UiPath Platform Reviews

We're mainly focused on finance for the time being so we've used UiPath for invoice processing and e-billing reconciliation. It makes sure that all of our converting information matches within our client databases. We've done a couple of solutions that track budget spend for certain clients, making sure that if the budget overruns or comes close to overrunning, then someone gets notified. If we get a new client or if a new legal case is opened, automation can make sure that all that information is then uploaded into our database. 

We've done a couple of smaller automations for the legal teams. These have been fairly basic ones though. There were a couple that download files from an email for them, and then rename them with the correct naming conventions, and saves them into correct drives. 

Another use case is to remove outdated users or information from our databases in line with the GDPR system.

In a general sense, UiPath has helped with data lineage, understanding where a process starts, who it rests with, and where it ends. It has made the process that we have automated a little bit more clear of which parts of the process are necessary, which are the parts that hold up the whole process, and which are the ones that are needlessly complicated.

For starters, it just helps give a bit more of an understanding of our processes once they're automated. Secondly, it's changed the way that we approach problems. We're tied into contracts that we might necessarily not want to be, but because we rely on the solution, we don't have a choice. Whereas, because UiPath is so versatile, we can use that to fill in gaps to take over processes, which otherwise in the past, we thought that only one specific tool could do for us. Now, we feel like we'd be less reliant on these specific tools to do a specific job. 

Third, a lot of teams are starting to understand that things can be automated. Whether it's in finance, HR, or even the legal teams, we started speaking to all the different teams and now they're bringing work to us and they're getting an understanding of things that do need to be done by a person and which don't. People aren't just doing work for the sake of it now. If they think there isn't a point to something and it can be automated, they bring it to us and we automate it. So, it's changed the way that we look at processes and don't just hardheadedly get someone to do it for no reason.

It checks our invoice stage for one of the processes that we do for e-billing. Previously, there wasn't anyone to check the financial data that we have in our systems against our clients and our recipients, and making sure that it all matches up. That process wasn't done at all so a month or two months later, a client would come back to us and say, "Hang on, you billed a strong amount or you've put our billing address wrong" which is obviously a little embarrassing. These things went completely unobserved for months. The client had to chase us, complain, and tell us we needed to fix it. Whereas now, it's more of a proactive approach rather than waiting for clients to come to us and tell us that we've done something wrong. We actually have the automation that can check and then validate those mistakes before they're even a problem and before they're spotted by anyone.

We're still in the early stages but we are starting to reach the point where UiPath is speeding up the cost of our digital transformation.

The digital transformation has made a couple of the lawyers' jobs easier by getting rid of the admin staff. It's freed up time and it makes things easier for everyone.

UiPath has definitely reduced our processing times as well. It really depends on the process but it has sped up. 

It has also decreased our error rates. At the moment we're looking to purchase an orchestration platform. At that point, we'll be able to collect more information about exact numbers and we'll actually have the analytics. 

The ability to use APIs within UiPath is really helpful. The web scraping is really great. It's so easy to use, it's very intuitive, and it's usually pretty consistent. When web pages change you need to update it, but it makes it quick. If you need to do another quick process, it's really easy to get it quickly and set something up. I can just scrape data from a website and save it somewhere.

The ease of building automation depends. UiPath makes things that are fairly simple but looks a little bit tricky in another language really easy. But if you're trying to do something really complicated, then sometimes it can be a little bit more tricky. It depends, sometimes it's really simple for fairly basic automations, I think it's fantastic. But when you want to try and get into the nitty-gritty and try and write your own code and then stick in there, it can sometimes be a bit difficult to use.

The documentation can be a little bit lacking. I think they improved it a little bit last month. Last time I checked, it seemed like they spent a bit of time trying to improve it. Sometimes some of the processes are nicely documented. UiPath offers training, which they provide on their website. They teach you how to use it, but for some processes, it just seems like the documentation isn't really there. It makes it a little bit difficult when you're using a specific process from the first time. 

If you're trying to invoke a method in UiPath, if you're trying to write a C# in there directly,  or if you need to do something which can't really be done in UiPath, but it can be done in C# or Python or something else, sometimes it's not that intuitive. It can be a little bit more complicated than it needs to be. I think that integration with other languages could be a little bit better.

We have been using UiPath permanently for around eight months, but we've been using it in-house for about a year before that.

UiPath itself is very stable because it interacts with so many different applications. I noticed in the past, at times, when using it with browsers, for example, using it with Google Chrome or Firefox, occasionally Chrome or Firefox will update and UiPath can take sometimes a week or two to update with it. For that week, you're able to use any solution that involves Google Chrome or Firefox, because it's waiting for that update. I've seen that happen with a couple of different applications, not as much recently. UiPath itself is very stable because it can interact with anything. If anything is updated and UiPath doesn't have time to update drivers to match that, sometimes you can get left a little bit stuck.

It's not really easy when you're using orchestrator to scale up and create a server, add a new bot, get a new license, and get it running. 

At the moment, it's just me using UiPath. I'm a developer and the architect for the solution as well. But we're planning to expand the team next year. 

We have a couple of processes that are running constantly, so I think we're using it as much as we can, and as much as our licenses allow. We're at a point now where we need an orchestrator to keep track and run everything at the same time. We're in the process now of purchasing that. I'll see where we're moving to, to expand quite far beyond that after we've got it. We're just at the point of ramping up.

I've sent a couple of requests to support when we needed licenses and when we changed to a different computer or a different user, and they got back to us really quickly and solved it within a day or so. I've been pretty happy with UiPath so far. I think every time I've sent a request to them, it's been resolved pretty quickly, and even if they couldn't resolve it super quick, the response times are usually within 24 hours or so, which is really good. I can't remember a time where we've been stuck in the dark with them.

I've used Automation Anywhere, but I haven't really used it within my work.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I implemented UiPath for a couple of years before I came to my current company. It was quite easy, but even the first time it's always been quite easy and quite simple to implement.

The initial setup only took a couple of days to get it all installed properly and cleared with IT. In terms of getting the first process up and running, it took about a week or two because we already had a couple of processes that were available. That's just a case of tweaking them, making sure they're all okay, and then just getting them set up and getting more packaged up.

Our initial strategy was mainly to focus on finance and to try and reduce the outsourced headcount with a couple of the finance teams. We outsource a lot of our work to a couple of other companies and we want to reduce the cost of that, so I automate it in-house. Our other strategy was to try and free up as much time for our lawyers as possible to make sure they weren't bogged down with work. It gives them more time to focus on the clients and work up better relationships with them.

We're still looking at the process that we've automated and seeing how much time and money we're saving with this crisis, but we don't have that information at the moment.

The pricing is pretty fair. Sometimes the pricing can be a little bit strange. There are different prices if it's for a specific user, a specific PC or if it's an attended bot or unattended bot. The price can be quite different, but I think when you talk to UiPath or when you look at the pricing sheets, there's not always a justification of why a certain license is more expensive than another. 

Licenses are more expensive than another but I wonder why there's such a big difference, why attended is four times more expensive, and that sort of thing. In terms of the orchestrator, I think it was a bit too much. It used to cost about 20,000 pounds a year. Now, they are ramping up costs. If you get an orchestrator but with just a few blocks, it's cheaper and then you can add up more parts to the orchestrator. So the cost goes up, which I think is better.

Definitely to try and get as many teams involved as possible to open up the conversation about RPA within the business. It works best when you've got lots of teams who have an understanding of RPA and how it works. They can come to you with their potential projects and you can filter through them and see which ones are going to be the most helpful.

It's hard if no one else in the business really knows RPA or how it works, or if there's a bit of a wall there. It's important to introduce RPA to as many different teams as possible and to encourage people to get involved, think about the processes that they do in it, and try to identify what can be helpful.

It's important to keep RPA close to the applications and the IT teams because if you're using RPA or UiPath you're going to need to be able to be speaking to your team who need permissions or admin privileges, or you need apps to be updated. It's important if you're going to put it in, have it as close to apps and development as possible.

It's a case of understanding that it's not a case of trying to get everything automated that you possibly can. The goal shouldn't just be to automate everything. If you've got a process and you can do 99% of it automated but you can't automate the last 1%, you can but it's going to be really fairly inefficient. Understand that it's fine for a process to have some bits that are automated, some of which are done by a person. The hybrid workforce, rather than going into the strategy of just automating everything is ideal. I've learned that trying to find that balance and getting that communication between the two is good.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We are in healthcare, and the supply chain can be a fragmented process, and now with the Pandemic quite fragile. In recent years, companies have been implementing leaner supply chains to reduce their costs. We found that our best approach to dealing with supply distributions was to create a partnership with a distributor who could provide us with a very large percentage of our day-to day-supplies. We have Central inventories in each of our hospitals; however, we use a stockless operation Monday-Friday. This means we fill supplies for our nursing units on the weekends, but during the week, the distributor is picking, packing, and shipping those supplies in a low unit of measure. Orders are placed electronically by noon daily, and start arriving by late evening. A 'back order' list is sent to us each workday in the late afternoon - too late to do anything with it. 

We did work with our distributor to develop a more customized spreadsheet that detailed each item, by hospital and delivery location. Each following day we would break the file down so that we could e-mail it to each area, to get feedback from them on critical needs.  This took our resources time to prepare and send the next morning. Staff getting the information didn't have much time to review and respond. In addition, we would update each PO line item with the revised 'due date', for back-ordered lines - this was a manual process.  This same resource would then use a tool to send each requestor a 'delayed delivery' e-mail notice.  The overall PO update and communication process took an additional 1-2 hours a day in staff resource time.

With the robot doing this work for us, the vendor sends a file to an address by a certain time. They send it in at about 3:30 PM every day. The robot now takes that file and works that file, which it has ready for us usually by 4:30 PM. Now, it still may be too late for us to work, but the first thing in the morning, we have the file, and the Bot has already sent out notifications to all the users of any backorders. First thing, when they walk in the morning, they know what their backorders are. They didn't know that until halfway through the day before. Now, they get the information first thing in the morning so they can react. Now, we are getting the information first thing and have the time to work with the manufacturers and distributors to come up with other products so that we might backfill or get a branch transfer.

Our end goal was to make sure that we had a daily tool that was 100 percent accurate and could be deployed across a broad spectrum of healthcare workers. Then, they could get information faster and more accurately with as much information to eliminate a lot of extra calls and communication. That is what we embarked on. We dissected our current process and looked at all its different triggers to see how we could turn this into an automated tool. We broke down our process and identified everything that we were doing, then UiPath helped us identify what we needed to modify. We worked that into a tool where a Bot could come along and process it every day, then deliver every afternoon. That was our end result, and it's been extremely successful. We started using the tool last December.

We combined some automation that we already had in this process into this tool to make it a whole automated process, rather than partially bringing it under. We have a vendor who delivers us a report daily of all their backorders because we use the main distributor, so they deliver us a backorder report. Therefore, we made sure that they aligned it in a way that the robot could read it. Then, we wanted to break that down in a way so each of our hospitals could see their section. So, we added some data to this tool which allowed the robot to see that record, and say, "This belongs here, and this belongs here."

Our staff have been reassigned to more value-added tasks. We haven't eliminated anyone because it's been very challenging for us to keep up with the COVID-19 issues. Now, we have resources who have the time to contact vendors, and find out, "When are we getting this? Can we get ourselves pushed to the top of the list?" They can actually be a voice on the other line, a human voice, who communicates. When you're sitting there doing all this other work, you don't have the opportunity to spend it on being a voice for the health system. So, we put people back on working back orders with other vendors and doing other things that needed to be done. We have not eliminated staff because we are using them in more productive ways, getting more work done.

Our staff can now do the things that we need them to do. It has given us the agility to pivot and move to other things, because we are not trapped in trying to work these files every day.

Our customers are getting information about 12 hours earlier, which makes it much faster to resolve back order concerns for their areas. If they have procedures, or certain kinds of cases coming up, and see that they have a back order, then they have much more time to react and try to address their shortage.

It provides information to people by automating that information in a much faster time.

Since we are getting information out to folks faster, they can spend the resource time needed to determine the best approach for what to replace it with, or if we need to work with a sales rep. It ensures that our staff have the best tools to do their job faster.

We have not seen it do OCR, and that would be helpful. Right now, the tool will not read a PDF file, and we can't use PDF files. We want it to able to take an image, then take that image and put the particular field out in the right spot in a table. We have not seen it where you can scan a document in, then it reads fields and places those in a table.

We began our journey last Fall - 2019 

It is very stable. Once we got all the kinks worked out, there hasn't been any maintenance. 

We had a little problem with getting it to run at night. We moved it off of one platform and put it on another one, which fixed that problem. These are things that we encountered early on that went away as we figured out how to resolve them. Most of those changes that we made were internal to our process and caused by some slow responses within our Citrix environment. Once we resolve those, we have not had issues with the tool itself.

I have one person in IT doing deployment and maintenance. We also have a second person under contract if we need support.

The solution is scalable. 

The robot processes the file in an unattended mode, then sends out an email with a link to its output file. From there, all the users, and there are probably about 20, get this file and react to it. They review it from their perspective because there are many hospitals involved. Each one of them has their own tab because the robot creates a tab for each. This makes it easy for them to go right to what they need. There are a lot of folks reviewing the results of what the robot has produced.

I have not used their technical support.

We were passively looking at some tools to automate some of our procurement processes. We are highly automated in our department, but we are always looking at ways to take the things that are not already automated, get into those, and see what parts of those we can streamline.

We met with UiPath last Fall. At that time, we went through a company by the name of Speridian, UiPath is a partner with them. We came to the conclusion that we had a manual process where the right components could be automated. Therefore, we made that our focus and started answering all the questions around the process to ensure that we had everything necessary for a robot to be able to answer the questions and keep moving the process forward.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We outlined what we do and what our end result needed to be. They asked us some questions, then sat down with our resources and walked them through it (or did it through Webex). I don't think there was ever any confusion on what was being discussed.

We didn't spend that much time on the process. Overall, as far as our work, the deployment was 10 to 12 hours, if you look at the meetings and such. Most of the time was spent on their side, because they had to go back and do all the development. So, I thought it was very painless.

We worked with the UiPath team and Speridian to ensure that the bot would know how to handle each aspect of the data and where apply it. As we tested it, we saw that we needed to go back and reconfigure this or this isn't how this is handled. We were kind of working through the things we forgot until we got to the point where, "Yes, this is it. We can do this every day." 

We had the robot tied into an automated tool that we were already using to send notices out. They were able to pull up that tool and have these automated components to all this stuff that we had a manual person sitting there doing every day. She was sitting there taking this data and sending it out, and now the robot was like, "I got the data. I'll send it out." So, we just ran it through the whole process. However, it does take having resources who can ask the right questions. What I found with this team was they were good in actually asking the right questions and helping us with what the robot would need in order to make decisions. Because that's what the robot is doing, it is automatically looking at a value, and saying, "I do this. I have that." 

We learned with it: How we need to respond and how we need to give the robot the feedback. It was quite an interesting process for us. Although you're always thinking you can automate so many things, there are components that you do need a person's brain to figure out. We found those pieces in this tool. We found some areas where, "Here's the exception." So, it even writes off the exceptions for us. While I do still need to have a person looking at exceptions, rather than the 100 lines that they used to have to look at, now they look at two, three, or four lines, then make decisions on those.

They gave us the opportunity to create a tool which would automate as much as possible, then provide us the data that we needed to act on. It has basically filtered out all the things that we didn't need to deal with. It has taken care of those, leaving us with everything that a human being needs to respond to.

I felt very comfortable with the UiPath person who was doing the programming, though I never really met him. I was very impressed. We talked on the phone a time or two, but they just seemed like they got it. They understood. It didn't take a long time for them to figure out what it was we wanted to do. They were able to tell us, "This is what we're going to need. Can you get it?" So, they were easy to work with. They also acted quickly. I thought the whole process of developing everything that we did went very quickly. 

They were able to link into our tools. They made suggestions to us, "Well, these are exceptions. We can put these here. We can do this. We can give you all this." They were providing us with ideas on how we could even expand on this. I found that to be very helpful. I really thought that they did it very quickly. They did not take long to understand what we were trying to do before getting in and really learning the impact. When we needed a change, the changes have come very quickly. 

It has gone so well that we will be doing a few more enhancements. Now that we've worked with the tool for a while, and know that the ability of UiPath and what they can do, we can enhance it even further.

We are doing things at a much earlier time in the day. The robot compressed the time it takes. We are getting our users' information earlier in the day. Now, it may take five to 10 minutes, where processes used to take half an hour or 45 minutes to go through everything. 

With COVID-19, so many supplies have been impacted. Our line items expanded and grew, so it would have been very difficult management manually. Thankfully, we had this process in place last December. It really came to our aid in March, April, and throughout this year, because it has streamlined the process. It has given everybody more time to pivot and make decisions.

The UiPath tool takes redundant processes away, and says, "Let us handle those, then you do all those creative things." It has given us back a lot of staff resources that were being used up by mundane, redundant processes. That's how it worked in our world. In other areas, anytime you fill out a form or answer a question, a robot can post that to a table. There are all kinds of things it can do. However, for us, it took these manual processes that we were doing day in, day out without a lot of thought and gave us that time back to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing, in order to ensure that our health system has the products that it needs to support the community. In my mind, that is what it is about: Giving back your resources to use them in the way they were intended and using a robotic tool to do those things that you can eliminate, like mundane, redundant processes.

Start with processes that happen over and over every day. Something that you have to do, like data entry, whatever it is. Peel back the onion, then look and see how you can automate some of that through a tool. You have to look at what your processes are and understand how those are getting done today. Maybe even share that information with somebody outside your area, because people from the outside might say, "Well, why don't you do it this way?" Because you've lived it so long, you don't even know why you wouldn't nor do you know the questions to ask. Therefore, look at your base processes that you're doing day in, day out and see how you might be able to automate any aspect of those that doesn't require human thinking. I'm sure you will uncover many things.

It is a learning process for everyone, but I thought it was a very fast track learning. Sometimes, you think, "Well, this is going to take six months," and it didn't. In a very short time, we were seeing samples of what we were going to get. Therefore, I was very impressed with the amount of resource time that it took. It was beyond what I expected.

Some tools we are working on will reduce the purchase order build, but we haven't implemented that yet. That's a whole other project that we're working on with them, and that piece goes into procurement.

It is very doable. I was probably fairly skeptical, but once we started thinking about it, it became very clear that this would be just a slam dunk. You have to open up your mind to it, but it was something that when they said, "Well, we want to use some robotics." The fear is you're going to take my staff away. There are some cases of that, but it is not so bad. I don't have to worry about the robot taking days off, getting sick, having a mother in the hospital and needing to be with them. I don't have to pay it scale. I just don't have to do any of those things. Now, the robot can't automatically think outside the box, but sometimes it can depending on the questions I ask it. 

Everybody just needs to take a breath step back, and say, "Yeah, maybe it can replace this." However, that doesn't mean we won't use this resource in another way.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. I'm not the type of person who just gives a rating of 10 all the time, but this solution has just been a phenomenal tool for us.

Originally, we were using UiPath to draft documents and send emails on mass to where we had large communication exercises. We used a robot instead of a small army of paralegals to generate the documentation and draft up the emails where we had to communicate with 2,000 to 3,000 people. It was a little bit more involved than just doing a standard mail merge, but we were able to use UiPath to create a number of documents and email it to an individual customer, all through a central email address.

Fast forward to where we are now, we have a few of these things focusing in on what we call post-completion activity, like the things you do after you sign a contract. So, it may be you're uploading it to the client's contract management system, applying stamps, or registering the contracts in an official register. The robot is able to do that for us post-completion. Those are our primary use cases at the moment. We're looking at more data integrity type stuff, like comparing our internal data sources against public record.

The ability to displace some activity that was traditionally on our paralegal team has improved my organization. We're an outsourced managed legal services provider. We're primarily a people-based business and UiPath displaces some activity off those paralegals and brings in automation. For me, it becomes an additional type of resource. The long and short of it is that we are able to move work that was traditionally done by people and would be charged at a rate, off to automation where we can bring the costs down. It enables us to reduce our running costs of our clients. A single bot running post-completion has saved as two FTEs.

UiPath has helped to speed up case resolutions in a couple of ways. It's focused on doing particular jobs, so it achieves the job faster. People don't need to complete an entire task end to end. They can stop at a certain point and the robot takes over. That allows a person to get through more work. Also, the fact that the robots are able to do this stuff overnight 24/7, means that we have more capacity to do stuff.

It gives us the ability to respond to clients. It gives us an option in how we're going to automate work for clients. It's hard to say if it has reduced the cost of our digital transformation because we deal with all the people. I suspect it hasn't done it internally, but suspect that has made some things cheaper for our clients. It enables us to deliver digital services cheaper for our clients. 

UiPath had an effect on our legal staff. It takes work that people don't want to do at the moment, having to download the document, take some details off the top and the bottom of the document, apply a stamp, and then re-upload, it's not what our paralegals and new trainees want to be doing on a day-to-day basis. So we are able to shift activity nobody enjoys onto a robot and let them focus on the stuff they've been trained to do.

In terms of how much it has reduced the processing times, the task itself still takes as long but we've got a robot doing it instead of a human. I don't think that the impact isn't that dramatic on-site processing times. At the moment, humans are only involved in 80% of the transaction and 20% has been held by robots.

These automations have decreased errors but it's hard to quantify by how much. They've inserted 20,000 transactions a year. I have no doubt that the error rates improved. It's just a hard thing to quantify.

The most valuable aspect of UiPath is the fact that it's a low-code platform. Being able to use a low-code platform really lowers the barrier entry of introducing automation. Normally, you fill in a request to go to IT to get a development resource allocated, and then you spend six months trying to do a project. Because UiPath is a bit of a platform, you can quickly, within weeks, start to knock off automation and get it checked and then successfully deployed. The low-code development environment is key for us.

Now that we're scaling up and taking advantage of Cloud stuff, it's become a lot easier to use. When we started our journey, we just bought a couple of bots and had them sit around on machines. It was a bit chaotic and we thought that if we take advantage of their wider platform, the orchestrator environment, it would make life a lot easier because we have all the monitoring and management. We have access to that in one platform rather than having to watch the individual robots, which is where we started.

We're going to use the solution's AI-enhanced document understanding feature. It's something we're looking at to help us with invoices and incoming bills that come in. It's on the backlog. We haven't got to it yet.

UiPath enables me to free up capacity for people to work on new work because they are involved, they're less accessible. At the moment, the majority of our staff is focused towards the end time making sure that things are filed correctly. It's more about focusing resources rather than being more responsive.

As things become more and more data-heavy and accessing other people's products and managing things, like obtaining the data through APIs, it feels like there could be a lot more for them to do, to make interacting with data or manipulating simple things like text strings. You need quite a strong development background or a reasonable level of understanding to achieve that. I think that could be made a little bit more achievable.

Three years ago we started using UiPath relatively small and we are looking to scale up significantly this year. Originally we started on-prem and as we're scaling up, we're going to move towards the cloud instance.

So far the stability has been good. With all of the low code platforms, it's actually more of a problem of what we've developed and deployed. It's how well we make our own software so that the platform will provide. It seems to stand up very, very well. I have not really had an issue. Anytime we have encountered a bug or whatnot, it's something we've introduced to ourselves, but thankfully there's a strong community where we can post questions and queries to get a response within a couple of hours.

I don't see scalability as being too much of a challenge. If we need more capacity on the robots, we're able to buy more licenses and additional VMs on the machine. If we need to expand or scale, it's just about deploying more machines. I don't feel it's that complicated. I suspect there are some constraints on how you build your applications, but that's more of an internal decision rather than UiPath's.

There are three people who are responsible for how to put a source of business analysis as well as development. Their role is to work with SMEs or people within our business units to understand a customer's process, get them deployed, and work with them to do it. The stuff we've taken on tends to be the easier, quick wins. We have three internal developers who were able to break down processes. We're a large organization. We have a large IT function that helped us with virtual machines and data centers, etc. We're not directly involved with them.

It's very easy to build an automation and just let it run. One of the key lessons we learned is the fact that you have to keep an eye on these things and that things change in the environment. Passwords run out and expire, folders may move as people move things around the network and a robot is just as susceptible to everything else that our user is. In terms of when you're designing any solutions, you have to pay a little extra attention to things that may cause you problems in six months' time. The simple fact that a password that you were using has been reset or is expired or something else, could cause the robot to failover. While the robot can tell you it's got a problem, you still have maintenance effort to keep an eye on. There is a maintenance commitment that you need for everything that is put on it. You need to spend a bit of extra time detailing exactly how you are going to respond to those things. Just because it's easy to deploy stuff, it doesn't do away with the fact that you have to keep an eye on it.

There are three analysts who are respondents to book fixes, etc. We have people in the business who we work with to automate these processes. They take a level of responsibility and keeping an eye on anything we try to automate. They're the first line of support. If anything's going wrong or something they can keep an eye on it and then if it is a technical book fix or something that needs to be resolved, that's then escalated to one of those three developers.

I only had one issue which was to do with the proxy setting when deploying some of the software. I raised the ticket on the website, got a response within half a day and it explained what I needed to do to fix it. That's my only experience of having to deal with them. I raised a ticket, I got the answer, and it worked. My experience so far has been fairly good.

We decided to use UiPath three years ago when RPA was starting to become a bit of a buzzword. We took a look at it and realized that it would be a very, very good solution for the right project by allowing us to automate mass activity all at once. One of those projects came around and we had to communicate it to a large audience. The process once agreed upon and nailed down could be very heavily scripted. We looked at a way that we would communicate it to the 30,000 people, all with documents that are pretty much the same but with a slight variation. We knew we wanted to try an RPA solution. UiPath was a very strong contender in those days and it was easy to access. That's why we ended up with it. We're able to achieve something with a single bot. All of those things make the software easy to test out. And then from there, you're able to make a decision.

The initial setup was really straightforward. In such a large law firm that has high data security obligations, we set these things up, appoint the orchestrator, and it just works. I have not encountered too many problems. 

It doesn't feel like a heavyweight ERP system or some larger workflow tool. These things are deployed onto a desktop and they speak to a server. It's not heavy. It doesn't feel like a piece of software with a heavy footprint.

The deployment took a week. It took us longer to end-to-end to get the invoice approved.

We've taken advantage of the architecture. Our IT team set some ground rules about where the virtual machines need to be hosted and deployed, but it's not that heavyweight. We increase some standards with IT and then install the software on those machines. We're using the Cloud version so there's not a lot to worry about.

We were able to do the deployment internally. 

Some of our ROI is quite dramatic. We have to email lots of stuff out to different people and our projector will require this to have a team of six or seven staff working solidly for a couple of weeks. The robot was able to get it done after a couple of weeks of configuration. This thing was able to pay for itself in a matter of hours once it was done. One of our post-completion robots took a week or two to develop and get stable enough to deploy. It's able to offset seven or eight hours a day. If we target the use cases correctly, we are able to get a return on the automation we deploy.

Take advantage of the Cloud-based implementation. You'll have to handle the Orchestrator licensing costs. It's obviously different for every organization. It's beneficial to get away from the on-premise installation. Also make sure that your business case justifies whatever the license cost is for an unattended or attended bot. 

Show your business case and that the automation will help you to exceed the license cost. You want to look at things that are going to give you a return on investment in about six months' time. Take advantage of the Cloud-hosted version so as not to pay the cost for Orchestrator. Then for your bots, make sure you will see a six months ROI in terms of how much automation you've gotten and how much you can get the robot to get done.

We also looked at BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. We took a quick look over the top three solutions at the time. UiPath seemed to be one of the leaders in the area.

We partnered with an organization to help us deliver it. We got some consultants in and sorted out what they were comfortable with using and what they recommended. For us, it was the size of the platform. We were looking at Automation Anywhere or BluePrism. It just felt like it would be a bigger project to implement when in reality all we wanted was one robot to do one job for us at the start of the project. It was more about the barriers of entry to getting started.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. It feels like nothing deserves a 10, and I highly recommend every organization has a handle on RPA. There are still a huge amount of features we're still yet to explore.

We are a UiPath customer, working with them to develop some products. It is a bit of a mixed thing where we are developing some products with them from scratch, but they are acting as the provider. We develop things, and if they're useful for others, then others can use them.

We are doing some pretty bespoke things to help us develop some solutions, but also help them develop their UI solutions in the legal area. We are working on a few things with UiPath to develop some search robots, some solutions to automatize subcontracts, and some timekeeping entries. These are several things that we are doing right now.

We are doing three things with them:

1. A robot to help us with software for time management, automating time entries. 
2. A robot to help us with filling in our engagement letters (contracts). 
3. A robot to help us with various public searches, i.e., the automation of searches of the public record.

We are adjusting robots from similar things that they do. The robots are not yet in production. 

The most valuable feature is its ability to save time with a task. In general, it improves accuracy as well.

UiPath's ease of use for automating our company's processes is a five out of five. We have found it very easy to talk to them, identifying what can be done along with the potential use cases. They have been very good at guiding us through what is realistic at this point, how their robots could help us save time and improve accuracy, and how our users can engage with their robots, e.g., ensuring that users engage with the robots and use their product. 

When we started to talk about practical implementation, their team was extremely switched onto identifying and fitting their product to our needs. They explained to us how we can use their products, what can be done to adapt their product, and what may happen sometime in the future, not necessarily now. I found this very helpful and straightforward.

What we have in mind in terms of what the robots could do for us is significantly more than what UiPath does now, but it takes more work. From my perspective, there is just a wide scope of implementation that goes beyond what we're starting right now. That is essentially the improvement. While I have nothing negative to say about our experience with them so far, I think we can work to develop more complex products with them. They are already working to develop something for our use cases, but what I would like is if we could develop more things for more complex needs, e.g., where we start with simpler stuff, then we can add things to what we're doing now.

We are in the development phase.

It is too early. We are still in development.

During the development phase, there are five people involved in the development phase. The users will be about 100.

We have not used their support.

We were not previously using something in this area. 

We have been thinking about ways to streamline our activities using technology. It happens that we knew UiPath, so we started to engage with them about what they could do for us. We had something like 20 ideas that we could implement, then we just started the easier ones which were closer to the products that they have. As things go, we will see whether we expand to other things.

We have known UiPath quite well and for a long time. They are also the leaders in the field, so it was a very easy choice.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We started to discuss potential solutions, then we met with parts of their team, developing that business area. After that, we met with the technical people designing the product. We had a couple of initial conversations and did some testing. It has been extremely simple and straightforward.

We are supposed to review some of their proposals and provide feedback. We are probably a week or two away from production.

UiPath could have probably implemented the solution in a couple of weeks. We had some delays on our side.

We did the initial setup ourselves.

It is important for whatever we implement that it's cost effective in a sense that the robots will replace some human time. If human time costs less than the robot, then that's not a good deal. Normally, human time will cost more than a robot, and that's what we're trying to displace: the human time. We want to replace it with a cheaper robot. 

We only looked at UiPath, because we know them quite well.

So far, the experience has been excellent. I would rate the solution 10 out of 10, but we haven't finished the implementation.

Look internally what your needs are. Try to identify what you could improve with software robots, ensuring these needs are clearly identified and the product is fit for purpose. Also, you should make sure there will be buy-in in the organization, so people will actually use the product.

We use it to automate searches in public databases. We have lawyers who need to search for various companies. For example, we are searching insolvency files for a list of business partners, so we use the robot to perform the search and notify clients about its results. Thus, it helps us with our work in searching public registries.

We have the Studio license and attended robots.

It enables us to provide new services, e.g., our use case is something that we could not have delivered manually. Now that we use the robot, it is something that we can offer to clients. Therefore, it has helped us expand our scope of services and offer to clients more competitive fees. We are now trying to get more clients.

If we were to do this manually, it would take us one day for 200 companies. Now, it takes about half an hour. So, it has reduced our time to process information. Before, we didn't offer these services on a mass scale. We just often did it for a couple of companies. Now, we can offer it on a larger scale.

One of the departments in our organization does use UiPath for compliance purposes: To send reminders to our clients. We have to ensure that clients are compliant when they submit financial statements. We use the robot to send them reminders to update the steps of compliance, i.e., if it's done. This is not my team, but another team who uses it for compliance purposes. It has increased their level of compliance because it's timely and there are no errors in the reminders.

We mostly value the fact that it easily interacts with existing systems. We don't have to go to a complex interface to access public information to send the emails, etc. This is the good part.

Its ease of management is okay. Our attended robots have some Excel files that we use to manage and configure the robots. It is quite straightforward.

It has helped relieve the legal staff of the burdensome task of searching on the public registry. For them, this has been a big improvement. It saves time and also the risk of human error has been reduced, because now the robot does the work. So, you don't get bored when you check 2,000 companies on the portal. The staff is overall more satisfied because they can do more value-added tasks than performing this search.

The pricing for Orchestrator and unattended robots could use improvement. If we plan to roll out and implement more robots, then perhaps lower costs on Orchestrator and unattended robots would make adoption even easier. 

For roughly a year and a half.

So far, the stability has been good. We haven't had any issues.

If you have an attended robot, then it is scalable to a certain extent, but this is because of the price tag. If you think through your use cases, then you can use the same license for multiple purposes. If we think of scalability in the sense of changing the process, then this is something that can be done, but it requires extra development time. So, it's rather scalable.

We have two lawyers using this robot. Their role is to monitor the robot and make sure that the robot works fine. For example, if there are any complaints from the clients, then they can respond.

We, in legal, are among the first to use this robot to my knowledge. Other than a couple of robots that I've mentioned in this review, I'm not aware of other robots.

The technical support is very good. They were very responsive. We had a question about the license and they replied very quickly.

We did not previously use another solution. We decided to implement an RPA solution because we wanted to streamline our processes. We also wanted to be able to offer and develop new services for our clients. For these particular use cases, using other technology solutions would have been more expensive and complicated to set up.

The initial setup was a bit complex. We are a very big company with a lot of IT centers. I think the complexity was on our side. The initial part of setting up the virtual machine and installing the licenses took roughly two months. After that, the development time was very short: one week.

Our experience, as administrators of the platform, is quite good. Once the robot is set up, it is very easy to see the results, reports, and if there are any errors. It is quite easy to use.

The robot that searches for insolvency cases was built in one week. After that, we have been testing it and making adjustments, but the construction and development time were very short.

It speeds up digital transformation because it's easy to implement and have it live. Therefore, it is something that we can use very easily to streamline our operations. 

I handled the project and managed the discussion with our IT. We had several infrastructure teams who set up the virtual machines and helped us install the licensing. We had a third-party developer who developed the robot. We also had an internal team who tested the implementation. I oversaw everything.

We were happy with the third-party developer.

Now, there are several providers/developers who can build UiPath robots quite easily and at affordable prices. So, in our case, it was quite a straightforward process of building the robot.

Our processing time was reduced to half an hour. Something that would have taken up the whole day (eight hours) was reduced to half an hour. This has freed up our legal staff’s time to focus on more important and strategic tasks.

What we have managed to do is to offer a completely new service. It is something that we did not offer on a regular basis or big scale. Using RPA, we can offer it to a larger scale with the reduced costs.

The pricing is okay, but I recommend to build a business case before going live. Ensure that you really use the license and building the robot makes sense. Try to think of multiple use cases, because one license can be used for several robots.

There are additional costs for using third-parties. We also have internal costs with the infrastructure and for the virtual machines where the robot operates.

The costs are quite affordable. It is a solution that makes sense from a business perspective.

We didn't do a very formal business review process.

I think the platform is very good.

Have a good consultant advise you on the processes of automations: How to build the use case and business case. You will need a bit of knowledge around RPA and business processes to be able to have a successful implementation. 

Have a stronger technical partner tool to help with developing the robot, making adjustments, testing, etc. Testing is very important. It is important that you allocate resources for testing.

Robots can do things in a different manner than we can and more efficiently. We have to be creative and think of processes, even if only part of them are repetitive, that we can automate and a human can work with the robot. Then, the overall the process is improved and our experience as humans is a lot better.

I would this solution a 10 out of 10 because they are very good at what they do. It's very important that you understand what the solution can do and its limitations. However, for this type of product, I think they are the best.

RPA - Novigo Automation Framework Solutions - Setup an Automation Factory Model.

Automation Focus has been Productivity, Quality, Cost, Process Optimization, and compliance.

Focused on delivering Process Automation for Oracle EBS ERP application for various departments including IT, Finance, Operations, Engineering, Sales .etc 

1. Manufacturing: Master data maintenance & monitoring Inventory transactions, BOM error fix & transfer, WIP issue & complacent
2. Finance: Financial closing, IC transaction, security & FA master & transactions, Master data, duplicate check, auto-CM creation & auto-payment, Customer Master, running letter, print errors & auto-receipts
3. Supply Chain: Sales order Integration with the portal, shipment, RMA, digital shipping & backorder, item cost update & inventory interface, procurement, receiving & monitoring
4. System Admin: Access provisioning, - Creating responsibility, Monitoring pending transaction & analyzer.

RPA Automation has accelerated heavily within the organization. 

It started with task automation and ended up with process automation.

• Increased Operational excellence - With multiple FTE savings every month.
• Lowered operational cost with a minimum saving of 780+ Man hours every month.
• Overall $1 million annual savings through improved process efficiency.
• Increased Shipping Order execution velocity by 2x times -At least 10,000 orders in every 4 days.
• Amplified shipping process efficiency and employee productivity by 100% - with one click execution.
• ABCDi (AnyBody Can Do it) technique enables Zero dependencies on SME requirement to perform the task and Zero dollars spend on training the Shipping operators.
• Prevents human error, increases data accuracy, standardization, and quality of data for the shipping process.
• Excellent ROI with investment cost recovered in 1.25 months timeline and an Annualized ROI for 5 years is 68.50%
• Built from LTI Novigo Automation Framework, it provides the agility and speed required to customize and deploy the solution quickly.

• Attended Bots have been star cases as it totally removes dependencies of user literacy to know the application. 
• ABCDi (AnyBody Can Do it) technique enables Zero dependencies on SME requirement to perform the task and Zero dollars spend on training the Shipping operators.
• With Novigo Automation Framework, the implementation lifecycle is accelerated by about 25%-to-32%, while drastically reducing the implementation services cost. Identification of possible use cases along with efforts required, time involved, and cost savings can be easily envisioned by using NAF.

• RPA AI capabilities - UiPath is leading in this area.
• UiPath should focus more on recommendations of process automation based on ERP Applications like Oracle, SAP etc. They should also provide a list of possible RPA cases as per departments, processes and based on various industry domains. 
• More on RPA Governance features to be provided out of the box. 
• RPA Capabilities with IVR Channels to address voice commands will be a game changer for Customer call center cases.                                                                               

We have been using UiPath for two years.

Excellent in stability. 

Easily scalable in a few minutes.

No.

UiPath Cloud Orchestrator setup is pretty must straightforward, we manage to do a complete setup in a matter of a few hours time.

We deployed it in-house - SI - LTI.

>30% ROI  - we recovery of overall investments recovered in seven months' time.

UiPath is very cost-effective.

Yes, we have evaluated all top RPA products like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

I have been using UiPath to develop automations for my company. We are a manufacturing company that uses SAP as our primary enterprise application. We are currently meeting with many different business areas and hearing about all of the different processes that they would like us to automate for them. Since UiPath works within SAP, it should help us get some easy wins!

UiPath has allowed us to remove tedious work from our daily process, saving us hundreds of hours. We are currently using it to process separations for people leaving the company. This was a 100% manual process before UiPath and it was required to be completed hundreds of times each month. The team doing the work was extremely overworked and UiPath has allowed them to see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. 

Orchestrator is essential, but I love how Studio includes so many activities that are pre-programmed to do what is needed.

Who doesn't love the recording feature? A recording is great to use when doing the first build of new automations!

The most important feature of all is the UiPath community and the forums, as they have helped me with countless questions!

One of the problems with UiPath is that it doesn't interact with some programs, such as AD and Chrome, and it would be great to have even more included!

We have been using UiPath for six months.

So far we have not had any issues with the stability.

We have not scaled, but from what I've read it should scale easily.

We did not use another solution prior to UiPath.

Understanding how everything connects was a little difficult, but UiPath offers classes that walk you through the setup. With the classes it was much easier. 

We implemented using our in-house team.

Do your research, the infrastructure piece is important to understand before purchasing. Also, you need Orchestrator to implement UiPath properly, so don't let anyone tell you different!

Finally, you don't need to start with 100 bots... my advice is to start small and then scale. 

We looked at Automate Anywhere and writing scripts, but UiPath seemed like the best path.

There isn't much that I don't like about the product. I love all of the new features and products they are releasing this year, and I can't wait to see where this goes in the future.

We use Studio and Orchestrator. I personally use unattended bots but we're releasing one of the largest attended implementations right now.  

For the most part, it's still in the back office, finance, and accounting, that's typically where we've been starting. That's where for me, as an inexperienced developer, is easier for me to get started.

We're able to handle some of our tax and HR processes, the volumes of the documents or new hires at a tremendous speed compared to how we used to do it manually in the past.

I like the layout and design of the Studio using the RPA framework. It makes sense to me. It's very easy to get started. I've been a fan of the current debugger. I know that UiPath is releasing an updating debugger but I think that's been very intuitive for me as well.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform for automating my company’s processes a four out of five because, for me, there's still a lot of clicks and keystrokes I need to do for development. I know that UiPath is releasing StudioX, which is something that is needed, for people like me who aren't super technical.

I would rate UiPath Academy RPA training a five out of five. It's one of the best. Compared to its competitors, it's intuitive and it's robust.

It's everything that UiPath is moving forward towards, intelligent, machine learning, and AI. I embrace the fact that the direction it's going especially for me personally.

I think in the Studio, as in building automations, it takes a lot of clicks and there's a lot of options and I think sometimes there's just too much. It should be more simplified on the user interface.

As far as our practice, we have over 150 consultants in the States and over 350 in India. We also have a team in Europe. Overall, we have over 3,000 RPA consultants. UiPath is probably close to about a third that would be UiPath competent.

I haven't had to contact their technical support. I go through my SMEs. 

We're always challenging ourselves to be more efficient and effective in the workforce. We also recognized that some of our businesses needed to do things better, faster and cheaper. RPA was a natural solution. For us, as a large organization, we want to learn about all of the top competitor solutions. UiPath is in the top-ranked quadrant regularly so it is an obvious choice.

Because of the market demands of Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and UiPath, we had to invest in learning all three equally. I don't know the exact reason we went with UiPath, I can ask our clients. 

The implementation process was easier than the competitors.

We have seen a 100% ROI. We do automation to deliver a faster ROI than traditional software. As a firm, we saved over 2 million dollars a year now from using RPA.

Regarding both attended and unattended bots, I think there are places for both and it comes back to the purpose of what you're automating. I think attended is going to be great for the casual users of applications. It's a lot of the call centers and even some of the system developers. The unattended are places where you can really find those scaling volumes and processes. Typically back-office functions are unattended.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. For me, it's very intuitive and logical. I grew up with a little bit more of a technical background so for me, it fits in well with my needs.

I would encourage someone considering this solution to use UiPath, especially if they're automated and especially with UiPath's new one-click cloud solution. It's so fast for them to get started. I would encourage them to be up and running in the same database to try it out.