UiPath Platform Reviews

We're the shared services divisions to contact centers and handle back-office work. Most of our use cases with UiPath so far have been automating back-office work, taking information from Excel files, and putting them into legacy systems or some mainframe integrations. All of our robots, as of right now, are unattended automation. We haven't really used the attended robots just yet.

The primary benefit so far has been bringing up and updating other processes so that I can move on to other more valuable processes. I no longer need to copy here and paste there. It's taken the robot part of the job out of my hands. 

I have not actually developed anything with it directly. I manage the people who do. The little bit of training that I did, was pretty straightforward. I was using the rapid development tools. If you truly want to build something that's stable and fast, you really have to get in there and at a much deeper level than I got. That said, from what I did, it looked easy.

UiPath has saved the company costs. With the automation we've had so far, we're probably in the 20 to 30 FTE savings range so far.

The solution has reduced human error. It helps in the sense that, if you take a process of humans doing it and give it to a robot that's always following a set of rules when it encounters a certain value, it's always going to handle it a certain way. It's the consistency that the automation provides that has been great.

I’m not sure if the solution has freed up employee time. That's tough to evaluate due to the fact that the FTE that would have been doing this manual process would just mostly get moved to perform more valuable work. It has freed up time by allowing us to allocate those resources to higher-value tasks.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses. They are all good. We've had developers go through the UiPath training. In fact, that's a requirement when developing. They have to at least complete the training. We have at least one developer that's gone through it completely. It's a fundamental starting point to training people on UiPath. We've taken internal people and they train them ourselves.

We also appreciate the fact that the Academy is free to use. Right off the bat, due to the fact the Academy was free, we were able to say, okay, complete the training. You have to complete the training in order to be able to develop. Right away, it became part of our standard. We see the value in it.

The speed could be improved. In some cases, when I have to ask analysts to estimate how much licensing we need, we have to figure out how long it's going to run, and right now we go with the worst-case scenario, that the robots are going to run no faster than the human. That's been our stereotype. We've used other platforms in the past, where I could perform a transaction to some websites in three seconds, however, for UiPath it was 10 seconds. That was even after we did some enhancements to make UiPath as fast as we could. I know it's the internals with the way that the platforms work, however, from our robot's perspective, speed seems to be a barrier.

We started using the solution in late 2019.

The solution is stable. 

I have not had any direct relationship with the support from UiPath. When I do have a technical issue, I'm to engage with an internal team and they are the ones that have the relationship with UiPath support.

We did use a cloud solution previously. We switched to UiPath on-premises as UiPath's on-prem deployment was more aligned with our security constraints. 

We've had multiple projects. Some have been very complex and others have been perfect. It's dependent on the projects that we're using it for. Some were a little bit more complex.

It's my understanding that, while the company likely did look at other options, I was not engaged in those meetings. While I recall some high-level conversations, they didn't say which ones we were actively evaluating.

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

I have not used the AI functionality in my automation program yet.

In terms of functionality, UiPath does quite well. The fact that it's not net-based gives it a lot of flexibility to use it in a non-standard way. For example, we were building a robot interface with an Oracle database, and we could either build a robot to open up an access database with blank tables and pull it down. Or we, due to the fact that it did not have access to the net, could grab an in-memory data set and cycle through that. I liked that flexibility and the fact that we had options.

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

We have around more than 300 bots that are active right now. All the automation we have is based, basically, on Oracle and Oracle ERP. We have other automation as well, however, for now, I am focusing only on Oracle-based automation.

We have so many other use cases that we want to implement within our organization. We try to look at how we can save time for our employees so that they can spend their time on other valuable things, and not waste their time on unnecessary time-consuming tasks. 

Our employees use Oracle ERP, so they have to process so many invoices at one time and it takes a lot of time to consume a single invoice. I'd estimate it would take at least 5 to 10 minutes. But with the automation, we can process one invoice within a minute, or maybe less in some situations. It saves a lot of time - likely hundreds of hours for each employee. It saves manpower for the company and saves you valuable time for the employees. They don't have to do the same things again and again and waste their time on that.

For example, if they have to download an invoice and process that for some reason. They have to go to some ERP tool, log it onto that first, type in the information, and then download the invoice. It takes a lot of time. They don't have to do this once or twice, it's hundreds of times due to the fact that they're not for the same couple of invoices. Therefore, this is one of the best use cases that we have for now. We are still looking for other future use cases, but for now, this is the one we have.

UiPath is saving employees hours of time and has also been able to dedicate their free time to more valuable tasks.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is the time-saving employees get. It's definitely sometimes complicated for the developers when they are automating. However, from a business point of view, I would say this is one of the best tools that every organization should have, to help save time and work hours.

Sometimes if you are doing the same task, again and again, we do make mistakes. Automating those tasks removes that human error. Also, with those types of tasks, a human gets annoyed very, very soon if they keep doing one thing again and again. With the help of robots, we can fix it. There is no error with the bot. The only error would be if there is an exception if something is wrong. That said, from a business point of view, when I'm working on a bot, I make sure that it is not throwing any errors and making sure that there are no mistakes. From a development point of view, we can always fix that, however, we don't want our bot to have an error on the production level.

The ease of use and building automation using UiPath is pretty straightforward. It's not complicated. Even a person who is non-technical can become a citizen developer and use StudioX to automate some of the tasks that they think are time-consuming for them. Otherwise, from a developer's point of view, I don't find it complicated. Initially, when a user is learning and at the initial stages of learning RPA, it's definitely complicated, however, once you get used to it, it's pretty straightforward. I love working as an RPA developer.

UiPath has saved costs for our company. I don't have any metrics on the spot, however, I would say it's a big amount of saving. Our organization is very happy that we are using UiPath. We have a few complications right now, however, in a few months we'll fix everything. By next year, when everything is all settled down within our team, then we can start looking at exact metrics in terms of cost savings.

Our teams have used the UiPath Academy courses. I have been using UiPath Academy for a long time. I tend to keep on checking what's new at the Academy. If something new is there, I always try to learn it as soon as possible. If somebody were to ask me "How can we learn UiPath?" The first answer I’d give them is, "Just go to UiPath Academy and follow the learning path over there." That's what I always recommend to any new person.

UiPath Academy courses have positively affected the process of getting employees up to speed in UiPath. It’s helping employees and companies to learn, and I would say it's a one-stop place for anything related to RPA. You don't have to go to other places. You will find everything at UiPath Academy. Sometimes it doesn't have too much detail on the advanced level of things. However, it provides enough information that you learn by experience. If you need more information, you also have access to the UiPath Forum for that.

The biggest value of the courses is that they definitely save time for someone who wants to learn. I don't have to read a book and I don't have to go to any other place or learn from multiple sources. Everything is in one place and I can just follow the learning path and it's a good education in the tool.

Sometimes we don't see what processes can be automated. When we think that, "Okay, we can do that. It's not so time-consuming," however, we can figure it out with the help of UiPath apps and we likely will use them in the future to automate even more.

In terms of improvements, to be honest, I don't have anything I'd want to be added right now. If I have any problems, UiPath is always there. It's easy to find everything. I don't think anything can be improved. It's going very well. It's working for us.

They could always continue to add new features, however, I don't have anything specific in mind right now.

We have been on UiPath for almost more than a year now within our organization.

I'm satisfied with the stability of UiPath. It's good.

UiPath is always there if you want to scale over UiPath-related items. It is scalable.

In terms of who uses the solution, on my team, it's only me who is an RRP developer. That said, every person in the team knows what UiPath is, and they are joining bots onto the system on a daily basis if they have something to do. In the finance department, there are almost 40 to 50 people using UiPath. It might be more. We have more than 300 bots active right now, and I'm not working on all the bots. We definitely have other developers and other people who are working on it in other divisions within the company. 

We also do have plans to create more bots. We are going to use the UiPath apps in the future to see what kind of automation we can do there as well. for example, the Task Capture is a good tool. We haven't used that yet, however, sometime in the future, I would love to set it up for everyone on my finance team and run that application in the backend so that we can see what processes might be automated.

UiPath support is amazing. We talk with someone on a weekly basis. They suggested we use UiPath technical support as we were having a few technical support issues with UiPath and we couldn't figure it out. When I submitted a ticket at UiPath, they were able to answer within a few hours. At maximum, we would get a response in one day. Not more than that.

They also answer with a solution, and the solution always works. I'm very satisfied with them. We don't have to search on the forum and do our own research. We just submit a ticket and once they get back to us, implement the suggested method and after that, it's all good. I'm really, really satisfied with UiPath's level of technical support.

It's my understanding the company did not use a different RPA tool before UiPath.

That said, there are so many automation tools and I do know a few. There's Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and Microsoft has their Power Automate. I'm not familiar with all of them as my focus is only on UiPath for now. I haven't used others. I wouldn't be able to compare them. UiPath does seem to be one step ahead, however, as others do not have a free learning academy the way UiPath has. They do not offer a free trial version initially either. That is the best thing UiPath has done from a business point of view.

I was not present for the initial setup of UiPath.

While I do not have an exact ROI metric, it's my understanding that we have saved way more than the solution costs.

For example, if we are spending, for example, $300,000 on the licenses in a year, and we are definitely saving more than $1 million, or maybe more than that. due to the number of hours that we are saving, it's a huge amount of savings we're receiving. 

The pricing is worth it. It's definitely expensive, however, I wouldn't say it's overpriced. The services that we are getting from those licenses help us to save way more than what we are spending.

My managers were telling me that they were comparing which tool to use before choosing UiPath. While I'm not sure what they were looking at, they said they liked UiPath from the first day and that's why they're sticking with UiPath now.

Maybe in the future, we might switch to the cloud, however, for now, we have an on-prem deployment. We're using the most recent version of the product.

We do not use UiPath's AI functionality in our organization yet. We are not using all the UiPath apps right now.

My advice to potential new users is that the first thing that they should do is they should go to the Academy just to get familiar with the tool and how they can use it. Then, move through to the next steps.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

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

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

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

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

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

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

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most valuable feature is the API.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am just an end-user of the product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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