UiPath Platform Reviews

My primary use case is automation. I worked in multiple companies with the same product on the same profile, and most of them were automation. The actual business use case would vary from company to company, and project to project as well.

One feature that I personally found valuable was the orchestrator. It is a pretty mature platform as of now, and it was three to four years back when I started to first use it. It has matured quite well. They had a major change a couple of years back. Our company transitioned from an older approach to a newer modern approach that they deployed. The orchestrator platform was very well-suited to the new approach - as was the development studio. It's really easy to use and intuitive. That has matured quite well as far as I can tell. These two are what I liked the most about the product.

UiPath’s ease of use and quick deployment times were great as the cloud orchestrator, which did not need much of a setup.

To build automation using UiPath is fairly simple. The studio is quite easy to use. Even now, with the community edition, it’s great. If we want to learn to start or try out something, we do not have to wait for licenses or anything else. That said, we can also get an enterprise trial. If we want to do something, learn something, even during our personal time, we can just download it. They also provide a free orchestrator version as well, so it becomes quite easy to learn and develop. 

The building, deployment, and manual deployment processes, for small-scale projects, are very easy. If we need to build something, we just publish it, and it generates the NuGet package. It's very easy to deploy there.

The materials and the training courses are all pretty well-structured to get started with.

UiPath Academy courses have assisted in the process of getting our team up to speed. The basics were there even when I started out. I was not initially an RPA developer. I was into server operations before this. The UiPath Academy training really helped a lot with the initial courses, where they give you a tour of the platform and each and every activity. For audiences who are not much into software development, these courses can guide them towards that. The building blocks got us up to speed. They have very good courses there.

Regarding the Academy, it is a great learning platform for basic tasks. However, for more complex information, I turn to UiPath Forum. Sometimes I need some Python or C# scripts or am building custom libraries there. That gets shifted onto different platforms like Stack Overflow. We Google other platforms as well for the other types of queries.

UiPath Forum is a pretty good place in terms of the user community. Most of the queries that are posted generally get answered. Sometimes, even for smaller issues, we do not go directly into UiPath support and we first try to resolve the issues via what we find in the UiPath Community. Overall, it’s a pretty good place to solve our issues, and the community as of now is pretty active.

We saved time in our IT department since we started to use this solution. UiPath handles infrastructure for the orchestrator and its maintenance. There's a pretty good amount of time saved as we had initially had a server on-prem deployment as well. However, it became cumbersome to deploy multiple databases and they have some Elasticsearch requirements and security updates that need to be regularly maintained and in sync with UiPath. Due to this infrastructure overhead, our time could be consumed maintaining everything. Without them handling the infrastructure, we'd be maintaining instead of building automations and deploying them. We realized that an automation cloud would be a better option which is why we switched.

UiPath reduced human error. That said, we do not track errors in the process. It's a good metric to track as well, however, we currently do not track it.

It reduced employees’ time on certain tasks. The main purpose of automation is to save us the number of hours that the project will take. There are many other parameters, however, the time saved is one of the big ones. 

A weakness with Academy is that, with the current updates that they have, the newer updates, the courses are not up to speed. Nowadays, Academy does not feel that intuitive and does not give sufficient information about the product to the customer.

In our current use cases, we do not need much user interaction. One shortcoming with UiPath Apps is that it cannot directly integrate with the orchestrator platform itself. For example, if we need to fetch any assets, values, or cue data from the orchestrator itself, it's basically a web platform. Even if we develop apps and want to do something based on that data, they do not have direct integration with the orchestrator. We need a separate bot, which will then interact with the orchestrator and then pass it back.

If we need ten to fifteen users who might simultaneously use apps, and we want to run a process for each of these users, then we might need fifteen licenses to do that. That is something that has been holding us back from using it, as it does not have direct orchestrator access. We need a separate bot to get the data to perform some actions.

Scaling and licensing need major improvement. I know that they have released something called Serverless Cloud Robots, where the bot machines do not need infrastructure. However, we do not generally want to run the bots or the data in the UiPath cloud as well. There are some hiccups that do happen when we run bots on another machine. That said, it might be a good feature and we can scale up and scale down more effectively.

I've used the solution for nearly four years now.

The stability has been quite good for a couple of quarters now. We had some issues two or three quarters ago, where there was a downtime of around thirty minutes which impacted assessment. After that, for the last couple of quarters, we have not seen any issues regarding the platform itself. It is pretty stable.

The product allows scaling up, however, when we deploy and run the bot, the bot does not actually run on the orchestrator. The orchestrator is just a management platform. When we need to scale up bots, what we would need to do is spin up new virtual machines. We need those virtual machines in order to scale up. This, along with the licensing affects the ability to scale.

If someone does not have a license, it cannot scale up. When comparing it to something like AWS offers, or any other cloud service, where you can rapidly scale up and rapidly scale down based upon our demands, that is currently not possible with the UiPath. We do not get to easily scale up. We need to plan in advance as to when we run our automation, what time we need to offset the loads, and which automation gets priority at that time. That becomes a bit of an issue.

As of now, scaling is a bit cumbersome, whether we are scaling up or down, and the licensing also revolves around scaling.

We use both attended and unattended automation. In the case of attended automation, scaling is a bit tricky. We need to consider licenses. Very few need the same automation to run on one hundred machines. If we do, then we would need to find a way to manage these one hundred licenses as well. It again comes down to cost.

Our thought process is that whenever possible and where we need to scale, we try to avoid human interaction, and we try to convert our bad pieces into attended automation. If some automation requires a manual login due to regulatory compliance or maybe due to capture, what we do is have these login paths that we take in as unattended input. Then where it’s possible, we would run it as an unattended mode and maybe then pass on the output to the attended mode.

We have support from UiPath, however, I'm not sure what model we are on. 

The support is not as responsible as we would expect. It's not bad, but it's not good.

The response time, the overall solutions that they provide, and the workarounds are okay. It's a mix of everything. We've had somewhat of a mixed experience with them.

Neutral

UiPath handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates for the Automation Cloud - the infrastructure being the orchestrator infrastructure. The robot infrastructure is handled by us.

I was involved in the initial deployment of UiPath in our organization's deployment process. The deployment process is pretty straightforward with automation cloud data, so we did not need to worry about that. The administration is pretty straightforward as well. They have all of these access models, folders, and groupings. It's very easy, even for a new user that needs access to a particular box to run. It's also easy to maintain.

In terms of deployment on the cloud, there is no overhead. The administration process is simple. Maybe it took us around two to three days of initial setup. Most of the time was spent brainstorming on how we would need to structure our use case. That was what took the majority of the time. Once we decided on that, it was pretty easy. It can be done in one day. The process is also ongoing as the requirements change and the roles change, and it always requires some sort of maintenance, taking out users, taking in new users, et cetera. However, that's pretty easy.

In terms of the deployment of individual bots, it is pretty easy. The manual deployment is also pretty simple. We deploy it from the studio. We get a bundle package and we upload it at the studio level as well as the orchestrator, and it's done. This is a straightforward model. We do have a CI/CD pipeline setup for enterprises where we avoid manual deployments. In that case, we do not use UiPath CI/CD. We do use Git and pipelines to push our packages directly to UiPath.

I can't speak to if there has been an ROI or not.

The licensing could be more flexible. They might have a different enterprise cost strategy for each of the licenses. The license is rigid in that you cannot generally scale up. To scale up, we have to have a license procured before we can run a bot there.

I am not involved in the comparison between Uipath and its competitors, such as Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or any other platform.

We do not really have clients in healthcare, however, my previous company has mainly evolved into what I can say is a pharmaceutical supply chain. The company is an ordering platform for pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure whether I can consider that as a healthcare pharmaceutical or supply chain use case.

I had done some trial POCs around the UiPath Apps feature. We did some basic trials within our team, however, we do not have any end-users who actively use UiPath Apps.

We're still at an early stage in terms of using AI in our automation via UiPath. We tried out some POCs, and I'm also just getting training on that as well. We do not have any production use cases right now that go into full AI or ML.

In general, they have a good ecosystem of developers. It would be easier to set up and use it. However, if a new company has heavier workloads and needs scaling capability based on time, they’ll need to calculate their requirements. For example, if I process 1,000 to 2,000 transactions per day and I need ten robots to do this and it's fixed every day, then it's fine. That said, if I have varying workloads, where the workload is the last week of the month and the workload is very high, maybe I’ll need twenty or thirty bots to accommodate this workload, while, for the rest of the month, I’ll just need around five bots. That's twenty-five bots that I’ll need to purchase, with many idle most of the time. That is one issue that needs to be planned correctly during the initial stage. 

Overall, I would rate UiPath eight out of ten.

One of the projects we have been working on is for a medical company. It includes fetching medical records from the company's web-based portal. These records have to be pasted into Excel and consolidated. We then send them back to the client via email. We use Orchestrator to schedule the process to run every day at three intervals. It is running as an unattended bot.

We have also used it for another company to help with their employee onboarding process.

If we had to build code from scratch in UiPath, we would have to configure proper exception handling and log creation. We would also have to connect it to Orchestrator queues. But with the predefined REFramework (Enhanced Robotic Enterprise Framework) template, those requirements have been built already. All we have to do is invoke our code in one of the four states: Init, Get Transaction, Process Transaction, and End Process. Because it is connected to Orchestrator's queues, we can then run the process.

We have also been able to develop our code based on UiPath's security and compliance credentials. UiPath supports confidentiality. Until now, we have never faced a security problem. It is the most secure RPA tool.

Another benefit is that UiPath automation saves our clients time. During our requirements gathering, one client told us that the process they wanted to be automated takes around 15 to 30 minutes to complete when done manually. As a result of the solution we implemented using UiPath, it is now completed within two minutes.

There are two features that I find to be the most valuable in UiPath. 

One is Orchestrator because it allows us to manage the bots and processes. For example, we can monitor unattended bots' run history and their logs. We can also modify our code based on screenshots by logging the screenshots and then viewing the logs in an Orchestrator job. That helps us trace errors and rectify them.

The second valuable feature is REFramework which is a pre-defined template built with proper exception handling and logging activities. Those aspects help developers to develop code properly.

In addition, I have implemented UiPath with ABBYY FlexiCapture for some projects, and that has been very helpful for successfully completing those projects and providing a positive impact for our customers. It makes it very easy to extract data from a PDF and then build code to process it in UiPath. The integration of ABBYY FlexiCapture with UiPath is a very good feature.

When it comes to REFramework, we need more training videos and tutorial documents for beginners. 

And while there are a lot of videos to learn about basic activities in UiPath, we need more documents and key points on how to connect third-party connectors. That would be very helpful for beginners and for quick implementation.

I've been working in UiPath for almost two years. I use it daily.

The stability of the solution is excellent.

The scalability is also excellent.

Sometimes technical support will get stuck on how to execute further, but we raise our queries in the UiPath Community Forum. There are so many RPA developers there and we get quick replies from them. We're able to build solutions based on their information. The forums are very useful for us.

Positive

I used to use Blue Prism.

I have seen a lot of return on investment with UiPath because it enables quicker implementation of automations.

When I compared the basics between Blue Prism and UiPath, I felt UiPath was much better.

With Blue Prism it takes a lot of time to build code and workflows. For example, to fetch data from Excel within UiPath only one activity is needed, called Read Range. But Blue Prism requires use of three activities to do the same thing. First, I have to open the Excel instance, then open the worksheet, and then fetch the data from the worksheet. Using UiPath means quicker implementations. 

And there are a lot more features in UiPath when compared to Blue Prism, and I haven't seen any disadvantages of UiPath. Using it, there is a solution for every process. There is no such thing as a process that cannot be done in UiPath. UiPath is the best solution for RPA and for our customers.

UiPath doesn't require any maintenance.

We are able to build workflows very quickly and it doesn't take that much coding knowledge to learn and understand UiPath. Beginners are able to learn it quickly and get into the businesses.

Choose UiPath. It is more helpful than any other tool for implementing solutions quickly and creating customer satisfaction. Based on my experience, UiPath is the best tool for automating RPA projects and repetitive processes.

I'm not currently using UiPath, but in my previous organization, which I left seven months ago, we had a complex trading application that included a web form and a Windows form. And on the Windows form was an Electron framework. If you want to run a web application inside a Windows application, Electron is a bridge between the web application and the actual Windows app. Because it was a complex application, it was not very easy to automate. That's where UiPath came in. It perfectly fit our automation testing scenario.

Before UiPath came into the picture, we were planning on doing automation testing with Selenium. The test plan with Selenium was going to take about three months. When UiPath was introduced and we started working on it, we completed the whole automation, end-to-end, in about one and a half months. It saved us that much time. And we made sure that our product was delivered with the required quality and that we did not compromise on that.

Because UiPath is SaaS, we were able to automate everything in a very productive manner. We were able to cross-verify all the flows and all the functionalities. And UiPath didn't require a huge amount of setup. It runs on minimal requirements.

In terms of human error, we saw a reduction, of course. It's not possible for a human to catch every error when new functionality is built. With UiPath automation, we were able to analyze errors right away and resolve them.

Another benefit was that it freed up employee time. It did a lot of the work by itself. The user only had to make sure that the correct workflow was involved and he could just sit back and check that everything was going correctly. It probably saved us 45 minutes daily.

UiPath makes you more productive because it comes with a lot of drag-and-drop features. You don't need to know the APIs to access particular elements on the screen. You can just drag and drop and define your actions and go ahead with the workflow. You can focus on the workflow rather than learning about the APIs, which is what happens with Selenium and other automation tools. That is one of the most beneficial features of UiPath.

I don't know if I was doing something wrong, and I did get assistance from the UiPath guys on this, but sometimes UiPath wasn't able to find an element on the screen. But that's what UiPath is for, and we wanted to make sure that our workflows were working correctly. Sometimes it was able to find an element and sometimes it was not. UiPath support did give us a solution, but it was not helpful enough.

The issue that I mentioned earlier, that sometimes it wasn't able to find the elements, was the only issue I saw with respect to UiPath. Otherwise, nothing was breaking and nothing was problematic on the UiPath side.

They were very friendly and they tried to be very helpful, but they weren't able to solve the issue I raised.

Positive

The version of UiPath that we used involved a direct installation. We asked our in-house team to get it installed because we didn't have the permissions to install software. They installed it in our system and we started using it right away. It was very straightforward.

I have worked with Selenium, which is an automation tool. That has quite a learning curve, but with UiPath it only takes you one or two weeks to get started. Once you're familiar with the basic tools, you can start writing a workflow. It is straightforward; nothing complex.

I never did the UiPath Academy courses because we had senior team members to help us and, in that company, we had a "learning playground" where we could go through the slides directly, without going through a whole learning process. We were then able to start our work right away.

UiPath did a good job. Before going into production, we needed to make sure that every test scenario and every case was handled. That's where we took advantage of the UiPath. We would run UiPath again and again and there were no breakages in our code and nothing was falling apart before going into production. I was working for an investment bank and every record was important.

The solution has provided assistance with the removal of repetitive human transactional activities; document to text solutions; complex data extractions; cut and paste operations; information content management. This is either supported in promoting strategies with our business partners, or implemented at our clients, or included in products we develop for our clients. 

We use it in our own operations that have been migrated to other products or solved with coding or third-party software offering solutions to specific needs. Solutions are based on client sites and our clients pay for their own licensing.

The costs involved and the licensing model have forced us to recommend other solutions to our clients and to stop using UiPath internally due to constraints imposed on small businesses (specifically around the community edition). 

For our clients who can afford the licensing costs (Blue Chip Clients), the benefits have been to remove some repetitive activities from the target areas. 

In most cases, where there is a high-value resource impacted by these repetitions, there has been a cost-benefit in doing so, however, where the labor cost is below a certain threshold, the benefits are contained to error avoidance and reliability only with (additional) costs being migrated to support the technology and increasing overall IT OPS costs - particularly now with the increased fees and current licensing model.

The product as a whole is a valuable contributor to efficiency improvement. It integrates with ease (although some coding experience is required for higher/involved functions). We use it to streamline and support our customer operations primarily, but also to do internal acceleration on human-dependent (simple) tasks.

Simplification of complex task creation by introducing pre-coded objects is the single most attractive feature of the product. The choice between attended and unattended Bot applications with similar functionality is an advantage. 

Features are on track, however, service and cost models need to be reviewed to be market sensitive and related to the industry. Providing a great product at the wrong price without consideration to the economic conditions of the markets within which it is being offered, creates barriers and another product is sure to fill the void.

Closer integration with machine learning frameworks and matrix processing can be improved and will benefit low-cost/entry-level uptake and activation for some clients. Although pass-through options exist and have been activated, this is not sufficient to create encapsulated learning within the organizations and serves to improve third-party algorithms with added exposure to privacy (information systems security management) risks. 

I've been involved with UiPath since the launch in South Africa with Larc Technologies as the first UiPath solutions partner and reseller for the country.

No robotic solution can ever be classed as stable unless there are no change dependencies. It will always require more support than any other core technology - its the nature of the beast.

Running multiple robots in an environment requires orchestration, which is another expensive modality in the UiPath stable.

Consultations outside the normal service environments are strained, authoritative, and inflexible and there is little consideration for anything outside their immediate scope of vision and there is zero hesitance to move against initial strategic positioning and commitments. 

Neutral

We have been involved with and supported UiPath from the onset. We have also delivered enterprise solutions with BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath has proven to be capable, but costly and inflexible from a pricing and support model viewpoint.

It depends on the nature of the requirements and can be super complex or super easy. Supporting the bots are always a challenge and supervision (alerts, monitoring) is essential.

We work with excellent vendor implementation teams and have in-house competence in design and delivery. In most customer environments, there are competent implementation and maintenance resources for bot environments. Over the past 5 years, bot development, administration, and maintenance skills have improved, however, there is still a significant gap in proper orchestration and optimization within bot frameworks - which affects the overall cost and effectiveness of automation strategies.

At present, the ROI is negative for us as a company. For our clients, it varies. When all costs are considered (TCO) over a two-year period, financial breakeven is mostly attained with some negative ratios (if it's the wrong tool for the job). 

In most cases, there are intangible benefits. In all cases, IT operations cost increased and, in worst-case scenarios, the business benefit was short-lived as the technology costs escalated and the resource reduction potential was never attained.

HA and DR planning are essential when determining actual resource reduction potential.

UiPath is becoming expensive and will be outpricing themselves if they continue to enforce their current service configuration (model). Many clients have been impacted by the pandemic and instead of assisting to breach the gaps, there is a sense that UiPath is monetizing on the disaster.  

We looked at BluePrism, Automation Anywhere and we are now moving on to Open RPA - a viable option if you have the right skills to plug gaps. 

We primarily use the solution for our clients. 

One interesting use case we've seen is that the product team leveraged UiPath to expose an API for their customers to then fulfill a service request.

It was part of their deal that, for them to sign this large contract with one of their clients, they needed this functionality. The product team has a huge backlog, and it wasn't going to make it based on everything else they had to deliver, so they actually leveraged UiPath to expose this and give them a service they just didn't have before.

When comparing it to, for example, Blue Prism, one of the key value points is, other than the full platform in general, the ability to trigger automation on demand. Basically, when the work gets loaded into the queue, the work can then be started without having to run things on a schedule.

The solution has improved the way an organization functions. For example, in general, in the context of RPAs, it's really about the focus of picking those tasks out of people's daily efforts so they can spend more time with the customers. What you get off the back of that is dollar for dollar savings. You invest in this tool, and you get back dollars by hours, however, beyond that, there are these peripheral benefits that you get that are a little harder to measure. You’ve got to have good guys out there to capture this.

In terms of endpoint satisfaction, customer satisfaction, you have to look at it within the business and their measurements before and after you've done something to actually see what is happening and attribute it to what you've done with UiPath.

We haven't done anything that hasn't saved money yet.

At the beginning of a journey, we were looking to get maybe 1X our money back in that first year. We try to get that at least. Depending on the size of the organization and complexity, it’s possible. As you go into year two, year three, you're almost looking at a multiplier reflecting that year. For example, a four-year-old program might get a company around 4X, if not more, in return. Of course, that also depends on how far you've implemented this product. You need to put money in to get money out, in a sense.

If you've got a pipeline of X and you only have three developers, you can only chew through that pipeline at a certain current rate. You want to look at the value and say, "Well, what if we doubled our staff?"

I have a calculator that shows, for example, if you have $10 million of savings sitting on the table through 20 things in the pipeline. If I put one developer on that, it will take me three years to go through that and build that out. At the end of that $10 million of value, imagine if instead, you had everything all automated on day one. That's a total max value, and you would get somewhere around 23% to 30% of that value returned.

If you double that or if you put a staff of three developers on that same pipeline, you finish earlier and you get about 75% of the total value. If you go to four developers or five, you get closer to 83%. Now, if you put 20 developers on there, you're only going to increment it to 95%, however, then you’ve just increased your total cost as you have to try managing 25 at the same time. The main idea being, based upon your pipeline and the size of your team, you can potentially increase your total return value within a fixed time.

The ease of the use of creating the building automation is actually improving year over year. For example, there are some training programs for UiPath, and it generally takes about a week to get through it. That’s on UiPath Academy.

If you actually use it with modern design, modern objects, and all the new things that have been released recently, you actually save time on training. If that shaves 20% of your training, you can also shave 20% off of your building capability or the requirements. BY using UiPath Academy, you save time on your projects.

It's fairly easy to learn, as a solution. However, it’s not that easy where you're just going to throw non-developers into it. Your first three days of UiPath training are actually doing .net. That's the one thing the market puts out there incorrectly is that your operations team can just jump on this. You still need a developer mentality as you're still dealing with exceptions and things that aren't the way humans think.

That said, in terms of usability, it's highly useful.

UiPath Academy helps streamline and keeps employees up to speed in the solution.

The biggest value of the Academy is that it's free. That's a major piece. It's fairly well organized, and they put things into channels based upon what your role is within your RPA program or your business, and that helps you stay focused in terms of what you need to learn.

The solution needs resource locking. This kind of leads toward scaling which is one challenge. It's not major. However, it is when you have multiple bots running the same process and they need to access the same piece of information to read and write. There's not a strong capability to manage the lock and have the capability to say "I have ownership of this file. No one else can touch it" and then release it, allowing the next one to pick it up. That's a key differentiator that I see between them and Blue Prism. That one feature is lacking.

The studio design is a little different. If you go from one tool to the next, you might be a little shocked at how things are organized. I don't see them changing that any time soon. However, the design could be improved upon.

I've used the solution for about four years. 

The solution seems to be stable. I haven't had any issues yet.

The solution is very scalable. I haven't pushed it to 100 plus or anything like that. However, based upon scheduling and triggers and SLA management, it's much easier to scale.

We did work with other RPA solutions in the past. The differentiation comes from the triggers, and the attended automation. The platform now is a big part of this. 

For example, Blue Prism is one of the tools that we work with as well. If you want new functions, new features, say, process mining, you have to go to Celonis or someone else, whereas UiPath is providing this platform with new capabilities almost daily.

It also depends on what kind of COE you want to build. Looking at Blue Prism, they have a nice UI as well. It's very business-focused. With UiPath, you need to have some developer capacity. There's .net in there, and some people just might not get that. However, at the end of the day, if they don't get that, should they be building processors? There's a bit of a challenge there.

The initial setup is not that complex. It's more about the client's setup. For example, the domain, entries, things like that, would add to the complexity you face.

If everything goes well, you can get things set up probably in a few weeks. I would say a month or so is needed for deployment and implementors should set expectations. For example, security depends on how much the organization is ready to take it on as well. If you don't get their buy-in right away, then you're just going to get delays.

Most of the companies see a good ROI from the solution.

The pricing and licensing get a little complex. There are so many different options that you can choose from, and practice adds to the time to figure these things out. Whereas, with, for example, Blue Prism. It's a pretty standard basic model. UiPath gets a little hectic at times.

The customers that use the on-premises version tend to use the latest version of the solution. 

While those using the cloud version of the UiPath apps feature are in the UK, the US users are not using that functionality. Mainly most of our focus has always been on RPA and then expansion. From what I've seen, we've mainly been using UiPath. At least on the North American side, it's been relatively new. That's why they aren't using apps yet.

We don’t have any clients that are using the solution's AI functionality in their automation program yet. I’ve only played around with it myself.

From a road mapping perspective, I'd advise potential new users that your key is the business case. If there's no business case, then this solution doesn't make sense for you to get involved or do anything else. The first part is to really understand the business case. Just to substantiate getting it into the company. Once you have that, that's basically your low-hanging fruit. 

That said, the key is not to hang everything on one process, not to sit there and bank it, as the concept is a program approach. Over time, it is going to sustain itself. Companies need to be ready to look at a process and think if it's a good idea first. And as you move through the steps, you're basically doing additional checks. As you learn about the process, you're also learning what it's like behind each process and what the value add is. At each stage, users need to ensure that it makes sense to continue. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. While there's always room for improvement, market-wise they are at the top of their game. 

We primarily use the solution for legacy data transfer, UI automation, CRM and ITSM automation, and call centers. Specifically, in call centers, using UiPath forms and form render has been really helpful.

I love developing in Studio. For my clients, the approachability of the orchestrator is really valuable. It takes a little bit to learn the licensing structure and layout at first, however, once they get it, it's pretty smooth sailing from there. The modern folders have become a great thing for any enterprise that's looking to automate using an orchestrator as a server.

I like to automate in Studio as I'm familiar with it. I honestly just like the platform so I like automating with Studio.

I really enjoy Document Understanding. I like how it all integrates together. Some of the stuff I've seen now with just the connectors and the way you can scale implementations is really exciting. While I do like Studio, I also like how it works with the rest of the platform.

We most recently built an unintended bot that saves them about $500,000 a year worth of GS 14 labor.

UiPath saves costs for our customers’ organizations. That would just be the cost savings from RPA bots. I haven't really dug into the cost savings of the ancillary products, however. I know that one of my clients is using the test suite now after I had built a proof of concept for it, and they've fully implemented it. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of cost savings there as well.

In terms of ease of building automation, it depends on the process. For anything that's ultra-low or a low-level complexity, it's very simple. Once you start getting sprawled out into larger automation that very much becomes object-oriented programming and is basically making a workflow. That's when you really need to take hold of programmatic concepts. You need to be a strong scriptor to be able to make the best RPA bots.

Our clients have reduced human error. That's one of the things that I tend to talk about the most. The bots can get work done faster, however, the reduction of human error is probably more valuable in some cases than just speeding up work.

In terms of UiPath Academy, everybody's used it. I've used it myself. My entire team has used it. All of our engineers are some sort of Pearson VUE certified now. Most of us have the Advanced Developer. A few of our younger junior developers have the associate, the RPA associate, however, they're working on getting the Advanced Developer and they lean on the Academy pretty heavily.

The biggest value in the Academy is the videos, which are pretty helpful. Sometimes you have to slow it down, however, for the most part, the way it goes through concepts, especially for somebody that doesn't have much programming experience, the videos tend to go through some of the more elementary things like variables arguments. That can get a little bit boring for programmers since they've been through that 100 different times. That said, that’s really where the strength lies as it does target a large group of different employees. As an engineer, I might pass by some of the boring stuff, however, I will still find things later on in the training where I'm like, wow, I actually never knew that.

The license model changing every year can be a little bit frustrating. It's hard sometimes when things go from being robot-based to being runtime-based.

Some federal users are still on the 2019 orchestrator or even a 2018 orchestrator. However, by being on them, they can't take advantage of modern folders. This issue is, once they get upgraded to 2020, and they start using modern folders, essentially you shouldn't really be using plastic folders anymore. Some of their frustrations aren't really long-term frustrations. Orchestrators have gotten really popular over the last few years. There are certain things that have made it so much better. That said, we're still in that transition where clients have been using classic folders and then they upgrade and they're going to have to change everything. Hopefully, they don't have to do it more than when they upgrade past 2020.

One of my clients upgraded their production environment from the 2019 orchestrator to the 2020 and everything was in plastic folders and I advised them to switch to modern folders and it was a pain. Once it was taken care of, it was great. It's just that it took a lot of convincing to tell them why it was better.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

It's pretty stable. The biggest issue is just that more companies need to really adopt a change management system, whether that's through Service Now or is built-in change management, those alerts need to be going to the RPA center of excellence. 

There are things that will change or break the UiPath bot sometimes. They're very stable and they've become more stable if there's a change management system. Automated testing can make it so you can catch things that have changed with applications with RPA testing before they've occurred and then you can fix things quickly.

The scalability was tough a few years ago, however, now it's exponentially easier with modern folders and the orchestrator.

I've worked with UiPath support. I would put them at a seven out of ten as they need to be a little bit more timely. There have been issues with a client where support has taken a really long time to get back to us or they haven't updated our support ticket, even though we've advanced. Maybe it was an isolated incident. I have worked with support before where that hasn't happened. I felt like I got in a bad run of working with the support folks and the client was definitely not pleased.

I actually don't have experience with other RPA solutions. I came from a web development background and I went straight into UiPath and now the way that it's scaled out and now that I work in the federal government, UiPath has such a large piece of the market share. I've never really seen a need to learn any other automation solutions. I may learn Power Automate at some point, however, I would really prefer to stick with UiPath.

The solution is pretty straightforward. I've run through complex issues, mostly the NuGet package and it's different with every customer. As far as the UiPath platform goes, it's pretty straightforward to deploy bots. It all depends on how an agency has its group policies set up for security and sometimes that causes issues. It's just about learning new ways to solve different problems that may be unique to an agency or may not be.

In the government, deployment takes a little longer. I would like to think development usually doesn't take that long, however, it's like going through ATO, especially if it's an unintended bot. Sometimes it can take like a few months. It just depends if they've got a center of excellence stood up or not. For example, if they've got an CI/CD pipeline or just a standard development life cycle, a lot of people don't have that set up and then it ends up taking longer as they have to go through ATO. It’s variable. Unfortunately, it's just a lot slower to get them deployed than in the private sector I think.

That’s no fault of UiPath. It's usually group policy security systems and things like that. I've had to talk to a lot of security folks and help walk them through things that need to be changed.

We've been implementing our UiPath as well.

I don't really have too much to offer about the pricing part of it. I don't really work on that side of the business. I would say my only gripe about the pricing would be something like a Studio Pro license being more expensive than a Studio license, just to essentially get something that links Test Manager. Some people might've found that a little bit hard to swallow. From what I've heard, Studio Pro is going away and Test Manager is just going to come into Studio. That would be the only thing I've noticed that I thought was a little silly. Everything else is typically not really my side of the business.

We have everything on-prem in our demo environment and the customers I work with typically have the on-prem offerings as well.

I have used UI path apps in our demo environment. I do not have any clients that are using it.

We have an AI center in our demo environment, however, I don't have any clients that are using it. I do have a client that's actually in the process of installing it right now and getting it through their governance model. That's as close as it would've come for our customers using the AI center.

To those considering UiPath, I would say, just go ahead and do it. RPA is pretty awesome. It's easy to get solutions out. There still needs to be a good bit of work done on the Citizen Developer Model, however, at the same time, as far as getting a team of engineers in there to automate things, if you get good RPA developers, you can get things automated really quickly. People can help you with your standard development life cycle. You just need to jump in.

I would rate UiPath solutions at a nine out of ten. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is that, in terms of the installation of the product, sometimes the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes it's tough to work through installation issues without actually contacting support. I do wish that was a little bit more streamlined.

I work at a financial firm where we do trade settlement activity. We are using UiPath for cleaning up data, doing reconciliation, and finding where the trade breaks and trade files are. It helps us lay the groundwork for the value add work, which comes later.

It allows us to grow our business. The use case that we have is a huge time saver because we do not have a lot of volume right now. We are looking to sell part of the business and get more clients onto it. The only way we could do that or even open that door for possibility is to automate and go through a lot more volume. 

Our teams are under huge pressure because trade volume has gone up over the past year. UiPath is just getting us back to the status quo and then also opening the pipeline for more volume to go through. We have a very strong program that encourages people to get trained up on tools. 

StudioX is going to be a big game changer for us. We found with the other tools that we use that as soon as we put UiPath in the hands of everyday users and ops users, they will be able to quickly learn it. This will make a big impact because we will get big volumes and projects coming through.

UiPath has done a good job coming up with the broadest use cases. However, I would like to see them dive into more industry-specific use cases. For example, checked OCR and brokerage statements are common. Anything unique to the financial industry would be useful for us.

We have using UiPath since February when it got brought into our team. We just had our first box go live about two weeks ago. We have had three go live so far; one using StudioX and two using Studio.

So far, I haven't heard any issues. We are always going to expect issues, but so far so good and I hope the stability is good. Alteryx had issues at times, which created some pretty big problems. Hopefully, UiPath will not do that as much, because we are expecting to lean on it.

I have not used them directly. 

It was not so much a switch for us. We are still using Alteryx. UiPath is a much better automation tool than what we were using before because it was self-service. We didn't have to have our COE build it and related solutions for us. We have similar functionality with Alteryx. Anyone can learn it and start building and go through our governance process. Doing so, they can have a huge impact on their team.

We are a large company and the initial setup took our COE quite a few months. However, I believe their experience was positive overall. A lot of the issues we had were internal and concerned how we were going to do our governance. We were very strict about that. 

Getting people access was easy and so was learning to build. Everything on the UiPath side went smoothly.

We're a mature automation team. Over the past four years, we've delivered well over 150 FTE. We're always looking for new tools and to pick up some of that automation that we couldn't do before. 

UiPath has helped with data scraping and plugging into websites and combining that with Alteryx. We can attack 90% of our use cases now. We can not deal with the other 10% for internal governance reasons and not so much capability.

The three use cases we have implemented with UiPath have saved about half an FTE. 

I know that the reason we went with UiPath is because it is a lot cheaper than the other vendor we were using. It is of a better quality as well, but it is less expensive to run on an ongoing basis. 

I'm not sure if we evaluated other options. My team does not look into the suite of options. We have a separate COE that sets everything up for us. We are tasked with implementation. 

My advice is to first build a good team that you can trust. Because great tools are useless if you don't have any builders or people that know how to use the tools. That is what we have been focused on. Also, have very specific support for your team.

We have multiple accounts sellable, accounts payable, corporate finance, and supply chain use cases. We have started some use cases at the factory floor automation as well.

There are so many benefits to using UiPath, but getting the buy-in is very important from the end users. We are seeing many hours saved with respect to automation. Automation should be on every project's agenda. 

Scaling at pace with regards to the industry has been the most valuable UiPath feature for us. I would also add that there are so many features in RPA. 

We are leveraging the UiPath Academy for our citizen developer program. We are asking them to train at their own pace. The courses are straightforward.

The adoption rate for this program is low, however. Out of the 150 citizen developers that started, only 10 decided to continue the process.

One way to improve the UiPath Academy, I think, would be to add some real-life use cases and take the students through the automation process. These would be good for citizen developers to start with.

We started our UiPath journey early last year. It has been a year and six months. 

UiPath is stable. The automations we have in place right now are stable. 

Over the past two years, I've reached out to them maybe twice. 

The initial setup was straightforward. When we started this automation journey, instead of going with complex use cases, we picked three simple ones. We started with the accounts receivable processes. 

Deployment took us six weeks. 

As of now, we have automated 160 processes using UiPath and saved many hours. We have saved around 60,000 hours. Although we are not directly reducing costs, we are avoiding the cost of hiring new people.

The solution is very expensive. It's getting harder for me to convince my management about licensing costs. 

Yes, we considered Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We created an automation using both of these and UiPath and ultimately decided on the latter. UiPath is more compatible with the other applications we were already using. Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is our ERP and they partner with UiPath, so that was a major plus for us. Also, UiPath has very straightforward coding courses.

It is usually not easy to build a complex automation. The whole process takes about four to six weeks for a complex automation. Most of the time is spent on gathering the requirements. The development itself does not take much time.