UiPath Platform Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using it for two years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are seeing a good ROI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use it to reduce manual effort and to increase accuracy and on-time implementation. We perform end-to-end automation, since we are a company where SAP is used very widely. We use UiPath for SAP automation.

We develop both attended and unattended solutions. We're using the platform as a service and it's hosted on-premises.

So far, we have 15 bots in production. As a result, we are saving a lot of time, although I don't have a figure right now, as well as a lot of effort. We are also able to provide timely delivery to our customers, so the automations have been generating a lot of buzz here.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA in our organization by automating processes that require human-robot collaboration. An example is our invoices that have data that needs to be scanned. The scans we were receiving did not have the accuracy that we were looking for. We also had a hard time getting the results through OCR. With the help of attended automation, we are able to have users verify data when the bot is running. Once the verification is done, the bot will perform the rest of the actions.

UiPath also definitely helps us with process analysis.

Although I have not used it yet, they have recently introduced a feature which brings more accuracy to the selectors, using the image and the selectors themselves. I feel that will be good. When we are creating selectors, there are elements that it's hard to get at, or there are times when the selectors get changed for some reason. The new feature should make it easier to work with in these situations.

They have also recently added a feature for attended automation, Picture in Picture, which is also nice to have. It's helpful because you don't want to just sit back and let the bot run and not work during that attended automation. Using the PiP feature, you can have it running on your desktop without having to interrupt it to your work.

I would also compliment them on the UiPath Academy, the learning platform that they have built. It contains everything that a developer or architect or tester or, anyone who is looking to benefit from an RPA, would need. It's all there on their platform. It helps speed up onboarding employees to UiPath. When I joined this company, I had prior experience with the RPA and UiPath. But two of my colleagues, who were working on test automation, didn't have that kind of experience. The Academy helped them to get started. We aligned quickly, once their fundamental developer training was done through the Academy. The Academy helped them align with the current practices of UiPath and RPA.

One area that needs improvement is monitoring. I know there are tools that let us see what a bot is actually doing on the virtual machines. If we could get that kind of offering from UiPath that would be great, because when a bot is running on the machine, we don't know what it's doing. Although we have programmed it, there are times when something causes a bot to fail. During such instances, the bot behaves differently when we run it in attended mode than it does in unattended mode. It would be great to have a feature where we could see, on a screen, what the bot is currently doing.

We started this UiPath journey two years back. 

I act as a UiPath lead because I joined early and I have some prior experience with it. There are three other people in India, and one more in the U.S, who use it in our company. The one in the U.S. does the managerial stuff and it's the developers who are in India. Then we have the business users for each of the bots and they also use UiPath. And we have a set of about 20 users who use the attended solution that we have provided to them.

Robots on the SAP system seem stable, but on the web they sometimes lack stability. Still, it's not a very common occurrence and I have overcome any issues with the help of the Trilogic. For example, we had an issue while getting an email from Outlook. A UiPath robot is not able to do that. It will time out. With the help of the Trilogic, we were able to overcome that.

Initially you have to put some effort in to obtain stability and then it is mostly stable. Some maintenance is required, but that's most probably when requirements change, or to add to the stability, but it's not a lot overhead right now for us.

It's highly scalable, in both development terms as well as business terms. We have the capability to add on robots. We can add to the VDI or machine anytime we want. They have put some serious thought into the scalability, when it comes to giving support to developers as well as the business.

We plan to increase our usage of UiPath. We have a lot of things in the pipeline. We have almost finalized on providing RPA as a service, something that we will offer internally. Right now, we are giving this free of cost to our customers who are the business people. We did so to get some attention and to create some interest in the tool. Now that we have almost finalized this as a service, we are going to involve business analysts who will be helping us to find more RPA use cases and finalize more RPA solutions. That means our usage will increase. We're still in an early phase.

I haven't had the chance to interact much with the technical support because the forum has so much information. If I browse through the forum, I will most probably get an answer. So I haven't needed to go to the technical support for any answers.

We have both test automation and UiPath working in parallel. Test automation has been here for the long-term, something like 10 or 15 years. The two guys who work with me, who didn't have prior UIPath experience, are working on that. That part mostly requires maintenance, and they now mostly work on UiPath development. So although we had a test automation solution, we didn't have a business automation solution. That is why we went with UiPath. It gives us an edge in business automation.

The initial setup of UiPath was pretty straightforward. I didn't find anything unusual or complex.

We went through an upgrade recently. We have dedicated cloud architects who helped us do it. We got instructions how to do it from UiPath support and we conveyed those instructions to our cloud architects and they performed it at their end to get UiPath cloud upgraded. Upgrading didn't take much time. It was done within half an hour.

One more feature that is useful is that earlier, we didn't have the option for a concurrent-user license. With the help of the concurrent-user license, we can save on licensing costs while running multiple bots under the same license.

If you are going to implement UiPath, my advice would be to look at how you are going to gather the requirements and how you're going to manage the requests for UiPath. 

Also, get some low-hanging fruit first, before going into the complex automations. That way, if you are new, the low-hanging fruits will generate confidence in the solution. Once that kind of confidence is generated, you can move ahead with the complex automations and complex solutions.

Go through the UiPath Academy extensively. They provide good training materials that I don't believe are available elsewhere. So I really recommend that. I recently attended a dev conference and I learned a lot about this stuff. I work in a closed environment where I don't have much of an idea of what's going on in RPA. This conference helped me keep in touch with the current trends in RPA and UiPath.

I rate UiPath at eight out of 10. For me, that's a very good mark. The two missing points are because there is scope for improvement. Overall, I'm pretty happy with UiPath.

We use UiPath to automate business processes such as certain types of reporting that have to be repeated on a month-to-month basis. Another example is invoicing processes, which can be automated. Generally, it applies to different business cases for enterprise automation.

An example of how UiPath has improved the organization stems from a cyberattack in 2018. We already had an RPA team and during that cyber attack, all of our systems went down. Our SAP provider cut our access to it, leaving us with a limited number of users. It was not a big enough team to deliver on to our clients all of the orders that were being received.

What we did with UiPath in that crisis scenario in a couple of weeks was that we created a process for order automation. We already had a proof of concept, and we were able to scale it quickly. It was not perfect but rather, done in an emergency situation.

With that couple of users and limited access to SAP, a couple of robot users were capable of working 24 hours, seven days a week, and we started to process all of the orders that were coming from the rest of the company. This is probably something that you could not have done with more classical solutions.

This was, of course, an emergency order automation and it was a topic that we were already working with. Prior to this, it was already a benefit for the company, but the fact that we had this flexibility showcases how powerful this tool is, or what its potential is.

Having the cloud-based version allows us to be at the latest version of UiPath Orchestrator and different products without having to take care of the upgrade process.

UiPath's portal for enabling business users to trigger and monitor jobs is a big deal for me because it's something that we have been trying to do for a long time. We have been asking for it. With the previous solution, which was the orchestration platform alone, it was not a good approach because the business users would have a lot of information on their hands and you have to either split your licenses so that they could not access everything, or create your own web portals for them to access specific parts.

The fact that they now have an intermediate portal where they see only their processes, which they can monitor for themselves without getting too much information that is not relevant for them, is a big deal. Something as simple as triggering your own process, which in the past would require dedicating a full license to, can now be done through the portal. It might be a task like checking emails for customers or creating your own application with their API. It's a huge increment in quality.

The portal can also be used for administrators and although we have the Action Center, we don't use it that often. From the point of view of administrators, I can say that the recent improvements make our life much easier. It also enables us to think of more complex setups. In the past, I would never allow certain configurations because they would either be a security risk or it would just create more problems than solutions. Now with the current interface, especially with what they will be adding in the future in terms of more governance from the platform, they just enable you to do more complex things. It allows you to go a little bit beyond what the normal scope would be.

That applies to the platform as well as the orchestrator in the new modern setup. They have the option to split within the same tenant and different companies, or different company departments. Also, the fact that you can dynamically allocate the licenses so that you don't have to worry or have to split them, brings us to another level.

It offers more granular and role-based access control and management. We now have more complex scenarios that in the past we would not even consider because it would be a problem if someone were able to see something that they should not see.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution is important to us and it is clear to me that they want to push a SaaS solution, more than the on-premises deployment. It means that we have the latest version without having to upgrade the systems. We always have the latest version of the studio, for example, and there's no disruption to our services. Furthermore, we are able to follow all of the previews that they come out with. We can try all of their new products, which is something that in the past, we would not have been able to do. It would have required, for example, upgrading our system twice a year. Certainly, we wouldn't be able to do it at the speed we can now.

Being able to minimize our on-premises deployment is really important. It was almost a given for us because we lost some of our interfaces during the cyberattack. From that point on, the company has had a clear policy of cloud and SaaS as a priority. The fact that we have the opportunity to access all of our services without any requirements from our side suits us very well.

The vendor continues to add services to the portal and we are connected through their insider program. This is something that we are really happy with.

It is helpful for us that new services being added to the portal are all managed from the same place because it simplifies our work, makes it cohesive, and makes sense from a philosophical point of view. Definitely, if they had it on different platforms, it would take away from the ease of management. The fact that they have it in a single place makes everything a little bit more interconnected. What they are doing seems to make sense and for me, it is good because we only have to take care of one single platform. This also speeds up our processes, which is a plus.

On the topic of security, especially coming from a cyber attack, having SOC 2 certification is important because it is a requirement for us. We probably would have tried to find an intermediate or an agreement, but the fact that UiPath is now SOC 2 certified means that we have complied with requirements.

The licensing system is something that needs to be improved. I think that if they are trying to push for a SaaS solution, with respect to the way they license their individual products. The robot licenses and the Studio licenses should be something closer to a pay-per-use, rather than a year-to-year license. Right now, the licensing model and the pricing are the only stoppers for us, in terms of escalating our use. The bottom line is that the licensing system is not as modern as the tool that we're trying to implement.

We have been using the UiPath Automation Cloud since January 2020, and prior to that, we had an on-premises solution from UiPath.

Four to six months ago, this was not the most stable solution. We had a lot of issues, especially during the summer and early autumn. The system would fail, or would not be accessible, or we had lost some of our logs.

Right now, the tool is working and is much more stable. It shows that they have put an effort into making it more robust.

With respect to scalability, the licensing system is the limitation.

The platform itself is scalable, although not infinitely, but to a couple of orders of magnitude of what we have now. However, you still have to go through the procurement processes, which always makes it a little bit more limiting. Ultimately, it means that we cannot utilize the full power of what this tool offers in escalation.

Currently, we have five people who are working on UiPath. There are three developers, I am the technical lead, and we have a manager that operates as a product owner for the projects. The three developers are also responsible for maintenance. We also have a business analyst who works through the documentation and is the point of contact for some of our business.

We have other non-official roles, who are people that know and use the tool or perform business analyst functions, but there are only five people in dedicated roles.

At this point, we are using the tool to the full extent of what our licenses allow us to do. We could scale it to be much bigger but in the current situation, I don't think that we will do so. We negotiated the last contract to be a five-year deal and I hope we can move beyond that, but for now, there's no plan to a scale.

We have mixed reviews for the technical support and depending on the topic, they will answer faster or slower, more personalized or not.

They have a ticketing system and the webpage is normally broken, depending on the browser. The response time may vary from topic to topic, so I don't have a consistent impression of the support system. They do answer our questions, but it is not always within the proper time or with the solution that we were hoping for.

What we are using now is the same thing as the previous product from UiPath, without the cost of having to host it yourself.

I have some experience with other products, but not at the professional level. My impression is that with UiPath, you can get started more quickly when compared to other RPA products. Also, the licensing costs are not as high.

Migrating from our on-premises solution to the cloud was not a typical case because we lost our on-premises deployment during the cyberattack. We had at least a few months without the Orchestration solution. When it comes to execution runtimes, where we run our processes, we used the same machines.

Basically, we had to set things up from scratch on the cloud. The process was pretty straightforward, and the fact that we didn't have to set up the Orchestration tool saved us from a lot of the complexity in the setup process. Normally, this is the complex part, including setting it up with the databases. We just had to connect our runtime with the Orchestration platform, which made it much easier.

With respect to the setup costs, the cloud setup balanced out because you don't pay for the orchestration platform, but you pay a little more for the individual licenses. 

Having this product has reduced the amount of maintenance work related to our automation operations because it is a managed solution. The fact that we don't have to host it ourselves is very important.

With respect to maintenance costs, we are a relatively small project, so I wouldn't say that we had a huge overhead. It would certainly be higher if we tried to do what we are doing now, which is being at the latest version all of the time. To do that, we would have needed somebody in a role who was taking care of it. As it is now, from a development or project management point of view, we can take care of these things without needing an architect involved all of the time.

We chose Automation Cloud because it was, at that point, the most flexible option.

UiPath is known for a certain number of products, and the role of our team is to use all of them. On the topic of the UiPath Cloud, the new products that they have come out with, like the possibility to create your own applications for your internal customers, or host certain data services from the same platform, were things that were not available in the past. These capabilities are useful. In general, all of their products are pretty important for us.

For UiPath as a company, we like the availability that they have and the fact that we can try and test all of their products beforehand, without paying. For a relatively small project such as ours, or even for a big company, it's pretty useful to be able to access this type of information and not be burdened with extra budget requirements.

This is a product that I recommend because the starting point is completely free. That's one of the great points of UiPath. My advice is that when it comes to scaling the project, it's really important to clearly set up goals and expectations. Otherwise, there will be an eternal loop of PoCs and non-viable products.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are in healthcare, and the supply chain can be a fragmented process, and now with the Pandemic quite fragile. In recent years, companies have been implementing leaner supply chains to reduce their costs. We found that our best approach to dealing with supply distributions was to create a partnership with a distributor who could provide us with a very large percentage of our day-to day-supplies. We have Central inventories in each of our hospitals; however, we use a stockless operation Monday-Friday. This means we fill supplies for our nursing units on the weekends, but during the week, the distributor is picking, packing, and shipping those supplies in a low unit of measure. Orders are placed electronically by noon daily, and start arriving by late evening. A 'back order' list is sent to us each workday in the late afternoon - too late to do anything with it. 

We did work with our distributor to develop a more customized spreadsheet that detailed each item, by hospital and delivery location. Each following day we would break the file down so that we could e-mail it to each area, to get feedback from them on critical needs.  This took our resources time to prepare and send the next morning. Staff getting the information didn't have much time to review and respond. In addition, we would update each PO line item with the revised 'due date', for back-ordered lines - this was a manual process.  This same resource would then use a tool to send each requestor a 'delayed delivery' e-mail notice.  The overall PO update and communication process took an additional 1-2 hours a day in staff resource time.

With the robot doing this work for us, the vendor sends a file to an address by a certain time. They send it in at about 3:30 PM every day. The robot now takes that file and works that file, which it has ready for us usually by 4:30 PM. Now, it still may be too late for us to work, but the first thing in the morning, we have the file, and the Bot has already sent out notifications to all the users of any backorders. First thing, when they walk in the morning, they know what their backorders are. They didn't know that until halfway through the day before. Now, they get the information first thing in the morning so they can react. Now, we are getting the information first thing and have the time to work with the manufacturers and distributors to come up with other products so that we might backfill or get a branch transfer.

Our end goal was to make sure that we had a daily tool that was 100 percent accurate and could be deployed across a broad spectrum of healthcare workers. Then, they could get information faster and more accurately with as much information to eliminate a lot of extra calls and communication. That is what we embarked on. We dissected our current process and looked at all its different triggers to see how we could turn this into an automated tool. We broke down our process and identified everything that we were doing, then UiPath helped us identify what we needed to modify. We worked that into a tool where a Bot could come along and process it every day, then deliver every afternoon. That was our end result, and it's been extremely successful. We started using the tool last December.

We combined some automation that we already had in this process into this tool to make it a whole automated process, rather than partially bringing it under. We have a vendor who delivers us a report daily of all their backorders because we use the main distributor, so they deliver us a backorder report. Therefore, we made sure that they aligned it in a way that the robot could read it. Then, we wanted to break that down in a way so each of our hospitals could see their section. So, we added some data to this tool which allowed the robot to see that record, and say, "This belongs here, and this belongs here."

Our staff have been reassigned to more value-added tasks. We haven't eliminated anyone because it's been very challenging for us to keep up with the COVID-19 issues. Now, we have resources who have the time to contact vendors, and find out, "When are we getting this? Can we get ourselves pushed to the top of the list?" They can actually be a voice on the other line, a human voice, who communicates. When you're sitting there doing all this other work, you don't have the opportunity to spend it on being a voice for the health system. So, we put people back on working back orders with other vendors and doing other things that needed to be done. We have not eliminated staff because we are using them in more productive ways, getting more work done.

Our staff can now do the things that we need them to do. It has given us the agility to pivot and move to other things, because we are not trapped in trying to work these files every day.

Our customers are getting information about 12 hours earlier, which makes it much faster to resolve back order concerns for their areas. If they have procedures, or certain kinds of cases coming up, and see that they have a back order, then they have much more time to react and try to address their shortage.

It provides information to people by automating that information in a much faster time.

Since we are getting information out to folks faster, they can spend the resource time needed to determine the best approach for what to replace it with, or if we need to work with a sales rep. It ensures that our staff have the best tools to do their job faster.

We have not seen it do OCR, and that would be helpful. Right now, the tool will not read a PDF file, and we can't use PDF files. We want it to able to take an image, then take that image and put the particular field out in the right spot in a table. We have not seen it where you can scan a document in, then it reads fields and places those in a table.

We began our journey last Fall - 2019 

It is very stable. Once we got all the kinks worked out, there hasn't been any maintenance. 

We had a little problem with getting it to run at night. We moved it off of one platform and put it on another one, which fixed that problem. These are things that we encountered early on that went away as we figured out how to resolve them. Most of those changes that we made were internal to our process and caused by some slow responses within our Citrix environment. Once we resolve those, we have not had issues with the tool itself.

I have one person in IT doing deployment and maintenance. We also have a second person under contract if we need support.

The solution is scalable. 

The robot processes the file in an unattended mode, then sends out an email with a link to its output file. From there, all the users, and there are probably about 20, get this file and react to it. They review it from their perspective because there are many hospitals involved. Each one of them has their own tab because the robot creates a tab for each. This makes it easy for them to go right to what they need. There are a lot of folks reviewing the results of what the robot has produced.

I have not used their technical support.

We were passively looking at some tools to automate some of our procurement processes. We are highly automated in our department, but we are always looking at ways to take the things that are not already automated, get into those, and see what parts of those we can streamline.

We met with UiPath last Fall. At that time, we went through a company by the name of Speridian, UiPath is a partner with them. We came to the conclusion that we had a manual process where the right components could be automated. Therefore, we made that our focus and started answering all the questions around the process to ensure that we had everything necessary for a robot to be able to answer the questions and keep moving the process forward.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We outlined what we do and what our end result needed to be. They asked us some questions, then sat down with our resources and walked them through it (or did it through Webex). I don't think there was ever any confusion on what was being discussed.

We didn't spend that much time on the process. Overall, as far as our work, the deployment was 10 to 12 hours, if you look at the meetings and such. Most of the time was spent on their side, because they had to go back and do all the development. So, I thought it was very painless.

We worked with the UiPath team and Speridian to ensure that the bot would know how to handle each aspect of the data and where apply it. As we tested it, we saw that we needed to go back and reconfigure this or this isn't how this is handled. We were kind of working through the things we forgot until we got to the point where, "Yes, this is it. We can do this every day." 

We had the robot tied into an automated tool that we were already using to send notices out. They were able to pull up that tool and have these automated components to all this stuff that we had a manual person sitting there doing every day. She was sitting there taking this data and sending it out, and now the robot was like, "I got the data. I'll send it out." So, we just ran it through the whole process. However, it does take having resources who can ask the right questions. What I found with this team was they were good in actually asking the right questions and helping us with what the robot would need in order to make decisions. Because that's what the robot is doing, it is automatically looking at a value, and saying, "I do this. I have that." 

We learned with it: How we need to respond and how we need to give the robot the feedback. It was quite an interesting process for us. Although you're always thinking you can automate so many things, there are components that you do need a person's brain to figure out. We found those pieces in this tool. We found some areas where, "Here's the exception." So, it even writes off the exceptions for us. While I do still need to have a person looking at exceptions, rather than the 100 lines that they used to have to look at, now they look at two, three, or four lines, then make decisions on those.

They gave us the opportunity to create a tool which would automate as much as possible, then provide us the data that we needed to act on. It has basically filtered out all the things that we didn't need to deal with. It has taken care of those, leaving us with everything that a human being needs to respond to.

I felt very comfortable with the UiPath person who was doing the programming, though I never really met him. I was very impressed. We talked on the phone a time or two, but they just seemed like they got it. They understood. It didn't take a long time for them to figure out what it was we wanted to do. They were able to tell us, "This is what we're going to need. Can you get it?" So, they were easy to work with. They also acted quickly. I thought the whole process of developing everything that we did went very quickly. 

They were able to link into our tools. They made suggestions to us, "Well, these are exceptions. We can put these here. We can do this. We can give you all this." They were providing us with ideas on how we could even expand on this. I found that to be very helpful. I really thought that they did it very quickly. They did not take long to understand what we were trying to do before getting in and really learning the impact. When we needed a change, the changes have come very quickly. 

It has gone so well that we will be doing a few more enhancements. Now that we've worked with the tool for a while, and know that the ability of UiPath and what they can do, we can enhance it even further.

We are doing things at a much earlier time in the day. The robot compressed the time it takes. We are getting our users' information earlier in the day. Now, it may take five to 10 minutes, where processes used to take half an hour or 45 minutes to go through everything. 

With COVID-19, so many supplies have been impacted. Our line items expanded and grew, so it would have been very difficult management manually. Thankfully, we had this process in place last December. It really came to our aid in March, April, and throughout this year, because it has streamlined the process. It has given everybody more time to pivot and make decisions.

The UiPath tool takes redundant processes away, and says, "Let us handle those, then you do all those creative things." It has given us back a lot of staff resources that were being used up by mundane, redundant processes. That's how it worked in our world. In other areas, anytime you fill out a form or answer a question, a robot can post that to a table. There are all kinds of things it can do. However, for us, it took these manual processes that we were doing day in, day out without a lot of thought and gave us that time back to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing, in order to ensure that our health system has the products that it needs to support the community. In my mind, that is what it is about: Giving back your resources to use them in the way they were intended and using a robotic tool to do those things that you can eliminate, like mundane, redundant processes.

Start with processes that happen over and over every day. Something that you have to do, like data entry, whatever it is. Peel back the onion, then look and see how you can automate some of that through a tool. You have to look at what your processes are and understand how those are getting done today. Maybe even share that information with somebody outside your area, because people from the outside might say, "Well, why don't you do it this way?" Because you've lived it so long, you don't even know why you wouldn't nor do you know the questions to ask. Therefore, look at your base processes that you're doing day in, day out and see how you might be able to automate any aspect of those that doesn't require human thinking. I'm sure you will uncover many things.

It is a learning process for everyone, but I thought it was a very fast track learning. Sometimes, you think, "Well, this is going to take six months," and it didn't. In a very short time, we were seeing samples of what we were going to get. Therefore, I was very impressed with the amount of resource time that it took. It was beyond what I expected.

Some tools we are working on will reduce the purchase order build, but we haven't implemented that yet. That's a whole other project that we're working on with them, and that piece goes into procurement.

It is very doable. I was probably fairly skeptical, but once we started thinking about it, it became very clear that this would be just a slam dunk. You have to open up your mind to it, but it was something that when they said, "Well, we want to use some robotics." The fear is you're going to take my staff away. There are some cases of that, but it is not so bad. I don't have to worry about the robot taking days off, getting sick, having a mother in the hospital and needing to be with them. I don't have to pay it scale. I just don't have to do any of those things. Now, the robot can't automatically think outside the box, but sometimes it can depending on the questions I ask it. 

Everybody just needs to take a breath step back, and say, "Yeah, maybe it can replace this." However, that doesn't mean we won't use this resource in another way.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. I'm not the type of person who just gives a rating of 10 all the time, but this solution has just been a phenomenal tool for us.

UiPath is used to automate processes, eliminating the need to increase headcount.

There was an increase in both quality and quantity while not having to increase admin simultaneously. We have successfully automated the majority of our automation projects.

The UiPath automation has helped us to keep our bottom lines down across the board.

UiPath has helped our organization with its environmental and social initiatives.

It has freed staff time for other tasks, improved their work quality, and saved hundreds of hours per month.

UiPath is the best automation solution available today. The process and task management are the most valuable features.

UiPath's Unassisted Task Mining has room for improvement.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

UiPath's stability is reliable, especially now that we've moved to the cloud.

UiPath scales well. We have not had any issues.

UiPath support has been responsive to us.

Positive

UiPath has successfully met our expectations by reducing project costs through automation, demonstrating a strong return on investment.

I would rate UiPath ten out of ten.

I have used UiPath in my last three companies.

We use the solution to pull documents from audit systems, download documents from document management systems, and grab data from financial management systems. 

I like UiPath's framework. It offers a modern design experience, which makes it easy to do different activities. 

The solution is expensive. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

The product is stable. 

UiPath is scalable. 

UiPath's support is great. 

Positive

UiPath's deployment within our environment is complex. However, we have online resources available. 

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. 

The tool's pricing depends on its use. It is expensive. 

Our business objective was to improve manual processes and increase efficiency. 

Task Capture helps to build documentation. 

UiPath has freed up our resources' time. 

I rate it a ten out of ten. 

I use UiPath to reduce any data entry, report generation, or anything where UiPath can help avoid human errors.

The solution is very user-friendly and easy to use. It comes with pre-built automation. The tutorials are very helpful. 

I have been working with the product for six months. 

The tool is stable. 

UiPath is scalable. 

The tool's support is helpful. 

I use UiPath to reduce human errors during report generation or data entry. Simple errors can cause delays down the stream. 

The product has helped us save hours, which can range from a few hours to tens of thousands of hours. 

UiPath has helped us increase accuracy. It is helpful in data validation. 

I rate it a ten out of ten. 

We use the solution for the implementation of automation for normal processes. We deliver use cases to customers.

The ability to automate everything is great. You can also do process mining and optimize costs. It can help save a lot of money in an organization. 

Depending on the business, and how you calculate the cost vs savings, the time to value varies. 

It's a complete ecosystem. It has everything you need. You can do attended or unattended bots. There's AI. There are document processes that you can do as well.

It's very easy to create any type of automation. It's the best solution so far in the market. 

We are able to implement end-to-end automation. It's important that you can automate anything with UiPath. You are not limited. You don't have to have any extra connectors. 

It has helped minimize our on-premises footprint. You can migrate to the cloud if you like. However, many companies, like banks, do not prefer the cloud. They prefer on-premises setups. 

I've used the Academy courses. I've started one and haven't finished it. My plan in the future is to utilize it more. The structure and details are great. If you are new to UiPath, it's very good. It helps effectively onboard new people. 

It helps reduce human error. 

We can free up employee time by 90%. 

If you are saving time, you are saving money, and therefore, it has helped save costs. 

Everything is working well. Of course, there can always be improvements.

I would like to see them integrate with generative AI like ChatGPT. It might make a developer's life easier. 

I've been using UiPath since 2019. However, I have not been continuously working on it.

The solution has been very stable. I'd rate stability nine out of ten. 

The solution is very easy to scale. 

I've never been in contact with technical support. 

We previously used a different solution. 

The implementation is very easy. The deployment is similar to other products. You create a file and share it with a customer and they import it. 

Through our methodologies, we define, design, deploy, and maintain. 

Pre-deployment, we need to do some testing. After that, once it's accepted, you deploy. You don't need much staff. 

There is some maintenance required for future changes in the application and any issues that may arise (like bugs). Typically, there's a business analyst and people from IT as well as someone from whatever department it's being deployed to. 

The customer deploys the solution. We take care of the design and implementation. 

I have noticed an ROI while using the solution. In general, a business analyst would do the calculations to see how much money would be saved if a robot was deployed. 

I do not deal with the licensing. 

We are UiPath partners. 

I'm not certified in UiPath, although I do have experience with it. 

I have not used the AI functionality yet.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's easy to work with UiPath. It has very good documentation.