Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users
Technical Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Attended automation enables us to verify scanned fields in our invoices
Pros and Cons
  • "They have also recently added a feature for attended automation, Picture in Picture, which is also nice to have. It's helpful because you don't want to just sit back and let the bot run and not work during that attended automation. Using the PiP feature, you can have it running on your desktop without having to interrupt it to your work."
  • "One area that needs improvement is monitoring. I know there are tools that let us see what a bot is actually doing on the virtual machines. If we could get that kind of offering from UiPath that would be great, because when a bot is running on the machine, we don't know what it's doing."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use it to reduce manual effort and to increase accuracy and on-time implementation. We perform end-to-end automation, since we are a company where SAP is used very widely. We use UiPath for SAP automation.

We develop both attended and unattended solutions. We're using the platform as a service and it's hosted on-premises.

How has it helped my organization?

So far, we have 15 bots in production. As a result, we are saving a lot of time, although I don't have a figure right now, as well as a lot of effort. We are also able to provide timely delivery to our customers, so the automations have been generating a lot of buzz here.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA in our organization by automating processes that require human-robot collaboration. An example is our invoices that have data that needs to be scanned. The scans we were receiving did not have the accuracy that we were looking for. We also had a hard time getting the results through OCR. With the help of attended automation, we are able to have users verify data when the bot is running. Once the verification is done, the bot will perform the rest of the actions.

UiPath also definitely helps us with process analysis.

What is most valuable?

Although I have not used it yet, they have recently introduced a feature which brings more accuracy to the selectors, using the image and the selectors themselves. I feel that will be good. When we are creating selectors, there are elements that it's hard to get at, or there are times when the selectors get changed for some reason. The new feature should make it easier to work with in these situations.

They have also recently added a feature for attended automation, Picture in Picture, which is also nice to have. It's helpful because you don't want to just sit back and let the bot run and not work during that attended automation. Using the PiP feature, you can have it running on your desktop without having to interrupt it to your work.

I would also compliment them on the UiPath Academy, the learning platform that they have built. It contains everything that a developer or architect or tester or, anyone who is looking to benefit from an RPA, would need. It's all there on their platform. It helps speed up onboarding employees to UiPath. When I joined this company, I had prior experience with the RPA and UiPath. But two of my colleagues, who were working on test automation, didn't have that kind of experience. The Academy helped them to get started. We aligned quickly, once their fundamental developer training was done through the Academy. The Academy helped them align with the current practices of UiPath and RPA.

What needs improvement?

One area that needs improvement is monitoring. I know there are tools that let us see what a bot is actually doing on the virtual machines. If we could get that kind of offering from UiPath that would be great, because when a bot is running on the machine, we don't know what it's doing. Although we have programmed it, there are times when something causes a bot to fail. During such instances, the bot behaves differently when we run it in attended mode than it does in unattended mode. It would be great to have a feature where we could see, on a screen, what the bot is currently doing.

Buyer's Guide
UiPath Platform
July 2025
Learn what your peers think about UiPath Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: July 2025.
865,484 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

We started this UiPath journey two years back. 

I act as a UiPath lead because I joined early and I have some prior experience with it. There are three other people in India, and one more in the U.S, who use it in our company. The one in the U.S. does the managerial stuff and it's the developers who are in India. Then we have the business users for each of the bots and they also use UiPath. And we have a set of about 20 users who use the attended solution that we have provided to them.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Robots on the SAP system seem stable, but on the web they sometimes lack stability. Still, it's not a very common occurrence and I have overcome any issues with the help of the Trilogic. For example, we had an issue while getting an email from Outlook. A UiPath robot is not able to do that. It will time out. With the help of the Trilogic, we were able to overcome that.

Initially you have to put some effort in to obtain stability and then it is mostly stable. Some maintenance is required, but that's most probably when requirements change, or to add to the stability, but it's not a lot overhead right now for us.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's highly scalable, in both development terms as well as business terms. We have the capability to add on robots. We can add to the VDI or machine anytime we want. They have put some serious thought into the scalability, when it comes to giving support to developers as well as the business.

We plan to increase our usage of UiPath. We have a lot of things in the pipeline. We have almost finalized on providing RPA as a service, something that we will offer internally. Right now, we are giving this free of cost to our customers who are the business people. We did so to get some attention and to create some interest in the tool. Now that we have almost finalized this as a service, we are going to involve business analysts who will be helping us to find more RPA use cases and finalize more RPA solutions. That means our usage will increase. We're still in an early phase.

How are customer service and support?

I haven't had the chance to interact much with the technical support because the forum has so much information. If I browse through the forum, I will most probably get an answer. So I haven't needed to go to the technical support for any answers.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have both test automation and UiPath working in parallel. Test automation has been here for the long-term, something like 10 or 15 years. The two guys who work with me, who didn't have prior UIPath experience, are working on that. That part mostly requires maintenance, and they now mostly work on UiPath development. So although we had a test automation solution, we didn't have a business automation solution. That is why we went with UiPath. It gives us an edge in business automation.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of UiPath was pretty straightforward. I didn't find anything unusual or complex.

We went through an upgrade recently. We have dedicated cloud architects who helped us do it. We got instructions how to do it from UiPath support and we conveyed those instructions to our cloud architects and they performed it at their end to get UiPath cloud upgraded. Upgrading didn't take much time. It was done within half an hour.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

One more feature that is useful is that earlier, we didn't have the option for a concurrent-user license. With the help of the concurrent-user license, we can save on licensing costs while running multiple bots under the same license.

What other advice do I have?

If you are going to implement UiPath, my advice would be to look at how you are going to gather the requirements and how you're going to manage the requests for UiPath. 

Also, get some low-hanging fruit first, before going into the complex automations. That way, if you are new, the low-hanging fruits will generate confidence in the solution. Once that kind of confidence is generated, you can move ahead with the complex automations and complex solutions.

Go through the UiPath Academy extensively. They provide good training materials that I don't believe are available elsewhere. So I really recommend that. I recently attended a dev conference and I learned a lot about this stuff. I work in a closed environment where I don't have much of an idea of what's going on in RPA. This conference helped me keep in touch with the current trends in RPA and UiPath.

I rate UiPath at eight out of 10. For me, that's a very good mark. The two missing points are because there is scope for improvement. Overall, I'm pretty happy with UiPath.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Lead Engineer RPA at HCL Technologies
Real User
If you have repetitive tasks, you can apply this solution and have your people trained to do other work
Pros and Cons
  • "if you are a business user, even if you don't have a technical team, you can install the second version of the Community edition, which is StudioX. This is specifically made for business people who don't have a lot of ideas about technicalities. This is a great feature."
  • "The Document Understanding feature should be more developed and advanced. For example, you have to make a template with their ML model. Currently, we can't use our own ML model, and we have to use the UiPath ML model. UiPath has only a few ML models right now. They should come up with more ML models or make it easier for us to use our own ML model."

What is our primary use case?

Most of our use cases are related to business, like reconciliation and reporting. Therein, they have some internal applications to automate SAP automation and Salesforce Automation. Our most recent use case is related to documents, like the invoices coming from customers. We have to extract that data from invoices via different formats, e.g., some are digital formats and some are scanned formats. So, we have to extract the data, which we are doing with the help of UiPath.

We are using both attended and unattended automation. For 90 percent of our use cases, we are using UiPath for unattended automation.

I use UiPath almost every day. When I finish developing one process, there is a new process to develop. If a process is complex, it almost takes six to eight weeks to develop it, then you have to deploy it for monitoring. After that, the next process comes up.

How has it helped my organization?

UiPath helps based on how it is configured. In our case, there are so many transactions coming in, it is not possible for a human to complete them in nine hours (working hours). So, we went with unattended bots, which we mostly run at night. We start the bots after the working hours of humans, so when the operations team returns in the morning, their work is complete.

From a developer perspective, the process is smooth and easy. You can find a solution on Google easily. You can develop your own code. From a technical perspective, it is 100 percent.

What is most valuable?

UiPath Studio is great. It has all the activities. You don't have to write anything. Even after that, if you feel that you have to do something for yourself, then you can write your on-premises code in it and develop your own framework. Everything is there. You just have to use UiPath Studio.

if you are a business user, even if you don't have a technical team, you can install the second version of the Community edition, which is StudioX. This is specifically made for business people who don't have a lot of ideas about technicalities. This is a great feature.

What needs improvement?

If websites are made in a recent programming format, it is very easy to automate them with the help of UiPath. However, if that technology is based on legacy applications, then it is very fragile and hard to do that. So, we have to choose the technology first, and if the technology is new, then you can easily automate it with other applications or the help of an RPA tool.

The process can be complex if an application is a legacy application or the data is unstructured. The analysis of some bots is lacking. If a customer asks for analysis of a particular bot, you cannot just get the data from the UiPath and give it to the customer. It is not that easy. I would rate this process as a seven or eight (out of 10).

The Document Understanding feature should be more developed and advanced. For example, you have to make a template with their ML model. Currently, we can't use our own ML model, and we have to use the UiPath ML model. UiPath has only a few ML models right now. They should come up with more ML models or make it easier for us to use our own ML model. While they are working on this, I have felt much difficulty in extracting data during our last process for Document Understanding. We had to go with the Python language. So, I think they are lacking in this feature.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

After deploying the bots in production, processes are very stable, unless something happens with the machine. You don't have to monitor a process every time. So, I am very impressed and satisfied with things.

We are looking to update to version 20.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This solution is very much scalable. If you are working in a small or large organization, it doesn't matter. It is very much scalable, up to anything.

We have a team of around 100 to 120 people in RPA automation, in which 60 or 70 users have the developer license. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I am very much impressed and satisfied with the UiPath solution. Earlier, I used the Automation Anywhere solution, and it is sort of messy and complex. You have to pull everything from a single workflow. Then, I moved to UiPath, and everything was very sorted. If you really like coding, you can do that. It gives you a real developer type feel.

How was the initial setup?

Developing and deploying robots with UiPath is very straightforward. It hardly takes five minutes to deploy a process on Orchestrator.

What was our ROI?

The last process that UiPath covered saved the work of two people.

If you have repetitive tasks, you can apply UiPath and have your people trained to do other work.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

If you want to start doing RPA, I think you should definitely go with UiPath because it has the Community edition. You can just install it and check whether or not your process works fine with UiPath. It will be an attended bot, but you can form an idea whether your bot can easily be automated.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We have one use case related to Microsoft Word Automation. Word Automation is not compatible with other tools. However, in UiPath, we were able to write our own code to automate and format the Word document, which is why UiPath Studio is the most valuable feature. We are also using the Automation Anywhere. But, in Automation Anywhere, we cannot write our own code. So, we can't automate Word Automation from Automation Anywhere as well.

Automation Anywhere has come out with its own new version of 2019, which is as effective as UiPath. However, when I have tried to run or deploy the bots, it still lacks in features. For example, in UiPath, AML activities are coming up very frequently. Whereas, in Automation Anywhere, these features are lacking, which is why I go with UiPath. Also, Citrix automation is very good with UiPath. You feel like you are able to detect the elements and images.

UiPath gives you REFramework, which is absolutely amazing for business use cases. Automation Anywhere also lacks this feature. With Automation Anywhere, you need to make your own framework, and if you are making your own framework, then the look becomes messy. If someone is trying to understand it, then they have to spend more time on the framework to understand it.

I use the IQ Bot of Automation Anywhere, and even after training a hundred documents, it's not picking up or extracting the data from documents. I feel like I have to train the model again, which is not the case with Document Understanding. If you properly make the templates in Document Understanding of UiPath, it gives you full text values. So, it is more advanced and suitable for me.

What other advice do I have?

We use UiPath Assistant to run processes about 10 percent of the time. Most of the time, we are using Orchestrator. 

UiPath releases new features every 15 days to a month. They have already come up with AI and machine learning.

If scanned documents are coming in for some of the work, we are also using Python language for this.

If you already have a technical team, then you can ask them to look into UiPath Academy. If they have basic knowledge of programming or coding, then even in seven days, they can easily learn UiPath and start applying it in their organization. You don't need to hire outside developers.

Overall, the solution is a nine (out of 10).

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
UiPath Platform
July 2025
Learn what your peers think about UiPath Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: July 2025.
865,484 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior RPA Developer at a mining and metals company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Straightforward to set up, flexible, secure, centralized control through web-based portal
Pros and Cons
  • "The fact that we have the opportunity to access all of our services without any requirements from our side suits us very well."
  • "We have mixed reviews for the technical support and depending on the topic, they will answer faster or slower, more personalized or not."

What is our primary use case?

We use UiPath to automate business processes such as certain types of reporting that have to be repeated on a month-to-month basis. Another example is invoicing processes, which can be automated. Generally, it applies to different business cases for enterprise automation.

How has it helped my organization?

An example of how UiPath has improved the organization stems from a cyberattack in 2018. We already had an RPA team and during that cyber attack, all of our systems went down. Our SAP provider cut our access to it, leaving us with a limited number of users. It was not a big enough team to deliver on to our clients all of the orders that were being received.

What we did with UiPath in that crisis scenario in a couple of weeks was that we created a process for order automation. We already had a proof of concept, and we were able to scale it quickly. It was not perfect but rather, done in an emergency situation.

With that couple of users and limited access to SAP, a couple of robot users were capable of working 24 hours, seven days a week, and we started to process all of the orders that were coming from the rest of the company. This is probably something that you could not have done with more classical solutions.

This was, of course, an emergency order automation and it was a topic that we were already working with. Prior to this, it was already a benefit for the company, but the fact that we had this flexibility showcases how powerful this tool is, or what its potential is.

What is most valuable?

Having the cloud-based version allows us to be at the latest version of UiPath Orchestrator and different products without having to take care of the upgrade process.

UiPath's portal for enabling business users to trigger and monitor jobs is a big deal for me because it's something that we have been trying to do for a long time. We have been asking for it. With the previous solution, which was the orchestration platform alone, it was not a good approach because the business users would have a lot of information on their hands and you have to either split your licenses so that they could not access everything, or create your own web portals for them to access specific parts.

The fact that they now have an intermediate portal where they see only their processes, which they can monitor for themselves without getting too much information that is not relevant for them, is a big deal. Something as simple as triggering your own process, which in the past would require dedicating a full license to, can now be done through the portal. It might be a task like checking emails for customers or creating your own application with their API. It's a huge increment in quality.

The portal can also be used for administrators and although we have the Action Center, we don't use it that often. From the point of view of administrators, I can say that the recent improvements make our life much easier. It also enables us to think of more complex setups. In the past, I would never allow certain configurations because they would either be a security risk or it would just create more problems than solutions. Now with the current interface, especially with what they will be adding in the future in terms of more governance from the platform, they just enable you to do more complex things. It allows you to go a little bit beyond what the normal scope would be.

That applies to the platform as well as the orchestrator in the new modern setup. They have the option to split within the same tenant and different companies, or different company departments. Also, the fact that you can dynamically allocate the licenses so that you don't have to worry or have to split them, brings us to another level.

It offers more granular and role-based access control and management. We now have more complex scenarios that in the past we would not even consider because it would be a problem if someone were able to see something that they should not see.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution is important to us and it is clear to me that they want to push a SaaS solution, more than the on-premises deployment. It means that we have the latest version without having to upgrade the systems. We always have the latest version of the studio, for example, and there's no disruption to our services. Furthermore, we are able to follow all of the previews that they come out with. We can try all of their new products, which is something that in the past, we would not have been able to do. It would have required, for example, upgrading our system twice a year. Certainly, we wouldn't be able to do it at the speed we can now.

Being able to minimize our on-premises deployment is really important. It was almost a given for us because we lost some of our interfaces during the cyberattack. From that point on, the company has had a clear policy of cloud and SaaS as a priority. The fact that we have the opportunity to access all of our services without any requirements from our side suits us very well.

The vendor continues to add services to the portal and we are connected through their insider program. This is something that we are really happy with.

It is helpful for us that new services being added to the portal are all managed from the same place because it simplifies our work, makes it cohesive, and makes sense from a philosophical point of view. Definitely, if they had it on different platforms, it would take away from the ease of management. The fact that they have it in a single place makes everything a little bit more interconnected. What they are doing seems to make sense and for me, it is good because we only have to take care of one single platform. This also speeds up our processes, which is a plus.

On the topic of security, especially coming from a cyber attack, having SOC 2 certification is important because it is a requirement for us. We probably would have tried to find an intermediate or an agreement, but the fact that UiPath is now SOC 2 certified means that we have complied with requirements.

What needs improvement?

The licensing system is something that needs to be improved. I think that if they are trying to push for a SaaS solution, with respect to the way they license their individual products. The robot licenses and the Studio licenses should be something closer to a pay-per-use, rather than a year-to-year license. Right now, the licensing model and the pricing are the only stoppers for us, in terms of escalating our use. The bottom line is that the licensing system is not as modern as the tool that we're trying to implement.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using the UiPath Automation Cloud since January 2020, and prior to that, we had an on-premises solution from UiPath.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Four to six months ago, this was not the most stable solution. We had a lot of issues, especially during the summer and early autumn. The system would fail, or would not be accessible, or we had lost some of our logs.

Right now, the tool is working and is much more stable. It shows that they have put an effort into making it more robust.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

With respect to scalability, the licensing system is the limitation.

The platform itself is scalable, although not infinitely, but to a couple of orders of magnitude of what we have now. However, you still have to go through the procurement processes, which always makes it a little bit more limiting. Ultimately, it means that we cannot utilize the full power of what this tool offers in escalation.

Currently, we have five people who are working on UiPath. There are three developers, I am the technical lead, and we have a manager that operates as a product owner for the projects. The three developers are also responsible for maintenance. We also have a business analyst who works through the documentation and is the point of contact for some of our business.

We have other non-official roles, who are people that know and use the tool or perform business analyst functions, but there are only five people in dedicated roles.

At this point, we are using the tool to the full extent of what our licenses allow us to do. We could scale it to be much bigger but in the current situation, I don't think that we will do so. We negotiated the last contract to be a five-year deal and I hope we can move beyond that, but for now, there's no plan to a scale.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have mixed reviews for the technical support and depending on the topic, they will answer faster or slower, more personalized or not.

They have a ticketing system and the webpage is normally broken, depending on the browser. The response time may vary from topic to topic, so I don't have a consistent impression of the support system. They do answer our questions, but it is not always within the proper time or with the solution that we were hoping for.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

What we are using now is the same thing as the previous product from UiPath, without the cost of having to host it yourself.

I have some experience with other products, but not at the professional level. My impression is that with UiPath, you can get started more quickly when compared to other RPA products. Also, the licensing costs are not as high.

How was the initial setup?

Migrating from our on-premises solution to the cloud was not a typical case because we lost our on-premises deployment during the cyberattack. We had at least a few months without the Orchestration solution. When it comes to execution runtimes, where we run our processes, we used the same machines.

Basically, we had to set things up from scratch on the cloud. The process was pretty straightforward, and the fact that we didn't have to set up the Orchestration tool saved us from a lot of the complexity in the setup process. Normally, this is the complex part, including setting it up with the databases. We just had to connect our runtime with the Orchestration platform, which made it much easier.

With respect to the setup costs, the cloud setup balanced out because you don't pay for the orchestration platform, but you pay a little more for the individual licenses. 

What about the implementation team?

Having this product has reduced the amount of maintenance work related to our automation operations because it is a managed solution. The fact that we don't have to host it ourselves is very important.

With respect to maintenance costs, we are a relatively small project, so I wouldn't say that we had a huge overhead. It would certainly be higher if we tried to do what we are doing now, which is being at the latest version all of the time. To do that, we would have needed somebody in a role who was taking care of it. As it is now, from a development or project management point of view, we can take care of these things without needing an architect involved all of the time.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We chose Automation Cloud because it was, at that point, the most flexible option.

What other advice do I have?

UiPath is known for a certain number of products, and the role of our team is to use all of them. On the topic of the UiPath Cloud, the new products that they have come out with, like the possibility to create your own applications for your internal customers, or host certain data services from the same platform, were things that were not available in the past. These capabilities are useful. In general, all of their products are pretty important for us.

For UiPath as a company, we like the availability that they have and the fact that we can try and test all of their products beforehand, without paying. For a relatively small project such as ours, or even for a big company, it's pretty useful to be able to access this type of information and not be burdened with extra budget requirements.

This is a product that I recommend because the starting point is completely free. That's one of the great points of UiPath. My advice is that when it comes to scaling the project, it's really important to clearly set up goals and expectations. Otherwise, there will be an eternal loop of PoCs and non-viable products.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Sr. Associate Technologies L2 at Publicis Groupe
Real User
Customizable forms, saves time, improves accuracy, and helps us build trust with customers
Pros and Cons
  • "Being able to customize this is extremely helpful for us because we have other attended automation processes, and they can each be tailored to the needs of the business."
  • "Simply put, a stronger collaboration between Microsoft and UiPath in a lot of areas would be helpful because it would ease the development process for us."

What is our primary use case?

We have a use case that involves an invoice billing process, where vendors from an external organization submit their details for the invoice. This automation works as expected, independently of anything else. It is also a good example of how we were able to scale RPA benefits in the company with the automation of a specific process that requires human-robot collaboration.

Our internal tools include the database where all of this information is stored, and we have a second automation that is used by the billers in our organization to tally the data that includes details such as what each vendor has submitted to get their payments.

We built a third automation in UiPath, which basically compares these first two. But, due to the complexity and the nature of the tally that has to occur, we require some human input in between certain steps.

For these particular steps, we have developed a four-bot configuration. These are four separate bots that run and a couple of them have an attended automation part, where a human can intervene. It's a verification step, where the human can decide whether or not something is okay. Specifically, the bot compares two fields and if they match, then it's great, but if not, it triggers a request to a human user for manual verification. If they approve then it is marked as a successful verification.

Because we use technologies like OCR, there are details that cannot always be interpreted properly. This is where we need an additional check, which is the reason that we have humans in the loop as part of the process.

How has it helped my organization?

We have saved a lot of time by using UiPath. We have also improved a lot in terms of accuracy and reducing errors in a lot of projects. In fact, in one of the projects, we automated the entire job, which involves coaching people on what has to be done end-to-end, by the robots. It was built on UiPath and on this project, we had a savings of more than €100,000 euros. That was a big saving for us, and it's continuing right now.

More importantly, a lot of the clients had complained about the end-user, which is outside of the organization, with respect to the accuracy of the data. There were errors. When we deployed robots based on UiPath, the accuracy has vastly improved and the clients are very happy with the results. They no longer have to keep coming back to our billers and telling them that things were not done properly. The robot functions like it has been programmed every single time. So, it's been perfect for that purpose as well. The customer trusts us more because of our deployments in robots.

UiPath definitely allows employees to delegate mundane tasks to their personal automations, saving them time. A major reason for a lot of our automation cases is because most people are not 100% involved in certain tasks. For example, if you spend two hours on a particular process, and then over the next four or five hours, you're supposed to be working on more complicated processes, but what happens during the first two hours is that things get complicated and the day is ruined dealing with small tasks. Now, suppose that the two-hour allotment for the smaller process is automated using UiPath, the person is free to dedicatedly perform more important functions. In the entirety of our automation effort, this has been a primary driver for all of the new use cases. It's a huge plus for us.

With respect to employee satisfaction, it has been a mixed result for us. In certain cases, it's been a huge boon because there was a heavy workload on the employees and UiPath really helped them cope with it. This was especially true during COVID when the workload increased exponentially, and people could not go into the office. However, there were times in the past when people were no longer required because UiPath was doing their jobs perfectly, making them redundant. As they were no longer required, they left the company.

So, we have had both scenarios, but moving forward, instead of telling people that they're no longer required, we have retasked them to other projects. Essentially, we have reabsorbed them and in turn, have simplified the hiring process. In this regard, we have adjusted.

What is most valuable?

The new UiPath assistant is very good.

The customizable forms that UiPath has recently launched allow us to give the user an exact input that they can provide. Being able to customize this is extremely helpful for us because we have other attended automation processes, and they can each be tailored to the needs of the business.

We use the selector technology for automating processes with dynamic interfaces on a daily basis in almost all of our projects. Our extensive use of this feature includes all of the different kinds of selectors that UiPath allows. We have the flexibility to modify these selectors as per our need. This functionality gives UiPath a big edge over its competitors and I know this because I've personally used products by other vendors. The selection-making process is much simpler with UiPath, with improved accuracy and reliability.

This feature is important because a lot of the processes are Citrix-based or remote desktop applications. Because the robot would not have a direct connection to the application, we have to use Citrix technology. All of the applications are different in nature, so having the flexibility to switch between different kinds of selectors and select our activities allows us to build the perfect solution for remote applications. Even the performance, in my experience, has been the best, especially for Citrix-based automations or remote desktop-based automations.

What needs improvement?

There are a few features that could be improved, and one of them is good integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. For example, Microsoft launched Power Apps as its platform, and even though its capabilities are not as good as UiPath, it has the advantage of being so well-integrated with Excel Online, Word, and everything else. We don't have to perform a lot of development work, and it's pre-approved in our organization. Applications like SharePoint are another example of pre-approved solutions. But with UiPath, we have to prove that it's a secure process. Simply put, a stronger collaboration between Microsoft and UiPath in a lot of areas would be helpful because it would ease the development process for us.

Another example is with the Automation Hub. At this time, Automation Hub does not allow you a direct login process or single sign-on option using Azure Active Directory. This means that you're limited to going through either Gmail or something else. This is true for the on-premises solution, not the cloud one. Although we had decided to purchase the Automation Hub license, this lack of functionality held things up because we did not want to manually go in to update all of the new users again and again. We wanted the information to be picked directly from Active Directory whenever a user wanted to sign up for it.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath Attended Automation for approximately three and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

In the past, stability has been great. However, more recently I have been facing some issues, and I'm hoping for some resolution. For example, we recently upgraded to the new orchestrator in Studio, and we had to upgrade a few packages also, In particular, the UiPath automation packages.

Some of our GUI activities, which are not fully backward compatible, have been facing some issues. Consequently, some of our bots have been impacted. We have already raised the issue and we are in discussion to find a resolution. This was the first time we actually faced an issue in terms of reliability with UiPath.

Our past experience has been very good, and I cannot say that we have any complaints regarding the reliability of UiPath solutions.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability-wise, it is very good. It is easily scalable and we have a lot of options for expanding and configuring as per our requirements. It is also customizable.

We have a team of between 20 and 30 people, which includes approximately 10 developers, 5 team leads, two architects, two production managers, and one overall manager. We have some contractual workers, as well.

We have approximately 35 automations that are in production right now. From a process perspective, we have pretty much worked on all verticals including finance, healthcare, internal IT processes that needed automation, and more. An example is ServiceNow, where jobs like creating user accounts, deploying new machines, and other administrative tasks have also been automated. HR processes, including onboarding, have been automated.

It is a very large organization, and there are lots of processes, so I expect that our usage will grow.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support is excellent in our experience. Whenever we have had a problem, they've always been there to support us and help us with the problem. I don't have any complaints, as they've always made the effort. Even if things have taken longer than we had hoped or expected, they've always come back with the best resolution they can offer.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have worked with Blue Prism and in my experience, UiPath does a much better job, both in terms of dev and listening to the community. For example, Blue Prism is a very closed community and very limited. They have improved, I would say, based on the success of UiPath, but it's not very open-source or open-natured.

The biggest advantage that I have noticed is with Citrix-based automations or remote desktop automations. There are cases where Blue Prism did not work, but UiPath was very good. I did not have to spend too much time with UiPath before it worked perfectly. The reliability was also great.

More importantly, UiPath listens to the customers as well as the developer community, and in turn, they implement features that make their lives easier. They constantly reach out for feedback and it's a good process because it helps to know that the customer is happy. If I am speaking about myself, I'm happy that if I have a need, or I'm facing some challenges, I put it in the pipeline for UiPath and within six months, I will see that feature live in production.

How was the initial setup?

We started with a disaster recovery scenario, where we have one live production orchestrator, as well as one backup orchestrator and a load balancer installed. This is a high availability disaster recovery (HADR) configuration, where all of our live bots are on the main orchestrator. In the case that the live orchestrator goes down, we have the backup orchestrator kick in.

The overall deployment and installation process was simple. However, we did face some issues with the Redis part. Configuring Redis was one of our pain points, and we reached out to UiPath about it.

Although it was resolved, it took a lot of time and effort, from our end as well. That was the only experience that stood out as a problem for us. But overall, it was a smooth process.

It took about a week to set everything up, although we had constraints from our own internal infrastructure team. The delay was not related to UiPath issues.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing is close to optimum; however, there is room for improvement in both the cost and flexibility of the licenses. It isn't the best pricing in the market but it's pretty close.

What other advice do I have?

For developing our attended automation, we began by coding the bot to our requirements, and then made modifications to it for attended automation.

My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to be sure of what your needs are regarding an RPA product. If you're looking for something very small-scale, very easy, then there are a lot of options. But if you're looking for a long-term, feature-rich solution, which has access to third-party integrations, then choose UiPath.

You will require a development team, at least to some level. UiPath is now simpler with the Studio X products, but in the past, it was a bit more challenging to dive deep into UiPath directly. It required some training but now, things have definitely improved.

One of the major lessons that I have learned from using UiPath is to make sure that everything is documented well. There is a lot that needs to be tested before bots are put into production because a lot of things that work on your local machine may not work on another. It can vary from machine to machine and where something works on one, a change in environment for another may cause it to fail. This means that you should change from machine to machine during the testing phase.

Overall, I feel as if now UiPath is on the right path with its competitors. It is a very good long-term solution.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Sr. Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Automation monitoring feature notifies us of any problems, reducing the amount of maintenance work involved
Pros and Cons
  • "The speed is much better because we're doing it on the cloud. With other solutions there were network problems, but in UiPath I have found that network connectivity is much stronger when transferring data from the back end to the front end. It is much faster."
  • "They should include new machine learning and AI algorithms for better forecasting and analytics."

What is our primary use case?

We use it with ServiceNow for maintaining tickets. Our task works to automate some scenarios such as software updates. In that scenario, there are some repeated steps. We use UiPath with Python scripting to automate those repetitive steps.

How has it helped my organization?

One of our use cases is for our insurance team where we have built a prototype which has helped the insurance team cut pricing. That is one of the automations that has made a difference.

Also, the fact that this is a SaaS solution means we are able to innovate much faster when it comes to automation. We have been able to complete use cases in as little as one month. There can be problems with the on-premises version because there are certain restrictions for accessing that database. But because this is on the cloud, we can access the data from anywhere in the world. That is very beneficial.

UiPath has also helped to reduce the amount of maintenance work related to our automation operations. It has a feature to keep the different automatic tasks monitored. That monitoring helps us if there's any problem in an automation. We get notification that there is a problem. If we don't know about those problems then, after some time, maintenance on them will be harder. It does help us to maintain things.

Before, we were using the on-premises service for our automation activity. By using UiPath Automation Cloud, we don't need to go anywhere. There is a single tool where we can keep track of the maintenance. Doing so with the on-prem solution was much more time consuming and slow. With UiPath it's so much faster so it helps us cut costs.

And in terms of overall cost savings, before we implemented one of our automations there were around 100 people taking care of the task. Using UiPath, we have automated that task and we have saved the fees of 100 people.

What is most valuable?

The speed is much better because we're doing it on the cloud. With other solutions there were network problems, but in UiPath I have found that network connectivity is much stronger when transferring data from the back end to the front end. It is much faster.

The Portal for enabling business users to trigger jobs with business input and for monitoring those jobs is great.

There is also the granular, role-based access control and management which is very important in our organization because we have different roles. Our manager has a much higher role, so that if there are some changes in an automated step, there are permissions from that higher authority. Otherwise, low-level employees could make changes without informing the higher levels and there could be a lot of conflicts. This way, we don't allow the lower-level employee to make any changes without proper permission from the higher authority.

The solution's single sign-on is also important because without it, a user ID and password could be compromised by a third-party or hacker. Single sign-on gives us another level of security when logging in to UiPath. It's very important and a good security feature.

UiPath also continues to add services to the Portal. There are proper updates that come out monthly or quarterly. They update different features or any problems with features, so the updates are very useful for us. It's very important that all the services are managed from the same place because no matter where a team is, if there is a glitch and we raise a question with customer support, and they do some fixing, that fix is available for all the users who are using UiPath. It comes from the centralized location, which is a very good thing. It is available for all our users around the world.

What needs improvement?

They should include new machine learning and AI algorithms for better forecasting and analytics.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using UiPath Automation Cloud for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is very stable. In most software, we find that when we increase the data size, there is some kind of decrease in network connectivity, a delay or lag. But UiPath is very stable because they release updates very frequently.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We use it for day-to-day purposes. The tools are working on different jobs, daily. We have plans to automate more scenarios and we are working on a PoC for them. If they go well they will be implemented in UiPath as well.

How are customer service and technical support?

Their support is very proactive. When we reach out to them, they fix our problem within a day. We can also use the Portal to have a chat about any issues that come up. Customer support is good and the community support is also great.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The fact that we don't have to worry about future installations and upgrades of Orchestrator, was important in our decision to go with UiPath, because those things are already built in. We don't need to worry about the infrastructure part. It is maintained by the UiPath team. They also have better community support to help us if we face any problems. That is one of the great things about UiPath.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was very easy. The vendor was very active and the community is very active so there was no delay in communication. It was very straightforward.

We started UiPath as a desktop application and then we slowly moved to the cloud.

And in terms of the setup costs of our automation operations, UiPath doesn't have a lot of dependencies, so it is quick. We don't need to contact another party to maintain things because the UiPath community helps us with every aspect. It works. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is good compared to other software. Based on the features that UiPath is providing, and the community support, the price is reasonable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have used different tools like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. When comparing all three, when it comes to cost, UiPath is great. It is also easy to use. Anyone can learn to use it within a couple of weeks. It is very useful and user-friendly.

The user interface and the usability of the other solutions is not as user-friendly. We also found some glitches in those solutions, things like network delays.

What other advice do I have?

We haven't found any problems with UiPath. It is working great. It's a great tool. I would suggest that everyone go with a UiPath because it has helped us a lot.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1427238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dir., Resource Management Systems and Data at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Eliminates mundane, redundant processes, enabling our workforce to be more efficient, and to feel better about their work..
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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."

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We began our journey last Fall - 2019 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have not used their technical support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Lead Consultant at Konexo
Consultant
Enables us to shift activity nobody enjoys onto a robot and lets staff focus on the stuff they've been trained to do
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

We were able to do the deployment internally. 

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Director - Cloud Architecture at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20Leaderboard
Prevents human error, increases data accuracy, standardization, and quality of data for the shipping processes
Pros and Cons
  • "Attended Bots have been star cases as it totally removes dependencies of user literacy to know the application."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

  • 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.

    What needs improvement?

    • 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.                                                                               

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We have been using UiPath for two years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Excellent in stability. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    Easily scalable in a few minutes.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    No.

    How was the initial setup?

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

    What about the implementation team?

    We deployed it in-house - SI - LTI.

    What was our ROI?

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

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    UiPath is very cost-effective.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Hybrid Cloud

    If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

    Microsoft Azure
    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    Nilesh Pawar - PeerSpot reviewer
    Nilesh PawarDirector - Cloud Architecture at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
    Top 20LeaderboardReal User

    5-Star RPA Platform - UiPath 2020.4

    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free UiPath Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: July 2025
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free UiPath Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.