UiPath Platform Reviews

We have a use case that involves an invoice billing process, where vendors from an external organization submit their details for the invoice. This automation works as expected, independently of anything else. It is also a good example of how we were able to scale RPA benefits in the company with the automation of a specific process that requires human-robot collaboration.

Our internal tools include the database where all of this information is stored, and we have a second automation that is used by the billers in our organization to tally the data that includes details such as what each vendor has submitted to get their payments.

We built a third automation in UiPath, which basically compares these first two. But, due to the complexity and the nature of the tally that has to occur, we require some human input in between certain steps.

For these particular steps, we have developed a four-bot configuration. These are four separate bots that run and a couple of them have an attended automation part, where a human can intervene. It's a verification step, where the human can decide whether or not something is okay. Specifically, the bot compares two fields and if they match, then it's great, but if not, it triggers a request to a human user for manual verification. If they approve then it is marked as a successful verification.

Because we use technologies like OCR, there are details that cannot always be interpreted properly. This is where we need an additional check, which is the reason that we have humans in the loop as part of the process.

We have saved a lot of time by using UiPath. We have also improved a lot in terms of accuracy and reducing errors in a lot of projects. In fact, in one of the projects, we automated the entire job, which involves coaching people on what has to be done end-to-end, by the robots. It was built on UiPath and on this project, we had a savings of more than €100,000 euros. That was a big saving for us, and it's continuing right now.

More importantly, a lot of the clients had complained about the end-user, which is outside of the organization, with respect to the accuracy of the data. There were errors. When we deployed robots based on UiPath, the accuracy has vastly improved and the clients are very happy with the results. They no longer have to keep coming back to our billers and telling them that things were not done properly. The robot functions like it has been programmed every single time. So, it's been perfect for that purpose as well. The customer trusts us more because of our deployments in robots.

UiPath definitely allows employees to delegate mundane tasks to their personal automations, saving them time. A major reason for a lot of our automation cases is because most people are not 100% involved in certain tasks. For example, if you spend two hours on a particular process, and then over the next four or five hours, you're supposed to be working on more complicated processes, but what happens during the first two hours is that things get complicated and the day is ruined dealing with small tasks. Now, suppose that the two-hour allotment for the smaller process is automated using UiPath, the person is free to dedicatedly perform more important functions. In the entirety of our automation effort, this has been a primary driver for all of the new use cases. It's a huge plus for us.

With respect to employee satisfaction, it has been a mixed result for us. In certain cases, it's been a huge boon because there was a heavy workload on the employees and UiPath really helped them cope with it. This was especially true during COVID when the workload increased exponentially, and people could not go into the office. However, there were times in the past when people were no longer required because UiPath was doing their jobs perfectly, making them redundant. As they were no longer required, they left the company.

So, we have had both scenarios, but moving forward, instead of telling people that they're no longer required, we have retasked them to other projects. Essentially, we have reabsorbed them and in turn, have simplified the hiring process. In this regard, we have adjusted.

The new UiPath assistant is very good.

The customizable forms that UiPath has recently launched allow us to give the user an exact input that they can provide. Being able to customize this is extremely helpful for us because we have other attended automation processes, and they can each be tailored to the needs of the business.

We use the selector technology for automating processes with dynamic interfaces on a daily basis in almost all of our projects. Our extensive use of this feature includes all of the different kinds of selectors that UiPath allows. We have the flexibility to modify these selectors as per our need. This functionality gives UiPath a big edge over its competitors and I know this because I've personally used products by other vendors. The selection-making process is much simpler with UiPath, with improved accuracy and reliability.

This feature is important because a lot of the processes are Citrix-based or remote desktop applications. Because the robot would not have a direct connection to the application, we have to use Citrix technology. All of the applications are different in nature, so having the flexibility to switch between different kinds of selectors and select our activities allows us to build the perfect solution for remote applications. Even the performance, in my experience, has been the best, especially for Citrix-based automations or remote desktop-based automations.

There are a few features that could be improved, and one of them is good integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. For example, Microsoft launched Power Apps as its platform, and even though its capabilities are not as good as UiPath, it has the advantage of being so well-integrated with Excel Online, Word, and everything else. We don't have to perform a lot of development work, and it's pre-approved in our organization. Applications like SharePoint are another example of pre-approved solutions. But with UiPath, we have to prove that it's a secure process. Simply put, a stronger collaboration between Microsoft and UiPath in a lot of areas would be helpful because it would ease the development process for us.

Another example is with the Automation Hub. At this time, Automation Hub does not allow you a direct login process or single sign-on option using Azure Active Directory. This means that you're limited to going through either Gmail or something else. This is true for the on-premises solution, not the cloud one. Although we had decided to purchase the Automation Hub license, this lack of functionality held things up because we did not want to manually go in to update all of the new users again and again. We wanted the information to be picked directly from Active Directory whenever a user wanted to sign up for it.

I have been using UiPath Attended Automation for approximately three and a half years.

In the past, stability has been great. However, more recently I have been facing some issues, and I'm hoping for some resolution. For example, we recently upgraded to the new orchestrator in Studio, and we had to upgrade a few packages also, In particular, the UiPath automation packages.

Some of our GUI activities, which are not fully backward compatible, have been facing some issues. Consequently, some of our bots have been impacted. We have already raised the issue and we are in discussion to find a resolution. This was the first time we actually faced an issue in terms of reliability with UiPath.

Our past experience has been very good, and I cannot say that we have any complaints regarding the reliability of UiPath solutions.

Scalability-wise, it is very good. It is easily scalable and we have a lot of options for expanding and configuring as per our requirements. It is also customizable.

We have a team of between 20 and 30 people, which includes approximately 10 developers, 5 team leads, two architects, two production managers, and one overall manager. We have some contractual workers, as well.

We have approximately 35 automations that are in production right now. From a process perspective, we have pretty much worked on all verticals including finance, healthcare, internal IT processes that needed automation, and more. An example is ServiceNow, where jobs like creating user accounts, deploying new machines, and other administrative tasks have also been automated. HR processes, including onboarding, have been automated.

It is a very large organization, and there are lots of processes, so I expect that our usage will grow.

The technical support is excellent in our experience. Whenever we have had a problem, they've always been there to support us and help us with the problem. I don't have any complaints, as they've always made the effort. Even if things have taken longer than we had hoped or expected, they've always come back with the best resolution they can offer.

I have worked with Blue Prism and in my experience, UiPath does a much better job, both in terms of dev and listening to the community. For example, Blue Prism is a very closed community and very limited. They have improved, I would say, based on the success of UiPath, but it's not very open-source or open-natured.

The biggest advantage that I have noticed is with Citrix-based automations or remote desktop automations. There are cases where Blue Prism did not work, but UiPath was very good. I did not have to spend too much time with UiPath before it worked perfectly. The reliability was also great.

More importantly, UiPath listens to the customers as well as the developer community, and in turn, they implement features that make their lives easier. They constantly reach out for feedback and it's a good process because it helps to know that the customer is happy. If I am speaking about myself, I'm happy that if I have a need, or I'm facing some challenges, I put it in the pipeline for UiPath and within six months, I will see that feature live in production.

We started with a disaster recovery scenario, where we have one live production orchestrator, as well as one backup orchestrator and a load balancer installed. This is a high availability disaster recovery (HADR) configuration, where all of our live bots are on the main orchestrator. In the case that the live orchestrator goes down, we have the backup orchestrator kick in.

The overall deployment and installation process was simple. However, we did face some issues with the Redis part. Configuring Redis was one of our pain points, and we reached out to UiPath about it.

Although it was resolved, it took a lot of time and effort, from our end as well. That was the only experience that stood out as a problem for us. But overall, it was a smooth process.

It took about a week to set everything up, although we had constraints from our own internal infrastructure team. The delay was not related to UiPath issues.

The licensing is close to optimum; however, there is room for improvement in both the cost and flexibility of the licenses. It isn't the best pricing in the market but it's pretty close.

For developing our attended automation, we began by coding the bot to our requirements, and then made modifications to it for attended automation.

My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to be sure of what your needs are regarding an RPA product. If you're looking for something very small-scale, very easy, then there are a lot of options. But if you're looking for a long-term, feature-rich solution, which has access to third-party integrations, then choose UiPath.

You will require a development team, at least to some level. UiPath is now simpler with the Studio X products, but in the past, it was a bit more challenging to dive deep into UiPath directly. It required some training but now, things have definitely improved.

One of the major lessons that I have learned from using UiPath is to make sure that everything is documented well. There is a lot that needs to be tested before bots are put into production because a lot of things that work on your local machine may not work on another. It can vary from machine to machine and where something works on one, a change in environment for another may cause it to fail. This means that you should change from machine to machine during the testing phase.

Overall, I feel as if now UiPath is on the right path with its competitors. It is a very good long-term solution.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

We use it with ServiceNow for maintaining tickets. Our task works to automate some scenarios such as software updates. In that scenario, there are some repeated steps. We use UiPath with Python scripting to automate those repetitive steps.

One of our use cases is for our insurance team where we have built a prototype which has helped the insurance team cut pricing. That is one of the automations that has made a difference.

Also, the fact that this is a SaaS solution means we are able to innovate much faster when it comes to automation. We have been able to complete use cases in as little as one month. There can be problems with the on-premises version because there are certain restrictions for accessing that database. But because this is on the cloud, we can access the data from anywhere in the world. That is very beneficial.

UiPath has also helped to reduce the amount of maintenance work related to our automation operations. It has a feature to keep the different automatic tasks monitored. That monitoring helps us if there's any problem in an automation. We get notification that there is a problem. If we don't know about those problems then, after some time, maintenance on them will be harder. It does help us to maintain things.

Before, we were using the on-premises service for our automation activity. By using UiPath Automation Cloud, we don't need to go anywhere. There is a single tool where we can keep track of the maintenance. Doing so with the on-prem solution was much more time consuming and slow. With UiPath it's so much faster so it helps us cut costs.

And in terms of overall cost savings, before we implemented one of our automations there were around 100 people taking care of the task. Using UiPath, we have automated that task and we have saved the fees of 100 people.

The speed is much better because we're doing it on the cloud. With other solutions there were network problems, but in UiPath I have found that network connectivity is much stronger when transferring data from the back end to the front end. It is much faster.

The Portal for enabling business users to trigger jobs with business input and for monitoring those jobs is great.

There is also the granular, role-based access control and management which is very important in our organization because we have different roles. Our manager has a much higher role, so that if there are some changes in an automated step, there are permissions from that higher authority. Otherwise, low-level employees could make changes without informing the higher levels and there could be a lot of conflicts. This way, we don't allow the lower-level employee to make any changes without proper permission from the higher authority.

The solution's single sign-on is also important because without it, a user ID and password could be compromised by a third-party or hacker. Single sign-on gives us another level of security when logging in to UiPath. It's very important and a good security feature.

UiPath also continues to add services to the Portal. There are proper updates that come out monthly or quarterly. They update different features or any problems with features, so the updates are very useful for us. It's very important that all the services are managed from the same place because no matter where a team is, if there is a glitch and we raise a question with customer support, and they do some fixing, that fix is available for all the users who are using UiPath. It comes from the centralized location, which is a very good thing. It is available for all our users around the world.

They should include new machine learning and AI algorithms for better forecasting and analytics.

I've been using UiPath Automation Cloud for two years.

It is very stable. In most software, we find that when we increase the data size, there is some kind of decrease in network connectivity, a delay or lag. But UiPath is very stable because they release updates very frequently.

We use it for day-to-day purposes. The tools are working on different jobs, daily. We have plans to automate more scenarios and we are working on a PoC for them. If they go well they will be implemented in UiPath as well.

Their support is very proactive. When we reach out to them, they fix our problem within a day. We can also use the Portal to have a chat about any issues that come up. Customer support is good and the community support is also great.

The fact that we don't have to worry about future installations and upgrades of Orchestrator, was important in our decision to go with UiPath, because those things are already built in. We don't need to worry about the infrastructure part. It is maintained by the UiPath team. They also have better community support to help us if we face any problems. That is one of the great things about UiPath.

The initial setup was very easy. The vendor was very active and the community is very active so there was no delay in communication. It was very straightforward.

We started UiPath as a desktop application and then we slowly moved to the cloud.

And in terms of the setup costs of our automation operations, UiPath doesn't have a lot of dependencies, so it is quick. We don't need to contact another party to maintain things because the UiPath community helps us with every aspect. It works. 

The pricing is good compared to other software. Based on the features that UiPath is providing, and the community support, the price is reasonable.

I have used different tools like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. When comparing all three, when it comes to cost, UiPath is great. It is also easy to use. Anyone can learn to use it within a couple of weeks. It is very useful and user-friendly.

The user interface and the usability of the other solutions is not as user-friendly. We also found some glitches in those solutions, things like network delays.

We haven't found any problems with UiPath. It is working great. It's a great tool. I would suggest that everyone go with a UiPath because it has helped us a lot.

Originally, we were using UiPath to draft documents and send emails on mass to where we had large communication exercises. We used a robot instead of a small army of paralegals to generate the documentation and draft up the emails where we had to communicate with 2,000 to 3,000 people. It was a little bit more involved than just doing a standard mail merge, but we were able to use UiPath to create a number of documents and email it to an individual customer, all through a central email address.

Fast forward to where we are now, we have a few of these things focusing in on what we call post-completion activity, like the things you do after you sign a contract. So, it may be you're uploading it to the client's contract management system, applying stamps, or registering the contracts in an official register. The robot is able to do that for us post-completion. Those are our primary use cases at the moment. We're looking at more data integrity type stuff, like comparing our internal data sources against public record.

The ability to displace some activity that was traditionally on our paralegal team has improved my organization. We're an outsourced managed legal services provider. We're primarily a people-based business and UiPath displaces some activity off those paralegals and brings in automation. For me, it becomes an additional type of resource. The long and short of it is that we are able to move work that was traditionally done by people and would be charged at a rate, off to automation where we can bring the costs down. It enables us to reduce our running costs of our clients. A single bot running post-completion has saved as two FTEs.

UiPath has helped to speed up case resolutions in a couple of ways. It's focused on doing particular jobs, so it achieves the job faster. People don't need to complete an entire task end to end. They can stop at a certain point and the robot takes over. That allows a person to get through more work. Also, the fact that the robots are able to do this stuff overnight 24/7, means that we have more capacity to do stuff.

It gives us the ability to respond to clients. It gives us an option in how we're going to automate work for clients. It's hard to say if it has reduced the cost of our digital transformation because we deal with all the people. I suspect it hasn't done it internally, but suspect that has made some things cheaper for our clients. It enables us to deliver digital services cheaper for our clients. 

UiPath had an effect on our legal staff. It takes work that people don't want to do at the moment, having to download the document, take some details off the top and the bottom of the document, apply a stamp, and then re-upload, it's not what our paralegals and new trainees want to be doing on a day-to-day basis. So we are able to shift activity nobody enjoys onto a robot and let them focus on the stuff they've been trained to do.

In terms of how much it has reduced the processing times, the task itself still takes as long but we've got a robot doing it instead of a human. I don't think that the impact isn't that dramatic on-site processing times. At the moment, humans are only involved in 80% of the transaction and 20% has been held by robots.

These automations have decreased errors but it's hard to quantify by how much. They've inserted 20,000 transactions a year. I have no doubt that the error rates improved. It's just a hard thing to quantify.

The most valuable aspect of UiPath is the fact that it's a low-code platform. Being able to use a low-code platform really lowers the barrier entry of introducing automation. Normally, you fill in a request to go to IT to get a development resource allocated, and then you spend six months trying to do a project. Because UiPath is a bit of a platform, you can quickly, within weeks, start to knock off automation and get it checked and then successfully deployed. The low-code development environment is key for us.

Now that we're scaling up and taking advantage of Cloud stuff, it's become a lot easier to use. When we started our journey, we just bought a couple of bots and had them sit around on machines. It was a bit chaotic and we thought that if we take advantage of their wider platform, the orchestrator environment, it would make life a lot easier because we have all the monitoring and management. We have access to that in one platform rather than having to watch the individual robots, which is where we started.

We're going to use the solution's AI-enhanced document understanding feature. It's something we're looking at to help us with invoices and incoming bills that come in. It's on the backlog. We haven't got to it yet.

UiPath enables me to free up capacity for people to work on new work because they are involved, they're less accessible. At the moment, the majority of our staff is focused towards the end time making sure that things are filed correctly. It's more about focusing resources rather than being more responsive.

As things become more and more data-heavy and accessing other people's products and managing things, like obtaining the data through APIs, it feels like there could be a lot more for them to do, to make interacting with data or manipulating simple things like text strings. You need quite a strong development background or a reasonable level of understanding to achieve that. I think that could be made a little bit more achievable.

Three years ago we started using UiPath relatively small and we are looking to scale up significantly this year. Originally we started on-prem and as we're scaling up, we're going to move towards the cloud instance.

So far the stability has been good. With all of the low code platforms, it's actually more of a problem of what we've developed and deployed. It's how well we make our own software so that the platform will provide. It seems to stand up very, very well. I have not really had an issue. Anytime we have encountered a bug or whatnot, it's something we've introduced to ourselves, but thankfully there's a strong community where we can post questions and queries to get a response within a couple of hours.

I don't see scalability as being too much of a challenge. If we need more capacity on the robots, we're able to buy more licenses and additional VMs on the machine. If we need to expand or scale, it's just about deploying more machines. I don't feel it's that complicated. I suspect there are some constraints on how you build your applications, but that's more of an internal decision rather than UiPath's.

There are three people who are responsible for how to put a source of business analysis as well as development. Their role is to work with SMEs or people within our business units to understand a customer's process, get them deployed, and work with them to do it. The stuff we've taken on tends to be the easier, quick wins. We have three internal developers who were able to break down processes. We're a large organization. We have a large IT function that helped us with virtual machines and data centers, etc. We're not directly involved with them.

It's very easy to build an automation and just let it run. One of the key lessons we learned is the fact that you have to keep an eye on these things and that things change in the environment. Passwords run out and expire, folders may move as people move things around the network and a robot is just as susceptible to everything else that our user is. In terms of when you're designing any solutions, you have to pay a little extra attention to things that may cause you problems in six months' time. The simple fact that a password that you were using has been reset or is expired or something else, could cause the robot to failover. While the robot can tell you it's got a problem, you still have maintenance effort to keep an eye on. There is a maintenance commitment that you need for everything that is put on it. You need to spend a bit of extra time detailing exactly how you are going to respond to those things. Just because it's easy to deploy stuff, it doesn't do away with the fact that you have to keep an eye on it.

There are three analysts who are respondents to book fixes, etc. We have people in the business who we work with to automate these processes. They take a level of responsibility and keeping an eye on anything we try to automate. They're the first line of support. If anything's going wrong or something they can keep an eye on it and then if it is a technical book fix or something that needs to be resolved, that's then escalated to one of those three developers.

I only had one issue which was to do with the proxy setting when deploying some of the software. I raised the ticket on the website, got a response within half a day and it explained what I needed to do to fix it. That's my only experience of having to deal with them. I raised a ticket, I got the answer, and it worked. My experience so far has been fairly good.

We decided to use UiPath three years ago when RPA was starting to become a bit of a buzzword. We took a look at it and realized that it would be a very, very good solution for the right project by allowing us to automate mass activity all at once. One of those projects came around and we had to communicate it to a large audience. The process once agreed upon and nailed down could be very heavily scripted. We looked at a way that we would communicate it to the 30,000 people, all with documents that are pretty much the same but with a slight variation. We knew we wanted to try an RPA solution. UiPath was a very strong contender in those days and it was easy to access. That's why we ended up with it. We're able to achieve something with a single bot. All of those things make the software easy to test out. And then from there, you're able to make a decision.

The initial setup was really straightforward. In such a large law firm that has high data security obligations, we set these things up, appoint the orchestrator, and it just works. I have not encountered too many problems. 

It doesn't feel like a heavyweight ERP system or some larger workflow tool. These things are deployed onto a desktop and they speak to a server. It's not heavy. It doesn't feel like a piece of software with a heavy footprint.

The deployment took a week. It took us longer to end-to-end to get the invoice approved.

We've taken advantage of the architecture. Our IT team set some ground rules about where the virtual machines need to be hosted and deployed, but it's not that heavyweight. We increase some standards with IT and then install the software on those machines. We're using the Cloud version so there's not a lot to worry about.

We were able to do the deployment internally. 

Some of our ROI is quite dramatic. We have to email lots of stuff out to different people and our projector will require this to have a team of six or seven staff working solidly for a couple of weeks. The robot was able to get it done after a couple of weeks of configuration. This thing was able to pay for itself in a matter of hours once it was done. One of our post-completion robots took a week or two to develop and get stable enough to deploy. It's able to offset seven or eight hours a day. If we target the use cases correctly, we are able to get a return on the automation we deploy.

Take advantage of the Cloud-based implementation. You'll have to handle the Orchestrator licensing costs. It's obviously different for every organization. It's beneficial to get away from the on-premise installation. Also make sure that your business case justifies whatever the license cost is for an unattended or attended bot. 

Show your business case and that the automation will help you to exceed the license cost. You want to look at things that are going to give you a return on investment in about six months' time. Take advantage of the Cloud-hosted version so as not to pay the cost for Orchestrator. Then for your bots, make sure you will see a six months ROI in terms of how much automation you've gotten and how much you can get the robot to get done.

We also looked at BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. We took a quick look over the top three solutions at the time. UiPath seemed to be one of the leaders in the area.

We partnered with an organization to help us deliver it. We got some consultants in and sorted out what they were comfortable with using and what they recommended. For us, it was the size of the platform. We were looking at Automation Anywhere or BluePrism. It just felt like it would be a bigger project to implement when in reality all we wanted was one robot to do one job for us at the start of the project. It was more about the barriers of entry to getting started.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. It feels like nothing deserves a 10, and I highly recommend every organization has a handle on RPA. There are still a huge amount of features we're still yet to explore.

We have several use cases. We're a telecommunications company. We use it for anything from order entry, design, activation, and interactions with technicians within our field. We really have an end-to-end solution.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and unattended bots.

It is deployed on-premise but on our own cloud.

We had a long-time situation where we were sending technicians to the fields unnecessarily, because they couldn't install the service. So, we worked through a process to wake up devices. We used RPA to implement it. 

With downsizing, we have been able to automate a lot of this space, so we can downsize and still function as a company.

Capitalize on the unattended automation, as there are a lot of different methods to evoke and schedule it. You can email it, trigger it via API bots or Orchestrator. There are a lot of different methods you can use. We don't really do a whole lot of attended. Not that we wouldn't at some point, but unattended is nice because it's out of sight and out of mind. Set it up and let it go.

We are the first company to bring UiPath Academy in-house on the 30th of September. When we signed our licensing agreement, we added it in our own LMS. So, we have that connection and everything else. We love it. We've implemented all of their modules: RPA Starter, all three of the development courses, Solution Architect, Business Analyst, and Build a Bot. It's super exciting. It's one of the best things that we've done. I would rate it a five out of five.

We now have a functionality that is being released for web forms. It's more for attended. I would like to have these web forms exposed in Orchestrator to be able to trigger a bot externally. I know we have partners that provide similar functionality. I would like to have that same functionality where you could deploy a form, but instead of having it pop up on somebody's desktop, they could go through a URL through Orchestrator and trigger the bots via a web interface. This is instead of having to be tied down to an attended bot.

For some of the Insights stuff, we have found that you have to be flexible on measuring your ROI. You have to be able to customize some of that because it's not as cut and dry as you think it is. 

I would look for the audits on the back-end. Performance-wise, make sure that it is still performing. 

I would rate the stability as a four (out of five), but some of it could have been us too. 

An overabundance of logging that we created crashed the SQL Server. We had to adjust and restructure the way we were doing all of our logging to prevent that from happening again. Ever since then, it has pretty much been fine. 

We have had issues with upgrades. However, from a normal day-to-day functionality perspective, it is pretty stable.

Right now, we have about 150 developers. Then, we have engineers and process analysts.

We have 400 automations on average and 1000 in the pipeline.

It's been fantastic. It doesn't matter what time of day or anything else. We get top-notch service.

It has been about our contacts and support team. They look at us, and say, "You guys want to do what?" Then, they stand behind us and help us get it done.

We had merging companies coming together with a lot of integration going on. With integration, there are multiple teams, processes, and systems. To keep up for our reduced expenses, we had to do it. This was another tool in the toolbox for us: automation.

It took us eight weeks from initial purchase to the first bot to be put into production. It took about two weeks for assessment and documentation, then another six weeks to develop and deploy it. The bot that we developed was complex. It wasn't super simple. We've done simpler, but that time frame was about average for us.

We did the deployment ourselves, but we had the premium support. So, we did have some support from UiPath. However, everything that we did, we did on our own.

ROI was almost instant. We measured everything from deployment. We measured our successes. We do audits once a month. ROI was pretty much from deployment. We don't audit anything in the first 30 days because there is a lot of settling in, some bumps, and, "Oh, we missed this step." For the most part, within 30 days, we were realizing and managing expectations on benefits.

We're really only measuring handling time right now, which is defined by our business clients. They define what handling time we are trying to define, then the measure of success. That's what we measure ourselves on.

We're probably in the tens of thousands of hours that we have saved, easily.

Because we have so many agents, that's why we went unattended. Attended was very expensive for us because it's a per person license. Where we can take entire workflows, do the triggering and scheduling, etc. We never have to have any human interaction with unattended.

We have a cost model for operating expense savings. It is usually about $100,000 to $125,000 and takes us six weeks to develop and implement. That's development, testing, and implementation. We do code reviews on everything. That does not include all the documentation, assessment, etc.

We just signed a very large perpetual agreement. So, we had 125 Studios and 1200 unattended licenses. We paid $3.7 million. Then, we paid maintenance costs for the next three years, which was 15 percent of that.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Pega, and UiPath.

Scalability was probably the number one that we went with UiPath. Scalability, the ease of use of the software, and the existing functionality that was there were the main reasons. There is a lot more out-of-the-box in terms of embedded functions that were there at the time when we did our analysis. It seemed like UiPath was really on the cutting edge. They were more proactively implementing good features, where others that we were talking with seemed like they were behind in that perspective. 

We'd rather stay on the cutting edge with technology instead of having to wait for our partner to get caught up.

Obviously, there are cheaper options than UiPath.

I'm really excited about the new stuff. There is great new stuff. We wish we would've had this stuff a year ago because we had to build some of it in-house. We are really excited about the Explorer and process mining.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform for automating our company’s processes as a three and a half to four out of five (where five is the easiest). It depends on the skill set of the developer. If you are a developer with a .NET background, then it will be a lot easier for more of the customization. For the technology overall, it is easy to automate our processes.

We run our automations in the virtual environments, like Citrix. We struggled a bit with Citrix at first, because our infrastructure and systems are somewhat antiquated.

Nobody is perfect. I would rate UiPath as a nine (out of 10).

We use UiPath primarily to drive efficiency within the company and introduce a new technology, which is only going to become more popular and more prevalent in the industry in the next few years.

At the moment, we use Orchestrator, Studio, and unattended robots.

We invested in an RPA solution because competitors were doing it. They do it because it's the next wave of this industry, the fourth industrial revolution. Everyone's saying that you can't escape it. It's also because our company, in the shared services department, is thinking about how to challenge our existing models. Traditionally, you chose whether to take the processes onboard or streamline them offshore, but robotics and automation are a competitive alternative to outsourcing. It's very easy. We are challenging the status quo and making sure we're evaluating all our options effectively.

We had a process that was very manual and repetitive and took a team of 14 people, all keying in manually. Now, we've managed to automate it and save 14 employees worth of effort, which amounts to around 14,000 hours to date.

We run our automations in a virtual environment as well. We do Citrix environments when we're working with our offshore partner. We do it on Citrix when working locally. Both work well. I know UiPath has developed a lot on the Citrix platform lately, so it's getting better and easier to do.

Within my immediate team, I have eight people and we can also involve the other operational teams. Including everyone who's related to automation across IT and ops and us, you're probably looking about 20 or 30 people.

The main value within Orchestrator is definitely the scheduling aspect. That includes the way you can prioritize work and use queuing systems to make sure they're at the right points in time, as well as whether they'd be long term related, especially if we're looking at finance.

In terms of Studio, it's just getting easier to use. Studio X is basically the embodiment of that. Even at this point in time with the current Studio version, anyone could pick this up and run with it to develop simpler automations.

The best feature about unattended robots is that they do exactly what you ask them to do. They are as reliable as the code that you provide them with. I think as long as you've got the right governance in place, such as IDs you have created, and you looped in the right teams, the robots are just the shell that will do exactly what you ask them to do.

I'd rate the ease of use of automating our processes at three and a half out of five at this point in time. That is because we've been on a journey over the past year or so and it's not been smooth sailing. There have been issues. I'm not saying that UiPath's support hasn't been great. It has been, but there is still a lot of work to do. It's still a relatively new product in terms of the grander scene of the industry. There's still a lot of work to do there to make sure that the integrations with existing software providers as well as new ones and API connectivities are as they should be. Often, you'll find yourselves using the workarounds in order to address issues that they haven't quite solved yet. I know that's constantly being improved, but that is the journey that we've been on.

One of the issues is with the acquisition of new types of software and new companies. It's important to introduce process documentation and make sure that it's not just making it look like UiPath products, but making it feel and act like one to us. They need to make sure it's embedded and the integration is seamless. They should just keep improving how easy it is to use. I think it's very good already, but there's always room for improvement.

I would rate the product's stability as three and a half, based on our experience. This relates directly back to where we've had challenges. Some of the integration with more mainstream products, like Excel, for example, has been questionable at times. It's just striking that balance between the fact that we want it to be democratized and easy to use by everyone, while we don't want to be in a position where we're forced out of the route to use macros necessarily within Excel. We want the UiPath software to be just as quick and easy to use as that more technical solution. Otherwise, we lose the benefit of having it. It shouldn't be technically inhibited.

I think their support offerings are good. They're very responsive. I think the challenge that they face though, is that they don't always have the answer. They don't always know what the real root cause is. Unfortunately, that's where the real crap piece comes in, which is both a blessing and a curse. It gives me some way of getting around it but it doesn't give me confidence that the issue will be addressed.

It probably took us about nine months to deploy, from the initial UiPath license to implementing the first robot in production. The reason for that is the learning curve of the team as well as the education across the operational teams to bring them up to speed and make sure that everyone's on the same journey. We were also working very closely with IT to make sure that we've got the right infrastructure in place, as well as support models, governance frameworks, etc. Without it, you can't really get anything done. It's a new technology and it was a new concept for everyone. Needing a robot ID, for example, was something that was never discussed before. Lengthy conversations had to be had to make sure that we weren't putting anything at risk with data privacy, for example.

The setup was both straightforward and complex, really. Some bits we're quite straightforward, but other parts were more complex. Especially the infrastructure we're still dealing with now one year on still has some complexities. We're still thinking about credential management versus the use of virtual machines and whether we should be using high density or not. There is also the matter of all the different types of offerings. There's a matrix that you have to abide by and I don't think UiPath is even aware of all the conflicts between the different options. That's something that we're still working through right now, but I'm sure they're going to address it.

We outsourced the implementation.

The performance benefits usually you would see instantly. We had a realization that there were some process changes that we probably needed to make, which we hadn't done prior to going live. I think it took us probably three months before we really saw the benefit coming through.

It's the same as what you would see on any of their list prices. There is also a corporate discount because of scale. Overall, we think it was a competitive price offering. They were the cheapest out of the three, so that's why we went with them.

We looked across the big three: Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. We did have a few others we considered, such as Kofax and Pegasystems. However, they're not dedicated RPA tools. That narrows you down immediately to probably select one of the top three dedicated RPA providers.

UiPath is a very unique example of being very technology-based from its history, but also its culture is very different to the other two. They're trying to be humble. UiPath has a different background and cultural fit, which is very much like our company. That was definitely one of the reasons we chose them. The other reason was the views. We just find it easier to use. The strategy, especially at the point in time when it was announced where the product was headed, was very much that they're trying to push this out to a robot for every person. We want everyone to be able to access it, too.

Do what you would normally do with any vendor. Check out the competition and see what is right for your company. I'll be shocked if you don't think that UiPath is the best because there's a reason why it's at the top of the Gartner reports all over the shop. It's got great user feedback on places like IT Central Station and other review boards. There is absolutely a reason for that. Also, assess the other values that you place importance on. It's not all about costs. Cultural fit was a massive deal for us. What would you envision your company looking like with the uptake of automation? Is it a cultural thing? Is it purely about efficiency or do you want everyone to be up-skilled for what the workforce in the future will look like? That means that actually having everyone being able to access the tools is very important.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of ten.

I have used the UiPath Academy RPA training, although not completed it. I am a bit busy doing a few of the bits, but a lot of my team have completed level one and some completed level three. I have one member of my team who just completed all the training available online. He's done every single module that you have available, including obviously the RPA Advanced Developers training. I think there is a wealth of knowledge there. It's incredible, but it's the same training material that's used internally for UiPath as well as other companies. I think as long as they stay on top of it and make sure that it never gets overlooked, it's a great resource for anyone to get, in order to up-skill in the new technology. If they constantly talk about the democratization of RPA, this is fundamental to that.

The training has helped my team get up to speed, apply best practices, and make sure that we're not wasting time. We were trying to work it out for ourselves in a bit of a haphazard manner. It also forces standardization, of course. Anyone else who decides to get qualified can use it. If you're thinking about doing attended automations, I think it's the right way to do it. Everyone has the same set of standards and rules to build off of.

I would rate the training as four and a half out of five because there's always room for improvement. However, I think it's very thorough and they've covered all the aspects, both technical and not technical. It is very impressive.

I think there are different perks to using one type of robot as opposed to another. The unattended robot cost is higher, therefore the need to make sure the utilization rate is high is paramount to getting your value out of it. I think that makes it challenging but worthwhile. There are different types of processes you will end up pushing towards with an unattended automation profile, whereas an attended profile, which we're starting to move into now, leads to other types of automation opportunities. Attended robots are cheaper, which means it is easier to achieve ROI, but you can almost expect less utilization because it won't be people's full-time jobs. They won't get back all the time and there will be licenses to honor which are being consumed. That has to be baked into the business case. I think you will end up with a portfolio of both. The big opportunities probably sit within an unattended fashion.

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

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

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

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

I have been using UiPath for approximately two years.

The stability is excellent.

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

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

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward.

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

The cost is on the higher side.

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

I 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. 

I use it for RPA in bank reconciliation, credit card operations, retail banking, vendor invoice management, purchase order matching, and employee onboarding.

It helps to minimize the on-premises footprint and speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. It also reduces human error and that reduces costs and makes systems more reliable. 

UiPath can also free up employee time. It depends on how many automation initiatives you run, but you can probably automate 20 to 30 percent of tasks.

Overall, the most valuable aspects are the automation, UI navigation, and orchestration.

It's fairly easy to use and automation can be done by relatively junior people. It's a low-code platform, so it requires a little bit of scripting but nothing too crazy. A business analyst can use it in most cases.

We're an implementation partner, so we don't use it for ourselves because we're too small. But for our client base, it enables end-to-end automation. That's a very important aspect, especially in banking where there is a lot of competition, the margins are low, and operating costs are high. They can't make any mistakes. That requires them to have an automation solution that does manual and repetitive tasks for them. It's a cost imperative.

And being part of the UiPath user community is a positive. I have also done a couple of the sales-oriented UiPath Academy courses. They are really easy to consume and they are free for partners and they're very business oriented.

UiPath is not easy to work with, as a vendor, from a partner perspective. They are difficult to deal with.

I have been working with UiPath for two years, not as an engineer but in business development.

It's very stable. I've not heard of any major issues where the system collapses.

It's scalable. You can throw more and more robots at it.

Technical support from UiPath is slow but good enough.

Neutral

ROI depends on the customer and what they need, but you can definitely have a return on investment of 300 to 400 percent within about three years. It's a relatively quick payback.

They are the biggest RPA vendor with the highest market share. They have a good product and the company seems really innovative. They're branching out into AI and process mining, et cetera. Generally, as a vendor, they're the strongest one in the mix.

My advice is to start sooner rather than later with RPA.

There is a lot of hype around the topic of RPA and customers are exploring it, but they can't do it without partners; at least not the first couple of projects. Deployments with our customers take about six weeks.

We maintain the solutions we create. We normally have a support contract in place for at least the first couple of years. Maintenance, on our side, involves two or three people.