UiPath Platform Reviews

I have used UiPath Orchestrator, and we have created both attended and unattended robots for our clients.

We have been using the new AI and OCR technologies with UiPath, and we are currently trying to implement the Citrix log capability that was recently introduced.

We are not running our automations in a virtual environment. When we automate any Citrix-based application, it's all email-based. There is a Citrix receiver and we communicate with that, which helps automate Citrix applications much faster.

Most of the clients I had seen have been running in virtual environments, although I have seen some of our clients running on the desktop. We have also seen hybrid scenarios.

One thing is that virtual environments can be standardized pretty quickly. So, that's an advantage. Normally, the companies, which are leaning towards more cloud now, will be happy with this. So, I think that is one factor. As you move virtual machines to the cloud you can migrate your bots to the cloud faster.

I have worked on various different domains including the public sector, commercial, healthcare, energy, utility, and federal. These are the different customers for which we are implementing solutions. Now, the customers are moving towards AI and natural language processing. They are more into chatbots, how they can use artificial intelligence, making use of data science, and putting more machine learning on board.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it two and a half. I'd say it is about marketing. You can develop anything. There are very small processes that you can develop with having minimal experience. However, when you start implementing complex processes, I would say you need to be a background developer.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. All of my team members have been using UiPath Academy for training and certification. It's not just with the U.S., but outside the U.S. as well.

From the point that a UiPath license is purchased until the first robot is ready totally depends upon what use case we are implementing. There are different methodologies that people use. Some build the bot without exceptions and it can go to production. Like a very simple process can go to production in two to three weeks. A more complex bot will take eight to ten weeks, and depending upon the process, it can go longer. I have seen tasks when a human is performing the job and it takes him around twenty minutes per transaction. But, when the bot comes in, it actually completed that same transaction in five minutes. But, to develop that five minutes of processing, it was understanding system availability and testing. Then you have to do load testing. It takes ten weeks or so.

Our clients decide to implement RPA for several reasons. The first reason, of course, is to have work completed faster. Second, when there is a workload, you can work on it more efficiently and with fewer people. Consider an open enrollment in October, where the open enrollment starts at 10:00 AM and there are a lot of transactions flowing in. Now you have to hire a human and train them. With the bot, we can just scale up instead. Finally, the bots are errorless.

In terms of eliminating human errors, it is a one hundred percent reduction. When you implement bots, it's error-free, as long as you have implemented it properly. The robot does not get tired, so the error rate is actually zero.

I would say, more important than saving money, it's more about business growth and client satisfaction. Our clients all serve someone, so it's more about customer satisfaction. The employees benefit because sometimes they have to do repetitive jobs, and they get bored with them. So, they can use automation and apply their brains somewhere fruitful.

Overall, automation is always improving customer satisfaction. Response time is improved, errors are reduced, and productivity increases because work is being done around the clock.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is user-friendly. I was a coding developer, so I know how to write code, and I've also used other RPA tools. This solution is workflow-driven, where you can easily relay what you had written. If someone has to read the code, it is very readable.

Second, I've always been a Microsoft technology guy, and they have provided the facility where we can implement any of the C# code into it. We have .NET code, and that's why I like it. We say it's a tool, but I would say it can also be leveraged as a custom coding tool. We can actually do whatever custom code you want.

I would like to see more machine learning features and capabilities for more accurate OCR.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. It's stable. The thing is, with the software, we have a few glitches here and there, but what I like is that we have the right support. When we actually reach out to verify, we get a faster response and also a faster solution. The responses are effective and fast.

The responses are effective and fast.

I have seen some cases where there is backend automation, but it was a series of processes. With this solution, they combine all of it into one. There were few human-interactive automations. Rather, it was batch-job processing of databases, etc.

The complexity of the initial setup depends upon the client.

There is admin access and a whole lot involved. There are safety concerns from client to client with their security policies, and it may take time. I have hardly seen any clients where it's easy to set up, within a week or two. It takes longer because of the client's own security policies. You have to get a lot of clearance because there is a lot of admin access that UiPath needs. If I had to rate the setup, I would give it three out of five.

A dedicated person is required to maintain this solution. The same way humans get sick and need doctors, the bots get sick and you need a maintenance person.

I would estimate that our clients see ROI, on average, in one year. It depends on what they are trying to save. If it is FTE then eventually you'll be getting everything. If you are trying to have a faster experience, it totally depends. There is a development cost and a tool cost that have to be considered. It also depends on the complexity of the processes and how long they take to code.

We have clients who use almost all of the RPA solutions. The most common ones are Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and WorkFusion. We don't recommend. We advise. We can implement regardless of the solution.

The choice is dependent on various factors. What we have seen is that most companies have a technology stack. Some have a Java shop, while others have a Microsoft shop, or others will use a different technology stack again. People tend to choose what best matches their technology.

When we started initially, most of the business users were afraid that the bot was going to take their job. That is not the case. The bot is actually helping them with their substantive, day-to-day work, by handing the repetitive work. So, after seeing the benefits, I've seen a lot of users now leaning towards bots, and they are very happy with RPA.

I am looking forward to the new version where they have implemented libraries. One thing they have done is merged the media packages into one. 

From a cost perspective, there is a difference between attended and unattended bots. I have implemented both, but most of the plans are moving towards unattended. The unattended bots come at a higher cost. For an attended bot, it is being used while the user is at the machine, and is more like an interactive bot. While there is a huge difference in cost, I still prefer unattended bots. I see less benefit in using attended bots and say that I would use unattended eighty percent of the time.

When I'm implementing an unattended bot, I am actually putting it on a machine. I can run as many unattended bots as I need on that one machine. I can do this with attended bots, but the thing is, you need user interactions. Now think in this way, if the user is not there, the attended bot is waiting for that user. Secondly, I see some of the use cases that are really helpful and suitable for attended, but I would rather go with unattended because it's going to show that I don't need a physical machine and it will be more efficient.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is to start with the UiPath Academy and do the training. Then, look through some videos, implement a process or two and see how comfortable you are. At this point, you can move forward with it. I would say that it is pretty easy to understand.

This is a good solution, but I'm a hardcore custom developer. I still want that flexibility in my hand to do whatever I can do. With a tool, there are always limitations in terms of policy and rules.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We play significantly in the BFSI and healthcare space. A lot of use cases have been related to BFSI. Insurance is much bigger, with claims and underwriting, policy admin, health benefits, and so on so forth. There are also good use cases on the functional level, HR and finance, and that cuts across industries. 

As an example, looking at fatality insurance for pets, clients had a high volume of documents come in, claims in all different forms, and they had to apply logic eligibility. There's a simple rule of whether you allow or disallow. If they don't allow the claim, then there's a comp process. By a sheer ability to read whichever way the document comes in, clients are able to load the system and quickly get the eligibility. 

This dramatically improves their claims operation by a big margin. Whenever there is some complexity in one, then we do an exception. We crunched the time so well and made the process so cost-effective it has given the client a huge benefit.

The democratization, automation, and attended automation, all of these are pretty good features. Those are all good value add to what it was there previously. 

The moment a machine takes over, there are fewer errors. That is inherent. When you say value, that is the cost-benefit. 

We have seen a lot of benefits on the backend, but then the algorithm is constrained, which can't transform because of the older technology. 

Sometimes in their partner communication, they aren't consistent. This maybe is related to the fact they are growing as a company.

The solution is fairly stable. 

The initial setup is always complex. Clients don't know the hardware, the licensing, or how it works. Any large organization will always have an initial hurdle. 

We have roughly around 164-165 trained RPA credentials on the engineering side, all on UiPath.

You do have complexity when it comes to maintenance, as you get to 50, 100 bots. 

As an example, one of the customers for whom we did an early bird, we estimated we could save this one division of their company $44 million. They only may have to invest about $4 million. There's $44.5 million for about 12 months. That's what we think we could save. 

The adoption of RPA has definitely been increasing and we know that all of that has been largely in the back office. In the back office, it's easier to check ROI. We've actually gone beyond ROI because ROI is a very simple statement, so we start showing clients value.

How long it takes to achieve ROI actually depends upon the client's way of implementing it. For example, some people will wait to take away the manual effort while they will stand by. Because what if it doesn't work? What if it fails? What if then my backlog increases dramatically? So, it is really up to them. If it is simple task automation, we can do it in about four or six weeks. In eight to 10 weeks they'll see the benefit. 

We're using all components of UiPath: attended, unattended robotics, and Orchestrator Studio. We have a very wide customer base and our clients use all of them.

Cloud adoption is increasing. Deployment models are a little bit more a logistic question than anything else because companies who want on-site are a little bit more conscious of security, but they take a normal amount of time, just to figure out the infrastructure. If we moved clients to the cloud, we can make it easier to implement. With email on the cloud, they have a huge set of processes. The larger the company, the larger the processing. With the cloud, it becomes faster. 

I've got a deep partnership with UiPath. I would absolutely rate them high. I'd give them a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd rate the stability five out of five.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the financial processes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unattended robot costs are high.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.