UiPath Platform Reviews

We use all of the UiPath products: UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, attended robots, and unattended. Primarily, we use them for financial liquidation. Our customers frequently use it for different cases. Some use it with chatbots.

Sometimes, our customers run automations in a virtual environment. In terms of implementing UiPath within a virtual environment, UiPath staff are working on the cost. Currently we have UiPath with a Citrix client and you need to go to the Citrix virtual station to activate. It's more difficult to implement as a user.

Our customers' organizations have involved about 15 to 20 people in their automation programs.

I would rate its ease of use as about four out of five. It's not so easy, but it's also not difficult. We have a great UiPath Academy and it's really useful and helpful. Sometimes we need to do difficult operations and use other frameworks, through activities in UiPath. I think this mechanism is very nice, but in implementation, the customers are pretty close. Sometimes we must do it.

This solution helps to eliminate human errors. The amount depends on the process and the customer. Even unattended robots don't provide 100% automation. Sometimes a robot interrupts and waits for a human to make a decision. There is a process when unattended robots do fewer steps and after ten interruptions are waiting for a human to go on. I would say there is about a 70% reduction in human errors when using an unattended robot.

UiPath also helps save time. One unattended robot works 24 hours a day because a robot doesn't get ill or need to sleep.

All of the features are valuable. I think the best feature for Russian government customers is security. Security in Orchestration for requiring credentials. Our customers are usually serious about security.

I would like to see more AI features with data classification and computer reason. I think it would be great to have more features in full monitoring robots.

I would rate their stability as four out of five.

In cases of high scalability when we have one process and many of us use that process, we sometimes have problems. When one process uses about 24 robots for 24 hours, we have problems with it. I think when many robots work at the same time, something goes wrong in orchestrating tasks between robots.

I am happy with the support. For me, it's okay.

The initial setup can sometimes be complicated, depending first of all on the environment, as well as the implementation strategy of the company. Too many processes or only one PoC could lead to a more difficult implementation. Sometimes, customers try to automate a lot of the big processes. When we try to automate the complete process, we understand with the customers how many FTEs you can get from it. Everything depends on the customer's requirements.

It takes about six months from the purchase of a UiPath license until our customers have their first robot in production.

UiPath is a data mining solution. Our company tries to explain why RPAs are useful.

I don't know which other solutions our customers evaluate. Kofax might be one. Sometimes we work with a customer to make a decision about which platform to choose. Sometimes we do a PoC for Blue Prism. In the Russian market, there are two major vendors that are competing against each other: Blue Prism and UiPath. Usually, customers go through a PoC to choose the best vendor. UiPath wins because you can automate more processes with it.

I would rate UiPath as nine out of ten.

We are using unattended bots, Orchestrator, and Studio.

We use this solution for doing a variety of things. It includes a lot of back-office finance and accounting, tax, and a little bit on our operations side. We're also using it for some test automation within our IT group, so helping to test our points of sale, and some of our data transfers as well.

Orchestrator runs on a dedicated server, but our bots all run on virtual dedicated machines in our data center. There were some challenges in setting everything up to run in a virtual environment. We implemented a couple of years ago, so I think that it has improved by now, although it was challenging.

Part of it was on our end, where our people were not familiar with it. The challenges included picking the right type of VM to run on, having the right kind of setup, and having the environment configured correctly. We needed this to allow the RPA team to have enough control over the day-to-day maintenance, and not have bottlenecks with the technical side. Managing things when we had issues or needed to add something new was also a challenge.

The documentation was kind of broad and didn't go into the detail that we wanted it to, although I have seen that get better, so that is really good. I'm sure if we were trying to implement it today, it would probably be a lot smoother with the tools that they've come up with.

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. I think there are still a few things they could do and it looks like they are working towards that. It still requires a good bit of training and ramping up for someone brand new to it, especially without a programming background, to jump in and start building. I think they can continue to refine that and they definitely are moving in the right direction. It's a little bit of a technical hurdle to overcome to be able to build not only just basic automations but enterprise-scale automations and automations that are reliable and can check up on themselves. I think they can work some more of that into the actual tool because we've had to do a lot of figuring out how to build best practices and how to program it directly, and the best way to be able to allow us to support it cleanly through the lifecycle. It is good, but there are some things they can add in to truly make it a five. My standards are pretty high, but I'm sure they'll get there.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are big fans of it. I typically don't get the luxury of hiring people with technical backgrounds. We usually have people coming out of school or people transferring from other departments who are interested in RPA. So, the Academy tools have been a lifesaver for us and they've been very good, especially for the RPA developer track. It is very detailed and we can really get someone through that training and feel like they're at least able to perform the basic functions of the tool pretty well. From there it is up to us in terms of getting them familiar with our best practices and how we program things and get some hands-on training with the more senior RPA developer to learn some further tips and tricks. Overall, I'm very pleased with the Academy offerings and they're one of the best I've seen from many of them.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was perhaps a month or two. It did not take long, and that included time for training. When we started off, we bought the software, went through the training as a team, and then started building a few small things. We probably had the first one in production within two months of buying the software.

We have seen a lot of improvements to our organization.

We have one that was a really high-visibility project, where it was kind of a data entry thing that all of our retail managers were spending time on. The data was fed through to a vendor that we franchise through, and they were spending an hour or two a week across hundreds of locations.

We took that into the back office and got data feeds for all the data they were putting in, and then had a bot go through to the current system of reporting, and enter that data for every single store location. We were able to free up those managers with a bunch of time. It was about 5,500 hours a year.

In terms of eliminating human errors, I can say that it has happened but it is difficult to approximate by how much. This is in part because we have a wide variety of software of processes that we've implemented. So, in some, it's definitely higher than others. On the whole, it's been good and it's been helpful, for sure.

A lot of the value from this solution comes from Studio and the activities. They really enable us to make things happen accurately, with the clicks and the types they support. Of all the automation tools I've tried or used, they seem to be the most accurate and most consistent.

The Orchestrator management tools are growing a lot and are constantly improving.

I would like to see more interconnectedness of everything, including making the APIs a little easier to use, and having bots be able to call other bots and get them to start things. Having all of this a little more seamless would be really helpful.

I would like to see more seamless AI functionality built in to allow teams without data scientists or strong data people to be able to build and deploy simple models that will help enhance their bots further and let them do more.

The technical support is a bit of a weak point for this solution, and ideally, they can improve turnaround time so that we don't have to figure things out ourselves as often.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four.

We've had some issues with stability, and I've talked to a lot of other companies who've had maybe more issues than us. It concerns ongoing support and the issues with bots not performing as expected or doing unexpected things as well. The problem is running into unexpected issues that can result from things that are not very readily apparent on the surface. This can be caused by underlying configuration differences in Windows, or patches that have happened, that sort of thing. It's still a challenge to manage and we often have bots that don't seem to have the issues when we are troubleshooting.

Sometimes it is our fault because we're not programming in enough breaks or logging enough to really track what's going on. It seems very dependent on the underlying operating system and things like update states of office applications. Occasionally, it'll just get stuck or hung up and we can't really figure out why, and that's frustrating. It definitely takes people time to go in and resolve those issues and figure it out.

It just seems like there's a lot of times where we just rerun the bot and then it works fine. I find it odd that it would stop at one point and then you just rerun it again and it works. A lot of those are, I will admit, due to input data issues or the system going down, or a website not being available or loading too slowly when it checks. However, I would like to see them continue to focus on stability as a platform, to avoid those as much as possible any issue.

My team that I work with directly is probably about ten people in total. There are a couple of other teams who are working more on test automation that are kind of separate and that's probably a total of about five other people right now, and we're looking to expand to another couple of teams. That will probably be about five more people within the next year, and then my team is growing. We're looking to add a few more people next year as well.

I am the automation lead, and the users are RPA developers and business analysts.

When it comes to the technical support for this solution, I feel that it may be a little bit of a weak point. When we reached out to customer support, we haven't gotten a ton of help, or it takes them quite a while to dig through the issue. It is understandable because they're going through someone else's code essentially, to try to resolve an issue. So, usually, we end up relying on internal people, more senior developers.

Sometimes it's just a matter of rerunning it or changing some input parameters and then trying it again, which is not the cleanest troubleshooting by any means. The problem is we felt like we had to, given the slow turnaround time on their support desk. We've kind of had to have the internal ability to figure things out.

Overall, I would rate their technical support a three out of five.

I know that they're a growing company and that they have a lot of new people. It seems like we've maybe had some bad luck in terms of the people that we've been in contact with when we've reached out. Perhaps they were new and maybe not fully understanding. There have been times we've reached out to support where we feel like we know the system better than they do, and that's frustrating. Again, that's why we've had to focus on internal knowledge building, which is a strength of theirs, through the training offered.

We do have a CSM assigned to us who I work with and he's somewhat spotty at times. I think he has a lot on his plate. So, at times we have questions that take a while to get answered.

We did a proof of concept that was driven by a consulting company and it was not a success. After that, we decided to implement an in-house solution using UiPath and from there it was successful.

We began with RPA because our management was interested in the potential and in trying it out. Even though the PoC failed, I think there was a promise with the software that we were able to see, so we made the purchase and dove into it. Obviously, it has been successful.

Installing the software itself, the Studio, most of the elements of the licensing and that sort of thing, were all very straightforward, which is great. I would say that the technical side, regarding the virtual machines, took a while in terms of setting up accounts and getting all the VM stuff figured out. All of that took a little bit longer than we expected before we had a stable platform. I think that there could've been some more resources available there, which I think they've partially fixed by now.

We were calculating our savings and our estimate is that in a little under a year, perhaps as little as six months, we probably earned back the amounts that we had paid for the platform for a year. Even into the journey, we felt like we had broken even and were making more money on top of that. ROI was very fast.

I can estimate our licensing costs are approximately $100,000 USD per year.

In addition to UiPath, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

My main reason for selecting UiPath, I think, was the strategy of focusing on a very open platform and allowing anyone to try out the trial, and allowing anyone to register for the Academy. I'm really focusing on democratizing RPA and making it available to everyone. It was a big focus for me because the other two had very closed-off systems and while they were able to give us demos, we didn't really get as good of a feel for how the software works as we did with UiPath where we could just download it and try it.

Also, we just had very good experiences with the salespeople and the people who demoed the product. They were very positive and very excited about RPA, and kind of matched what we were looking for. We felt like it was a much better fit for us, focusing on easy to use automation, not as much on code security like Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere didn't seem to have a clear strategy for what they wanted to do moving forward.

Ultimately, UiPath has been a successful choice, and I feel that they have continued to grow their lead on the competition.

I really liked a lot of the things I see coming in terms of the future improvements for Orchestrator. I think it's going to continue to grow into a true kind of Cloud Platform for end-to-end automation, whereas right now, it's a little more focused just on building things in Studio, and then managing monitoring them in Orchestrator. So, I'm excited about some of the further integration with the dashboards and everything for managing how it works.

Upcoming is better management of projects from end to end. I've built a lot of things myself to keep up with that. But having UiPath support, a lot of that, a little bit better, it's improved. This is including the focus on the process mining and the design phase, and it's often a bottleneck of not having enough time to go through and really thoroughly map out and document the processes.

I am interested in trying the specific Studio for test automation. I think UiPath has a big advantage in that space with their RPA software. It really solves an issue that a lot of other test automation platforms have, which is not being as consistent as they could be, or being too hard or too complicated to program correctly.

From a cost perspective, we have definitely got our money's worth on the unattended bots, which is what we have been focused on. We have bought a few attended bots to try them and this next year, we will be looking for good use cases. It requires a little more integration and using the API. We're looking at leveraging more attended bots, and we may end up buying more, but we're still evaluating how to use them. Unattended bots felt like the clearest advantage for us to implement, and we were successful in starting with those.

We were an early adopter of this solution in our region, so I often speak with people who are researching this solution. I tell them that UiPath is a really great platform and it's growing. It's moving in a really great direction, and I recommend people to take it in-house. Find a small team of people who are really passionate and interested in learning it, and then start small. Start with a few small things to get your feet under you, build an operating model that will support scaling, and then slowly scale it out over time. That's what we have done, and it has been successful for us.

Overall, I am very happy with UiPath, but I do have a few small quibbles. On the whole, it's been very successful and I'm very happy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our client's companies have extensive issues with SAP and getting information out of it. They have another technical ERP system with an in-memory database where they don't get the information out of it, then have to add it manually to SAP. That will be probably the first big use case for automation. So, we will get a bot reading it on the database from the Citrix environment and probably moving it to SAP.

The client will probably have it on-premise. They tend to be really risk adverse in terms of Cloud solutions. We have tried to get them to use the cloud more because it's just easier.

We are using Studio Orchestrator, and unattended bots. I have programmed attended bots before.

The client is eliminating human errors as they are eliminating some of the accrual processes from SAP, where a lot of mistakes can be made. If the bot is not making mistakes, then they are eliminating errors by 100 percent, but this depends on whether the bot is efficient or error-free.

You need an understanding of how to code, use the variables and arguments, etc. That was why I was excited for StudioX. I tried it earlier, and it was amazing. This is actually what they were missing. Studio is great because you can do so much stuff.

On a scale of one to five (where five is beneficial), I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four. There is some stuff that they could do better. I sampled the advanced, which is really difficult because it's just PDF. I had to use some YouTube videos to understand the framework that you need to pass for developer. They could do more videos on that.

They have three parts. The first is the foundation, and they are a lot of videos. The third part of it (advanced), there are no videos except one. That's only those PDF files, which you have to look and read through. I was like, "Okay, I probably can't do it." Then, I fell upon some community YouTube videos from other developers who just demonstrated it. This would be great if UiPath offered that, because I found out later that the developers made mistakes in their videos.

In the foundation, they get into much detail in the beginning. You're overloaded with information. You have to go through videos like three times to get it correctly. They could remove some stuff out of there. Those quizzes are really frustrating too. They are too detailed. If you sat with Uipath, you think it's really easy. However, it's not so much, if you get into those details.

Studio is a bit overwhelming in the beginning. They could get add some details, but not so many, into the foundation training. I've seen StudioX and loved the colors. Please get the colors into Studio. I loved the flow and that you got all these activities and colors too. It was so much easier. It was visually easier to understand where to click. It was really user-friendly.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform for automating our company’s processes as a four out of five (with five being very easy). I would rate it as a four because it didn't work in the beginning to get my bots active. I had to get into a lot of videos to get them running. I didn't understand how it needed to be designed or coded.

The Orchestrator training was much better, but I still somehow missed some details which I needed. However, it's not just do it, then it's done. You need some time to get into it. Though, it's much easier than Studio.

The integration with Outlook is not that good yet.

I would rate stability as a four (out of five). I had some cases where Orchestrator didn't work in it. We couldn't login and the platform was slow.

We are still small and just starting out. We have five developers/solution architects involved in automation projects. We have done our certificate through UiPath Academy.

Support is pretty good. It's responsive.

Our client was having some problems. They got a framework running on a scale: 

• Which processes should be automated?
• What are the easiest processes to automate and more difficult?

For our first client project, it took us five months from the time that UiPath license was purchased until we implemented the first bot. 

The initial setup was straightforward. They identified several easier flows, and it was like learning with the client together. I know they are phasing out some more complex issues where you have to get into the details of HTML coding and stuff like that to get some stuff done. That is where UiPath gets difficult, because it's just coding and tech.

Our client saw ROI after one month. They realized after we showed them the first process that three people would be free to do other stuff. They got to sort of afraid of what they would do with those three people, and those people were afraid, which was a big issue. 

We invented RPI and pizza. We all came to those pizza Fridays and showed them that they don't have to be afraid. They benefited from it more than not, and no one would lose their jobs.

We told the client UiPath is best. We looked for the biggest player in the market and decided UiPath was the platform.

We target medium-size companies and have long-term relationships with them. They trust in our opinion. We told them our reasons that we think UiPath is the best.

UiPath is biggest player in the market. They have this platform economy going. I'm really excited to hear that they bought the process goals. There's a lot of potential there, if they integrate process automation with process mining. That is a big thing for me.

We looked into other RPA tools, like Blue Prism. We decided it's harder to learn and implement.

I would rate the solution an eight (out of 10). They need to thrive to get better.

If you have some tech experienced people, then UiPath is the better solution because it's easier to learn and implement.

Right now, the primary use case is document retrieval from our client system. We are a healthcare billing company, so we have to pull things like medical records and different documents from hospital stays. So, we used the robots to pull those versus an FTE.

We have both unintended and attended robotics that we use. We haven't really delved into Studio a lot yet. That's going to be part of our staging and going into the next phase. We built all of our basic bots, so now we're going into the more complex bots.

We are on-premise. We were looking at moving to the cloud, so that will be something in our next steps.

It has a really good turnaround time for our operations department to start working on claims, because all the information has already been pulled upfront with the bots. Instead of having to go into an account and request medical records or a certain type of document, it's normally already been pulled on the front-end as soon as the account loads because we run everything through the bots.

The most valuable feature right now is we have been able to utilize our staff better with the bots. We can put them on more high priority items. That was the one thing that everyone was afraid of: The bots would replace them. What we did is retrain them to do other tasks that we needed, as that was more of a priority for us.

We do deal somewhat with Citrix. It depends on the client and how the bot has to be set up. We have some clients who do run through Citrix, then we have some who use a VPN tunnel to get in. So, we have it on both.

The implementations or integrations through Citrix are really good. The only problem that we are coming across is just maintenance. If the Citrix platform gets updated and we're not notified, it breaks. So, we have to reconfigure our bot to the new updates. Unfortunately, that's just the name of the game, and that would be true if we were pulling them manually versus a bot. We would still run into that with the Citrix platforms.

I would rate stability as a five (out of five). We have not actually had any issues with UiPath. Most of our issues have been with just platforms changing, breaking, and the regular maintenance.

We have about 40 bots right now with 30 ready to be made.

Our team is really small. We have roughly six people who are working with the developers and actually running the bots. We're the only department using the solution. Our department was asked to lead this on, so we've been very fortunate to be able to lead it and be able to help our own department first. Now, we're starting to look at other areas of the company to deploy RPA.

We have not used UiPath technical support.

The initial setup was a little complex, but that was because we really didn't even know what we were getting into. We were told by upper management (our CFO) that automation was the next frontier and we had to go that route. We were sort of the pioneers going through this for our company,

It probably took about six to eight weeks for us to talk with development and for them to get the context of what we wanted. It took them about five weeks to actually build the bot. Then, once they built the bot, it was in production. Of course, we had to go back and do some maintenance because it did not work first time. After we got the hang of it, it's been great.

We got some consulting from UiPath. We do use their developers. Other than that, we do not go through a third-party. We did everything else ourselves.

Our experience with UiPath services was good. There were some bumps along the way. It's just trying to understand the process and RPA from what we've seen.

It took us about six months to really see what the bots could do. We then started tracking financial savings and how it's helping the company. We set out a bit differently. Our CFO came out, and said, "Automation is where we're going," but on top of that, "This is X amount of money that you have to save in the process."

We have spent the last 18 months tracking how much we are spending and how much we're saving. We hit the goal with no problems because we were able to shift staff. We did eliminate some staff, but this solution really brought out the skill level of our employees. Those employees with the higher skills were able to transfer to more important projects.

Within the first year, we saved a little over $600,000. That totaled to almost 19 FTEs which we ended up saving.

We haven't used any other vendors.

We are on spreadsheets and data. I keep saying we're stuck in 1996. It's been nice to have the vision of being able to be in the 21st century and really be able to use the bots the way we want to use them.

We have not taken part in the UiPath training. That's something that we talked about right before this conference. We really need to start utilizing more of the training that's offered. We want to turn some of our soft coders into people who can really code for us, not always relying on developers to do all of our work. That's definitely something that we're implementing soon.

I would rate it at least a four (out of five) for ease of use. We don't deal so much with UiPath, but from what we do deal with outside of developers, we have not had any problems. It has been very user-friendly, for those of us that don't know coding. We are able to look at things, sort of fix things, etc.

I rated them a four for ease of use, not a five, because we want to see what UiPath can do. We have a lot on the table. We have 30 bots ready to go. A lot of it's more screen scraping, which will be more complex. So, we want to see really if UiPath can do what they say the solution can do. We want to test its scalability.

I definitely would say UiPath is the way, especially with everything that they're coming out with now. It helps you understand more about RPA instead of just being thrown into things. It helps you understand all that on a smaller level. It is what everyone else has said here at the conference too, "Start with a small project. Don't go out with a big thing because it's not going to work." Luckily, we did start small, and we've just grown from there. Those would be my suggestions.

I would rate the solution a 10 out of 10.

We are using attended and unattended robots, Orchestrator, and Studio.

We are in the financial services industry. A lot of what we do is background data processing, and we use the unattended robots for a lot of it. We do have some attended robots as well, but most of our processes are unattended.

I am a developer, so I primarily use Studio. I write the instructions for our Orchestrator Application Manager to do everything we need in Orchestrator. 

We are currently operating an on-premises deployment, but we're in the pilot group for Cloud, so as soon as we get a date on that we'll probably be migrating.

One of the primary processes that we've automated is reporting. Prior to automation, our users were only able to run a few of the reports, a few times a week. Now, we're running every single report that there is to run, which is probably four or five times what they were able to do, every single day. Every morning they receive a summary of that work, so they're able to just get on and look at it, rather than during the close of the day. In financial services, the close of the day is crunch time. We work really hard to make sure that everything is done within a set about of time because there is a domino effect. One person has to be done before the next person can finish, and they're not having to dig back and try to figure out when these issues happened. We're providing it to them upfront. We can say exactly what happened, which account they need to look at, and on what date. This means that we're ahead of the issues, rather than trying to backtrack and find them.

We are not currently running in a Citrix environment, but the only reason we're not is that our sister company hosts our Citrix environment, so we can't install any of the services that make those environments much easier to utilize. For example, we can't install the computer vision component because we don't own it, so they won't let us.

Our team is really small, there's only six of us on the actual RPA team. However, we work really hard with the business to get buy-in in every department. We're trying to roll out at least one automation in every single department. Our company's goals for the next year, I believe, every associate of the company is supposed to have proposed a task that they are doing, whether it's daily, monthly, yearly, whatever, that could be automated. Then our team will ingest that, prioritize that, and work through it. But, we're really trying really hard to get our whole company involved, and we're getting ready to kick off this campaign to try and get more attention to it and to try and get people using it. We want it to be more than just a buzzword. We want it to be something that everybody's talking about regularly, and using, and excited about.

When it comes to getting people interested, I think it's probably a combination of education and sharing the experience of those projects that we have rolled out. When people are really seeing that with the projects that we've rolled out, our close is shortening, they become interested. What we say is happening, or will happen when we're rolling these automations out, is happening. Getting that to be shared from process owner to their team, to the teams that they're working with, it acts like word of mouth for those that are affected. We don't like it to just all come from us, the technical team. We don't want to simply tell them that it's going to do something. We want others to talk about what it has done for them and suggest they should take advantage of that too.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a five. We don't struggle with it.

I took the UiPath academy training, and I love it. We are looking at an unrelated tool right now, and we found no comparison between their training and the UiPath Academy. We were spoiled with UiPath Academy, and we didn't really realize how good that training really is.

The thing that I love about the developer training; the level one, level two, level three... level one really does walk you through it. It gives you, literally the walkthrough, so when you don't understand, you can go back, you can look at, and see exactly how to do it. But by the time you're in level three, it's not doing that anymore. The requirements are a little bit looser, you have to figure out how to interpret the words or the requirements, and it becomes more challenging, but I think that that's important, because, by the time that you're actually working real projects, it's not a walkthrough anymore. You have to figure it out on your own.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately three months. It did take us a little while, but we knew that we purchased our licenses before we were really ready to hit the ground running. We function out of such a small team, and we were still working with UiPath trying to figure out which partner we wanted to bring in for consultants because we wanted somebody with experience. We didn't want someone who just finished the training just run in and try, and I think we learned a lot working with that consultant.

We did work with a second consulting group, Machina Automation, and we loved working with them. They're great. They're just so supportive, and they really want to make sure things are right. It's never just sending them the requirements and pounding it out to get it into production. We work with them really deeply to try and make sure that they understand the process, we understand the requirements, they express their concerns to us, we express our concerns to them, and we work together. It's not like we just send them the documents and they send it back as a project. The whole way through we touch base with them every single morning. They're always asking what more they can do and how they can help. They ask if we're happy with what we received.

We do time card reviews, so the time that they spend with us we're actually able to go back and validate, based on that, what they've said they did, that indeed it is what they did. We had received some scrum and sprint training from them. We've had actual developer consultants, we've had mentoring hours for our developers. So we've had a lot from them, and they've been able to help us with everything. Anything we ask, they try to accommodate us. For example, we asked if they had any experience with Kibana. They did not but said that they would find somebody who does.

With respect to saving time, I don't actually track that because I am a developer, but I know that our goal for next year is twenty thousand hours. That's the big goal that we're working towards. With one of our processes, I think we're going to hit about thirteen thousand hours if we can just get that one process done. That's a statement review. We sent out tens of thousands of statements, so we'll be able to review every single one of those. This would be a huge saving in time.

I think right now we have about one hundred and thirty-six processes in production, and a lot of what we've done so far is in the finance section of the business. As such, a lot of those are only run on a quarterly, or monthly basis. We have some annual processes, and we have very few daily processes, but those daily processes add up over time.

In addition to the hours that we have saved, one of the big things we're working on is accuracy, control, and staff avoidance. Staff avoidance is the work that couldn't have been done otherwise because we would have had to hire someone to take on all of the work. So, we're able to do more than what our current staff is capable of doing. We add that into our time savings.

But, more than that, we really do focus on accuracy and timeliness. We're able to speed things up. We're able to ensure that things are exactly as expected. We spent a lot of time in the early stages of our planning, really trying to optimize our processes, so we get our original documentation, we take it, and our team works with the business to optimize that. After we get sign-off and we've optimized the manual process and got it documented and signed off, then we do a developer review and discuss ways that it can be made easier. Then we do a review for development and optimize it. Finally, once we get that signed off, we actually start our development.

We spend a lot of time on the front end of the process, making sure that everything is accurate and reliable, and we're going to be able to deliver faster as expected, and it's going to be able to handle all of these different errors or use cases. Following this process has worked well for us, so far.

I think the most valuable feature is being able to run processes in an unattended way where we can schedule them, and then have the report sent to the process owner's inbox in the morning. The is great for us, and we use it a lot. It saves the users a lot of time, and we're able to do a lot more for a user than they were ever able to do on their own.

I would like to see a biweekly scheduling option in Orchestrator. We've actually built into our automations a roundabout way to process every two weeks but it would be really nice to front end a biweekly schedule. Being in the financial services industry, we do have a lot of projects that run on weird schedules. We've kept some of our automations attended just because they're ad-hoc. They might need to re-run them. We don't want to have to wait for Orchestrator managers to kick those processes off. But, outside of that, there is no need for this one to be an attended robot. It's a perfect candidate for unattended automation, just the scheduling is the problem.

With respect to the stability, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. We haven't ever had any issues with it.

We did not use another RPA system prior to this one.

When I first started at the company as an intern for my department, it was only myself and my boss, who's now our COE manager. The very first thing that we did was meet with all of the different functional departments of the company, and we explained to them what RPA is. We explained the types of processes that it can help take off your desk and asked for ideas from each department about what could be done to help them.

We took that, and we built this huge backlog of perhaps three hundred different items, prioritized them, and worked with others to explain that it was needed. At this point, we did PoCs with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

I found the initial setup to be straightforward. They had me sit in on it and I don't work infrastructure, so there were some things that kind of went over my head. They did a lot of planning. After some help from UiPath, it went really fast.

UiPath helped us with the implementation. We worked with them to really figure out what our infrastructure needed to look like. 

We evaluated both Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism in addition to this solution. We ruled out Blue Prism pretty quickly. Our sister company uses Automation Anywhere, but we liked UiPath, primarily for the reason of our experience working with them and the sales team. To me, it was so much more than just working with the sales team, they're our friends now. We still talk to them and we have relationships with these people. We actually just ran into one of our developers for our PoC. It's a culture you want to be a part of.

In comparing with Automation Anywhere, one of the big reasons we went with UiPath was the support that we received. Any question we had was immediately answered. If they didn't know the answer, then they would search to find the right people in the company who did. I think that that's more valuable than just saying that they'll find us an answer. You always got the feeling that they were going to follow through, just by the conversations that we have had with them. I think that really sold us, a lot.

Also, watching the road maps for both companies at the time, initially it seemed like Automation Anywhere was ahead, and that UiPath was catching up. Then, when UiPath started releasing what they were going to be doing, as opposed to only what they were working on right now, we realized they were really going to be moving ahead. I think that kind of sold us too. Just watching what's on the road map, and how it fits in with what we see our company doing in the next few years, they aligned really well. I think that was the point where my boss really realized that it's going to be a good fit for us.

When I was in business school, they taught us that the things that users like the most are the things they didn't know they needed. I think UiPath does a great job of anticipating the users' needs, and they meet them before we knew that it was what we needed. I am excited about the next release.

I recently had a discussion with my father, who works for one of the energy companies in my state. He works at the IT level but on the infrastructure side. When I explained to him our savings in terms of hours that we have had since adopting RPA, he was very excited and is now heading their RPA initiative.

RPA is making a difference and it's really changing the way the workforce works.

My biggest advice for anybody considering this solution is to get their quality improvement, and Six Sigma teams involved because I think it makes a huge difference in terms of understanding processes. When you can get your processes understood, you can get people on board early, at every level.

I think it's really important to have proponents for automation, just in general. You want to have the automation mindset at every single level. Of course, it's important to have your C-level bought in, but it's important to have the people who are doing the work bought in too. If you don't get their buy-in, it's going to be much more difficult because a lot of the work that you're automating is at their levels. You're working with them on a day to day basis to understand their process, to understand all of the rules behind what they're doing. So, buy-in, and process understanding, that's just critical. You can't move fast without those two things.

We have nothing bad to say about UiPath. We have regular communication with them and all of the concerns we have are always addressed. They're addressed quickly and they're addressed well. They really listen to what the customers want.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use unattended robots and the Orchestrator module. I am most familiar with the Orchestrator. We are very new to this solution and just getting into it.

We are a financial insurance company and we do VoW, Verify on Web. We have a bunch of different insurance carriers.

We run automations in a virtual environment, VMware, and I haven't seen any problems with it.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a five. For my part of it, this solution seems very useful. I have limited exposure to it because I do more of the installation, the configs, etc. I don't really work with the workloads, although I see what is being worked with. We have our in-house developers who are doing the integration into our in-house programs, so I watch what they do and it just seems that it's very easy to pick up on.

I have not used the UiPath Academy, although I think that the developers have. I did not get any feedback from them about it.

I was not involved at the time, but I think that from the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately three to four months.

In terms of eliminating human errors, I would say that we have a twenty-five percent reduction in the number of them. However, it is hard for me to say because I'm not that clear with it prior to the incorporation of the robots.

With respect to saving time, because of the commitment to the development and the installation and the bringing things onboard, at this point, we have not saved time. In daily operations, we do save time. I would say that we save between twenty and forty hours a day.

Our organization has improved because of the time savings. We've got robots now taking ten seconds to do what people were taking four to six minutes to do. It's a whole department of people that are now free to do other things.

I like Orchestrator and how easy it is to manipulate and get your data, to see what's going on. My job is to make sure that the system is running, so it's very easy to go to the Orchestrator through the dashboards. If it's not running, you'll see through the logs what's not running and what has caused the problem. At that point, normally, I escalate it to whoever needs to work on it.

The company likes this solution because of scalability.

One of the things we're struggling with it how to project how many robots we need to do these processes, so better documentation or assistance in this regard would be useful.

With respect to the stability, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. I cannot give it five, yet, because I have just not had enough exposure to it.

We have about twelve people working with this solution, from developers to the business side to the IT side.

The idea of RPA was brought back down to me from our VP of IT, but I'm not sure where he got it from.

We have already seen a workload that has been moved off of our employees. It was within the first two months of the bot being developed. It is not my place to say the amount, but I can say that it is substantial and six digits. 

From a cost perspective, the unattended bots are going to be a major saving for us. We have a lot of mundane, routine tasks that need to be done. I have not done very much with the attended bots, so I'm not sure how we might benefit from using them.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is that knowing what it is you want to automate is the most important thing. We were kind of blind walking in on that. We had one process we looked at and now it's throughout our company. People have all kinds of ideas about what we can do with automation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using the unattended robots and Orchestrator modules of UiPath.

We have built close to fifty processes in the three years that we have been a client. Our primary use case, the one the gives us the biggest relief, is the processing of premium border rows. The robot will pick up Excel files with between four hundred and a thousand rows of data, and then does the data entry into our policy issuance system.

All of our automation runs in a virtual environment and we do not have any problems. At the start, of course, there were a few bumps in the road, but we got it figured out and now have no issues at all using the VM.

When we began working with automation, I was the leader and I had three BAs and three developers offshore. When our company decentralized, we created three other robotics divisions. There are now twenty-eight of us including the project manager, the BAs, the testers, and our developers. People are spread across four different divisions within the corporation.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, I will consider the individual components. With the Orchestrator, on a scale of one to five, that's easy, it's a five. It is very evident how to use it. The Studio, I am not a developer but I got six developers up and running on it in a very short period of time. It has a very short learning curve, so on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four.

My rating of four is because I know that we had some challenges with using the recorder. Things would shift and there were a couple of things that had worked and then stopped working. We found a little instability, and it was hard for us to know whether it was us, or the application, or the studio. Ultimately, we were not able to get a final answer on the root cause of those problems.

We are no longer experiencing these problems. When we upgraded, a lot of that went away. Also, when we went to Orchestrator, a lot of that went away. Exactly as UiPath had told us when we went to them with the issue, they gave us some solutions and once we implemented them, the issue was corrected.

I did not attend the UiPath Academy, but my Business Analysts took the BA course and my offshore developers all took the Academy. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five easily. Before the Academy came around, they were kind of self-taught. When they took the Academy, it closed some of their gaps.

When we started with this solution, we did a PoC with the help of a UiPath developer. In two weeks we built a PoC for a bank reconciliation, which was pretty fast. That helped us decide whether we wanted to go with the product, and of course, we did. After that, we took the code, which really didn't have a lot of bells and whistles in it, and we gave it to one of our developers to really soup it up and make it more robust. That took them about a month to do.

Orchestrator has given us a huge boost in terms of efficiency.

In addition to the resource-creating benefit that we get from this solution, it has given people the opportunity to move away from those mundane jobs and into something more challenging. Rather than sitting there doing data entry, they're able to move up, re-skill themselves, and add value to themselves as well as the organization.

We have been able to eliminate one hundred percent of human errors. We found that the robot was better than the human because when the human was doing some of the processes, they were supposed to be checking into another system. While testing our robot, we found that the robot's state was different from this other system that it's supposed to check against. We thought that the robot was wrong; however, we found out that the humans were eliminating that step. They were cutting corners. This stage of our development raised a flag to inefficiency on the human side.

In terms of the time that this solution saved, it equates to the equivalent of four full-time employees a year. At two thousand hours per year times four, that's a savings of eight thousand hours.

The Orchestrator is great because you schedule it, and that's it, you don't have to worry about it. It will tell you what passed and what failed if it had any issues. We don't have that dependency on someone needed to schedule tasks.

The code in Studio is easy to follow. I am not a developer, but I am able to read the code. When we have problems, the developer will display the script and I'm able to read it and follow it. Several times, I have been able to see where there was an error and the developer was able to fix it. It looks like it's easy to code.

We had some issues with instability for which we were never able to determine the root cause.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate the stability of this solution a five.

A UiPath consultant assisted us with our PoC, and the experience was incredible. They were really wonderful.

The technical support for this solution is excellent. They're very responsive and we never wait more than twenty-four hours for an answer. The developers have more contact with support than I do.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to this one. Our former CFO went to a meeting where they were talking about robotics, and when he returned from the meeting we had a discussion about it. I was working in Internal Audit at the time, and with his prompting, I left Internal Audit to head up the robotics process. From there, it just took off.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward. To me, it just made sense.

In our first year, the development was a little bumpy, which is to be expected. I would say that it was fourteen to fifteen months before we hit a smooth path. Even with that, things go smoothly for a while until you start doing more challenging and more complex things, then you're back to a crazy path, then you correct yourself and things go smoothly again.

One of the issues is bad user requirements. Simply put, we don't know what we don't know, and we're dependent on the business to tell us. Even if you ask the same question in a variety of ways, if the business can't articulate it or tell you about it, then we can't build for it. Getting the right user requirements was our biggest challenge.

After that, we were trying to build for everything, instead of just building for the straight path. Trying to build in all of the exceptions and allow room for an imperfect world is what took us down. We've since learned that we're going to build for the straight path, and then look at the exceptions as we start to gather data on them. When we find exceptions that occur at a high frequency then we'll build for that. Failing is fine, and it is expected, as long as you can learn from it. Our approach is based on what we have learned from our mistakes.

From just one of our four divisions, A&H, we saved approximately $390,000 USD. You can multiply that to include the other three divisions (Estimate: $1.5 Million Dollars).

This past July, I completed a cost-benefit analysis and we determined that in the three-plus years that we have been using UiPath, we created the capacity to the equivalent of four full-time employees and have cost-avoidance in that we didn't have to hire five other employees. This is where the value is helping us utilize resources better.

Overall, we are giving ourselves a two year ROI.

We did not evaluate options from other vendors.

We went to Swiss RE because they offered to show us what they were doing. We saw their process and we were impressed by it, and it was a pretty nominal cost to buy the package. We thought, instead of wasting time, which could take months, and management wanted us to hit the ground running, we would try it. If we didn't like it then it wasn't a big loss of money. So, we totally circumvented the traditional route of purchasing and we are happy that we made the right decision.

From what I have seen recently, I'm excited to try the Community and start building my own robots because it just looks like it's gotten a lot easier.

I am looking forward to one of the upcoming options, the dashboard. It will give us the productivity of the robot, which is something that I do myself right now. I record everything on each robot that runs and we keep metrics on it. These include how long it took to run, how many transactions it processed, and what the error rate is. Then I have to figure out ROI. So, the dashboard is huge and at the top of my list of things that I want to see.

We have a process for obtaining the right requirements for someone to follow. We go and observe the business and we record the process. That way, when we have to sit down and write the requirements, we can refer to the video and don't have to keep going back to the business because that is going to annoy them. We include the video when we send it to our developers and that way they have a visual for it, as well. When we put together formal documentation we show screen prints of where to click. After doing it a couple of times, one of our developers had this great idea to make things configurable so that we're not hardcoding a lot of stuff in there. With that configuration file, we just keep improving.

From a cost perspective, I can't speak to the advantages of attended robots because we do not have any. When I look up the pre-automation cost of doing a process versus post-automation, we give ourselves a two year ROI. We're not going to automate everything immediately, so we give ourselves a two year ROI and if it's going to be a positive ROI, we'll go with it. Of course, based on what it is, we'll prioritize. If it's a nominal ROI it will probably go to the bottom of our pipeline, but that's what we do when trying to evaluate initiatives.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to try UiPath. Use the free version. I have a friend who does this as well, and I encouraged him to use the free download and do something simple. After it worked, they would up going with the product. With respect to the cost, you're going to recognize the savings immediately for the cost of the tool.

We are very pleased with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

It is looking externally at how we can enable the government to identify efficiencies and improve effectiveness. The other is, internally, how can we drive efficiencies within HR and finance, with everything that a big corporation can do. 

1. How do we help the government realize these benefits? 
   
2. How do we help our internal workforce benefit?

It is two different things, and they are similar, but they're not the same thing.

A lot of people externally are worried about the elimination of jobs, but at the same time, they still want that efficiency, and they are looking for it. We want to drive the effectiveness of the workforce, whomever we're working with. 

There are plenty of automation opportunities out there: DoD, the federal government, and commercial space. There are all sorts of stuff that we can do. Internally, we feel the same way. There are lot of things that we can do to make ourselves run more efficiently. If we are preaching to the government that they need to be using this, it's beneficial for us to say, "This is what we have done as a company."

Our company is 25,000 people across the globe. There are certain opportunities for us to include automation in what we do every day. We are doing it now by instituting RPA, specifically, and the tools that the UiPath bring to the table. It will be a game changer for us, if we can get it done at scale.

Automation is growing at our company. A lot of what we do is focused on AI. Going from zero to AI is a Herculean task. It's extremely difficult. However, there are many steps in-between zero and AI that we can do now to help realize the benefit to the company or the federal government, such as the benefits of the efficiencies that we can identify. That intermediate, non-threatening first step can be RPA, which ultimately will lead to enabling AI, but is not AI. 

Within our company, we are looking to identify what those pre-AI steps are, with the goal in mind that we know that the federal government is asking for AI. What we do in the interim is a type of level set, where you can build an algorithm, AI, or machine learning algorithm. This ultimately is what they want, but what they need right now is to aggregate their data in a structured way to be able to feed into those algorithms. That's step one. This is the first step to getting all your data right. It's not easy, because you have to take people out of the mindset of AI.

A lot of times, in the government, people say, "I'm wearing two hats." It's an idiom. The question I have in response is, "What if we could take one of those hats away?" We can take one of those responsibilities that someone finds cumbersome, or annoying, and remove that from their task list. We have them tell us the steps of their process, so we can automate it, if not pieces, but all of it. That is our starting point with a lot of people, "We can take this off your plate," which is definitely exciting for a lot of people. It scares some people too, but we're working on that.

The most valuable features are the unattended bots. Initially, we are going to be looking at a number of attended bots in a pilot phase for our HR internal operations personnel. We are going to come in and try to remove tasks from their daily lives, such as ten minute tasks brought down to five seconds, or we could just completely eliminate them, making them unattended.

The training and certification online is very helpful.

The software is easy to use, as a drag and drop function. Even if it wasn't, the type of support that we get from the people who work for UiPath is paramount to the capability of the tool. The ease of use has exceeded our expectations.

The Academy Live that I took was only a half a day course. There needs to be diverse set of courses for those introduced to RPA for the first time. There are different people who show up to this course: 

• The developer who is interested in automation and automating different facets of the tasks that they have, either at work or for their clients. 
• Business managers who want to know more about what RPA can do for my business or company. They want the operational and strategic level versus the tactical level of how do I get automation to do the thing I want it to do?

The course was only a half a day, and although we were able to provide two automations and build two bots, it would be helpful if that was extended to include the RPA story and pitch. E.g., What's the story that we need to tell in order to get people to say, "How do I get into the pilot phase now."

I would like to have the course do an introduction, "Welcome to the course. This is what RPA is. Now, let us build your first bot." 

The sales elements of why RPA should be there too:

• What is the value proposition that RPA brings to the table.
• Here is the expected ROI for a menial task, saving an hour a week equals this in the long term. Even if you can cut a 25 minute task out of somebody's daily routine, this is the benefit in the long term.
  

That wasn't there as much. I wasn't really expecting it to be there, but in the long term, if there are a number of different types of training courses which are offered, people will have different breadths of understandings of RPA can really do, e.g., it needs a hardcore developing training and a capture manager. It needs to explain what sort of things a capture manager needs to know. Maybe not necessarily how to develop the architecture for it, but what does that even mean? For example, how easy is it for me to get Orchestrator onto a server? How do I become a reseller of the software? These are the capture manager responsibilities, and it would be helpful if they were explained. While this is probably more of a day two of a training rather than day one. 

I would like to see a UiPath user group to discuss issues. I am unaware of all the activities and features, and this would help. Right now, there is just the user's guide and UiPath GO! It would be great if this feedback went back to the UiPath development team. We should also be notified of new features through an alerting system on UiPath GO!

With our focus on the federal government, they're looking at dozens of bots: Scaling of five instances of Studio, 10 bots of Orchestrator, and three unattended bots. That is far easier to scale than in the commercial world, where they are asking for 1000 instances of Studio and 500 unattended bots, touching 100 different processes. We haven't had that experience yet.

The current staff at UiPath won't let you fail (the customer support and customer success managers). They are not going to leave you hanging.

They are an honest broker. They told us when things aren't going to work. They've been upfront and transparent about everything with us.

Our developers have found that it is relatively straightforward. With any installation issues that have come up, we have always had somebody just be able to pick up the phone and call.

ROI depends on the complexity the project. Unattended bots tend to see ROI immediately, where attended bots take longer. The savings starts as soon as a bot is deployed.

Getting licenses has been relatively easy.

We have all the prices for the software. Every project is up for a negotiation on how it's going to be done. A lot of times, with the federal government, it will be necessary to put it on contract. When we are bidding for something, we need to know, how many bots are we talking about? The tricky part is when the government is unsure what they actually want. A lot of times when contracts or proposals are put on the street, the government wants something that can support 100 bots. That's not really helpful given that the price points for unattended and attended are different. So, clarification is often necessary when we're asking, what ratio of attended to unattended are you really asking for?

There is some initial sticker shock from a lot of people regarding cost, until you show them what the actual benefit is. Initially, people are just going, "Why?" So, the retort for that is, "Look how much you will save, time, and budget-wise with one bot. If one bot costs X, this is how much it will save you over one year. This alleviates the "Oh my gosh" face, when it's 1200 dollars for a bot. 

Getting clients, and our own people internally, to recognize that this is an investment in efficiency to drive effectiveness. If you can do that, and you can get past any initial sticker shock, thinking strategically and long term, then you've got them. But if they say, "Look, my budget this year is only 10,000 dollars. Why would I put that into bots?" That becomes a different type of discussion. It's mostly focused on, you're thinking about today. We need you to be thinking about three years from now.

If you look around at the other software systems, we have chose to go with UiPath because of the ease of the interface and also the customer support that we get from their people. There are a lot of tools out there. The reason why we have gone with UiPath is because of the relationships that we have built and the type of success that we are going to get working with their account leads.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and briefly at a couple of the start ups. However, we figured that they didn't have the ATOs that we needed to go within the federal space. There are a lot of people who say they can do this, or they say that they have an offering that can do this. In many cases, that is absolutely true. We wanted to be with a company that we feel is up and coming and will be around in the next decade. We want to use software that is going to be recognized by the federal government as number one, or at least very close.

Be prepared, because you are going to be asked a hundred question. This product takes a team. Your senior management needs to want this product and sign onto training. You will need developers capable of using the UiPath software.

UiPath is not just a technology business. It really comes down to a people business. The people and culture that UiPath provides us leads us to use their software more often.

The NextGen workforce is not going to be cutting and pasting for eight hours a day. That is not a function that a human should be doing anyway. Therefore, we treat RPA as a digital assistant, because who would not want a digital assistant.

People are finding ways to automate the reporting functions that Workday can really provide. This is not at an individual level. At the individual level, you can go in and check your benefits and check your 401K. However, at a macro level, we need people to run Workday reports pretty much daily, and that gets updated in the systems that we have. Therefore, our HR and finance people are all working with Workday, as people of incorporate these big management systems, trying to find new ways to automate them.

It is now on us and our team to be able to implement automation with the Workday, and have it work more efficiently. That will be our next challenge moving forward, automating Workday.