UiPath Platform Reviews

We are using attended and unattended bots. The attended ones are very low profile. We are also using Orchestrator.

Our primary use case for this solution is to automate underwriting processes.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment, yet.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four. I think that we still struggle sometimes with what kind of a bot we need to use for what kind of work. It may be a lack of understanding on our side. We need to have more clarity on this.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. This is what I have heard from my team members. I did enroll in the training but I didn't make much progress. That said, I have heard good things about it.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately a six-month transition.

In terms of eliminating human errors, I would say that this solution has done so to a certain extent. The stuff that we are automating was quite simple to begin with. As such, there was not a lot of room for error because we have multiple verification steps. I cannot estimate a percentage for the reduction of human error.

I would say that we have a time-savings of approximately fifty percent.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the unattended robots because I can schedule my jobs and it can run on its own. I don't need to pay much attention, except in the case of an exception. That is the only time that I need to deal with it.

We sometimes struggle trying to figure out what kind of a bot we need to use for what kind of work, and it would be nice to have more clarity on this.

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

We have a team of ten developers who work with this solution.

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

We got involved in automation because it makes us more efficient and we save money. These are a few of the important things that we are always looking for.

The implementation of this solution was done in-house.

We have seen ROI because a lot of the work is now automated, so the people who used to do these tasks, the monotonous work, are now doing better things. I would say that we saw ROI in five to six months.

The licensing costs for the unattended bots are a little too expensive. If it were lower then I think we could use it more effectively.

We are excited about the upcoming features with artificial intelligence and document understand capabilities. I think that those are features that would come in quite handy for us.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to take a look from the grand scale to see which use cases are the prominent ones. Do not look at all of the tiny details because sometimes we can make a use case very complex. The end result is less valuable. Look for the high-level stuff that can be quickly automated, then come down to the final stuff later.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company likes this solution because of scalability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall, we are giving ourselves a two year ROI.

We did not evaluate options from other vendors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are very pleased with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The training and certification online is very helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

The sales elements of why RPA should be there too:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting licenses has been relatively easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We currently have 150 bots in production. It is used the most where there are repetitive, cumbersome tasks. Where we do need to have somewhat of a decision made, we put it into a decision tree. This is our primary use case. 

We are looking into other use cases, such as:

• How do we use it as a platform for pretotyping?
• How do we use it as a platform to drive forward machine learning and artificial intelligence usage in our company? 

We have automated assignments where we previously used employees. The outcome of this has been a greater customer experience achievement. We simply are solving tasks faster, and at the same time, we have been scaling down employees. 

We have started to do tasks more often and faster than we have ever done them before. For instance, some of the things in finance, we only did that once per quarter. Now, we have started doing them once a week. This gives us greater insight into those areas. 

The most important outcome here is the amount of insight which you receive when you put power to a process. It gives you the insight that you wouldn't have had when you had 20 employees working. With two bots doing the work, you suddenly get a data foundation that you didn't have before. Then, you can build upon the bots, instead of thinking you know what is happening.

The platform is object-orientated. You can create and reuse objects, which is a great feature. 

UiPath has decided that people who are great at what they do can be invited into the platform and utilize services on the platform. This is another great feature, and one of the reasons that we initially chose the product as our platform.

The solution is easy to use. When you put it together with the UiPath Academy, it's easy to get it going and understand. The drag and drop feature makes it simple and easy to use. The UiPath Academy is great and helpful.

We tried utilizing the virtual environment, but we had some issues in that area. It's one of the areas that we haven't revisited over the last half year because our volume is that high for us. Thus, it is one of those things that we have sort of left on the side for now, but I do hear there is some great stuff coming with it.

We haven't had instability issues.

It can scale.

The customer and technical support are great. We have received fast, sufficient responses. There is easy access. 

We did not have a previous RPA solution.

We were in a place where we needed to do something differently. At the time, RPA was something different. So, we needed to sort of examine, "Could this help us?"

The initial setup was straightforward.

We saw ROI in eight or nine weeks, so it was fairly fast. We have seen a lot of performance benefits, which I would rate as a ten out of ten.

The solution has helped to eliminate many human errors.

Our licensing costs are roughly 1.1 million Danish krones a year. 

We see some elements in the license model that we're trying to figure out how to utilize. There have been some elements in the license model where UiPath has helped us solve them commercially, and having a license model which is more focused on scalability would be a great feature.

If UiPath really wants to put Attended Robots out to everyone, there will be a cost issue. We have some that we are testing now and what their effect will be. However, these are the robots where the license model needs to change before we go full throttle in that direction.

We also looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We selected UiPath based on its object-oriented approach.

There is something off in UiPath's licensing model. Their competitors have started targeting us now because they know that we have a lot of bots. They have different types of licensing models, and say, "Because you are having so many jobs with so many job bots, you can save money on the platform by using us instead." 

Play with it and have a playful nature. Acknowledge that you don't know what you're doing with it, then just acknowledge that you're going to make mistakes. The only difference between being good or great at this solution is your ability to learn from your mistakes, because you will be making mistakes. Also, you will be overpromising when working with this solution.

For automation technology, in general, the system landscape is quite wide. We are just starting to put RPA on the shelf for automation. We are pushing a machine-first approach. RPA is the sort of tool on the shelf now helping us become a more efficient customer-oriented company. It is a tool in the landscape with plenty of existing tools, but this is the one that is the most easily accessible for the business people.

We built ourselves some automated documentation, and it was fairly easy to copy. One of the things that people start doing is documenting what they're doing in an organization and updating the documents, then freely sharing them. We would like some sort of automated documentation, as this would be helpful.

Primary use cases would be within the finance sector. We supply financial services for other government agencies. The main robots that we have in use right now are concerning floating of financial periods, uploading reports, commenting on these reports, and so on. We are starting to look at invoice processing, to a larger degree. Then, we have a few quality and control robots which do checks on data quality, customer information, customer carts, etc. 

We are using approximately 20 robots right now for different uses.

We've opted for professional, traditional developers and programmers to do batch robots. We don't use it in our business units. Possibly because we are a government agency, we don't necessarily get enough IT security around the users applying their own robots. 

It is not easy to use in this way because we do use traditional programming skills. We are considering moving some tasks out into the workforce for Attended Robots, etc. We think that this will be a problem for us in regards to getting it pushed out there and still maintaining good quality. However, we haven't tried it yet.

We are able to smooth out peak workloads. Because with a lot of the period closures, like monthly and yearly closures, we work in peaks. Everything has to be done within a few days. When we can prepare a lot of the data and reports through the night, the employees can start on those in the morning. Therefore, we are leveling out some of the workload features, which is one of the main benefits.

Automation technology for us is mainly a way to get around the long-term IT projects. This is the future for us, when using UiPath, to start moving into the AI part of it. In addition, the bundling of the offerings into UiPath is quite important, so we don't have to go to several different vendors. We can try it out on our own and see if this is something we want to do. Then, we might bring in another partner or vendor to do some specialized training, debug the networks, etc. We're never going to get that capability ourselves. We don't have a large IT department nor do we have data scientists. For us, it's important that one or more of these skills are getting baked into the system.

The ability to integrate between legacy systems is the most valuable feature. We use it mainly to replicate manual processes, where you just have to pull out data or pull down large volumes of customer information, in general. We work across many individual customers, who are individual entities or individual databases in our ERP system. We work across about 220 databases. Therefore, the task of logging onto different databases alone is quite cumbersome.

The main thing is to make data available to the employees when they start working mornings, instead of them starting drawing out reports to see if there is anything that they need to act upon. With these legacy systems, which work on a one-to-one basis, we tried to batch process them a lot more.

We have looked at it with Citrix, and there are problems with it. Some of the new features coming will address it.

We have been looking at Attended Robots, which result in the inability to lock your screen. That is simply a no-go for ever using them in most government agencies, as IT security will prohibit us from using them. If UiPath wants Attended Robots to be used inside a government agency, it needs to be applicable on a virtual desktop.

A lot of what is coming is what we are looking towards: Both on the skill set with computer vision, but especially also on the enhanced identity management and security. The ability to debug and lock at a less complex level for us to look at. 

One to three years.

UiPath's stability is quite good. We don't see any problems with the stability of the platform application. All our problems stem from the basic systems that we operate on, which are quite vulnerable to network problems, time outs in various systems, etc. However, these have nothing to do with UiPath. Perhaps some of the things which are on the road map will help with the debugging of some of these issues.

One of the things that we are lacking right now is not stability, but usability with debugging, e.g., when you can't see what went wrong. We have to look through 50,000 pages of logs or so. 

The scalability is quite good. 

The main problem around scalability is the licensing structure and the inability to dynamically assign licenses across robots. While I know this is coming, this is our main gripe with scalability: the licensing structure. Because we are part of a larger setup with our own IT supplier, who does a multitenancy setup with Orchestrator, to have more flexibility with the use of licenses would be very valuable.

We are using virtual desktops to deploy and run the machines with robots. It is necessary, as we cannot scale it on individual on-premise machines.

We have used the customer support. Our main issue with them is they need to understand the problem that we are writing about, and not reply too soon with a standard answer.

All our developers are using UiPath Academy and are RPA certified. While they like some thing, some of the frameworks which were used in the Academy examples, the developers didn't agree with. This is probably because they are IT professionals themselves and are used to doing things a different way. Whether it's because the use case wasn't good or they were just used to something else, this was the main gripe.

The product has a lot of backing from our director, who has been pushing the agenda. To be able to stay relevant, even as a government agency, we have to reduce our costs every year by two percent. To be able to produce that, we need to be more efficient at what we do. The target is: Not to reduce staff, but keep up with the increased demand for production and costs.

I wasn't part of the very first setup.

We mostly did the deployment ourselves or with our own IT partner, who is not a partner of UiPath. So, it has mainly been done by our own IT people.

On the individual robots, we do have good return on investment. However, once you add in the governance, including when we are scaling up the solution and the maintenance of robots, then I don't think we are at a break-even point. This upcoming year, we are expecting positive ROI. For us, the return on investment is high quality data. 

It has helped us to eliminate human errors. We have a robot that is specifically requested to avoid, for example, uploading reports on the wrong customers because of GDPR cases, where data protection officers will have to get involved, even though, it's not sensitive data. We have seen problematic use cases drop from a couple of incidents from maybe 100 transactions to zero. We are looking to completely eliminate errors in some cases, not just reduce.

It has saved our organization time. We use the robots to try to address some of the peak workloads that we have. They are not there so much to address a certain number of hours that we want to save. We want to be able to use the robots to help address our customers' needs during designated time frames to reduce extra stress on our employees.

We would like to see improvement around the licensing and multitenancy. 

We also evaluated Blue Prism and Kofax Kapow. The reason that we went with UiPath has a lot to do with scalability, as our IT supplier has committed to a multitenancy set up, which was not possible with Blue Prism. 

We are quite happy with UiPath. We are not looking at other vendors at the moment. They are all offering similar solutions, but with a slightly different focus. We could use any other solution, but the development is so fast that even changing now would be no guarantee that we end up with what we want, because everybody is moving at a pace where we can barely keep up with the development of the products.

Try out different vendors and their labs. See how it fits to the processes that you are trying to automate right now. Some applications are better at old mainframe systems, and if that's what you will be focusing your efforts on, then maybe UiPath isn't the best vendor for you. There are others who focus more on that sort of environment. So, be realistic about what you want to automate, and choose your use case initially from that. 

We see the biggest benefit right now from Unattended Robots, but that's all we use. In the very long-term, Unattended versus Attended Robots will be able to generate a greater benefit. However, with the current licensing costs, they will need to change for it to be a positive business model. We have to be able to move licenses from one person to another. If we have to apply a fresh license to each person in the workforce, with our budget, it will not be possible.

We are primarily utilizing the platform within our department to gain buy-in for the customer's system.

We are a traditional development team, and using this platform has enabled us to work with multiple teams efficiently.

The governance aspect is very important to us. UFS Studio is also crucial for our operations.

There are significant delays between the technical team and the actual team. We are also missing some integrations with Google.

I cannot specify the exact amount of time we've been using it.

We have a dedicated development team. That said, we do have the resources to help with implementation.

I cannot speak on how it compares to other models or other components.