UiPath Platform Reviews

We are in healthcare, and the supply chain can be a fragmented process, and now with the Pandemic quite fragile. In recent years, companies have been implementing leaner supply chains to reduce their costs. We found that our best approach to dealing with supply distributions was to create a partnership with a distributor who could provide us with a very large percentage of our day-to day-supplies. We have Central inventories in each of our hospitals; however, we use a stockless operation Monday-Friday. This means we fill supplies for our nursing units on the weekends, but during the week, the distributor is picking, packing, and shipping those supplies in a low unit of measure. Orders are placed electronically by noon daily, and start arriving by late evening. A 'back order' list is sent to us each workday in the late afternoon - too late to do anything with it. 

We did work with our distributor to develop a more customized spreadsheet that detailed each item, by hospital and delivery location. Each following day we would break the file down so that we could e-mail it to each area, to get feedback from them on critical needs.  This took our resources time to prepare and send the next morning. Staff getting the information didn't have much time to review and respond. In addition, we would update each PO line item with the revised 'due date', for back-ordered lines - this was a manual process.  This same resource would then use a tool to send each requestor a 'delayed delivery' e-mail notice.  The overall PO update and communication process took an additional 1-2 hours a day in staff resource time.

With the robot doing this work for us, the vendor sends a file to an address by a certain time. They send it in at about 3:30 PM every day. The robot now takes that file and works that file, which it has ready for us usually by 4:30 PM. Now, it still may be too late for us to work, but the first thing in the morning, we have the file, and the Bot has already sent out notifications to all the users of any backorders. First thing, when they walk in the morning, they know what their backorders are. They didn't know that until halfway through the day before. Now, they get the information first thing in the morning so they can react. Now, we are getting the information first thing and have the time to work with the manufacturers and distributors to come up with other products so that we might backfill or get a branch transfer.

Our end goal was to make sure that we had a daily tool that was 100 percent accurate and could be deployed across a broad spectrum of healthcare workers. Then, they could get information faster and more accurately with as much information to eliminate a lot of extra calls and communication. That is what we embarked on. We dissected our current process and looked at all its different triggers to see how we could turn this into an automated tool. We broke down our process and identified everything that we were doing, then UiPath helped us identify what we needed to modify. We worked that into a tool where a Bot could come along and process it every day, then deliver every afternoon. That was our end result, and it's been extremely successful. We started using the tool last December.

We combined some automation that we already had in this process into this tool to make it a whole automated process, rather than partially bringing it under. We have a vendor who delivers us a report daily of all their backorders because we use the main distributor, so they deliver us a backorder report. Therefore, we made sure that they aligned it in a way that the robot could read it. Then, we wanted to break that down in a way so each of our hospitals could see their section. So, we added some data to this tool which allowed the robot to see that record, and say, "This belongs here, and this belongs here."

Our staff have been reassigned to more value-added tasks. We haven't eliminated anyone because it's been very challenging for us to keep up with the COVID-19 issues. Now, we have resources who have the time to contact vendors, and find out, "When are we getting this? Can we get ourselves pushed to the top of the list?" They can actually be a voice on the other line, a human voice, who communicates. When you're sitting there doing all this other work, you don't have the opportunity to spend it on being a voice for the health system. So, we put people back on working back orders with other vendors and doing other things that needed to be done. We have not eliminated staff because we are using them in more productive ways, getting more work done.

Our staff can now do the things that we need them to do. It has given us the agility to pivot and move to other things, because we are not trapped in trying to work these files every day.

Our customers are getting information about 12 hours earlier, which makes it much faster to resolve back order concerns for their areas. If they have procedures, or certain kinds of cases coming up, and see that they have a back order, then they have much more time to react and try to address their shortage.

It provides information to people by automating that information in a much faster time.

Since we are getting information out to folks faster, they can spend the resource time needed to determine the best approach for what to replace it with, or if we need to work with a sales rep. It ensures that our staff have the best tools to do their job faster.

We have not seen it do OCR, and that would be helpful. Right now, the tool will not read a PDF file, and we can't use PDF files. We want it to able to take an image, then take that image and put the particular field out in the right spot in a table. We have not seen it where you can scan a document in, then it reads fields and places those in a table.

We began our journey last Fall - 2019 

It is very stable. Once we got all the kinks worked out, there hasn't been any maintenance. 

We had a little problem with getting it to run at night. We moved it off of one platform and put it on another one, which fixed that problem. These are things that we encountered early on that went away as we figured out how to resolve them. Most of those changes that we made were internal to our process and caused by some slow responses within our Citrix environment. Once we resolve those, we have not had issues with the tool itself.

I have one person in IT doing deployment and maintenance. We also have a second person under contract if we need support.

The solution is scalable. 

The robot processes the file in an unattended mode, then sends out an email with a link to its output file. From there, all the users, and there are probably about 20, get this file and react to it. They review it from their perspective because there are many hospitals involved. Each one of them has their own tab because the robot creates a tab for each. This makes it easy for them to go right to what they need. There are a lot of folks reviewing the results of what the robot has produced.

I have not used their technical support.

We were passively looking at some tools to automate some of our procurement processes. We are highly automated in our department, but we are always looking at ways to take the things that are not already automated, get into those, and see what parts of those we can streamline.

We met with UiPath last Fall. At that time, we went through a company by the name of Speridian, UiPath is a partner with them. We came to the conclusion that we had a manual process where the right components could be automated. Therefore, we made that our focus and started answering all the questions around the process to ensure that we had everything necessary for a robot to be able to answer the questions and keep moving the process forward.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We outlined what we do and what our end result needed to be. They asked us some questions, then sat down with our resources and walked them through it (or did it through Webex). I don't think there was ever any confusion on what was being discussed.

We didn't spend that much time on the process. Overall, as far as our work, the deployment was 10 to 12 hours, if you look at the meetings and such. Most of the time was spent on their side, because they had to go back and do all the development. So, I thought it was very painless.

We worked with the UiPath team and Speridian to ensure that the bot would know how to handle each aspect of the data and where apply it. As we tested it, we saw that we needed to go back and reconfigure this or this isn't how this is handled. We were kind of working through the things we forgot until we got to the point where, "Yes, this is it. We can do this every day." 

We had the robot tied into an automated tool that we were already using to send notices out. They were able to pull up that tool and have these automated components to all this stuff that we had a manual person sitting there doing every day. She was sitting there taking this data and sending it out, and now the robot was like, "I got the data. I'll send it out." So, we just ran it through the whole process. However, it does take having resources who can ask the right questions. What I found with this team was they were good in actually asking the right questions and helping us with what the robot would need in order to make decisions. Because that's what the robot is doing, it is automatically looking at a value, and saying, "I do this. I have that." 

We learned with it: How we need to respond and how we need to give the robot the feedback. It was quite an interesting process for us. Although you're always thinking you can automate so many things, there are components that you do need a person's brain to figure out. We found those pieces in this tool. We found some areas where, "Here's the exception." So, it even writes off the exceptions for us. While I do still need to have a person looking at exceptions, rather than the 100 lines that they used to have to look at, now they look at two, three, or four lines, then make decisions on those.

They gave us the opportunity to create a tool which would automate as much as possible, then provide us the data that we needed to act on. It has basically filtered out all the things that we didn't need to deal with. It has taken care of those, leaving us with everything that a human being needs to respond to.

I felt very comfortable with the UiPath person who was doing the programming, though I never really met him. I was very impressed. We talked on the phone a time or two, but they just seemed like they got it. They understood. It didn't take a long time for them to figure out what it was we wanted to do. They were able to tell us, "This is what we're going to need. Can you get it?" So, they were easy to work with. They also acted quickly. I thought the whole process of developing everything that we did went very quickly. 

They were able to link into our tools. They made suggestions to us, "Well, these are exceptions. We can put these here. We can do this. We can give you all this." They were providing us with ideas on how we could even expand on this. I found that to be very helpful. I really thought that they did it very quickly. They did not take long to understand what we were trying to do before getting in and really learning the impact. When we needed a change, the changes have come very quickly. 

It has gone so well that we will be doing a few more enhancements. Now that we've worked with the tool for a while, and know that the ability of UiPath and what they can do, we can enhance it even further.

We are doing things at a much earlier time in the day. The robot compressed the time it takes. We are getting our users' information earlier in the day. Now, it may take five to 10 minutes, where processes used to take half an hour or 45 minutes to go through everything. 

With COVID-19, so many supplies have been impacted. Our line items expanded and grew, so it would have been very difficult management manually. Thankfully, we had this process in place last December. It really came to our aid in March, April, and throughout this year, because it has streamlined the process. It has given everybody more time to pivot and make decisions.

The UiPath tool takes redundant processes away, and says, "Let us handle those, then you do all those creative things." It has given us back a lot of staff resources that were being used up by mundane, redundant processes. That's how it worked in our world. In other areas, anytime you fill out a form or answer a question, a robot can post that to a table. There are all kinds of things it can do. However, for us, it took these manual processes that we were doing day in, day out without a lot of thought and gave us that time back to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing, in order to ensure that our health system has the products that it needs to support the community. In my mind, that is what it is about: Giving back your resources to use them in the way they were intended and using a robotic tool to do those things that you can eliminate, like mundane, redundant processes.

Start with processes that happen over and over every day. Something that you have to do, like data entry, whatever it is. Peel back the onion, then look and see how you can automate some of that through a tool. You have to look at what your processes are and understand how those are getting done today. Maybe even share that information with somebody outside your area, because people from the outside might say, "Well, why don't you do it this way?" Because you've lived it so long, you don't even know why you wouldn't nor do you know the questions to ask. Therefore, look at your base processes that you're doing day in, day out and see how you might be able to automate any aspect of those that doesn't require human thinking. I'm sure you will uncover many things.

It is a learning process for everyone, but I thought it was a very fast track learning. Sometimes, you think, "Well, this is going to take six months," and it didn't. In a very short time, we were seeing samples of what we were going to get. Therefore, I was very impressed with the amount of resource time that it took. It was beyond what I expected.

Some tools we are working on will reduce the purchase order build, but we haven't implemented that yet. That's a whole other project that we're working on with them, and that piece goes into procurement.

It is very doable. I was probably fairly skeptical, but once we started thinking about it, it became very clear that this would be just a slam dunk. You have to open up your mind to it, but it was something that when they said, "Well, we want to use some robotics." The fear is you're going to take my staff away. There are some cases of that, but it is not so bad. I don't have to worry about the robot taking days off, getting sick, having a mother in the hospital and needing to be with them. I don't have to pay it scale. I just don't have to do any of those things. Now, the robot can't automatically think outside the box, but sometimes it can depending on the questions I ask it. 

Everybody just needs to take a breath step back, and say, "Yeah, maybe it can replace this." However, that doesn't mean we won't use this resource in another way.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. I'm not the type of person who just gives a rating of 10 all the time, but this solution has just been a phenomenal tool for us.

Originally, we were using UiPath to draft documents and send emails on mass to where we had large communication exercises. We used a robot instead of a small army of paralegals to generate the documentation and draft up the emails where we had to communicate with 2,000 to 3,000 people. It was a little bit more involved than just doing a standard mail merge, but we were able to use UiPath to create a number of documents and email it to an individual customer, all through a central email address.

Fast forward to where we are now, we have a few of these things focusing in on what we call post-completion activity, like the things you do after you sign a contract. So, it may be you're uploading it to the client's contract management system, applying stamps, or registering the contracts in an official register. The robot is able to do that for us post-completion. Those are our primary use cases at the moment. We're looking at more data integrity type stuff, like comparing our internal data sources against public record.

The ability to displace some activity that was traditionally on our paralegal team has improved my organization. We're an outsourced managed legal services provider. We're primarily a people-based business and UiPath displaces some activity off those paralegals and brings in automation. For me, it becomes an additional type of resource. The long and short of it is that we are able to move work that was traditionally done by people and would be charged at a rate, off to automation where we can bring the costs down. It enables us to reduce our running costs of our clients. A single bot running post-completion has saved as two FTEs.

UiPath has helped to speed up case resolutions in a couple of ways. It's focused on doing particular jobs, so it achieves the job faster. People don't need to complete an entire task end to end. They can stop at a certain point and the robot takes over. That allows a person to get through more work. Also, the fact that the robots are able to do this stuff overnight 24/7, means that we have more capacity to do stuff.

It gives us the ability to respond to clients. It gives us an option in how we're going to automate work for clients. It's hard to say if it has reduced the cost of our digital transformation because we deal with all the people. I suspect it hasn't done it internally, but suspect that has made some things cheaper for our clients. It enables us to deliver digital services cheaper for our clients. 

UiPath had an effect on our legal staff. It takes work that people don't want to do at the moment, having to download the document, take some details off the top and the bottom of the document, apply a stamp, and then re-upload, it's not what our paralegals and new trainees want to be doing on a day-to-day basis. So we are able to shift activity nobody enjoys onto a robot and let them focus on the stuff they've been trained to do.

In terms of how much it has reduced the processing times, the task itself still takes as long but we've got a robot doing it instead of a human. I don't think that the impact isn't that dramatic on-site processing times. At the moment, humans are only involved in 80% of the transaction and 20% has been held by robots.

These automations have decreased errors but it's hard to quantify by how much. They've inserted 20,000 transactions a year. I have no doubt that the error rates improved. It's just a hard thing to quantify.

The most valuable aspect of UiPath is the fact that it's a low-code platform. Being able to use a low-code platform really lowers the barrier entry of introducing automation. Normally, you fill in a request to go to IT to get a development resource allocated, and then you spend six months trying to do a project. Because UiPath is a bit of a platform, you can quickly, within weeks, start to knock off automation and get it checked and then successfully deployed. The low-code development environment is key for us.

Now that we're scaling up and taking advantage of Cloud stuff, it's become a lot easier to use. When we started our journey, we just bought a couple of bots and had them sit around on machines. It was a bit chaotic and we thought that if we take advantage of their wider platform, the orchestrator environment, it would make life a lot easier because we have all the monitoring and management. We have access to that in one platform rather than having to watch the individual robots, which is where we started.

We're going to use the solution's AI-enhanced document understanding feature. It's something we're looking at to help us with invoices and incoming bills that come in. It's on the backlog. We haven't got to it yet.

UiPath enables me to free up capacity for people to work on new work because they are involved, they're less accessible. At the moment, the majority of our staff is focused towards the end time making sure that things are filed correctly. It's more about focusing resources rather than being more responsive.

As things become more and more data-heavy and accessing other people's products and managing things, like obtaining the data through APIs, it feels like there could be a lot more for them to do, to make interacting with data or manipulating simple things like text strings. You need quite a strong development background or a reasonable level of understanding to achieve that. I think that could be made a little bit more achievable.

Three years ago we started using UiPath relatively small and we are looking to scale up significantly this year. Originally we started on-prem and as we're scaling up, we're going to move towards the cloud instance.

So far the stability has been good. With all of the low code platforms, it's actually more of a problem of what we've developed and deployed. It's how well we make our own software so that the platform will provide. It seems to stand up very, very well. I have not really had an issue. Anytime we have encountered a bug or whatnot, it's something we've introduced to ourselves, but thankfully there's a strong community where we can post questions and queries to get a response within a couple of hours.

I don't see scalability as being too much of a challenge. If we need more capacity on the robots, we're able to buy more licenses and additional VMs on the machine. If we need to expand or scale, it's just about deploying more machines. I don't feel it's that complicated. I suspect there are some constraints on how you build your applications, but that's more of an internal decision rather than UiPath's.

There are three people who are responsible for how to put a source of business analysis as well as development. Their role is to work with SMEs or people within our business units to understand a customer's process, get them deployed, and work with them to do it. The stuff we've taken on tends to be the easier, quick wins. We have three internal developers who were able to break down processes. We're a large organization. We have a large IT function that helped us with virtual machines and data centers, etc. We're not directly involved with them.

It's very easy to build an automation and just let it run. One of the key lessons we learned is the fact that you have to keep an eye on these things and that things change in the environment. Passwords run out and expire, folders may move as people move things around the network and a robot is just as susceptible to everything else that our user is. In terms of when you're designing any solutions, you have to pay a little extra attention to things that may cause you problems in six months' time. The simple fact that a password that you were using has been reset or is expired or something else, could cause the robot to failover. While the robot can tell you it's got a problem, you still have maintenance effort to keep an eye on. There is a maintenance commitment that you need for everything that is put on it. You need to spend a bit of extra time detailing exactly how you are going to respond to those things. Just because it's easy to deploy stuff, it doesn't do away with the fact that you have to keep an eye on it.

There are three analysts who are respondents to book fixes, etc. We have people in the business who we work with to automate these processes. They take a level of responsibility and keeping an eye on anything we try to automate. They're the first line of support. If anything's going wrong or something they can keep an eye on it and then if it is a technical book fix or something that needs to be resolved, that's then escalated to one of those three developers.

I only had one issue which was to do with the proxy setting when deploying some of the software. I raised the ticket on the website, got a response within half a day and it explained what I needed to do to fix it. That's my only experience of having to deal with them. I raised a ticket, I got the answer, and it worked. My experience so far has been fairly good.

We decided to use UiPath three years ago when RPA was starting to become a bit of a buzzword. We took a look at it and realized that it would be a very, very good solution for the right project by allowing us to automate mass activity all at once. One of those projects came around and we had to communicate it to a large audience. The process once agreed upon and nailed down could be very heavily scripted. We looked at a way that we would communicate it to the 30,000 people, all with documents that are pretty much the same but with a slight variation. We knew we wanted to try an RPA solution. UiPath was a very strong contender in those days and it was easy to access. That's why we ended up with it. We're able to achieve something with a single bot. All of those things make the software easy to test out. And then from there, you're able to make a decision.

The initial setup was really straightforward. In such a large law firm that has high data security obligations, we set these things up, appoint the orchestrator, and it just works. I have not encountered too many problems. 

It doesn't feel like a heavyweight ERP system or some larger workflow tool. These things are deployed onto a desktop and they speak to a server. It's not heavy. It doesn't feel like a piece of software with a heavy footprint.

The deployment took a week. It took us longer to end-to-end to get the invoice approved.

We've taken advantage of the architecture. Our IT team set some ground rules about where the virtual machines need to be hosted and deployed, but it's not that heavyweight. We increase some standards with IT and then install the software on those machines. We're using the Cloud version so there's not a lot to worry about.

We were able to do the deployment internally. 

Some of our ROI is quite dramatic. We have to email lots of stuff out to different people and our projector will require this to have a team of six or seven staff working solidly for a couple of weeks. The robot was able to get it done after a couple of weeks of configuration. This thing was able to pay for itself in a matter of hours once it was done. One of our post-completion robots took a week or two to develop and get stable enough to deploy. It's able to offset seven or eight hours a day. If we target the use cases correctly, we are able to get a return on the automation we deploy.

Take advantage of the Cloud-based implementation. You'll have to handle the Orchestrator licensing costs. It's obviously different for every organization. It's beneficial to get away from the on-premise installation. Also make sure that your business case justifies whatever the license cost is for an unattended or attended bot. 

Show your business case and that the automation will help you to exceed the license cost. You want to look at things that are going to give you a return on investment in about six months' time. Take advantage of the Cloud-hosted version so as not to pay the cost for Orchestrator. Then for your bots, make sure you will see a six months ROI in terms of how much automation you've gotten and how much you can get the robot to get done.

We also looked at BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. We took a quick look over the top three solutions at the time. UiPath seemed to be one of the leaders in the area.

We partnered with an organization to help us deliver it. We got some consultants in and sorted out what they were comfortable with using and what they recommended. For us, it was the size of the platform. We were looking at Automation Anywhere or BluePrism. It just felt like it would be a bigger project to implement when in reality all we wanted was one robot to do one job for us at the start of the project. It was more about the barriers of entry to getting started.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. It feels like nothing deserves a 10, and I highly recommend every organization has a handle on RPA. There are still a huge amount of features we're still yet to explore.

RPA - Novigo Automation Framework Solutions - Setup an Automation Factory Model.

Automation Focus has been Productivity, Quality, Cost, Process Optimization, and compliance.

Focused on delivering Process Automation for Oracle EBS ERP application for various departments including IT, Finance, Operations, Engineering, Sales .etc 

1. Manufacturing: Master data maintenance & monitoring Inventory transactions, BOM error fix & transfer, WIP issue & complacent
2. Finance: Financial closing, IC transaction, security & FA master & transactions, Master data, duplicate check, auto-CM creation & auto-payment, Customer Master, running letter, print errors & auto-receipts
3. Supply Chain: Sales order Integration with the portal, shipment, RMA, digital shipping & backorder, item cost update & inventory interface, procurement, receiving & monitoring
4. System Admin: Access provisioning, - Creating responsibility, Monitoring pending transaction & analyzer.

RPA Automation has accelerated heavily within the organization. 

It started with task automation and ended up with process automation.

• Increased Operational excellence - With multiple FTE savings every month.
• Lowered operational cost with a minimum saving of 780+ Man hours every month.
• Overall $1 million annual savings through improved process efficiency.
• Increased Shipping Order execution velocity by 2x times -At least 10,000 orders in every 4 days.
• Amplified shipping process efficiency and employee productivity by 100% - with one click execution.
• ABCDi (AnyBody Can Do it) technique enables Zero dependencies on SME requirement to perform the task and Zero dollars spend on training the Shipping operators.
• Prevents human error, increases data accuracy, standardization, and quality of data for the shipping process.
• Excellent ROI with investment cost recovered in 1.25 months timeline and an Annualized ROI for 5 years is 68.50%
• Built from LTI Novigo Automation Framework, it provides the agility and speed required to customize and deploy the solution quickly.

• Attended Bots have been star cases as it totally removes dependencies of user literacy to know the application. 
• ABCDi (AnyBody Can Do it) technique enables Zero dependencies on SME requirement to perform the task and Zero dollars spend on training the Shipping operators.
• With Novigo Automation Framework, the implementation lifecycle is accelerated by about 25%-to-32%, while drastically reducing the implementation services cost. Identification of possible use cases along with efforts required, time involved, and cost savings can be easily envisioned by using NAF.

• RPA AI capabilities - UiPath is leading in this area.
• UiPath should focus more on recommendations of process automation based on ERP Applications like Oracle, SAP etc. They should also provide a list of possible RPA cases as per departments, processes and based on various industry domains. 
• More on RPA Governance features to be provided out of the box. 
• RPA Capabilities with IVR Channels to address voice commands will be a game changer for Customer call center cases.                                                                               

We have been using UiPath for two years.

Excellent in stability. 

Easily scalable in a few minutes.

No.

UiPath Cloud Orchestrator setup is pretty must straightforward, we manage to do a complete setup in a matter of a few hours time.

We deployed it in-house - SI - LTI.

>30% ROI  - we recovery of overall investments recovered in seven months' time.

UiPath is very cost-effective.

Yes, we have evaluated all top RPA products like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

We have several use cases. We're a telecommunications company. We use it for anything from order entry, design, activation, and interactions with technicians within our field. We really have an end-to-end solution.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and unattended bots.

It is deployed on-premise but on our own cloud.

We had a long-time situation where we were sending technicians to the fields unnecessarily, because they couldn't install the service. So, we worked through a process to wake up devices. We used RPA to implement it. 

With downsizing, we have been able to automate a lot of this space, so we can downsize and still function as a company.

Capitalize on the unattended automation, as there are a lot of different methods to evoke and schedule it. You can email it, trigger it via API bots or Orchestrator. There are a lot of different methods you can use. We don't really do a whole lot of attended. Not that we wouldn't at some point, but unattended is nice because it's out of sight and out of mind. Set it up and let it go.

We are the first company to bring UiPath Academy in-house on the 30th of September. When we signed our licensing agreement, we added it in our own LMS. So, we have that connection and everything else. We love it. We've implemented all of their modules: RPA Starter, all three of the development courses, Solution Architect, Business Analyst, and Build a Bot. It's super exciting. It's one of the best things that we've done. I would rate it a five out of five.

We now have a functionality that is being released for web forms. It's more for attended. I would like to have these web forms exposed in Orchestrator to be able to trigger a bot externally. I know we have partners that provide similar functionality. I would like to have that same functionality where you could deploy a form, but instead of having it pop up on somebody's desktop, they could go through a URL through Orchestrator and trigger the bots via a web interface. This is instead of having to be tied down to an attended bot.

For some of the Insights stuff, we have found that you have to be flexible on measuring your ROI. You have to be able to customize some of that because it's not as cut and dry as you think it is. 

I would look for the audits on the back-end. Performance-wise, make sure that it is still performing. 

I would rate the stability as a four (out of five), but some of it could have been us too. 

An overabundance of logging that we created crashed the SQL Server. We had to adjust and restructure the way we were doing all of our logging to prevent that from happening again. Ever since then, it has pretty much been fine. 

We have had issues with upgrades. However, from a normal day-to-day functionality perspective, it is pretty stable.

Right now, we have about 150 developers. Then, we have engineers and process analysts.

We have 400 automations on average and 1000 in the pipeline.

It's been fantastic. It doesn't matter what time of day or anything else. We get top-notch service.

It has been about our contacts and support team. They look at us, and say, "You guys want to do what?" Then, they stand behind us and help us get it done.

We had merging companies coming together with a lot of integration going on. With integration, there are multiple teams, processes, and systems. To keep up for our reduced expenses, we had to do it. This was another tool in the toolbox for us: automation.

It took us eight weeks from initial purchase to the first bot to be put into production. It took about two weeks for assessment and documentation, then another six weeks to develop and deploy it. The bot that we developed was complex. It wasn't super simple. We've done simpler, but that time frame was about average for us.

We did the deployment ourselves, but we had the premium support. So, we did have some support from UiPath. However, everything that we did, we did on our own.

ROI was almost instant. We measured everything from deployment. We measured our successes. We do audits once a month. ROI was pretty much from deployment. We don't audit anything in the first 30 days because there is a lot of settling in, some bumps, and, "Oh, we missed this step." For the most part, within 30 days, we were realizing and managing expectations on benefits.

We're really only measuring handling time right now, which is defined by our business clients. They define what handling time we are trying to define, then the measure of success. That's what we measure ourselves on.

We're probably in the tens of thousands of hours that we have saved, easily.

Because we have so many agents, that's why we went unattended. Attended was very expensive for us because it's a per person license. Where we can take entire workflows, do the triggering and scheduling, etc. We never have to have any human interaction with unattended.

We have a cost model for operating expense savings. It is usually about $100,000 to $125,000 and takes us six weeks to develop and implement. That's development, testing, and implementation. We do code reviews on everything. That does not include all the documentation, assessment, etc.

We just signed a very large perpetual agreement. So, we had 125 Studios and 1200 unattended licenses. We paid $3.7 million. Then, we paid maintenance costs for the next three years, which was 15 percent of that.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Pega, and UiPath.

Scalability was probably the number one that we went with UiPath. Scalability, the ease of use of the software, and the existing functionality that was there were the main reasons. There is a lot more out-of-the-box in terms of embedded functions that were there at the time when we did our analysis. It seemed like UiPath was really on the cutting edge. They were more proactively implementing good features, where others that we were talking with seemed like they were behind in that perspective. 

We'd rather stay on the cutting edge with technology instead of having to wait for our partner to get caught up.

Obviously, there are cheaper options than UiPath.

I'm really excited about the new stuff. There is great new stuff. We wish we would've had this stuff a year ago because we had to build some of it in-house. We are really excited about the Explorer and process mining.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform for automating our company’s processes as a three and a half to four out of five (where five is the easiest). It depends on the skill set of the developer. If you are a developer with a .NET background, then it will be a lot easier for more of the customization. For the technology overall, it is easy to automate our processes.

We run our automations in the virtual environments, like Citrix. We struggled a bit with Citrix at first, because our infrastructure and systems are somewhat antiquated.

Nobody is perfect. I would rate UiPath as a nine (out of 10).

We use UiPath primarily to drive efficiency within the company and introduce a new technology, which is only going to become more popular and more prevalent in the industry in the next few years.

At the moment, we use Orchestrator, Studio, and unattended robots.

We invested in an RPA solution because competitors were doing it. They do it because it's the next wave of this industry, the fourth industrial revolution. Everyone's saying that you can't escape it. It's also because our company, in the shared services department, is thinking about how to challenge our existing models. Traditionally, you chose whether to take the processes onboard or streamline them offshore, but robotics and automation are a competitive alternative to outsourcing. It's very easy. We are challenging the status quo and making sure we're evaluating all our options effectively.

We had a process that was very manual and repetitive and took a team of 14 people, all keying in manually. Now, we've managed to automate it and save 14 employees worth of effort, which amounts to around 14,000 hours to date.

We run our automations in a virtual environment as well. We do Citrix environments when we're working with our offshore partner. We do it on Citrix when working locally. Both work well. I know UiPath has developed a lot on the Citrix platform lately, so it's getting better and easier to do.

Within my immediate team, I have eight people and we can also involve the other operational teams. Including everyone who's related to automation across IT and ops and us, you're probably looking about 20 or 30 people.

The main value within Orchestrator is definitely the scheduling aspect. That includes the way you can prioritize work and use queuing systems to make sure they're at the right points in time, as well as whether they'd be long term related, especially if we're looking at finance.

In terms of Studio, it's just getting easier to use. Studio X is basically the embodiment of that. Even at this point in time with the current Studio version, anyone could pick this up and run with it to develop simpler automations.

The best feature about unattended robots is that they do exactly what you ask them to do. They are as reliable as the code that you provide them with. I think as long as you've got the right governance in place, such as IDs you have created, and you looped in the right teams, the robots are just the shell that will do exactly what you ask them to do.

I'd rate the ease of use of automating our processes at three and a half out of five at this point in time. That is because we've been on a journey over the past year or so and it's not been smooth sailing. There have been issues. I'm not saying that UiPath's support hasn't been great. It has been, but there is still a lot of work to do. It's still a relatively new product in terms of the grander scene of the industry. There's still a lot of work to do there to make sure that the integrations with existing software providers as well as new ones and API connectivities are as they should be. Often, you'll find yourselves using the workarounds in order to address issues that they haven't quite solved yet. I know that's constantly being improved, but that is the journey that we've been on.

One of the issues is with the acquisition of new types of software and new companies. It's important to introduce process documentation and make sure that it's not just making it look like UiPath products, but making it feel and act like one to us. They need to make sure it's embedded and the integration is seamless. They should just keep improving how easy it is to use. I think it's very good already, but there's always room for improvement.

I would rate the product's stability as three and a half, based on our experience. This relates directly back to where we've had challenges. Some of the integration with more mainstream products, like Excel, for example, has been questionable at times. It's just striking that balance between the fact that we want it to be democratized and easy to use by everyone, while we don't want to be in a position where we're forced out of the route to use macros necessarily within Excel. We want the UiPath software to be just as quick and easy to use as that more technical solution. Otherwise, we lose the benefit of having it. It shouldn't be technically inhibited.

I think their support offerings are good. They're very responsive. I think the challenge that they face though, is that they don't always have the answer. They don't always know what the real root cause is. Unfortunately, that's where the real crap piece comes in, which is both a blessing and a curse. It gives me some way of getting around it but it doesn't give me confidence that the issue will be addressed.

It probably took us about nine months to deploy, from the initial UiPath license to implementing the first robot in production. The reason for that is the learning curve of the team as well as the education across the operational teams to bring them up to speed and make sure that everyone's on the same journey. We were also working very closely with IT to make sure that we've got the right infrastructure in place, as well as support models, governance frameworks, etc. Without it, you can't really get anything done. It's a new technology and it was a new concept for everyone. Needing a robot ID, for example, was something that was never discussed before. Lengthy conversations had to be had to make sure that we weren't putting anything at risk with data privacy, for example.

The setup was both straightforward and complex, really. Some bits we're quite straightforward, but other parts were more complex. Especially the infrastructure we're still dealing with now one year on still has some complexities. We're still thinking about credential management versus the use of virtual machines and whether we should be using high density or not. There is also the matter of all the different types of offerings. There's a matrix that you have to abide by and I don't think UiPath is even aware of all the conflicts between the different options. That's something that we're still working through right now, but I'm sure they're going to address it.

We outsourced the implementation.

The performance benefits usually you would see instantly. We had a realization that there were some process changes that we probably needed to make, which we hadn't done prior to going live. I think it took us probably three months before we really saw the benefit coming through.

It's the same as what you would see on any of their list prices. There is also a corporate discount because of scale. Overall, we think it was a competitive price offering. They were the cheapest out of the three, so that's why we went with them.

We looked across the big three: Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. We did have a few others we considered, such as Kofax and Pegasystems. However, they're not dedicated RPA tools. That narrows you down immediately to probably select one of the top three dedicated RPA providers.

UiPath is a very unique example of being very technology-based from its history, but also its culture is very different to the other two. They're trying to be humble. UiPath has a different background and cultural fit, which is very much like our company. That was definitely one of the reasons we chose them. The other reason was the views. We just find it easier to use. The strategy, especially at the point in time when it was announced where the product was headed, was very much that they're trying to push this out to a robot for every person. We want everyone to be able to access it, too.

Do what you would normally do with any vendor. Check out the competition and see what is right for your company. I'll be shocked if you don't think that UiPath is the best because there's a reason why it's at the top of the Gartner reports all over the shop. It's got great user feedback on places like IT Central Station and other review boards. There is absolutely a reason for that. Also, assess the other values that you place importance on. It's not all about costs. Cultural fit was a massive deal for us. What would you envision your company looking like with the uptake of automation? Is it a cultural thing? Is it purely about efficiency or do you want everyone to be up-skilled for what the workforce in the future will look like? That means that actually having everyone being able to access the tools is very important.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of ten.

I have used the UiPath Academy RPA training, although not completed it. I am a bit busy doing a few of the bits, but a lot of my team have completed level one and some completed level three. I have one member of my team who just completed all the training available online. He's done every single module that you have available, including obviously the RPA Advanced Developers training. I think there is a wealth of knowledge there. It's incredible, but it's the same training material that's used internally for UiPath as well as other companies. I think as long as they stay on top of it and make sure that it never gets overlooked, it's a great resource for anyone to get, in order to up-skill in the new technology. If they constantly talk about the democratization of RPA, this is fundamental to that.

The training has helped my team get up to speed, apply best practices, and make sure that we're not wasting time. We were trying to work it out for ourselves in a bit of a haphazard manner. It also forces standardization, of course. Anyone else who decides to get qualified can use it. If you're thinking about doing attended automations, I think it's the right way to do it. Everyone has the same set of standards and rules to build off of.

I would rate the training as four and a half out of five because there's always room for improvement. However, I think it's very thorough and they've covered all the aspects, both technical and not technical. It is very impressive.

I think there are different perks to using one type of robot as opposed to another. The unattended robot cost is higher, therefore the need to make sure the utilization rate is high is paramount to getting your value out of it. I think that makes it challenging but worthwhile. There are different types of processes you will end up pushing towards with an unattended automation profile, whereas an attended profile, which we're starting to move into now, leads to other types of automation opportunities. Attended robots are cheaper, which means it is easier to achieve ROI, but you can almost expect less utilization because it won't be people's full-time jobs. They won't get back all the time and there will be licenses to honor which are being consumed. That has to be baked into the business case. I think you will end up with a portfolio of both. The big opportunities probably sit within an unattended fashion.

We primarily use UiPath for RCM and it can handle most tasks effectively, especially when dealing with data extraction from PDF files. There might be more complex scenarios where AI could be more suitable, although the implementation might be challenging. We are in the process of evaluating these AI-powered use cases.

We have found UiPath to be quite valuable as we actively deploy and use bots, which have become a significant asset to our operations. 

We were able to achieve the savings. It has freed up around ten thousand hours of time and resources for other tasks.

Improving financial and recording operations through the use of charts would be advantageous.

I have been using UiPath for approximately two years.

The stability is excellent.

Scalability is impressive, and it only requires the appropriate licensing.

The support is quite commendable, and they are very prompt in addressing issues. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward.

ROI is significant when the use case results in substantial cost savings, but it's important to note that not all use cases deliver such hard savings.

The cost is on the higher side.

My recommendation is to thoroughly assess use cases and choose the right tools to prevent possible setbacks. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

I use UiPath to reduce any data entry, report generation, or anything where UiPath can help avoid human errors.

The solution is very user-friendly and easy to use. It comes with pre-built automation. The tutorials are very helpful. 

I have been working with the product for six months. 

The tool is stable. 

UiPath is scalable. 

The tool's support is helpful. 

I use UiPath to reduce human errors during report generation or data entry. Simple errors can cause delays down the stream. 

The product has helped us save hours, which can range from a few hours to tens of thousands of hours. 

UiPath has helped us increase accuracy. It is helpful in data validation. 

I rate it a ten out of ten. 

I work in development, creating robots, and I use UiPath for automation.

UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premise footprint and reduced human error. It has also sped up digital transformation and reduced its cost without requiring any expensive or complex application upgrades.

UiPath's best feature is that it's low code. UiPath also has the best community I can think of in the IT sector.

UiPath would be improved by integrating AI.

I've been working with UiPath for four years.

UiPath is very stable.

UiPath is very easy to scale.

UiPath makes it easy to build automations, monitor the activity of the robots, and let the business side interact with the robots. It also has a lot of applications, starting from test capture and process mining to reporting the activity of the robots. UiPath is a simple solution if you're looking to save time and money, but in the long term, I would suggest customizing the main applications you're using. I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.