UiPath Platform Reviews

Our primary use cases are within the financing and HR teams right now. But of course, there's a lot of opportunities in the clinical space and with MB services. We have use cases in all of those departments throughout the organization, but right now we are engaged primarily with the HR and finance team.

We have two automations in production right now. We just started our COE and it's been exciting so far. We are building things and have identified quite big end-to-end opportunities. 

I'm not new to the automation world. I've been in this field since late 2015 and I've seen the ROI you can get with it. Some things you can quantify and others you can't. However, we are very new to UiPath so I can not comment on improvements just yet. We will know within a year. 

We have seen savings in time. One of the automations that we have in place with our finance team is a monthly reconciliation process. The first three to five days of the month are critical in finance. So, if you're able to save as little as half an hour every day in those five days, that adds up to a full day of work. This automation has helped our accountants and the finance team do their closing and be on time and have extra time to analyze things. They're not fighting fires anymore.

The partnerships that UiPath has with other vendors are excellent. Some of the applications that we rely on heavily, like DocuSign for Workday, already have built-in integrations with UiPath. This will help us scale and go to market quickly. 

I am happy that they are always listening to us and doing as much as they can to include more features. 

UiPath could work towards more engagement on the community practice side. Some of our people are having a hard time understanding how to make sense of the data that UiPath puts out. 

There could be some guidance as well on how to calculate ROI. ROI is how much money you have spent and how much you are getting back. But, how can I know how much money I've spent? Do I calculate the cost of infrastructure? Do I calculate the cost of the team I have? Where do I begin? What is the right way to look at ROI? What are some of the analytics I should be looking at?  

Utilization, the success rate, business value, and ROI have to go hand-in-hand. You cannot tell a whole story with just ROI. 

I have been using UiPath since March of this year. 

My impression of UiPath's stability is good. Compared to some other automation vendors that I've used, I would say that UiPath is more stable and better. 

We do not have a lot of experience with them but whenever we reached out to them they helped and directed us. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was on-premise and run-of-the-mill. Our team is very knowledgeable and had already done similar implementations. 

We had four people engaged in the implementation from our side. We partnered with EmiTech for the deployment and they brought in their expert and helped guide us through the installation process. 

I do not fully understand our pricing model yet, but I would say that it is fair. I cannot tell at the moment how it is going to affect us. Right now we have only six unattended bots and maybe two attended ones, so we will see how it goes as we grow. 

The ease of building the automations depends on the process, but overall I would say that UiPath is intuitive. If you understand some basic functions of logical expressions or loop functions, UiPath is intuitive enough to help you build some impressive automations. It is easy to pick up.

We have a few people who have completed UiPath Academy courses and are now going for advanced certification. I'm not planning on building any bots on an enterprise scale myself, but I am going through the training as well. 

UiPath Academy is excellent because it is intuitive. Of course, you have to have some development or SDLC knowledge, but it helps tremendously. You get so much insight on the features. You also get to build a small automation. I dedicated 30 to 40 hours to the trainings and was able to get some knowledge from it. 

The trainings are even easier for people from accounting, for example. They are used to macros, automations, and file transfers. Conceptually, they are already there and with a tool like UiPath Academy, they can start using the solution. It's important to just stick with it.

Our use cases for UiPath are all across the board. We started primarily in the finance and accounting sectors and moved to our integration center, which is made up of individuals working with our field operations folks to schedule and conduct work.

We have also moved into HR and found a lot of hours there, as well. We have also done automations for our IT and supply chain sectors. We probably touched about 15 different business units within our organizations with UiPath automations.  

We have seen a reduction in human error. A perfect example of that is an automation that takes a report from our bank and identifies all of our customers who have changed their routing or checking account information from the previous day. It then goes into the system and figures out which of these customers are check-free and updates their routing account number information. This process used to take four people four hours each day. It now takes the bot less than 15 minutes a day. There was a lot of room for human error in this process that has been eliminated. It has been automated, improving the data quality instantaneously.

The UiPath Academy was one of the biggest reasons why we chose this solution over other products. What was important for us was the availability of the free online training that we could do. 

The other vendors we were considering at the time were offering training but for a fee. We would have to pay some $2,000 per session and our upfront investment to get the team off the ground would have increased exponentially as a result.

Also, with those classes, you don't always know which quality you're going to get. Sometimes they're phenomenal and other times not so much. 

We've leveraged the UiPath Academy with our college recruits/interns. We have been able to say, "OK, we're going to hire you, but here's your commitment. You need to go through these training classes before you start your job." This would help them hit the ground running, which is phenomenal. 

The UiPath Academy expedites onboarding, which is probably its biggest value.

There is more that we could be doing with the platform. At the moment, we're just leveraging RPA right out of the box. We're just doing what I would call plain Jane automations. We're not doing a great job of leveraging the process discovery tools, which is a huge pain point for us. A lot of businesses are dealing with people shortages right now, which is taxing. And the people that are there are doing too much work so they don't have time to sit down and document their processes. Having those process discovery tools will elevate our game and allow us to be able to help them more quickly. That's a huge win for us. 

The other piece of the pie is that as we roll out automation to our organization, we're finding nuances with the process. Using some of UiPath's process mining tools, we can identify discrepancies between, for example, processes in Ohio versus Pennsylvania or Virginia or Kentucky. This would be huge for us because we spend a lot of time addressing these nuances for the automations.

The pricing could be more transparent. Overall, I think the pricing is fine, but they keep changing it. It should be more structured. They don't have to tell us what their pricing is, but they should publish how the product is broken down. 

Also, as a customer, one of my frustration points is that I'm not sure the customer success team is engaged at the right level with the customers. There's too much focus on selling more product versus helping to evolve the COE. 

There are many partners out there that have kind of learned over the last two years like this is what we need to get it off the ground. There are so many customers out there that I've talked to that have bought UiPath and it's just sitting on the shelf. If they can help them get it off the ground and get it going, then they can increase the community. 

Another issue that we run into that is not necessarily a reflection of the solution is the fact that our IT operations team does not want us running automations during business hours. This is because they don't have a good understanding of what the true impact of automation is on the source system. It would be great to have UiPath help us educate other members of the organization that automation is no different than human interaction. This could help people like me communicate with stakeholders and increase our ability to run even more automations. 

We started using UiPath in November of 2018.

I haven't seen any issues with UiPath's stability. 

We haven't seen any issues with scalability. 

We have had a mixed bag with UiPath's tech support. We have upgraded to premium support now because we need more help. The reason why we went with premium support is because we were not getting what we needed from the customer success team.

The setting up of the infrastructure and getting off the ground from a technology standpoint was the easy part. The complex part was setting up the governance model and setting up the COE model. 

I think it's probably gotten better since 2018. When we started, I didn't feel like UiPath or the partners had their heads wrapped around governance and the infrastructure set up.

At the time, I felt like I was on my own when it came to security aspects and things like setting service-level accounts for bots, setting up bots on virtual machines, and governance aspects like setting up a steering committee or the structure around the intake, tracking, or ROI processes. 

The service providers and UiPath did not help me. It was difficult in that sense in the beginning. I even ran into some trouble with my superiors because the whole process was taking longer than expected. 

We are running around 20 bots and have 105 automations in production today. One of our automations saved 25,000 hours. Overall, I'll say we have more than 250,000 hours saved for the organization.

I think we take a fee of $50 per hour, so that's well over $10 million saved that went back to the organization. 

UiPath's pricing can be confusing. They are changing it all the time. It would be nice if it was a bit more transparent. 

Before settling on UiPath, we looked into Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This was back in 2018 and the product has come far since then. 

To be honest, the best product offering at that time was Automation Anywhere. However, we understood UiPath's vision and saw where it was going. We liked the training that was available and there were a couple of use cases that we needed that Automation Anywhere would not be good for. 

Cost was another factor. At that time, UiPath had aggressive pricing that helped them get their foot in the door and enabled us to get off and go. 

My first bit of advice is to ask questions of customers. It is helpful to build a community around you of individuals that you can call upon and just ask questions. In Columbus, we started an intelligent automation user group that brought together customers. It wasn't necessarily UiPath-specific. We talked about different topics and challenges that we are having. 

For me, that was helpful, especially in terms of governance because I got a lot of good ideas from different people in regard to how I should set up my governance or how to handle certain security issues. I highly recommend connecting with other customers and leveraging the experience and knowledge that they have rather than trying to figure it out on your own.

We love UiPath Studio and we have done a little bit with StudioX. We have not had a high level of success with them because our business has been taxed. Trying to find business resources to put towards those efforts has been our biggest hurdle to getting a citizen developer program off the ground.

Currently, we're doing digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations and to get those in the center of excellence and understanding, and then go further. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, et cetera. Right now, we're just in finance.

One of the best benefits is that it just gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them. Instead of just their single task.

For instance, with PO distribution, we can ask larger questions, such as: Where are our suppliers lists? What do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as I am now due to the fact that I’m trying to automate it. What you find is the challenges aren't just in the robot. It's what you do before you get to the robot that is critical. If it forces us to fix other exterior items, we've been a success. However, if you can add to the task, what the robot does and then pull it through, that's where things get interesting. My job is just going to expand and I foresee I’ll be so busy with so many ideas.

We do use the UI apps feature. We are working with consultants. They actually know more of the technical details and they're supposed to be transferring data. I'm more of a functional person that understands the design and the processes, not the programming, coding, or details. I'm learning that as I’m in training for the RPA. I'm about 70% through training. I've been taking that through UiPath

Getting up to speed with UiPath has been tougher due to the fact that the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. The younger people, I'm sure, pick it up much faster.

It is helping our onboarding process and is useful in getting me up to speed.

The biggest value I get from the UiPath Academy is the ability to connect the software to the processes that we’re trying to automate and being able to understand the functions in terms of where you would go to get an even better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial as it offers solid examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

There's so much out there and there's so much to learn as it's not one software package. UiPath Academy provides us with the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. The opportunities are amazing and also intimidating.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership of UiPath by taking care of things such as infrastructure. We have gone and moved many more things to the cloud. We have a Hyperion solution in the cloud that we use for consolidation.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to follow what the robots are doing. Currently, I've been working on the automation hub. That's the next step. You can use the orchestrator to see how they're doing, for example.

We’ve realized some efficiencies in our current processes due to UiPath. That said, I'm a novice. We've just begun with these five processes. That's why I want to do the reporting and figure out the analysis as I want it to basically sell itself.

In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team. What I do like is that once you do something, you store it in a library. And then you have plug-and-play automation that you can add to others. You don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again. That's going to be a huge benefit.

In terms of reducing human error, inherently, it has to improve accuracy. Now that we’re focused on it, we’re testing it, and if it's not a hundred percent accurate, it's not going to production. We absolutely anticipate a great reduction in human error.

In terms of payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field will require adoption and interest. You can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. That will be the challenge. Managing the change is huge for us. It's always an obstacle. It's not that, can you automate something, it's more of a question of, internally, will they let you automate something?

I'm looking for more of the analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing. That's what's going to make management invest further into this. I actually come from a reporting background. That's what I focus on in the other financial packages that we have.

I've been using UiPath since I started training in July of 2021.

I'm not worried about the stability of the product. If others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than we are automating, it's not really a concern of mine.

In terms of scalability, right now, it's way too big for me to even understand it. It's like I'm in a county and you're asking me about the universe. I'm just trying to get directions. I still need time to absorb the entire scope.

Right now, just accounting and IT use the solution. Finance is learning it as well. They're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% the way through that journey.

I have not really had to use the support. I will, due to my training. I've gone back and forth and I've lost some of my training. I have the diplomas and different things and the degrees that I kept, however, I've lost some of that initial training. It all has to do with version release. I'm a tenant I'm just in the training phase. What I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig and learn the systems and get comfortable with everything.

We didn't use any other RPA solution previously.

The reason we adopted UiPath was due to a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning and reporting, et cetera. However, the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes and really took and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. 

There's a team of five members that went and looked at the processes that we were doing and said, which ones can we change or do better? Between the controller and the consultants, there was an analysis performed. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They looked forward five to ten years and what they were projecting looked really nice.

I didn't directly handle the implementation. I will learn that more as we go. From what I saw, the workflow was nice. The implementations that we have are being done in baby steps, and so far, the steps are relatively easy. It is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. That will help us with the reporting. We'll be better able to understand what things are best to automate and what is easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from these five implementations.

Our consultant assisted us with the implementation process, and they really did a sprint on the implementations.

The sprints were such that it was really a six-week turnaround time. We actually had to go backward and do the assessments from those implementations. I wasn't in this role at that time. Therefore, I'm now doing the cost benefits backward to see if we can set them up correctly and then see what we can do ourselves going forward. The key will be not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it ourselves. 

Also, we'll have to assess how quickly the people in the field can adopt the product and have a robot actually be their assistant. We want to figure out how quickly we can deploy citizen developers. 

The solution is pricey at the beginning, however, we'll have to see going forward with what we get for the tools. It's always expensive to buy a really nice car and then not drive it very far, very much. It's all about the utilization. If we use it fully, the cost won't be as high.

The company did evaluate other solutions, however, they liked UiPath the best due to its differentiating reputation, experience, and level and quality of tools.

UiPath has not yet saved costs for our company. However, we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do that reporting so that we can see the savings if any. The decisions we make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. We need to instead think about where we want to be five years from now and go backward. We need to ask: what are we doing today that's going to make a difference in five years? It's an investment in the future right now.

I'd advise those considering the solution to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if they didn't go forward, the basic principles that are revealed can probably fix other things. Some people just have bad processes. Once you get your processes aligned and make them to the point that they're standardized and understood across the different units using them, it will become easier to automate.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. In order to rate it higher, I need more experience. I've got to learn, got to understand it better. Then I've got to utilize it. Like many software that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, however, there's the best way. I always wish we'd just teach the best way. That said, I understand that you want to make people agile and to understand fully by exploring different ways. When you learn, learning all the different ways is very cumbersome, and yet, better in the long run.

We are on-prem within the insurance industry. Our use cases are in auto reports and micro use cases within that.

The biggest benefit we see from UiPath is the overall platform. It's not only the functionalities. As we started tying that all together in the platform view, with the orchestration forms and the workflow function, it'll be key, because it's been around in the industry for 20 years, but hasn't been tied to everything. 

It saves us costs but that's only one part of it. We are looking at it in terms of employee centricity, customer centricity, reducing the risk, and improving the accuracy. There's a multitude of factors that we are looking at.

We have seen a reduction in human error using UiPath. We are an audit firm at heart. We do a lot of audit and tax work, which is all related. Within use cases in those spaces, we see a change in terms of accuracy. It eliminates manual errors. Instead of just looking at 20% or 30% of the big picture, you can look at 100 of it because it's automated. 

The most valuable feature is the fluidity of the products. When I want to use RPA, I can use RPA. When I want to do process mining, I can do process mining. Those are the two top that I typically use it for. 

Building automations is easy. It's drag and drop. If you are a developer and want the full functionality, you can actually dive into it at a little bit more of an API level.

We use the Academy. I am the training and certification lead for our UI group of 200 practitioners. It's probably the only group in your partner community that's 100% certified. We are tied in into your training and certification piece and we are using and reusing the licenses to make sure that we are pushing out the updates from the platform through the training store.

Our training and certification programs are still gaining maturity. We recently signed the USN Certification with UiPath, which gives us access to brochures and AP credits. It makes it a little bit more formal because the process was there, but it was very informal. We were exchanging emails, but now it's tied together with the workflow. It's getting there. 

The breadth of the courses is the most valuable aspect of the Academy. This is my third year doing this. There has been an increase in courses being offered. 

The path forward is probably to tie this all together in a platform and look at the workflow automation. At this point, we are doing snapshot automation, point solution, and staff automations. The term RPA itself is a misnomer, it never was a robotic process, it was robotic task automation. We are automating tasks and the way to get away from that is to look at process level automation end-to-end. That won't be done with RPA tools, it has to be with the workflow tools. How do we tie in and how do we tie into, either the orchestration function or decisioning functions? They will tie into a broader transformation initiative. It'll be dual-edged.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

The stability has improved in the last two years. As they push more functionality on that and go more cloud-centric, I think it will be much more stable. We just got through an issue yesterday, but it was resolved quickly. We knew what to do. We could figure out the root cause. 

Scalability has come a long way. UiPath is probably the leader in this, but as we look at broader solutions and a process-centric automation suite, we also have a long way to go forward. We are at a midpoint in the journey. It's on UiPath and the department of community to try to hook that together.

UiPath is our biggest alliance in the automation side for my company and the plan is to increase the usage. There's a commitment from the very top on both sides. We have stepped away from past automation and stepped into the broader use of it and the transformation journey. There have been micro transformation journeys in all sectors, whether it's financial services or outside of that and commercial, national accounts, and the public sector. That's how we're looking to scale and become even bigger in the next few years.

We use Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and Pega Robotic Process. Some of it is just down to the differences between what the tools offer. I've used all four of them.

Each solution has its pros, but in terms of speed to market, and improving the quality, the partner network, the product suite, and the product roadmap itself, UiPath is a few years ahead of the rest. That's reflected in the analyst reports.

UiPath is something that people can dive into. My advice would be to take a few courses, everything is available online. It really comes down to people's aptitude and whether they want to get into this. I don't think it's very difficult.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Purely because there is always room for improvement, but it's on the right track. Product roadmaps and positioning are in the right space.

We are on-prem but we will be migrating to the cloud by the end of the month. 

My company has 100,000 people and uncountable departments. One of the biggest bots is in HR and finance. So far we have almost 57 bots in production, almost 45 in pre-production. We will have almost 100 bots by the end of this year. Our target is to reach 800 bots by the year after. 

No one can beat the automation. It's like you can sit back and play Tetris and let the bot do the work.

We see time savings, precision, and speed. Time is the most precious thing in the world. My company has saved around five million dollars this year. 

We use a standard approach when it comes to developing bots. By the end of this year, we are going to use Insights for reporting and we are going to use data mining the year after. We are doing a pilot right now, that captures the activities and try to figure out which is the high potential area. Based on the data, we will figure out and decide which route we should take.

Insights helps to determine which processes we will automate next. Based on that, we can get the data and write the defaults for leadership so they can make the right decision.

It's very easy to build automations. That's why we want to deploy 800 bots by next year. Our assessment is that it only takes 5% to 7% effort. The rest is trying to figure out the deployment process, the platform struggle, networking, etc. The development is very easy.

AI is a good feature. I am looking forward to that making life easier. It has enabled us to automate more processes. Based on the requirement, chat can hand over the process and we can kick off that bot to do the job. If someone has a problem with a ticket or with a schedule, they can connect to the schedule department or schedule bot. 

We have a citizen developer program in the company so we have taken the UiPath Academy courses. We bring the citizen developer on board and they have to go through the courses on our portal. We have tight integration of UiPath Academy with my company's internal learning process portal.

It's a wonderful integration and it's a very organically arranged process. We can start a raw developer and let them deploy a bot in a couple of months. It's a remarkable achievement. UiPath is very good at developing those courses. 

Creating the pipeline for the automation and then deploying it and keeping it there, is where the focus should be. I think UiPath realized that and is working on it. 

Support could use improvement. It's always a struggle to engage with them. We have a very tight relationship with support, but when things are in hot water, everyone wants to fix it right away which doesn't always happen. 

We have been using UiPath since 2018. 

The stability depends on the client's infrastructure. We're using a Citrix environment and internal infrastructure security has a lot of parameters. It totally depends. Every client has different challenges.

The scalability is a big value. If we have 100 bots today and we want to have 800 bots next year, on-premises is very challenging and expensive but with the cloud, it's very easy to replicate.

The quality of support depends on the support person that you get and on the situation. We started getting better support because we have a dedicated team.

Neutral

I have experience with Blue Prism and Microsoft cloud automation. The difference between them is like the difference between a Ferrari and a Toyota. UiPath is a Ferrari. It's a very mature and solid platform.

The initial setup is very easy because we created the right pipeline with the help of UiPath. However, at the end of this month, we are going to the cloud and we do not know the challenges that will bring. 

The deployment will take a few minutes. 

UiPath is revolutionary. My advice would be to try it out. In the beginning, it looks a little difficult, but once you get your hands on it and get used to it, it's the most wonderful thing.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. To make it a perfect ten, licensing and support should be improved. They should use the Microsoft model, where it's free. Once you develop it, the user will deploy it. You can make money on that. But let users have a taste, let them sit down in the driving seat and drive it.

My company has multiple processes across various lines of businesses like finance, contact center, HR, tax, etc. Our use cases are based on the business corporation. They have to agree with the use case and what they want to automate. They have to provide the business details about the exact process. The developer or the lead will design the solution accordingly.

For example, in the revenue accounting area, we have around 5,000 to 15,000 requests in a day. It's all based on the number of sales that they made. We have implemented a multi-board approach, where the process can simultaneously run in almost 15 to 30 missions, whenever there is a requirement. We can increase the number of licenses based on the requirements.

We use Automation Cloud and Task Capture. They're trying to implement Task Capture with a couple of lines of businesses right now. We did not implement it completely, but it's in process.

If a person is spending eight hours in a day on a job, we can automate that process. He can validate it in an hour and the rest of the time he can spend doing other things. Our overall experience is good with automation. There are a couple of businesses that are really happy with our support on their daily tasks. 

If revenue accounting wants to do their responsibilities, they need 100 employees. Automation made their life easy and they can now validate quickly with 5 or 10 agents and get it done.

UiPath has saved costs.

We use the Apps feature. It helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps.

The Automation Cloud offering will help to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership, by taking care of things like infrastructure and maintenance. We are on-prem now. We are going to migrate this year.

We have various automations in various applications like desktop, mainframe-based, and SAP-based applications. I work with almost all of the applications. I see good progress no matter what we do. The most valuable feature is that UiPath works with all these solutions.

Building automations is easy based on whatever automation you develop, just drag and drop. It's easy to maintain.

We use the Academy. If you don't know anything about UiPath, you can go to the UiPath Academy and start using it. It will give you an overall idea of what is what. 

The greatest value from the Academy is that I don't have to go to a person for learning. I can learn on my own time, night or day. The portal is also good. 

They're planning to look into machine learning. They have a vision; they have a plan.

When we raise a ticket, they'll ask a number of questions to analyze the problem. It would be better if they connected quickly and it was a call so they can understand the issue and then schedule a follow-up call. 

We can't explain each and every thing. When it's on a call, we can explain it in a few minutes. 

The stability is good, but when we migrate to a newer version a few issues can emerge. We just have to do our best and make sure everything is up and running. Overall, the stability is okay.

We previously used Blue Prism. It is process automation. The user interface is different. How we interact with the development environment and how we manage the solutions is different. Overall, Blue Prism and UiPath are both good. 

I wouldn't say the setup is difficult. We need to work with various teams to get everything going.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the complexity. If it is complex, based on the developer and urgency, we'll split it into two parts, test it, and quickly deploy it. We have deployed on an emergency basis in one to two days. It's a complex process, but there are five or six developers who work without any sleep around the clock.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

With federal governments, a lot of the use cases vary around what they're doing, however, it's just a lot of PDF, Excel, and Microsoft Suite automation and then interacting with their custom and web-based tools for subject information.

We don't use it a ton internally. We do more consulting services where we help other organizations get it set up. We're trying to look at maybe more internal ways to use it, however, most of what we do is external. That's just our entire model.

The typical spiel with UiPath is you're getting rid of the tedious and redundant work and you're saving time for people and bringing them up to do more human-oriented tasks.

Anything and everything under the solution has been very helpful for us. UiPath Studio is the most valuable for what we're doing simply due to the fact that it’s development software.

The most valuable part is how it interacts with the websites. A lot of the other automation solutions aren't doing that. A lot of what we do is involved in web-based automation and that's pretty key.

As a developer, the ease of building automation is great. I don't know if it's easy for the typical business user that I interact with. That's why there are professional services to develop and things like that.

We do use the UiPath Academy courses. UiPath Academy is great. It's one of the best online training platforms I've seen. That said, it’s an average user base that we're working with. I've had to teach people how to copy and paste. That level of user is not going to learn how to do variables and selectors and things like that.

The science of the software's easy enough to pick up if you know how to develop and I thought the Academy was fantastic at helping the learning process along.

The biggest value that the UiPath Academy offers is just the ability to train somebody up and know how to use UiPath in roughly a week.

The solution has saved costs for organizations. The exact amount is very tricky to quantify as I have multiple clients. It depends on which client we’re talking about. A lot of them are coming up in the beginning stages. My first client saved around 200,000 hours, which was significant. More recent ones may be in the tens of hours at this point. Those numbers relate to nobody specific, just a fledgling RPA program.

UiPath has reduced human error. That said there's plenty of bot error that occurs. You have to be aware of that if you are going to replace humans. I haven't honestly tracked it to see what the percentage is on errors on any of my projects, however, I would assume it is a reduction, and yet not quite 100%.

Right now, reducing errors is not yet important for our business and the businesses that we consult for. We don't really come across processes where there are so many errors. That's what we need to fix. It's not why people are using it. They're using it for the ROI value.

The solution has freed up employee time. It generally allowed the employees to focus on higher-value work and their level of satisfaction with the job.

I’m not sure if the Academy fulfills all of our needs in terms of staying up to speed with the solution. I haven't really gone back to the Academy after I first got through the development training to look at other solutions and stuff. I usually just rely on meetings with UiPath.

The stability needs to be improved, as does the scalability. 

We've used the solution for four or five years.

In terms of stability, that's where there's room for improvement.

It just comes down to a lot of selectors and items of that nature. Selectors can fail randomly and then start working again and can cause issues. That's been our issue with stability.

The scalability is directly tied to the stability. It's a lot harder to scale the solution to run on a lot of computers. Each of these has some unique issues when it comes to deployment.

With my current client, we have probably around ten users at this time.

Technical support is great. Also, the UiPath forum is super helpful, however, when I've used the license key, you got actual support and that's been really good.

I'm not aware of the company using a different RPA solution previous to UiPath. I personally only use UiPath.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployments have taken six months to a year.

We have seen a return on investment from the companies that are utilizing this solution.

The individual robot and studio licenses are good. Usually what I see clients shake their heads at is the add-ons, the AI capability. Insights, for example, was very expensive. My client didn't want to get it due to the price.

Orchestra is usually acceptable as it's part of the package, however, the other stuff that's not studio or robot, usually, clients aren't, in my experience, interested in paying more.

We are primarily focused on UiPath due to the fact that that's what our clients are using, however, we're vendor agnostic. We support UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere as well. We have developers that are all trained in each of their usages. Whether we use them all at once or suggest them depends on the client. We have one client where they're using a bunch of them, however, most of our clients use UiPath I'm with the federal government, and UiPath is the only one that's really approved to do that. 

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

We do not yet use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program.

I would advise new users to be patient due to the fact that it's going to take a while for it to get stood up. Also, when you are working with the federal government, there are lots of approvals. Other than that, new users should make sure they get use cases and have everything very well documented. Users need to understand all the decisions and the logic behind it. That's the main advice I'd give.

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

Often, the solution is used for a lot of connecting data from different systems, et cetera. Also, a lot of tasks involve taking data from Excel or an email and putting it into different PDFs at high volumes and then saving everything in a certain spot in the file directory.

With UiPath, people can do more knowledge work and don't have to spend as much time doing menial tasks. For example, connecting the different systems and handling large volumes of Excel and PDFs. From what I've seen with clients, that's really common. Typically, tasks with data like that would take like a lot of time. The same with pulling reports from a website and then having to run a tableau dashboard and refresh R code. There are a lot of different layers that RPA is able to connect to and with, which is cool.

I like that you can automatically take a picture of what you're getting the selector for. For example, the next developer can tell what was on the screen. That way it’s easy to transfer from developer to developer, which is sometimes difficult.

I also really like being able to put notes on each of the activities. That's really valuable for me. Even if I'm not passing it to somebody else, it reminds me of what I was doing.

On a grander scale, there's definitely other stuff, however, those are just little things that I find valuable.

The one bot that pulls reports runs the R code and then refreshes the Tableau dashboard saves a lot of time. I can't recall the number exactly, however, without the bot, it takes a long time to pull those reports manually. I’m talking half a day for one person. And we may need to pull 20 or 30 reports per day. The website takes a long time to load, which means for a person it's just a lot of sitting time, which is very annoying.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. It’s well-known that UiPath's training is the best of any of the tools, including Blue Prism, Power Automate, or Automation Anywhere. Power Automate in particular doesn't really have as much specific training. With UiPath, the pictures and the hands-on nature, and just the scrolling is cool. The training looks cool and it's very helpful. After you take the training, you can actually go and do something. It's not like you've just read about it.

The biggest value in the Academy is the paths. You can choose to go down a certain path. It's nice to have it curated. Also, there’s definitely the hands-on piece that sets it apart. In some other solution’s training, they just describe the different features of the tool. With UiPath, it’s interactive and you have to do it. Part of the assessment is you have to do that big RA framework process, which is good due to the fact that, with just training, you've already done it. You’re already using the tool.

Building automation with UiPath is very easy. It has a good interface. I like how you can nest certain activities. It makes things more visible. The modular approach of having different pages and then invoking them is very intuitive.

We just use attended automation right now as there is a lot of proof of concepts going on. We're hoping to get to more unattended automation soon since that seems to be a big, high-value area.

In general, and maybe this is not the tool's fault specifically, however, more awareness of the limitations for federal clients needs to be considered. There is a lot of the cool stuff that we've heard about, and I'm probably going to hear about today, that we can't really use due to security.

A particular part of the platform hasn't been ATOD. If there's any way that UiPath could help support even more the federal clients by saying "hey, this is not going to break your system" that would be really helpful as some of it would be very valuable to them. It's just getting it past the review process that is the challenge right now, and security is the main concern.

For citizen developers, Studio is difficult. It's just too over their head. They don't want to finish the training. They're getting fed up. They already have their own job and they're just not as bought in on the process which is the tone set at the top. Their management has to deal with that. It just doesn't seem very realistic overall sometimes for a lot of clients to have citizen developers.

I've been using the solution for about two years.

Sometimes clients think that they can just do something and then it runs forever. People who actually work with it know that it's going to break and you're going to have to fix it. However, that's part of the process. When it first starts running, you're going to have to make it better. There needs to be managing of expectations. It's going to give you value, however, it's not going to be perfect the first time, which is just not even the automation's fault. It's sometimes the systems. You have to learn the quirks of the systems and the systems that it works with. For example, a website might have a pop-up that you wouldn't expect. It'll break, and clients will ask "why is this broken?" You have to explain the bot doesn't know how to handle everything.

In theory, the scalability is great. In practice, if clients hear "oh, you can just build a bot and then put it out to everybody" - that's not really the case. There's going to be that deployment and configuration process where you have to work with each of the analysts or whoever you're working with to actually make it work on the computer. There might be more expectation management needed. Sometimes, for example, a computer has quirks, and we have to do this and that. That said, overall, after you get situated, it's very easy to manage from the orchestrator new packages, et cetera. My assumption is that it is good.

The responsiveness was quick, however, in my case, I wasn't really able to get the question answered. It was actually about licensing for one client. They were not as immediate in terms of their service, however, it was still good. We got an outcome. It just took a little bit longer than we expected to come to the conclusion.

The initial implementation was pretty straightforward. It wasn't specifically at my organization, however, one of the clients did an implementation from the ground up and we helped them get UiPath. It was us coordinating with UiPath reps, and it was pretty straightforward.

For our part, it was just knowing what licenses to get and working with, and knowing the client's situation. We were working closely with the UiPath reps to say "this is what they need" and then we just got it for them. I thought it would be a lot more complicated to know what license structure they would need, however, it turned out just fine.

I don't remember the length of that project. Deployment might have been around eight months for the whole thing to get situated and start being used.

We worked with UiPath to help our client set up the solution.

We've seen an ROI in UiPath. We just had a bot challenge with one client where they showcased different automation that they've made throughout the organization, and the numbers were great. I cannot remember the exact numbers, however, they were impressive.

The whole UiPath model is a bot for every person, so the attended licensing is obviously where the money goes. I don't know how realistic that is for a lot of clients. It makes a lot more sense to focus on making the process mining, task capture, and those type of tools, very user-friendly for people who would otherwise want to consider citizen developers.

You have to identify like the people who want to be citizen developers. There are really not many of those people, in my experience. One time I was working with somebody, and she didn't know where the start button was - and she was one of the people they had identified as a citizen. For her, this solution is not going to work.

Companies need higher-up people who know their organization and can identify those people. That's an internal thing. Overall, I would love to see UiPath figure out their financing to re-pivot and focus on citizen developers and get really good at identifying processes. Either way, we're still going to have dedicated people who actually develop and perfect as StudioX even is way above a lot of clients I've worked with. Taking into account all of my clients there has been one guy who could use Studio.

I've looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

With Blue Prism, the pro is that the grid in the development environment makes it easy to align and then see from a very high level what your process is doing, which UiPath is lacking. Even though you have the workflows where you don't have to have everything on the page, you can invoke stuff from other pages. That's nice. However, it's still not as visually apparent in terms of what's going on, unless you put a lot of notes, which some people just don't do. Blue Prism is good at the high-level view. I don't like them for almost everything else. It's very antiquated. I know they came up with RPA, the name and everything, however, I don't think they've kept up with the current energy of the industry. Also, their training is not good and the online community is not at all as strong as UiPath. 

With Automation Anywhere, the development, everything about that has gotten better recently. It has mostly improved due to the fact that they were coming from a really low place. I did not like that tool a couple of years ago. Then, they redid their training, and the interface became a lot different. They've gotten better. However, they are still not my favorite tool. The use cases that the tool is geared toward are not always as broad as what UiPath can handle. I do not like the search functionality for the different activities. If you type into, which is a UiPath phrase for an activity, in Automation Anywhere it won't recognize the phrase. They don't use it as a search function. You have to type exactly the name of the activity. I understand that they don't want to accommodate the exact verbiage that UiPath uses, however, it's annoying. In UiPath, if you type in something similar, it'll still bring up similar activities, even if it's not exactly the name, which is nice. Sometimes you can't remember the exact wording and it's good there's an option to search in a way that will show you the closest options.

With UiPath, the pros are the training. With getting new people up to speed, you would never say "let's start you on Blue Prism." It's too complicated. The UiPath training is really good,  and the developer community and online forums are usually accurate, which is more than you say for some other stuff. Overall, the usability of the UiPath tool, the deployment, and the interfaces of everything we've seen are a lot cleaner. Even on a basic level, the solution just looks cool. The main downside is the lack of awareness surrounding what government clients can use and what they can't and then work to tailor to that.

We are a UiPath partner. 

We have one client that is on version 20.4.3, however, most others are on the latest version of the solution.

We do not use the UiPath apps feature or UiPath's AI functionality right now.

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

I would love to see a change in the process mining and differentiation on how they're catering toward the citizen developers. That would be outstanding and would show a lot of self-awareness for the company. Maybe I'm just totally cut off from the commercial sector and maybe they have brilliant people who are just ready to develop immediately, however, that is not what I've seen across all of my clients.