UiPath Platform Reviews

Since we are a healthcare organization with HIPAA rules, we're on-prem. Our use cases boil down to claims testing and membership testing. It'd be institutional professional dental claims and making sure our membership is loaded correctly.

We have to configure our software to pay claims and pay providers. What we're realizing is that, the more claims that we can run through the system, the more accurate we can get, the faster the payment on the claims, and the faster the payment to our providers.

The only features we're actually using are the orchestrator and 32 unattended bots.

The value of that is the power to be able to run our thousands and thousands of claims and membership to make sure that everything looks correct.

The solution has saved costs for our organization. I know it's over a million, however, I haven't done the exact numbers.

UiPath has reduced human error. We’re finding out that what we've built for configuration in the past, we're finding mistakes that we did a year ago. Now, the bots are proving that and we've been able to correct those past mistakes. This way, we don't have inaccurate payments or recaptures.

The product has freed up employee time - and it's not just the employee time. We do have some triggers that run. Some jobs are run that people use to manually do at night and weekends. We also don't have to hire additional people just to learn 80 different types of things in a claim and identify correctness manually. The robots will go through and then they can identify if there are specific things that are wrong. That part will go to our experts and they'll review those exact issues.

This use of bots allows for employees to do higher-value work. We also have been able to up-skill some of those people to sometimes a leadership role or a different role they would normally never get due to the fact that they were always manually looking at the claims and membership. This has definitely affected their level of satisfaction at work.

I don't know if we have an accurate estimate of how much time we are saving. I just know we do volume and we do thousands and thousands of claims a day, and therefore, it really helps.

We use UiPath’s Academy. That's how we learned the system. We actually learned it in six weeks and then started the development after that. It's very powerful and I continue to use it today.

It’s helped employees get up to speed with the product. This is especially useful when we get newer versions or we onboard other people. That's part of our syllabus. The first thing a new user has to do is go to the Academy and take some of the classes that we recommend. Then we identify, “okay, did you like it? Is this for you? Is it not for you?” et cetera. It’s a quick win where we don't have to take our time as we've got other work that we have to get completed. It acts as a filtering system for us. Both us and the employee can see if it’s a good fit very quickly. We can find out at an early stage instead of a year later.

The biggest value of the Academy is just knowing that we can do so much more volume and get in some more accurately without human error, or having people working nights and weekends. That has always been a really big push and we've been able to slowly work away from that.

Obviously, we’re not in a perfect world yet, however, getting rid of the manual aspect has been great. People just get burnt out. You can only look at things manually for so many hours. If you've been doing this for 10 years, it's got to be frustrating for those people who are always afraid they’ll get their job taken away. At the same time, for them, it’s so much easier as they don’t have to look at 80 things. They can look at five things that failed and then enjoy time with family and have a work-life balance. That’s big.

We've coded up to like 80% of what's possible. We really cut our pain points and said "this gives us our value, our bang for our buck." What we're doing now is saying, "okay, well, how do we improve it?" We've got another area or we've got another part of the software that we use our application that UiPath interacts with. Right now, our main concern is what else we can do to make it even more accurate or get more information or test more information to make it a solid pro program.

I'm a developer and I'll move things around and they'll change order, or I'll try to save something and it won't save the first time. I'll have to open something twice, open something three times. I've got a list. I'm working out quirks with UiPath. There are just UX things where if I copy this and put it here, it should look the same as it was, and I don't know why it doesn't. It could be my machine. It could be my local machine and it might just be that conversation with the premium plus to say, "why is this doing this?" Or maybe there could just be a setting, where we didn't check that box when we set it up. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

We actually had to spend about four months of maintenance to make sure that we got the solution to how we wanted it. We brought in a contracting firm and they didn't know the company and they just kind of said, "here's what bots can do." 

What we did is we did an assessment program for two months. During those two months, we looked at what they built, which was great. This got us up and running and showed us what's possible. 

Then, we took those two months to identify, for example, if the database maybe should have been set up a little better to interact with our other databases. Or if the coding should have had different paths of risk that they didn't know about. If you don't know the business, you don't know the risks, and therefore, you don't know how to set it up. That's why we did all of that assessment and then we spent four months fixing it to adjust to what we thought was a better path or a more stable path in order to support the robots.

The scalability potential is astronomical. We've got so many areas in the company, including finance and pharmacy, and there are all kinds of different areas and authorizations that you can actually go down and say, okay, now we have time. Let's put it on our calendar. 

The next piece we're looking into is the citizen developer angle. We know that has some power potential, however, we have to have regulations and audits. We want to be careful if we do start moving in that direction to really understand if it is right for the company and is helping people versus if we build something wrong what that would mean to manually have to correct that. That's time nobody has.

Technical support has been great. We usually get answers within hours of a request. I thought we were on the premium support plan and now we're going to go to the premium plus, I believe they call it. That starts up here for us in November.

We've had some challenging solutions where it has taken us several weeks to work through it. They tell us "here's what we recommended". That said, we know our system. It's just like any other contracting firm. They don't know your system and your solutions, however, they give you the recommendations. At this point, we've been able to work through everything that we've had technical issues with. We decide to do some of them a different way. Technical support has been supportive of this approach. It's like a partnership, and that really makes a big difference.

We started with Rational Robot in 2005. I actually developed that. I've been with the company for over 20 years. I started with Rational Robot and then we moved to some C Sharp and some coded UI.

We tried Test Architect for a little while. We've used different RPA methodologies and UiPath seemed to fit a little better with where we are and the robustness we wanted.

We switched when we moved over to new healthcare software. The old one was just COBOL and green screens, and it was hard to automate it. We did, however, it was very difficult. When we moved to this new application, we needed to make everything more quality controlled, and the only way to do that was with the robots.

I was not a part of the implementation process. 

The deployment process took about eight or nine months via our vendor. 

We brought on some contractors to do our initial setup, including a proof of concept, and they built part of the system and after that, we took it over. They were what we called a vendor tracking firm.

We have definitely seen an ROI.

The biggest ROI was in the configuration. We're realizing we may be setting some things up wrong and that's not how the customer should have been set up. When we see things fail, we ask why is this failing? And then we go upstream and find out that we didn't even build a specific thing and realize that it was a mistake, a key entry, a mistype, et cetera, and the bots catch that on the backend.

We're able to do that quicker. It's manual labor and it's tedious. Now, manual labor's fine if you want to go in and manually check this, that, and the other thing, however, when that's your day job and you're checking the same 80 fields compared to a spreadsheet over and over, it's just got to be frustrating and employees feel it. You hear it on the call.

With UiPath, we can ask the question "what can we do to support you?" We're not going to replace people; we want to get them to a better place. Our employees understand that. It took them a while, however, they do understand that now and think the solution is really cool and are thankful for the support. It's a tool, not a human being's replacement. 

I don't write the checks. I don't know what the actual cost is. That's always on leadership. My understanding is it's a reasonable price for the value that we're getting out of it.

We did look at the Power Automate desktop. It doesn't have the orchestrator to control things, and it has some other limits. When we do formulas and try to validate what the value should be, they are very difficult or impossible to set up on the Power Automate. At some point in time, I'm sure we'll be able to do that. In today's world, what we need right now is UiPath.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We do not use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. We just do some checks and then just make sure via verification that everything matches in the configuration to the actual claims from the inbound files to the outbound.

There's an automation hub, test, capture, process, mining, all of these other features we haven't been able to purchase yet, due to the fact that we want to make sure that our bread and butter, the claims of membership, is solid. Once we have that in a good place, which we're hoping will be in 2022, we've already talked to our sales rep about the next steps. They've talked about the other features and offered recommendations. We'll go down that path next year and it'll be really exciting to see what else we can do to bring on the other areas of the company.

I'd advise potential new users that they definitely want to do some kind of proof of concept against other systems. I have heard other companies here that have said, okay, we're going up against four other automation tools. That's great. However, do your homework. You need to go and present everything to your leadership and showcase the solutions. 

As we get some of the demos of software, we can kind of compare them to what our system's needs are. A new user can say, well, maybe these are our top two. When you get to your top two, that's your time to bring somebody in, an expert to discuss what you're trying to do.  

If you do choose to go with UiPath, that UiPath academy is so valuable. That's a big asset. If you do the premium plus care, they will support you through and help you get things set up and running or make it better. We've been up and running for two years. Their goal and my goal is to see how to make things better to continuously improve the system and make everyone happy.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. There are just a few system quirks I'm trying to work through. 

We have 12 bots in production right now. I can't speak exactly to all the bots. My role is in process mining. With process mining, we're using the PDP process and we're building out a model for sales orders.

The most valuable features of UiPath are the possibilities. For example, we're excited about what's coming and we've saved some time with the bots, however, we're still learning. The idea is once we get really good at process mining it will be really good at building bots. We'll be able to uncover those opportunities and then execute on capitalizing on them.

I'm not sure of how much time we've saved, in the tens of hours per month. While it's not nothing, they've been small use cases to build up the capability. We are still figuring out how to build bots, and how to get the orchestrator all set up. 

We're doing a crawl, walk, run, taking our time and doing it right. We are building up the center of excellence. We're out of crawl and we're in to walk, however, we're not running yet.

So far, the conversation around automation and cultural change has been really powerful in terms of re-thinking our processes and asking if there's a better way to do it. right now, we're beginning to understand that we don't have to be stuck where we're at.

It's changed the dynamic of how we look at our processes and how we talk about why and how we do what we do. That's been tangible.

Our teams have used UiPath Academy courses. It has been instrumental and we couldn't do it without those courses. That was one of the reasons why we selected UiPath. They're robust and it is easy to access training modules.

The biggest value that we've realized from the Academy is confidence. Just getting over that initial hurdle of understanding what we're doing has been huge.

In terms of the ease of building automation via UiPath, it takes a long time to set up the environment and get the training and be able to do it.

The overall ecosystem and platform, which I know that they're working on, needs to be better. Being able to connect idea generation and opportunity into discovery and then into automation needs to be seamless. It needs to be end-to-end and also more robust. If I had to give them a piece of advice, it would be that the RPA is one component of process improvement, and they own the RPA space, so I realize that's their bread and butter, however, RPA isn't the only tool in the toolbox. I'd like to see more in relation to how we can eliminate waste and how we can lean out our processes.

Maybe the improvement solution isn't RPA. I'd like the solution to address how can I see more opportunities and capitalize on the improvement of any kind with an obvious focus on RPA. That's where the real power is going to come from. That said, it's not the only focus.

I've used the solution for over a year. 

The stability has been great. I don't have any issues or comments there. I don't have any concerns with the stability of the company or the platform's software. We haven't experienced many bugs or anything like that. We're happy with the stability.

The scalability is where the solution is going to come into play. Likely, it will, as we have learned the possibilities are ripe and endless. 

Right now we're using it extensively, however, we're only building bots and deploying process mining within our controller and finance area. That's our learning curve and it is probably the ripest ground for automation. We plan to increase usage. We've just scratched the surface there. We've only done maybe 5% of controllers. Then, we have the whole rest of the organization and the whole supply chain.

Technical support was great. They helped a lot during the implementation. I would rate them at an eight out of ten simply due to the fact that the premium support person was very, very helpful and honestly I don't know what we would've done without them. However, that did come at a price.

Making that service standard as part of the implementation process would probably pump my technical support rating up to a ten in that, while the experience was a ten, we paid for it.

In terms of the initial setup, once you have people that are familiar with the software and you have all your environments and connectors set up, the Building Box is very user-friendly. That said, it doesn't happen overnight.

From contract signing to putting our first bot into production, the setup and deployment were about six months.

Being on-premise, there was added complexity. Had we opted for the cloud version, it would have been a simpler process. We had the standard provisioning servers and had to get them set up and installed the software, et cetera.

The process was complex simply due to the fact that it's an advanced technology, however, UiPath is really great at helping out. We had a premium plus support person.

A lot of the details and things that we'd never done before, they were there to help us on their end and give us pointers and tips on our end.

We have not yet seen an ROI. When we look at the savings we have realized versus the upfront costs and the time investment, we're probably still under water, however, we recognize that this is a long game.

For the quality of the product that we get,  it's a fair price. I'm a believer in you get what you pay for. You always want to maximize your value, however, that doesn't necessarily mean a lower price.

Before choosing UiPath, we did look at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were the ones that we actually did full demos of. We also looked at the websites of some of the smaller players.

The main one that we really looked at where and it came down to a head to head was with Automation Anywhere. The key difference for me, with my focus, was process mining. Automation anywhere had some capability there, however, it was a recording device and it was intrusive to the end-user. You also couldn't go backward in time. When you got everything plugged in and turned it on, you could start recording and building your processes. You could see last week's processes next week, however, the UiPath solution uses the audit tables. Therefore, when I turn it on, I can go back in time, for not just a week; I can go back two years. I can go back that far to see how the process has evolved and where we're at. I can build a more robust baseline to change from today rather than having to wait for six months to build my baseline.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. We just installed it earlier this year, therefore it's probably the latest and greatest.

We do not use AI functionality in our automation process. We also do not use UiPath apps features. While we're learning about some of those new things, we're not using them today.

The main thing that I would advise others is to get leadership on board and get their ducks in a row in terms of the culture that they want to create and the long-term vision that they have for this.

You can't capitalize on it in six months. If you're going to throw in the towel if you're not seeing ROI in your first calendar year, then don't even start. It takes some leadership fortitude and some stick-to-itiveness. It doesn't happen organically or on its own. If a company is not dedicating the resources or not freeing up people's time, they won't get far. The bots aren't going to create themselves yet. Maybe with AI, in the future, that will be possible, however, that's way off.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine for now. I'm really happy with the program that we're building up. I'm happy with the solutions that they offer. It'll jump up to a ten when we get to scale and it's paying for itself. 

It's widely used across the bank. Some are dealing with regulatory issues, for example, taking documents out of one system, moving them into another. Others are opening new accounts for clients. Some are doing payment transactions and that involves looking at emails that come in and determining what type of document that is so it gets routed and processed correctly. We've touched every line of business within the bank.

The solution has improved our organization, specifically around all the operational aspects of the bot. Once we deploy them through the orchestrator we use insights to see how the bots are performing, what errors are referring to, and just the general health insights would be the biggest lift that we've gotten out of the solution. Building the automation is a little bit easier and quicker on the platform than where we were before.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

We are really getting into using AI Center and we use Insights.

The solution saved costs for our organization. That said, I can't quantify it.

UiPath has reduced human error.

In the initial automation that we're doing, we're migrating the ones that have run on another platform. Therefore, we already know how valuable they are to the bank. Sometime in 2022, we'll really be getting into new opportunities.

UiPath has freed up employee time. In my specific job, I’m responsible for the running of the platform, making sure it's up and available. The other teams actually take care of the delivery and are more in tune with the business side and can speak more to the freeing of time in quantitative terms. I’m a degree away from that. I'm aware of what's going on over there, however, I don't track it so closely.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. The Academy is a really good platform to start training on. It really gets you into the platform and allows you to start exploring other things. Generally, they're really good courses.

The number of courses and the variety of the topics all seem to touch on whatever aspect you're looking to do with the platform.

With all the different tools that they have in their arsenal, sometimes it's hard to know how we can get the most out of them. We see it as a kid going into a candy store. There are all sorts of choices. However, we don't necessarily understand, you would take this, but not that? You seem to need to mix and match certain things. We don't necessarily understand that. We need them to be more clear in saying, for example, "if you want to do process mining, great, however, these are its strengths and these are its limitations." If we know the pros and cons, then we can make a decision about what we need to adjust in terms of how we go after new opportunities. Basically, we are seeking better guidance on how to use the suite of the products together.

I've been using the solution for a year. 

The solution is very stable. 

The scalability is good. 

We have a team collectively between developers and product owners and general users, so the users are comprised of roughly 100 different people. At different points, our in-orchestrator has 30 or so developers across several teams. In general, in terms of human people using it, it's likely 80 to 100 users or somewhere in there.

We are looking to increase the usage.

Technical support is okay. They have some gaps that they need to close. I know some of their folks from firsthand experience aren't necessarily used to using the new modern folders. Therefore, when we get on the phone and say "Hey, we're having this problem". The support staff will say "Oh, well you're a modern folder set up. I mostly work with classic." That doesn't matter from my perspective. I still need help.

We used to use Blue Prism. Blue Prism only does RPA. Our goal was to consolidate, to have one platform for automation as a long-term solution for the bank. We went through a selection process and UiPath came out on top.

I wasn't directly part of the setup team, however, from the outside looking in, it seems it was a little more involved than we had initially thought.

Some of it may have been internal. Bank processes and having to have so many different people involved to install a server and configure it on the network and all that could have added difficulty.

The deployment was probably close to three or four months. We have four environments. Over the course of about three months, all four environments eventually got stood up. The first took the longest. We noted what went right and wrong and went from there. 

We probably have seen an ROI, based on the initial cost to stand it up. That pricing structure is increasing now from the initial offering, however, overall, we're probably seeing some benefit out of it.

The pricing is pretty fair for the size per the number of licenses. It's my understanding that part of that was influenced by the fact that they won their business from one of their competitors, Blue Prism. That probably helped.

We looked at Automation Anywhere. They had recently upgraded from their desktop to a web-based client. In the meantime, they dropped functions in the conversion and when I used it on the desktop, I noticed that there were certain functions that they didn't bring over onto the web version yet, which kind of surprised me. As far as just overall usability, integration with other technologies, whether it's Python or writing .net custom code, UiPath just kind of seamlessly works within the platform.

We are not yet utilizing AI.

I'd advise potential new users to do the due diligence and don't expect that UiPath is going to always outline the best ways to use it. A company just has to understand there's a lot there and try to be as specific in what they want to do. 

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine.

We are using it to automate various tasks of mortgage onboarding.

We use UiPath Assistant and Studio. We are using the cloud version. 

We do a lot of mortgage onboarding. To make that opening process of a loan easier, we're automating various tasks or tests during the creation of loans, such as running driver for approval letters and things like that. So far, we're getting good feedback from the business. We have 60 bots now.

It has reduced human error. I don't know the exact impact, but currently, we have about a thousand transactions a day between all of our bots. A lot of those are critical where you don't want errors on it. So, knowing that those are error-free is really good for the business.

The Orchestrator is most valuable because we get work periodically throughout the day. It'll ebb and flow. We have a really tight SLA, so we're able to have bots on demand. As soon as work shows up, the bots are picking it up.

In terms of ease of building automation, it is pretty straightforward. Once you learn the tool, it is pretty easy to use. 

I have used UiPath's Academy courses. They have helped a lot in getting up to speed with the solution. I came from Blue Prism. Once you know a system, you try to map another one with the way you did things in the first one. I was able to figure it out pretty quickly by just going through the courses. The content is pretty good. They have everything you need to know to get started. 

It is a little confusing at first. I came from Blue Prism where you have one dashboard and very little jumping back and forth. In Orchestrator, you have menus, and there is a lot of jumping between tabs and subtabs to get to the specific information, but once you learn that, it is pretty intuitive. There is just that initial learning curve if you're coming from another system. Blue Prism does everything in the one pane, and even though UiPath is neatly laid out, you just got to learn how they laid it out.

They started using it before I joined. I joined the company in April, and I believe they started with the concepts back in January of this year.

We've had only one outage, and that might've been our internal issue. Otherwise, it has been rock solid.

In our use case, it is a little difficult to scale because we have to create accounts for each robot. We do want to explore the feature where you can scroll up bots on demand and shut them off on demand, but we don't have the resources. So, we can't use that yet based on our internal limitations. If you're able to use that, then that's great.

In terms of the number of users, we don't have any attended people. It is just our development team.

They've been fairly responsive to everything we've reached out for.

I don't think they used any other solution.

It was all set up before I came in, but I had to onboard new stuff. It is pretty straightforward and easy once you figure it out.

In terms of cost savings, I don't know the numbers exactly, but I've heard good things.

The automation cloud offerings help to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates. However, I'm not 100% in tune with that side.

The pricing for the robots is fair. One thing that annoys us a little bit is that we have to pay for each developer. With Blue Prism, you can have 20 developers and not incur any additional costs. We don't like having to piecemeal all these different licenses. It is providing value, but it is not in the sense of a robot. You're paying for the tools, whereas other people just give you the tools, and then you pay for the bots.

I'm sure they did because that's a part of their bidding processes.

It has not helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps because we're not utilizing or doing user-created stuff. We are also not using its AI functionality in our automation program.

It, as such, hasn't freed up employee time because we're still in the baby steps. We're still trying to figure out how RPA fits in with everything. We're piloting a bunch of things, and we'll automate one part, but we haven't been able to downsize or reallocate people yet.

I'd rate UiPath an eight out of 10.

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. I'm more of a functional person who understands the design and the processes but not the programming, coding, and details. 

I am using their automation cloud offering.

One of the best benefits is that instead of just doing their single task, it gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them; for instance, for PO distribution, we had to think about where our suppliers' lists are and what do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as much as now because we are trying to automate it. What you find is that the challenge isn't just in the robot. It is what you do before you get to the robot that is critical, and if it forces us to fix that, it has been a success. It helps you to realize some efficiencies in your current processes.

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. We have FCCS cloud from Hyperion.

I anticipate that there would be a reduction in human errors and also time savings within these five processes. Inherently, it has to improve the accuracy. That's because now you're focused on a particular thing, and you're testing it. If it is not a hundred percent accurate, it is not going to production. 

The ability to follow and orchestrate what the robots are doing has been very valuable. I've been working on the automation hub because that's the next step after our test case of five robotic implementations. So, it is orchestrated to see how they're doing.

UiPath Academy is helpful in terms of the ability to connect the software to the processes that you're trying to automate. It has been helpful in understanding the functions, and it is where you would go to get a better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial with examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

I'm learning it for the training for the RPA associate, and I'm about 70% through there. UiPath's academy courses have been helpful in onboarding or being up to speed with UiPath. However, it has been tougher because the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. I am sure the younger people will pick it up much faster. There is so much out there, and there is so much to learn because it is not one software package. It provides the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. So, the opportunities are amazing but also intimidating.

I started with UiPath training in July 2021.

I am not worried about the stability. I may be naive, but if others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than what we are automating, it is not really a concern.

It is being used by accounting and IT. Finance is learning that, and they're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% on that journey.

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, etc, but right now, we're just in finance. Payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field that they do every day will take adoption and interest. Raising four kids, I realize you can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. So, that will be the challenge. The challenge is not whether you can automate something. It is more like will they let you automate something.

I have not really had to use the support, but I will. I've gone back and forth, and I've lost some of my training. I'm a tenant who is just in the training phase. So, everyone has had issues with getting in, and it's more whether they're using Google or Explorer, and how they're accessing it. I am getting that standardized and having them do that. I am also a victim of the same thing that I'm teaching them, and what I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig.

Before UiPath, we didn't use any other RPA solution. We went for UiPath because it was really a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning, reporting, etc, but the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in, and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes. They took Rally and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. There is a team of five members who went and looked at processes that we were doing and then told us about which ones we can change and do better with. By using his experience in other companies and having discussions with other people, along with the KPMG group, they did an analysis. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They're doing that by looking forward to five or 10 years and then coming back, which is really nice.

I will learn more about that. The workflow was nice, and the implementations that we have are relatively easy, but 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. With reporting, it will be helpful for us to understand which things are best to automate and which ones are the easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from five implementations.

We are doing consulting with a collaborative effort with KPMG. So, they actually know more of the technical details, and they're supposed to be transferring data. 

KPMG did a sprint on the implementations. The sprints were such that it was really six week turnaround time, and that involved actually going backward and doing the assessments from those. By doing the cost benefits backward, we can set things upright and see what we do going forward. The key is not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it, and how quickly the people in the field can adopt that and have a robot actually be their assistant. I believe you call that the citizen developers.

Right now, it is way too big for me to even understand it. I feel like it's a universe. I'm just trying to get directions. The area that I'm looking at right now is analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing, and that's what is going to make management invest further into our idea. I come from a reporting background, and that's what I focus on in other financial packages that we have with PeopleSoft, Hyperion planning, and the FCCS cloud. In many of these automations, the need part of it is that you're not stuck within the software that you had; for example, a macro within Excel can only help you with what you're doing in Excel. It can't help you with an email. It can't help you with a PDF form, but you can bring these together, so the automation opportunities are endless.

So, at this time, it hasn't saved us money because we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do reporting so we can see. The decisions you make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. You should go to where you want to be five years from now and go backward. What you are doing today is going to make that five years strike. So, it is an investment.

It is pricey at the beginning, but we'll have to see going forward what we get for the tools. It is always expensive to buy a really nice car and not drive it very far and very much. So, it is about utilization.

I believe my company did evaluate other solutions, and they definitely liked UiPath best. The primary differentials were reputation, experience, and the level and quality of the tool.

I would advise others to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if you didn't use it going forward, with the basic principles, you'll probably fix things and then come back to it. Some people just have bad processes, and it would be very frustrating to use them because they haven't fixed their processes. You have to get your processes aligned first and then take them to the point that they're standardized and understood by different people using them, and then you can automate across different software packages.

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

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I'm learning it, but have to inject experience. I have to learn and understand, and then I have to utilize t. Like many solutions that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, but there is the best way. I always wish you'd just teach the best way, but I understand that you want to make people agile and have an understanding of using it in different ways. However, learning all three ways is very cumbersome. You really want to learn the way you're going to use it.

We primarily use the solution for the typical banking and transactional use cases. An example could be something such as homeowner's association transactions. That incorporates multiple departments in a bank, including treasury management accounts and opening an ACH. All of those areas are very transactional in terms of the rules-based processes that they follow.

We also use the solution for wire transfers. We have a lot of those. Then, from a business perspective, we look at lines of business as well. It can be used for residential and commercial lending. It's very process-driven and very transactional. We're able to incorporate automation in those areas very easily.

The solution allows us to do more with less. If we have a relationship with a third-party bank to onboard with a thousand accounts with a 15-day turnaround time, depending on what the relationship is, without automation, without RPA, you'd have to hire at least 10 or 15 contractors to get that done. That’s from a contractual perspective, to make sure that you meet the deadlines. However, automation just allows you to scale. You can save the same scenario in multiple areas. The scalability and the time to scalability on offer are key. And that's where we see the value as an organization.

The time to value is excellent on this solution. It is incredible. Unlike any other technology, which is really generally workflow-related, this RPA will give you quick wins, as demonstrated by the return on investment.

The solution has saved costs for our organization. We look at it from different lenses. We look at it from an actual savings perspective. We forecast it and then we annualize it to understand where the product will be or what it will bring us in the long and not just short term. For us, it’s very ROI-driven.

I’ve been with the bank for nine months now, and we went from having two processes automated to now having actual savings of about a little over $300K. It's not bad. There are about 30 processes in production. If we annualize that and forecast out we can see how we can continue to grow.

We have been able to reduce human error. I would call that the cherry on top. You don't really track that until you have it automated. However, if the alternative is having end-users upset that mistakes happen, having the level reduction we’re getting is great.

The solution has freed up employee time by a lot. We see it wherever it's very transactional heavy, where we had multiple team members. Now the teams are built by bots and people. Where you had three people before, now you have a person and a bot executing. So far, we have likely saved, in these nine months, a little over 11,000 man-hours. That's quite a win.

This additional time enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. That’s the whole purpose. We tend to look at ROI, not just money. It's also what else are the employees doing. We’re saving money from a man hours perspective, and, from a cost avoidance perspective, we’re not having to hire. The folks that work for us actually can do valuable work. They can focus on better decision making, more time with the customer, better relationship making, et cetera.

My team has started to utilize the UiPath Academy. My team is composed of multiple different skill sets from PMs to BAs to engineers, and so forth. Even at the level of IT, with the teams that manage infrastructure, sometimes I have them taking some of the infrastructure courses in the Academy. The Academy works well due to the fact that they prep you to grow quickly. If you don't understand how the technology operates, it could be a little bit difficult. You do have to train a little bit to understand it a little bit, however, it's not very difficult, especially when you have access to the Academy.

Having the Academy has affected the process of getting employees up to speed big time. Their appetite to get better and better is just enormous - not just due to the fact that the product is good and it's providing that information to do that, but also due to the fact that they're seeing results. That's helping them want to do it better and faster. It’s a win-win situation there.

The Academy has a really good curriculum for very particular skill sets. It's hard to be an engineer and have to learn a bunch of different stuff that won't necessarily concern you. UiPath has been able to really compartmentalize that learning capability so that it makes sense to different groups and speaks to their level of expertise. That’s probably the most valuable aspect of it.

In the world of NextGen technology, it would be ideal if they could speed up their beta products. My team handles all next-generation technologies that we implement in the bank. For example, we're looking at task mining right now. It's theoretical, however, that product is going to be tremendous. That said, it's still a bit in beta. For us, if they were trying to get new items a little bit quicker out there, that would be ideal. They're running with it, therefore, I'm not overly worried. They also want to provide a good platform for its users, and so I understand why they want to make sure it's good. The competition, in reality, even though it's growing, is not as strong. The feedback is just me being picky at this point.

We've been using the solution since 2015.

So far, we have had very few issues and the issues really have been around very complex knowledge. We have reached out to UiPath to get advice, and they responded, and it hasn't been bad at all.

Scalability has not been an issue. It's not even a topic of concern. The concern is more on the business side and can you manage the growth from a business perspective. The technology's there and I want to automate more. However, with automation, the question is if you can manage it.

We do have plans to increase usage. 

We have about 30 automations in place. That means about 60 to 70 people are using it. They work in shifts and they'll come in and they'll use their bots to process stuff while they do other stuff. 

Technical support is great. In the times we've used it, they've come back relatively quickly.

I started with UiPath a long time ago and I actually worked for Automation Anywhere. I was head of their cognitive product. Therefore, I used them for a while. They're not a bad product at all. They're really good, however, their scalability is a little bit of concern. For us, coming back to UiPath was probably a good decision.

The initial setup is complex. However, that's okay. It's also not supposed to be easy. You have to learn a little bit about what you're doing. Any technology would be a little bit complex. Once it's in, you can get that learning curve moving. With the actual users, that's where the trick of the implementation piece comes in. Once you're through it, however, that's where UiPath becomes really tremendous.

The deployment was maybe 60 days, however, it wasn't necessarily just because of UiPath. In banking, there's red tape. It takes time to get certain aspects approved. It takes time to get the right infrastructure in place. The enterprise has to be willing to put the time in just as UiPath has to put a certain time. It's a blend. As we were implementing, we were still putting things together and setting up governance. It was not just the technology. You still have to prep on the business side.

In terms of maintenance, on my team, I have about seven people, three engineers, a couple of business analysts, and a couple of PMs.

The pricing could be a little bit better for document understanding. I ran the pricing scheme for intelligent documents. With understanding at Automation Anywhere, there's room to maneuver. They can do a little bit better in making it easier for customers to dive in. I know it's available, however, it is what it is.

The organization evaluated Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. 

We went with UiPath due to the fact that they gave us a good deal and we wanted to try it out. We started little. At the hedge fund, we're actually now at over three bots in production. Automation Anywhere's a little bit pricey at the moment. We just kind of pulled the trigger on UiPath and it was a blessing. 

We're just customers and end-users.

While we are on-premises, we're starting to use the cloud including some of the modules from the cloud, document understanding, task minding, et cetera. We're using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd advise those considering the solution that there's a secret sauce to it. It's not just the technology. People need process systems and a really good partner. That's how you get it done.

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

We use UiPath for OCR, for our subrogation department to analyze credit report organization letters that come into our company to identify whether they're identity theft, fraud, or any other type of keyword phrase within the document. It also extracts the information coming out of the CRO to properly assign it to accounts associated with our subrogation department. 

Another use case is navigating through one of our third-party clients in order for us to get documents out of their system and into our system so that we can analyze and package them.

We see benefits from the AI side of doing OCR and in order for us to do onscreen recognition of documents. It increases the efficiency of our agents in order for them to get back to working accounts, rather than reading through document after document every single day in order for them to pick out one or two words into the document and assign a smart code. The automation does all of that for them now.

UiPath has saved us costs. It's thousands of documents per day that we're OCRing and then that reduces it to around five to 10 minutes per document. It's around 50,000 minutes per agent, per day.

It has reduced human error because there would be some different document types. It's able to detect multiple types versus a user finding one document type when there could be multiple document types that are associated with a letter, while the user is browsing over it that can be missed in the second document type. But when you're looking at machine learning and at the text, it'll be able to easily pick out those keywords from a document that has multiple document types.

It has also freed up employee time. It frees up their time to do other work.

We are currently using the AI function in order for us to do Task Mining to be able to pull out of a couple of our key groups that we're trying to add additional automation to. That's what we're using AI Center for at the moment.

We have done UiPath Academy courses. I got certified in the advanced RPA Academy. I need to renew that because they expire every year. Another developer has his associates, so we use that every year where we can get some training. It helps keep people up to speed. It makes sure that you're doing the latest and recommended in the RE framework and what you have initially designed.

Building automations can be difficult at times with some of the activity packages and documentation being out of date, but we have a TAM that we work with that is very helpful in making sure that RRGs are known and that we get the results within the UiPath structure.

They need to deprecate their previous versions on their website or their documentation. It should just point to the newest version rather than when you go to Google if you're just trying to find UiPath and then it points you to a solution that was a couple of years ago. Or it points to a form that someone randomly has posted to their code. That needs to be cleaned up.

We've been using UiPath since 2013. The Orchestrator is on the cloud and the robots are on-prem.

It's pretty stable. We haven't run into any issues with operating totally different packages. There have been some things where I wish there were more restrictions in access groups that could be applied within Orchestrator, but other than that, it's pretty good.

We are still working through scalability. There are a couple of things that we've run into that were an issue with trying to use machine templates and getting them to connect properly with the robots. Another scalability issue that we have is that we have a non-static environment where some machines get deleted after they log off and get back on, they have to reconnect to it. We had issues with that, but those are for our attended robots.

We have unattended bots. We have four of them and it's a total of seven automations, but they run every 15 minutes.

We used to use OpenScan before I got hired and then eventually moved off of OpenScan because the product was too cumbersome and difficult to navigate. So we moved to UIPath.

They saw UIPath and they saw that it was going down a good road. So that's what they chose it. 

The initial setup was pretty easy for us. Getting into the Studio is pretty simple to get us set up and going. There are a couple of issues with mixed environments for DLLs. You do get packages for UFS that I've run into trying to use one of our older DLLs that hasn't been updated, but all in general, getting it working, and being able to figure it out was pretty simple.

We have seen ROI. 

The subscription models that they have out there need to be simplified.

I've talked to a couple of our partners and talked about the 49 pages of subscriptions. It needs to be more streamlined for what they offer and packages because we run into issues where we're signing up for Task Mining, but they didn't include AI Center, which is a requirement of Task Mining in one of the factories. If the subscriptions got simplified and got it down to a couple of pages, they would see tremendous growth. That way customers don't need to hire somebody to figure out what the licensing model was versus going for a third-party vendor.

My advice would be to start in the cloud. Cloud is the easiest way for us to get started versus trying to get our internal environment set up. We had on-prem orchestrator and on-prem servers, but it was easier to implement the cloud and get it up and running and scale versus our internal environment, as well as keeping the data secured within our robots on-prem. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We're in the financial services industry, so we target the operations. We use it in finance but we're also going after our wealth management group, capital markets group, and fixed income capital markets group.

In one year we've done 17 automations in about 3,500 hours. We're just getting started. 

We use mostly unattended automation, but we do have both.

It's still early for us so we're selecting specific areas and items to automate based on areas that we believe will provide strategic importance for us.

We're now going to start expanding that and going after some of the larger jobs that we want to try to tackle, now that we've got some experience under our belt.

We have saved costs in terms of employee hours saved. There are definitely going to be costs associated with that. Some of those are pretty high net worth individuals that UiPath is doing tasks that they just didn't need to do.

It's definitely saving time for employees. One of our most successful automations frees them up from doing an entire task. Their quality of life has had a big improvement. It also happens to save a lot of hours. It saves a little over 2,000 hours annually.

We are still learning how to build automations but I'm a fan of the RA framework. We use StudioX to help with citizen developers to help fill our pipeline. The tools are pretty good and evolving.

The ability to bridge various applications that users are using is the most valuable feature. If we have a process that's entered in multiple locations, we can send a robot to do one of those processes on behalf of the person. We've had good success there.

Everybody on the team goes through Academy courses and continues to go back there for continuing education. Citizen developers are directed in that location as well. So we try to get them to complete StudioX. We like its ability to extend the life and the usability of some applications that by themselves can be a little cumbersome to use. I would like to make those apps and those experiences better for the user. And actually do more with them by extending parts through APIs that are passed to other applications.

We're looking to start to modify the meat of the process and then tag on pieces to the beginning and ends. 

Insights is a little clumsy. StudioX is a great start but needs more functionality. They should bring the document understanding into StudioX and make it go a little bit further. There's a pretty clear point at which you really need to switch over to Studio, but in the case of some of our citizen developers, they'd like to stay in StudioX. They just need more features. 

We have been using UiPath for a year. 

It's been very stable. The only problem we had were some digital certificates and those aren't UiPath's fault. It's partly our fault and how we manage them. One of those got in the way and shut some stuff down. It's not really the UiPath platform. That really hasn't gone down on us at all. It was the certificates. 

We're only at 17 automations now. We have a lot of headroom in the bots that we currently own and the licensing that we have. We're getting ready to put the necessary pieces in place so that we can scale it up.

The technical advisor is very good. 

Positive

 We have plenty of solutions that fall in the surrounding area, like various CTL things, automated software, and the types of things that are primarily used by IT.

We had a strategic partner help us with the setup because we knew nothing about it. They helped set up our COE and the basic frameworks that we were going to be using within IT. I came in about four or five months into the project as an analyst so I wasn't there when they did it. 

The strategic partner we used was very good.  They got us up and running and got our initial test trial into play.

The setup process was not straightforward. They purposely gave them some things that were a bit of a challenge. 

We are happy with what we got as a result.

The first deployment took quite a while. If you're considering standing up a whole COE in all those environments, they did that fairly quickly. I believe it was in about three months. It has then continued to evolve from there. That was the learning experience. If you look at our development, that first automation, there's a long flat line. Then it started to ramp up pretty significantly in the back half of the year.

Pricing is working for what we have right now. We set up two Orchestrator environments and we're unable to use our single license of the analytics on both. That's a bit of a problem. We'd like to see a dev environment for us that is free of licensing. It's development versus production. Charge us for production, don't charge us for dev. That's about the only complaint I would have.

Don't be afraid to jump in. Get the IT department involved early, get the security department at the table. As long as you have top-down management that's there to mandate and make sure everybody does what they should be doing, the proper sponsorship, and the proper buy-in from the people that have to execute.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.