UiPath Platform Reviews

We're a revenue cycle management company for medical billing. We've reallocated our charge entry employees. We're using bots now to do the charge entry on medical claims and then also payment posting along with eligibility and AR. We've been able to reallocate about, just within this last year, probably eight employees. They've been reassigned to more valuable work - things that the bot can't do and actually requires a human to do. We've been understaffed, so it's actually worked out great for our company.

The ease of building automation isn't a problem. It seems to be very easy to do to a point. Our challenge is we work in a live environment. We're not able to use a test environment when we build things out. We have to go very slowly.

I'm not that familiar with the product, with the solution, however, the UiPath apps feature and OCR are great. That said, we're not using any of the apps currently.

The biggest benefit we've seen is the accuracy. Even just with employees calling in sick or not having enough staff. We’ve been able to fill those roles.

The robotics piece has been a huge thing. We're doing medical claims. We're always worried about claims not getting paid. This has been able to capture those claims so that people get paid the first time. One of the other things we track is how many times we touch a claim. For example, how many clicks. We couldn't do that before. That's been very valuable to us.

We’ve improved our efficiency in a way for sure. Even just our cost analysis has improved. When we do new contracts, we know what it's going to cost exactly.

I don't know if it's UiPath as much as just what we do is really complicated. Even the consultants that we've used with UiPath, even they've said, wow, this is very difficult what you guys do. There are a lot of moving parts, so it's not as much of a UiPath problem in terms of limitations. It's just our own processes.

Right now, I don't think I've been on there long enough to know if there are missing features or functionalities I’d like to be added.

I’m talking to people right now, to see how it can do things better or how we could use it more effectively. We’d like to discover what worked for other people.

We've been using UiPath for about maybe a year and a half tops.

I haven't had any problems or concerns right now concerning stability. The biggest concern I do have is that we've already invested six people in this. We're going to have a lot more that will, more or less, not have the robotic piece as part of their job. That work will be reallocated. I have about a hundred employees that UiPath could technically reallocate.

When I look at that, I worry about if something does happen or it doesn't work or there's no backup. Then, suddenly, I don't have employees. Right now, we can jump in and some humans can do the work if necessary. My concern is that in the future they won't exist. This hasn't happened yet. I hope it doesn't.

Scalability hasn't been a problem at all. We can just continue to add bots every time we need them. It's been easy.

We started with two. Three months later, we added another two. After another three months, we add another two. From our standpoint, it's great. My UiPath rep was shocked that I keep adding more, so that's good.

I have not used technical support.

That said, we had one issue with UiPath where something didn't work. We talked to them and it was taken care of within a couple of days.

My vendor is working with them. They mentioned there was an issue with insights that they are working through. Insights are still not quite functional, or there are some resources we need. However, the vendor is dealing with it directly. It's a work in progress. 

We did not previously use a different RPA solution. 

The initial setup was pretty easy. We didn't have any challenges with that. I contacted one of our vendors and they ran with it. We didn't have issues at all.

With the vendor, it took us about 30 days to deploy UiPath. After that, in terms of implementing bots, the first bot took us about three months. Once we did the first one, it just went really quick after that. We could reuse some processes which made it faster. There was a lot of reusing of the same. We were also internally understanding what information they need and how it works.

It was all new to us. I'm still learning the acronyms they use. We need to learn what they are talking about. We’re not IT-based at all. It's definitely different.

We had the solution implemented by a vendor. They implemented it all. We didn't have any challenges as far as that goes.

Our experience with the integrator was good. I would say that they didn't realize how challenging it was going to be or, at least, the person who integrated didn’t. At the same time, they know almost everything about my business now.

UiPath has saved costs for our organization. For example, we’ve allocated six employees that are paid around $40,000 a year and we've implemented six bots to do those same functions and they're around $8,000 a year. In a way, we’ve doubled our staff, and almost tripled our ROI.

We had a problem before with the pricing, however, for the most part, it's fine where it is now. My ROI is fine. It works great. I have zero complaints.

You have to do a package at a time. That's my only challenge, where sometimes I don't need that many licenses. 

When you first sign up, it's a package that can renew every five years. I don't necessarily need everything. I'd prefer just to pay for certain pieces. 

We did not evaluate any other options. We started using UiPath due to a referral at a neurological healthcare conference about four years ago. The speaker suggested UiPath. I actually didn't know of any other company until after we were on UiPath. We've since talked to others who have used other solutions and they mentioned that we made the right choice when we chose UiPath.

We started on-premise for the first six months and then we actually moved to the cloud.

We do not use their UiPath apps feature as of right now.

We are mostly using unattended automation.

We haven't really calculated the reduction in human error. We're just moving on to our Insights app. We're just getting ready to launch that, so we're not there yet. We don't know what that turnaround will be.

We do not use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program right now.

Our teams have not yet used the UiPath Academy courses.

I'm a little concerned about having to bring on more people that are not in this industry. We're going to have to start them over from the ground up, which takes time.

When we first started, we wanted to know if it really worked. We got a certain budget and just started using it, and now I can say that yes, it does work. We can see that now that we've stepped back. We should have done it earlier. That's what I would tell people. I would definitely tell people to look at it first, before anything else. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We've got mostly finance use cases including a lot of accounts receivable and stuff like that. Then, there is a lot of work where I do trading settlements, so a lot of settlements as well. The back office automation's there, too. We're still getting used to it and still getting started.

We've been able to expand up to citizen developers, and have been able to show them how to do various things. It's easy to pick up, so a lot of citizen developers are learning it now, and with little to no coding experience. It's been great.

The recorder has been great. Just being able to really start your automation there, and just modifying them a little bit and then getting them really in production has been helpful.

The solution has saved costs for the organization. For example, I used to do back-office stuff, and I was able to move to more of an IT role. That was definitely a savings there, and obviously, no one had to automate it after me or do it manually after me.

We have found that the solution has reduced human error as now it's a bot doing it. It's really reduced errors due to the fact that no one has to check each time to ensure the work is error-free, and, in general, there are a lot fewer errors. 

The solution has freed up employee time. For example, as I mentioned, I myself have moved off of back-office tasks and, in doing so, the company did not have to hire someone after me. We've likely saved 10,000 hours in a year. We're really happy with that result. The additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. People can now just quickly audit it and then move on to something more important.

The Academy is great to use. We've been able to learn a lot from there. That's what our citizen developers will look at as they get more familiar with the product, and as we show them how to develop items. It has positively affected the process of getting employees up to speed on the solution. A lot of them have little to no coding experience and the Academy has helped by showing them what they need to learn. The biggest value is if they have little to no coding experience, it'll really start from the basics and teach them from there. You don't have to teach them all the variables and stuff like that.

While I like the Academy a lot, it could maybe go deeper into some of the topics. The basic ones, such as Excel, which is already a decent course, could maybe go into more specifics. My issue is that, while the basics are good, getting into the weeds a little more could be very helpful. It's hard to specify exactly what is needed, however.

We've used the solution for about a year now. We're still getting used to it. 

Our stability is great. You rarely have any downtime, once you build it. There's obviously the support, however, I'd say it's pretty minimal.

We're trying to work on scalability at the moment. It's there, however, we have a lot of different departments that do a lot of different things and that's where we need to really work on scaling. It has nothing to do with UiPath. It's just about getting everybody trained up on everything on our side. That said, we can see how it is possible to scale in the future. We do plan to increase usage.

Currently, we have about ten users who are familiar with UiPath. It's not too many. They are either developers or just everyday users that support it.

In terms of technical support, from the perspective of tickets, et cetera, I would say they are pretty good. We've only done a few upgrades so far. We've only had it for a year, and so far, in that time, support seems great. They have been helping us out on everything.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

I can't speak to the initial setup, as we had an outside party handle pretty much everything. I actually joined after they onboarded us and everything, and therefore wasn't a part of the process at all.

We have two to three people that handle maintenance tasks, on top of the AI.

We had an outside party do the deployment. It was a consultant. They did it for us.

I don't have any insights into the licensing process. 

While I joined after UiPath was implemented, my understanding is the company did look into a couple of other options, just to see their capabilities.

I would advise potential new users to go for it. The Academy offers a great starting point. It's a great tool. I would recommend UiPath.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

Our primary use cases are for invoice processing and some legal intake use cases.

The benefits we see from UiPath are always time savings. I've never seen another benefit. It's always that people don't have to do manual tasks anymore.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership, by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, if security isn't a big issue. 

With the cloud offering, you don't have as much control of where the data is and how it's protected versus the on-prem. If you're dealing with very sensitive information, you could introduce a compliance risk if you're using the cloud offering. But with the customers that we partner UiPath with, that's not an issue, so we use the cloud offering.

The screen automation features are the most valuable. There are some things, in an automation process that is complicated, that UiPath isn't very good at. And there are some things that are very repetitive and UiPath is good with it. For those repetitive aspects, it's obvious why it's valuable. It's replacing the amount of time that a human being would have to spend doing it.

We have seen that our clients have freed up time for their employees.

Our clients utilize AI functionality from UiPath. UiPath is really good at simple repetitive processes, but not as much at complex processes. The more complicated it gets, it breaks down because if it's less repetitive, it's less automatable.

AI functionality enabled our clients to automate more processes overall. It helped with end-to-end automation in the way that if you automate more processes, you save more time, and save more money for the company.

It is not very easy to build on automations. That's a problem with UiPath. I don't think it's very easy to build automation on top of it. 

Accessibility needs improvement. It would be easier to build on UiPath if they would have more employee-level users as opposed to consultants. Then that would increase the value of the product and the platform.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

The stability is good. 

It's very scalable in our organization. The hardest thing is getting in and getting someone to build their first five automations and their first five robots in the first place. After that, it's very hard to rip out. Once you've already automated something and you've done all the in-depth work to set it up, it's pretty sticky.

There are around ten users and they're almost all solutions architects.

We've used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, but I think UiPath is the market leader right now.

Even though UiPath is hard to use, it's easier to use than Blue Prism. And it has more features than Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is never straightforward. There are always bugs. It doesn't matter if it's UiPath or any other company, it's always complex. It's never easy the first time.

The implementation takes around three months. 

Ideally you don't want to take someone's job, but if you free up the time that someone was spending doing something, you don't have to pay them to do that anymore, or you can reinvest their time somewhere else.

It's expensive, but it saves a lot of money too.

My advice to someone implementing UiPath would be to hire someone technical to do it. It's not as easy to use as they say it is.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. To get it to a perfect ten, it would need to be easier to use. 

Our primary use cases are in our financial department. We had a bit of a downturn, but we still had work that needed to be completed. So we developed several automations to manage a lot of the financial work and a lot of our payment processing systems. We expanded that out to include more of our traders' work processes, just because we saw there were a lot of workloads coming in and a lot of repetitive work. So we used UiPath to eliminate a lot of that for our commercial traders, then we did the same thing for our operations and production teams so that they have their own automated processes.

We plan on scaling it and using it in more functions.

Our biggest metrics are in our financial org, they have more of a cost avoidance where we don't have to backfill those positions. It's around $2 million a year because we don't have to bring in personnel to complete the processes.

It has helped solve certain human errors but that's an unintended bonus because we're automating a process as it is that a machine is going to repeat. We don't really have a person to do it.

UiPath has helped to free up employee time. The additional time enabled us to focus on higher-value work. By removing a lot of the repetitive work, it's given them the ability to do more analytics and to dive into the data science realms of their job to do more data-driven analysis of what they're doing.

The ability to do citizen development is the most valuable feature. That initiative has helped us to expand it because that gives folks that are closer to the business the ability to develop their own solutions that are tailored to what they need to do, as opposed to waiting for someone in IT to contact them to build it out. Or to wait for a business analyst to provide some type of value metric, but they can actually go and build it themselves.

My job is to actually be the evangelist to these groups. I'd say we've been pretty successful. My developers are working with the citizen developers who help to guide them and to teach them how to build their own automations for their business process.

It's pretty easy to build automation. The no-code process has really driven the adoption by the business people so that they don't have to skill up and learn how to code anything. They only need to know how to click a button and build it out. That's the best component.

We used the UiPath Academy course. It's our training regimen for our business users. We have to introduce them first to the platform and understand how to work through the platform. It's a pretty straightforward and easy course. With our citizen development program, we also have the Academy where they can either do hands-on learning or use the Academy to get some video training as well.

The biggest value of the Academy is the ease of being able to access the training. 

Governance has room for improvement but that's more of a cultural thing. It depends on your company. We have the reference architecture that we have in place, but it's easy for someone to say, "Okay, I need to make an adjustment here outside of that reference architecture." Because it's so easy for them to do that, they leave the company now that a non-compliant bot is out there running a production process, we need to be able to rank that in. There needs to be footwork that we have to do as an organization for my team as opposed to a true problem with the platform.

We have been using UiPath for around five years now. It's the on-prem version, but we have it deployed in the cloud in our Azure tenant. We started on-prem then we migrated it about three years ago.

It's pretty stable. It's more of the architecture and how it runs because it has to leverage VDIs and as Microsoft releases an update, we have to be watching that process because it'll make the box really brittle. Any change to the UI anywhere will break and that's where we have to step in and fix it.

Every corner of the business except for folks out in the field uses UiPath. It's around 200 people or so.

We've had a little bit of back and forth whenever we have an issue and some of the solutions we got back were pretty boilerplate-type answers. We had an issue with a Microsoft update. They said, "Well, could you potentially reach out to Microsoft and have them let you know." 

They're just going to release the update. We need to be a little bit more proactive on the software side. Our account executive took care of it for us. He stepped in and enabled us to not have that response again. 

I wasn't there for the initial setup but I heard about it. It was complex, but that was more of a cultural thing.

The deployment took around a year to get that through planning, discovery, and implementation.

Our biggest return is our cost avoidance and not having to backfill personnel.

I think the pricing is comparable. It's fair pricing for the size that we're deploying.

My advice would be to make sure that you have a really good understanding and a really good culture in your company that understands and wants to get on board with automation because it will require that type of mindset of understanding what you're doing before you do it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

There are lots of use cases. Mostly, there are many gaps in organizations that buy a lot of software and a lot of automation platforms like ERPs, however, they don't know how to actually create an end-to-end process and connect those systems. In those cases, they end up like small islands in a big organization. What I started doing was filling those gaps. After that, we use the RPA to fulfill that. For me, a lot of processing in Excel or some processes that needed multiple users to interact is what we use the solution for. We just capture those tasks and convert them to RPA bots. Basically, we've automated a lot of manual tasks.

We do not use UiPath in the contact center environment. In our case, contact centers here are really dependent on CRMs. Even using chatbots in contact centers is still very new in Iran. These foreign branches, these foreign companies that are in Iran, do not see any potential to use RPA in this scenario. 

Mostly, UiPath has improved my career. I am an RPA Developer, and without UiPath my job wouldn’t exist. UiPath changed my career. Due to UiPath (not Automation Anywhere or not Blue Prism), there’s a noticeable increase in the speed of development. I was a C# Developer and it's helped me a lot. Generally, UiPath is in the top 10 and has offered a lot of new technological shifts and people are talking about it more. When people are talking, there are great opportunities. There are now new voices that can be heard. 

UiPath is constantly listening. That's a good point for UiPath - it's always listening from its community to its top customers and interacting with comments. Due to the fact that it listens, it integrates new software, goes into end-to-end automation, and changes for the better. Someday they will have Autonomous RPA, a real Autonomous RPA that can actually decide like a true robot, not just a robot that works on a script. One day they will offer a true robot that can finally decide what to do in certain situations, not by just using something like document understanding that we call Machine Learning. UiPath is very, very good at giving true innovation to people. It’s a win-win for everyone.

RPA is actually something that can be executed, that can be used side by side with many programming technologies.

The speed of development in UiPath is very fast. For example, sometimes you want to do many frameworks and the budget is low, with the timeline being very crucial. With UiPath Studio and with the whole UiPath platform, it can be very fast to develop and deploy. That's the main advantage for me personally - that the speed of development is great.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring. They are all there. The one exception I’ve noticed is that end-to-end automation is still lagging, I have reasons for that. However, the monitoring of the robots or even using insights is there. They are the prerequisites for an RPA platform. They are great suites. They are necessities.

I like parallel processing. I like that a robot can do some parallel stuff while the user continues to do their own thing. If it needs interaction, we can just pop up a clear window or apps, for example, or through email, in order to inform the user about the robot's request.

AI Automation overall has enabled us to automate more processes. However, when we go forward and move forward, we see that we can digitalize those documents before it needs to be processed by an image machine-like OCR or even Machine Learning. For example, there are still handwritten documents. We’ve convinced many organizations to drop those handwritten documents and use digital products for us. Those are immediate time savings for the process. We are not using document processing anymore, for example, in a specific organization. For processes that still need to have handwritten or printed out documents, document understanding could be fine. I really hope, however, that they shift to AI, which is what RPA lacks. RPA lacks Autonomous Automation, that's something that everyone is waiting for. We’d like to have a robot that's actually using the computer with its own mind, not just the workflow we give it.

For end-to-end scenarios, UiPath is still growing. I'm not saying that UiPath isn’t good. There is a lot of potential. They're using UiPath Actions or Apps, for example. Dashboards ensure that end users can interact in a new way with robots or with the whole end-to-end automation. RPA is a technology that hasn't maxed out yet.

Someday, there will be no legacy software or very intelligent processes that will use APIs. It’s my understanding that UiPath bought some company that specializes in API Automation. For end-to-end automation, UiPath needs to integrate all those components, rather than task automation to process automation, real process automation. With RPA, if you read the HFS report, you see that the process version is actually not a process. It's tasks. Perhaps in their next LTS release, UiPath will actually gain to that point.

There are minor bugs. Every major software has bugs. That said, all are solvable, all are resolvable, and it's not a very bad thing.

Mostly, licensing must be improved somehow. Licensing is very expensive. Even in many industrial countries such as the USA or UK, UiPath is still very expensive. For example, Microsoft now owns its own RPA, Power Automate, and the pricing is much more reasonable than UiPath. UiPath licensing is very vague and expensive. There are some ways that they can reduce the cost to make everyone benefit from an RPA.

UiPath needs a lot of maintenance. Every RPA vendor, every RPA on-premise software, needs a lot of maintenance. The cloud version has reduced that, as far as I know. It’s resolved the maintenance issue so that users can focus more on other things. Every new feature will be first on the cloud version and eventually, we can benefit from that.

We use document understanding. For English documents, it helps, however, for Persian documents, due to the fact that the models, the Machine Learning models, that are pre-built, are based on English or other common languages. If we want to actually use Persian, we need to use AI Fabric and build our own models. It's now out of our budget to do something like that here.

It's almost been three years since I first started using UiPath.

I don't like the stability very much as it has minor bugs.

You see that processes break without any reason. When you check the system, check every log, even view robot logs or logs in the network level and you see that it has, it's only then that you realize the issue was a bug from the UiPath platform. Once that happens, you must go to the community and explain the situation to each other. The good thing is, there is a community right there and you can learn from each other. 

Scalability is great. UiPath has many capabilities. Anyone, via a simple search, can go through UiPath and even try the enterprise version and just see for themselves that there are many, many, many capabilities. You can use .NET and there are many NuGet packages that you can use or you can even design your own custom package. There are many great platforms, such as Insights, Action Center, UiPath platforms, and so many different types of robots.

In terms of technical support, I do not have the opportunity to speak with them, as we are in Iran, and, due to sanctions, we do not have a direct opportunity to speak directly to UiPath's support. Therefore, I cannot have an opinion on their services.

I'm familiar with other RPA solutions such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.  

I saw a lot of people that are going to RPA. I put myself in their shoes. However, from my perspective, UiPath has a great community. The UiPath forum is very good compared to Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Every technology can be learned, sooner or later. That said, the first thing that any kind of technological software needs to have is a good community to facilitate that learning. Without community, you cannot spread the word, you cannot spread the knowledge. It's the first thing that UiPath has over both of these other solutions. 

And the second thing is, as a technological matter, UiPath is much better. The other two lack the connection, lack the integration. The user interfaces of both Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are terrible. I do not like them. They're not very intuitive and they are not easy to learn. UiPath is using Workflow Hosting Foundation from Microsoft and great integrations with .NET, which is so much better than the other ways that other vendors are approaching things.

I'm typically involved in the setup. I'm involved in every phase of the process. 

The setup is straightforward. They're using .NET Core now and before that, they were using ASP.NET's Standard Framework. The company has relied on default application configuration as far as, for example, in web.config or .JSONs. Most configuration must be done in the UI itself. I don't really like to just manipulate files at the system level just to do something. I believe that's the way now, however, that can be improved. It could be just in the UI and the certainty would be much better.

The length of time it takes to set up a robot deployment depends on the project itself, however, for a small project, it can be in one month to 45 days.

The initial deployment of UiPath is not more than three days.

Setting up UiPath doesn't have any standard process. There's just documentation. We are always using its documentation.

We do not have any relationship with UiPath directly. We are just a contractor doing RPA for foreign companies that are based in Iran.

Iran has sanctions against it, and there are a few companies that are local branches of foreign companies, and those that have licenses from UiPath all use on-premise deployments. We're always using the latest versions of the solution. Right now, we are on version 19 and it's in the 2010 LTS.

I didn't have the opportunity to use UiPath Cloud. I'm in Iran and I don’t have access. There are some capabilities that are still in the cloud version, like Apps.

While it depends on the project requirements, much of our work is on attended automation. I see attended automation as a gateway to an RPA solution as users are very busy and we cannot just pop-up in some programs, random programs, and stuff so they end up having to wait. I do not believe that attended automation helps users as much as an unattended version can help. This is due to the fact that at some point, someone still has to be involved in the process.

RPA is a new technology and a new shift that there's no good book on how to manage. Maybe there are some, however, they can be obsolete rather quickly, as the technology is changing and with every new version. That's why hands-on experience is the best way to learn. Even for UiPath, without any practice, without any hands-on experience, and without any good community, you cannot do anything.

If someone wants to learn UiPath, first they must sign up within the community and then go to UiPath Academy. Start there. Practice. Get in touch with people in the community, and then create a small use case and do some hands-on work. Practice is very crucial in RPA. Don't forget to review official documentation as well, as it will save you lots of time. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use attended and unattended bots, Orchestrator, and Studio for development.

We're seeing increasing adoption of Studio because more people see how easy and straightforward it is to use a lot of the features. It helps that UiPath training is free. Our entire team, including our salespeople, have gone through the training. It's free and it makes a big difference. For the salespeople, they're able to talk more intelligently about RPA.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five, for sure. In fact, I have taken a lot of ideas from their training to educate my customers about RPA. When it comes to RPA, a lot of it is education because some of them don't know exactly how automation can be done. I've told UiPath that I use their training in my presentation, and it is great.

We are working with a technology company called Rammer, Rammer.ai. What the Rammer software does is listen to conversations to learn the details of what is being discussed. A third-party system is used to transcribe the conversation into text, then Rammer will learn the details without much training. It knows the topics, it understands what is talked about the most, talked about the least, how much we are adhering to the script if it's a call center use case, or if it is a simple meeting use case then it knows who is assigned what tasks, it recognizes the follow-ups, and it knows the summary of the discussion. All of this is summarized in a nice, consumable manner. So now, when a bot knows all of this information, it goes into Orchestrator, logs all these activities that are picked up by unattended bots downstream, and they trigger all those processes back. So it's a massive consumption of all of those heavy use cases.

We have not yet run automations in a virtual environment, although we do have customers who are asking for it. We are not sure if we will need UiPath's help for this yet because we haven't tried 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. Really, it depends on how clearly we understand the requirements. So a lot of times we are able to find process gaps, which wasn't the case earlier before we started thinking about automation in this manner. I would say the ease of use is actually dependent on some of those factors as well.

Usually, starting is the biggest challenge for most people, and I think this is because it is in a trial environment and there is a lack of documentation, with multiple people doing one part of a small subset of a task. There are these challenges and then if none of them are documented, you need to figure out the process flow. From person one, where does it go? This can change when people can do multiple things.

It becomes a very complex web to understand and navigate through. We need to understand the task and how it should be performed. For developing the robot, it's very important to have the clarity upfront, otherwise, we cannot code them. That is the biggest challenge, I feel.

From the point that a UiPath license is purchased until the first bot is ready is almost immediate. This is because we usually start with a PoC on a small scale, just to see if automation with this approach makes sense. By the end of the PoC, we'll normally know exactly how many bots are needed. Sometimes it is on us, more than the customer when we cannot estimate every process that is outside of the departments and division that we work with because we just work at finance. For example, we can't just estimate what marketing would use, and so on. That will sometimes delay things.

The attended and unattended classification and simplicity are great, and it's easy to explain to people. Right off the bat, the task performing the lowest granular entity is very clearly defined, which is something that I like.

I really like that I am able to tell the story, using Orchestrator, how humans work, how bots work, and how humans and bots work together. Orchestrator really tells a lot more than just being a simple task manager.

In future releases of this solution, I would like to see more packaged solutions.

We would like to see intelligence built into the core. Specifically, we would like to see the recognition of human to human conversations. That intelligence would be great because we have some very important use cases in that space that we are seeing. Our focus is moving closer to one hundred percent in that space, as all of our new work is related to conversations.

UiPath should offer an on-demand cloud-type model where you can get bots for five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, or whatever duration you need.

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

We don't see many failures, and this is partly because of our approach. We start by creating something called a heat map, which I learned in some of the training from UiPath. The training clearly explains how to handle errors. It includes which process to automate fully and which processes should be automated partially, with a human in the loop.

We start with the right approach. We understand the process and we have the heat mapping that gives us full clarity of where the exception flows are and how to handle them. So when you do that, it becomes second nature to handle those exceptions. We are pretty comfortable, and we are applying the best practices, which adds to the stability. 

Talking about our own people, we have roughly sixty-five who are either developers or architects. For our customers, the number is growing all the time. The requests for training and setting up workshops for them comes to us every week, basically from different customers. We don't know the extent of automation beyond the people we work with because there are other vendors like us who are also there, so we don't have the exact number but what is refreshing to see is that even VP level or senior-level employees are interested in learning. They ask us if we can hold a workshop for their entire team, whether they're doing the development of bots or not. Hopefully, that will increase the numbers, but right now I don't have an estimate on the total number of customers. I only know on our side.

We have tremendous support from UiPath. We can say that from our perspective, we are very fortunate to be in the Pacific Northwest and that team is one of the best. It doesn't matter if we are big or small, they help everyone. So every time we have an issue or a challenge, whether it's engineering, presales, architecture, or development, we get all the support.

Our customers usually don't know much about RPA, so one of our jobs is to educate them on it to get them interested. Gradually when they understand, it moves forward.

In the majority of cases, the initial setup of this solution is simple to medium in terms of complexity. We are finding very few complex scenarios at the moment.

I think the overall architecture is simple. It is very clear and very straightforward. UiPath's product team is doing a great job in is creating a lot of very out of the box integrations and analytics, and that always helps. That is good, but I think if people are not trained yet and they think that it's easy, drag-and-drop, and simplistic, those folks struggle a lot.

We've seen that people think "Oh yeah, it's just some scripts and drag and drop so we can do this easily" and that misconception exists. We don't treat it as an easy scenario, so we gave it all the respect that proper Python code, a data science problem, or a highly complex situation deserves. When you approach it that way, it's at best at a medium complexity.

In general, we treat it right in the middle. It's not that straightforward, but the architecture is simple enough that the development complexity is medium. That's the simple and medium combination.

When it comes to ROI, for some scenarios it's immediate on the day you go to production. Doing the math, if it is automating thirty hours of work in a week, it is going to be the moment you turn on the switch.

Sometimes when the expectation is set at a different level, the KPIs are different. It may be that the customer is looking to have an "X million" dollar cost saving. It just depends on how you're defining the KPIs. So in those scenarios, obviously it'll build up to that saving.

A lot of people talk about the total cost of ownership as being a real saving or real value for products. So there are just all these different layers of complexity in that. I mean in theory it is immediate at the moment you turn on the switch, but then you need to consider the bigger picture, and it's not a straight answer. It'll be different.

The most important tip that I would share with respect to the licensing is that you should not think of a bot as being able to do only one thing. You should always consider the downtime and utilize the bots properly. That's the way you can have exponential ROI from just that one simple investment.

Even though these bots don't really cost much, you still want to say there are resources like a dedicated machine that is there, there are electricity and all kinds of resources that also go into it. So the overall cost, we should look at that. If a bot is doing ten hours' worth of work in five minutes, there are twenty-three-plus hours work that the bot can actually do. So, think of orchestration.

Some of our customers have tried different solutions. There are some customers who have even tried a lot of competing products and they're not satisfied. They have a very low expectation from what automation should or could do. So for us, that's even harder in terms of educating them.

People who don't know anything about this kind of automation, sometimes it's a little bit simpler to just run them through an hour or two of our workshop, but people who already know about it may have set their mind in a certain manner. Sometimes for those customers, the customers with experience in other solutions, are usually a little bit more difficult to convince. They have doubts that have come about because of whatever they've been using, and they don't fully understand the capabilities because UiPath does things very differently from others.

So on both ends, education is a challenge.

We are very excited about the new things that have been announced recently. There is the integration with AI, with AI fabric. There is Studio X, which has pre-built APIs with Microsoft Office and all the other Salesforce integrations that they've come up with. These are very exciting because that will increase adoption even more. People already understand unattended and attended automation, and now with Studio X being available so easily, and with analytics being part of its fabric, it's going in the right direction.

We have a very nice step-by-step flowchart that explains how to approach or what processes to automate first of all, and what are the chances of change or variations and all of that. While we are developing this, we at least are following the best practices from all the training that we received to ensure that we have taken that int consideration and we have not picked the process that is hard to automate, or which should not be automated. Then, it's more of a system change or any transformation that the customer should do first and then do automation. Basically, we should not do automation for the sake of it.

At my company, we don't work with any other RPAs. When it comes to customers choosing this solution, it should depend on the use case. If there is a strategic advance that they need to get and they need to really think of analytics and intelligent automation, UiPath makes a very compelling case. I think that it is important to choose your solution wisely and do it based on your use cases.

From a cost perspective, there is a big difference between the attended and unattended bots. One is twenty-five percent the cost of the other, which is a massive difference. Our customers use both, and we like this a lot because the way we utilize attended and unattended bots are the right way to do it. If you need to do multitasking and handle a lot of tasks, the choices vary.

Specifically from a pricing point of view, I think it is justified. When I first heard the price, and obviously I didn't ask about the duration or subscription levels, I thought it was a monthly price. Hearing that, I thought that it was cheap. Later, I was told that it was an annual fee. So for me, I understand that my customers can afford this price, and I am happy with that.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I've created an app for conversions and exchange rates. Every day I need the exchange rate of a certain currency and I use the API free exchange and UiPath.

It's also used for the reconciliation of invoices.

I've used it for the creation of an onboarding bot for employees to be onboarded onto a website with a remote system. I used AWS and a virtual machine and created a Google Form from there, and used UiPath's computer vision to do onboarding activities and extract data from files. PDF files can then be entered into the remote system. UiPath can be used to fill the forms.

It can be used for web extraction tasks as well, for example, for booking flights, where you can extract the flight details for particular search criteria and place them into an Excel sheet.

It can also be used to extract data from invoices in order to populate an Excel sheet, for a portable format. I've created a process that used documents as a learning model and extracted the invoices, using logic to output the transactions. 

Another use case I tried was extracting data from Amazon based on exact data. The same can be done on Linkedin using the Linkedin API. I'm fine-tuning and extracting data, putting the outputs on Google Sheets.

I've experimented with many use cases and automated many processes. 

It's low code/no code which makes it very easy to work with. 

Building automation using UiPath is easy. If I see a video or some instructions, I can do it. Things are doable. You learn. If there are use cases or there is information online, you can replicate the process.

Adding activities is easy. All of these partners are integrated into UiPath now - including AWS and G-suite. You have activities already built right into UiPath and they are working to make everything as low-cost as possible.

Then you have OCRs which offer the Document Understanding. I can do a PDF extraction using just OCR in a normal way.

I love the Document Understanding. You can see whether a document is valid or not. You can accept or reject. I came up with a .NET background. I used to write so many lines of code for doing a certain thing. Here, you have a for a loop. You don’t need so much code.

I remember when I used to work for a UK client, a gas utility, and at that time we used a read-through data driver, and got the Excel data, and again validated everything. However, for that, we used to write around two, three pages of code. Now, using UiPath, you just do a real Excel activity and you get the entire sheet. Automation has made our lives easier.

I can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. Now, since the cloud has come into the picture, everyone is going to the cloud and everything is easier but with the new cloud partners like Google, AWS, Azure, and Oracle. A company may not have its own on-premise orchestrator.

Earlier, you needed three servers for production, testing, and development. Since UiPath has both cloud orchestrated and on-premise, it's easier for organizations to use less physical space. For smaller organizations, they can go to the cloud. For larger they can have their on-premise orchestrator. It’s flexible.

UiPath enables me to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis and then robot building and finally monitoring of automation. There are many process mining tasks, capture tasks, mining, et cetera. More things have to be automated - such as deploying, managing, and enhancing for continual improvement. It has all the components.

For a beginner, end-to-end coverage may not be essential. When we talk about automation, we should know what can be automated so that we ease our lives and that doesn't mean we have to remove the resources. You don’t have to involve the employees. You just need to simplify the task so that there is continual improvement. Users should consider not only, how to automate but what needs to be automated. If it is automated, how it can be improved gradually and what are the returns? Sometimes that doesn’t necessarily mean you need end-to-end. You just need simplicity.

I do use the attended automation. For some processes, I use the attended automation for testing purposes. I use the attended if I'm using UiPath assistant, otherwise, it's normally background processes that are unattended.

Attended automation will be for Document Understanding when I'm training a robot, for example, for what is the format or validating the time I'm using attended one. If I'm asking a user for particular search criteria, or for currency exchange it's mixed but mostly unattended.

Both attended and unattended work together - the human as well as the robot. However, it depends on the scenario. Unattended means you are not dependent on any human resources.

The orchestrated cloud, which is a SaaS, it's quite helpful. If I just want to install UiPath studio in my system and I'm least bothered about what environment it should be, what infrastructure should be, where I'm going to deploy, it is quite useful and quite easy when there is a SaaS option available.

I’ve used the AI functionality for sentiment analysis such as getting reviews from the websites about a particular product or service.

UiPath offers great object detection where you have a magistrate and you can detect whether you want to detect the people. If you want to extract how many people are there in that image, for example, during a social distancing sort of event, that can be used for object detection. I've used object detection for images in terms of extracting a number of people.

I’ve trained the system to read different types of invoice formats. I've used the email or Document Understanding that can read separate invoices, receipts, utilities, et cetera. I’ve used the solution to create processes for invoice reconciliation.

The AI functionality is quite easy to use. For tollgates, for example, when they charge for tolls, the solution can be utilized for seeing the number plate, and through the image, get the data, extract the number of data from the numbers plate, use the driver information from the number plate of the car, et cetera. It becomes a very easy AI model. Without any type of knowledge in AI, you can use those out-of-the-box functionalities.

The more training you do with machine learning, the better results you get in the end.

I use the automation cloud feature.

We are not bothered about any patches or any work that has to be done to maintain the infrastructure; the vendor does it.

The automation cloud offering has helped decrease time to value, however, since I have not deployed real-time projects, I cannot give exact numbers on the decrease. That said, from my experience, I feel that it is true.

It’s my understanding that the automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's overall cost of ownership, however, at this time, I just use the free version.

The solution enables you to be better and better with cloud features that are quite accessible.

In terms of UiPath Apps, I have used them, however, just for my own purposes, for my own training purposes, as I was learning. It is easy to use and pretty much drag and drop. For the basic things, the user can do a lot with minimal training. You can do everything with low code and less coding knowledge as well. A person may not be technically sound, however, even with minimum knowledge, they can create apps using UiPath apps. That's the interesting part of UiPath apps.

UiPath reduces the cost of digital transformation. It does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

UiPath has reduced human error. For example, let's say I'm filling a form using a document. Typos, errors, spelling mismatches, et cetera, are reduced when it is handled by automation. When we automate this process, the robot minimizes the error since a human is not involved in this case of data entry. It will extract whatever data there is in that document and it will fill in the form. Similarly, for calculating Excel data, we can avoid calculation errors.

More videos are required. There are basic videos that can help you learn about the product, however, there need to be more in-depth videos to help you through certain tasks. For example, I was trying to use an API for conversion. I was doing it for a single transaction, one by one. There can be cases where it will not go for a simple conversion or simple transaction, and it will be a bulk action. In that case, I may need to upload a file. I was searching for an upload control however, I could not find anything to assist me.  It would have been helpful to find some sort of instructional video for this task. The file upload, where you upload a file and select a file so that you can extract data all those things based on that file is a commonly used feature - and yet, that was missing. 

UiPath apps may be able to increase the number of automation I can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. However, they need to elaborate on the process. I need more articles on that. From the point of view of the person developing the automation, I need more details on writing the correct code or doing the automation, which I hope will be coming in the next releases.

They require an improvement in the IEP. I don't know whether it's a bug or something. I find that, with drag and drop, you have to drag it in a particular fashion. 

When they add new features, they should offer some in-depth sessions on them to help people get comfortable with the changes. 

It would always be helpful to have new partnerships between UiPath and different cloud vendors. 

I started using the solution in February of this year.

I am on a gap year. I used to work for an IT company, and I have taken a gap. To re-skill myself I started learning UiPath. 

The stability is quite good. You have other options, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. UiPath will be like coming out with new revisions in the coming years that will continue to compete with those.

Even now, it's quite stable and quite reliable, even if the changes which are coming, in the much of the deployment, are felt good. There are frequent revisions. I have no experience in other automation, however, from what I've seen, even as it changes, it's stable.

Scalability is quite good. It has alliances with different cloud vendors so that you can scale your robots. You can have different instances, different new virtual machines, and in the cloud. You're not concerned about what to install and you just pay as you use. The cloud vendors make it very scalable. 

Once I am employed, I do plan to increase usage.

I use the forum for any queries. I didn't face user technical problems for any robots that I am using. I have not been in direct contact with technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

You just go to UiPath.com and register with your user ID or any email ID. From there, you install the UiPath Studio and you set your workflows. Once you publish, you get it in your orchestrator, attach the process, create a job. And then you run it. 

It's quite easy to create a workflow, publish it, and deploy it in the orchestrator. Next, you have to tag the correct robot, the correct machine, and the correct sponsor. In any environment you want.

For small processes, the deployment would hardly take a few minutes to deploy.

Maintenance is light for the cloud instances and really does not need much. The cloud vendors do the work, however, users need to pay for the services which they use.

I handled the initial setup myself. I did not need an integrator or consultant. 

I can't speak to the exact pricing of the product as I am using a free version of it right now. I'm not paying any licensing fees to UiPath.

I shouldn't say you need licenses for many things for today, however, for working on Visual Studio, if you want to automate something, you need a license, which costs you around 5,000 to 6,000 Rupees. If you want to do some extra Microsoft office activities. You need the maximum office license, which is 70,000 Rupees. That said, with UiPath, you need not have Microsoft Office installed. You can still read the data and extract the data in an Excel format. You can then share the data from those automation activities with no third-party license cost and no software licenses.

UiPath can help save costs in an organization. There are so many legacy systems wherein you have so much data migration, and many things which are done manually can be automated and you can save resources while doing something new. 

I'm just an end-user. 

My first experience with automation was, "Okay, which product to learn?". After all the reviews and reading, I decided to start with UiPath. My previous background was .NET web development. I was a full-stack web developer with seven-plus years of experience and I found that I really like when a product is built on a .NET framework. I realized that "Okay, it's better to do something, learn something and I have a background of the platform so let's start from there".

When I started using this product, I found the academy was quite open, and in the forum, there were people who were training as well. I found that while I may not get 100% of the answers I need, 85% to 90% of the time the answer is there if you search. 

Many people do not know RP automation, and it's great that they have these free resources - which is rare for such a product. Each region has a chapter where people working in this area come and share their knowledge and experiences.

Currently, I'm using the 2019 version of the solution. It's not the latest, however, it's not much older. I'm using the enterprise as well, which is free for 60 days. I started using UiPath apps as well. I'm learning so I use the cloud orchestrator to deploy my processors. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

My use case is to automate a bunch of office processes. It helps my team and finance organization save time and money.

There's a monthly upload process in my order management team. Every month, this team uploads a bunch of files to SAP. Now they don't need to do that because the bot does that for them at a given time period. The team members need to just upload a file to SharePoint and then the bot will pick it up.

It reduced human error. It saves us time redoing work and allows our humans to do other stuff.

It has freed up a couple of hours in a month. If you scale it, I'd say there are some processes that are daily. It has been at least 2,000 hours so far. This additional time enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. Bots can be tricky to debug. So, sometimes employees get frustrated there but overall they're happy it's there in the first place.

UiPath reduced the cost of our automation operations. Right now it's breaking even, but over time there'll be more. It has also reduced overall costs. 

The Studio and Orchestrator are pretty valuable. They seem to have a lot of connectivity and usability. It's pretty easy for people without a coding background to use it.

It's pretty easy to build automation using UiPath. It's a little hard for some activities because there's not enough support. There's not a lot of adoption with that activity, but the ones that are commonly used have pretty good support.

Its end-to-end coverage is important to us. If we have it all on one platform, we don't have to bounce around other software. But, we ended up doing a little bit of both.

Capturing ROI needs improvement. I would also like for it to have more logging mechanisms in Orchestrator.

I have been using UiPath for about two years now. 

It's stable now. 

We mainly use Unattended Automation but it has helped to scale RPA benefits by automating departments for the very few Attended Automations we have. It's important to me because my job pretty much depends on this software. Changing from this product to another RPA product is going to be extremely costly and time-consuming.

It is scalable. We have about 30 users on it now that are entry-level/senior associate-level people.

It requires four developers to maintain. 

We plan to increase usage in the long term. But right not we still have enough capacity in our existing Orchestrator.

I would rate their tech support a six out of ten. Most of them don't work in U.S. time and they're not always very responsive. Sometimes they give an answer that is pretty generic and can be found in the online article, even though I referenced the article already.

We also use Automation Anywhere. 

The initial setup was not too hard and not too easy. Some documentation wasn't very clear, and for basic features it handled it pretty well. But, if you wanted to go more granular and customize your deployment, it would be a little hard to find out the answer.

The deployment took about a month. We involved the UiPath support to help us implement it and upgrade our systems. Other than that, we got our PAM software lead that uses CyberArk to configure the Orchestrator with us.

We have seen ROI. I don't know the max number of hours but I'd say we've saved around 2,000 hours so far.

I think pricing could be better. I think it should be more visible.

The license system with Studio licenses seemed a bit redundant and not necessary.

We looked at other solutions but went with UiPath because of the cost. Another reason was that we have more developers that are specialized in UiPath, as well as management, who seemed to like UiPath more.

I still have to pay attention to the infrastructure a little bit because it's still On-premises. I'm using the On-premises products more so, but the support has been pretty decent. And then, there are community forums to look up how to debug some stuff.

The upfront cost is always going to be more than trying to keep it to the human process, but over time we'll realize more return.

My advice would be get UiPath support to do this for you and involve all your IT firewall security team.

You need to know more about security and cybersecurity in order to fully deploy your automations. Some of that is kind of missing in the Academy where they focus mainly on building automations, but not really securing it.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.