UiPath Platform Reviews

I am currently involved in healthcare-related projects and wholesale/retail-related projects. Previously, I was involved with banking and financial services, healthcare, and retail.

My current company is using a combination of the UiPath tool and SAP automation.

In my previous company, I used the UiPath tool for many projects.

It has a very easy drag and drop process and logic base setup. Previous projects were taking a lot of time. However, when we used UiPath on the same projects, instead of a process/task taking a day, it was now taking anywhere from 10 minutes to five hours.

There is almost no human involvement. For example, in banks, a bank manager will receive so many loan applications. We create some bots to check the requirements after validation and do the follow-up work. The manager is only checking boxes for the final approval request.

In the banking sector, I am using AI Center and creating some workflows. Some machine learning is needed to create these workflows in AI Center. This gives us a 94% accuracy, which is good accuracy.

Document Understanding is a good feature. It is a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning. We have created some workflows using Document Understanding. We are using its machine learning to do some language analysis, semantic analysis, and invoice processing. UiPath currently provides some language conversions, such as German to Russia and Russian to German. However, it does not offer Russian to German, English to German, German to English, Russian to English, and English to Russian as well as some non-trainable languages.

Document Understanding has been one of the best features for invoice processing. For example, companies require some keywords in invoices. While normal frameworks take much of time, we upload the invoices using Document Understanding, then determine the keywords required for cross referencing. The cross reference is very fast. It will capture the amount and put that in an Excel format. This is a very good feature.

A valuable feature of UiPath has been the REFramework. In banking, we need to log in to the website with a user ID and password. Once, we did that wrong and the workflow stopped. Using REFramework, there is exception handling. Stability depends on the correct configuration of error handling, so this is the best feature. 

It has some Citrix recording options.

The AI Center feature has been very good. It supports many machine learning languages and skills. It speeds execution and provides a good savings on time.

I like the certifications offered by UiPath Academy.

I would like UiPath to give free trial licenses for more features, like AI Center. UiPath currently offers two licenses for the trial version. However, if I need to practice in AI Center, then I need four to six licenses.

I have been using UiPath since 2018.

The stability is very good.

There are no limitations for Windows.

We have over 500 activities in UiPath right now.

I haven't used the technical support so much. My colleagues use it sometimes, depending on their problem. The speed of their response depends on the type of plan, normal or enterprise, that needs support. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

There is also social media support through Twitter and LinkedIn.

The user community is very good. I am a member. If a developer has any doubts when working on a project, then a lot of people in the community are ready to give immediate answers.

We have faced challenges when installing market-related data. We need to dig deep when we are installing it with Orchestrator and/or VMware. All the documentation is available, but it needs to be prepared in advance. Whereas, we work in real-time.

I have been involved with many client installations for UiPath and Orchestrator. We do standalone installations for single node and multi-node systems, like Linux. Linux is not fully supported, as compared to Windows. UiPath deploys well on Windows.

My previous company had good ROI using UiPath compared to other tools.

UiPath Academy is free of cost.

The UiPath Community Edition is enough to implement any complex workflows.

The price for attended robots is good.

Some features are very costly, like Document Understanding. That is why in India many customers are not using the Document Understanding license. This is a premium feature and its licensing costs are high compared to other tools.

Compared to other tools, UiPath provides a good, rich environment.

I am using AutomationEdge, which is similar to UiPath, but a small tool. It provides the same features as UiPath, but it is not as popular a tool. The UiPath Academy videos are very good and better than those offered by AutomationEdge. While AutomationEdge also has a free learning course, you must watch their videos from start to finish. UiPath has no restrictions on its learning, which is good and the best option. For example, when you are an advanced learner, you want to go to advanced training courses. However, AutomationEdge makes you start from scratch, even as an advanced user of RPA.

Some processes are faster in AutomationEdge than in UiPath for insurance-related organizations.

I am also using Automation Anywhere, which is a popular tool in comparison to UiPath. However, feature-wise, UiPath is easier to use because Automation Anywhere requires complicated coding knowledge, though some of their features are very good. While UiPath requires some coding knowledge, it is not as high level as Automation Anywhere.

UiPath is the number one tool in my opinion. I would recommend choosing UiPath for someone looking to purchase an automation tool for the first time.

UiPath has very good accuracy. I would overall rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

I am an RPA developer and I am using UiPath to create both attended and unattended bots.

I develop bots that run doing overnight tasks and we can check the results in the morning.

UiPath allows us to scale without having to worry about the infrastructure. It is simple to scale any of the automations that you develop. 

UiPath makes it easy to build automations. It is very user-friendly and they provide all of the courses in the UiPath Academy. We can learn starting with the basics, and it is really simple. One person needs between two weeks and one month to learn it.

This solution provides us with the ability to do end-to-end automation, starting with the discovery phase and process mining. After that, we move to the building page where we have Studio X, and then we can deploy the automation on the cloud.

UiPath has helped us to scale RPA benefits by automating the backup of all of the projects running in the organization. This bot runs every night and reduces our workload for one employee by eight hours, or one day each week. 

UiPath handles all of the infrastructure updates and maintenance, which is really good.

The cloud offering has helped us to see time to value quicker. It has helped us in many ways, including with the automation of repeated tasks. One example is that I created a bot for myself that is responsible for filtering all of the spam emails from my inbox on a daily basis, and then removing them. The first step is the identification and the second step is removing them. This saves me time.

The automation cloud has helped us to reduce the total cost of ownership because we can manage everything through Orchestrator.

UiPath has definitely reduced the percentage of human errors that we have in our processes. In our system, all of the bots follow our best practices so there is a very small chance of error. The reduction in error rate depends on the process. For example, the OCR is not very accurate so the errors are higher but if the process involves an API or SQL queries then it is very good.

This product has helped to reduce the cost of our automation operations. There is more of an upfront cost but it is one-time, and then we start saving.

The best feature is the good community support that is provided in the UiPath forum.

I like that it is a cloud version and runs on Citrix. I used the cloud offering to deploy my bots and manage my Orchestrators.

It would be very helpful for us if they provided more business use cases and helped us to learn them.

We have been using UiPath for almost two years.

There are times when you need to shut down the automation and restart it. Other than that, it is very stable.

I am the only one developing the bots but I am currently training some other people who are just learning it.

To this point, we have not had to scale any of our projects. Our usage of it depends on the project and where we can use automation.

When other features and updates are released, we normally visit the forum to help understand them. I have never used technical support.

I have also tried using Automation Anywhere.

Each solution has different types of bots that are available. One of the differences is that with UiPath, you have Orchestrator to help you manage them.

Generally speaking, UiPath is easier to understand.

The initial setup is not complex. It is easy to deploy and the actual setup of UiPath is not very difficult. It is a matter of downloading the Studio and creating an account in the Orchestrator. Then, you can start working.

My IT team was responsible for the initial setup. Only one person was needed to complete it.

I take care of all of the maintenance.

I am using the Community Edition and am not familiar with the cost of the paid editions.

We do not yet use the AI functionality but I know that it is there.

I have watched some videos on the UiPath apps feature, which lets us create automations in a low-code/no-code fashion. We have not used it yet but this is something that we'll be exploring in the future.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using this solution is that they have a very good community forum, where you can share ideas and learn from other RPA developers.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to start by taking the fundamental UiPath courses from the UiPath Academy. This will help to understand RPA and UiPath.

In summary, this is a good product and I'm quite satisfied with all of the functionality that it provides.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

In our organization, we are using UiPath as a service model. It is an on-premise model where UiPath is deployed on-premise. We are not using it on cloud services. 

We have a center of excellence that has been set up to communicate with UiPath for all the licenses, for all the tools, et cetera. Individual teams will connect and will communicate with the development team to get those licenses. For the team structure, we have a COE manager, and a COE is again communicating all the relevant information to the teams.

First of all, you would have to go and submit an idea to the COE team. The COE team will review and see this is the correct candidate for our solution and we can leverage it as automation. They provide us with the required licenses and the cycle continues.

The use-cases for the UiPath are limited. For example, if you are coming from a banking background, there would be use-cases it comes from the data solutions. If you are coming from an insurance background, would have use-cases where you would have benefits that are being reconciled. Healthcare might be dealing with patient data, et cetera.

If I talk about the support teams, in general, the use-case for the UiPath is as a ticketing system, where you have a lot of data to add to the queue to remove the need to add items manually.  

UiPath has the ability to implement with multiple systems. You can extract the data from any other application, click the data to enter the specifications, and start the automation cycle. That way, you have a technology that helps you to build a fully automated enterprise.

Our use case depends on the client and their needs. It's specific to their industry. We basically use the product to build automation for them.

We have seen the benefits both in terms of cost-saving, and time-saving. If you are doing automation which a human or an entire team is doing, let's say five hours a day, and there are seven to eight people doing the same amount of stuff, then you can automate that. 

When it comes to automating your process where the company is paying for software if you can use it to make robots that take energy away from repetitive tasks, you end up saving a lot of man-hours - which helps pay for the software.

Savings are measured both in terms of active saving or cost-saving. Then again it entirely depends on the kind of automation you're organizing. 

The most valuable feature of UiPath the process mining. The half capture was a tool that was provided by UiPath in the earliest reviews which simply allowed you to record the operations

It's great for automating tasks specific to business cases. It makes it very easy to do so as well.

The solution offers pretty good analysis capabilities.

The solution ensures there is proper documentation throughout the process.

The product creates a kind of skeleton for developers to help them work faster. 

UiPath is a low-cost platform.

If you are someone who is coming from a business background, and you don't have much coding experience, and you don't want to go through the coding world, UiPath, has UiPath StudioX. With the help of UiPath StudioX you can automate your items to read emails, download specific things, and do other small automation tasks that do not require advanced coding.  

If you are a developer who is more into coding and wants to do more coding, you have Studio and Studio Tool. Based on your level of expertise, UiPath has various levels of product: StudioX, Student, and Studio Pro, for example. It is always good if you have a programming background as sometimes you might need to write a small piece of code, however, it is a comparatively very easy task compared to the other traditional programming languages where you have to write a lot of code to do simple automation.

With the application of AI in recent releases, automation such as document reading can happen faster.

The UiPath app feature has increased the number of automation you can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Recently, we had a UiPath hackathon which was contacted by UiPath for automation. We went to an NGO, and, for that NGO, we created a solution with the help of UiPath apps. For example, we used to create the invoices that would take seven to eight minutes to manually create. However, with the help of UiPath apps, we were able to do the same path in less than one minute. We have seen a drastic change.

The solution reduces human error significantly. When you are doing a process for more than five hours, you might deal with human error. However, robots don't make mistakes and can run 24/7 without issue.

You do need some coding experience.

AI is not available on older versions. I don't know if it is available in the latest versions of this review. Most enterprises, I'm working with still are at the previous version of the UiPath studio.

UiPath needs to enable more of the features which are available. For example, today, if I have to implement an automation path for the mainframe application, I cannot do the mainframe application without the client. I cannot just do a trial. If UiPath could create dummy applications for the developers who want to try new features, that would be helpful. 

The should be more out-of-the-box models if UiPath keeps adding on. Recently they have added a model in their AI section. However, it would be useful to have out-of-the-box models direct themselves towards plugins. 

You need to continually update the solution as, if you don't, after a few months you won't recognize the product due to all of the new releases. It will be like using a completely new device.

I've been using the solution for five years. It has been a while.

Stability-wise, UiPath can handle the different varieties of stability on the applications you are automating. 

For example, if you choose to automate applications that are expected to change in the next few months, then UiPath cannot help you. That takes an entirely different form of planning. However, the more stable the process, the less likely any part of the process will change, the better UiPath can assist. 

The solution is scalable. If you have to add new functionality to the robots, you will find that is definitely scalable. Let's say you have automated a process and you are getting 1000 tickets only, and then you suddenly get an influx of 10,000 tickets. You don't have to go and run and change your code or anything. Scalability-wise it is just with the click of a mouse that you can handle the change. And, just as easily, you can decrease usage if there are only a small amount of tickets. While developers and coding will be necessary to make it happen, I would say the solution scales extremely well.

I have not contacted UiPath via the contact center. The firm I'm working for has a center of excellence. We do not, as individual developers, directly communicate to UiPath. There is a team that sits in the company that communicates with UiPath, as we're an enterprise. We don't have direct access to the UiPath team.

That said, I do interact with them on the community edition, which I also use, and I find that if I raise a ticket, they listen to my feedback and adjust accordingly. They're excellent.

I have not used any other solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. From an enterprise point of view, from the client's point of view, there are certain restrictions that the company might have in place that could affect the way it's set up. 

The company needs to have a checklist to ensure it's set up optimally.

That said, there are no drivers, no scripts, nothing. Everybody can do it. You just have to click on the approve button, select it, and the job is done, that's it.

We do our own implementation strategy, however, I am not directly involved in what exactly has to be implemented. There are separate teams for that.

While I can't speak to how much users pay for enterprise-level editions, I can say that their community version is quite good and free to use. I've used the community license for the last five years and it's been great.

I do mostly 90% unattended automation. I have created only one attended automation for a client and that was a specifically requested requirement. That was a bit difficult to automate. 

One piece of advice to everybody who is working in UiPath would be to practice and keep UiPath updated as the technology is growing and it is getting updated frequently. If you do not keep yourself updated for three or four months, you'll be dealing with a completely different tool. Keeping it updated allows for the gradual changes to come in in a way that a user can handle, as opposed to having to re-learn or re-discover the product if you have let updates lapse for months.

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

We used to maintain a lot of Excel sheets for lead generation and other activities. UiPath helped us to automate those processes and clear our workloads so that we could focus on other main tasks.

It saved a lot of time on tasks that could be quite redundant. Fetching data and maintaining the machines and regularly updating them. That's the only thing that I was using it for. Using UiPath saved me about 10 to 12 hours on a weekly basis.

It allowed me to delegate mundane tasks to personal automations and to focus on more important tasks. By not having to do tasks that don't add value or skills, I could focus on tasks that were more important and that added value to my skills or targets. That brings much more satisfaction.

Also, the ability for employees to delegate mundane tasks to personal automations meant that we did not have to hire a person dedicated to doing those particular tasks. We could use the tool to do those tasks. It helped save those costs. On that front it helped in business operations.

UiPath was quite useful in terms of getting data from thousands of webpages online and arranging it in a predefined format. You can easily create robots and define operations in UiPath.

I come from a non-technical background. You need a little bit of technical knowledge to use it. We had a demonstration of how to use the platform, but it's easy to use. It helps in automating tasks which otherwise you would have to do manually.

The desktop Assistant tool provides a personal automation launchpad so that you can easily access and run automations. That's important because you don't have to go to someone every time you face a problem, or every time you have to run an automation process. It helps make you independent so that you can do your own tasks.

Other things I like about it include:

• Its dashboard is quite easy to use and you don’t need to have a programming background to understand it.
• You can record screens in Excel and download it from the cloud.
• You can also get quite a load of data from the web and use it for your processes without any manual effort.
  

For me, it was quite an effective tool because I hadn't used any automation tool previously. It was quite new for me and it took time to adjust to it and understand it. At times, some processes took longer with the tool, initially. But when you do them on a regular basis, you understand it better and it takes much less time. Setting up the systems could be difficult initially. It would be better if it were more user-friendly for non-technical users.

I used UiPath for less than one year.

It's quite stable and reliable. We had no issues.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup of UiPath in our organization, but I think it took less than a month to deploy it. It's also an ongoing process after deployment. There are a lot of things that need to be done.

About 10 to 15 people were using it in our organization. The users were mainly in IT where they were using it for central management and other automation purposes.

The fact that we didn't have to hire a resource specifically for doing certain tasks is how the ROI could be calculated. It also saved time for the existing employees.

There is a trial version available. You can go for the trial version first and then buy it and scale it per your needs. Try this tool. Go for it. It's definitely worth a try. If yours is a large organization, try the Community Edition first to get the hang of it. After that, move on to its Enterprise version.

What I learned from using UiPath is that there are tools available in the market that can essentially make your life a lot easier. You don't have to worry about doing certain tasks, maintaining them, continuously updating them. Their backups are always available, even if you lose something. They are always easily accessible on any device.

We use UiPath for cases where we have to do a workflow-related mechanism. Most of these use cases are small, Excel-based solutions and desktop-solution-related workflows, where one or two applications have to be connected, along with the Excel operation, for the end-to-end workflow creation.

We use both attended and unattended automation.

We have created 10-plus solutions using UiPath, and the savings that have been generated from these solutions are around $1 million. They are very cost-effective solutions: finance, order-to-cash, and protocol-to-pay processes. It has created value on the higher end, because the processes were quite cumbersome. We re-engineered the processes and started using UiPath for workflow automation.

We have saved roughly 50 FTEs on a yearly basis. It also enables us to use a lower skillset workforce, which is a cost-effective measure.

Quality, no doubt, is one of the key parameters of automation. UiPath has resulted in quality improvement for the overall processes where it's deployed.

It's on the OCR side and the workflow side where UiPath creates value to us.

The most important and valuable feature of UiPath is the ease of creating automations. It's a workflow-based model. End-to-end coverage is, no doubt, very important, because when you use a fragmented solution, the overall process flow becomes shaky. UiPath has the required capabilities to create an end-to-end solution for a business case. For our scenario, the business cases are quite small. That way, the turnaround time to create a solution is short and it becomes very easy to deploy, which is quite helpful for us.

Another important feature is the OCR capability, which integrates quite easily with other kinds of tools. We have integrated with ABBYY and we have even used the Amazon OCR engine. From an integration perspective, it is scalable enough to integrate with third-party solutions, whereas that kind of thing becomes a bit of challenge when we use Automation Anywhere.

We are able to use Python scripting and Python libraries for data extraction.

We also use the solution in creating attended automations. They are very much division-specific and are currently used by the procurement and the finance teams. These are on-demand, data reconciliation activities that are performed once a week. The bot is clicked by the person who is attending, which is generally a procurement or a finance guy. These are tedious activities so that's why we have the dedicated license for the attended format.

It is quite user-friendly with the drag-and-drop functionality. It has connectors which are quite suitable and industry-standard for basic applications that we use on the desktop, like for the Microsoft suite. From an integration perspective, it has done well.

We have also used its selector technology to automate processes with dynamic interfaces for one of the finance applications, where the UI screen is changing.

The cognitive area is one where there is room for improvement. Automation Anywhere has grown in that area, whereas UiPath still is more dependent on third-party integration. That is something which they should be focusing on more. They should acquire a product and get it integrated.

I have been using UiPath for around two and a half years. I have used both Automation Anywhere and UiPath. We have both tools.

UiPath Robots are quite robust, and from a maintenance perspective it has become easy, if you create logs. It's pretty good.

In terms of scalability, as I mentioned, it has certain challenges, but with the minimal capacity which we are running, it becomes easy to maintain the bots.

We have 10 to 12 automations already in place, and there are around five to six more in the pipeline, which are still being rolled out. The RPA tool we used is determined on a case-by-case basis.

UiPath technical support is pretty good. Most of the answers are provided by the community forum. If you raise a ticket, they are proactive in getting back to you and addressing the point. It's good.

The initial setup was okay. I was involved in the setup of Automation Anywhere four years ago, and with UiPath. Compared to Automation Anywhere, it was much smoother because the community side is quite good with UiPath. In the early days when we were facing issues, we had the UiPath community support to find answers. We did not have to raise a ticket with UiPath because we were able to get our answers in the community forums.

The first case took us around seven to eight months to put in place. The first one is, obviously, always a tricky one. We also picked a use case of medium complexity and it took a bit of time. Later on, we started building more of a workflow solution using our low-cost workforce and, after that, the journey was quite smooth. Initially there were some hiccups, but once the team understood the tool itself it became easy.

We deploy developers who require a lower level of skill sets, developers who do not have that much training. They are normal .NET developers whom we train for one and a half months on UiPath and they start developing UiPath solutions. We have a center of excellence with our developers who work on UiPath. We recently hired two more, so we now have around 11 developers who are working on UiPath.

Taking UiPath courses to get up to speed has been very helpful. I am certified for the tool because of the courses. The curriculum is at least on par with that of Automation Anywhere, although I would say it is much better. The only issue is that the courses are very limited. The AA University has increased to a vast number of courses, and most of them have become free for the end-user. The UiPath course material is good, but there are notably fewer courses and less certification available for people like us, who are more on the business side. AA has a business analyst program and a program manager certification, but I was not able to find anything specific like that in the UiPath Academy.

Our strategy with UiPath is that we generally go for unattended automation because that doesn't lock up our licenses for the bots. We prefer solutions which require unattended automation, because of a lack of budget and other constraints. From the deployment perspective, we have a dedicated server and we're following the minimum guidelines which are required to conform to the deployment standards.

The ROI generated is quite high because of the cost factor.

It is much much cheaper than the Automation Anywhere. That is a key differentiator. It is targeted at mid-level enterprises. It is cost-effective.

There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. We have taken few of the training-related services from them. Once we move to the cloud version we may require some consulting services to move from on-prem to cloud. That would be the only other cost associated with UiPath.

When it comes to the main differences between UiPath and Automation Anywhere, UiPath is cost-effective. It is quite a lot cheaper than Automation Anywhere. It is also drag-and-drop, a fact which makes basic automation very easy compared to Automation Anywhere. It's quite user-friendly. In addition, the OCR functionality is quite robust in UiPath because it also provides a third-party integration. Python scripting becomes easy and that means our OCR solutions are quite good. These are the pros of UiPath. 

Regarding the cons of UiPath when compared to AA, the first one is the level of scripting details. Custom scripting is quite lacking in UiPath. It's more a drag-and-drop functionality which doesn't allow that higher level of customized scripting when compared to AA. Secondly, the scalability is quite robust in AA as compared to UiPath. Even though we are not pushing the limit, the general opinion out there is that UiPath fails quite visibly when you try to scale solutions that involve operations plus a new product rollout. That's a challenge with UiPath. And, as I mentioned, AA has improved a lot in the cognitive area and UiPath has not reached that level. It relies more on the third parties.

Even if you are a large enterprise and you're trying to start your RPA journey, UiPath is the answer. It sits in the top one or two solutions, along with Automation Anywhere. It's one of the leaders in RPA, and with the low cost model of the license structure, it is very easy to start with UiPath rather than with Automation Anywhere.

If you are looking for a strategic approach, where you have projected that within five to six years you will roll out 250 to 300 bots, scalability is something you have to factor in when starting your journey.

We haven't used the solution's artificial intelligence. We tried to run a PoC using a chat bot, but it didn't do well. I don't think UiPath has its own AI engine. They provide an API-level integration with other AI tools. We had a challenge there because most of the AI functionalities had to work on the cloud. We had to integrate with the Google Cloud and Amazon cloud, but both are in the public domain and transferring data from our office to the cloud was a challenge. We hit a wall. For that scenario, we moved on to Automation Anywhere, which provides us an on-prem solution.

Most of the automations that we work with are internal to our systems. We are also trying to use it with BPM.

We are reducing people's activities in our organization. For example, there are monthly reports that we have to upload and read, and it was taking a day to do this activity. Then, using UiPath, we can reduce that time to two hours. 

It has helped a lot to minimize our on-prem footprint. This is really important because it minimizes tasks that people work on, including myself.

If you automate with UiPath, you don't have to worry about firing someone who is doing the same process. Instead, you are giving that person more time for analysis for the information that UiPath brings in.

The OCR is something that is really cool. You can work with a lot of systems and use the HTML feature to interact with websites. I really like that it interacts with websites. 

UiPath Portal works great for accessing features.

UiPath provides single sign-on, which is very important, because we don't have to manage a lot of passwords.

It is fast. With UiPath Studio, you can get the passwords and work in it quickly. 

The UiPath Academy is great for learning the solution. It helped us a lot.

We would like to know how to implement the artificial intelligence (AI) feature because we are working on some activities in this area.

The bank knows about UiPath, but not all people consider UiPath something they really trust, which is why there are just two of us working on it full-time. We do teach people about UiPath, but they are not 100 percent involved with it.

The stability is usually really great. However, at this point, we are uploading a new version because the stability is not right. They told us that our version, 18.4.5, is not 100 percent compatible with Orchestrator. Therefore, we don't have the stability that we had before.

The scalability works great for us. It is really fast when we ask for something.

It is really fast at scaling automations. At the beginning, it was slow because we couldn't work the way that we wanted. Now, it scales automation quickly.

We haven't had contact with technical support because UiPath has been working great for us.

This is our first RPA solution.

Before Orchestrator, we worked on an application to manage UiPath because we didn't have Orchestrator two years ago. So, we create our own application to manage UiPath.

It was very easy to set up UiPath the first time. We implemented UiPath with virtual machines, and that didn't affect our costs in a significant way.

The timeframe for setting up a new bot for implementation depends on whether it will be big or small. It might take a day, if it is really easy, or a week.

Getting the idea to have a new bot for the first time is kind of complicated. Once you can explain how it will work or be a solution, then you can just go for it.

I have to be involved in the beginning when implementing a new bot. 

Two people from our bank were involved in the deployment. One person develops the solution and another does the QA.

We worked with a third-party (BDG) to set up UiPath. They were really good.

It has helped a little to reduce our work. Before, we had people working at 6:00 AM because they had to inspect, analyze, or look into the systems for prevention. For example, they had to prevent the systems from going down. Now, with UiPath, that person doesn't have to come early because we get everything in reports from UiPath. So, that person doesn't have to come early anymore. That person now just has to look at the report and see, for example, that UiPath did a fix in the morning. 

The solution really works for its price.

The license cost is the only cost to start a new bot. However, if we want UiPath to do an activity and go through another machine, like Remote Desktop, or application, like Bloomberg, then we have a special license that is an extra cost.

We also evaluated Automation Anywhere, but decided on UiPath, which is friendlier. We also considered that UiPath has its Academy and more documentation.

We are glad UiPath has security because not all the RPA solutions have security.

We are getting into AI now, because we haven't worked with that yet.

Right now, we are 100 percent familiar with Orchestrator.

We didn't have to install a lot of features with this infrastructure. We just download some activities to work with everything, and it works fine. We don't have a lot of infrastructure for using data.

Our first step is getting Orchestrator because we really want to have the entire bank involved in UiPath. The solution is great. It can reduce costs, especially with all that stuff that people do. We have big plans for UiPath going forward.

I would rate this solution as 10 (out of 10).

We are using UiPath primarily for unattended automation. We are automating processes for business functions like finance and go-to-market.

We have Orchestrator which is hosted on the cloud and we also have UiPath deployed on-premises. We have three different instances of Orchestrator: one for development, one for staging, and one for production.

There are multiple business processes involving finance users. For example, for intercompany settlements, the end-to-end process was handled manually before. But now, the entire intercompany settlement, which involves many transactions, takes place automatically. Users don't need to intervene. They just need to verify whether all the calculations made by the robot are correct.

Another win for us was in the go-to-market function, where our customers talk to a customer advocate for purchasing different products and offerings. If they want to renew a quote or generate a new quote, they used to contact the CAs and talk to them on the phone, which would take a lot of time. It would take more than a day to process their requests and place their orders. Now, with the help of UiPath, we have developed a fixed form which we hand out for the customer to fill in. The average response time, as a result, has decreased a lot. We are now able to close a deal and generate revenue very quickly, compared to before. The process is around 90 percent faster for us.

We have just started using the AI functionality for unstructured invoices which we receive from different regions. Until now, when we wanted to extract information out of them, there was not any particular rule or way to get that information. A human had to be involved. That is where the AI functionality has come into picture. It makes our robots smarter and gives us the ability to train a robot to extract the relevant information out of different types of invoices.

Of course we have also been able to produce increased accuracy for a lot of our processes. With processes where we are receiving data in bulk, it's very natural for a person to miss out on certain things, but a bot does not miss out on any of the information and create errors in that way, so we have been able to reduce human errors to a great extent.

One of the most valuable features is its ability to allow us to integrate any external scripts—code or any other scripting file.

Also, they have recently come up with new features, like Document Understanding and AI fabric, which we have also started to use. These are helping us a lot with unstructured data extraction from invoices. The AI Fabric has out-of-the-box models, so we are using the invoices model from Document Understanding package. There is also the capability to train the model and that is a great way for us to get information out of the different invoices, as we deal with different invoices from different regions, rather than a single format. This is a great feature which is built-in.

It is also important that all the new services that UiPath is adding to the Portal are managed from the same place. Ease of onboarding for the customer should be a main priority. If the new services can be managed from a single place, it would be very easy for us to onboard them, to understand how to use them, and to enable them in our current workspace.

In addition, things like UiPath's navigation, drag-and-drop options, pre-packaged templates, and low-code features help developers, and people who have some understanding of tech, to build solutions quickly. With these features, we don't have to go down the same path all over again. This helps developers.

Each one of us has used the UiPath Academy courses and that has played a major role in getting people up to speed. I, myself, learned about UiPath by doing the Academy courses and then doing UiPath certification. If anyone wants to start with RPA, and UiPath in particular, it should definitely be their first point to get started with it. The Academy courses are really good.

There are challenges raised by the fact that UiPath is coming up with different versions almost every quarter, and at times almost every month. We plan to upgrade almost every quarter. Recently we were trying to add AI Fabric into our production Orchestrator, but we faced a lot of challenges. We had to involve the UiPath support team in the upgrading process. We were quick movers to upgrade to AI Fabric, as not many companies have done that. There were some bugs that we discovered during our upgrade journey, and that's how UiPath came to know about those bugs. It was little tricky, but UiPath's team is always present and helps along the journey. They have been coming up with a lot of new services and products and there are a lot of announcements on their Portal as well. But it's difficult for customers to keep up with their announcements.

Another area for improvement is version control functionality, particularly for Git. So far, for a lot of files, especially Excel, we are not able to compare the differences between two versions of a project. File conflict resolution could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for two years and three months.

The robots are pretty stable. It just depends on the way they are coded and how robust the developer has made the solution. If they have taken care of all the edge cases and of the possible areas of failure, the robots are predictable.

The solution is scalable. There is functionality to add as many robots as you want by purchasing additional licenses. There is a feature where we can use one machine and add different user profiles which is great. We are able to run the robots by using just one piece of hardware with different user profiles.

But if you are willing to scale up and you want to enable a lot of your team members to use the automation functionality, you can easily do that by purchasing more licenses and you will be able to schedule your processes in a better way.

We have about 15 people who use UiPath in our company. They are mostly developers, solution architects, or business analysts. We have 20-plus end-to-end automations and we use the tool on almost a daily basis.

Not all teams within our company know about UiPath. As of now, we have onboarded the finance and go-to-market departments. We plan to onboard the other teams, to run sessions with them and let them know that something like this exists and that it can help them in their day-to-day work. We are definitely planning to increase our number of automations.

The UiPath support team is there to help us to onboard stuff faster. It helps us achieve our business objectives quicker. We are able to solve stakeholders' problems very quickly. Because we have already planned to go live with certain bots, if our platform is ready earlier, we are able to provide the business value as soon as possible. That has really helped.

I would rate their technical support at nine out of 10. They are pretty helpful. Even if they're not able to come up with a solution right away, they ask for the specific files and all the logs and, usually, things are resolved within a couple of days.

I don't really know about the specifics of pricing, but identifying the type of automation you need will determine whether you can go with attended or unattended licenses. Think about whether you want your robots to run unattended and 24/7 or not, or whether you want a person to validate something in a given process, or if you want to constantly monitor the bot. Those are the types of things that will help determine the types of licenses you need.

With unattended, they now have something called Action Center where you can do a hybrid automation. That type of automation will be unattended, but there will be a human in the loop.

It really depends on what you are looking for and what kind of budget you have. If you already have the Microsoft Office suite, you get Microsoft Power Automate which is also an automation platform. You need to decide how extensively you want to go into the automation journey and whether you are really planning to expand it. If you are planning on going big with Automation, UiPath is the way to go. But if you just want to experiment and try out automation, and you already have Microsoft Office suite, you should try the Power Automate platform.

We are a small but global company. We are about 1,200 people. We are a logistics company, and most of our employees work in our warehouses. So, our office workers are somewhere between 400 to 500 across the globe. Being a logistics company, we are maybe a little bit old-fashioned. There are a lot of papers going back and forth, and we are trying to automate different scenarios. We cater provisions to ships, so we are basically a grocery store for ships. 

One important thing is when a ship is going into port somewhere, they put in an order for whatever provisions they need for when they leave port again. So, we need to be quick at expediting their orders. When they put in a request for a quote for whatever products they need, we need to respond very quickly, because the tendency is that whoever responds first gets the order. So, we want to do that. We are trying to sort of increase the speed of those types of operations as well as the quality of them. 

It is hard to really pinpoint what it is we are doing, but it's the communication between customers. When we receive a communication from a customer, we want to move the process through our company as quickly as possible and with high quality.

We are fairly new to UiPath still. We do intend to use it company-wide and have started out with purely unattended scenarios so far.

We invoice every month quite a substantial amount of money to our customers. We saw a problem in that about 20 percent of our invoices were sent to the wrong addresses. That meant that, at month's end, when we were expecting money to come in, we would be missing around 20 percent of our cashflow that month. Of course, we wanted to prevent that because 20 percent of the cashflow of $300 to $500 million a year is a lot of money. 

We have automation that runs every night through all our invoices. Because we have some problems with our master data in the company, it does a number of measurements, on whether an address for an invoice seems to be the correct address, and a number of checks, such as, what ship was the goods delivered to? After that, it looks up information through the international registers of ship ownerships, then it will do a number of checks, giving each invoice a score as rating the probability that the address is correct. If it is below a certain threshold, then we will do some manual processing, and we are looking into UiPath Action Center for this. For four or five of our largest branches in the US and Asia, we have seen a significant improvement in the payments at month's end, which has definitely improved our cashflow.

The administration is a SaaS solution, which helps to minimize our on-prem footprint. The only things that we have running on-prem are the machines running the robots. Everything else is handled in the cloud. We don't need to worry about backups, etc.

We are adopting as much as we can some of the things that should reduce the maintenance costs. We are using Robotic Enterprise Framework in our development and Automation Hub to sort of qualify our ideas. So, we are trying to implement a uniform way of doing things throughout the lifecycle of an idea. UiPath supports this fairly well, and I think it will get even better.

Just this week, we are launching our Automation Hub effort because we need to start building a pipeline for our automation candidates. Right now, we have eight or nine ideas in our Automation Hub. That will grow quite quickly because we need the help of Automation Hub to decide on which idea that we will be moving forward with next.

UiPath continues to add services to the Portal. It is fairly important that they are all managed from the same place because it is a single point of access, which was a factor that really played into our choice of vendor, UiPath. We use Automation Hub to sort of collect ideas and discover what ideas are good for information, then we use Orchestrator to manage them once they have been developed. We are hoping to use Insights at a later point, when that is available in the cloud, so we have a complete end-to-end solution in one place. 

Automation Hub is an immature product. We have only been using it seriously for about a week and have already seen some things that will give us a few headaches down the road. We are committed to using it and will continue to use it, but I have some suggestions for improvement. We have been in contact with our local UiPath office about that, and their initial response was positive.

We would like to see more detail and refinement. It is still a young product, and we are confident that the product will improve a lot over the next few months.

We are hoping for some integrations between Automation Hub, Orchestrator, and Insights.

We are missing a way to quantify that money isn't everything with this solution.

Our license was activated sometime in July. So, we have been using it for about six to seven months.

We have seen a few quirks here and there. Overall, we are satisfied with the stability.

We have only a couple of handfuls of automations running, which are very stable. So, we are not doing much maintenance at all. Maintenance needs half an FTE, if even that.

The potential scalability is really good.

I don't know what the scale is for UiPath Portal. There are still signs that it is a young product, but we see it moving and improving at a really good pace. So, we have high expectations.

The technical support has been good. I have only used them a couple of times. The response has been good. They are knowledgeable. 

One of the big reasons why we chose UiPath is that it has a big following in online communities. It has a good forum itself: Forum.UiPath.com, but I really wish that UiPath would have moderators in their forums who are more active. There are a lot of questions that go unanswered, and that is a shame.

We didn't previously have any other automation solutions in this company.

Our initial setup was very straightforward. Our deployment took only a couple of days. We are a small operation with only two unattended licenses. We created the Orchestrator account and installed the robots on two servers. 

As far as development goes, we really just have the base package. Then, we are adding on Automation Hub right now.

We did engage with their local consultancy. They sort of helped us build a strategy for the infrastructure structure setup and strategy, as far as how to identify candidates, operations, and development. However, initially, we just wanted to pull the trigger very quickly. We had an evaluation phase of a couple of months, where we were testing different products and had tried to set up UiPath before, which helped.

We have used Carve Consulting, and our experience with them has been fantastic. We are working with this third-party consultancy to have them come up with a couple of ideas for some solutions that would involve AI Center for the end of this year or next year.

The initial deployment needed just a couple of people from our side, including me. I worked a little with some of our infrastructure guys, getting the accounts set up, the service division, provisions, etc.

We just haven't scaled to a point yet where there has been any kind of return on investment.

There are not very many users because the stuff that we have automated so far has just taken work off people's hands. Where a person used to spend all day uploading pricing data into a database, we have a bot doing that now. So, people are not using UiPath, they have just sort of been relieved of their duties. While that sounds bad, we have made an effort to find areas where FTEs get to spend time doing what they are best at.

The licensing is too expensive. It is not a cheap product. We constantly have to build business cases where we have to justify our existence as an RPA team. 

We have engaged in a long-running licensing agreement because we believe in the product.

We have used a third-party consultancy, and that's definitely not free.

We looked at a local variant of Kofax RPA called SmartRPA, which was built by a Danish company. It is basically Kofax RPA with an Orchestrator service built on top of it. We evaluated that. We also looked at something called OpenRPA, mainly due to price.

UiPath is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation, which is a platform that I have worked with previously. So, there was a lot of familiarity and extensibility. Then, we looked at how good the product is at automating desktop applications. There was not really a contest there; UiPath was better by far.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution very positively affects how fast we are able to innovate when it comes to automation. When we did the evaluation of what product to choose, UiPath versus something else, the ability to assess deployment of the whole administration was a key factor.

In our decision to go with UiPath, it was very important that we didn’t have to worry about future installations and upgrades of Orchestrator. We just didn't want the trouble of having to do upgrades. With UiPath being a young product that is evolving very quickly, we would be doing on-prem upgrades every few months and we don't have time for that. So, we liked the idea that it is a cloud-based setup.

Security was a factor in our decision to go with the solution. We didn't look into all the technical specs and certifications. We just looked at some of their customers, and said, "If that bank is using it, and it is used in the defense industry, then they know what they are doing." They had good references.

It is the best product.

It is an automation product. At the end of the day, it is software development. If there is anything that is important in software development, it is that you have a defined process from beginning to end, from the birth of the idea until it has been put into production and eventually retired. So, you need to have a defined process for different stages in the lifecycle that you need to be in control of. The product somewhat helps us do this with Automation Hub and the Robotic Enterprise Framework, but we are looking forward to even more tools for stuff like that.

So far, we are still in the meat and potatoes space. We haven't really gone into the AI or Document Understanding stuff yet. 

UiPath Portal is good overall for enabling administrators to work with Orchestrator. I have seen a lot of improvements, even in the last six or 12 months. We are learning as we go. For the first few months, we were working in a classic folder. Now, we are adopting modern folders in order to better be able to scale our efforts.

UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management. Right now, that is not so important to us because we do everything unattended. So, we have a couple of service accounts that run everything. However, once we move into attended scenarios, then it's really important that we have that granular control.

I know that there are some new features coming out in regards to deploying automatically and elastically, but we haven't looked that much into them. We don't expect them to be a problem.

We are looking forward to doing attended robots, but that will probably be in the second half of this year when we start looking into that.

For the size of our company, we started fairly big. We went all in, buying licenses, consultancy hours, etc. We have spent a lot of money this first year. I would probably advise someone to start small but still be ambitious. Do a lot of PoCs and see how it fits into your organization. There needs to be a lot of disciplines surrounding it, e.g., if you just stay with five or 10 automations, then things are good. However, once you build 100, you start running into maintenance problems and things like that, so there needs to be a discipline. 

You don't need to spend a million dollars to sort of get off the ground, so I would advise people to start small.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).