UiPath Platform Reviews

I am a service provider and developer who implements UiPath for our clients. But in the company that I work for, we also use UiPath to make invoices for ourselves and, mainly, for payroll activities.

We need to get reports from our HR tool and combine them with another source of information where employees are recording the hours they spent with various clients. We then create the documents needed for the IRS. In our case, all the users of UiPath are data entry specialists in different departments, such as HR, finances, and marketing.

UiPath definitely helps reduce the cost of digital transformation.

It also reduces human error. We can be sure, given that our test case is successful, that there are no errors when none are reported. This definitely helps businesses. Errors generally lead to work being postponed. When errors come back to someone at a given point in time, they can rapidly overwhelm that person. With automation working, this is no longer the case because everything is smooth. And if there are errors, they will resolve them one by one.

In addition, it definitely frees up employee time. That is the purpose of automation. Unfortunately, I can't share metrics about this. But the additional time enables employees to focus on more important work and that affects employee satisfaction. Repetitive tasks make people irritated about the nature of their work. When they can work on new tasks that are more complex and creative, it makes an impact on their job satisfaction.

UiPath saves costs in our organization because we don't have errors where it is deployed and because it has reduced the number of FTEs who do repetitive tasks. On average, within a small company, it can save up to 10 FTEs.

One of the most valuable features is that UiPath is easy to deploy, especially for medium-sized companies. It is also easy to scale.

Also, the fact that you can scale automations without having to pay attention to the infrastructure for doing so is quite critical. The infrastructure could require a lot of maintenance resources and affect costs, so that feature is quite important.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation, with its full range of tools, starting from Automation Hub, which is the initial point for gathering your processes from business lines. It's driven from employees or a center of excellence, and goes on to include implementation, and the reporting in Orchestrator is quite powerful as well. The end-to-end coverage is important, as clients always like one tool that covers their needs and plans.

The only thing missing is something to track the development cycle. We use third-party tools to do that. That is the only gap in UiPath.

Also, scheduling of UiPath robots could be improved. Scheduling is a feature for defining in what sequence, and on what machines, you want your automations to be launched. That area could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for more than three years.

Overall, the stability of UiPath is about average. We do have some instability, because of workloads that are too massive for Orchestrator, but it could be that it was not installed in the right way.

Scalability is connected to the stability. The situation I noted when talking about the stability of UiPath happened for our largest client, where they already have 160 processes running. There are problems with the maintenance of such a large number of bots.

But in terms of increasing our usage, we are in a phase with our clients in which we are constantly enlarging the automation within their companies.

UiPath support is definitely willing to help. They will usually propose a call, if they think that will be easier for solving an issue. Their services are quite good.

We did not have a previous solution, except for Excel macros.

It is relatively easy to deploy. Of course, it's not as straightforward as a simple application installation, but with the help of UiPath, in particular, or with the help of the UiPath Community Forum, which is quite enhanced with answers about installation, it's not a big deal to install it.

Taking into consideration internal IT restriction and internal IT resources, deployment can take up to two weeks.

Our deployment strategy usually involves convincing clients that they need to start setting up a center of excellence for automation and then there are lots of initiatives that need to be undertaken within the center of excellence. Among the most critical are awareness, dealing with IT stakeholders, and of course, the capabilities of developers. Taking care of those things will lead you to a smooth path for digitizing the first processes, which are low-hanging fruit. The further you go, the more you can then enhance your automation with the more advanced capabilities, like AI, Document Understanding, or chat bots, et cetera.

Deployment of one robot takes about three months and up to five people. We need an SME who knows the process that is being automated. In addition, there is usually a business analyst who tries to help optimize the process so that it will work better with robots. We need a developer, of course, and we usually have a data solution architect who helps to ensure that overall infrastructure is functioning. It also helps to have an automation evangelist on the business side.

We have two roles for UiPath maintenance. One is the IT maintenance guy who makes sure the VM is working correctly, and that we can easily scale from the infrastructure perspective. The second role is the operator, whose day-to-day tasks include scheduling the bots correctly, implementing quick deployments by creating assets in Orchestrator, and maintaining things from an RPA perspective.

ROI usually takes six to 12 months.

Licensing is quite complex, and sometimes that's true even when we have to explain it to our customers. There may not be a way to do it more simply.

The only potential additional cost when implementing UiPath involves the third-party tools. It can be a quite big portion, of course, so you should consider that aspect. Examples would be integrating different systems within a company, systems such as Salesforce, SAP, or ServiceNow; all of the main CRMs that businesses use.

We looked at the main competitors, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. The decision to go with UiPath was based on contacts we have, clients who had already implemented RPA. We got better feedback about UiPath from them.

The first thing to consider within your organization is whether it's easier to deploy it on-prem or via the cloud version. Then focus on how to structure your development team. It can be either entirely a third-party service provider, or in-house developers, or it could be a hybrid. The third thing to consider is what the cost center will be for RPA implementation in your company.

The marketing side of how easily you can build automations with UiPath is a bit exaggerated. You definitely need some programming skills to do very powerful automations with it. But it still provides various levels of development tools, meaning that you could have zero programming experience and still automate some processes in your company.

UiPath is definitely the market leader in RPA. The biggest lesson I have learned from using it is to start with the low-hanging fruit, and then go on to more complex stuff.

I am currently involved in healthcare-related projects and wholesale/retail-related projects. Previously, I was involved with banking and financial services, healthcare, and retail.

My current company is using a combination of the UiPath tool and SAP automation.

In my previous company, I used the UiPath tool for many projects.

It has a very easy drag and drop process and logic base setup. Previous projects were taking a lot of time. However, when we used UiPath on the same projects, instead of a process/task taking a day, it was now taking anywhere from 10 minutes to five hours.

There is almost no human involvement. For example, in banks, a bank manager will receive so many loan applications. We create some bots to check the requirements after validation and do the follow-up work. The manager is only checking boxes for the final approval request.

In the banking sector, I am using AI Center and creating some workflows. Some machine learning is needed to create these workflows in AI Center. This gives us a 94% accuracy, which is good accuracy.

Document Understanding is a good feature. It is a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning. We have created some workflows using Document Understanding. We are using its machine learning to do some language analysis, semantic analysis, and invoice processing. UiPath currently provides some language conversions, such as German to Russia and Russian to German. However, it does not offer Russian to German, English to German, German to English, Russian to English, and English to Russian as well as some non-trainable languages.

Document Understanding has been one of the best features for invoice processing. For example, companies require some keywords in invoices. While normal frameworks take much of time, we upload the invoices using Document Understanding, then determine the keywords required for cross referencing. The cross reference is very fast. It will capture the amount and put that in an Excel format. This is a very good feature.

A valuable feature of UiPath has been the REFramework. In banking, we need to log in to the website with a user ID and password. Once, we did that wrong and the workflow stopped. Using REFramework, there is exception handling. Stability depends on the correct configuration of error handling, so this is the best feature. 

It has some Citrix recording options.

The AI Center feature has been very good. It supports many machine learning languages and skills. It speeds execution and provides a good savings on time.

I like the certifications offered by UiPath Academy.

I would like UiPath to give free trial licenses for more features, like AI Center. UiPath currently offers two licenses for the trial version. However, if I need to practice in AI Center, then I need four to six licenses.

I have been using UiPath since 2018.

The stability is very good.

There are no limitations for Windows.

We have over 500 activities in UiPath right now.

I haven't used the technical support so much. My colleagues use it sometimes, depending on their problem. The speed of their response depends on the type of plan, normal or enterprise, that needs support. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

There is also social media support through Twitter and LinkedIn.

The user community is very good. I am a member. If a developer has any doubts when working on a project, then a lot of people in the community are ready to give immediate answers.

Positive

We have faced challenges when installing market-related data. We need to dig deep when we are installing it with Orchestrator and/or VMware. All the documentation is available, but it needs to be prepared in advance. Whereas, we work in real-time.

I have been involved with many client installations for UiPath and Orchestrator. We do standalone installations for single node and multi-node systems, like Linux. Linux is not fully supported, as compared to Windows. UiPath deploys well on Windows.

My previous company had good ROI using UiPath compared to other tools.

UiPath Academy is free of cost.

The UiPath Community Edition is enough to implement any complex workflows.

The price for attended robots is good.

Some features are very costly, like Document Understanding. That is why in India many customers are not using the Document Understanding license. This is a premium feature and its licensing costs are high compared to other tools.

Compared to other tools, UiPath provides a good, rich environment.

I am using AutomationEdge, which is similar to UiPath, but a small tool. It provides the same features as UiPath, but it is not as popular a tool. The UiPath Academy videos are very good and better than those offered by AutomationEdge. While AutomationEdge also has a free learning course, you must watch their videos from start to finish. UiPath has no restrictions on its learning, which is good and the best option. For example, when you are an advanced learner, you want to go to advanced training courses. However, AutomationEdge makes you start from scratch, even as an advanced user of RPA.

Some processes are faster in AutomationEdge than in UiPath for insurance-related organizations.

I am also using Automation Anywhere, which is a popular tool in comparison to UiPath. However, feature-wise, UiPath is easier to use because Automation Anywhere requires complicated coding knowledge, though some of their features are very good. While UiPath requires some coding knowledge, it is not as high level as Automation Anywhere.

UiPath is the number one tool in my opinion. I would recommend choosing UiPath for someone looking to purchase an automation tool for the first time.

UiPath has very good accuracy. I would overall rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

I am an RPA developer and I am using UiPath to create both attended and unattended bots.

I develop bots that run doing overnight tasks and we can check the results in the morning.

UiPath allows us to scale without having to worry about the infrastructure. It is simple to scale any of the automations that you develop. 

UiPath makes it easy to build automations. It is very user-friendly and they provide all of the courses in the UiPath Academy. We can learn starting with the basics, and it is really simple. One person needs between two weeks and one month to learn it.

This solution provides us with the ability to do end-to-end automation, starting with the discovery phase and process mining. After that, we move to the building page where we have Studio X, and then we can deploy the automation on the cloud.

UiPath has helped us to scale RPA benefits by automating the backup of all of the projects running in the organization. This bot runs every night and reduces our workload for one employee by eight hours, or one day each week. 

UiPath handles all of the infrastructure updates and maintenance, which is really good.

The cloud offering has helped us to see time to value quicker. It has helped us in many ways, including with the automation of repeated tasks. One example is that I created a bot for myself that is responsible for filtering all of the spam emails from my inbox on a daily basis, and then removing them. The first step is the identification and the second step is removing them. This saves me time.

The automation cloud has helped us to reduce the total cost of ownership because we can manage everything through Orchestrator.

UiPath has definitely reduced the percentage of human errors that we have in our processes. In our system, all of the bots follow our best practices so there is a very small chance of error. The reduction in error rate depends on the process. For example, the OCR is not very accurate so the errors are higher but if the process involves an API or SQL queries then it is very good.

This product has helped to reduce the cost of our automation operations. There is more of an upfront cost but it is one-time, and then we start saving.

The best feature is the good community support that is provided in the UiPath forum.

I like that it is a cloud version and runs on Citrix. I used the cloud offering to deploy my bots and manage my Orchestrators.

It would be very helpful for us if they provided more business use cases and helped us to learn them.

We have been using UiPath for almost two years.

There are times when you need to shut down the automation and restart it. Other than that, it is very stable.

I am the only one developing the bots but I am currently training some other people who are just learning it.

To this point, we have not had to scale any of our projects. Our usage of it depends on the project and where we can use automation.

When other features and updates are released, we normally visit the forum to help understand them. I have never used technical support.

I have also tried using Automation Anywhere.

Each solution has different types of bots that are available. One of the differences is that with UiPath, you have Orchestrator to help you manage them.

Generally speaking, UiPath is easier to understand.

The initial setup is not complex. It is easy to deploy and the actual setup of UiPath is not very difficult. It is a matter of downloading the Studio and creating an account in the Orchestrator. Then, you can start working.

My IT team was responsible for the initial setup. Only one person was needed to complete it.

I take care of all of the maintenance.

I am using the Community Edition and am not familiar with the cost of the paid editions.

We do not yet use the AI functionality but I know that it is there.

I have watched some videos on the UiPath apps feature, which lets us create automations in a low-code/no-code fashion. We have not used it yet but this is something that we'll be exploring in the future.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using this solution is that they have a very good community forum, where you can share ideas and learn from other RPA developers.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to start by taking the fundamental UiPath courses from the UiPath Academy. This will help to understand RPA and UiPath.

In summary, this is a good product and I'm quite satisfied with all of the functionality that it provides.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution offers pretty good analysis capabilities.

The solution ensures there is proper documentation throughout the process.

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

UiPath is a low-cost platform.

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

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

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

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

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

You do need some coding experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have not used any other solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).