UiPath Platform Reviews

We use Studio, Orchestrator, Studio and Orchestrator right now for RPA development for automating pretty much anything that rules-based processes can accomplish that are mundane and take time. 

UiPath has improved our organization simply through the ability to automate. Creating rules-based processes and making them automated can allow us to make better use of people's time. Now people are not working weekends and overtime. People are working their regular hours and doing their regular jobs.

I would say the most valuable feature in the solution is Orchestrator in conjunction with the customer service piece which is also very valuable. The ability to troubleshoot whether it is infrastructure support or a development support issue, having somebody to reach out and provide feedback is very beneficial.

One additional feature that I would like to see included in the next release of this solution — and actually looking forward to — is more development in the reporting. The Insight piece that was announced was very good to hear about. We are excited about that and looking forward to it just so we do not have to develop our own reporting infrastructure. Instead, we can leverage UiPath's Insight platform to do reporting, deliver reports, measure production errors, and further simplify how we gather and assess information. As far as room for improvement, I would say that is my biggest missing piece.

On a scale from one to five where one is not stable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of UiPath platform as a three. Right now, we are having some connectivity issues, between Orchestrator and our environment. We have been working with our infrastructure support team and UiPath infrastructure report team to figure out what's going on. We are working through the issues and I'm very impressed with the support that we have been given, but we have got to figure out what the issues are and solve them.

We have approximately 15 people in our organization involved in the automation program and I don't think it would be difficult to scale that usage up.

I would say that overall I'm very pleased with the customer and technical support from UiPath. They have been very responsive. If there is any need or if there is an issue, they are good at getting to work on finding a solution. They also provide additional resources.

Our team used UiPath Academy's RPA training and on a scale from one to five, where one is the least beneficial and five is the best, I would say the training is probably a four-out-of-five. The feedback that I've gotten from others that attended is that it is very informative and they are good training courses. The tests are challenging enough that it makes participants involved so that they are prepared for the next course. So mostly the RPA training is a positive experience.

We did previously use a different solution, but it was a proprietary vendor solution — one of our servicing vendors created it. They were not able to deliver solutions of service packs within an expected timeline. We had to identify different short-term and long-term needs and decided to invest in a new solution. We had to identify a way to bridge some of those gaps in the interim until we could get those upgrades on that platform.

We ended up choosing UiPath automated processes on the recommendation of Accelerate who we were using as a consultant.

I would say the initial setup was straightforward and it wasn't too complicated. From the time we purchased the UiPath license until our first bot introduction I think it was only about two months. The installation itself was easy too. We were able to install it on-premises, get all the licenses running, get all our basic needs set up so we could do development, and put a bot into production. It was not a long onboarding process before we started seeing results. 

We did use the assistance of a consultant for the deployment. That would be Accelerate. Our experience with them was okay. On a scale from one through five I would say they scored a three-out-of-five. The delivery was not quite what we expected and did not meet our timeline. We set out with a goal and we fell short of that goal, and we're working with them to help us have a good forward-thinking plan. Delivery was not fully met, so we weren't too happy with that. But otherwise, they were right there.

We have seen a return on investment and some performance benefits. For example, we were able to pretty much completely automate one process that had two FTEs (Full-time Employees) who were spending 40 hours a week completing a process. Using UiPath we were able to almost completely automate that process and bring that workload down to 10%. So now the bot does 90% of the work and they just handle Excel. 

I think I could say we'll save approximately $400,000. Somewhere around there. But it isn't just financial savings. The solution helps to eliminate human errors, saves the organization time, and allows the reallocation of resources. I would say, based on the use cases that we have, we have saved roughly 60% of our effort on automated processes. So the users are now managing business exceptions that they may have and are handling things on a higher level.

I don't know if we had additional options on a shortlist because I wasn't involved in that part of the selection process. I was brought in a little bit later. But there are obviously a host of different vendors that have different solutions that Accelerate would have been aware of. We went through a vetting process and identified Accelerate as our number one choice as a consultant. From there, UiPath was the vendor they suggested, so that's how we got connected with UiPath.

We run our automation in a virtual environment. The implementation is good. We are having a few issues. I don't know if it's directly related to the virtual environment, but we are having some connectivity problems which affect stability. Otherwise, we're good.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is easy, I would rate the ease of use as a four. It is a four and not a five for the simple fact that the product does not really achieve the level of simplicity I expect. I'm not a technical person. Most non-technical people can — if you're kind of familiar with the different workflow options and sequences — go in and develop some things you need to accomplish for automation with this tool. I would say that for more complicated pieces, you need a more technical background. The focus on making it easy for non-technical users is very important and they could do a better job of it in my opinion.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product at probably a seven out of ten. That leaves a lot of areas for improvement. On the other hand, I'm pretty pleased with the product and what UiPath has delivered.

The advice I would to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution is that with UiPath, customer support is a driver. Anybody can deliver a product, but it's what kind of system or service you provide to back it up that can matter as much or more. My experience has been great with UiPath and their ability to provide excellent support matters a great deal to my customer experience.

I'd say our finance applications, like accounts payable, have been our biggest use cases for this solution. 

I would say just the ability to be able to go outside of the IT department in our organization to get things done and have a sort of agile group to do automation. It is difficult to get IT involved in this type of thing in our organization. So being able to have our own agile group is beneficial for us.

Another thing that is valuable is that I think it's just saved a lot of our finance and customer service people a lot of manual time on processes. We are just able to involve a lot more value-added work.

I really liked the insights dashboard. I guess that there is an additional fee for that. Being able to see your return on investment in real-time is definitely beneficial. We spend a lot of time manually calculating how many hours we saved and that would make it a lot easier. The improvement I want is already there. I have to look into implementing it.

The area of the solution that has room for improvement is the stability of the bots. It just seems like we have spent a lot of time trying to fix bots that are down and whether that is our coding or the product. I think there must be a better way to diagnose the issues and avoid them.

On a scale from one to five, five being the most stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a three. We've had a lot of issues with bot stability. I don't know if it is how we go about development or if it is the platform itself, but we spend too much time trying to fix all the bots that seem to be breaking.

I have not used technical support personally but our IT group has. Everything I have heard about the customer services group has been positive.

I have used the UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the most, I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four out of five. I'm not an IT person, so would have given it a five if I was. Parts of the training may have been more advanced than I expected.

We had a lot of archaic processes in our company — a lot of paper-based processes — so we knew we needed a better solution. That meant we had to work through a lot of processes and re-engineer what we were doing. We knew that we needed to move in the direction of automation because the processes were just not sustainable. We had processes but we did not actually have an automation solution until we started using UiPath.

The initial setup for the product was something I found to be a bit complicated. At least the first couple were pretty complicated. It was just that we were all new to the technology and we didn't really know necessarily what we were doing. It is getting better. From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had your first robot in production, I think we took about three months.

We did you use an integrator. It was EY Technologies (Ernest & Young). They helped us out a lot and our experience with them was good.

We have certainly seen a return on investment. As far as how many months it took to see real value, I think we just crossed that threshold. So it was about twelve months in total. We have probably saved — just at our platform — around $100,000. The solution has also helped to eliminate human errors with a couple of the bots that we've deployed for sure. It has also saved our organization time. If I had to estimate, I'd say probably 8,000 hours a year so far.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. We kind of landed on UiPath because it just seemed like it was a little easier to navigate than the other ones from a user experience.

Currently, we do not run any of our bots in a virtual environment and we use only untended bots so far. Either of those situations could change at any time. We have a couple of processes that we are looking at for attended processes, but we haven't implemented any yet.

We have about five people involved directly in the initiative. On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease of use the platform for automating as a four. It is a four because I would say it takes a little time to kind of get up and rolling for a developer, but it is not too bad.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product a seven. We have just had some issues with keeping bots up and running. I feel like the issue is the learning curve.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution is to just do it. Make sure you know what processes you are going to want to automate. If you need to do standardized anything in the processes, do that on the front end in the planning stages versus kind of chasing your tail on the back end.

We primarily use the Studio, which is for developing the robots, and we deploy to Orchestrator.

We went through a large SAP transformation and we had a lot of issues getting the users to accept the new systems. They were issues related to the adoption of new systems. We decided to build these attended bots in order to guide the users through the system. Essentially, it is navigation or guidance assistance. By helping the users with proper data entry and design, flowing in a logical sequence that is easy for the user to follow, it minimizes end-user training.

Running our automations in a virtual environment is something that we had tried during our PoC. Currently, we have attended bots deployed in more than twenty thousand laptops, and eventually, we're planning to have more than eighty thousand deployments. Because of the large scale, initially, we were having a lot of challenges because of things that go on with the users' machines. We wanted to explore Citrix because there is just one virtual environment that every user logs on to, and then run the processes from there. Unfortunately, it did not work for us. We were seeing a lot of issues and felt that it was much more stable deploying individually to each laptop, instead of using Citrix.

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. There is always room for improvement.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. The material is very sequential and logical. You don't get lost because you just follow the modules from beginner to intermediate to advanced. You cover everything from end-to-end, and it is very structured.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one year. This included our pilot project, then the development and the UAT. When we went live in production there were three thousand users. 

This solution saves our users time. For example, on a standard SAP system where a user has no training, and you tell them to go and finish performing a transaction, it will take them between thirty and forty minutes. Now, with these attended bots, it is almost reduced to half. They can finish the same transaction with minimum training in probably fifteen minutes.

This solution has definitely reduced human errors. We have cleaned up the transaction screens and we help the user to focus on what is needed. We give them the right instructions to make sure that they enter the right information.

This solution is mainly used for navigation, position making, and reducing errors. It means that we have a quicker time to finish any transaction. We are a financial organization, so obviously, for us, it's important to record every sale that we make and every client that we have. It has significantly helped our client servers to reduce the time that they spend on these systems to finish a particular transaction.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of using it. This includes the way the activities are set up, and how easy it is to solve problems by searching with Google if we're stuck.

We did not have to do a lot of customization because the standard UiPath activities fit our needs. This is a big point for us because we end up customizing most of the products that we use just to satisfy our own business needs. In the case of Studio, we didn't have to create a lot of custom activities.

I find it difficult to set up the Orchestrator and it should be more user-friendly for non-technical people. I understand how we create packages and push them, but I find the maintenance hard to follow. As it is now, I have to contact our IT department, which takes two to three days. In the meantime, we just have to wait.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. In terms of attended automation, we did have a lot of issues. We have requested lots of product enhancements, which then came through the pipeline. Initially, we did see a lot of issues and they had to make some changes to cater to our needs. Also, we have some more requests that have been put in the pipeline to make it a bit easier for us.

We have about twenty people working with RPA in our organization. At this time we have automations running on more than twenty thousand laptops.

The technical support for this solution is very good. They're very responsive.

We have had people working on-site at UiPath too, and they have been hands-on trying to see what we are solving. They have given us very good and very relevant suggestions, which has been helpful for us. 

We did not use another RPA prior to this solution.

We knew that we needed to invest in this solution based on user feedback. When we launched our new SAP system, everybody kept complaining about how difficult it was to use. There is a lot of training involved, but it's not like you can remember the training. We replaced fourteen hundred systems and put them into a single instance, so even if you are trained for weeks it is hard to remember all of it.

Basically, we needed something that was easier and helps us navigate through the systems so that we can complete our transactions. This solution does just that. It guides the user, waits for the user to give the right input based on what is expected, and then takes the user to the next relevant screen so that they can perform the transaction.

The initial setup has been complicated for us. After we went live in production, one of the issues we saw, but didn't realize initially, was that even though the tray was not open, by default though, if the bot is pushed onto a user's machine then it will be connected to the Orchestrator. Even though the user is not running the process, the bot always stayed connected. That was causing a large load on the Orchestrator and we didn't realize it until we started increasing from three thousand to twenty thousand users. That's when we were seeing a lot of timeouts. The production connection kept dropping and we were not able to figure out why. UiPath helped us to restructure the whole SQL database and the way we established the connections.

We have not yet seen ROI, although I think it's too early because we only went live two or three months ago. The big expansion in users was just this week, so it is too early for us to say.

We do know that we have been receiving very positive feedback so far. The users with machines where these bots are deployed have been saying it is very easy to use and there is minimal training required. It's out there, on the desktop or laptop, and they just have to launch by clicking the play button and the process starts. 

When we started this project, we explored Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. I don't think that they were able to give us what we were looking for in terms of attended automation. When we looked at UiPath we found that it could satisfy all of our business requirements, which is why we chose this solution over the others.

I am really excited about the new Studio X. Ours is a consulting firm where not everybody is tech-savvy, but everyone wants to get their hands into automation. UiPath is saying that it is going to be very easy. Even for people without a technical background at all, they will be able to build their own process and bot. I'm looking forward to seeing how our users are going to make use of that within the UI.

This solution is easy to use and adopt in an existing environment. The best part for us is that even though some features were lacking, the turnaround time to have them implemented was amazing. We have always coordinated with our UiPath partner to tell them what it is that we need. When we have requested features, we have found that in the next release they are added. We found this unique among vendors.

My advice to anyone who is researching this type of solution is to definitely go for it. There are a lot of materials out there which will help them make the decision. Our own journey showed that it was easy for us to use, learn, adopt, and finally deploy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

Our primary use case for this solution is in the financial industry.

We do not yet 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. The whole interface needs some TLC because it can be a bit tricky.

We have used the UiPath training and it has improved a lot since we first tried it. When I used it a while ago, it had its problems. I think it came due to the fact that it was not developed by native English speakers. For example, they had questions that were simply wrong. It has improved a lot and now it is beneficial. I think that the biggest challenge is for them to stay up to date.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately four and a half months.

This solution has saved us time, but more importantly, it has saved us money by not paying certain fees or certain penalties. With respect to saving money, the last amount that I saw was six figures. Legally, I am not allowed to say more.

Being in the finance business and having certain audits, this solution helps to make sure that we have validations and checks in place to help us to do our processing quicker. Also, with invoices, normally when you pay them by a certain date you get a certain discount. So, we've managed to significantly increase the savings we get just from having invoices processed earlier or on time.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we have one process where we've eliminated errors completely. The average is that we eliminate errors by fifty to sixty percent.

The most valuable feature in Orchestrator is the scalability.

The most valuable feature of unattended robots is that they are always available.

They have added a lot of new features over the past months, and things are a little more complicated. In the interface, sometimes you just have the screen full of windows and figuring out what goes where can be a bit tricky.

We would like to see improvements in Studio such as syntax highlighting and documentation functionality for audit purposes. That would be great.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. There are a couple of things that break the robots, and it has to do with the technology itself. The user interface and other components are prone to error, and it's not one hundred percent automation. This is something that you take into consideration when you do RPA. They have also had a couple of updates over the past years where they made significant changes that basically broke the robots.

We have more than a hundred people involved with RPA.

So far, I have only used the ticketing through email support, and it is sometimes frustrating. I've only just learned that there is telephone support. It is hard for me to rate customer service because I was looking for telephone support, thinking that it was not available.

In general, there is room for improvement support-wise.

We are in an industry that is heavily targetted by low-cost countries, so in order for us to stay competitive, we had to do something. When we did our research, the two obvious solutions were RPA and AI.

When we started, it was with Blue Prism, and we learned from the issues we had. When we were looking at what we could do as an AI, UiPath started to emerge and started to become a big player. We then looked at capabilities and the licensing model, and at the time there were two vendors that had pretty similar capabilities.

These two were Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Automation Anywhere had a very high initial investment requirement and UiPath didn't, which is why we stayed with UiPath. I believe that you had to buy at least a hundred licenses for Automation Anywhere, whereas with UiPath you can buy one or two.

It looks like we made the right choice.

The initial setup of UiPath was straightforward. The approvals on our side slowed things down. If it were not for that then we could have been up and running in six weeks.

We implemented the solution ourselves.

We only automate processes where we expect to see ROI within twelve months. As such, most of our processes have an ROI between six and twelve months.

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

We are in the process of moving this solution to the cloud.

From a cost perspective, it is very hard to get ROI with an attended robot. The price is too high.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is not to overthink it. RPA is a technology that you learn by doing it.

This is a very strong product. I think that there is a lot of good investment and a lot of good attention out there. This is the best or one of the two best tools out there. They are listening to what the market wants and just need to be careful not to get greedy. That said, there is always a little bit of space for improvement.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and mostly the unattended bots.

Our primary use for this solution is to give time back to the employees.

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 five. It's drag-and-drop, and all of the activities are there.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a four. All of this information there is self-explanatory and it works. 

From the point where we started using the demo version, it was a couple of months until our first robot was ready.

This solution has probably helped to eliminate human errors.

I can definitely say that this solution has saved the organization time. With all of the processes together, we have saved one full-time equivalent person. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the unattended automation.

This solution is easy to use and it saves you time.

In future releases, we would like to see more drag-and-drop, and more out of the box AI.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. We had some issues where we needed to get in contact with the support, and sometimes, UiPath crashes on our servers.

We have about eight people in our automation group.

Most of the time, the technical support for this solution is very good.

One one occasion, it was not very good. We had a problem with a new version. When we updated to 18.2, the robots stopped working after some time. We had a lot of emails that included session logs. I made it quite clear that it was really important because we were in the beginning phase and the robots had to run. In the end, I fixed the problem by downloading the next version, 18.3. When we asked whether the problem was version-specific, they never got back to us, which isn't very good.

We did not use another RPA solution before this one.

From the external consultants, we got the idea that RPA has the possibility to save us time and money, so we decided to do it.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. Orchestrator is easy to understand. You can connect the virtual machines to it and then run the robots.

In the beginning, we used a consultant from Roboyou to assist us with the process. Our experience with them was good.

We recognize ROI in terms of performance benefits as soon as a process is automated and an employee can do something else that is more meaningful. It is not a benefit listed on a spreadsheet, but the employees are happier.

Our licensing fees for this solution are €68,000 (approximately $75,000 USD) yearly.

Two years ago, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, in addition to UiPath. UiPath was the best overall solution then, and it still is now. It has a big community, and you can download the demo versions to start testing immediately.

This solution saves us time in all areas. We don't keep track of exactly what we have saved in terms of time, but we can say that we have more customer experience. If somebody has a mundane task and wants it automated then we do it.

My solution for anybody researching RPA solutions is to try UiPath. When you want to start, it is easy to register and get going.

This is a good solution and it saves us time, but there is always a path for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is around manual conversion of data from one system to another. These are big processes right now.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator and the robots.

Our organization is more efficient. The people that you're automating processes from are happy they are getting done. They are excited and like to be a part of the process. It's also new technology. It's innovative. and people enjoy being around that.

We don't have a baseline metric for the elimination of human errors. So, we don't know how many errors a human actually makes doing some of the conversion data entry processes. We assume they are about 90 percent accurate and UiPath is 100 percent accurate.

We have saved 18,000 hours so far this year.

With the robotics and management of Orchestrator, we are able to kick things off. We are starting to get more out of the scheduling of these and into more on demand triggered events, such as a RESTful service calls and things of that nature.

The ease of using the platform for automating your company's processes is a five out of five. It is super simple. Everyone who we have in our robotics team had no experience with automation or robotics previously. They went online took the classes from UiPath. They started with the Community Edition, just to play with it themselves, then they were probably experts within a couple of months.

Everyone has used the UiPath Academy training. I would rate it around a three or four out of five. While it's simple and you get a decent understanding of what's there, you still have to dedicate on an awful lot of time doing the automations to become proficient at them.

While it looks like it is being addressed, getting the unattended robots to every person's machine in the company and executing on their machines needs improvement.

I would rate the stability as a five out of five. it hasn't gone down yet.

We have a team of four people involved in our automation program.

I have only used the technical support to fix a licensing discrepancy. They were okay.

Everybody said, "We had to do more with less," from the C-suite on down. RPA is the only way that you can do that which seemed viable. So, we tried it out.

We were previously using VM. 

The initial setup is straightforward. With our proof of concept, it took us two to three weeks to develop it, then another week to make it production ready. When we deployed it into production, we had the license. We installed the robot and had it running through Windows Scheduler before we had Orchestrator, and it just worked

We started with a proof of concept, had it running in production, and bought the license that day.

We did have a systems integrator who helped us. Overall, for the initial implementation, I would rate them a five out of five. They came in, and it was great.

We have been able to achieve our ROIs on pretty much every process that we have done. You see it almost initially, as soon as the process starts running. However, until we get the actual feedback of, "Yes, I can tell this is saving us time and effort." It takes about a month for the business unit to really recognize it.

We haven't technically saved money because we haven't gotten rid of anybody, so our CFO will not let us claim money. However, we do calculate time given back. Right now, I believe for this year, we've been given back 18,000 hours so far.

Our licensing costs are around $40,000 a year.

We looked at the big three: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. Then, we chose UiPath because of cost and ease of use. The training was there. It was so quick and easy to pick up.

I would recommend UiPath. It's easy to use and learn. It just works and doesn't break. It's cost-effective.

We run our automations in virtual environments, such as Citrix. Orchestrator sits in VMware along with unattended robots. It kicks everything off behind the scenes. Most processes are set on a time schedule.

We prefer unattended bots. We're moving into that real-time trigger, but still like to run unattended to give some form of user interface for the user to call them.

I would definitely rate it a 10 out of 10 because of what it delivers and allows, along with the benefits. You can also see on their strategy on the roadmap, it's just expanding and getting better.

Our primary use case is IP invoice automation.

We are currently using Orchestrator and bots.

It gives you a technology or ability to build a solution on any legacy system.

I love Orchestrator: 

• The configuration part
• The amount of keys
• Transaction reporting
• Logs
• Accessibility on the iPhone.

VM was on the service for high density. It is finicky at times. The latest release is a lot more stable. However, I've had a two week production outage where DLLs weren't registered and someone from Vegas had to login for eight hours onto the fraud service to work it out. Even though they uninstalled and re-installed it, all the different apps still wasn't working. So, I  have lost a bit of faith in it to be honest.

I would like to have cloud stuff back in Australia and hosted there. I want everything in SaaS, bots included.

While it has eliminated human errors, it has created other errors.

I would like something that better identifies the processes. If it could watch the computer, then work it out for me, that would be good.

Now that I've done an upgrade, it seems to be a lot better. Because I was running high density on the 2016.2 or 2016.3. I had a lot of problems, but I couldn't work out whether or not it was just UiPath or our client app that was timing out. But, we noticed that if you login as console, you have far less issues than if you run high density.

These days, the stability is a four out of five. Back in the day, it wasn't.

In my old organization, 50 to 100 people were involved.

I have a bit of a different issue because at my old company that I just left, I was only paying $3,600 USD per bot. I turned up at my new company, and because of our size, we are paying $8,000 per bot.  

The support is not good. I had a two week production outage.

There was a business problem, and we needed to work at how to solve it. The partner was a big driver in this process.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It took two weeks from the time we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot in production.

We used Blackbook.ai, and our experience with them was awesome.

We have seen ROI. The last company that I work for was trying to get 1000 FTEs out the door, and I think that they are already at 60. In Australia, at my current company, we are already at 10 FTEs. Just in Australia, we have save a million dollars, and maybe five million in India.

The reduction of 10 FTEs has saved us time.

At the last place that I worked, it was $700,000 USD.

Everything that I read about Blue Prism suggest that it is too heavy and takes too much development to ramp up.

I looked at Automation Anywhere for the price point, especially for a PoC. Between Blackbook.ai and what I saw already with UiPath, I just thought UiPath was the better option.

Scout it out. I am going to try to work with this company a different way than what I did than last time, e.g., federated.

I would rate the overall product as a nine out of 10. It's an enabler. It seems pretty good. There is a lot of investment and new things.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a four out of five. It is pretty easy to use but it is not doing everything for me. I still have to do stuff.

I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four out of five.

We have a bunch of uses for the product so it is hard to judge which is the most important. We started working with data structures for websites and then moved into more complex automation like speech detection and making more cognitive decisions based on rules. Our automation using bots is essentially on the verge of using artificial intelligence.

There are a lot of ways this product has improved our organization. Even a simple project can bring us a lot of recognition. One example is retrieving passwords on Amazon. Imagine that you have a user who forgets their password. Amazon lets you reset your password but there are a lot of steps. In the background, Amazon is validating that you are the person that you are saying that you are with a lot of manual steps. We automated that with a bot and other tools and the customer experience skyrocketed. We reduced the processing by five minutes just for that service. Not only did we apply that solution for one country, but we also applied it to seven different countries. It was a success story.

What I think is the best thing about UiPath is that it is fairly easy to understand and learn how to use it. One of the most valuable things about the product is the improvement they are making with the tools. They are offering around thirteen new products now. With these additions, there is a lot of value-added enhancement that we can provide via the automation to augment what we already have implemented.

The studio's Orchestrator is the tool that we use in order to create the scripts for the bot. It is what enables us to deliver automation. Having these new technologies within the studio is what enables us to be more creative. With the Orchestrator we can monitor the bots, we can "orchestrate" them, and we can deliver that tool to customers so that they can manage their bots. It is really like digital workforce management. If we created a bot for a business, usually it would just do its job and the customer would not see what the bots are really doing. With this tool, the client has that opportunity to see what the bots are doing. 

The bots automate the work that otherwise would have to be done with other interventions and resources, so reallocation of resources and focus is the most valuable thing overall.

There are a lot of things that can be done to the product to make it better. The feature list that I develop between releases is often covered new releases of the product. That is good. But there are still a lot of enhancements that I would like to have within the Orchestrator and the queues. For example, how we manage the queues is an important thing.

I would like to see the ability to have other ways to look for one transaction within the queue. If I am looking for a single transaction, it would be good to have a filter that you can use to specify a detail, like just looking for a reference name that starts with a particular letter — but not the entire reference, but wildcards. Those are the kind of things that can be enhanced and make a big difference. Maybe they are not on the roadmap for the company when it comes to upgrades at this point because those are tiny things within the tools. But even those tiny little things can make a lot of difference in the functionality of the tools.

On a scale of one to five where five is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the stability of this platform a five. The stability of the platform is very good. During the four years that we have been working with UiPath, we have not encountered any issues with stability because of the platform. There are always issues with the environment and that can affect stability and performance, but with the platform itself, there are no issues.

Within the RPA suite, we have around 40 people working with the product. But we also have to consider that we usually engage people from other places to contribute to every single project. There are a lot more users than are working with us within the project and within our immediate company team. The peripheral people are going to be people from security, people from IT, people with specific business backgrounds, etcetera. The number of users and the product itself are scalable.

The technical support is actually pretty good. We worked a lot with our CSM (Customer Service Management). They are always doing a great job to find someone to help us out when we have issues. They get the right person for the right issue. For now, if I had to rate it from one to five where five is the best, it is going to be a five.

At the beginning, we would try to automate tasks using spreadsheets where we had calculations. We had macros and things of that sort to automate small tasks. The next step in moving to a new era was to turn to RPAs. There were a lot of things that we needed to implement through this new technology. So we did have another solution before for some types of automation but it wasn't really a dedicated system for automation and it wasn't capable of this scale.

We have a turn-around time of four to six weeks. In order to go to implementation and production, it depends on the complexity of the project. A normal project that is not that complex will obviously take less time. We have to take into consideration the time that we have in assessment, in the evaluation of the project, and in development, and only after that do we do testing to put it into production.

There are, of course, always challenges, but not all of them come because of the UiPath platform. There's a lot of things that are an issue because of the environment or the target applications that we're using. It is often more because of that than the platform itself.

We have in-house developers, we have a QA team, and we have a training and communication team specifically for the RPA suite. We also have managers for the teams, the support team, and solution architects. We do our own implementations and assist others in doing theirs.

We usually try to calculate return on investment within a year or two depending on the project. But we start to look at the benefits from the first month we put the product into production. Not really the ROI exactly, but the benefits. What I mean by benefit is if the automation is achieving the goals it was intended to achieve. Once we pass through the cost of implementation, license cost and any additional expenditure of resources, then we look into ROI.

We have seen a lot of benefits in a variety of ways depending on the projects. Most of what we have been seeing is capacity creation. There are a lot of things that can be introduced to automate processes. If there is work that can't be handled by a team and they are not going to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement), creating bots and putting bots into their team to take over redundant tasks is letting the team use resources differently. It creates additional capacity so the team can focus on more important things — like quality or process. That enables the business unit to accomplish their tasks while raising quality. The bot can always be depended on to do a specific task in the same way. If we have the right steps and if we have the right process to execute, the output from the bot is going to be right. That is another incredible benefit. Of course and for example, giving the customer a response in one hour instead of five hours enhances the customer experience. Proper use of automation can do all of these things.

Bots can also be used in eliminating human errors. Being cautious in estimating that, it could be as much as a 60% to 80% reduction. It will be reducing human error, but there is always some level of error in processing.

The percentage of time saved using UiPath bots depends on the projects, but most processes can save teams 85% of the time they would spend on tasks that can be automated. Some other automated tasks we have the efficiency go up to 90 or 95%. That is pretty good and a great way to allow for the reallocation of resources.

The cost depends on how many licenses we have and how we use the bots. We have a rate for attended bots and a rate for unattended bots. The price itself depends on the project and the number of licenses required. The prices, in general, are good — actually they are the best — but they could always be cheaper. Right now there is no one that is cheaper. The cost is in line with what we thought that it should be.

In 2016, we started to evaluate vendors. We went through Automation Anywhere and a lot of the competing products. We decided to go with UiPath not only because of the cost and the model that they have, but also the relationship that they have with customers. They actually care for you. They are always looking to provide you with the newest and best technologies. They try to make you use it in the best ways and they try to make you test out new features and provide feedback. If you need it and you realize that it's really good, then they help you make it happen. That is the best thing. They are being humble even though they are growing a lot. It is what actually made us go through UiPath.

We are using the entire UiPath tool. We are using the studios, we are using the orchestrator, we are using the bots. That is both unattended and attended bots.

We have two different environments. One is on-prem within Costa Rica data center and then we have another in the U.S. that is on an internal cloud and we use VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Citrix.

The virtual environment is actually pretty functional. There are some pros and cons. The pro is that it enables you to add virtual machines if you need them. The con might be that sometimes you need to enable connections that are not enabled. You might have to go through firewalls, go through network issues, etcetera. With that, it is a little bit more complex to build out automation sometimes. You have to go through configuration hurdles when you encounter them.

On a scale of one to five with five being very easy and one being very hard, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a five. It is a five because when comparing it with the other RPA (Robotic Process Automation) platforms, it is easier to navigate within the studio and it is more comprehensive. There is a saying in usability that if you need to take more than five clicks in order to find what you're looking for, it is not easy. Finding what you want in one or two clicks is what makes a product easy to use.

We use UiPath Academy RPA training all the time. Every new employee or intern that we employ in our company goes through the RPA academy training first. That is kind of the bible for us. On a scale of one to five, five being very beneficial and one being not beneficial at all, I would rate the academy as a five. 

My advice for anyone considering this solution is very simple: It is worth it, go ahead and give it a try. You will like it. Try to experience everything within UiPath and go through every single feature that they have and can provide currently before you commit to it. The company's support will back you up and they will make sure that you find what you are looking for.

On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the product as an eight. To get a ten, a product should be perfect. Nothing is perfect. It is not a nine because it is just a cautious rating. In technology, we always say that for every question there is an answer that says "depending on...[something]". Depending on what you're looking at, it is going to be an eight or it's going to be a nine. It should never be a ten.