UiPath Platform Reviews

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 are using Studio and Orchestrator, and we purchased an unattended bot.

Our UiPath is integrated with Kibana, which is a free tool.

Our primary use of this solution is to automate manual processes. We have approximately eighty use cases to automate.

The RPA team includes two developers, a manger, and two BPOs.

We run automations in a virtual environment, but I am not familiar with the details.

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 five. We just drag and drop. If you want to write something we use "Type Into". If you want to click, we use the corresponding click application. For me, it's very easy, and we also have tutorials available on the UiPath website. That is something that is very useful for everyone who wants to learn, and even a non-programmer can start learning to become a developer.

The Academy RPA training was very beneficial and I would rate it a five out of five. You cannot skip one step. There are ten sections and you cannot skip any of them. It means that until you pass a certain test, it will not allow you to go to the next lesson. This restricts people from jumping directly into another section. I really like the training and it is very easy. The tutorials are not very lengthy, they are simple, and the way they are explained is relatable. The practice tests that were conducted at the end were really helpful.

We partnered with IVy to create our first two pilot bots, and from the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately six months. It was very easy because they helped us.

This solution obviously helps us when it comes to eliminating human errors. I cannot estimate the percentage, but our company is manual process-intensive. We have a lot of manual processes like invoicing, where we have a process with the business team. They pull out an invoice number and a purchase order number from a PDF, and the source PDF is not structured. When it was being done manually, they had encountered issues entering data into one of their applications. This is one place where human errors have been reduced.

Using this solution has saved us time. For example, we have a huge process and I have heard that it saves us millions of dollars every year. Each human takes forty hours to complete the task, whereas it takes the unattended bot between ten and fifteen minutes.

Any savings in time for humans gives them time to work on something else.

The most valuable feature in Studio is the macros. They are very useful but at the same time, it depends on how we write them.

UiPath is very easy to learn.

When we deploy code into Orchestrator, sometimes there are macro activities that worked in Studio but do not work correctly in production. For example, I have implemented a Text Reading Activity that worked fine in Studio, but after deploying the code into Orchestrator it does not read the text exactly. I was able to create a workaround by using a split function in the code. It was reading the text fine because the data is being read using split functions, but this is something that I would like to see fixed.

I would like to see more AI and natural language processing.

Having chatbots available would be a helpful inclusion in a future release of this solution.

Customer support and technical support are very nice. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

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

We partnered with IVy to assist us with the implementation. They helped us with two pilot bots. One of them was not up to the mark, so our CEO decided to have it reprogrammed. I would rate them a four out of five.

We have our own IT team that looks after connecting the servers with Orchestrator.

I am not updated regularly about how much money this solution saves us, but I have recently heard that we saved $400,000 USD in six months.

After our CEO decided to invest in RPA, we chose UiPath because it is easy to learn.

I have heard of Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, but I have not learned them or worked with them.

We are looking forward to the new tools, and when they launch, we are definitely going to use them.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to speak with UiPath. Many people do not know how to start. The basic things they should have are a proper PDD (Process design document) and a recording of the manual process. These two things are essential. It is also very important to hire the right partner if you do not have your own developers because some of them are not up to the mark.

This solution is simple and easy to implement. I know there are lots of new features coming and every year they are providing good solutions with every release. There is always something new that minimized errors in previous versions.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

Our primary use for this solution started with automating processes in finance, procurement, and HR. Now, we are researching various directions in logistics.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment. This is something that we are trying to avoid.

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. I'm an IT-based person, and for IT people it is easy to learn. UiPath claims that it is easy to learn and it's for everybody, but it's not true. For business people, it is hard to learn and hard to understand how to code to make things work. They need a lot of help with things like exception handling. If somebody lacks technical or programming skills then it makes it much more difficult to use. Although UiPath is getting closer to business users, there are still some basic skills that they need to have to make it work.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. When I get new hires it doesn't matter whether they have previous experience in RPA or development, they have to go through all of the basic training from the Academy. This includes the Orchestrator and I've been recommending SAP training because we are experiencing growth in the use of SAP. Going to my team, this is the base, and then we have created our internal framework and standards that also require training. Some people may already have experience with UiPath or Blue Prism, but they still need to take the training from the Academy.

Before I arrived at the company, there were already some automations running. However, fifteen months ago we shut down a couple of robots because they were failing terribly. From that time, it took us five months to create the first robot.

We have a project that combines UiPath with OCR and our integration tool. This allows us to automate processes we use in different projects that are coming from different vendors in different countries. Apart from gathering the information, we are template invoicing. The robots take invoice information and post the results into our SAP and other systems. It is much faster than our original process. This has been implemented in Spain, and we are now releasing it to other countries, one by one.

Using this solution is not just about saving time or reducing the number of staff. It is also for improving stability and decreasing the number of errors that we have. In Spain, where we were implementing a pilot project for purchase orders, we saw a decrease in the number of human errors. When they started, there was an error rate of ten percent. After three months in production, the error rate decreased to five or six percent, and after six months it was one or two percent. Also, even though there was still an error rate, it was consistent and it is something that we can account for.

In terms of money savings, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

The most valuable feature is Studio, which allows developers to specifically focus on development. Orchestrator allows us to connect those things together.

I would like to see some use cases and additional information on the process mining and the OCR features that are being released. There are other products that offer OCR features, and at this point, it is hard for me to determine the benefit of using UiPath for OCR rather than integrating it with another solution. This is not just from a business perspective, but from a development perspective as well. For example, I would like to see how you can connect UiPath to all of the applications to collect the logs and the data. Then, how we can put that information together. If there is a thirty-minute delay then how do you identify whether it was because the person went to lunch, or rather that they were working and thinking.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a three.

The stability of this solution really depends on the developer or the execution. It's not always a UiPath issue. If the process is unstable, it's the issue of the business case and not the actual execution of any development. So it really depends on how you use the platform and how you understand it. We will use a more stable technology, such as alerting through an API, before we go to the UI path.

We have about one hundred licenses for production and four Orchestrators.

Both customer support and technical support are really good. Whenever I have a question, whether it is business, Studio, or Orchestrator related, I usually get an answer. We have our own customer success manager who helps us on a daily basis. I also have connections to the lab and to the production team so I can ask questions there as well.

At this company, they did not have an RPA solution in place before this one.

Personally, I have also used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. From my perspective, it's about how you use the tool, and not about which tool you use. Personally, I don't like Automation Anywhere, and I used to be a Blue Prism guy.

I feel that Blue Prism is easier to learn because you can do things in terms of processes or objects. Logically, it is easier. In UiPath there are more options, but it's also harder to learn because you need to create a logical structure on your own. It doesn't show you how to do that in an easier way. UiPath has more connections and more inbuilt stuff than Blue Prism, but on the other hand, the navigation between the types of variables is slightly different. It's not a disadvantage, but it is something that takes time to learn.

I find that Automation Anywhere is not that user-friendly. For example, in Blue Prism you have loops that you can put a component into. In Automation Anywhere, you have to copy all of those stages, one-by-one. You cannot create a loop, which is basic.

We have not been tracking ROI yet, although we are working on it. It is difficult to calculate because to collect the information for each process it requires a logging system. Each project will require a specific logging system so that we can collect the same information to compare and evaluate it. We have to consider our development costs, maintenance costs, licensing costs, etc. At this point, we do not have enough people to work on this, so it is a work in progress.

They ran a selection process here and my understanding is that Blue Prism was not able to provide a free Studio license, unlike the policy they now have in place. This is the reason that UiPath was selected. 

The majority of our use cases are unattended, and that is the way that you should go. We do use attended bots as digital assistants, where you have small automations that are triggered by the users on their own to direct the robot. These are two separate products.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is not to be scared to use it. Play with it as much as possible and see if it brings value. There are different applications that can bring more value in certain cases.

Overall, this is a good solution, but there are always ways to improve a product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Studio, the Orchestrator, and we have attended and unattended robots.

Our primary use case is automating back-office processes from the corporate side. One example is the automation for ticket closure for some of the customer complaints. We also use it to fill information gaps between systems. Instead of having information run through standard APIs, we have it copied over from one system to another.

We run automations in a virtual environment, and the implementation was pretty easy and quick.

We used the Community Edition before purchasing our license. From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one week. We found it to be very easy and very fast. We, as a Contact Center, usually face a lot of problems when we suggest any requirements. When we started with RPA, it took approximately one month for a very complex process to be automated.

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 five. It is very easy. You can use the UI, or you can use APIs for the connection. In the end, you can do it.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five, for sure. In two or three weeks, an RPA developer can do everything.

In the Contact Center, the key issue is the handling time. RPA has helped us to decrease our time, and eventually, it will help to decrease the headcount.

For one of our processes, it reduced the time it takes from five minutes to somewhere between forty and fifty seconds. That saves a lot of time.

In terms of eliminating human errors, there has not been much difference because we have very strict processes and strict steps for them, so human error was minimal, to begin with. Our success is in the reduction of time to complete them.

The unattended, back-office robots are the most beneficial feature.

The Form Builder for back-end robots needs to be a web portal instead of a full desktop application. 

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution between three and four. For exception handling, it means that a senior RPA developer has to understand the reasons behind the process. If they have not been exposed to it then it is easier to perform some simple fixes and continue the process.

We have implemented eighteen processes so far, they are they used in several departments. In total, we have approximately four thousand people who are using this solution.

From a scalability point of view, we're not that confident that we can have the robots running twenty-four hours a day with a huge transaction. Being a telecom operator, we have a lot of transactions and the stability of the unattended robots needs some enhancement.

I think that both customer support and technical support are very good. When we have any questions or any issues, we are connected immediately. 

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

We learned about RPA because one of the contractors was working on an RPA PoC at our company, and we were convinced that it could help us a lot. The IT people were invited to see the technology and from there, they decided to implement it with our in-house IT group.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. We used the Community Edition and it is very easy to use. 

We performed the implementation on our own.

We realized ROI in approximately six months. Our cost savings come from savings in agents.

From a cost perspective, unattended robots are better. They run twenty-four hours a day and do not require running on a client machine. The attended robots are not as cost-effective.

We did evaluate one other RPA solution before choosing this one. Our main reasons for choosing UiPath were the price and the ease of development. The Community Edition is very useful, and we are easily able to find RPA developers working in UiPath. This is different than with some of the competing products.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is that it is easy to download and it has a big community. A PoC can be done easily, and you can decide from there whether this solution is suitable.

This is a good solution, but the stability of the unattended robots needs to be improved.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and bots.

We are a consulting company that is working with one of our clients to automate back-office accounting processes for a logistics company. There are five people in the core team who are working on the implementation.

We run automations in a virtual environment, but I was not responsible for the implementation.

With respect to how easy it is to automate the company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it four. It's very easy, but it is difficult to explain to our customers who are not as technical. In other words, it is difficult for people who are coming from the business side.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. Without it, I don't think that I could have started the implementation. I completed the developer program just for a general understanding of how everything works, including the Orchestrator and how it all works together. For me, the training was really important. It was very good and I really liked it.

We were working with the Community Edition at first, but from the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one month.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we expect to see this benefit later. Until this point, we haven't touched the processes where there could be human errors. We just started with the really basic ones, which are so easy that people don't make errors there, and neither do the bots. We plan to get to the more complicated processes next.

With respect to saving time, I can say that this solution has helped, but at this point, I don't know by how much.

While we were implementing this solution, we were empowering people. This solution changed the way people are working because it is so open and everybody can take part in it. It caused them to think about their processes in a different way, with automation in mind and possibilities for the future. Now, when they're having strategy meetings, they have dedicated time slots where they're just talking about processes that could be automated, so the whole mindset is changing now.

The most valuable feature in Orchestrator is that it stores the credentials in a safe way. Our clients were afraid that the credentials would be stored where somebody could see them and being able to schedule bots with the credentials available is very important for them. 

We would like to see Studio made a little easier so that our non-technical customers can also implement the bots. For example, some of the features from the upcoming Studio X should be put into the original Studio, as well.

I have trouble understanding the machine learning and AI components, so I would like it to be easier to understand how and what to do with them.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution between three and four. Sometimes there are issues where something is not working, although there are probably times where it happens because we don't know how to use the solution in the best way.

Both the customer support and technical support for this solution are very good.

The technical support has been very helpful. Our team has had many calls with UiPath regarding the virtual machine, which did not work at first. Within two days it was working.

Our clients did not use another RPA solution before this one.

They are undergoing a digital transformation and wanted to give themselves and edge so that the other companies will not get ahead. They just saw the need to change and we told them about RPA and they got very excited. We showed them the first pilot bot and they were ready to implement it.

Our in-house IT department handled the initial setup.

We have seen ROI and performance benefits from using this solution. While I do not have specifics in terms of money or time saved, I think that we could see the benefits after a week. There were processes that the client no longer needed to do, so they had more time available for other things.

For our first customer, we started with Orchestrator, an unattended bot, and a couple of Studio licenses, all of which cost $25,000 USD for the year. It is definitely worth the money.

We had researched Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but we didn't look too deeply.

The choice for UiPath was made based on what we read on the Internet, including the Gartner Report. It was very easy to get started after first downloading the Community Edition and then taking the Academy to learn how to do it. It is easy, fast, and the statistics say that it is the best.

Right now, this is a good solution that I would recommend. It is really beneficial for a lot of companies. At the same time, there are things that can improve and they are working on them.

I would rate this solution an eight 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.

We use only unattended robots with Studio and Orchestrator. Our primary use for the bots is in finance, so we only do finance use cases like AP (Accounts Payable) invoice retrieval.

The solution has improved the way our organization functions because no one has to sit for hours just spending time retrieving documents. The staff just picks up the documents they need in the morning, start their analysis right away.

What I find the most valuable about UiPath is flexibility in adding code. That ability is the most important feature for me and what I do.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see better scheduling options. Because of the schedule limitations, you can only schedule one process at a time. There are situations where I might want to build five processes that need to work together. As I can only schedule one at a time, it isn't currently possible.

On a scale of one to five where one is unstable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a five. There are not many issues at all. On other platforms that we use, we always seem to encounter small things that cause problems. For example, with other solutions, we have had problems processing things like resolution and there is always an issue. But with UiPath, I can control almost everything from the robot and get it working.

There are ten people in our organization involved in our automation program and I think it can be scaled at any time.

While we don't use technical support directly, our team has used UiPath Academy RPA training to become more familiar with the product. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the best, I would rate the Academy experience as a five. We've also used the forum. In all, between the implementation help, the Academy and the resources, I would rate the support as a nine-out-of-ten.

From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production took only about one month, and that was without previous experience with the product. The initial set up of the product was straightforward, so it was all pretty efficient.

We did not need to use an integrator, reseller, or consultant. We did the entire implementation all in house. The only exception is that we did get some help from UiPath by working with them directly. 

We have experienced some return on investment and performance benefits, and it only took about one month to see it. There is one monthly process we use and in just one run — the first time we ran it — something that took two people two days was done in two hours. So, what took 16 hours to do analysis on before has been cut down to two hours. It is hard to say how much money that saved as we just changed the allocation of resources. The solution also helped to eliminate human errors which are even harder to account for.

We chose to try UiPath because we wanted to test the SQL capabilities that it has. I don't know that I would say we evaluated other options before choosing it as a solution. We currently work with both Blue Prism and UiPath at the same time. 

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is easy, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a seven. I think that especially business users who don't have more of a technical background can get lost in all the different features that are available.

For this solution, we could totally deploy with attended robots, but our business just isn't ready for that yet. I think, with the adoption of Studio X that we might be in that position, but not right now.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven overall. The scheduling feature just isn't there yet to allow more flexibility in programming and use, but the development is much faster and the flexibility better than much of the competition. The introduction of open-source changes the game for RPA solutions.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution or a similar one would be to clearly evaluate the use case. Don't just breeze through and assume you need automation. Take a good look at what you actually need to do, make sure the solution fits, and make sure the targeted processes are processes that should be automated.