for ROI, and then there are other people who are just getting into these programs and these solutions. I need to understand the technical aspect of it.

The other part of it is understanding how UiPath plays out in the ecosystem of available cloud applications and other enterprise software used. A lot of the software out there in the market, such as Workday, has native automation, point and click customization, and automation, potential, and capability. UiPath may want to think about how it plays with these other products as opposed to in place of. We have built teams that have developers who are really proficient, including me in NetSuite and other products. Every day we want to make sure we're using UiPath the right way so that we're not squandering or wasting resources because the same time spent on UiPath could be spent redirecting UiPath elsewhere. That application is inherently not sophisticated enough to handle customization. 

We've been using UiPath for one and a half years.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward for us. We actually worked with a partner. We ultimately put it on AWS just for continuity and it was pretty straightforward for us. We don't really have too many bots going anyway.

The actual deployment didn't take a lot of time. A lot of work was spent only because a lot of work was already invested in building out the prototype which mirrored all of the manual processes. We recorded the manual processes and attempted to replicate as much as we could. We did the proof of concept demo without key stakeholders. So by the time we came to building out the actual work in production, it was just replicating what we already had in the prototype.

We are fine with licensing and pricing. We just need to see where we are in our adoption. I don't have enough of a sense of what the different levels of usage could be.

We evaluated other solutions. Back then the community platform was easy to download and it had a couple of ways of gaining access to software from having access credentials to tokens which is a lot more secure for us. There were also managed packages in UiPath that were readily available that spoke to NetSuite, Salesforce, and Excel. It was a no-brainer.

We only have two developers on it, they support it. We don't have citizen developers. The plan is to continue to see if we can get value add and go beyond the processes that we've addressed and maybe put out a team.

My advice would be to be open; it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I've seen users get tripped up over the fact that every time they think that providing value add through manual intervention, through exceptions, they almost always think it's 100% unattended.

At the end of the day, we are not taking away anyone's jobs. Almost always, there will be an attended piece. It's like driving the car on a freeway. You have the ability to put it on cruise control and the ability to put your foot on the brakes. That's what most users forget. They ask about audit internal controls and on our end, UiPath recently attained SOC 2 type two certification in June of this year, which is great. The reality is there's always a manual human compensating review element, so there shouldn't be a risk if it's built right.

I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten.