UiPath Platform Reviews

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are looking to update to version 20.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the use cases that I have recently completed is related to SAP and the interaction with Excel and our internal application. We are going with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP application and we used UiPath to help in this area, and were able to do so within a few days.

Some of our people are going for process automation and some are doing desktop automation.

It helps our developers learn and implement things faster.

Also, the UI Targets feature has helped us with some difficult situations. We were using other solutions for these situations but our company has moved away from them to using UiPath, and it's working very well. 

UiPath provides lots of integration to our ERP application and lots of new updates are coming out day by day. It helps us to automate our tasks.

We are using the solution's selector technology for UI automation. That is the most important feature for us. For example, one of the applications in our company is being updated day by day, by the development team. We use selector to make it dynamic.

We also use the latest version of the desktop Assistant tool for some queueing activity in UiPath Orchestrator. The tasks in the queue are continually updated and then they are run by robots. Using Assistant, we get a lot of information about our queues, like if something fails, for example. Also if a robot fails we get robot status-type information from the Assistant. The Assistant plays a good role because, if a process is going wrong, we have control. Using the Assistant we can stop that process. It is a most important feature from UiPath.

An area which the UiPath team is rapidly working on is machine learning and artificial intelligence. At the moment, it is a little difficult to understand. If they could add some more training on it in their Academy, it would help customers to learn about these features.

I have been using UiPath for the last eight months.

We only use the stable versions, regardless of whatever they are releasing, to avoid bugs and errors. In the stable versions, we have never found any issues or any bugs. If there is any issue, we have a team that will contact the UiPath team and we will get quick solutions. But so far, we have never had any problem or issues with a stable version of UiPath.

We use the Assistant to handle all the robots' actions. We are scaling and tracking it. That is very important for us. The scalability features of UiPath are awesome.

In the eight months I have been working with UiPath I have implemented seven or eight projects. Day by day we are increasing our usage of it, and UiPath is also increasing the product's features and adding technologies. That enables us to work on more projects, as it is easy to integrate.

We have been able to implement a lot of little projects. That is one of the reasons that it is cost-effective. In addition to the affordable price, it just takes a few days to develop solutions for these projects.

In India, a developer costs about 16,000 rupees per day. Using UiPath, all our projects have been done in 30 days. If we tried to do these little projects in another technology, they would be more costly because they would be more time-consuming.

Our company is based on automation. UiPath is the correct solution for this. It is cost-effective and has an affordable price.

UiPath is not the only technology we are using, but we are migrating to UiPath because it is cost-effective. The previous solution was Blue Prism, but for the little projects, it was not the right solution.

In addition, the Control Room is really required for other technologies, like Blue Prism, but there is no need for it with UiPath, because we manage and deploy it with our team only. We don't need to worry about the Control Room.

For the beginner the UiPath Academy has a lot of training available. It's important to go through the training. After the training you can easily work on any project in UiPath. So first of all, follow the training. For intermediate-level users, UiPath is the correct solution. These users just need to keep up to date, day by day, because the UiPath team is rapidly updating the features.

The Picture in Picture functionality for attended automations is a new feature. Up until now we have not used PiP, but we have some use cases for an internal project we are doing and are looking into it for the future.

We are using UiPath Automation Cloud, but we have not yet migrated our on-premises UiPath instance to it. We are thinking about the on-premise because it fully depends on our own enterprise. If we go to the cloud, we will be able to collaborate better with our team and what others, because it is "public."

We are using attended automation. I help drive a lot of products in UiPath. Now, we are using their data process mining and document understanding features. We are creating forms, then putting data on the forms, so our attended bots will work.

We use UiPath to resolve customer complaints by creating buttons that link to back-end integrations.

Employees can see information very quickly, reducing a lot of complications.

Uipth gives us as good speed and accuracy to improve all the bot la performance.

I like the document understanding feature. It gives us more accuracy. 

The AI and machine learning features are very useful for us.

UI Targets enabled us to quickly build automations within multiple applications, even without the right connectors. For example, we can drag and drop Outlook activities.

We use UiPath selector technology is a wonderful feature, especially compared to other RPA tools.

From mobile applications, we use Orchestrator where we can monitor processes and share them. 

Need more AI and Machine learning build technology and integration of 3rd party applications. Need some improvements in orchestrator

We have been using it for around two years.

5,000 people are using UiPath.

Any queries that we have, we can go onto their forums. If there are issues, we can contact their support and they will resolve them.

We have used Automation Anywhere, which is complex to understand. 

The initial deployment was not complex.

I will rate the level of expertise is 9(out of ten)

The attended automation has saved us time.

The pricing is average; it is not too high nor too low.

Its speed is better than other RPA solutions. They release more updates, details, and features compared to their competitors. 

We can learn from UiPath Academy.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10).

We're mainly focused on finance for the time being so we've used UiPath for invoice processing and e-billing reconciliation. It makes sure that all of our converting information matches within our client databases. We've done a couple of solutions that track budget spend for certain clients, making sure that if the budget overruns or comes close to overrunning, then someone gets notified. If we get a new client or if a new legal case is opened, automation can make sure that all that information is then uploaded into our database. 

We've done a couple of smaller automations for the legal teams. These have been fairly basic ones though. There were a couple that download files from an email for them, and then rename them with the correct naming conventions, and saves them into correct drives. 

Another use case is to remove outdated users or information from our databases in line with the GDPR system.

In a general sense, UiPath has helped with data lineage, understanding where a process starts, who it rests with, and where it ends. It has made the process that we have automated a little bit more clear of which parts of the process are necessary, which are the parts that hold up the whole process, and which are the ones that are needlessly complicated.

For starters, it just helps give a bit more of an understanding of our processes once they're automated. Secondly, it's changed the way that we approach problems. We're tied into contracts that we might necessarily not want to be, but because we rely on the solution, we don't have a choice. Whereas, because UiPath is so versatile, we can use that to fill in gaps to take over processes, which otherwise in the past, we thought that only one specific tool could do for us. Now, we feel like we'd be less reliant on these specific tools to do a specific job. 

Third, a lot of teams are starting to understand that things can be automated. Whether it's in finance, HR, or even the legal teams, we started speaking to all the different teams and now they're bringing work to us and they're getting an understanding of things that do need to be done by a person and which don't. People aren't just doing work for the sake of it now. If they think there isn't a point to something and it can be automated, they bring it to us and we automate it. So, it's changed the way that we look at processes and don't just hardheadedly get someone to do it for no reason.

It checks our invoice stage for one of the processes that we do for e-billing. Previously, there wasn't anyone to check the financial data that we have in our systems against our clients and our recipients, and making sure that it all matches up. That process wasn't done at all so a month or two months later, a client would come back to us and say, "Hang on, you billed a strong amount or you've put our billing address wrong" which is obviously a little embarrassing. These things went completely unobserved for months. The client had to chase us, complain, and tell us we needed to fix it. Whereas now, it's more of a proactive approach rather than waiting for clients to come to us and tell us that we've done something wrong. We actually have the automation that can check and then validate those mistakes before they're even a problem and before they're spotted by anyone.

We're still in the early stages but we are starting to reach the point where UiPath is speeding up the cost of our digital transformation.

The digital transformation has made a couple of the lawyers' jobs easier by getting rid of the admin staff. It's freed up time and it makes things easier for everyone.

UiPath has definitely reduced our processing times as well. It really depends on the process but it has sped up. 

It has also decreased our error rates. At the moment we're looking to purchase an orchestration platform. At that point, we'll be able to collect more information about exact numbers and we'll actually have the analytics. 

The ability to use APIs within UiPath is really helpful. The web scraping is really great. It's so easy to use, it's very intuitive, and it's usually pretty consistent. When web pages change you need to update it, but it makes it quick. If you need to do another quick process, it's really easy to get it quickly and set something up. I can just scrape data from a website and save it somewhere.

The ease of building automation depends. UiPath makes things that are fairly simple but looks a little bit tricky in another language really easy. But if you're trying to do something really complicated, then sometimes it can be a little bit more tricky. It depends, sometimes it's really simple for fairly basic automations, I think it's fantastic. But when you want to try and get into the nitty-gritty and try and write your own code and then stick in there, it can sometimes be a bit difficult to use.

The documentation can be a little bit lacking. I think they improved it a little bit last month. Last time I checked, it seemed like they spent a bit of time trying to improve it. Sometimes some of the processes are nicely documented. UiPath offers training, which they provide on their website. They teach you how to use it, but for some processes, it just seems like the documentation isn't really there. It makes it a little bit difficult when you're using a specific process from the first time. 

If you're trying to invoke a method in UiPath, if you're trying to write a C# in there directly,  or if you need to do something which can't really be done in UiPath, but it can be done in C# or Python or something else, sometimes it's not that intuitive. It can be a little bit more complicated than it needs to be. I think that integration with other languages could be a little bit better.

We have been using UiPath permanently for around eight months, but we've been using it in-house for about a year before that.

UiPath itself is very stable because it interacts with so many different applications. I noticed in the past, at times, when using it with browsers, for example, using it with Google Chrome or Firefox, occasionally Chrome or Firefox will update and UiPath can take sometimes a week or two to update with it. For that week, you're able to use any solution that involves Google Chrome or Firefox, because it's waiting for that update. I've seen that happen with a couple of different applications, not as much recently. UiPath itself is very stable because it can interact with anything. If anything is updated and UiPath doesn't have time to update drivers to match that, sometimes you can get left a little bit stuck.

It's not really easy when you're using orchestrator to scale up and create a server, add a new bot, get a new license, and get it running. 

At the moment, it's just me using UiPath. I'm a developer and the architect for the solution as well. But we're planning to expand the team next year. 

We have a couple of processes that are running constantly, so I think we're using it as much as we can, and as much as our licenses allow. We're at a point now where we need an orchestrator to keep track and run everything at the same time. We're in the process now of purchasing that. I'll see where we're moving to, to expand quite far beyond that after we've got it. We're just at the point of ramping up.

I've sent a couple of requests to support when we needed licenses and when we changed to a different computer or a different user, and they got back to us really quickly and solved it within a day or so. I've been pretty happy with UiPath so far. I think every time I've sent a request to them, it's been resolved pretty quickly, and even if they couldn't resolve it super quick, the response times are usually within 24 hours or so, which is really good. I can't remember a time where we've been stuck in the dark with them.

I've used Automation Anywhere, but I haven't really used it within my work.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I implemented UiPath for a couple of years before I came to my current company. It was quite easy, but even the first time it's always been quite easy and quite simple to implement.

The initial setup only took a couple of days to get it all installed properly and cleared with IT. In terms of getting the first process up and running, it took about a week or two because we already had a couple of processes that were available. That's just a case of tweaking them, making sure they're all okay, and then just getting them set up and getting more packaged up.

Our initial strategy was mainly to focus on finance and to try and reduce the outsourced headcount with a couple of the finance teams. We outsource a lot of our work to a couple of other companies and we want to reduce the cost of that, so I automate it in-house. Our other strategy was to try and free up as much time for our lawyers as possible to make sure they weren't bogged down with work. It gives them more time to focus on the clients and work up better relationships with them.

We're still looking at the process that we've automated and seeing how much time and money we're saving with this crisis, but we don't have that information at the moment.

The pricing is pretty fair. Sometimes the pricing can be a little bit strange. There are different prices if it's for a specific user, a specific PC or if it's an attended bot or unattended bot. The price can be quite different, but I think when you talk to UiPath or when you look at the pricing sheets, there's not always a justification of why a certain license is more expensive than another. 

Licenses are more expensive than another but I wonder why there's such a big difference, why attended is four times more expensive, and that sort of thing. In terms of the orchestrator, I think it was a bit too much. It used to cost about 20,000 pounds a year. Now, they are ramping up costs. If you get an orchestrator but with just a few blocks, it's cheaper and then you can add up more parts to the orchestrator. So the cost goes up, which I think is better.

Definitely to try and get as many teams involved as possible to open up the conversation about RPA within the business. It works best when you've got lots of teams who have an understanding of RPA and how it works. They can come to you with their potential projects and you can filter through them and see which ones are going to be the most helpful.

It's hard if no one else in the business really knows RPA or how it works, or if there's a bit of a wall there. It's important to introduce RPA to as many different teams as possible and to encourage people to get involved, think about the processes that they do in it, and try to identify what can be helpful.

It's important to keep RPA close to the applications and the IT teams because if you're using RPA or UiPath you're going to need to be able to be speaking to your team who need permissions or admin privileges, or you need apps to be updated. It's important if you're going to put it in, have it as close to apps and development as possible.

It's a case of understanding that it's not a case of trying to get everything automated that you possibly can. The goal shouldn't just be to automate everything. If you've got a process and you can do 99% of it automated but you can't automate the last 1%, you can but it's going to be really fairly inefficient. Understand that it's fine for a process to have some bits that are automated, some of which are done by a person. The hybrid workforce, rather than going into the strategy of just automating everything is ideal. I've learned that trying to find that balance and getting that communication between the two is good.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We are a UiPath customer, working with them to develop some products. It is a bit of a mixed thing where we are developing some products with them from scratch, but they are acting as the provider. We develop things, and if they're useful for others, then others can use them.

We are doing some pretty bespoke things to help us develop some solutions, but also help them develop their UI solutions in the legal area. We are working on a few things with UiPath to develop some search robots, some solutions to automatize subcontracts, and some timekeeping entries. These are several things that we are doing right now.

We are doing three things with them:

1. A robot to help us with software for time management, automating time entries. 
2. A robot to help us with filling in our engagement letters (contracts). 
3. A robot to help us with various public searches, i.e., the automation of searches of the public record.

We are adjusting robots from similar things that they do. The robots are not yet in production. 

The most valuable feature is its ability to save time with a task. In general, it improves accuracy as well.

UiPath's ease of use for automating our company's processes is a five out of five. We have found it very easy to talk to them, identifying what can be done along with the potential use cases. They have been very good at guiding us through what is realistic at this point, how their robots could help us save time and improve accuracy, and how our users can engage with their robots, e.g., ensuring that users engage with the robots and use their product. 

When we started to talk about practical implementation, their team was extremely switched onto identifying and fitting their product to our needs. They explained to us how we can use their products, what can be done to adapt their product, and what may happen sometime in the future, not necessarily now. I found this very helpful and straightforward.

What we have in mind in terms of what the robots could do for us is significantly more than what UiPath does now, but it takes more work. From my perspective, there is just a wide scope of implementation that goes beyond what we're starting right now. That is essentially the improvement. While I have nothing negative to say about our experience with them so far, I think we can work to develop more complex products with them. They are already working to develop something for our use cases, but what I would like is if we could develop more things for more complex needs, e.g., where we start with simpler stuff, then we can add things to what we're doing now.

We are in the development phase.

It is too early. We are still in development.

During the development phase, there are five people involved in the development phase. The users will be about 100.

We have not used their support.

We were not previously using something in this area. 

We have been thinking about ways to streamline our activities using technology. It happens that we knew UiPath, so we started to engage with them about what they could do for us. We had something like 20 ideas that we could implement, then we just started the easier ones which were closer to the products that they have. As things go, we will see whether we expand to other things.

We have known UiPath quite well and for a long time. They are also the leaders in the field, so it was a very easy choice.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We started to discuss potential solutions, then we met with parts of their team, developing that business area. After that, we met with the technical people designing the product. We had a couple of initial conversations and did some testing. It has been extremely simple and straightforward.

We are supposed to review some of their proposals and provide feedback. We are probably a week or two away from production.

UiPath could have probably implemented the solution in a couple of weeks. We had some delays on our side.

We did the initial setup ourselves.

It is important for whatever we implement that it's cost effective in a sense that the robots will replace some human time. If human time costs less than the robot, then that's not a good deal. Normally, human time will cost more than a robot, and that's what we're trying to displace: the human time. We want to replace it with a cheaper robot. 

We only looked at UiPath, because we know them quite well.

So far, the experience has been excellent. I would rate the solution 10 out of 10, but we haven't finished the implementation.

Look internally what your needs are. Try to identify what you could improve with software robots, ensuring these needs are clearly identified and the product is fit for purpose. Also, you should make sure there will be buy-in in the organization, so people will actually use the product.

We have developed a product for a court of arbitration. UiPath provides the automation engine behind it. Our product is a platform that is live online. It allows a party to provide some contract information, and the robot assembles a document and communicates with DocuSign, our signature provider. It then sends out a correspondence to the other party and manages the signature process for a bespoke contract for an arbitration agreement.

This is a service that we provide to the world, pro bono, as it were, to promote arbitration and the adoption of a particular arbitration clause. It's accessible to all. Parties can log in and it helps them to negotiate and conclude an arbitration agreement in a mediated fashion. The robot sends out email on behalf of a third-party, a court of arbitration, and it helps the parties get that agreement done.

It's about concluding an arbitration agreement before the dispute goes any further.

It helps us in providing added value to the clients and to the community at large. It's a marketing thing for us, in the widest possible sense, rather than something that we use in our practice.

But in terms of reducing the cost of digital transformation, if a person had to do what the robot does, it would probably be impossible. It would be impossibly costly. If one person had to handle the communication, instead of the robot, and try to negotiate each addendum, nobody would do it because it would take days or weeks for a lawyer to manage, and it would be prohibitive. Yet, all of a sudden, we have this service that is so cheap in many ways that it can even be provided for nominal user fees. It's quite dramatic.

I would also imagine that processing time is reduced by many orders of magnitude. As a professional, if I had to manage an addendum like that, it would take me weeks. And it takes about seven minutes or so, if all goes well.

What I have found interesting is that our product acts as a human would but it's not intrusive. It doesn't require any real integration or interface with one's own systems, in any meaningful way. Obviously, you need access, an account to log in, but it otherwise acts as a human, and that makes deployment quite smooth. It doesn't require you to change anything in your system. I found that very useful.

Regarding the ease of building automations, I'm not sure how it's done because I'm not a programmer myself, but it's great. Just looking at how fast they moved once we had the program settled in — it was quite fast. For this particular process, which is assembling a document, talking to DocuSign, sending out emails, and so on, the deployment of production was like "today." It was quite quick.

In terms of the ease of management of automations using UiPath, I don't dare poke into it, as a non-technical person, but it looks manageable. I have someone who does not do RPA normally, who doesn't do this type of programming at all, but that person knows where to look for errors and doesn't get lost. It's reasonably accessible.

I could use more standardized features, retail-style, things that I could use off-the-shelf. Right now, all this requires quite a bit of adaptation in bespoke work with UiPath, which they've done very well. But looking at it after having used it, I would get stuff that is prepackaged from them, if they were any.

We launched with UiPath in June.

The stability of the solution is okay. 

The downside of the upside, when I said that it works like a human, is that in some cases, if it interacts with a website that is changing, then it's like a human. You need to adapt it to the changing environment in which it works. That's an inevitable fact of life, that it interacts with other apps. It can also interact through APIs, but you want it to be very flexible, you want it to be an agent, like a human. The downside of that is that if something changes with a website, then of course, you have to change the robot and tweak it a little bit. But that's the only issue that has required our attention so far.

Our product is a public-facing instrument and we have had no problem with the number of users, so we have not seen any issues with scalability.

In terms of potentially increasing our use of UiPath, we're exploring a number of solutions actually, for practice management and actual lawyer work. These would be in-house solutions, rather than public-facing. We have a few ideas that we have run by them and we are waiting for feedback.

We've had no problem with the customer support. We were in direct contact with the whole team. They have always been quick to respond. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

We would use regular Microsoft automation features. I would have a flag on a particular correspondence, or a particular rule for attachments. We would use little bits and bobs of automation that are available, but we did not have any bespoke solution.

We went with UiPath because they made themselves known in the sector and it was a question of the vision that they communicated. There was a modest vision of providing solutions to very discrete problems, not revolutionary solutions to everything. Rather, they focused on whatever helps in a particular organization. We liked that. It matched our understanding of legal tech as well. It needs to be supportive of whatever little bit of help you need, rather than providing you with an environment that engulfs you with everything. We liked that approach, and when we approached them they were very receptive.

The initial setup process was okay. I'm a non-technical person, but I was able to manage it. 

It took quite a bit to figure out what we wanted from it, the flow and the logic of it. After we agreed on that, on the concept, actual production took two or three days. Of course, somebody had already done a proof of concept, although that was not based on a final brief. We danced around and changed it a bit.

For maintenance, we have somebody in tech that we pop questions to, and our maintenance of the server is done in-house as well.

We have realized return on our investment. It was a joint project with UiPath so we had special arrangements in terms of licensing, but it was very well received in the market. It was very beneficial for us.

Our product is something that we launched in June, and the robot has been featured in general business publications, in the Kluwer Arbitration Blog, and the Resolver, which is the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators magazine, as well as the Romanian Arbitration Journal. Essentially, everybody knows about it. It is one of the most popular UiPath robots out there; the most featured and interviewed robot in the wild. We were quite pleased with the publicity.

My advice is to think about it very carefully and know exactly what everybody is doing every day in the office, the little bits and pieces. Really look at that seriously, because there are so many things that we do in a software environment that are very amenable to automation, and it saves a lot of time. Think very carefully about the particular needs of your office and look into it, because it can save you a lot of money.

It's clear that this is the future.