UiPath Platform Reviews

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and mostly the unattended bots.

Our primary use for this solution is to give time back to the employees.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. It's drag-and-drop, and all of the activities are there.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a four. All of this information there is self-explanatory and it works. 

From the point where we started using the demo version, it was a couple of months until our first robot was ready.

This solution has probably helped to eliminate human errors.

I can definitely say that this solution has saved the organization time. With all of the processes together, we have saved one full-time equivalent person. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the unattended automation.

This solution is easy to use and it saves you time.

In future releases, we would like to see more drag-and-drop, and more out of the box AI.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. We had some issues where we needed to get in contact with the support, and sometimes, UiPath crashes on our servers.

We have about eight people in our automation group.

Most of the time, the technical support for this solution is very good.

One one occasion, it was not very good. We had a problem with a new version. When we updated to 18.2, the robots stopped working after some time. We had a lot of emails that included session logs. I made it quite clear that it was really important because we were in the beginning phase and the robots had to run. In the end, I fixed the problem by downloading the next version, 18.3. When we asked whether the problem was version-specific, they never got back to us, which isn't very good.

We did not use another RPA solution before this one.

From the external consultants, we got the idea that RPA has the possibility to save us time and money, so we decided to do it.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. Orchestrator is easy to understand. You can connect the virtual machines to it and then run the robots.

In the beginning, we used a consultant from Roboyou to assist us with the process. Our experience with them was good.

We recognize ROI in terms of performance benefits as soon as a process is automated and an employee can do something else that is more meaningful. It is not a benefit listed on a spreadsheet, but the employees are happier.

Our licensing fees for this solution are €68,000 (approximately $75,000 USD) yearly.

Two years ago, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, in addition to UiPath. UiPath was the best overall solution then, and it still is now. It has a big community, and you can download the demo versions to start testing immediately.

This solution saves us time in all areas. We don't keep track of exactly what we have saved in terms of time, but we can say that we have more customer experience. If somebody has a mundane task and wants it automated then we do it.

My solution for anybody researching RPA solutions is to try UiPath. When you want to start, it is easy to register and get going.

This is a good solution and it saves us time, but there is always a path for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use all of the products in the UiPath platform.

We have use cases ranging from back-office to manufacturing, which include large project management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and treasury management. Most of the areas in the company have processes that we have automated.

We run our automations in the Citrix virtual environment, although we are unhappy with Citrix. It is pretty bad, and it's very difficult to keep up the performance. AVS or Azure do not offer a good service yet, but we are looking for alternatives with respect to the virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. We have been using UiPath for quite a long time, and we have seen this evolving. It has been getting better over the last few years.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training between three and four. The training is good, but the content doesn't have the depth required for people to go ahead and do something if they're not technical. It's still pretty high-level.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was three to four weeks. The process is getting better, but when we started in 2016 and UiPath was small, it was good but needed refinement. I would have rated it three out of five back then.

Using this solution is enabling us to move the drive for digital transformation to the core. We can now take automation to a level it has never been to.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we have seen benefits. With humans performing, the accuracy was at approximately ninety percent. Our accuracy with automation is now close to one hundred percent.

With respect to saving time, we have seen FTE savings but the numbers are confidential.

The most valuable feature of Studio is the ease of use. It is really easy for people to learn the basics and the learning curve is not steep.

Orchestrator makes it very easy to manage the platform.

Orchestrator needs to have better integration to include business users.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution between four and five. Stability has been getting better. For example, Studio used to have a lot of bugs when you were developing and when you were capturing the screens. Now it's been getting better, but there is still room to improve.

Orchestrator used to lag quite a bit when there were a high number of transactions, and there is still room to improve.

We have at least a few hundred people involved in our automation program.

The technical support for this solution is pretty good. Whenever we had trouble they were always there.

We did not use another RPA prior to this one. We were looking at improving the efficiency of processes and bringing some innovative solutions to automating tasks and processes. This is when we decided to try RPA. 

We implemented this solution on our own.

We have seen ROI but I cannot share the specifics.

We did a very extensive vendor review. We had all of the major providers of RPA solutions in 2016, and UiPath was the one that came through in terms of fulfilling all of the criteria.

Looking ahead at the features that are being released this year, they seem to be what we have been looking for.

My advice for anybody researching this type of solution is to choose wisely. There are a lot of products out there, but few of them actually work.

This is a good solution and they are releasing some features that I am looking forward to, but there is still room to improve. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is around manual conversion of data from one system to another. These are big processes right now.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator and the robots.

Our organization is more efficient. The people that you're automating processes from are happy they are getting done. They are excited and like to be a part of the process. It's also new technology. It's innovative. and people enjoy being around that.

We don't have a baseline metric for the elimination of human errors. So, we don't know how many errors a human actually makes doing some of the conversion data entry processes. We assume they are about 90 percent accurate and UiPath is 100 percent accurate.

We have saved 18,000 hours so far this year.

With the robotics and management of Orchestrator, we are able to kick things off. We are starting to get more out of the scheduling of these and into more on demand triggered events, such as a RESTful service calls and things of that nature.

The ease of using the platform for automating your company's processes is a five out of five. It is super simple. Everyone who we have in our robotics team had no experience with automation or robotics previously. They went online took the classes from UiPath. They started with the Community Edition, just to play with it themselves, then they were probably experts within a couple of months.

Everyone has used the UiPath Academy training. I would rate it around a three or four out of five. While it's simple and you get a decent understanding of what's there, you still have to dedicate on an awful lot of time doing the automations to become proficient at them.

While it looks like it is being addressed, getting the unattended robots to every person's machine in the company and executing on their machines needs improvement.

I would rate the stability as a five out of five. it hasn't gone down yet.

We have a team of four people involved in our automation program.

I have only used the technical support to fix a licensing discrepancy. They were okay.

Everybody said, "We had to do more with less," from the C-suite on down. RPA is the only way that you can do that which seemed viable. So, we tried it out.

We were previously using VM. 

The initial setup is straightforward. With our proof of concept, it took us two to three weeks to develop it, then another week to make it production ready. When we deployed it into production, we had the license. We installed the robot and had it running through Windows Scheduler before we had Orchestrator, and it just worked

We started with a proof of concept, had it running in production, and bought the license that day.

We did have a systems integrator who helped us. Overall, for the initial implementation, I would rate them a five out of five. They came in, and it was great.

We have been able to achieve our ROIs on pretty much every process that we have done. You see it almost initially, as soon as the process starts running. However, until we get the actual feedback of, "Yes, I can tell this is saving us time and effort." It takes about a month for the business unit to really recognize it.

We haven't technically saved money because we haven't gotten rid of anybody, so our CFO will not let us claim money. However, we do calculate time given back. Right now, I believe for this year, we've been given back 18,000 hours so far.

Our licensing costs are around $40,000 a year.

We looked at the big three: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. Then, we chose UiPath because of cost and ease of use. The training was there. It was so quick and easy to pick up.

I would recommend UiPath. It's easy to use and learn. It just works and doesn't break. It's cost-effective.

We run our automations in virtual environments, such as Citrix. Orchestrator sits in VMware along with unattended robots. It kicks everything off behind the scenes. Most processes are set on a time schedule.

We prefer unattended bots. We're moving into that real-time trigger, but still like to run unattended to give some form of user interface for the user to call them.

I would definitely rate it a 10 out of 10 because of what it delivers and allows, along with the benefits. You can also see on their strategy on the roadmap, it's just expanding and getting better.

Our primary use case is IP invoice automation.

We are currently using Orchestrator and bots.

It gives you a technology or ability to build a solution on any legacy system.

I love Orchestrator: 

• The configuration part
• The amount of keys
• Transaction reporting
• Logs
• Accessibility on the iPhone.

VM was on the service for high density. It is finicky at times. The latest release is a lot more stable. However, I've had a two week production outage where DLLs weren't registered and someone from Vegas had to login for eight hours onto the fraud service to work it out. Even though they uninstalled and re-installed it, all the different apps still wasn't working. So, I  have lost a bit of faith in it to be honest.

I would like to have cloud stuff back in Australia and hosted there. I want everything in SaaS, bots included.

While it has eliminated human errors, it has created other errors.

I would like something that better identifies the processes. If it could watch the computer, then work it out for me, that would be good.

Now that I've done an upgrade, it seems to be a lot better. Because I was running high density on the 2016.2 or 2016.3. I had a lot of problems, but I couldn't work out whether or not it was just UiPath or our client app that was timing out. But, we noticed that if you login as console, you have far less issues than if you run high density.

These days, the stability is a four out of five. Back in the day, it wasn't.

In my old organization, 50 to 100 people were involved.

I have a bit of a different issue because at my old company that I just left, I was only paying $3,600 USD per bot. I turned up at my new company, and because of our size, we are paying $8,000 per bot.  

The support is not good. I had a two week production outage.

There was a business problem, and we needed to work at how to solve it. The partner was a big driver in this process.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It took two weeks from the time we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot in production.

We used Blackbook.ai, and our experience with them was awesome.

We have seen ROI. The last company that I work for was trying to get 1000 FTEs out the door, and I think that they are already at 60. In Australia, at my current company, we are already at 10 FTEs. Just in Australia, we have save a million dollars, and maybe five million in India.

The reduction of 10 FTEs has saved us time.

At the last place that I worked, it was $700,000 USD.

Everything that I read about Blue Prism suggest that it is too heavy and takes too much development to ramp up.

I looked at Automation Anywhere for the price point, especially for a PoC. Between Blackbook.ai and what I saw already with UiPath, I just thought UiPath was the better option.

Scout it out. I am going to try to work with this company a different way than what I did than last time, e.g., federated.

I would rate the overall product as a nine out of 10. It's an enabler. It seems pretty good. There is a lot of investment and new things.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a four out of five. It is pretty easy to use but it is not doing everything for me. I still have to do stuff.

I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four out of five.

We have a bunch of uses for the product so it is hard to judge which is the most important. We started working with data structures for websites and then moved into more complex automation like speech detection and making more cognitive decisions based on rules. Our automation using bots is essentially on the verge of using artificial intelligence.

There are a lot of ways this product has improved our organization. Even a simple project can bring us a lot of recognition. One example is retrieving passwords on Amazon. Imagine that you have a user who forgets their password. Amazon lets you reset your password but there are a lot of steps. In the background, Amazon is validating that you are the person that you are saying that you are with a lot of manual steps. We automated that with a bot and other tools and the customer experience skyrocketed. We reduced the processing by five minutes just for that service. Not only did we apply that solution for one country, but we also applied it to seven different countries. It was a success story.

What I think is the best thing about UiPath is that it is fairly easy to understand and learn how to use it. One of the most valuable things about the product is the improvement they are making with the tools. They are offering around thirteen new products now. With these additions, there is a lot of value-added enhancement that we can provide via the automation to augment what we already have implemented.

The studio's Orchestrator is the tool that we use in order to create the scripts for the bot. It is what enables us to deliver automation. Having these new technologies within the studio is what enables us to be more creative. With the Orchestrator we can monitor the bots, we can "orchestrate" them, and we can deliver that tool to customers so that they can manage their bots. It is really like digital workforce management. If we created a bot for a business, usually it would just do its job and the customer would not see what the bots are really doing. With this tool, the client has that opportunity to see what the bots are doing. 

The bots automate the work that otherwise would have to be done with other interventions and resources, so reallocation of resources and focus is the most valuable thing overall.

There are a lot of things that can be done to the product to make it better. The feature list that I develop between releases is often covered new releases of the product. That is good. But there are still a lot of enhancements that I would like to have within the Orchestrator and the queues. For example, how we manage the queues is an important thing.

I would like to see the ability to have other ways to look for one transaction within the queue. If I am looking for a single transaction, it would be good to have a filter that you can use to specify a detail, like just looking for a reference name that starts with a particular letter — but not the entire reference, but wildcards. Those are the kind of things that can be enhanced and make a big difference. Maybe they are not on the roadmap for the company when it comes to upgrades at this point because those are tiny things within the tools. But even those tiny little things can make a lot of difference in the functionality of the tools.

On a scale of one to five where five is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the stability of this platform a five. The stability of the platform is very good. During the four years that we have been working with UiPath, we have not encountered any issues with stability because of the platform. There are always issues with the environment and that can affect stability and performance, but with the platform itself, there are no issues.

Within the RPA suite, we have around 40 people working with the product. But we also have to consider that we usually engage people from other places to contribute to every single project. There are a lot more users than are working with us within the project and within our immediate company team. The peripheral people are going to be people from security, people from IT, people with specific business backgrounds, etcetera. The number of users and the product itself are scalable.

The technical support is actually pretty good. We worked a lot with our CSM (Customer Service Management). They are always doing a great job to find someone to help us out when we have issues. They get the right person for the right issue. For now, if I had to rate it from one to five where five is the best, it is going to be a five.

At the beginning, we would try to automate tasks using spreadsheets where we had calculations. We had macros and things of that sort to automate small tasks. The next step in moving to a new era was to turn to RPAs. There were a lot of things that we needed to implement through this new technology. So we did have another solution before for some types of automation but it wasn't really a dedicated system for automation and it wasn't capable of this scale.

We have a turn-around time of four to six weeks. In order to go to implementation and production, it depends on the complexity of the project. A normal project that is not that complex will obviously take less time. We have to take into consideration the time that we have in assessment, in the evaluation of the project, and in development, and only after that do we do testing to put it into production.

There are, of course, always challenges, but not all of them come because of the UiPath platform. There's a lot of things that are an issue because of the environment or the target applications that we're using. It is often more because of that than the platform itself.

We have in-house developers, we have a QA team, and we have a training and communication team specifically for the RPA suite. We also have managers for the teams, the support team, and solution architects. We do our own implementations and assist others in doing theirs.

We usually try to calculate return on investment within a year or two depending on the project. But we start to look at the benefits from the first month we put the product into production. Not really the ROI exactly, but the benefits. What I mean by benefit is if the automation is achieving the goals it was intended to achieve. Once we pass through the cost of implementation, license cost and any additional expenditure of resources, then we look into ROI.

We have seen a lot of benefits in a variety of ways depending on the projects. Most of what we have been seeing is capacity creation. There are a lot of things that can be introduced to automate processes. If there is work that can't be handled by a team and they are not going to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement), creating bots and putting bots into their team to take over redundant tasks is letting the team use resources differently. It creates additional capacity so the team can focus on more important things — like quality or process. That enables the business unit to accomplish their tasks while raising quality. The bot can always be depended on to do a specific task in the same way. If we have the right steps and if we have the right process to execute, the output from the bot is going to be right. That is another incredible benefit. Of course and for example, giving the customer a response in one hour instead of five hours enhances the customer experience. Proper use of automation can do all of these things.

Bots can also be used in eliminating human errors. Being cautious in estimating that, it could be as much as a 60% to 80% reduction. It will be reducing human error, but there is always some level of error in processing.

The percentage of time saved using UiPath bots depends on the projects, but most processes can save teams 85% of the time they would spend on tasks that can be automated. Some other automated tasks we have the efficiency go up to 90 or 95%. That is pretty good and a great way to allow for the reallocation of resources.

The cost depends on how many licenses we have and how we use the bots. We have a rate for attended bots and a rate for unattended bots. The price itself depends on the project and the number of licenses required. The prices, in general, are good — actually they are the best — but they could always be cheaper. Right now there is no one that is cheaper. The cost is in line with what we thought that it should be.

In 2016, we started to evaluate vendors. We went through Automation Anywhere and a lot of the competing products. We decided to go with UiPath not only because of the cost and the model that they have, but also the relationship that they have with customers. They actually care for you. They are always looking to provide you with the newest and best technologies. They try to make you use it in the best ways and they try to make you test out new features and provide feedback. If you need it and you realize that it's really good, then they help you make it happen. That is the best thing. They are being humble even though they are growing a lot. It is what actually made us go through UiPath.

We are using the entire UiPath tool. We are using the studios, we are using the orchestrator, we are using the bots. That is both unattended and attended bots.

We have two different environments. One is on-prem within Costa Rica data center and then we have another in the U.S. that is on an internal cloud and we use VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Citrix.

The virtual environment is actually pretty functional. There are some pros and cons. The pro is that it enables you to add virtual machines if you need them. The con might be that sometimes you need to enable connections that are not enabled. You might have to go through firewalls, go through network issues, etcetera. With that, it is a little bit more complex to build out automation sometimes. You have to go through configuration hurdles when you encounter them.

On a scale of one to five with five being very easy and one being very hard, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a five. It is a five because when comparing it with the other RPA (Robotic Process Automation) platforms, it is easier to navigate within the studio and it is more comprehensive. There is a saying in usability that if you need to take more than five clicks in order to find what you're looking for, it is not easy. Finding what you want in one or two clicks is what makes a product easy to use.

We use UiPath Academy RPA training all the time. Every new employee or intern that we employ in our company goes through the RPA academy training first. That is kind of the bible for us. On a scale of one to five, five being very beneficial and one being not beneficial at all, I would rate the academy as a five. 

My advice for anyone considering this solution is very simple: It is worth it, go ahead and give it a try. You will like it. Try to experience everything within UiPath and go through every single feature that they have and can provide currently before you commit to it. The company's support will back you up and they will make sure that you find what you are looking for.

On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the product as an eight. To get a ten, a product should be perfect. Nothing is perfect. It is not a nine because it is just a cautious rating. In technology, we always say that for every question there is an answer that says "depending on...[something]". Depending on what you're looking at, it is going to be an eight or it's going to be a nine. It should never be a ten.

We're starting within our finance group, so a lot of different processes in our finance group are being automated. Our main project was for our tax department, extracting data from PDFs and putting them into Excel.

We have two people involved with RPA in our company.

We just purchased this solution last week so we're still installing everything. We did automate four processes with the community edition. The length of time in development varied by the process. The longer ones required help from UiPath. They came on-site for the PoC, so that helped us out. Some other easy ones we just did ourselves within a couple of days.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it is a four. But with Studio X, I think it will probably be a five. I say four because as you get more complicated with your processes, you need to learn how to code and there's a brunt learning curve. A lot of people will get turned off by that. So, I made some good sessions with Studio X, it's all drag and drop, mostly, so that's perfect for the business users.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are actually in the process of taking it right now. It's good that they have something like that available. There are not that many who have aced it.

So far we haven't gone too far, but I expect that people will be a lot happier because they won't be doing the jobs that they don't like doing. They'll have more time to learn and up-skill technologies like this, which can help further their careers rather than just learning, or not learning by copying and pasting.

The most valuable feature is automating processes and tasks, giving users time for more value-added activities. This results in cost savings.

The free community edition allowed us to test out the technology before investing in it.

I would like a better ability to connect and integrate with other software systems. An example would be integration with data and business intelligence tools. I don't think they have a native connector yet. So, just something that a user can connect, and have RPA in the middle, would be helpful.

I would also like to see an easier UI for the user. It may have already been taken care of with Studio X, but I think if they keep improving that, it's going to get a lot of people interested because users are attracted to it.

We were just using community edition for about six months.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I mean we haven't used it too much so we haven't really pushed the boundaries, but for the stuff we've, done I would say it is stable.

Their sales and pre-sales support is very good. They've been very willing to come onsite and help us out and help with our pilot as well.

We got introduced by RPA from PWC. They came and talked at one of our finance summits.

The paid version, I'm still learning how to use, how to connect everything together. There is still a little learning period for that as well. Learning how Orchestrator works, how the licensing works and things like that, were necessary after using the community edition.

UiPath helped us with our PoC and they were great. I mean they came for free and through just a pilot or a proof of concept. We could actually see if the technology works for a use case.

Before we start anything we evaluate the process and we take down how many hours it saves, the costs, and ROI. In our main project, it took someone approximately three hundred hours a year to do all that data extraction, data input, and that also came along with errors because someone could fat-finger the value.

Then, through the PoC, they're able to turn around within two days. A bot can basically do that entire process and do it error-free as well.

It is a savings of three-hundred hours, and the cost savings is a multiplier of hourly pay.

We also use it as an ETL tool sometimes, so instead of paying for an API connection, we can use RPA. Simply just to run a simple report of the system.

I don't have any other software vendors to compare it to, but I would say if you're fully utilizing it then there's definitely an ROI in it. Obviously, if you have only one process running five minutes a day with the bot, it's not worth it. For us, what we did was we built enough use cases before we bought that enterprise license to make the ROI on it. We've got eight or ten and then we realized that we can cover that license cost easily with ROI before we purchased it.

Ultimately, we realized ROI within six months.

We got purchased the basic minimum package and it was around $35,000 USD, annually.

We tested out Kryon RPA, and we looked but did not test Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were out of our price range, and at that time, neither of them had a free community edition, so we couldn't test out the technology.

UiPath sort of fit our company well because it was priced reasonably, and they also had a free version so we could test out the technology. Ultimately, we chose UiPath because of the price. It was not as expensive as Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. It has a free community version where you can test new technology, which was huge. They also have a local office next to us so we can get their help pretty easily.

They have announced features in the next release, and I think that they are all the things that users would want. There are easier ways to document processes and a better and more user-friendly UI. A lot of people just got turned off by having to learn code. So that was a lot easier, and then being able to track all your RPA projects and the ROI on them saves time. Doing them manually is time-consuming. Fortunately, we're a small company because I couldn't imagine if you're trying to implement this for a bigger company.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to, first of all, do their own research on the ratings and independent research. Secondly, I would just say a lot of them now have free community editions, so there's nothing holding you back from testing out the technology and seeing if it works. I think Blue Prism is the only one that doesn't have it now. That's a really high cost and a barrier to seeing if the technology works. Just going and validating the software and doing a simple automation task is important. All of those vendors have free training so you can just go step-by-step and learn something. I think that's the biggest thing someone can do, and then obviously finding enough processes within your company as well.

This is a good solution but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for invoice processing in combination with intelligent data captures. It's used for anything to do with lots of finance processes. Typically they go into lots of HR processes as well. They're the two main business functions that we work in.

Orchestrator has valuable scheduling and being able to run things on demand and dynamically as well allocating the transaction, and the studio are good features. Nothing stands out in particular. Everything's kind of equal, it just depends on the task you need to complete.

With an unattended robot, you can schedule it and have it running autonomously.

The solution is quick and easy to implement. It's fairly easy, and it means clients don't have to get IT involved. If you get IT involved in anything there's always blockers and there are always other priorities. 

They should expand on workflow type items and take another step up from the long-running workflows to offer more visibility of business processes within Orchestrator.

The solution needs a better integration team, different versions of Orchestrator, and to make it easier to identify problems with versions, as well as to be able to fix those kinds of problems. It's hard if you don't keep up to date all the time as well, for example, to go from 2018 to 2019 versions. It's quite a big jump considering activities and things like that.

I'd rate the stability five out of five.

When we were using technical support we were typically going directly to some people we knew in UiPath because we knew them very well. We haven't had that many instances that we needed to use the help though.

In terms of ease of setup, I would rate the solution four out of five. From an IT perspective, it's pretty simple, but from a non-technical perspective, I think people will struggle.

They've brought us Studio X which is starting to increase that to a five out of five. From a business user perspective a lot of the sales teams will sell it as a very easy to mend product which isn't particularly helpful because when you go into a customer environment and you have to build via a complex process and then integrate it with IT and all of the business systems then obviously it's not a five minute job. It's not overly complicated but can take three to four weeks for some processes to be implemented successfully.

From the time the UiPath license is purchased to implementing it virtually takes about three weeks.

ROI depends on the process. Some customers are using their people badly and they literally have a person doing the job of processing invoices all day long. It's very quick to realize their ROI because it's a 30-40 thousand pound salary that they get to replace very, very quickly. More commonly, on a big project, it takes 6 to 12 months to get to an ROI. Even if you are just breaking even, in a year or two you'll start to get an ROI.

There's information online. There's actually a section where you can go through training online for licensing. There's some documentation available as well from the UiPath sales team. You can just ask them.

I've already struggled with licensing a little bit. It's never been super clear because you have the notion of a mode lock and concurrent users and things like that depending on whether you want it on one machine or whether you want the licenses to be able to float around different users. The wording around it can be improved. They communicate in a simpler way.

Usually, the client looks at UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and sometimes other smaller competitors but that's quite rare.

We use Orchestrator, Studio, and unattended and attended robotics. We typically use more unattended than attended generally. Increasingly we're using attended robots. We use Orchestrator but at 1:1 per client, and Studio for development.

For the larger clients, they still go on-prem, but mid-tier customers start to use the cloud solution.

We try to encourage clients not to run automation within virtual environments like Citrix. UiPath does work through Citrix but it's only if clients really don't have control of that environment. We have done it, but where possible we always ask clients to install either the robot on the local machine or to install the major Citrix extension. By running within virtual premises everything's a little bit more or less stable so you have to add more checks, which means the development time takes a bit longer; and the data coming out is a little bit less reliable. But with the Citrix extension, everything has become a lot easier.

I used a web tool for the UiPath Academy RPA training. I did a lot of the training before there was an Academy, and then when it came out I did the certification. We always put our team through every stage of the training. I'd rate the Academy four out of five. It's easy to follow and get through. The only thing that's lacking a little bit is, it's just that you can't do 2 weeks worth of training and then become an expert. Another thing is that there is a further certification which is an advanced developer certificate which needs product experience as well, and for me, there's not been enough distinction between the 2-week online training vs that proper diploma. There's always some confusion, when people say, "Oh yeah, we've got this", many people say it doesn't mean as much as it could, or other software companies have a better distinction between levels of certification experience. They need to offer a solution architect type certification for someone who knows the infrastructure really well and can prove it. There needs to be a proper qualification for that.

In terms of reducing human error with the solution, I've always been an advocate of the software benefit that comes out of automation. AFT savings are great but I think a lot the other benefits include less mundane work being done, fewer errors, better compliance, better visibility. One of the things that hasn't been exploited that well is the additional data that you get from automation. Where humans previously were just doing a job, for example, we automate a lot of processes.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the financial processes. 

In our company, we are freeing up 14,000 hours per month.

All of the UiPath's components, meaning Studio, Orchestrator, and Unattended Robotics, are really important for us because they offer really clean processes. The one that generates more value for us is the Orchestrator because we are planning to really scale up the factory. It helps us to have an overview and control. With the insights that they announced recently, I hope we have really great control over it in the company.

In terms of ease of use, I would rate the solution five out of five. It's really intuitive and any people that have the basics of coding can handle it. 

In the next release, they need enterprise connect. That's something we were wondering about. 

The solution could maybe use more artificial intelligence components or stuff we can start to use in the AI field. 

It could use an easy integration with SAP. Most of the processes of our company are in SAP. Sometimes it's kind of tricky to automate it.

I'd rate the stability four out of five. We haven't presented problems but sometimes with the UiPath robot, the robot attended license breaks.

We have reached out to technical support. We are in Columbia so sometimes there are slow responses because they don't have too much capacity to attend to us in Latin America. It could be better.

Our time to market in implementing our first robot was four months because it was new for everyone in the company. We started too many processes at the same time and we were preparing everything around the company. It was slow. It was four or five months.

The initial setup was easy. We didn't have any problems.

We implemented the solution ourselves. Our IT department and our robotics architect handled it. We also had UiPath help us with the set up as well.

I'd rate their assistance five out of five. They helped us a lot.

Unattended robot costs are high.

For our company, we have money to buy the solution and we have a huge contract with UiPath, but for companies that are smaller, the costs are too high. For example, a company that is not too big, because they have to pay in dollars, may suffer because conversion rates are high.

When we started we started with UiPath and Blue Prism. We made 14 processes with each and we decided to stay with UiPath. Mostly because of the IT architecture. We really like the Orchestrator, for example. It was like a huge consideration we had because Blue Prism is like a closed book and we didn't like it too much.

We utilize the full UiPath package. We are all on the cloud using the Microsoft Azure platform. 

We also use it within the virtual environment. It has been tough implementing it. Sometimes it doesn't identify the selectors or the images. It has a higher risk of failure. It's risky to have a centralized process.

We plan on automating the drilling process, the upstream and midstream process of the company, and the transportation of oil and gas for the company. Those are the main areas for us that we are aiming to automate. We started with back processes such as financial processes, logistic processes, and HR processes because they are not the core. As we continue learning about it, we will focus on the back-office processes.

A prerequisite for us in the company is to go through the UiPath RPA Training Academy. They have many courses, including foundations and advanced certifications. I'd rate the Training Academy four out of five. If they didn't explain too many things that would be great. They do basic stuff that will help people have a different mindset about it. They need more of an overview. Use cases, examples and more explanations about the activities in the UiPath would be useful. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.