UiPath Platform Reviews

In our organization, we are using UiPath as a service model. It is an on-premise model where UiPath is deployed on-premise. We are not using it on cloud services. 

We have a center of excellence that has been set up to communicate with UiPath for all the licenses, for all the tools, et cetera. Individual teams will connect and will communicate with the development team to get those licenses. For the team structure, we have a COE manager, and a COE is again communicating all the relevant information to the teams.

First of all, you would have to go and submit an idea to the COE team. The COE team will review and see this is the correct candidate for our solution and we can leverage it as automation. They provide us with the required licenses and the cycle continues.

The use-cases for the UiPath are limited. For example, if you are coming from a banking background, there would be use-cases it comes from the data solutions. If you are coming from an insurance background, would have use-cases where you would have benefits that are being reconciled. Healthcare might be dealing with patient data, et cetera.

If I talk about the support teams, in general, the use-case for the UiPath is as a ticketing system, where you have a lot of data to add to the queue to remove the need to add items manually.  

UiPath has the ability to implement with multiple systems. You can extract the data from any other application, click the data to enter the specifications, and start the automation cycle. That way, you have a technology that helps you to build a fully automated enterprise.

Our use case depends on the client and their needs. It's specific to their industry. We basically use the product to build automation for them.

We have seen the benefits both in terms of cost-saving, and time-saving. If you are doing automation which a human or an entire team is doing, let's say five hours a day, and there are seven to eight people doing the same amount of stuff, then you can automate that. 

When it comes to automating your process where the company is paying for software if you can use it to make robots that take energy away from repetitive tasks, you end up saving a lot of man-hours - which helps pay for the software.

Savings are measured both in terms of active saving or cost-saving. Then again it entirely depends on the kind of automation you're organizing. 

The most valuable feature of UiPath the process mining. The half capture was a tool that was provided by UiPath in the earliest reviews which simply allowed you to record the operations

It's great for automating tasks specific to business cases. It makes it very easy to do so as well.

The solution offers pretty good analysis capabilities.

The solution ensures there is proper documentation throughout the process.

The product creates a kind of skeleton for developers to help them work faster. 

UiPath is a low-cost platform.

If you are someone who is coming from a business background, and you don't have much coding experience, and you don't want to go through the coding world, UiPath, has UiPath StudioX. With the help of UiPath StudioX you can automate your items to read emails, download specific things, and do other small automation tasks that do not require advanced coding.  

If you are a developer who is more into coding and wants to do more coding, you have Studio and Studio Tool. Based on your level of expertise, UiPath has various levels of product: StudioX, Student, and Studio Pro, for example. It is always good if you have a programming background as sometimes you might need to write a small piece of code, however, it is a comparatively very easy task compared to the other traditional programming languages where you have to write a lot of code to do simple automation.

With the application of AI in recent releases, automation such as document reading can happen faster.

The UiPath app feature has increased the number of automation you can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Recently, we had a UiPath hackathon which was contacted by UiPath for automation. We went to an NGO, and, for that NGO, we created a solution with the help of UiPath apps. For example, we used to create the invoices that would take seven to eight minutes to manually create. However, with the help of UiPath apps, we were able to do the same path in less than one minute. We have seen a drastic change.

The solution reduces human error significantly. When you are doing a process for more than five hours, you might deal with human error. However, robots don't make mistakes and can run 24/7 without issue.

You do need some coding experience.

AI is not available on older versions. I don't know if it is available in the latest versions of this review. Most enterprises, I'm working with still are at the previous version of the UiPath studio.

UiPath needs to enable more of the features which are available. For example, today, if I have to implement an automation path for the mainframe application, I cannot do the mainframe application without the client. I cannot just do a trial. If UiPath could create dummy applications for the developers who want to try new features, that would be helpful. 

The should be more out-of-the-box models if UiPath keeps adding on. Recently they have added a model in their AI section. However, it would be useful to have out-of-the-box models direct themselves towards plugins. 

You need to continually update the solution as, if you don't, after a few months you won't recognize the product due to all of the new releases. It will be like using a completely new device.

I've been using the solution for five years. It has been a while.

Stability-wise, UiPath can handle the different varieties of stability on the applications you are automating. 

For example, if you choose to automate applications that are expected to change in the next few months, then UiPath cannot help you. That takes an entirely different form of planning. However, the more stable the process, the less likely any part of the process will change, the better UiPath can assist. 

The solution is scalable. If you have to add new functionality to the robots, you will find that is definitely scalable. Let's say you have automated a process and you are getting 1000 tickets only, and then you suddenly get an influx of 10,000 tickets. You don't have to go and run and change your code or anything. Scalability-wise it is just with the click of a mouse that you can handle the change. And, just as easily, you can decrease usage if there are only a small amount of tickets. While developers and coding will be necessary to make it happen, I would say the solution scales extremely well.

I have not contacted UiPath via the contact center. The firm I'm working for has a center of excellence. We do not, as individual developers, directly communicate to UiPath. There is a team that sits in the company that communicates with UiPath, as we're an enterprise. We don't have direct access to the UiPath team.

That said, I do interact with them on the community edition, which I also use, and I find that if I raise a ticket, they listen to my feedback and adjust accordingly. They're excellent.

I have not used any other solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. From an enterprise point of view, from the client's point of view, there are certain restrictions that the company might have in place that could affect the way it's set up. 

The company needs to have a checklist to ensure it's set up optimally.

That said, there are no drivers, no scripts, nothing. Everybody can do it. You just have to click on the approve button, select it, and the job is done, that's it.

We do our own implementation strategy, however, I am not directly involved in what exactly has to be implemented. There are separate teams for that.

While I can't speak to how much users pay for enterprise-level editions, I can say that their community version is quite good and free to use. I've used the community license for the last five years and it's been great.

I do mostly 90% unattended automation. I have created only one attended automation for a client and that was a specifically requested requirement. That was a bit difficult to automate. 

One piece of advice to everybody who is working in UiPath would be to practice and keep UiPath updated as the technology is growing and it is getting updated frequently. If you do not keep yourself updated for three or four months, you'll be dealing with a completely different tool. Keeping it updated allows for the gradual changes to come in in a way that a user can handle, as opposed to having to re-learn or re-discover the product if you have let updates lapse for months.

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

The primary use case is the automation of many reports, dashboards, and tables that were created manually by some of my colleagues. The tasks involve collecting information from SAP Solution Manager, manipulating some of the data based on business rules that have been implemented, and then storing the data in a specific way that can be used in the next part of the workflow. This includes using Excel and the aim is to create a PDF report that is sent to the top business line managers.

UiPath is the perfect tool to implement a solution like this, with continuous operative tasks between Microsoft native applications such as Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.

Before our UiPath implementation, the organization spent approximately two junior FTE on these tasks, and another 0.2 senior-level FTE in order to guide junior resources.

This process runs every day and if these tasks are executed manually, it means that two resources need to be staffed forever. At the end of the project, the organization gained a boost of two FTE saved and released, able to move on to other projects. This produced real value for the organization.

The efficiency of the process was the key success factor.

UiPath has the simplest low-code user interface that I've seen in my professional life. You simply drag and drop the activity on the flow, in a clear way, with clear names, and manipulating clear variables/arguments based on parameters. These are the key points in my humble opinion.

The library creation platform is really simple to use. Basically, it works like a normal flowchart application and once you've published packages, you can use and re-use these packages like activities in another workflow.

Last but not least, official Microsoft office integration is really useful, although all of the official integrations are very easy to use.

The UiPath Connect! and UiPath Go! communities come to our support every time we need to implement something challenging.

There are features that could be implemented on the coding side; for example, automatically assigning a unique ID for the "activity" used during the flow. As of now, if you use an activity via simple drag and drop, the activity keeps the original name. If you don't change the name of the activity manually then you will lose some information during logging. It would be useful to put a simple incremental ID on each activity, so even if you don't change the activity name, you will know where the process becomes stuck.

During the last update, the connection between robots and the Orchestrator (cloud) changed a lot. It would be a good idea to provide an easy way to use a single type of robot, regardless if it is a standard robot, floating robot, connected user, etc. Basically, have a simpler way to deploy robots in development, testing, and production environments.

I have been working with UiPath since 2017, and I plan to continue.

This product is really stable, and this is true for the on-premises deployment as well as the cloud version.

This solution is really scalable. It can be used in other organizational departments or on other robots in order to boost your automated tasks.

The vendor provides really good support; fast response time and great quality!

UiPath was my first RPA solution.

During the initial setup, care should be taken when configuring the robot connection. If you choose the "modern folder" setup then you could be struggling.

I am part of the vendor team, implementing RPA for other clients.

We have a 300% return on investment.

The price and setup costs need to be supported by a strong business case.

We evaluated Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, and Selenium (for web automation).

We are using the on-premises UiPath solution for both attended and unattended bots. At this time, we use unattended bots primarily to facilitate integration between applications, and we are not using the attended bot capabilities.

Generally speaking, we develop integrations for our core banking system, which was written in-house and running on a mainframe. It is a highly-developed system that we started using more than 30 years ago. When it was created, we didn't have the integration capabilities that exist in other applications or core systems, today. This means that in order to have external applications communicate with the core system, we need to develop integrations. Examples of this might be web services or other APIs, and that's why it takes time to do.

We have teams to do the integration, but considering that the core banking system is in Turkey and all of our teams are busy, we don't have enough resources to implement all of our integration projects. Now, for the past three years, we have been implementing bots to handle integration by moving data from the applications to the core system, and from the core system to the applications.

The biggest benefit for us is time savings in terms of developing satellite applications for the core banking system. We are developing the robotic API, and we are integrating our internal front-end applications with the core system.

Using this approach, we can easily get and set data from the core system, and we can see the results for each transition. We can learn about what happens in the core system with the help of the bots.

The amount of time that we save depends on the use case. For example, if we implement integration between core banking and the applications instead of native integration through development, it saves a lot of time. I prefer native integration versus using the bots but sometimes, you don't have this opportunity because it will take too long to put into production. Other times, you can't justify undergoing a large development process for just a small integration, so it's enough to solve the problem using the bots.

There is another use case where our operations teams perform repetitive tasks using the bots. For example, when performing the task manually, users have to take the data from one screen and enter it on another screen. We have never tried to calculate how much time we are saving in cases like this, although I'm sure that we are saving a lot of time.

People in the organization have been asking for more projects to be automated because it is easier for them. When their tasks are automated, they are more relaxed and can focus on other more important tasks, as opposed to the repetitive ones. Getting away from repetitive tasks puts you in a position where you can make more decisions and be part of the smart part of the business. This leaves the easier, repetitive tasks for the robots.

There are a lot of really useful features in UiPath including the Orchestrator and the Studio.

The Orchestrator is one of the main tools that I use because I like to help orchestrate the bots. It is the heart of the tool and it gives me a lot of flexibility to automate or manage bots that are in the field. The Orchestration Server is one of the most important features and when you perform a deep dive, you see that it has a lot of functionality. It's great.

The Orchestrator has other features such as computer vision, AI, and machine learning, and it complements the bots and the Studio.

UiPath integrates well with Elasticsearch, which is a great search engine. ElasticSearch is more capable than UiPath for searching logs. I'm filling the gap in log reporting using ElasticSearch, where I'm feeding the logs into it and then creating dashboards, or using the analytics parts of ElasticSearch and Kibana.

The UiPath Academy is a very valuable component of this solution. Many of our employees have used the courses. With it, a person who has a little bit of an analytical mindset can easily learn to do many things. If somebody is willing to develop themselves in RPA, the UiPath academy is more than enough to do so. They will understand the components that make up the ecosystem. The academy is very good, well constructed, and has a lot of labs and exercises to help one learn the system by themself without any help, and very easily.

The logging capability that comes with Orchestrator does not allow you to create smart reports. You have the logs from the bots and what's happening on the machines because you get all of this information from the logs. However, UiPath is more capable when it comes to collecting information about your processes, time saved, or process execution. They have some smart report dashboards.

The installation and initial setup is difficult for non-technical organizations.

We have been using UiPath for more than three years.

Stability is something that we should consider in two parts. The first concerns the bots and how they are running the tasks on the machines. This comes down to what kind of developers we have because if you are developing properly, and implementing all of the exceptional cases that may occur during the execution of the process, it's very good. I haven't had any issues in cases like this.

The second part is the Orchestrator, and I haven't had issues with this either. In the more than three years that we have been using this environment, including the time in production and our test environments, we have never had an issue.

We have had two or three incidents because we didn't have enough space left on the database storage, but that was not related to UiPath. Rather, it is related to the infrastructure. Another time, the SSL certification expired so we had to renew it. Otherwise, stability-wise, we haven't had any problems.

Scalability is very good, although we have not reached a point where we needed to scale the infrastructure. The high availability and scalability are two of the main features in the UiPath environment but we have not needed to go in that direction yet. At this time, we only have five bots in the organization and that is enough.

We are not planning to increase the numbers at this point because the number of bots that we have can be managed on a single node. We don't have clusters or multiple bots because of the criticality of our processes, but these are things that you can add and set up to share the workloads. Although we don't use it, I think that it looks really promising.

In our team, we have a business analyst and developers. Some of the roles for the developers are varied. At most, we have three people on a project who are working with UiPath.

The technical support for UiPath is good. When we first started contacting them between two and three years ago, the support for everybody was the same. However, they're now offering different tiers of support that require a different license and cost. There is one basic technical support, where all customers have the right to open tickets and try to solve the problems. Then, there are different support levels where you can pay extra and you can get more assistance for solving your problems.

Up to this point, all of the problems that I have had are mostly related to upgrades and installations, and they have only been from time to time. So far, I have been able to solve problems with basic technical support. Some of the problems I have solved on my own, whereas with others, I have needed a small bit of help from technical support.

I can say at this point that the support is good, although really, I haven't had any major problems that necessitated a lot of support.

We have used other RPA solutions in the past, but not to the same scale as UiPath.

The initial setup is not very complex, but it depends on the profile and experience of the person who is using it. Considering we had a great deal of deep experience in the project implementation and also the technologies, we are familiar with everything. This includes tasks like installation of the infrastructure, configuring the databases, configuring the virtual machines, and installing the robots' features.

For less technical organizations or people, it will be difficult to implement the UiPath infrastructure. In that case, they will need the help of partners.

It's not so easy, but it's well documented. In fact, one of the good things about UiPath is that everything is very well documented. The deployment takes no more than two or three weeks.

Our implementation strategy started with developing bots using the trial license. We found the bot implementation was very easy. The trial includes everything that you need to develop workflows and the bots that run on the machines. When you get to the point where you need to run multiple bots in production, you need the Orchestration server.

We did not install Orchestrator until between four and six months after we started with the trial. In the beginning, we were testing UiPath and creating some small projects. These were very easy to implement. After that is when we decided to buy the license and move the bots to production.

In terms of maintenance, it is not critical for the bots. It's the Orchestrator that has to be maintained and kept up to date. Every year, you need to upgrade your infrastructure with the latest release, so there is some annual maintenance. If it is on-premises then you also have to maintain the hardware that everything is running on.

Of course, there should be somebody responsible for taking care of the databases and general system maintenance. The operating system, for example, should be maintained by someone. All of these things are layers and sublayers on top of the solution.

If instead, you implement the cloud version of UiPath, then you can get rid of all of the maintenance. In that case, you have only the bots and the Orchestrator, which are hosted on the UiPath cloud, and you don't have to worry about anything. UiPath does the upgrades and performs all of the maintenance, which is nice. In the future, we may go in this direction. However, at this time, maintaining the infrastructure in our organization is easy and not a burden for us.

I can't say that UiPath is expensive but I can't say that it's cheap. The cost that we are allocating for RPA doesn't burden us too heavily, so what we are paying is acceptable compared to the gains that we have in the organization. That said, it is relative because it depends on the size of the organization, the budget, and other factors. From our point of view, considering our budget, it is okay but for another organization, it might be expensive.

There are some features, such as UiPath Insights, that require you to purchase an additional license. The logging capabilities are also a feature that you need to pay extra for.

While we were searching for solutions, we read the documentation for UiPath. We found out that UiPath was originally started as a Romanian company, where we are, so we figured that we would try it since this is where it was first implemented. Our tests showed that UiPath was very promising but we kept investigating other solutions.

We tried Blue Prism and we tried Automation Anywhere, which are both RPA tools. We also did some studying, looked at the Gartner report, and did some further analysis. Ultimately, we decided to buy the licenses from UiPath because it was solving all of our problems.

When you use this system, you are using features from several different modules. It's something like an ecosystem where you have the bots, Studio, and the Orchestrator. If you are not using all of them at the same time then something is missing. They complete each other. If, for example, you don't have the Orchestrator and are only running the bots then it is a different kind of automation.

In the past, as I was using UiPath, I found that there were additional features that I wanted, but regularly and with each product update, they were bringing in new functionalities. At this time, I don't have a project that is waiting and cannot be implemented due to missing features. All of the tools that they deliver, for the time being, together are enough to implement any type of project.

We are not yet using the AI functionality because to this point, although that is because we don't yet have a proper project for it. At the same time, the AI and machine learning functionality are very important to us because we are planning to use them.

We have not used the UiPath Apps feature because it is one of the new features that has come out lately, and we haven't had the time to gain a deep understanding of these technologies. We have some rough ideas about how we can use this feature, but for the time being, we do not have a project that needs to be solved with UiPath Apps.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is to start with studying the processes and trying to determine whether they are good candidates for RPA. In order to automate a process, you need structured data such that the inputs and outputs are somewhat predictable. Once you know what it is that you want to automate, you have to understand the capacity, and then if you have any candidate processes, you can begin developing.

UiPath is the RPA solution that I recommend. However, it is important to know, before purchasing a solution, which of the processes are good candidates for automation.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I am an automation consultant and most of the robots that I work on are unattended.

Some of our use cases involve end-to-end automation. One of them is an SAP system where the transaction data, material numbers, and other things are used for T-codes. Based on the value of data in the T-code, it opens other T-codes in the process and updates those registries accordingly. This may include, for example, T-codes one and two. Then, from T-code one, I need to get input with regard to my material numbers. This might be a materials invoice or the invoice numbers of material orders. With those, you have to put it in one T-code and get output.

Based on the output of the T-code one, you need to do the rest of the operations in T-code two and T-code three. Once the job is completed, update all the information about the different T-codes in an Excel sheet and then update it back to the system.

UiPath saves time both from the perspective of a developer and an end-user. I can talk about the two positions because I have been involved in both roles. On the development side, the features make it very easy and tasks that normally take half an hour can be completed in a minute or two.

With respect to the end-user, assume that a process normally takes an hour a day to complete. Once the automation is in place, the whole process will be done in a minute or two. Importantly, the user does not have to monitor the process because it runs in the back end or on a server in a remote location. The entire process will run without monitoring.

At the same time, the user will be informed. Let's say that you have to get some data out of it; most of the time, the data available every few days. Personally, given that I am not normally in the role of the end-user, I have to log in to all of the systems and look for the data. However, if UiPath is configured and developed properly then it will inform you in an email that the data is now available. Similarly, if there is no data available then it can be configured in such a way that the user will be informed of that. This would give the user the opportunity to save and plan to utilize their time for other purposes.

In our company, we have a lot of use cases where we were able to implement unattended automation. This meant that we saved a lot of time and we were able to reutilize the employees for more useful engagements. 

An additional thing that we are able to achieve through using an RPA like UiPath is a reduction in errors. When we are performing any kind of activity, such as a recalculation in Excel, or calculations in a step-by-step process that involves manually copying data between two places, there is a high chance that an error will occur. This is a human error that can be avoided once we implement the automation and move it to production. Ultimately, all of these types of errors will be eliminated.

It is difficult to estimate the total number of errors that we avoid, but I can say that we were able to save time and with each process, the number of errors is reduced.

The most valuable feature is the set of data scraping tools. You can scrape data into your tables, then easily transform it or convert it between formats. If UiPath or another similar automation tool was not there, it would be very difficult to automate something that is a UI- based application. There is no other option to get that back-end data out of it. If we were not able to convert the formatting, or if for whatever reasons we cannot extract the data into a table format, it would be very difficult for us to convert and get the data that we want. The data would be difficult to format and we would spend a lot of time on it.

UiPath provides the data in a table format and in a structured manner, which means that we are able to get the required value from the table and do the necessary calculations on it. It saves us a lot of time in this process.

We have started using the AI functionality but so far, not to any great extent. For example, we were able to identify different types of images while reading an invoice. Prior to using the AI capabilities, we were not able to read them. This is our only use case for AI at the moment, but we plan to explore other activities and possibilities.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses and by doing so, we were able to learn a lot of things. They had examples of use cases that can occur in different scenarios and instead of getting that from a live environment, or during development, we were able to learn it from the Academy and a live example.

With the Studio, we can do basic troubleshooting in the production machine or VM, in case any error occurs. This is helpful because we don't have to move the data back to the development machine.

The integration with APA should be improved with respect to adding data from external sources and being able to bring in data from third-party applications. Also, it should be better the other way around, where UiPath is providing APA data to other applications.

I have been using UiPath for the past four years.

If the application is working fine, without making any updates or changes, then the bot will work as expected about 95% of the time. However, if there are any changes to the end-application made by the developers, or there is a content change, then we definitely have to align to those changes and it will take time.

Generally speaking, we move a process to production once it is stable.

We can easily scale this solution so the scalability is quite good.

We have between 15 and 20 developers in my team who work with UiPath. I am not sure about the number of people on the other teams. In terms of end-users, there are more than 100.

I have developed 30 processes personally, and my team has created more than 200. We plan to continue using UiPath in the future.

We have used technical support and the UiPath technical team is good. Whenever there is help required, and we are not able to find the solution for that from the UiPath documentation, we get a ticket with the support team. Based on the criticality of the process, they help us.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to UiPath.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy. The main component is called Orchestrator and then there are two more components called Studio and Development Robot. These two are connected to Orchestrator, and once the development is complete, you can do the unit testing on the same machine. After this, you publish the package.

Once the item is published, it will be pushed to the Orchestrator and then connected to the bot. This is where you're going to run the process. Once it is complete the bot will start running. The whole process will take approximately 10 minutes and you can move the data to production.

When the process is running in production, Studio allows you to troubleshoot from there, without having to move it back to the development machine.

I deployed UiPath on my own. They have provided enough documentation.

The pricing and licensing costs seem okay to me, although it is a little bit on the high side.

In the past, you needed to install the Studio license if you wanted to be able to troubleshoot in production. However, that has changed and you no longer need to buy it separately.

My advice for others who are implementing or using UiPath is to ensure that they test the robots and processes thoroughly before moving them to production.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I started my RPA journey as a developer, and I first heard about UiPath as a low-code, drag-and-drop automation platform. Back then, it was very much in the beginning stages of its development. Ever since then, I've seen it evolve quite fast. I would say even faster than other RPA platforms that I've used, in just a few years.

Thinking back to when I first started using it, there are many new features and updates and it's my preferred platform for RPA.

We primarily used unattended automation, where you deploy the bots to work autonomously. This is unattended, end-to-end automation with no human in the loop, other than providing the inputs or checking the outputs.

We have several use cases, but our main one is reducing manual work. The processes that require a lot of manual input and have a lot of human error are the focus. That could be, for instance, processes that have to do with invoicing, billing, reporting, and coding, which require a lot of man-hours, are very reliant on a human being available, and are time-sensitive. Those are the ones that are on the top list to be automated.

Beyond that, I can't specifically talk about the processes that we've automated.

UiPath helps to implement end-to-end automation, although the discovery of processes, gathering requirements, and creating the design, all happen outside of UiPath. But the development, which is developing the bots, then testing and then deploying them, does happen end-to-end within UiPath.

The end-to-end development capability is important, but this is because every tool offers this and it is expected. That said, there is definitely room for improvement in that end-to-end should include process discovery. It is end-to-end, but those ends can extend further than what it currently is. In that sense, it's no different than other RPA tools.

Another way that UiPath improves the way our organization functions is that the robots can run 24/7. If you think about a human workforce, they work eight hours a day, they take days off, they get sick, they leave, and they take knowledge with them once they leave the company. But, the robots can be run non-stop 24/7, and each process can be scaled up. The same process can be run by one bot, or it can be run by 10 or 100 bots. This means that there's a lot more flexibility that the bots bring, especially for high-volume processes that perhaps even have some peaks, such as an end-of-month rush to produce invoices or meet a deadline or an end-of-financial-year crunch.

These robots have an easier time addressing and variability when it comes to volume. They really create a lot more scalability to where businesses can grow and know that they can meet the demands of the future. So, they're a lot more future-proof, whereas people are harder to rely on.

Speaking from a business perspective, it's the FTE savings. A company obviously needs to spend money on UiPath licenses and development costs, but those costs are oftentimes lower than the cost of that FTE, the full-time employee, whose work is getting automated. If you purely just think about the financial benefits, it's the lower staffing costs.

There is also the ability to free up people. This means that even if people aren't replaced and their salary isn't saved, what they can do is pivot their focus to, for instance, be a lot more customer-facing or do a lot more strategic or creative tasks that perhaps get pushed to the side because there's not a lot of time allocated towards performing them. Now, FTEs have a lot more capacity to contribute and perform tasks that still to this day cannot be automated, like creative thinking, complex decision-making on the spot, strategy, and just human interaction.

In the beginning, employees meet automation with a critical eye. They're thinking, "Well, what's going on? Why are these robots coming in? Are we going to work alongside them? How is this going to work?" But to be honest, in the end, there are winners and losers. What I mean by that is that some jobs are replaced, and that's just simply because of that FTE saving that is usually the driver to justify the cost of development. But on the flip-side, the employees that do stay and do work alongside the bots are usually a lot happier because they have to juggle a lot fewer things.

The robots are there to make people feel like people and not like robots, where they just do the same thing over and over and don't enjoy their job or don't enjoy what they do. A robot takes that away and helps people enjoy their work a lot more because they can do non-repetitive tasks. They can be a lot more customer-facing and perhaps build stronger relationships with their customers, know them better, and have more time available to work on other projects or work on other things that they may never have had the time to do.

In our organization, the robots work on multiple projects. The amount of employee time that is freed up depends on the project and what you are automating, but a pretty good estimate would be a 20% to 40% savings.

With respect to the reduction of problems related to human error, the fact of the matter is that some employees, whether you like it or not, are more error-prone. By automating a process, we were able to standardize it, and therefore, identify the cause of the human error and remove it by replacing the process with a robot that makes a more reliable judgment in terms of action. It is literally just an if-else statement. It's a lot easier to quantify and therefore it's a lot easier to evaluate, and therefore the result is a lot more reliable. Whereas with an employee, let's say the output of their work is a lot more unreliable simply because they could be working on 10 different things on the same day. There could be a deadline approaching, and the quality of work fluctuates with an employee because of it.

With a robot, you will notice that over time, in fact, the quality improves, and that's just the basic truth of RPA. It doesn't happen automatically, and it does require work. It happens because you see the results of the automation and you see areas for improvement, ultimately leading you to make adjustments. You iterate on the RPA solution and make it better over time.

Although it does not improve automatically, through a conscious effort you can be a lot more confident in the output and then be able to see unbiased results at the end of the day. Part of these results is your exception rates, which can be errors. It can be failures, whether technical in nature or decision-making business rule types of errors. Then, you can adjust your process to where it can positively improve that exception rate, and just iterate on that to where it becomes acceptable. Moreover, it's quite stable, which is not the case with the human workforce.

The automation cloud Orchestrator has its benefits and negative sides. The benefit is the fact that it's web-based. A person who has the login credentials can access it without the necessity to have something installed. The development and the monitoring of the bots are separated in UiPath, where the development happens in the Studio and the monitoring happens in the Orchestrator.

In other tools like Blue Prism, it happens in the same place. I've used both, and the Orchestrator is nice. It has a very nice UI, it's user-friendly, it has a lot of features, and I find it quite easy to use. For example, you can see all of the machines, you can see the robots, and you can schedule them. If the business wants to see a lot more across the output of the Work Queue, they can have that visibility from Orchestrator, which is great.

The downside of Orchestrator is the package deployment, which is perhaps another minus of UiPath in general. The deployment of a new package does not take a long time, but there are a lot of steps. It's not an intuitive process. If you have to release a lot of packages, which does occur, especially in the early stage of deployment, when you are releasing hotfixes, or when something goes wrong and you need to redeploy a fix really quickly to minimize business impact, it does slow you down.

I wish it would be just one or two clicks, rather than the whole importing or exporting and connecting to the desktop application and everything that accompanies it. I wish it were a lot easier. Again, it has its upsides but it's not perfect.

The best feature in UiPath is their robotic enterprise framework because that is an inbuilt processing framework for utilizing their work queues. It's plug-and-play, and already pre-built to where you don't have to start from scratch. It's enterprise-grade and ready to be used. All you need to do is populate your dispatcher, create a queue, create a performer, and you're good to go.

The highest benefit of it is that it's just there, ready to use, and you don't need to start from a blank screen. You don't have to figure out, for example, how to create an environment where the robots can check if there's anything in the queue to be worked on. The framework is already there. The other tools that I've used, like Blue Prism, don't have that built-in quite as well.

My perspective and overview are from that of a developer, and I find that the recorder feature is really good. This is because UiPath lets you record your actions on the screen. So, if you want to interact with a web-based interface, for example, then you have UiPath record your actions and then build the activities that you would need in order to replicate those actions through the robot. It makes it a lot better and although it's not perfect and it does need to be reviewed and adjusted, it speeds up development quite a bit. This is especially true when it's basic back development like populating fields and clicking buttons and navigating on a web.

Compared to other RPA tools that I have used, something that stands out to me in UiPath is that it has a very extensive library of activities. Those activities are easy to search for and use.

When you are writing code, there is a feature called IntelliSense, which autocompletes your code. More specifically, when you're typing code, if you're starting to type the name of a variable, it will show you all of the variables available and you can just click them. It's very interactive and it's reminiscent of the Microsoft Visual Studio environment, both from the UI perspective and the coding perspective. This means that developers that are familiar with Visual Studio will probably feel right at home using UiPath. It's very developer-friendly and it's geared towards appealing to existing developers.

The UiPath Academy courses definitely help in the process of bringing employees up to speed. The Academy is the go-to place for UiPath learning and I think that other RPA tools are copying this model of disseminating knowledge, being a lot more open with training, making it freely available, and providing an online classroom. These are things that UiPath has always done, and it certainly helps new developers get upskilled in RPA, and specifically with UiPath.

When it comes to ease of use, UiPath is intuitive insofar as the basic features have a low learning curve. However, if you want to take full advantage of what UiPath can do, and if organizations want to create more sophisticated automation solutions, it is more difficult. For instance, automations involving back-end access, maybe writing directly to databases such as SQL or using API, that's a steep learning curve. In fact, I think the learning curve is exponential.

If you just want to make a robot that sends an email, that's really easy to do. But, if you really want tangible benefits, like if you really want something that solves a business problem, it is a huge learning curve and it takes a while to master. Obviously, it does have that low-code requirement, but I would say that's only for entry automation projects, like proof-of-concept or something along those lines. For something that really solves a business problem, you would need code, because that just makes it a lot more robust and a lot more powerful if you can custom-code certain steps of the process.

Features for process discovery would improve the end-to-end development capabilities.

From a developer's point of view, my biggest struggle with UiPath is debugging. The debug mode in UiPath feels clunky and it is a sore spot. It feels it's hard to control the flow of the process. There are a lot of internal errors and it's not intuitive. In general, debugging is not a good experience and I don't enjoy doing it. In contrast, Blue Prism has better debugging capabilities.

Blue Prism is a little more dynamic; you can adjust variables, you can jump around the flow, and it's easier to control. With UiPath, it's a little bit of a nightmare. It becomes harder to debug the bigger your automation is, because it's quite unpredictable, and it's quite unstable. Definitely, if debugging was improved, I would say UiPath would get 11 out of 10.

Something that I noticed recently is that they have moved to paid certification for developers, whereas it used to have free certification. This is a little bit outside of the platform itself but the pain point here from my perspective is that there is a barrier to entry for new RPA developers, or ones that want to renew their certification. It has become a lot harder and that used to be a differentiator for UiPath. It had a very strong online learning offering and it offered no-charge recertification on top. This is now very similar to what other tools are doing and I see that as a negative.

My first introduction to UiPath was in early 2018 or late 2017.

The robots could be a lot more stable, which is another area for improvement. The stability issue with UiPath is a prominent one, especially in comparison to other tools like Blue Prism. I feel that there are a lot of errors that are caused by the UiPath framework, as opposed to the robot design. Sometimes it's just very unreliable and crashes unexpectedly, which creates serious issues in terms of reliability. In early deployment, it always happens that it's very late nights, and there's a lot of babysitting processes. The robots need it because you never know what's going to crash.

In comparison with other RPA tools, it is average when it comes to reliability. I would rate other tools a little bit easier to manage expectations as to what you can reasonably expect to go wrong, and what you can reasonably expect to break. With UiPath, our developers, even our experienced ones, oftentimes get errors that we've never seen in our lifetime. This is partly due to the flexibility of UiPath, with it being so easy to adapt to all types of applications and all types of environments and it being so malleable. It is one of the most versatile tools; it's industry agnostic, platform-agnostic, and tool-agnostic, but that flexibility creates a lot more room for error in the code. It means that a lot more things can break or interfere with each other, compared to other platforms that are perhaps more niche and more targeted in what they're actually trying to solve.

UiPath is definitely scalable. It is modular, where you build a workflow and that can be reused across multiple robots or multiple processes. Those processes can then be run by one, two, three, five, and 100 bots, provided that they can work concurrently in the same environment, performing the same process. It's wonderful and the scalability is uncapped. If you have licenses, then you can use them, which is great.

The only limits are how many licenses are you willing to buy, and the inherent limits of your own infrastructure and your own process. It comes down to how many robots can realistically work concurrently in the same infrastructure and in the same network without breaking it.

We have approximately 20 developers who use UiPath. We have business users, but it is difficult for me to say how many there are.

I have been in contact with technical support, and I have experienced submitting a support ticket to them. I even got on a call with them and they were very helpful. We had been having issues with automating a platform and we wanted to get their specific insight as to what was going wrong. It had to do with UiPath not being able to extract selectors from that specific interface.

I was really surprised because they spent the time to not only address my ticket and answer my questions, but also to allocate time to schedule a meeting, and really look into the platform via screen share. I was sharing the screen with them and showing them what was happening, and they really looked into it and gave it a lot of attention.

I understand they get a lot of tickets, and I really felt they provided a good answer. They responded really fast, I would say within 24 hours, and we began exchanging details through a back and forth conversation.

They provided me with the outcome that I was happy with. It was a very good experience.

In addition to UiPath, we used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath is king here, and I rarely hear anything about the other two. I would estimate that we use UiPath 95% of the time, perhaps even 99%.

The alternative to UiPath that I am more familiar with is Blue Prism. From my perspective, UiPath is geared towards developers. The audience towards which it's skewed is the developer or the technical person. Blue Prism is geared more towards business people. It's geared towards converting business people, including SMEs and subject matter experts that know the process well, into developers. You will find that the language that each program uses is one that's geared towards the target market. Consequently, UiPath uses a lot of developer language and developer concepts.

For example, UiPath works similarly to the Visual Studio Environment. Blue Prism, on the other hand, uses a lot of flowcharting visuals, as well as the language that it uses for the same concept. It's going to use a definition that's more from a business process flowcharting realm. Recently, both platforms are converging onto each other and I feel like they're becoming more and more similar, but they still have a few things that are different.

One thing that stands out for me is that Blue Prism has wonderful debugging. It's a lot better than UiPath, and it's an all-in-one tool where the monitoring and the building of the robots happen in one application. The deployment is also really easy.

Blue Prism also offers online learning, which is great. They didn't use to have that offering, and I think that they got a lot of inspiration from UiPath. Their online courses have been great because previously when I was learning RPA, I had to use YouTube. Now, they have a whole Blue Prism university, which is amazing.

Blue Prism has inbuilt version control and a lot of other great features. They have a heavy emphasis on security and encryption, which UiPath perhaps needs to improve on. Companies such as banks, insurance agencies, and finance agencies are a lot more interested in Blue Prism because of its very strong security protocols. The encryption offering is a key requirement for companies that work with a lot of sensitive personal data.

I have never been involved in the initial setup, although my understanding is that it's quite a journey.

The areas of the organization with the most ROI from UiPath are operations, finance, HR, and sales. Those are the key departments, although it's across every organization because those departments have a lot of manual work-intensive processes that are the first contenders for automation.

We have a yearly licensing model that gives us access to the development and production environments. The cost of licensing is expensive.

Part of automation is the analysis and optimization of processes because the analysis phase is a by-product of wanting to automate a task. If you want to automate something, you have to break it down into parts and really look at it and think, "How can I reduce this into a series of business rules, a series of decisions, or series of steps?" It's an exercise of process optimization in and of itself because a good practice in automation is to not just take what it is and automate it, but to think, "Does what is currently in place actually work? How can it be improved? How can it be streamlined? How can it be done in fewer steps?" It's a good chance to practice some process review, improvement, and transformation.

The idea is to make it optimal because the current process usually has unquestioned practices that maybe haven't been reviewed for a very long time. A lot of businesses say, "We've always done it this way," and they've never thought to revisit the approach. RPA gives you an opportunity to think about whether what you've always been doing will work when it's being done by a robot. Most often, the processes get streamlined through the requirements gathering phase, understanding the as-is, and then a key part of that is doing the process design, which is the to-be vision.

During that time, processes go through a few design iterations where they are optimized and streamlined because we want the robots to be as efficient as possible. This means performing as few steps as possible without sacrificing value and efficiency. It is important because any inefficiencies in a robot are going to scale with the number of times you're going to run that process. If you run a process a thousand times, and let's say there exists inefficiency that results in an extra minute being used, that could be shed if you were to review and optimize that process.

Ultimately, optimization is an important exercise because the benefits include a further capacity to run more automated processes, and less time is taken up by inefficient steps.

Something to be aware of is that updates to the platform have to be managed because any update could impact the performance of a bot that was built with an earlier version. To avoid having a newer version impact the performance of something that was built previously, all of the updates need to go through a due diligence process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from UiPath is surprising; not everything needs to be automated. It feels weird to say it because thinking, "Well, I have this platform, I have these bots, why not just automate absolutely everything?", but the truth is that there are things that can be streamlined outside of RPAs. Also, some processes can be automated through other means. Consider the very simple example of sending automated emails, or sorting out your inbox by putting the right email in the right folder, those types of things can be done with email rules rather than RPA.

If a platform already has some sort of inbuilt automation, whether that's a social media platform, email platform, networking platform, or any other type of platform, it's always better to explore that first before looking to solve that problem with RPA. There are times when an Excel Macro or an email rule will be a lot faster and a lot more cost-efficient. RPA should be directed towards big-ticket items, big problems, and large volumes to where no existing solution would provide the same level of value.

My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to try it out for themselves. The most beautiful thing is when companies take the leap to have a very small citizen developer team, where they upskill a few technically-minded people with free courses and try to build a small proof of concept to see if RPA is the right path for them. I really encourage that sort of curiosity and experimentation because all of the resources are out there and anybody can learn, as long as they're driven and passionate and curious about automation. I would really encourage people just to give it a try and see what comes out of it.

In our organization, UiPath is the number one RPA tool. Being close to the industry as a developer, and I do feel like it's the preferred tool, at least where I'm based in Australia. It is definitely the preferred RPA solution on the market. Our usage is definitely going to increase in the future. I feel like the future is bright for UiPath. That said, it isn't perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use UiPath for cases where we have to do a workflow-related mechanism. Most of these use cases are small, Excel-based solutions and desktop-solution-related workflows, where one or two applications have to be connected, along with the Excel operation, for the end-to-end workflow creation.

We use both attended and unattended automation.

We have created 10-plus solutions using UiPath, and the savings that have been generated from these solutions are around $1 million. They are very cost-effective solutions: finance, order-to-cash, and protocol-to-pay processes. It has created value on the higher end, because the processes were quite cumbersome. We re-engineered the processes and started using UiPath for workflow automation.

We have saved roughly 50 FTEs on a yearly basis. It also enables us to use a lower skillset workforce, which is a cost-effective measure.

Quality, no doubt, is one of the key parameters of automation. UiPath has resulted in quality improvement for the overall processes where it's deployed.

It's on the OCR side and the workflow side where UiPath creates value to us.

The most important and valuable feature of UiPath is the ease of creating automations. It's a workflow-based model. End-to-end coverage is, no doubt, very important, because when you use a fragmented solution, the overall process flow becomes shaky. UiPath has the required capabilities to create an end-to-end solution for a business case. For our scenario, the business cases are quite small. That way, the turnaround time to create a solution is short and it becomes very easy to deploy, which is quite helpful for us.

Another important feature is the OCR capability, which integrates quite easily with other kinds of tools. We have integrated with ABBYY and we have even used the Amazon OCR engine. From an integration perspective, it is scalable enough to integrate with third-party solutions, whereas that kind of thing becomes a bit of challenge when we use Automation Anywhere.

We are able to use Python scripting and Python libraries for data extraction.

We also use the solution in creating attended automations. They are very much division-specific and are currently used by the procurement and the finance teams. These are on-demand, data reconciliation activities that are performed once a week. The bot is clicked by the person who is attending, which is generally a procurement or a finance guy. These are tedious activities so that's why we have the dedicated license for the attended format.

It is quite user-friendly with the drag-and-drop functionality. It has connectors which are quite suitable and industry-standard for basic applications that we use on the desktop, like for the Microsoft suite. From an integration perspective, it has done well.

We have also used its selector technology to automate processes with dynamic interfaces for one of the finance applications, where the UI screen is changing.

The cognitive area is one where there is room for improvement. Automation Anywhere has grown in that area, whereas UiPath still is more dependent on third-party integration. That is something which they should be focusing on more. They should acquire a product and get it integrated.

I have been using UiPath for around two and a half years. I have used both Automation Anywhere and UiPath. We have both tools.

UiPath Robots are quite robust, and from a maintenance perspective it has become easy, if you create logs. It's pretty good.

In terms of scalability, as I mentioned, it has certain challenges, but with the minimal capacity which we are running, it becomes easy to maintain the bots.

We have 10 to 12 automations already in place, and there are around five to six more in the pipeline, which are still being rolled out. The RPA tool we used is determined on a case-by-case basis.

UiPath technical support is pretty good. Most of the answers are provided by the community forum. If you raise a ticket, they are proactive in getting back to you and addressing the point. It's good.

The initial setup was okay. I was involved in the setup of Automation Anywhere four years ago, and with UiPath. Compared to Automation Anywhere, it was much smoother because the community side is quite good with UiPath. In the early days when we were facing issues, we had the UiPath community support to find answers. We did not have to raise a ticket with UiPath because we were able to get our answers in the community forums.

The first case took us around seven to eight months to put in place. The first one is, obviously, always a tricky one. We also picked a use case of medium complexity and it took a bit of time. Later on, we started building more of a workflow solution using our low-cost workforce and, after that, the journey was quite smooth. Initially there were some hiccups, but once the team understood the tool itself it became easy.

We deploy developers who require a lower level of skill sets, developers who do not have that much training. They are normal .NET developers whom we train for one and a half months on UiPath and they start developing UiPath solutions. We have a center of excellence with our developers who work on UiPath. We recently hired two more, so we now have around 11 developers who are working on UiPath.

Taking UiPath courses to get up to speed has been very helpful. I am certified for the tool because of the courses. The curriculum is at least on par with that of Automation Anywhere, although I would say it is much better. The only issue is that the courses are very limited. The AA University has increased to a vast number of courses, and most of them have become free for the end-user. The UiPath course material is good, but there are notably fewer courses and less certification available for people like us, who are more on the business side. AA has a business analyst program and a program manager certification, but I was not able to find anything specific like that in the UiPath Academy.

Our strategy with UiPath is that we generally go for unattended automation because that doesn't lock up our licenses for the bots. We prefer solutions which require unattended automation, because of a lack of budget and other constraints. From the deployment perspective, we have a dedicated server and we're following the minimum guidelines which are required to conform to the deployment standards.

The ROI generated is quite high because of the cost factor.

It is much much cheaper than the Automation Anywhere. That is a key differentiator. It is targeted at mid-level enterprises. It is cost-effective.

There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. We have taken few of the training-related services from them. Once we move to the cloud version we may require some consulting services to move from on-prem to cloud. That would be the only other cost associated with UiPath.

When it comes to the main differences between UiPath and Automation Anywhere, UiPath is cost-effective. It is quite a lot cheaper than Automation Anywhere. It is also drag-and-drop, a fact which makes basic automation very easy compared to Automation Anywhere. It's quite user-friendly. In addition, the OCR functionality is quite robust in UiPath because it also provides a third-party integration. Python scripting becomes easy and that means our OCR solutions are quite good. These are the pros of UiPath. 

Regarding the cons of UiPath when compared to AA, the first one is the level of scripting details. Custom scripting is quite lacking in UiPath. It's more a drag-and-drop functionality which doesn't allow that higher level of customized scripting when compared to AA. Secondly, the scalability is quite robust in AA as compared to UiPath. Even though we are not pushing the limit, the general opinion out there is that UiPath fails quite visibly when you try to scale solutions that involve operations plus a new product rollout. That's a challenge with UiPath. And, as I mentioned, AA has improved a lot in the cognitive area and UiPath has not reached that level. It relies more on the third parties.

Even if you are a large enterprise and you're trying to start your RPA journey, UiPath is the answer. It sits in the top one or two solutions, along with Automation Anywhere. It's one of the leaders in RPA, and with the low cost model of the license structure, it is very easy to start with UiPath rather than with Automation Anywhere.

If you are looking for a strategic approach, where you have projected that within five to six years you will roll out 250 to 300 bots, scalability is something you have to factor in when starting your journey.

We haven't used the solution's artificial intelligence. We tried to run a PoC using a chat bot, but it didn't do well. I don't think UiPath has its own AI engine. They provide an API-level integration with other AI tools. We had a challenge there because most of the AI functionalities had to work on the cloud. We had to integrate with the Google Cloud and Amazon cloud, but both are in the public domain and transferring data from our office to the cloud was a challenge. We hit a wall. For that scenario, we moved on to Automation Anywhere, which provides us an on-prem solution.

Most of the automations that we work with are internal to our systems. We are also trying to use it with BPM.

We are reducing people's activities in our organization. For example, there are monthly reports that we have to upload and read, and it was taking a day to do this activity. Then, using UiPath, we can reduce that time to two hours. 

It has helped a lot to minimize our on-prem footprint. This is really important because it minimizes tasks that people work on, including myself.

If you automate with UiPath, you don't have to worry about firing someone who is doing the same process. Instead, you are giving that person more time for analysis for the information that UiPath brings in.

The OCR is something that is really cool. You can work with a lot of systems and use the HTML feature to interact with websites. I really like that it interacts with websites. 

UiPath Portal works great for accessing features.

UiPath provides single sign-on, which is very important, because we don't have to manage a lot of passwords.

It is fast. With UiPath Studio, you can get the passwords and work in it quickly. 

The UiPath Academy is great for learning the solution. It helped us a lot.

We would like to know how to implement the artificial intelligence (AI) feature because we are working on some activities in this area.

The bank knows about UiPath, but not all people consider UiPath something they really trust, which is why there are just two of us working on it full-time. We do teach people about UiPath, but they are not 100 percent involved with it.

The stability is usually really great. However, at this point, we are uploading a new version because the stability is not right. They told us that our version, 18.4.5, is not 100 percent compatible with Orchestrator. Therefore, we don't have the stability that we had before.

The scalability works great for us. It is really fast when we ask for something.

It is really fast at scaling automations. At the beginning, it was slow because we couldn't work the way that we wanted. Now, it scales automation quickly.

We haven't had contact with technical support because UiPath has been working great for us.

This is our first RPA solution.

Before Orchestrator, we worked on an application to manage UiPath because we didn't have Orchestrator two years ago. So, we create our own application to manage UiPath.

It was very easy to set up UiPath the first time. We implemented UiPath with virtual machines, and that didn't affect our costs in a significant way.

The timeframe for setting up a new bot for implementation depends on whether it will be big or small. It might take a day, if it is really easy, or a week.

Getting the idea to have a new bot for the first time is kind of complicated. Once you can explain how it will work or be a solution, then you can just go for it.

I have to be involved in the beginning when implementing a new bot. 

Two people from our bank were involved in the deployment. One person develops the solution and another does the QA.

We worked with a third-party (BDG) to set up UiPath. They were really good.

It has helped a little to reduce our work. Before, we had people working at 6:00 AM because they had to inspect, analyze, or look into the systems for prevention. For example, they had to prevent the systems from going down. Now, with UiPath, that person doesn't have to come early because we get everything in reports from UiPath. So, that person doesn't have to come early anymore. That person now just has to look at the report and see, for example, that UiPath did a fix in the morning. 

The solution really works for its price.

The license cost is the only cost to start a new bot. However, if we want UiPath to do an activity and go through another machine, like Remote Desktop, or application, like Bloomberg, then we have a special license that is an extra cost.

We also evaluated Automation Anywhere, but decided on UiPath, which is friendlier. We also considered that UiPath has its Academy and more documentation.

We are glad UiPath has security because not all the RPA solutions have security.

We are getting into AI now, because we haven't worked with that yet.

Right now, we are 100 percent familiar with Orchestrator.

We didn't have to install a lot of features with this infrastructure. We just download some activities to work with everything, and it works fine. We don't have a lot of infrastructure for using data.

Our first step is getting Orchestrator because we really want to have the entire bank involved in UiPath. The solution is great. It can reduce costs, especially with all that stuff that people do. We have big plans for UiPath going forward.

I would rate this solution as 10 (out of 10).

We are using UiPath primarily for unattended automation. We are automating processes for business functions like finance and go-to-market.

We have Orchestrator which is hosted on the cloud and we also have UiPath deployed on-premises. We have three different instances of Orchestrator: one for development, one for staging, and one for production.

There are multiple business processes involving finance users. For example, for intercompany settlements, the end-to-end process was handled manually before. But now, the entire intercompany settlement, which involves many transactions, takes place automatically. Users don't need to intervene. They just need to verify whether all the calculations made by the robot are correct.

Another win for us was in the go-to-market function, where our customers talk to a customer advocate for purchasing different products and offerings. If they want to renew a quote or generate a new quote, they used to contact the CAs and talk to them on the phone, which would take a lot of time. It would take more than a day to process their requests and place their orders. Now, with the help of UiPath, we have developed a fixed form which we hand out for the customer to fill in. The average response time, as a result, has decreased a lot. We are now able to close a deal and generate revenue very quickly, compared to before. The process is around 90 percent faster for us.

We have just started using the AI functionality for unstructured invoices which we receive from different regions. Until now, when we wanted to extract information out of them, there was not any particular rule or way to get that information. A human had to be involved. That is where the AI functionality has come into picture. It makes our robots smarter and gives us the ability to train a robot to extract the relevant information out of different types of invoices.

Of course we have also been able to produce increased accuracy for a lot of our processes. With processes where we are receiving data in bulk, it's very natural for a person to miss out on certain things, but a bot does not miss out on any of the information and create errors in that way, so we have been able to reduce human errors to a great extent.

One of the most valuable features is its ability to allow us to integrate any external scripts—code or any other scripting file.

Also, they have recently come up with new features, like Document Understanding and AI fabric, which we have also started to use. These are helping us a lot with unstructured data extraction from invoices. The AI Fabric has out-of-the-box models, so we are using the invoices model from Document Understanding package. There is also the capability to train the model and that is a great way for us to get information out of the different invoices, as we deal with different invoices from different regions, rather than a single format. This is a great feature which is built-in.

It is also important that all the new services that UiPath is adding to the Portal are managed from the same place. Ease of onboarding for the customer should be a main priority. If the new services can be managed from a single place, it would be very easy for us to onboard them, to understand how to use them, and to enable them in our current workspace.

In addition, things like UiPath's navigation, drag-and-drop options, pre-packaged templates, and low-code features help developers, and people who have some understanding of tech, to build solutions quickly. With these features, we don't have to go down the same path all over again. This helps developers.

Each one of us has used the UiPath Academy courses and that has played a major role in getting people up to speed. I, myself, learned about UiPath by doing the Academy courses and then doing UiPath certification. If anyone wants to start with RPA, and UiPath in particular, it should definitely be their first point to get started with it. The Academy courses are really good.

There are challenges raised by the fact that UiPath is coming up with different versions almost every quarter, and at times almost every month. We plan to upgrade almost every quarter. Recently we were trying to add AI Fabric into our production Orchestrator, but we faced a lot of challenges. We had to involve the UiPath support team in the upgrading process. We were quick movers to upgrade to AI Fabric, as not many companies have done that. There were some bugs that we discovered during our upgrade journey, and that's how UiPath came to know about those bugs. It was little tricky, but UiPath's team is always present and helps along the journey. They have been coming up with a lot of new services and products and there are a lot of announcements on their Portal as well. But it's difficult for customers to keep up with their announcements.

Another area for improvement is version control functionality, particularly for Git. So far, for a lot of files, especially Excel, we are not able to compare the differences between two versions of a project. File conflict resolution could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for two years and three months.

The robots are pretty stable. It just depends on the way they are coded and how robust the developer has made the solution. If they have taken care of all the edge cases and of the possible areas of failure, the robots are predictable.

The solution is scalable. There is functionality to add as many robots as you want by purchasing additional licenses. There is a feature where we can use one machine and add different user profiles which is great. We are able to run the robots by using just one piece of hardware with different user profiles.

But if you are willing to scale up and you want to enable a lot of your team members to use the automation functionality, you can easily do that by purchasing more licenses and you will be able to schedule your processes in a better way.

We have about 15 people who use UiPath in our company. They are mostly developers, solution architects, or business analysts. We have 20-plus end-to-end automations and we use the tool on almost a daily basis.

Not all teams within our company know about UiPath. As of now, we have onboarded the finance and go-to-market departments. We plan to onboard the other teams, to run sessions with them and let them know that something like this exists and that it can help them in their day-to-day work. We are definitely planning to increase our number of automations.

The UiPath support team is there to help us to onboard stuff faster. It helps us achieve our business objectives quicker. We are able to solve stakeholders' problems very quickly. Because we have already planned to go live with certain bots, if our platform is ready earlier, we are able to provide the business value as soon as possible. That has really helped.

I would rate their technical support at nine out of 10. They are pretty helpful. Even if they're not able to come up with a solution right away, they ask for the specific files and all the logs and, usually, things are resolved within a couple of days.

I don't really know about the specifics of pricing, but identifying the type of automation you need will determine whether you can go with attended or unattended licenses. Think about whether you want your robots to run unattended and 24/7 or not, or whether you want a person to validate something in a given process, or if you want to constantly monitor the bot. Those are the types of things that will help determine the types of licenses you need.

With unattended, they now have something called Action Center where you can do a hybrid automation. That type of automation will be unattended, but there will be a human in the loop.

It really depends on what you are looking for and what kind of budget you have. If you already have the Microsoft Office suite, you get Microsoft Power Automate which is also an automation platform. You need to decide how extensively you want to go into the automation journey and whether you are really planning to expand it. If you are planning on going big with Automation, UiPath is the way to go. But if you just want to experiment and try out automation, and you already have Microsoft Office suite, you should try the Power Automate platform.

I have multiple use cases as part of this solution, since I work in different domains with different technologies and applications. We use attended and unattended bots.

One use case was for a credit-based client where we worked on the UI automation of the application. We were using UiPath Automation Cloud because our team is spread across different geographical locations, like the U.S, APAC and EMEA regions. We had different RPA developers who are developing the script simultaneously and putting it on the system, and our business case was that we wanted to automate the UI applications. Since there were different developers in different geographical regions, they created the bots on their system. Due to the cloud offering, we were able to move the bots to production using a click of a button. There is also an Orchestrator offering as part of the cloud, which is hosted. Once we had a thorough peer review of the bots being developed, we pushed it to our production-ready cloud-based Orchestrator. From there, we use it to run the script. That is an unattended bot, which is also one of the features. Since it is a credit-based UI automation, there are some instances where manual intervention is required in order to see whatever data is sent out to the client, if it is in the correct order or not. That is why we use the unattended offering of UiPath. Both these technologies help us a lot in creating our production-ready implementation. 

For another use case, we did an implementation in the SAP application. It was a procure-to-payment (P2P) cycle, where a third party sends out the invoices which get fed into the SAP application, then it gets verified and goes out to the payroll team. Once that is verified by the payroll team, the payment is released to the concerned vendors. All these points of entry were being done manually: the third-party invoices entered into the SAP application, SAP verification, and the payroll team verification. Since it involved a lot of financial data, people were very hesitant to get it automated. However, since we had this UiPath offering, that initial hesitation was turned into a very good implementation of whatever we wanted to achieve as part of this UiPath automation. We were using the unattended bot as part of the cloud offering. We ran the processes at night from Orchestrator, so people working from home didn't need to stay up late in order to run the processes. Since we were using the cloud unattended bot service of UiPath, we were able to trigger the whole process in a single click of a button, which is amazing.

As part of the UiPath offering, we have three offerings: Studio, StudioX, and Studio Pro. These three offerings are provided via cloud on a single system and installed on our laptops or desktops.

I am working as a senior analyst. As part of this particular role, I have to cater to the client's needs if they want to get a UiPath implementation. Then, I do the consulting as part of the implementation. I also get involved in the PoC development and how we should use the cloud offering, e.g., what benefits are there.

We were able to move prototypes, which were in PoC stages to production very quickly, which helped us a lot. There has been more collaboration happening because of the cloud implementation. Because we have different geographical locations where in RPA bots are getting developed, at the end of the day, everything is pushed into Orchestrator Cloud. From there, we can execute it. In terms of collaboration, this has been very helpful. 

UiPath Automation Cloud has helped us to minimize our on-prem footprint. We were able to get our prototypes into production very quickly. In turn, this helped us to get stuff minimized quickly because we were able to move the prototype as part of the PoC into production faster. We were also able to scale. For example, if we had new people joining the team, we could easily move them into the cloud offering and add a new tenant. We have added two or three new members who could readily go ahead and use the solution to develop RPA bots.

It is a single point of truth. There is no discrepancy or ambiguity. We can go to the leadership team, and say, "This is what it saves us on costs, man-hours, and effort that we used to do manually versus what we are doing now using the bots."

The most valuable feature (as part of the cloud offering) is Orchestrator. Even if we have the RPA developers spread across different geographical locations, we are able to get the bot ready and pushed into Orchestrator, where any non-technical guy can come in and run the process. When I say non-technical guy, I mean any person from the business or leadership who just wants to see how it works. They can go ahead and log into Orchestrator and execute the process.

The Orchestrator portal is very intuitive, so you don't have to run around and talk to anyone. It is so intuitive because it is like using a web-based application. For example, nobody has to train us to go and do whatever they want us to do. It is so intuitive that we can figure out, "Hey, this is what I need to click in order to add new tenants. This is what I need to click in order to change the geography from India to APAC or any other location. In terms of execution, whatever bots are in execution right now will be shown there. Also, whatever bots are not running, they will be displayed as part of the dashboard as well as the failures.

UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management, which is very important as part of the monitoring. When we want to drill down on why there is a failure, we need to do a root cause analysis as part of understanding on why this particular bot failed and what could be the reason: 

• Is it because of some kind of data issue? 
• Is it because of an issue from the product? Then, we need to reach out to their support teams. 
• Is it because of an incorrect implementation of the bot or feature that we want to get implemented as part of the solution?

We are moving from single sign-on to no password sign-on. As we are moving ahead with technological advancement, maybe that feature can be added. This totally depends on how that technology is accepted by the people. If people in big enterprises are not willing to switch and don't want to move away from the single sign-on, then it will be very difficult to digest this. However, whenever there is a change, it is very difficult to digest. Eventually, people will like it. I believe if it is implemented as part of UiPath, who is a technological leader in terms of RPA and new stuff when they roll out every release, then this would be a good area that they can look into for enhancement.

They could add more features in order to get that dashboard more intuitive, e.g., how easily can we visualize everything being reported. I believe this should be improved as part of our Orchestrator offering. Now, we have different visualization tools being used, like Power BI. The data gets flooded into those kinds of tools and the dashboard is easy to understand. So, someone with a non-technical background can see the dashboard and understand what has happened. However, to provide detailed analysis, there has to be some improvements so we can provide drill-down data to developers showing, "Hey, this has gone wrong." If they could also incorporate that as part of the reports, then it would be very quick to view on the dashboards.

I have been using it for two years.

UiPath has a number of offerings: on-prem Orchestrator, Automation Cloud, Automation Hub, Cloud Orchestrator, Task Mining, Task Capture, etc. Sometimes, it feels like other new areas are getting more focus compared to areas, like dashboard Insights, which should be more relevant. They should focus on these other areas to make the cloud offering more robust. Though, they are working towards it and releasing updates. Therefore, eventually, they will look into it, work on it, and iron out any kind of discrepancy.

It was very easy to scale up. Since we started getting a lot of data from the client which was getting filled as part of the UI-logged application, we were able to push in data as part of the UI. So, we were able to reduce replies to clients significantly.

We find the solution to be scalable. Since this RPA technology is now widely accepted as part of our enterprise solution, businesses are coming in. Once the business team is onboarded, we can easily onboard the people who have technical expertise to create the bots, analyze them, and provide logic on how we need to design the bots. As part of the initial stages, we only have a business person, a solution architect, and a tool expert. First, we create the credentials for them, then we provide the solution to the business as part of a PoC. After that, if we are using any other traditional system, then it will take a lot of time to get 10 or 15 people onboarded in order to develop the solution in a fully-fledged manner. However, since we have the orchestration capabilities, we can just go in that particular Orchestrator dashboard and create our tenant with a few clicks. We can also move in and out between different geographies. For example, if I want to go and look into what is happening in the Indian service line, I can just go and click on that particular service line, which is already configured as part of Orchestrator.

Initially, when we were going with the idea of creating an RPA bot, the first thing was to get a nod from the business to make sure about how scalable the solution is. At times, what happens is once we get the business sign off, then it takes around a month or two in order to get the team onboarded with all the necessary accesses. Once they get all the accesses, they will start working on the solution. However, in this particular case, as part of this Automation Cloud offering, we didn't have to waste any time after we got the business nod, saying, "Hey, you guys can go ahead and implement this full-fledged solution." Since the orchestration capabilities are there, the moment we received an email from the business, we shot out an email, "Hey, we are getting these pieces and have already created the credentials. Tomorrow, you can get the ball rolling in terms of solution development."

There are multiple channels where we can reach out to them. One of those channels is the Community Forum, which is being constantly monitored for any issues. So, if anybody has already faced it, they go ahead and have it answered. Or, if nobody has seen it before, then the forum moderator comes in, and says, "Hey, why don't you go ahead and reach out to the IT support?" So, this is a channel that gets a response and has faster ways to directly approach the support team managing the servers.

The UiPath Community Forum is worldwide. It is being monitored by community moderators. I have seen feedback being put through to the IT support team, then that is put through to the right channels to get addressed. They really listen to the customer feedback, which is what I appreciate about them. 

The support is responsive at resolving any kind of tickets or issues when we reach out for help. This is one of the primary factors for going with Automation Cloud versus other cloud offerings, like Automation Anywhere and ElectroNeek. UiPath support is very much available and provides a solution. Even if they don't have the solution, they tell the affiliate, "This is how much time it will take," or "It will be released in the next update."

We don't need any IT support in order to maintain this particular solution. Since it is a cloud offering, everything is taken care of by the URL.

In case of any issues for the setup and updates, we reach out to the UiPath support team.

The initial setup is very easy. It is like installing an app on your iPhone. That is how simple it is. Basically, it is not an installation at all. It is just signing into a cloud account. As part of the cloud offering, we are provided with a URL, which gives us access to the Orchestrator instantly. There is no setup whatsoever. You don't have to go and download any EXP or MSA file on your system, then double click it and a number of forms are popping up. It is nothing of that sort. It is a single URL, where you can log in with your credentials, and that is one time activity. After that, it is a single sign-on the moment that you access that particular URL.

The implementation was frictionless with the single sign-on feature.

By using the Automation Cloud version, when there is a new version pushed out, then I do not have to do a reinstallation again in order to get all the newest features. Since I am using the SaaS offering, the new functionalities being pushed out as part of the newest version will be easily accessible to me without doing an uninstall or installation. This is a good part of the offering.

We are seeing a good ROI.

The maintenance work has been reduced because of the bots. Initially, the time that we invested in order to zero in on this particular product was 60 to 70 percent of the job data. This helped us a lot when we were deploying it.

This solution has reduced business costs. For example, products and bots that we designed for UI automation were also deployed for back-end services.

The setup cost is minimized drastically since it is a cloud-based offering. We don't need to have a dedicated person or team to monitor it. We just subscribe to the services, get the URL, login, and the next moment, we are creating tenants and the service line. Then, "Boom!," we are ready for executing the bots from our test check.

Our license cost is reduced since we don't require any IT support. 

I used the free versions of other vendors when we were trying to zero in on the solution that we wanted to use. We used a few other competitors of UiPath as when we were doing the PoC, and the features that we liked the most and made us lean towards UiPath were its intuitiveness and ease of use. We liked how Orchestrator can be used by the business or by anyone with a non-technical background. That is what helped us to make our decision in favor of UiPath. 

With other tools, we had some issues with their support where they were frequently not reachable. They were not able to set up any discovery calls, such as, "Hey, this is how it is going to work." They also don't have very active community forums. 

Instead of talking to the support or sales teams, we investigated on our own. We went to the UiPath Academy, which is readily available, and looked into its documents, which were highly detailed. We also monitored their Community Forum, which is being moderated properly. Then, we read some reviews on IT Central Station, seeing how people are reviewing it and why they are paying for it. For example, if their whole community is coming out with good words, then there has to be something which they are doing well. That is what made us make the decision to zero in on UiPath Automation Cloud.

When comparing UiPath with different vendors offering RPA,like Automation Anywhere or ElectroNeek, we initially thought that Automation Anywhere was ahead of the game and UiPath was playing a catch-up. A few weeks back, UiPath had a good investor round, then they went all guns blazing out in the market. There is a lot of community awareness in terms of UiPath implementation. So, I believe the road ahead for UiPath is very good. 

One of the newest upgrades that we had was in respect to payments getting added. New functionalities are getting added. They also work on the feedback that they get from interviews conducted by sites, like IT Central Station, who take unbiased reviews. They work off this feedback, which is why they are upgrading their products out in the market.

I haven't used the AI Fabric solution as of yet because we don't have a business case for it as of now.

If you are ready with your own business process that you want to get automated, then I would recommend UiPath for its intuitiveness. You should consider the intuitiveness of the UiPath as one of the parameters in your solution decision. For example, if you have the business process ready, then that is half the job done. The other half will be taken care of by your RPA developers or solution architect. So, if you are using UiPath, the learning curve is very small. You don't need to invest a lot of time. 

They have their UiPath Academy learning website, where you can go in as well as ask your team members to learn based on their roles. There are different series of educational videos based on job roles and how that particular role should look at UiPath as a solution. For example, as a manager, if I'm going in and looking into the UiPath, I do not want to be bothered about how I'm going to pull in activities and develop the automation bot. As a manager, I am going into Orchestrator to see how many bots have executed successfully or failed. If I was a solution architect, then I need to know how to design the service lines if they are located in different geographical regions. 

Everybody is really looking for some kind of solution that eases our life since we are working from home. It takes a toll when we are working from home. When we have these RPA bots coming to our rescue, then it makes a difference in our day-to-day life. Then, we can spend more time with our loved ones rather than spending more time in front of our laptop screens.

I would like to rate it as nine (out of 10) because I believe no one is perfect and all the bots are being developed by humans. Going forward, I read on a forum that UiPath is developing an AI feature where the bot will autoheal itself. Once the autohealing feature is implemented, I would rate the solution as 10 (out of 10) because there would be no manual intervention.

We are a small but global company. We are about 1,200 people. We are a logistics company, and most of our employees work in our warehouses. So, our office workers are somewhere between 400 to 500 across the globe. Being a logistics company, we are maybe a little bit old-fashioned. There are a lot of papers going back and forth, and we are trying to automate different scenarios. We cater provisions to ships, so we are basically a grocery store for ships. 

One important thing is when a ship is going into port somewhere, they put in an order for whatever provisions they need for when they leave port again. So, we need to be quick at expediting their orders. When they put in a request for a quote for whatever products they need, we need to respond very quickly, because the tendency is that whoever responds first gets the order. So, we want to do that. We are trying to sort of increase the speed of those types of operations as well as the quality of them. 

It is hard to really pinpoint what it is we are doing, but it's the communication between customers. When we receive a communication from a customer, we want to move the process through our company as quickly as possible and with high quality.

We are fairly new to UiPath still. We do intend to use it company-wide and have started out with purely unattended scenarios so far.

We invoice every month quite a substantial amount of money to our customers. We saw a problem in that about 20 percent of our invoices were sent to the wrong addresses. That meant that, at month's end, when we were expecting money to come in, we would be missing around 20 percent of our cashflow that month. Of course, we wanted to prevent that because 20 percent of the cashflow of $300 to $500 million a year is a lot of money. 

We have automation that runs every night through all our invoices. Because we have some problems with our master data in the company, it does a number of measurements, on whether an address for an invoice seems to be the correct address, and a number of checks, such as, what ship was the goods delivered to? After that, it looks up information through the international registers of ship ownerships, then it will do a number of checks, giving each invoice a score as rating the probability that the address is correct. If it is below a certain threshold, then we will do some manual processing, and we are looking into UiPath Action Center for this. For four or five of our largest branches in the US and Asia, we have seen a significant improvement in the payments at month's end, which has definitely improved our cashflow.

The administration is a SaaS solution, which helps to minimize our on-prem footprint. The only things that we have running on-prem are the machines running the robots. Everything else is handled in the cloud. We don't need to worry about backups, etc.

We are adopting as much as we can some of the things that should reduce the maintenance costs. We are using Robotic Enterprise Framework in our development and Automation Hub to sort of qualify our ideas. So, we are trying to implement a uniform way of doing things throughout the lifecycle of an idea. UiPath supports this fairly well, and I think it will get even better.

Just this week, we are launching our Automation Hub effort because we need to start building a pipeline for our automation candidates. Right now, we have eight or nine ideas in our Automation Hub. That will grow quite quickly because we need the help of Automation Hub to decide on which idea that we will be moving forward with next.

UiPath continues to add services to the Portal. It is fairly important that they are all managed from the same place because it is a single point of access, which was a factor that really played into our choice of vendor, UiPath. We use Automation Hub to sort of collect ideas and discover what ideas are good for information, then we use Orchestrator to manage them once they have been developed. We are hoping to use Insights at a later point, when that is available in the cloud, so we have a complete end-to-end solution in one place. 

Automation Hub is an immature product. We have only been using it seriously for about a week and have already seen some things that will give us a few headaches down the road. We are committed to using it and will continue to use it, but I have some suggestions for improvement. We have been in contact with our local UiPath office about that, and their initial response was positive.

We would like to see more detail and refinement. It is still a young product, and we are confident that the product will improve a lot over the next few months.

We are hoping for some integrations between Automation Hub, Orchestrator, and Insights.

We are missing a way to quantify that money isn't everything with this solution.

Our license was activated sometime in July. So, we have been using it for about six to seven months.

We have seen a few quirks here and there. Overall, we are satisfied with the stability.

We have only a couple of handfuls of automations running, which are very stable. So, we are not doing much maintenance at all. Maintenance needs half an FTE, if even that.

The potential scalability is really good.

I don't know what the scale is for UiPath Portal. There are still signs that it is a young product, but we see it moving and improving at a really good pace. So, we have high expectations.

The technical support has been good. I have only used them a couple of times. The response has been good. They are knowledgeable. 

One of the big reasons why we chose UiPath is that it has a big following in online communities. It has a good forum itself: Forum.UiPath.com, but I really wish that UiPath would have moderators in their forums who are more active. There are a lot of questions that go unanswered, and that is a shame.

We didn't previously have any other automation solutions in this company.

Our initial setup was very straightforward. Our deployment took only a couple of days. We are a small operation with only two unattended licenses. We created the Orchestrator account and installed the robots on two servers. 

As far as development goes, we really just have the base package. Then, we are adding on Automation Hub right now.

We did engage with their local consultancy. They sort of helped us build a strategy for the infrastructure structure setup and strategy, as far as how to identify candidates, operations, and development. However, initially, we just wanted to pull the trigger very quickly. We had an evaluation phase of a couple of months, where we were testing different products and had tried to set up UiPath before, which helped.

We have used Carve Consulting, and our experience with them has been fantastic. We are working with this third-party consultancy to have them come up with a couple of ideas for some solutions that would involve AI Center for the end of this year or next year.

The initial deployment needed just a couple of people from our side, including me. I worked a little with some of our infrastructure guys, getting the accounts set up, the service division, provisions, etc.

We just haven't scaled to a point yet where there has been any kind of return on investment.

There are not very many users because the stuff that we have automated so far has just taken work off people's hands. Where a person used to spend all day uploading pricing data into a database, we have a bot doing that now. So, people are not using UiPath, they have just sort of been relieved of their duties. While that sounds bad, we have made an effort to find areas where FTEs get to spend time doing what they are best at.

The licensing is too expensive. It is not a cheap product. We constantly have to build business cases where we have to justify our existence as an RPA team. 

We have engaged in a long-running licensing agreement because we believe in the product.

We have used a third-party consultancy, and that's definitely not free.

We looked at a local variant of Kofax RPA called SmartRPA, which was built by a Danish company. It is basically Kofax RPA with an Orchestrator service built on top of it. We evaluated that. We also looked at something called OpenRPA, mainly due to price.

UiPath is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation, which is a platform that I have worked with previously. So, there was a lot of familiarity and extensibility. Then, we looked at how good the product is at automating desktop applications. There was not really a contest there; UiPath was better by far.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution very positively affects how fast we are able to innovate when it comes to automation. When we did the evaluation of what product to choose, UiPath versus something else, the ability to assess deployment of the whole administration was a key factor.

In our decision to go with UiPath, it was very important that we didn’t have to worry about future installations and upgrades of Orchestrator. We just didn't want the trouble of having to do upgrades. With UiPath being a young product that is evolving very quickly, we would be doing on-prem upgrades every few months and we don't have time for that. So, we liked the idea that it is a cloud-based setup.

Security was a factor in our decision to go with the solution. We didn't look into all the technical specs and certifications. We just looked at some of their customers, and said, "If that bank is using it, and it is used in the defense industry, then they know what they are doing." They had good references.

It is the best product.

It is an automation product. At the end of the day, it is software development. If there is anything that is important in software development, it is that you have a defined process from beginning to end, from the birth of the idea until it has been put into production and eventually retired. So, you need to have a defined process for different stages in the lifecycle that you need to be in control of. The product somewhat helps us do this with Automation Hub and the Robotic Enterprise Framework, but we are looking forward to even more tools for stuff like that.

So far, we are still in the meat and potatoes space. We haven't really gone into the AI or Document Understanding stuff yet. 

UiPath Portal is good overall for enabling administrators to work with Orchestrator. I have seen a lot of improvements, even in the last six or 12 months. We are learning as we go. For the first few months, we were working in a classic folder. Now, we are adopting modern folders in order to better be able to scale our efforts.

UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management. Right now, that is not so important to us because we do everything unattended. So, we have a couple of service accounts that run everything. However, once we move into attended scenarios, then it's really important that we have that granular control.

I know that there are some new features coming out in regards to deploying automatically and elastically, but we haven't looked that much into them. We don't expect them to be a problem.

We are looking forward to doing attended robots, but that will probably be in the second half of this year when we start looking into that.

For the size of our company, we started fairly big. We went all in, buying licenses, consultancy hours, etc. We have spent a lot of money this first year. I would probably advise someone to start small but still be ambitious. Do a lot of PoCs and see how it fits into your organization. There needs to be a lot of disciplines surrounding it, e.g., if you just stay with five or 10 automations, then things are good. However, once you build 100, you start running into maintenance problems and things like that, so there needs to be a discipline. 

You don't need to spend a million dollars to sort of get off the ground, so I would advise people to start small.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).