UiPath Platform Reviews

We use Orchestrator, Studio, and Robot to work with automation in our finance department.

The product improves how our organization functions by automating tasks so users aren't having to spend time doing mundane things.

The most valuable feature is the unattended robots as they completely take tasks out of the user's hands.

In the next release of the solution, I'd like to see process mining to analyze business processes through event logs. It would help the end-users determine what processes need to or can be automated.

As for areas of the solution that have room for improvement, the usability for the end-users could improve so that they will be better able to program on their own. Coupled with process mining capabilities, that could remove the need to involve programmers or IT in the automation of simple tasks. The cloud platform could be improved so we would be able to deploy through that with sufficient security.

On a scale from one to five where one is not stable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of the platform as a four. It is a four because I haven't seen any outages yet but we may need more experience with the product to be sure it is totally stable when we are completely live.

We have about four people are in our organization who are currently involved in our automation program and I can see that expanding as the company improves ease-of-use.

Our team has used UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the most beneficial, I would rate the UiPath Academy RPA training as a five. It is very good and very detailed.

We have also used customer support and it is good. When I called in they were helpful with answering questions that I had and they responded quickly. Usually, we had one person assigned to us that kind of helped us implement and who was familiar with our needs. This helped in several cases.

I was involved in the decision process to move to UiPath. We knew that we needed an RPA solution to take care of repetitive tasks that could be automated and we had been using solutions in other departments. We went through an RFP (Request for Proposal) process when the finance senior leadership wanted to see what RPA was about and how it could help in their processing. UiPath was one of three products that made it to the next stage of evaluations for this use case.

We did simultaneously use a different solution, which was Pega. UiPath was actually already being used in the company but the idea was to expand into the finance processes.

The initial setup process was straightforward. The complexity that we met with was because of the requirements of our own company. The setup, as far as the installation, was straightforward and simple. From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production was about three months.

We did use a consultant for the deployment. The company was PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited). On a scale from one to five where one is very bad and five is excellent. I would rate our experience with PwC as a three. They are not rated higher in our case because they didn't provide us with the best resources. They sent a younger team that seemed not to have really ever used UiPath.

We have only projected a total for return on investment and performance benefits from the solution through testing and past performance as we are not fully live yet. It will probably take six months to see the actual ROI when we know more about the performance benefits of full deployment. The solution has already helped to eliminate human error by about 25% and has saved our organization approximately 2,000 hours.

As far as pricing, I don't know what the company spends on the license. I do know about the robots. I think the attended robot is a little bit too pricey. With the unattended robots, we can put them on virtual machines — not really Citrix but regular virtual machines which are a little bit cheaper.

The vendors who were on our shortlist were UiPath, Pega, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. We chose UiPath because we already had the product in-house and we had already gone through all the security checks for the company requirements.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy. I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a three-out-of-five. I give it that rating rather than going a bit higher because it is a little bit difficult for the regular users to automate. In some cases, you have to be more of a programmer to automate successfully. Even so, it is better than other RPA tools.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the product over-all as an eight. It gets the job done, but there is still a lot of room for growth in the capabilities so that is why I think that eight is a justifiable rating.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching RPA solutions is to read up on what RPA is and what it can do for your company. That is where I would start. Then try to go to as many meetups or conferences as you can to find out more about the products and how they are being used.

We're a consultant, so we help customers use this solution to develop automation and help set up COE. We provide the means for an entire organization to build its use cases. That's how we use Orchestrator both attended and unattended.

The solution has helped eliminate human errors. The amount varies by specific use case, but it is sometimes 50% to 60%.

It has also saved organizations time. Internally, we're not at a stage where we've measured it. I would say right now it's not that great, but maybe 15 or 20 hours per person.

Orchestrator's value really comes from scheduling and jobs, where robots can trigger other robots. I can't speak to the new versions yet, but they all seem great. Attended is where the human and robot interaction can happen seamlessly. With unattended, some of the processes that were earlier so mundane are all being done without any human interaction, so that provides true end-to-end uninterrupted automation.

I would rate the ease of use for this solution as five out of five.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is awesome. It's top of the line, so I would also say that it should get a five out of five rating.

I talked to the product team. They are very passionate about this. In my opinion, all the different components that they have now released should be integrated under a single umbrella, available through a single landing page. That way, everything integrates with each other and they are able to communicate data back and forth. To me, that would be the ultimate solution.

I get it. There is a roadmap and it's a journey. Still, I would like to get to a place where everything integrates with each other. Now that we have all these different means that can help us enable a customer in their journey, making sure that they're integrated would truly add value. That removes the overhead of combining data from all these different sources.

I would rate its stability as five out of five. With any tool, there have been occasions when a job did not trigger or aborted, but that's been very rare in my experience.

I would say we have more than 20 users. There may even be around 50 users, if not more.

It was very easy to install this solution.

It does not take long from the time one purchases the UiPath license until they have a real bot in production. We do this mostly for our customers, but also for our own internal use case. We were able to get it done and up and running in weeks.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. The time to get an ROI varies from case to case. 

Attended is fairly cheap. Anytime you bring in Orchestrator, that starts to become a little more expensive. I'm a little concerned about all the new SKUs that are coming in and the products associated with them. I am really interested in finding out if someone wanted a full product suite, what kind of money are they looking at annually.

I would rate UiPath as ten out of ten. I've done implementations across tools, so I'm familiar with some of the other market leaders too. Honestly, though, UiPath is very good at keeping up with the times. It's easy to implement. Its ease of use and how quickly you can get set up and going stands out, in my view. They've got the bolt on the market, so even with the new launches that happen with some of the new tools that came in, I think Connect really speaks to an overall automation strategy. I think that sets it apart.

I'm working for one project where we're trying to automate processes for a logistics company, specifically in their back-office accounting processes.

We're using Studio, Orchestrator and the bots. In other words, we're using the whole platform.

When we were implementing it, we were empowering people. In this company, everybody has their own work and they were really in their own area. Then we started this project and they got empowered to change the way they were working. UiPath is so open that everybody can take part in it.

That was one thing that changed right away. Another thing was the way they think about processes and where there are possibilities to automate has really changed. Before, they never thought about automating all these processes but we told them there is a possibility. Now, when they're having strategy meetings, they have dedicated time slots where they're just talking about processes that could be automated. The whole mindset is changing now.

We have a virtual environment that we use.

We haven't touched the processes where there would be human errors that much. We started with the really basic ones that are so easy that people don't make errors there. We will get to the more complex processes, but we haven't yet.

The solution has definitely saved time.

Orchestrator lets you start a credential stair, so you can get the credentials in a safe way. Before this, they were afraid that credentials would be stored somewhere and people could see them. I think it's really important for our customers that you can do that in Orchestrator. The scheduling feature is also valuable of course.

In terms of ease of use, I would rate this solution as four out of five. I think it's very easy, but our customers are sometimes not so technical. When they come from the business side, it's somehow hard for them to understand.

I would give the RPA Academy training program five out of five. Without it, I don't think I could have started implementing this solution. I did the developer program just for a general understanding of how everything works: how Orchestrator works and how it all works together. For me, it was really important to do the training then. It was very good, so I really liked it.

It's really hard for me to get all the machine learning and AI parts. I think maybe that's going to get a little bit easier for me to understand how to really use it in the company. I don't really know what to do with it at the moment. I think that is something that could be improved.

I tested the live sessions and we saw some parts of StudioX. There were some things that were so easy there. I think it would be good if they would put it also in Studio, for example. The carts they have are in color. We try to get people in the company, even if they're not technical, to implement the bots or processes by themselves. I think some parts they changed in StudioX could be really helpful in Studio skills.

I would rate their stability as three to four out of five, but I would say that's probably because we don't know how to use it best. That is why we sometimes have issues that something's not working.

We are a consultancy firm but the customer that we are working with has about five people in the core team that are working with this solution.

Both customer support and technical support are very good. I think the chief from my customer and the UiPath technical team had many phone calls because the virtual machine didn't work at first. They were in contact and I think two days later it was working.

I can only speak for my client, who is undergoing a huge digital transformation. They're a small German company and they just know if they don't change something other companies will get ahead. In Germany, there are many family-owned firms and the owner just saw the need to change. We told them about RPA and they got very excited. We showed them the first pilot bot and they were set.

We chose UiPath, for the same reasons you can read on the internet. If you look at the Gartner and Forrester reports, I think they all say UiPath. Also, it's just so easy to get started. You just download the community edition and you're starting. Then you do the Academy and you actually know how to do it. It's very easy and very fast. All the statistics say it's the best.

In terms of the setup, because we were using the community edition first, and then we licensed it afterward, we had the first bot running in about a month.

We have seen ROI and performance benefits. We are still at the beginning but we can definitely see it. I think we could see after about a week that we had processes that the company didn't have to do anymore and so they had more time. 

So far, our first customer started with just Orchestrator and an unattended bot, along with a couple of studio licenses. I don't know the cost. Maybe $25,000 for the year.

I would definitely say it's worth the money.

We did a little research obviously. We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but that's it. We didn't really look too deep. We just saw UiPath and said, "Okay, I think that's a fit for us." And then we went for it.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten because of what I see from the stage we're in now. There are things that can improve and they are all working on improvement. I still think that at its current state, it's really beneficial for a lot of companies.

I would recommend UiPath. I like the company and I like their products.

We are using Studio and the attended robots, but we haven't implemented Orchestrator yet.

Our primary use is to automate tasks within the accounts receivable, accounts payable, and trade settlement realm that we work in. We're also getting into some more internal audit automation.

We run automations in Windows Virtual Machines. It was a long process for us to get started, getting our IS to buy into letting us set up this environment and get started with it.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a two or three. They offer upfront training, the UiPath Academy, and that makes it easier but you still need to have a technical mindset to understand it, as it is now.

We have all used the Academy. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. It's a great experience and very beneficial.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately six months. It took us a while because we had a bunch of other projects in front of getting our first automation. The process was hard, although it was not complicated. The approval process involved going through a security review. 

We have not found that our automations have saved us money, yet. However, it's giving people back the time so that they can do more value-added work.

With respect to saving time, we have just measured the out rate. We're probably saving thirty hours a week with what we have going now, so almost one FTE.

This solution has absolutely helped reduce or eliminate human errors, although I cannot estimate by how much at this time.

Using this solution has definitely increased the confidence and communication that we have between departments because we're saving a lot of department time, and they can focus on their value-added tasks. With this, they're a lot more willing to work with us, and they're happier employees.

The most valuable features of Studio are all of the activities that UiPath and their partners have developed.

The biggest problem that we have when working with this solution is the selectors. If there was a little more flexibility with the selectors, and they were a little bit more adaptive, I think it would be helpful.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution four and a half to five. We haven't had any problems.

Currently, we have twelve automations running.

In our organization, we have three people directly doing automation and design work. There are probably six or seven more than are trying to get the larger enterprise into UiPath and get their departments set up with it.

The technical support for this solution is excellent. They got back to me really quickly and provided the solutions that I needed. It was very helpful.

We were not using another RPA solution prior to this one. In deciding to invest in this technology, we recognized that people were doing a lot of tedious processes and that we can make better use of their time.

Huron Consulting assisted us with the implementation and deployment, and they were very helpful. On a scale from one to five, I would rate them a five.

We have been asked to start measuring for tracking ROI but have not yet begun. However, I can say informally that we have seen performance benefits. People are very happy with the things we've automated so far and they're just glad to be relieved of some of that tedious work.

Right now we only have a couple of Studio licenses and a couple of bots, so we're at about $8,000 USD per year. We're hoping to ramp that up pretty soon.

We evaluated Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere before choosing this solution.

One of the major reasons that we chose UiPath was because they gave a free trial at the time when we were looking at it, and none of the other vendors did. Then they also have the UiPath Academy, which allowed us to look at it first and then learn how to use it before we actually had to make an investment.

From a cost perspective, the unattended robots are going to be of more benefit because they can run twenty-four hours a day. At the same time, the attended robots are pretty affordable. I think we're coming up with more use cases where people have it on their desktop and want to be able to run it on demand. We have definitely benefited from both types of robots.

We are looking forward to some of the new features that are going to be released. One of them is in the UI, where you can document what your processes have and figure out if any have the potential for automation. That is going to be very helpful.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to first speak with a partner. If someone is new and hasn't been in this space before, it's going to be kind of confusing and they're going to need somebody to guide them it setting it up.

This is a really great product and there's a lot of potential for it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have robots and we have Orchestrator and we are exploring the new analytics model over the next few months. Right now, our primary use is mostly operational processes and deploying apps for the global operations team. We have multiple automation processes in place for them already.

The product has improved the way our organization functions in a lot of ways. Mostly, I would say it improves our processing efficiency. When you have one person working eight to five to take care of tasks and can replace that, instead, with a bot that can work 24 hours a day to onboard customers or entering information to a form, that drives a lot of value for the organization. With that benefit and decreasing human error as well, that turns into a lot of value for a global organization like us.

The most valuable feature in UiPath is different from one process that we build to the next. I would say that the ease of configuring new processes may be one of the most consistently valuable features for our robot production. Creating a process is just a drag-and-drop solution most of the time. With this automated feature for process creation, it is very easy to make what we need, and that ease-of-use is valuable.

There are a few areas where the product can be improved for our use. Invoice processing, for us, is a major use case. I saw some examples in our research that mentioned machine learning models and how to implement that in the new, upcoming version. It seems that the machine learning would solve some of our current issues in processing. That is one feature that I would like to see and experiment with when it is released. I want to explore that to see not only what it can do, but how efficient it is and how it affects the performance of invoice processing models. The other feature we are interested in that is promised to be in the next release is the VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) desktop. 

Those two features, for us, are critical. But we also need them to be fast and efficient for us to be able to use it in practice. Otherwise, we are going to continue struggling with the solutions we already have. The solutions are kind of already there in UiPath, and I think they need to work hard on the performance of anything they release. This is especially true for those two solutions. For us to have a good business case for deploying them for use, we need them to be efficient.

A feature that we tried to use that clearly has room for improvement is the UiPath Computer Vision component. We have tried to use that but it was not efficient enough for our planned applications. It was a little disappointing. It needs to be improved in performance and in the design of the machine learning models. It is pretty easy to use for people considering the technology. I just don't think it is quite to the point where it should be.

On a scale from one to five with one being the least stable and five being the most, I would rate the stability of UiPath as pretty stable. For us, it has really been a five.

We have 35 employees involved in the automation program doing configuration. We also have three platform administrators and a bunch of automation champions right now — there are quite a few of the latter.

Customer support, in general, is pretty good. They are very responsive. We have one dedicated support person in New York and we always get support right away. But there are other facets to UiPath technical support.

The classroom and Academy training are both easy to use and beneficial. On a scale of one to five where five is the best, I would rate these resources as a five-out-of-five. It was and is beneficial and it is available to help the staff get oriented to the product and resolve production issues.

We have 35 configurators. Of those 35, I will say that only five or ten of them were formally and personally trained by a trainer at our site in Costa Rica. The rest — and really most of the configurators — have been trained only using the UIPath Academy suite. So, with some senior resources available and the Academy, you can establish a team of proficient configurators in a very short time.

The reason why we choose UiPath was because they let us play with the tool before we bought into it. We were looking at many vendors for an RPA solution, but the other vendors wanted us to pay first before they would let us explore the products and what they could do. With UiPath we were able to play first without paying and that's something that was attractive and showed that the company was forward-thinking and confident. We explored the product and saw that it was something that could help us to solve some of our problems. So that is why we identified it as a solution and eventually selected it as the product that was going to cover our processing needs.

The initial setup was pretty easy because we had the assistance of UiPath experts on-site. They helped us with the first deployment. They did a lot to help make it pretty easy. It might be more accurate to say it was not easy, but that because of them it went smoothly. That's what their group was there to do: sort out modeling problems pretty quickly and get the product to production.

We used a consultant and our experience with them on a scale from one to five where five is the best, I would say they were a five-out-of-five. They knew what they were doing and were excellent in promoting the deployment. We have no complaints about their services or the result.

We have automated a lot of things and realized about a million-dollar return on investment in about a year-and-a-half. There is still a lot more to do in our company. We are big, so we have a lot of opportunities for automation and we are expected to be producing even more benefits than we already have. But a million-dollar return on investment is pretty good and is only the beginning of what we will eventually realize.

Right now we have around 200 licenses in terms of the bots we have in production. I know the cost is about $200,000 or $300,000 per year. I am not sure about additional costs.

From what I understand UiPath is cheap when you compare the costs to other vendors in the same market. In any case, the price seems to be good in comparison to the actual benefit. We also have some type of special agreement for pricing discounts because we are one of the early adopters who engaged with UiPath for use of the product. I feel we have some very special treatment and the price, for us, is reasonable and convenient.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight out of ten. The reason why it is an eight and not a ten is because there are some specific considerations — especially in performance and machine learning — that we believe has a lot of room for improvement. They are starting to introduce the functionality, they are doing a good thing in introducing it, but there could be a lot of improvement.

If I would make a recommendation for people considering automation options, I would say that they should take advantage of manufacturers that let you play with their product to evaluate if a particular solution is convenient for you. This is the reason why UiPath became the more convenient option for our company when we were looking to start with process automation.

For us, the virtual implementation has been working well because we have deployed everything that we automated in our Citrix environment. Now the new question is how easy it will be to interact with target applications through our VDI desktop. Resolving that to this point has been pretty tough for us and it is actually one of our constraints in making processes work efficiently.

Robotic processing has helped to eliminate human errors and reducing human error is definitely one of the basic benefits that those moving into robotics should expect — if they are approaching automation correctly.

The solution also saved our organization time. For example, we had the one case where we had to onboard around 2 million customers. What that would take in terms of manual hours is about a month and a half. Instead, using RPAs, we were able to complete the task in one week. That is just one example. We have multiple examples in three years of automation. 

We use Studio, Orchestrator, attended and unattended robots.

We use this solution to solve the things that people don't want to do. They spend a lot of time and there is a high potential to make manual errors. Quality suffers because it takes too long and users can get fatigued. There are the things that we are targeting and we have already seen some of the benefits.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. It is easy, but there are some improvements that can be made.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. It is my lifeline. 

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately six to eight months. I felt that the process was complicated, in part because of UiPath but also partly because of internal things.

Internally, in order to get set up, the entire infrastructure needs to be in place. All of the servers have to be set up and you need the right permissions because the bots need their own security. You have to explain to people that this is going to be a service account, and you have to explain the need for it. These are all internal, but necessary issues.

This solution has saved our organization time. I would estimate that the bots save us four weeks every month.

In terms of eliminating human errors, this solution absolutely helps in that regard. The bots don't make any mistakes. Rather, they point out the mistakes that have been made by humans so far.

The ability that this solution has to work with Excel is really good.

The SAP feature looks helpful and we are going to explore that functionality in our next project. 

We don't like the attended bot experience, where it requires the user to be hands-off. We installed it on the user's machine, and the user should not touch the mouse or keyboard because the moment they do, it crashes. It takes over the machine and cannot work in the background. For this reason, it is difficult to work out scenarios that are purely attended. 

For example, we have a process that downloads two files and then does some massaging of the data. Now, the data needs to be looked at by the user. An email is sent and the files are deposited into a common folder, and the user will address the task when they have time. After the user manipulates some of the data or makes decisions, it can proceed to the next step.

They drop the modified files into the common folder, but the bot doesn't react because there is no feature in Orchestrator to trigger based on the arrival of a new file. Instead, we have to put in a call to check periodically, whether it be five minutes, fifteen minutes or some other interval. This is something that we don't find desirable.

Creating a trigger that is based on either the arrival of a file or the arrival of an email is a common scenario and it should be built into the platform so that I don't have to code for it every time. As it is now, there are only two ways to trigger a bot.

Orchestrator does not have a good filtering mechanism to look for jobs, and the table view needs to be improved.

From the UiPath side, one thing that irritates me is that you cannot find the downloads to upgrade to the new version. I'm a paid customer and I log in with my credentials, but I cannot download it. I need to create a ticket, tell them who I am, and I have to give them a long list of things that I don't remember. They will address the ticket maybe today or tomorrow, and then finally I get a response. When I use other tools like Microsoft and SAP, as a customer or subscriber of the tool, I just download the latest versions and install them on my servers. When I have a mandate to do work, I want to be able to do it. However, when I can't download the file and have to wait for a ticket to be answered, this wastes my time.

The integration with Elasticsearch and Kibana is a struggle. They are not UiPath products, but they are recommended by UiPath. Some documentation is provided, but it is an Orchestrator installer package the just installs itself. I had to do a lot of experimentation on Windows machines because the configuration is different for Linux machines, and this gave me some trouble. There is a lot of information about this in the UiPath forums and I spent a lot of time on it.

Right now, I have a set of configuration data that I put into an Excel file. The users can change the file and my app will run using the configuration variables. A problem occurs if the Excel file is not closed properly because there are locking issues. This is a pain because the bot crashes when opening a locked file. There is something in Orchestrator called Assets, but it is kind of limited. It only accepts text and a credential. It would be nice if it had a simple database table, say to be able to create a couple of columns that I want to set up for a bot-related task. Rather than a single piece of text, there is a whole table of information. My users will be able to edit it, based on the permission that I assign. Then the bot will look at it and work according to what is specified. This would be a great feature to have.

I would like to see the Studio web-based so that we don't have to install it on everybody's desktop. 

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I have never had any problems with the platform itself. I haven't had to restart the servers or anything like that.

We have three people in the organization who work with the bots.

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

In deciding whether and RPA would benefit us, we followed the guidelines that UiPath provided, which is a twelve-step validation process. If processes are unchanging, there is a lot of manual work, there is the potential for errors, and it's simple to automate, etc, then RPA may be suitable. Based on this assessment, we made the investment in RPA.

Our own team was responsible for the implementation.

We have recognized ROI through savings in employee hours. For our PoC, with two projects, we saved one full-time employee.

It took us one year to see ROI, although I don't think that we have saved any money yet because of the development time. If we negate the development cost then it might be $60,000 USD, as a developer's salary, but we're not there yet. One of the things that I am trying to do is motivate people to look at more processes that we can automate because right now, my bots are sleeping and I want to put them to work.

Our licensing fees are approximately $140,000 USD annually, which includes all of the bots, Orchestrator, and the Studio.

In our company, there is another group that had already implemented UiPath, and they have had good success. We followed their lead, but in addition, we reviewed other sources such as the Gartner ranking. The features set was also considered during the evaluation.

I feel that the cost of the bot is worth it, provided that we make use of it. The unattended bot is cheaper, but it is useless for us right now because there is no use case. We think that Studio X might change that, and I've heard that the Studio X license includes the attended bot. So, if we swap the attended bot license that we currently have then we could take them away and then get the Studio X license, and that will motivate more people to make their own automations.

No organization has unlimited resources, but the business is changing around us and we are always tasked with new things to do. In that aspect, you have to make room for innovation, and you have to automate.

UiPath has shown tremendous gains with this solution. They're sitting on the shoulders of Microsoft .NET, and they've shown some initiative on what you can do with a generic platform. They offer free training and a Community Edition for people to experiment with, and it can do wonders for the world. We have seen that happening and I love that.

This is a company that is listening to customers' feedback and I think that they should keep doing that.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to start by watching all of the videos. Go through the UiPath Academy and get a feel of what it can do. Read all of the case studies and see what other people have done. You will get a feeling for the ROI. Then download the Community Edition and play with it to see for yourself what gain you can get from this tool. Finally, start small and just keep adding to it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Orchestrator and robots.

Our primary use for this solution is Accounts Payable invoice automation.

We run automations in the virtual environment provided by the Amazon service. Our implementation has been finicky at times. The latest release is a lot more stable, but I've had a two-week production outage where DLLs weren't registered and someone from Vegas had to log in for eight hours to our servers. They had to uninstall and reinstall the solution, as well as all of the different apps. I lost a bit of faith in the solution with that incident.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four. It's pretty easy to use, but it wouldn't be a five because it isn't doing everything for me. Things still need to be done.

I have not taken the Academy training but my team has. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a four.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately two weeks. The process was pretty straightforward.

With respect to saving time, the last company I worked with was trying to save one thousand FTE. So far, they are already at sixty FTE, and in Australia, we're at ten FTE.

This solution has helped us to reduce human errors, although it has created other errors.

Orchestrator has a lot of good features including the configuration, the queues, the transaction reporting, the logs, and accessibility.

This technology gives you the ability to build a solution using any legacy system.

I would like to see more support for the cloud in Australia.

A tool that better identifies the processes, watches the computer and works it out for me, would be an improvement.

The stability of this solution has improved since we started using it. Now that I have done an upgrade, it seems to be a lot better.

I was running High-Density on the 2016.2 or 2016.3 version, and I had a lot of problems. I couldn't determine whether they were just UiPath issues or it could be partly attributed to the client app. What we noticed was that if you log in as Console, you have far fewer issues than if you run High-Density.

These days, I would rate the stability a four out of five. 

We had between fifty and a hundred people working in the automation program in the old company.

I have only used technical support once and my experience with them was not good. That was during our two-week outage.

We used Blackbook.ai to assist us with our implementation and our experience with them was awesome. 

We have seen ROI from this solution in terms of money saved. Just in Australia, we have saved a million dollars. In India, we have saved maybe five million dollars.

At the last company I worked with, the annual licensing fees were $700,000 USD.

From a cost perspective, I have an issue with the price of the bots. At the company that I was with previously, we were paying $3,600 USD per bot. With the new company that I am at, because we're new and we don't have the size, we are paying $8,000 USD per bot.

It was 2016 when I evaluated this solution, and it had a small market share at the time.

Everything I had read about Blue Prism said that it was too heavy, too old school, and had too much development ramp-up time. I looked at Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Automation Anywhere had a good price point, especially for a PoC. However, in between Blackbook.ai and what I saw out of UiPath, I felt that UiPath was the better option.

This solution is pretty good. It's an enabler. There is a lot of investment and a lot of new things. My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to make sure that it is set up to scale correctly.

What I would like to see is everything as a SaaS, completely, bots included, and I want it hosted in Australia.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use all three of the UiPath components which include: Studio, Roboyo, and Orchestrator. There are a bunch of use cases that we explored for the POC (Proof of Concept) to be sure the product fits with our expectations for automation. For example, one use case is reconciliation processes for insurance group retirement and LOB (Law on Occupational Benefits) plans. We built it, tested it, and now that is one of the primary things we use the product for.

This solution has improved the way our organization functions in several ways. It has helped to eliminate human errors. It already saves 20 hours per month for reconciliation and LOB. It helped clients schedule their transactions before the end of the month. All of that automates tasks and makes financial processing faster in the insurance industry. That works out great for us.

The most valuable features provide solutions for when I am using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. It easily integrates with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, and ABBYY OCR. We are using that integration feature to incorporate OCR mostly for reading scans. To interact with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, or ABBYY OCR, you don't need to implement a separate component but you can just — in a blink of an eye — integrate those peripheral solutions into the UiPath Studio and use them in your automated processes.

If we can integrate other features that are not part of UiPath, it makes it far more useful in automation. In this case, UiPath is not building out an actual OCR component but they are just giving you an option to incorporate the other OCRs. That is very valuable.

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see the ability to grant permission to users at the job level. Some jobs or processes may need to belong to only one person. Right now, I believe we don't have that feature in UiPath and we can't assign a job to a user. We can give permissions on a tenant level, or we can give permissions on the environment level, but not at the job or process level. 

I would like to see the ability in UiPath to be able to assign each job or each process to a particular user and give that user some specific access and privilege. For example, maybe they should only be able to run or stop a particular job or a particular process, but they can not do anything else. That makes a lot of sense because all users may not need to see all the processes in Orchestrator in one instance or have access to administrative features. The same goes for a tenant or even in an environment. If UiPath can make that happen at the user-level or process-level for a robot, that helps a lot to enable customized bots.

On a scale from one to five where five is the best and one the worst, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform at a four-out-of-five. The stability is a four instead of a five because the stability is not completely dependent on only UiPath. Underlying obligations play a part too. Sometimes when I am writing applications, I'm not up on how to handle every exception. That is not possible because a developer does not know all the scenarios an application can become involved with. In that scenario, the product can lag. But, otherwise, it is really a very good solution that is dependable and stable.

Approximately five people in our organization are involved in our automation program working in the CoE (Center of Excellence). There are four developers and there are 200 users including business users. So, you can say there are around 250 people currently involved in this. I don't think scalability is an issue.

We did have the opportunity to use UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where five is the most beneficial, I would rate the training as a four-out-of-five. It is good for basic understanding. We have usually had UiPath foundation training for all of our developers. Really, I think you can say that we have not put fully utilized it.

Other parts of technical support we have only used very minimally. For example, we have not used premium support or licensed support levels. Sometimes we called customer support on tickets to integrate with mainframe obligations the first time or some more involved issues. But that type of situation was unusual. We have barely used the customer support because most of the information is available in Academy, in the portals, or the user forums. A few times when we left a ticket, it was not even necessary for us to get back to technical support because we resolved the issue on our own.

We knew that we had an opportunity to invest in a new solution when we heard about RPA three years back. UiPath and WorkFusion came to us at the same time and saying, "We have a solution to improve your work processes."

We spent some time evaluating which tool was right for us by doing a study inside our organization to determine how much manual work could be automated. With some analysis, we found out that there is a huge opportunity for implementing this type of RPA solution in AXA (global insurance, not an acronym) as it is a large organization with a lot of repeated processes.

Because there was a lot of manual work, people in our organization had to work for more hours at times to properly complete a job. Sometimes they had to stay overnight and work additional hours on weekends to complete processing on time. To avoid that we requested that operations consider our proposal for automation.

We showed operations where we could automate repeatable and mundane tasks. The response was very positive and they realized we need to implement these solutions to help us to buy some time for employees to properly do their work and reduce labor intensity.

Our previous solution was either no solution at all except for manual labor or some experience we had with one tool called OpenSpan. OpenSpan did not have a proper management console and was difficult to use so it mostly remained unimplemented. When we introduced the potential solution for seriously pursuing RPA to reducing the workload, that is when we started looking at UiPath.

The set up for the product is straightforward. It is seamless. In fact, you just need to know the server where it will reside. There is material available in UiPath guides and the UiPath forum where you can just follow along step-by-step and install your Orchestrator. So it is very straightforward. 

From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production is not exactly clear. We had developed a POC, which was ready to be put into production and then we bought a license. After we bought the license, we just put it into production and it had already been built.

We did the entire implementation ourselves with some contact with UiPath.

We are not yet really realizing a return on investment as our deployment continues to be in progress. How much money we have saved is what we are hoping to eventually count in the ROI. In terms of the calculations that we started last year, we asked that the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) points look at time-saving and not really the dollar saving. The time saving you can say approximately 20 hours per month, which we have achieved consistently up until now. We have achieved something but we are expecting that to grow a lot.

The solution has also helped to eliminate human errors. I cannot say exactly what that percentage is —  say even 20% or something like that. There are a couple of instances before we automated the reconciliation process last month — before we actually put the bot into production — where people were getting the wrong details by mistake. I would say we have reduced the human error because those situations are being handled by the bot and they will not be repeated now. 

We license the product on a yearly basis and it costs us around $80,000. We are a very large organization. We have unattended bots and there is a pricing structure surrounding that but I'm not involved in the licensing terms.

What made us choose UiPath to automate our processes was evaluating the capabilities of competition and deciding on the best solution for us. We compared UiPath, WorkFusion and other products — and even other types of tools — in terms of infrastructure, setup, how easily it could be scaled, etcetera. UiPath stood out a little as it had the capability to invoke virtual machines automatically without any human intervention. A lot of other tools didn't have that capability at that point. But the time we had to come down to a decision, UiPath had features that were not available in any of the other tools. With other research into the company and product, we saw that UiPath listened to the customers' needs and was often upgrading. Now all the competition has seen them as the leader and they have tried to incorporate features UiPath had already deployed.

That initial difference we saw between UiPath and the other tools we compared was the reason we took this direction. We believed UiPath and we decided that this was our theater for RPA. Now, if we see some enhancements that need to be made in the product, we just communicate to UiPath and we know they will look at the idea and maybe implement it. UiPath has the capability of adding features immediately. They are releasing around 10 or more versions in a year with important new features. 

We do use a virtual environment such as Citrix when it is appropriate and that works out pretty well. The obvious advantage is there is no dependency on a physical machine being available and they are available 24/7 from anywhere. I am actually comfortable developing anything and everything in Citrix via virtual machines.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease-of-use of the platform as a five. Ease of use is one other thing that I like a lot about UiPath.

Going a step further, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product overall as a ten compared to other RPA solutions. In comparison to its nearest competitor — Blue Prism — UiPath is way ahead in terms of providing features, giving customer support, ease of use, ease of access to our personal history, and surely in the development of robots.

Everybody can understand easily what exactly the product is doing and can become familiar with it quickly. With other competitors, there is a huge infrastructure to set up. Some of the products make it so each bot needs a control room. Those products are not centralized, which makes them more confusing to use.

People have to manage on their own how they are going to build all their RPA management solutions. When you are using UiPath, you just get Orchestrator instead of multiple robots and control panels, then you just scale whenever you want.

I definitely recommend UiPath for simplicity and ease-of-use. If somebody was getting an RPA solution, the advice I would give them is to definitely go for it. Setting up RPAs eliminates human error in tasks and lightens workloads for menial jobs. This lets people focus on more innovative work and it can lead to further integration. What I would think is the natural path for UiPath is that it can integrate the AI in the future. Right now, people think that this is already cognitive or AI integrated, but there is a very long way to go in the future for it to become truly like artificial intelligence.

So, what I am saying is I would take it as a first step towards the AI. I would definitely recommend people use it so that in future when AI comes in, you can just grab an AI solution from UiPath and improve your implementations further.