UiPath Platform Reviews

UiPath is best at its core and with the help of plugins from UiPath and community you get solutions to a lot of problems out of the box. I have tried couple of more platforms, but the easiness, diversity and flexibility that UiPath provides is unparalleled. 

In the recent top 50 enterprise application at g2crowd, UiPath is at 18th place and topmost in the automation platforms. 

I have done quite a lot of different real-time projects with UiPath. In one big project, there was a lot of loan applications from scanned documents. We used Abbyy Flexicapture for reading OCR and ICR text and we read it very accurately. It really boosted the moral and now we are automating the whole CAD department of the bank. 

Now we are looking forward to more complex processes and try using the ML and AI into it.

RPA is our bread and butter. We have implemented projects in the telecom and financial industries. 

A good example was when we implemented a network process in the telecom sector. The time for that process was seven minutes, then by implementing the RPA, we drastically reduced it to 40 seconds. The process involved worked on four different applications. Each application required a secure login, and the speed was due to the websites being hosted on the Internet. It did not require any internet connection when we implemented RPA on-premise, and used complete network and system resources.

• The ease of the processes
• There is no coding at all required to implement a complex business process. If you have some programming background, it will help you. However, if you are a business user, you can still develop simple processes.
• The automated recording helps quite a bit. You record a complete business process along with human interactions to the desktop or web application. You can easily manipulate them. Once you are done, you have a complete recording of the interactions, which you can use to tweak your requirements.

You can't write small snippets of code. If you want to do a single code snippet, this is not available by default. For example, if I want to do some date conversions, and that date conversion requires different variables to be available in the context, but they are not there. A small snippet of code change should be available out-of-the-box. This will help me in the long run. I can create activity out of it. Support for a little bit of in-line script should be there.

There aren't stability issues, though it should have better RAM and cores. When it's overloaded you get considerable problems.

Scalability is one bit which should be properly planned at the time of license and planning. For tight budget projects, you have to be very precise in the runtime execution requirements otherwise, you might face issues.  

Tech support takes time replying to queries. The more you go to the community, the more likely you will get replies. Therefore, tech support should be improved.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We were up and running in approximately 15 minutes. UiPath is the best of breed in the market for setup.

Licensing is one of the big issues when I have been doing some pre-sale activities. One robot price licensing is quite high with UiPath. They should provide some discounts to partners so we can spread the product easily in countries, like Pakistan and other areas in the Middle East. Licensing should be reduced and price should be cut down a bit.

We also evaluated Blue Prism. We went UiPath due to the community support.

It has a lot of community support with a lot of help available. It is a very mature tool.

The academy for UiPath is very good place to start with UiPath. It is easy and the learning curve is quite low.

Our primary use case is to develop automation projects, like automating Excel activities for repetitive tasks and operations on files. We also automate operations on Citrix. With UiPath we can easily manage all of the projects in a single page (i.e. in orchestrator).

We have used this product to implement automation for several things, including:

• UI automation that updates a project's status based on conditions
• Gathering data from web sites
• Excel functions related to HR operations
• File checks, to determine the validity
• Python and .NET scripts to connect to different databases

The most valuable features are Activities, Orchestrator, and UiPath Go!

The UiPath Orchestrator is one source to easily manage all bots.

I would like to see all a full-featured version for mobile devices.

In some Activities, there are inconsistencies between versions where the most recent does not have support for throwing the same kinds of errors.

The support from the community, as well as from UiPath themselves, is awesome. Also, users have the advantage of training videos and material, including free certifications.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

This solution is priced less compared with other products.

The primary use case is invoicing and billing. The first thing that we used it for was some content migration from one video hosting provider to another. We later on moved to invoicing and billing, which included time sheets, management, and feeding data into our accounting system.

The features that we use the most for our use case include reading PDFs, email integration, and web and desktop automation talking to other desktop software.

We have generally found it easy to use, but we also develop some extensions. We are actually a software development shop, so we have developed extensions to the core UiPath platform. They have made it pretty easy to do that.

UiPath could use more OCR use cases to help with those features.

I would like to see higher end AI type features natively in UiPath. Some native integration over time would help.

We found it to be quite stable.

We have a relatively small use case. Most people have entered the market on a small scale. The maturity will come in, maybe over this year, as people start to scale up. 

I expect some issues will surface when it starts scaling up. However, that happens with any software. 

The eagerness of UiPath engineers and their salespeople to help us along the process has helped us align ourselves more with UiPath.

Support is good, helpful, and eager to help.

The UiPath Academy is great. It was one of the reasons which made us choose the tool, and align ourselves with it. It was easy to get the software, and train on it. If you're doing professional work, you don't want to have untrained people work on it. This will not lead to success.

As a software development shop, we value training quite a lot. They made it easy to help our developers come up to speed with the software and get certified.

The initial setup is quite easy. We have worked with some other RPA tools, but they took us quite awhile to get setup. With UiPath, it was relatively easier to get started.

We have seen ROI by it saving some hours for us. We are a small company. We use the tool mostly because we want to learn about the software. We also save some hours, but we do it to learn and help other customers who are doing it at much higher volumes. The savings for us is relatively lesser than the savings for a larger customer.

ROI is a bit tricky. Customers need to implement simpler use cases: Get ROI from the tool, learn it, and re-implement it. This is just the nature of how RPA works. I see a lot of opportunities for it.

When customers start scaling up their use of RPA and have learnt how to use it, that is when the real ROI will start trickling in. When you start off, it will take some effort to get it right. Once you developed some maturity with the process, and you're scaling up a lot of use cases, and you have one bot doing a lot of different things and being able to share a lot of processes with a few bots, that's when you will start seeing good ROI.

This tool gives opportunities for people to be productive in other areas, which is hard to measure sometimes. The first step is to get them there, then determine where you can go from there. ROI is a very long term thing. The product lets people focus their skills on what they are good at, which is a type of ROI.

UiPath made it easy to learn their software. When we looked at a variety of RPA tools initially, UiPath was the easiest to get started with. It has good Academy content and an open platform, which is easy to download and start using (the Community Edition).

We have been looking at other RPA solutions, but we like UiPath quite a lot.

We are using it for financial applications in the financial sector. We also have a couple of bigger federal customers who started RPA development on their own, then needed our help. 

Internally, the RPA offerings team is developing more resources, so we can support all our customers. This involves a lot Pegasystems, ERP, and homegrown systems.

We are really seeing that RPA in the production, where people are using it, they are getting benefit.

Screen scraping credentials of whatever features that it has. The robot can log into the system, scrape the data, and enter the data into the system. This eliminates a lot of the manual work that the team had to do, which has improved the performance. Our teams used to do a lot of data entry, and this repetitive work has been reduced. The same resource can now work on some high-end work.

The ease of the use is good and exceeded my expectations. The implementation became easier and more standardized. Also, our development time has been reduced. Using ReFrameWork, we saw that the code become organized very nicely by UiPath and the implementation became easier and more standardized with more prebuilt components, which reduced development time. If you load the ReFrameWork nicely, you can do things faster and more standardized.

I have found there to be setup issues with Chrome. Right now, I am using IE.

I am looking for more batching processing because of the ODI framework. While they have a process where they log everything into Orchestrator, then they process it. However, when I have 50,000 to 100,000 records being batch loaded and processed one-by-one Orchestrator, I am apprehensive about it.

Stability looks good except that we see that when we run the bot sometimes somewhere in the middle it fails. It will recovers, but I don't know why and can't answer to my customers why. I don't know if something can be done to eliminate the failing piece. I don't know whether it is a stability issue, but it should be handled in future. Other than that, stability looks great.

If you start using Orchestrator, and you put your Orchestrator on a very high-end machine, it can handle thousands of bots. I don't see any issues with running multiple processes on a single bot, then connecting it to Orchestrator.

Before using UiPath Academy, we used the customer support to answer our initial questions.

This automation is not exactly like other automation that we used to do. This is a different type of automation where we are not disrupting the existing codes. We are providing all these features to the customer.

The initial setup is simple. Once you install Studio, you can do the development within minutes.

Once the bot is programmed, it eliminates human error. It doesn't make any mistakes if you have programmed it correctly.

Right now, we are not working with other vendors.

I would recommend UiPath and its bots.

Most of our work is with unattended bots. People are more keen to work with unattended bots because they just want to schedule it somewhere in the night and let the bot run, then come in the morning and have it ready.

Everyone in our organization has used the UiPath Academy. We are certified in it. There are three levels of training, which we had to go through before the final certification. The Academy is very good and well-organized. We went through it step-by-step.

One of team members developed a bot in a Citrix environment for a project, and it looked great. From his machine, he connected to Citrix, logged into the application, did some data scraping, and built an Excel file, then provided the data.

Our primary use case for it right now is in human resources. We are using it as a recruiting capability where we receive resumes in from recruiters, one in particular. Then, we're looking at the emails, pulling data off the resumes, and loading it into a database. We are also identifying resumes which might need some additional clarification. This saves a lot of time, so somebody doesn't have to go through each email, evaluate them, and pull the resumes down.

Our customers are the DoD, mostly, and some civilian agencies.

• The ability to integrate easily within our IT environment.
• The ease in which we are able to program and tie it into our various applications.

I would like more defined processes for around use cases. This might be helpful, as it is more general at the moment.

We have not experienced a whole lot of issues with UiPath at all internally. 

In some of the pilots that we are developing for our partners or for our customers, we haven't seen any major big issues or bugs.

We are still in the initial phases of deploying different bots, one bot at a time. Once we get into the Orchestrator area, we are looking at more of shared, multiple Unattended bot deployments. Then, we will have a better feel for it.

The support has been excellent and very helpful. We have received a lot of great information and assistance from the UiPath engineers and partner alliance people, who has been very helpful and responsive.

It took us only about two days of man-hours to build it out. Thus, it is easily implemented, programmed, and deployed. The ease of use and implementation together are a huge value-add and time saver to any organization. 

The ease of use did exceed our expectations. We heard it was easy. We had been trained up and had certified people. However, this was our first endeavor, in terms of deploying it internally, and it went extremely well. 

We have seen a huge benefit time-wise, in terms of the repetitive type of activities that we do. Now, we have automated those and can do the more hardcore analysis of the resumes. In the human resources area, it would take 27 minutes to process 20 emails. With UiPath, we are doing it in about two minutes, which is a huge time savings.

Given how cheap it is to initially buy the product, the licensing methodology that they have in terms of renewing every year is appropriate. Later on, if they start charging more early on, for deployment, buying the license, and deploying it initially, then having a lower maintenance fee might be more appropriate. Now, with the scale they are at, it is an appropriate way to do the licensing.

We are a partner. We are totally onboard with UiPath. We did not look into different partners to use as a product internally.

It is the market leader, particularly in the federal government. It is getting the widest use right now.

The product is extremely helpful. In terms of usability, capability, and functionality, it's one of the best products that we have used in terms of being easily implementable and cost-effective.

We find that all the materials out there for partner use are extremely effective and organized extremely well. They are very detailed and helpful.

Internally, we use UiPath to automate financial transactions, specifically for invoice processing.

Externally, on the client side, we use automation in the financial space, primarily. There are various use cases from generic file uploads to transaction processing that we implement for our clients.

We have some processes that haven't been completed flushed out. Right now, there has not been an exact improvement yet.

Ease of use and speed of development are the most valuable features. 

The overall integration with Microsoft stack and a few other third party vendors, like Google, are very useful to us. Having these built into the product speeds up our development, so we don't have to code a bunch of connectors on our own.

I would like to see some sort of better implementation of the Python modules. Right now, any error code that Python throws up turns into a generic error that is difficult to track down. I would want to see some sort of integration that at least lets me debug the issue.

Its pretty difficult to do source control through the typical Git functions because of the nature of the UiPath and the visual element. Some sort of method to bring source control home for us would be very helpful. A way to systematically track which actions or activities were added and subtracted from a given process before adding to a repository would be very helpful to us right now. Our team of developers is growing, so control has become somewhat of an issue for us.

Ease of use has definitely exceeded expectations. Initially coming in, UiPath had some features that needed to be implemented that weren't quite there yet. Now, we are on 2018.4 and all of the features that we desperately needed are there. Thus, ease of use has been pretty great.

We have looked into scalability a lot. So far, we haven't done anything that involves a 100 bot. However, the scalability seems pretty easy. Scaling up to just five bots running in parallel has been very easy.

If we are going to build up the environment, we would run on virtual machines. We would connect through Remote Desktop Services, not through Citrix.

The technical support has been fairly good. I like that they pick up on interactions in the forum. However, some of the transitions from the forum to submitting a ticket are a little clunky. If a ticket could be submitted on my behalf on the forum, then have me boot over to where the ticket is, that is fine. Just kicking me out of the forum, then having me submit a ticket seems counterintuitive to me.

As a company and for our client, we see any sort of legacy system or too many individual systems as somehow needing to be integrated. This is the bread and butter for RPA, and where we started our conversation (and our clients' conversations).

The complexity of the initial setup depends on who you are. First time implementing, it seems a little complex. If you know how to develop UiPath, it is more straightforward. I had to walk somebody through the implementation setup of the environment because they had a lot of questions about where they were going. For software development is not that complex, it is pretty straightforward.

Having some understanding of database management and services is helpful, so you understand the inner workings of UiPath.

It has definitely eliminated human error in our internal process, somewhere between full production, deployment and testing. There were definitely some error prone tasks that we eliminated. If I had to give a ball park, maybe 10 to 20 percent of the process was error prone, which we were able to resolve with UiPath.

For time savings: What used to be a 15 minute task, now it takes the bot two minutes for the bot to run through, for example.

Generally, we push unattended. We think the cost savings is better with unattended. As far as ROI, when you are talking about returning man-hours or moving people off work, unattended does that efficiently. Attended doesn't always save much time. Thus, we push unattended for cost.

We have seen general platform survey before implementing RPA of the different market vendors.

Personally, I looked at other platforms, and it is hard to transition from UiPath. It does have ease of use that now I am used to.

If you are starting with development, start with the UiPath Academy. For the end user or client, start conversations about security and prevention now, while you get trained up on development.

Internally, there is not a lot of automation in place. We are using a good robotic process automation software to bridge that gap right now and get us further down the automation road. 

We use the UiPath Academy for new hires. The new training programs, both the previous and current versions, with the UiPath Academy work out for us. I have the previous videos, then the current new slide deck idea. It is pretty streamlined and high level, but it is good for getting new people started.

Also, I used Academy just last week. I used it for security because I had some knowledge gaps on security with UiPath.

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.

At Forest Service, we have a massive onboarding season. Because our primary mission is to combat forest fires, we have a huge intake of firefighters that we hire every season. Because of that, there's a lot of onboarding material that needs to be processed through HR, literally tens of thousands of people in such a short amount of time. I can see, potentially, RPA being able to help with some of the manual work that we do.

It's probably the best bang for our buck, but there are certainly other use cases potentially. That is the area that I'm more familiar with, though.

UiPath can batch process a lot of the hands-on manual work that nobody wants to do. I think that's probably its best value. That said, it does kind of highlight the need for standardized processes, which can be challenging at times, specifically in our space. Just having formalized documentation about what the end-to-end process should be is key. Once that's standardized, then it's a lot easier to leverage UiPath for automation.

Having looked at other RPA software, I think UiPath is the most user-friendly. At the same time, it's robust enough to customize and get into the source code. It's accessible, but also has enough features for more hands-on developers to be able to do what they need to do. From the two that I've seen, it was the more user-friendly one.

I have used UiPath's Academy for some of the foundational level training, not the more advanced ones. I think I had some feedback at the time. It's been a few months since I've taken it. Overall it was pretty good.

I feel like it's pretty good as it is. One thing I would change is when you're nesting certain workflows, it can get a little complicated as you start getting deeper. For example, if you have multiple blocks that need to live inside each other, and you're using a library to drag stuff or just insert it, it can be very challenging from a visual level to see what level it's in or how deeply nested it is. It's hard to roll it up into a parent level display. So, that's a little confusing sometimes. I guess, if there's any way to improve that, I think that would be helpful.

I think UiPath uses VBScript. If there were some kind of library of common things that developers could use, that would be helpful, but it's not a big deal. You can just Google that stuff. Making something like that accessible would be nice, but I don't think it's crucial.

The big question on my end is just how to scale and keep things stabilized. This is such a new technology for us, that there's a lot of questions around it. I think, being able to answer that would be helpful. I don't really know the answer.

I don't know about technical support. We were talking to a developer that was helping us at the time just to walk us through. Our experience with the developer was good. They have a very knowledgeable staff. They're very eager to help us figure stuff out. All in all, it was a positive experience.

The setup, at least from the local side, makes sense. This could be just more of my experience since my expertise in UiPath is not as high as it could be. I'm not super familiar with how Orchestrator is deployed and managed, in terms of multiple bots and scheduling, but that's probably a limitation more on my end then with UiPath.

We are currently in the research stage. It's more like proof of concept work. Right now, it's really about convincing people that this is a technology to look at and pay attention to. We are trying to convince the people with the authority that this is a good way to invest.

I have local test environments that I've used personally. At Forest Service, they're very visually oriented. If you talk to them about it, they won't get it. They need to see it to believe it. So, I've been trying to do that locally in my own environment. I have been building use cases that I think are parallel to what we're trying to do, to demonstrate the value.

We looked at a couple of alternatives. Automation Anywhere was one of them. I haven't looked at the other ones, since we chose UiPath pretty early on, having heard about them previously. We also considered some others like Pega and a few others.

Automation technology is non-existent in our company currently, but definitely something that should be leveraged for. I think there's a lot of value in being able to free up people from doing small repetitive tasks and just be more strategic focused. The challenge, really, is just convincing people that they're not going to lose their jobs. We need to show them that we're freeing up their time to be more valuable. The challenge is just educating people about what it actually is.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. I think it's going a lot of places. It's definitely more advanced than some of the other ones that I've seen. UiPath is probably the best one that we've seen so far.

My advice is to make sure you have your processes documented before you try to fix something that can't be fixed through robotic process automation. At a fundamental level, your organization needs to be ready for it. It's not a magic bullet to fix stuff that's confusing at your organization level. But, if you have it straight and documented and you're doing high volume amounts of it then you should use this to free up people's time and make them do better work. I think it would be useful.

We use UiPath to log into a system, run a report, extract the information from the report, and send emails to hundreds of people, all in just seconds.

We have a requirement when someone leaves the agency that you have to remove access immediately but that wasn't always done. This allows us the ability to take the daily report when people leave and send notifications to the right people to remove system access.

UiPath allows people to do more value-added work. I found that we were able to take a person well versed in access programming and convert them to be an RPA developer with relative ease.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is phenomenal. Just the fact that they offer that information is a huge selling point for them. I continually share links to the site and I encourage people to go out. I tell them to take the training if they want to learn more. I started the technical training, but I kind of oversee the program, so I didn't have to learn all of it. Nevertheless, just the awareness of what RPA is and those intro-functional courses were very informative.

It was more difficult to use than we originally thought it was going to be. It's not as simple as drag and drop. You really have to have a background in IT development type of work. I suppose you could make simple automations but we definitely found it to be more complex, especially the supporting infrastructure beneath it.

I think where the improvement needs to occur is within the federal government to put out the policy that it has been determined to be a safe product that can be put on any DoD network. That would be huge, but right now that decision isn't out there and every agency has to go out and make its own determination. Some CIOs are more risk-averse than others. That would be one thing, but obviously, UiPath doesn't have a way to influence that.

We don't know about the scalability until we get in there. From everything I've read and heard, I think it will be scalable and should fulfill our needs.

Technical support has been very accommodating. In fact, they'll be on site to help us overcome some of the challenges we've had without having third-party integration support. We've been struggling on our own, but UiPath has been there and has even agreed to come onsite to help work through some of these issues.

We have automations everywhere through the agency. There were a lot of presentations being held. Senior leaders started to get wind of this and other organizations were sharing their successes and that kind of piqued our interest to assign somebody to explore it.

The initial setup was complex. I've just seen the emails that go back and forth and I think if we had a third-party integrator, it would have resolved a lot of our questions. The security aspects have been our biggest challenge and concern.

We absolutely have a return on our investment. It gets difficult to really quantify what the ROI is when you start looking at that. Just the ability for technicians to do more value-added work is hard to put a price on. We have a system that stores a lot of documents. Our pilot bot was just to log into that system and download the documents for audit purposes. Now we can literally let the bot run for 12 hours pulling all the documents and those people can do more important things.

The pilot bot we set up to send those emails, equated to about 350 hours a year. The audit bot is almost endless because if we can share those bots with our customers and the customers can do the same thing and achieve those same benefits, you're getting into millions of potential dollar savings.

This solution has definitely helped to eliminate human errors, as well.

It would be nice if you could just buy the product instead of having the annual rate license renewals. I assume that's how UiPath makes its money. It's expensive, but I guess we'll have to do the business case to see what the ROI truly is.

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism were really the main competitors. The UiPath Academy, for one, was a big selling point. Other than that, just having conversations with other government agencies that have used UiPath and have succeeded in that development helped us make the decision to choose UiPath.

We have hundreds and hundreds of IT technical specialists. We have very sensitive information that must be protected, which is IT's primary focus.

I would rate UiPath as nine out of ten, not a ten just because of the pricing.

My advice to someone starting out with UiPath is to get third-party integrator support.

We are using UiPath primarily for process automation. We are trying to consolidate information, eliminate redundant manual tasks, and save some money.

I'm developing my first bot, so I can't answer that yet. I've just got my UiPath certification, been thrust into a project which I'm pretty excited about. I don't know what our client is going to ask as of yet. Obviously, those parameters are probably going to change weekly, if not daily. I think there's some scalability to UiPath that's going to make everything pretty convenient and easy to use.

The tool is very simple, even for a layman like myself without a coding background. It's a gateway to the process automation industry. I think this is really the simplest and easiest way to do it.

I used the UiPath Academy and got a certification. It was very easy to use, they are very patient, but it's not automatic. They are very diverse and applications are necessary. The steps just take you all the way through. If you reach a stopping point, you can literally just start over. Then you can try again with another series of questions, some more accessibilities, or different paths towards the same outcome. I loved it. I thought it was pretty simple and pretty easy to use. It's very non-stressful.

Regarding automation, we serve the federal government here, so I'm working for a very specific division in my company. We're serving the client, so I don't even know how new and exciting this is going to be. This is going to be huge. I think we're right on the cusp of all of it. The sky's the limit.

Due to the sensitivity of my project, I would like a new feature like some sort of generic interface or input where other UiPath users can examine our product or our situations and help us fix them. Some sort of official UiPath community within, where everyone can kind of help each other out.

The stability is fine. The only factor we have is a finicky customer. We need to help them with their choices, changes, reversals, augmentations, but it seems to be pretty simple and intuitive so far.

Our initial setup was pretty straightforward. We used it on a secure client-server, so there was no change from what I'd learned on my own and what I had to use in the work environment. It was pretty simple.

In as far as learning the product, it is almost free in its efficiency in teaching people like myself how to use it. With regards to the client, it's a little early yet, but they project incredible savings. One thing I should say about UiPath and process automation is that it's not an attempt to eliminate jobs. This is a huge misconception and stigma. It's an attempt to make working more efficient. In that respect, I think it'll save everyone a lot of money if they're willing to try it and implement it.

I've heard about some alternatives, but I haven't used them yet. UiPath is my first entrance into this. I really don't see the need to use anything else. The client likes it as well, so if they're happy with it, I have absolutely no desire to investigate anything else.

I would rate this solution as a solid nine out of ten, just because I haven't used it very long. I'm probably going to give it a ten. I don't know what else UiPath can do for me, and I'm sure there's more.