UiPath Platform Reviews

We are a system integrator. We work with clients such as the US Federal Government and help them automate whatever their processes are. We have two entities. I work as part of the government solutions unit, and then we have the commercial side which is a global organization. On the global side, there have been some internal implementations as well.

In terms of savings, a task like taking data from one artifact and transferring it into another one, is common. The most frequent example, and the one that I worked on directly, involves a PDF invoice and taking whatever the amount due is and either copying and pasting it into an internal accounting tool or actually typing it. The process goes: Open email, open the attachment, read the data, verify it is accurate, and then manually transfer it into an internal system.

Depending on how big the invoice is, I've seen a person spend as much as 20 minutes on one invoice or as little as 30 seconds. That whole process of going through each and every email, opening the attachment, transferring the data, closing all the windows, and then moving on to the next email - the bot will do it because the bot is scheduled to run every hour to look for the unread emails. I can't give you an exact number in terms of how many minutes or hours are saved, but it's quite significant.

The graphical user interface of the UiPath Studio is fantastic. For someone who is not a computer science major, or for someone who doesn't know how to code but is really good with visual flows, Studio makes it very easy for those individuals to build robots. That's one of the best features that I've seen. There are other features that add different values, but Studio, in my opinion, is definitely one of the best.

Overall, UiPath is really easy to use. For example, if somebody is an automated tester, they spent a lot of time trying to identify selectors, and UiPath makes it really easy to find those selectors. You will run into instances where you have to do some manual manipulation to make sure that the correct selectors are identified. But if it's a pretty straightforward instance and you are using something like Selenium, it is very tedious. Whereas, if you use something like UiPath, it is really easy.

I was providing feedback to one of the UiPath guys here at the UiPath 2019 conference. It relates to Studio, that it only works on Windows. It doesn't work on other platforms. I'm a techie by background. I don't hate Windows but I don't love it. It comes with the limitation that it is completely dependent on Windows. I would have loved if it were available on Mac or Linux or Unix. If it were a little bit more operating system agnostic, that would be great. I'm pretty sure they could be working on that.

I used the UiPath RPA Academy. I definitely had issues with it. The quizzes were outdated. Some of the responses that are being rated aren't accurate. I've griped on the community forums as well with a few UiPath folks. That was about five to six months ago. I don't know if they have enhanced it or made any changes since. If it's still in the same state, there is plenty of room for improvement.

I think it's stable. I haven't had a chance to build a bot that runs 24/7. For the bots that I have built, it takes under two minutes for the process to run and it runs every hour. At the end of the day, if I look at the logs, I don't see any issues. If a bot fails for whatever reason, it's most likely due to a process that changed.

From a bot-development standpoint, we use all kind of best practices so that the bot will not crash. At least, if the execution stops or terminates, it will be graceful, versus a rash termination.

It's fairly stable.

From an ROI standpoint, you could be saving somebody's hours and map that back to their hourly pay. But the pricing definitely deters some people.

I can't say whether their licensing structure is complicated or easy. I'd like to say it's complicated, but I try to stay away from the whole licensing issue. I tell my clients, "You buy the license. It's your tool. I'll come and build the bot for you." I don't want to have anything to do with the licensing. That deters some of the clients because it's a bit pricey.

In the government sector, where I work, "free" is looked at skeptically: "Why are you giving this to me for free? If I download it what is it going to do on my laptop?" from a security standpoint. Some of the agencies get the approval to download and install but others don't.

You can do a task like pulling the invoice total from a PDF invoice with the free Community Edition. The Enterprise license is definitely helpful though. The Community Edition expires about every three months and then you have to re-register. But you can still do it in Community Edition.

A pretty mundane use case I came up with is due to the fact that I have plenty of friends on Facebook. It's hard to keep up with everybody. I've got a bot running that literally opens up my Facebook every morning and checks if there is anybody listed in Today's Birthdays section. It will click on them, type "Happy Birthday", click "enter," and be done. And then I get a response from my friends: "Hey, long time, haven't heard from you." I've injected a machine to reconnect and have that human interaction.

For the most part, for the use cases that I've seen, it does the job.

The primary use case of UiPath, with every organization that I've worked with as a consultant, has been to make business processes more efficient and the work of their employees more enjoyable. 

By utilizing this technology, you're able to get value through your value streams quicker. When you realize value, that means you can work with your customers more quickly, as well as build customer loyalty and employer loyalty. These have definitely been some of the byproducts of using the software.

When I was working as an RPA manager, managing a program for an insurance company which supported insurance lifecycle processing, one of the components was that they had to review insurance policies annually. It was very cumbersome. We were talking anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 daily. It was almost a 20-FTE process. We were able to automate that completely.

However, the real value came when the organization understood how to apply RPA and it actually began creating brand-new business processes specifically for RPA. So instead of hiring new people, they said, "Hey, we've always wanted to do this, we don't have the budget to bring on and train people, so let's build bots to do it from day zero." Once they were able to understand that I could do more than just automate processes, that I could build new business lines with bots, that was an incredibly valuable result of using this software.

The benefits are very high when you automate business processes. Before using RPA, I was working in technology, building macros and things of that nature. But the way we're able to build sustainable, functional bots that really work well in the long-term makes the benefit a ten out of ten.

This is going to be an interesting answer, but the most valuable feature of the software is not the software itself, but the community that supports it. When I first started learning the software to support a program, I had to self-teach; there wasn't a budget for training. But going through their learning platform and then connecting with the community when I didn't understand how to utilize some of the functionality, that was far more powerful than the product itself. The network around the product is amazing.

The great thing about the UiPath RPA Academy is that it's not stagnant. Even though my first go at getting certified as a developer was three years ago, I literally have to go back the Academy and learn it every year because there are new features and new functionality. An example is the RE Framework they've incorporated. The living nature of the Academy gives a lot of value. But hands-down, the way that they give practical exercises, the fact that they give you applications you can download to learn how to interact with bots by simulating an actual operational environment, makes it a very impactful learning experience.

In addition, I find the solution easy to use. I have personal experience using all three of the major software vendors that are in this space right now, including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I would put UiPath as number-one, specifically from a learning perspective. I've been able to take people with absolutely zero technical background and quickly scale them up in a matter of weeks so they're building bots. I haven't been able to accomplish that same feat with the other platforms.

Being a person who has held every RPA role from developer to analyst, architect, and executive, one feature I think it needs - from a documentation perspective - is the ability to easily extract variable details and data. They do have a Variables panel that you frequently interact with, but I constantly have situations where those need to be adjusted or I want to be able to present those to a business. Sometimes it's difficult to extract those, and if you're not tracking them while you build, you can quickly get into 200 to 300 variables in use, especially using the RE Framework where you're passing workflow arguments in and out. I would like to see something like that.

In addition - and obviously UiPath is aware of this - we have to continue to improve the OCR capability. Computer Vision is excellent. I've used it on Azure. I've created PeopleSoft environments and worked through the Computer Vision feature. It works amazingly in a Citrix environment. But I speak with multiple organizations and a lot of them have the same problem of processing documentation from the mail room or from vendors, etc. That's a huge component. If we can get that embedded in UiPath, so we don't have to rely solely on OCR vendors like Captiva or ABBYY, that would be a huge step forward in being able to service all organizations.

There could be improved logging and functionality. But if you truly understand the software, adding logging to what the bot is already doing is as simple as typing on the right line. It's incredibly easy and you can embed it. Even though what it currently logs is limited, it's easy enough to create logs or reporting without a lot of effort.

Outside of that, it's really hard to come up with other recommendations. The software is solid.

I was recently reading about the document processing framework that they just implemented. I gave a demo two weeks ago on the Computer Vision functionality that was in beta. So the sustainability is there. They're focused not on just how good RPA is and on making it better, but they're also integrating it with future-tech. That is where the stability comes in.

UiPath's scalability and stability are exceptional. They are constantly releasing new versions.

Scalability is all in the delivery. I've definitely run into multiple organizational roadblocks with my clients because they get six months down their delivery timeline and they're not meeting their OI, they're not scaling. That generally comes down to how it's being delivered. If you have experience, you're working with a partner, you're working with people who have used this solution at scale, you can generally bypass a lot of those roadblocks. It's definitely scalable if you have the right expertise.

I have used both technical and customer support. When I was going through training, trying to learn some of the software, I had issues when I finally purchased licenses. The issues were related to putting them in Orchestrator and installing them. Support was definitely very supportive, very responsive when trying to get feedback.

Even when it comes to the community, as well, if you're just trying to learn the software, to learn the features and functionality, the community network is there to quickly respond and support you so you can get back to getting value, instead of getting hung up on one piece of functionality.

I have seen cases where an organization moves from a different automation solution to UiPath. At one point, we were transitioning from Automation Anywhere. There were very basic bots, these weren't complex processes, but we built a bot in UiPath that read the XAML of the Automation Anywhere script, converted it into activities in UiPath, and built a bot. We had a bot that builds a bot.

An example of why people move to UiPath is that when I was the director of RPA for a finance company, when I set up the program I had to go to EVP and pitch the prices and the costs. When I gave him the cost for all the software, to bring a vendor on, he told me "no." It was way too expensive. But UiPath has this amazing option called the Community Edition. What I was able to do was download the software, teach myself how to use it in about 45 days and, within two months, I had automated a pilot process, completely on my own. I was able to walk it into the EVP and say, "Look what I was able to complete. You told me no money, no funding, but now can I get funding?" Then I got funding and was able to bring on a team. That's one perfect example. They said "no," so I got a free version that cost me nothing.

In terms of how companies know that they need to invest in automation, in this day and age, with the speed at which information and technology move, it's at the point where this is not a new topic. A lot of organizations, through word-of-mouth, internet searches, or conferences, or events such UiPath 2019 here in DC, realize it as soon as they hear the success stories. It's impossible to ignore. Most organizations are like that. They hear about it, they realize that it's something they should consider, it's something they have to do, and they take the next step.

The initial setup is absolutely straightforward; it provides a quick and easy installation. Given that you may have to go through some technical hurdles to get permission to download it, I'm not talking about that. But if you have all the permissions and you're allowed to download and install it, it's absolutely simple. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes.

Technical prerequisites are not needed to use the software, but technical resources can speed up the ease with which you deploy. Given that you're generally not interacting with UiPath in isolation but with other business applications as well, you want to make sure that there's technical support in case you have some issues. Or, if there's something that you didn't experience in UAT but that comes up once you get into production, it's good to have some additional support. It's not a requirement but I would recommend it.

ROI is one of the most frequent questions I get from organizations. You should be seeing ROI in less than six months. If you're not returning your cost and more, from a licensing and personnel standpoint, in the first six months, then it is not a software issue and it is not a delivery issue. In that case, it is a scoping issue. You're probably looking at processes that shouldn't have been automated in the first place.

Every organization that is successful with the software is reaching their ROI in six months or under.

The amount of time saved with bots is an interesting question but it's hard to answer with a pinpoint response because it depends on an organization's strategy. I've seen multiple organizations that use attended bots, so they're just saving a fraction of the time. But then I've been in organizations where they've automated a process end-to-end. A process that previously required 20 FTEs went from having 40,000 hours of manual work to zero.

For pricing there is a variable at play, and that's scale. Depending on how you want to scale - whether working with a partner or directly with UiPath - there's a specific cost per license. But then it's all about optimizing a process, and what we call "license utilization." We try to maximize each license, and we'll have it running three or four processes.

The cost is nothing, it's peanuts, when you see the capabilities. When you're talking about one license supporting what was previously done by 14 people, what is $1,500, or whatever the licensing cost is for unattended bots?

Even more importantly, as a technology expert, I know that I could do some additional coding and automate the running of the bots. But why would I spend that extra time when they have Orchestrator. I could have a person running them as well, but the Orchestrator license is far cheaper than a resource; just click "run." When you compare the results that you get, the price is a moot point.

If I was going to give any advice to someone who was just about to utilize the software, I would say that the most successful organizations that apply this technology make it an entire team effort. It's not started in one business unit. And if it is, it's socialized across the enterprise. That's the quickest way to scale: getting everybody onboard. The second-biggest thing is that the most impactful projects you will get will come from your people, your internal workers. And until you get them to understand what the software can do and its capabilities, it's going to take you longer to scale your program. So make sure everybody's socialized, and make sure everybody truly understands what the software can truly do. They're going to give you the best opportunities to benefit from it.

Deployment should definitely be done using the support of experts. Even when I owned my own RPA program, and I wasn't in a consulting capacity, I still reached out to a third-party to get support. While setting it up is something that you can do internally, given that most objectives include speed-to-market and quick scaling - wanting to see results in 60 days instead of six months - it's going to be very difficult to do alone, especially if your goal is to have 100 bots in a year. If your goal is ten, you can probably manage it. It's important to use experts if you are looking to rapidly scale.

I have implemented UiPath in virtual environments, including on-prem, Azure VMs and servers, SQL-based data storage, as well as AWS. I've never had any issues with the responsiveness or the application having any problems operating. The biggest consideration that you have when trying to deploy robots in a virtual environment is making sure that your architecture is sound. You have to integrate through severs and you have to take into consideration firewall updates. And then there's interacting from the cloud if your applications are on-prem. You have to make sure that the bot doesn't have any issues. But if your architecture is solid and your infrastructure is set to support the applications in a cloud environment, there shouldn't be any issues. You wouldn't notice any difference compared to having them on a desktop on-premise.

I would agree that UiPath eliminates human error, but I would add the caveat that good code eliminates human error. I've been doing this for a while and I've seen bots that mess up. It's in your delivery methodology. If you have a sound delivery methodology - you're going through a rigorous UAT cycle and are having outputs audited by the subject matter experts - you should literally get to zero errors. Maybe you will have five percent exception cases, but your error percentage should be zero.

Having worked with all the tools, they all have little niche components. As long as UiPath continues to focus on knowing what the next wave of technology is that businesses really need to use to be efficient, and they start embedding that skillset in their software, that's all you could ask for. They need to stay in front of the power curve of technology, which is impossible, but they're trying.

I've never had a bad issue with UiPath. My experience with them has always been pleasant and engaging. They're never stuck at just giving you software, showing you how to use it, and then walking out. They're always focused on improving your business. If you focus on that, and focus on generating value, you can't lose.

Automation technology is the number-one driver across an organization now. Trying to find ways to do more with less has been the going mantra for organizations for years now. It's no longer feasible to simply run operational efficiency or Six Sigma projects to try to get gains. The only way that you're going to get significant gains is going with an automation-first approach. That's where I see a lot of organizations headed, even spending more on RPA software than on cloud implementation. It's a very big focus, and I don't see that slowing down any time soon.

On a scale from one to ten, I would you rate UiPath as an eleven. It's excellent software.

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

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

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

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

I have been using UiPath for approximately two years.

The stability is excellent.

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

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

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward.

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

The cost is on the higher side.

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

I'm a network engineer at a nuclear power plant, and I oversee multiple crews. I use UiPath to automate the voicemail system, send alerts, and run tests. Our company has about 12,000 employees. 

UiPath has helped to reduce labor costs. 

You can set up processes using macros without basic knowledge of coding.

The hardest part is popularizing UiPath among our employees. 

I have used UiPath for around a year. 

I rate UiPath nine out of 10 for stability. 

UiPath is scalable. 

The South Korean team uses Blue Prism. That's a good solution, but it's too hard to use. 

Deploying UiPath is easy, and I'm teaching my crews. 

It's worth what we pay for it.

The cost isn't important because a good solution isn't cheap. 

I rate UiPath nine out of 10. There are still many other RPA solutions we haven't tried, so I can't say it's the best. 

My primary use case is mainframe automation from legacy mainframes that previously hadn't been automated with other automation tools. The product worked like a dream with the mainframe automation.

We're trying to get rid of the boring, mundane tasks that people do every day so that they can spend more time doing more important things like figuring out why there are issues happening rather than just putting a Band-Aid on.

In our first year of jumping into it, we set up the infrastructure and everything, so it's been less of a year of development, but we have saved a hundred thousand hours.

The automation efficiency depends on what the job at hand is and how much it saves. But some of the tasks done constantly throughout the day, even if it's only saving five minutes, add up really fast. 

We use Task Capture all the time. We have a bank business analyst who uses it and teaches people how to use it. We're constantly getting process definition documents to review and add to our pipeline.  

Studio itself has all its great features and is easy to use. 

There are bugs here and there. My only complaint is that each time we open a new ticket, we get someone new and have to explain how everything is set up all over again. 

It would be nice if they had that somewhere on record for support.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

It is a stable solution; everything seems to be running pretty smoothly altogether. The biggest issues are not on the UiPath end, but on our company's end like, network issues and issues like that keep popping up every now and then.

The support's been pretty decent. We have a TAM, so we have someone we are constantly in contact with.

We meet with them weekly, and they're very helpful. If we do have to open up a support ticket, there's a bigger issue that they can't help with. They usually help get the ball rolling.

Support has been pretty helpful. Like any other support though, they ask all the basic questions in the beginning just to figure out what has or hasn't been done.

My only complaint is that each time we open a new ticket, we get someone new, and we have to explain how everything is set up all over again. So it would be nice if they had that somewhere on record.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. There's plenty of documentation that is easy to follow. 

The hardest part was more on our company's network and infrastructure, trying to navigate all the hoops that we have to go through just to make sure it's secure and the network's secure. Getting access to what we need to get access to.

We're still kind of new to things and working on migrating to the cloud. We're one small team in the organization. By moving to the cloud, we're hoping we can onboard more and more teams to be able to use it and spread it throughout the company.

UiPath helped us along the way. 

There are other automation tools that the company uses, but they can't do everything that UiPath can. All of the potential automations just kept being pushed to the side until we started using it.

We used Microsoft Automate for a very short time. We started looking into it for some tasks. The issue is that we're trying to automate it deep inside our corporate network, so, we haven't really been able to use Power Automate.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. The amount we could do in one year is pretty impressive. 

We use UiPath for automation.

As a consultant, we have been involved in many client projects and deployed UiPath using a hybrid model.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation.

UiPath's User Community is good.

UiPath helped us reduce our on-premises footprint.

UiPath helped us reduce human error.

UiPath's support for various types of interfaces is the most valuable feature as it aids in automating the end-user systems we want to streamline.

I would like to have the ability to make changes at different stages of the development process without having to start from the beginning each time.

Automating with UiPath is not as easy as it appears in the advertisements.

I have been using UiPath for seven years.

UiPath is stable, but not 100 percent reliable. I would rate its stability an eight out of ten. If we need to restart the project, open the file again, or close down the program and open something else, UiPath does not behave consistently every time.

UiPath is highly scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes around one month.

I give UiPath a seven out of ten.

Maintenance is required. We need to make changes to the code due to updates in the systems on which the automation is running. There are updates in the IT environments, such as operating systems, and also in the UI part. The newer features in UiPath bring new updates, and its components necessitate modifications to the code.

Our primary UiPath use case is reconciling data and getting data from the web and writing to either Excel or our system. The automations are very reliable. 

Task Capture is quite a helpful feature because it is easy to design a process flow with it. All you have to do is just capture it and then do the manual process. It then gives you the process flow and the process definition document, PDD, so it saves you a lot of time.

The database connectors I found are not fully free and expire after 30 days. That is something I would like looked at for MongoDB specifically. With regards to this, I was working on a project that needed a robot to read data from a MongoDB database. To achieve this, I used the CDATA ODBC driver because I couldn't find a direct Activity to achieve this from Studio. See the link to the CDATA ODBC driver for UiPath here https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/...

It would also be great to have UiPath Insights included in the free Orchestrator. The Insights module is currently only available for paid licenses. It would be great for developers to have it included in the free version because then we could try it out. 

I have been using UiPath since May 2018, and have recently worked with UiPath Process Mining. I am currently not very actively using this tool because the projects I'm on at the moment are using Power Automate. However, I do look at it once in a while.

UiPath is quite stable. I have not seen any inconsistencies come up because even exception handling is well set up in case of bad themes. Transformational processes are well managed, including exceptions, so that adds to the stability. Also, you can scale out from one bot to tens of thousands, so automation is quite easy with UiPath.

Very scalable

The initial UiPath setup is straightforward. You just go on the cloud, create an account, and you get the Orchestrator right away. From there, you can download the Studio. So once you build the automation, you just publish it from the Studio and you can run it. It's a very seamless process.

There is no need to hire an external team. You can do everything yourself. Also, the forum is quite busy and active. You can get a lot of helpful material there.

I cannot give actual figures, but I have seen a return on investment especially in processing invoices. It used to take us a week to read certain invoices into Excel but now it takes us only a day. So we are saving five Mondays in a week and 30 or 40 a month. 

From what I hear, UiPath's licensing costs are a bit high, but I can't evaluate that information because I haven't actually experienced the cost. We are using a free version at the moment. A good thing about the Community Edition is that they allow you to deploy even as a company as long as revenues are below $5 million I think.

I recommend automating the small processes in the Community Edition. This is the best way to evaluate how scaling would go within your organization. 

It is also important to fully understand what you want to automate. I also recommend trying the Process Mining feature to make sure you are able to pick up areas of automation within the organization's processes before committing to paying for automation. 

We primarily use the solution for interactions with customers. For those coming through the contact center, we are automating responses and actions.

The solution has improved the company in that when a customer needs to come in and have a consultation with an agent, it opens up a video conference to actually see the other end of the product, the full consultation, instead of being described over the phone. It makes the meetings much more effective.

One of the most valuable aspects of the solution is that we are able to automate a process that doesn't have an easy API or integration. It’s an easy way to complete an outcome without having to read another application.

I have seen a reduction in human error. The assumptions that agents were making previously via verbal communication compared to actually physically seeing something are now completely different.

UiPath has freed up employees' time. I don’t have the exact metric in relation to that, however. Also, this additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. We’re not chasing issues that can be seen physically, instead of trying to gain understanding by going back and forth via calling or email or chat.

It’s my understanding that UiPath has saved our organization money.

I have used UiPath's Academy courses. It has helped a lot in terms of helping users to understand the whole process. It goes under the hood to help users figure out how everything gets applied and then how we can write code as well. It gives a solid direction of what it takes to be a good developer.

There are definitely some changes I would like to see. I’d like to see, for example, more note code for applications. Some of the complexity of the scripting is hard. If note code was there, it would be easy to just scale it.

I've been using the solution for five to six months.

The stability so far has been good. We just have got to make sure that we don't change anything on the back end and adjust it. Right now, it's a critical path that we need to be aware of in needing adjustments. It offers a great interchange.

Scalability is good in terms of adding more RPA processes across the board. There's also a question of, when things change and adjust, how it reacts to those changes. Scalability can cause issues.

Right now, the number of people who use it in the organization is small. There are
maybe three or four engineers. It's used at a high level. There are more in-depth engineers that are involved with it.

Technical support has been pretty good for asking questions and giving responses. I'm not sure anyone would get a perfect ten out of ten, however, they are good. To be perfect, support would always have to have an answer and do all the work for me. 

The solution was chosen when I was brought on board. I'm not sure what was used previously.

That said, I am familiar with other RPA solutions. For example, Blue Prison is more foreign to me, compared to UiPath. Automation Anywhere seems very familiar from what I have seen, however, I don't really have a good understanding of all the theory, technically, except in terms of UiPath.

The initial setup started off as straightforward, however, it can easily get complex. For example, not knowing the other applications and what it takes to interact with them will make things a bit more complicated. Also, the APIs versus actually scripting information, especially when you're talking databases or backend reports, et cetera, gets complicated.

Our deployment took three months.

The CTO and development team were involved in the process of implementation.

We deployed the solution ourselves, internally.

We have yet to see an ROI, as we just started using the product.

The pricing, in comparison to others in the market, is fair. 

We don't scale that big. If we scaled larger, we might have different opinions about pricing. 

We have the solution on the cloud. It hasn't affected our footprint too much as we haven't really integrated too much at this point.

We use a mix of attended and unattended automation, however, for the most part, it's attended.

I would advise companies to train as many people as they can through the training portal and provide simple boxes and procedures to execute on things that are scalable components.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. A perfect ten can't happen. However, I'd rate it at a seven due to the fact that it's got the possibility of the cloud, which is great. While I don't have a problem with scalability, there's an issue around how much more it is going to cost. There's a question around scaling and ROI and if it is worth it. 

We used to maintain a lot of Excel sheets for lead generation and other activities. UiPath helped us to automate those processes and clear our workloads so that we could focus on other main tasks.

It saved a lot of time on tasks that could be quite redundant. Fetching data and maintaining the machines and regularly updating them. That's the only thing that I was using it for. Using UiPath saved me about 10 to 12 hours on a weekly basis.

It allowed me to delegate mundane tasks to personal automations and to focus on more important tasks. By not having to do tasks that don't add value or skills, I could focus on tasks that were more important and that added value to my skills or targets. That brings much more satisfaction.

Also, the ability for employees to delegate mundane tasks to personal automations meant that we did not have to hire a person dedicated to doing those particular tasks. We could use the tool to do those tasks. It helped save those costs. On that front it helped in business operations.

UiPath was quite useful in terms of getting data from thousands of webpages online and arranging it in a predefined format. You can easily create robots and define operations in UiPath.

I come from a non-technical background. You need a little bit of technical knowledge to use it. We had a demonstration of how to use the platform, but it's easy to use. It helps in automating tasks which otherwise you would have to do manually.

The desktop Assistant tool provides a personal automation launchpad so that you can easily access and run automations. That's important because you don't have to go to someone every time you face a problem, or every time you have to run an automation process. It helps make you independent so that you can do your own tasks.

Other things I like about it include:

• Its dashboard is quite easy to use and you don’t need to have a programming background to understand it.
• You can record screens in Excel and download it from the cloud.
• You can also get quite a load of data from the web and use it for your processes without any manual effort.
  

For me, it was quite an effective tool because I hadn't used any automation tool previously. It was quite new for me and it took time to adjust to it and understand it. At times, some processes took longer with the tool, initially. But when you do them on a regular basis, you understand it better and it takes much less time. Setting up the systems could be difficult initially. It would be better if it were more user-friendly for non-technical users.

I used UiPath for less than one year.

It's quite stable and reliable. We had no issues.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup of UiPath in our organization, but I think it took less than a month to deploy it. It's also an ongoing process after deployment. There are a lot of things that need to be done.

About 10 to 15 people were using it in our organization. The users were mainly in IT where they were using it for central management and other automation purposes.

The fact that we didn't have to hire a resource specifically for doing certain tasks is how the ROI could be calculated. It also saved time for the existing employees.

There is a trial version available. You can go for the trial version first and then buy it and scale it per your needs. Try this tool. Go for it. It's definitely worth a try. If yours is a large organization, try the Community Edition first to get the hang of it. After that, move on to its Enterprise version.

What I learned from using UiPath is that there are tools available in the market that can essentially make your life a lot easier. You don't have to worry about doing certain tasks, maintaining them, continuously updating them. Their backups are always available, even if you lose something. They are always easily accessible on any device.

We use it for financial use cases: purchase-to-pay processes, reconciliation processes, vendor payment, and merchant payments. This is just in finance. Then, we have retail order processing, order creation, PO generation, delivery note generation, and all those things in retail. We even have banking processes as well, such as a payments portal. We use it in most of the fields.

We don't use cloud licenses. Most of our licenses are on-prem.

We use both attended and unattended automation in UiPath.

We are partnered with UiPath. Sometimes, UiPath refers customers to us, bringing us business. We also give them business.

We have a third-party order processing portal, which keeps on changing its UI very often and has elements that keep on shuffling between the metadata. What we had in this case was the script running was shuffling the elements, and we are disabled that thing. Then, we used the selector technology instead. Selector technology is very important for all our UI-based processes. We rely on it. 

We used the AI Fabric functionality in one of our projects. We had to categorize users' reviews based on the sentiment scores. Everything was already available, including the model. So, we just have to click on all those things from UiPath now.

The new features that they are adding in, these are very different from other RPA tools in the market:

• AI Fabric
• Integration with different data models
• You can do all the data processing, data mining, etc., in the back-end UiPath. 
• You don't need a separate tool for data mining or other cognitive abilities. You can do all the cognitive abilities in UiPath. 
• UiPath Apps, which they're bringing in just now, is a really good thing. It has a good user interface.

Most RPA tools do not directly have these features. Also, we don't have to rely on other tools in order to develop these things. We can directly develop and integrate them with UiPath on one platform. So, we don't have to struggle within multiple platforms.

UiPath Apps is available only on Community. So, this was a best case scenario for us. It was pretty good. The only thing is that it has to be more advanced. Now, it is very basic. I would like more integration with the UI elements. It should be more user-friendly, especially if we go for any other application development. For example, in other UI development platforms, you can easily drag and drop to develop in a UI. However, it is a very initial phase for UiPath Apps, and maybe in the future, they might improve this.

We have used the Picture in Picture functionality for a few attended automations, where the user is monitoring or we are installing a new interface. Sometimes, in my experience, Picture In Picture is a bit buggy. It takes over your control, then the controls get mixed. That is one of few issues that I have found. Other than that, Picture In Picture works pretty well.

I had an instance when UiPath crashed on my computer. Then, the code that I was working on also crashed. This was a very crucial process for us, but we apparently didn't have a backup. UiPath also didn't have any way to recover that code. This was something which I found very strange, because ideally the source company should have a mainframe where they can recover a code. Or, if I give them a corrupted damage file, then they could easily recover that code. 

The stability is pretty good when we follow the best practices, i.e., whatever is in the REFramework. 

Scalability is something that we are still figuring out. RPA is something which we cannot do for everything, because there is a small gap between profit and the cost.

The support has been pretty good so far. The response time could improve, then it would be much better. However, once we get a ticket assigned to a technical person, then it is pretty straightforward. They are very fast, know their job, and know how to resolve the issue.

The on-prem setup is straightforward. There is very detailed documentation. We always get support from UiPath, so it is not difficult. I have never faced any issues, but I have only deployed on a small scale.

The timeline of the project depends on the project's complexity. Usually, the due diligence and everything else takes about two or three weeks. Then, the design takes another one or two weeks before we start with the development, depending on the inputs.

I get involved with small client setups.

There is a client-facing team of around 25 people who do due diligence and design work. There is also our back-end/technical delivery team, which includes mostly developers, a product project manager, project owner, and developer lead, who are there mostly for their technical abilities, not for their design abilities. 

The price of Orchestrator is pretty high in general as well as compared to other solutions, because Automation Anywhere does not charge for its Control Room.

We can develop our own packages and integrate them, which is pretty good. Other tools don't have that.

There are a lot of cons with Automation Anywhere, which we are using. They deployed a new version, 2019, which is very buggy, and they are still working on that. I don't know how or why they released it to the public. They did so much testing, but it is still buggy.

Power Automate (previously Softomotive) needs to improve on its UI. The ease of use is not there with this solution.

Go for it. It is a pretty good tool, which is straightforward and easy to use. They have training in place. Even if you are new to it, you can go ahead and learn to do it. 

They are bringing in new things. You can automate, integrate, and test things. It is even used for mobile testing. It is pretty good in that case. For most of people's use cases, UiPath will suffice for their use cases.

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