UiPath Platform Reviews

The solution is primarily used for invoice processing in combination with intelligent data captures. It's used for anything to do with lots of finance processes. Typically they go into lots of HR processes as well. They're the two main business functions that we work in.

Orchestrator has valuable scheduling and being able to run things on demand and dynamically as well allocating the transaction, and the studio are good features. Nothing stands out in particular. Everything's kind of equal, it just depends on the task you need to complete.

With an unattended robot, you can schedule it and have it running autonomously.

The solution is quick and easy to implement. It's fairly easy, and it means clients don't have to get IT involved. If you get IT involved in anything there's always blockers and there are always other priorities. 

They should expand on workflow type items and take another step up from the long-running workflows to offer more visibility of business processes within Orchestrator.

The solution needs a better integration team, different versions of Orchestrator, and to make it easier to identify problems with versions, as well as to be able to fix those kinds of problems. It's hard if you don't keep up to date all the time as well, for example, to go from 2018 to 2019 versions. It's quite a big jump considering activities and things like that.

I'd rate the stability five out of five.

When we were using technical support we were typically going directly to some people we knew in UiPath because we knew them very well. We haven't had that many instances that we needed to use the help though.

In terms of ease of setup, I would rate the solution four out of five. From an IT perspective, it's pretty simple, but from a non-technical perspective, I think people will struggle.

They've brought us Studio X which is starting to increase that to a five out of five. From a business user perspective a lot of the sales teams will sell it as a very easy to mend product which isn't particularly helpful because when you go into a customer environment and you have to build via a complex process and then integrate it with IT and all of the business systems then obviously it's not a five minute job. It's not overly complicated but can take three to four weeks for some processes to be implemented successfully.

From the time the UiPath license is purchased to implementing it virtually takes about three weeks.

ROI depends on the process. Some customers are using their people badly and they literally have a person doing the job of processing invoices all day long. It's very quick to realize their ROI because it's a 30-40 thousand pound salary that they get to replace very, very quickly. More commonly, on a big project, it takes 6 to 12 months to get to an ROI. Even if you are just breaking even, in a year or two you'll start to get an ROI.

There's information online. There's actually a section where you can go through training online for licensing. There's some documentation available as well from the UiPath sales team. You can just ask them.

I've already struggled with licensing a little bit. It's never been super clear because you have the notion of a mode lock and concurrent users and things like that depending on whether you want it on one machine or whether you want the licenses to be able to float around different users. The wording around it can be improved. They communicate in a simpler way.

Usually, the client looks at UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and sometimes other smaller competitors but that's quite rare.

We use Orchestrator, Studio, and unattended and attended robotics. We typically use more unattended than attended generally. Increasingly we're using attended robots. We use Orchestrator but at 1:1 per client, and Studio for development.

For the larger clients, they still go on-prem, but mid-tier customers start to use the cloud solution.

We try to encourage clients not to run automation within virtual environments like Citrix. UiPath does work through Citrix but it's only if clients really don't have control of that environment. We have done it, but where possible we always ask clients to install either the robot on the local machine or to install the major Citrix extension. By running within virtual premises everything's a little bit more or less stable so you have to add more checks, which means the development time takes a bit longer; and the data coming out is a little bit less reliable. But with the Citrix extension, everything has become a lot easier.

I used a web tool for the UiPath Academy RPA training. I did a lot of the training before there was an Academy, and then when it came out I did the certification. We always put our team through every stage of the training. I'd rate the Academy four out of five. It's easy to follow and get through. The only thing that's lacking a little bit is, it's just that you can't do 2 weeks worth of training and then become an expert. Another thing is that there is a further certification which is an advanced developer certificate which needs product experience as well, and for me, there's not been enough distinction between the 2-week online training vs that proper diploma. There's always some confusion, when people say, "Oh yeah, we've got this", many people say it doesn't mean as much as it could, or other software companies have a better distinction between levels of certification experience. They need to offer a solution architect type certification for someone who knows the infrastructure really well and can prove it. There needs to be a proper qualification for that.

In terms of reducing human error with the solution, I've always been an advocate of the software benefit that comes out of automation. AFT savings are great but I think a lot the other benefits include less mundane work being done, fewer errors, better compliance, better visibility. One of the things that hasn't been exploited that well is the additional data that you get from automation. Where humans previously were just doing a job, for example, we automate a lot of processes.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the financial processes. 

In our company, we are freeing up 14,000 hours per month.

All of the UiPath's components, meaning Studio, Orchestrator, and Unattended Robotics, are really important for us because they offer really clean processes. The one that generates more value for us is the Orchestrator because we are planning to really scale up the factory. It helps us to have an overview and control. With the insights that they announced recently, I hope we have really great control over it in the company.

In terms of ease of use, I would rate the solution five out of five. It's really intuitive and any people that have the basics of coding can handle it. 

In the next release, they need enterprise connect. That's something we were wondering about. 

The solution could maybe use more artificial intelligence components or stuff we can start to use in the AI field. 

It could use an easy integration with SAP. Most of the processes of our company are in SAP. Sometimes it's kind of tricky to automate it.

I'd rate the stability four out of five. We haven't presented problems but sometimes with the UiPath robot, the robot attended license breaks.

We have reached out to technical support. We are in Columbia so sometimes there are slow responses because they don't have too much capacity to attend to us in Latin America. It could be better.

Our time to market in implementing our first robot was four months because it was new for everyone in the company. We started too many processes at the same time and we were preparing everything around the company. It was slow. It was four or five months.

The initial setup was easy. We didn't have any problems.

We implemented the solution ourselves. Our IT department and our robotics architect handled it. We also had UiPath help us with the set up as well.

I'd rate their assistance five out of five. They helped us a lot.

Unattended robot costs are high.

For our company, we have money to buy the solution and we have a huge contract with UiPath, but for companies that are smaller, the costs are too high. For example, a company that is not too big, because they have to pay in dollars, may suffer because conversion rates are high.

When we started we started with UiPath and Blue Prism. We made 14 processes with each and we decided to stay with UiPath. Mostly because of the IT architecture. We really like the Orchestrator, for example. It was like a huge consideration we had because Blue Prism is like a closed book and we didn't like it too much.

We utilize the full UiPath package. We are all on the cloud using the Microsoft Azure platform. 

We also use it within the virtual environment. It has been tough implementing it. Sometimes it doesn't identify the selectors or the images. It has a higher risk of failure. It's risky to have a centralized process.

We plan on automating the drilling process, the upstream and midstream process of the company, and the transportation of oil and gas for the company. Those are the main areas for us that we are aiming to automate. We started with back processes such as financial processes, logistic processes, and HR processes because they are not the core. As we continue learning about it, we will focus on the back-office processes.

A prerequisite for us in the company is to go through the UiPath RPA Training Academy. They have many courses, including foundations and advanced certifications. I'd rate the Training Academy four out of five. If they didn't explain too many things that would be great. They do basic stuff that will help people have a different mindset about it. They need more of an overview. Use cases, examples and more explanations about the activities in the UiPath would be useful. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use all of the UiPath products: UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, attended robots, and unattended. Primarily, we use them for financial liquidation. Our customers frequently use it for different cases. Some use it with chatbots.

Sometimes, our customers run automations in a virtual environment. In terms of implementing UiPath within a virtual environment, UiPath staff are working on the cost. Currently we have UiPath with a Citrix client and you need to go to the Citrix virtual station to activate. It's more difficult to implement as a user.

Our customers' organizations have involved about 15 to 20 people in their automation programs.

I would rate its ease of use as about four out of five. It's not so easy, but it's also not difficult. We have a great UiPath Academy and it's really useful and helpful. Sometimes we need to do difficult operations and use other frameworks, through activities in UiPath. I think this mechanism is very nice, but in implementation, the customers are pretty close. Sometimes we must do it.

This solution helps to eliminate human errors. The amount depends on the process and the customer. Even unattended robots don't provide 100% automation. Sometimes a robot interrupts and waits for a human to make a decision. There is a process when unattended robots do fewer steps and after ten interruptions are waiting for a human to go on. I would say there is about a 70% reduction in human errors when using an unattended robot.

UiPath also helps save time. One unattended robot works 24 hours a day because a robot doesn't get ill or need to sleep.

All of the features are valuable. I think the best feature for Russian government customers is security. Security in Orchestration for requiring credentials. Our customers are usually serious about security.

I would like to see more AI features with data classification and computer reason. I think it would be great to have more features in full monitoring robots.

I would rate their stability as four out of five.

In cases of high scalability when we have one process and many of us use that process, we sometimes have problems. When one process uses about 24 robots for 24 hours, we have problems with it. I think when many robots work at the same time, something goes wrong in orchestrating tasks between robots.

I am happy with the support. For me, it's okay.

The initial setup can sometimes be complicated, depending first of all on the environment, as well as the implementation strategy of the company. Too many processes or only one PoC could lead to a more difficult implementation. Sometimes, customers try to automate a lot of the big processes. When we try to automate the complete process, we understand with the customers how many FTEs you can get from it. Everything depends on the customer's requirements.

It takes about six months from the purchase of a UiPath license until our customers have their first robot in production.

UiPath is a data mining solution. Our company tries to explain why RPAs are useful.

I don't know which other solutions our customers evaluate. Kofax might be one. Sometimes we work with a customer to make a decision about which platform to choose. Sometimes we do a PoC for Blue Prism. In the Russian market, there are two major vendors that are competing against each other: Blue Prism and UiPath. Usually, customers go through a PoC to choose the best vendor. UiPath wins because you can automate more processes with it.

I would rate UiPath as nine out of ten.

We are using unattended bots, Orchestrator, and Studio.

We use this solution for doing a variety of things. It includes a lot of back-office finance and accounting, tax, and a little bit on our operations side. We're also using it for some test automation within our IT group, so helping to test our points of sale, and some of our data transfers as well.

Orchestrator runs on a dedicated server, but our bots all run on virtual dedicated machines in our data center. There were some challenges in setting everything up to run in a virtual environment. We implemented a couple of years ago, so I think that it has improved by now, although it was challenging.

Part of it was on our end, where our people were not familiar with it. The challenges included picking the right type of VM to run on, having the right kind of setup, and having the environment configured correctly. We needed this to allow the RPA team to have enough control over the day-to-day maintenance, and not have bottlenecks with the technical side. Managing things when we had issues or needed to add something new was also a challenge.

The documentation was kind of broad and didn't go into the detail that we wanted it to, although I have seen that get better, so that is really good. I'm sure if we were trying to implement it today, it would probably be a lot smoother with the tools that they've come up with.

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 think there are still a few things they could do and it looks like they are working towards that. It still requires a good bit of training and ramping up for someone brand new to it, especially without a programming background, to jump in and start building. I think they can continue to refine that and they definitely are moving in the right direction. It's a little bit of a technical hurdle to overcome to be able to build not only just basic automations but enterprise-scale automations and automations that are reliable and can check up on themselves. I think they can work some more of that into the actual tool because we've had to do a lot of figuring out how to build best practices and how to program it directly, and the best way to be able to allow us to support it cleanly through the lifecycle. It is good, but there are some things they can add in to truly make it a five. My standards are pretty high, but I'm sure they'll get there.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are big fans of it. I typically don't get the luxury of hiring people with technical backgrounds. We usually have people coming out of school or people transferring from other departments who are interested in RPA. So, the Academy tools have been a lifesaver for us and they've been very good, especially for the RPA developer track. It is very detailed and we can really get someone through that training and feel like they're at least able to perform the basic functions of the tool pretty well. From there it is up to us in terms of getting them familiar with our best practices and how we program things and get some hands-on training with the more senior RPA developer to learn some further tips and tricks. Overall, I'm very pleased with the Academy offerings and they're one of the best I've seen from many of them.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was perhaps a month or two. It did not take long, and that included time for training. When we started off, we bought the software, went through the training as a team, and then started building a few small things. We probably had the first one in production within two months of buying the software.

We have seen a lot of improvements to our organization.

We have one that was a really high-visibility project, where it was kind of a data entry thing that all of our retail managers were spending time on. The data was fed through to a vendor that we franchise through, and they were spending an hour or two a week across hundreds of locations.

We took that into the back office and got data feeds for all the data they were putting in, and then had a bot go through to the current system of reporting, and enter that data for every single store location. We were able to free up those managers with a bunch of time. It was about 5,500 hours a year.

In terms of eliminating human errors, I can say that it has happened but it is difficult to approximate by how much. This is in part because we have a wide variety of software of processes that we've implemented. So, in some, it's definitely higher than others. On the whole, it's been good and it's been helpful, for sure.

A lot of the value from this solution comes from Studio and the activities. They really enable us to make things happen accurately, with the clicks and the types they support. Of all the automation tools I've tried or used, they seem to be the most accurate and most consistent.

The Orchestrator management tools are growing a lot and are constantly improving.

I would like to see more interconnectedness of everything, including making the APIs a little easier to use, and having bots be able to call other bots and get them to start things. Having all of this a little more seamless would be really helpful.

I would like to see more seamless AI functionality built in to allow teams without data scientists or strong data people to be able to build and deploy simple models that will help enhance their bots further and let them do more.

The technical support is a bit of a weak point for this solution, and ideally, they can improve turnaround time so that we don't have to figure things out ourselves as often.

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

We've had some issues with stability, and I've talked to a lot of other companies who've had maybe more issues than us. It concerns ongoing support and the issues with bots not performing as expected or doing unexpected things as well. The problem is running into unexpected issues that can result from things that are not very readily apparent on the surface. This can be caused by underlying configuration differences in Windows, or patches that have happened, that sort of thing. It's still a challenge to manage and we often have bots that don't seem to have the issues when we are troubleshooting.

Sometimes it is our fault because we're not programming in enough breaks or logging enough to really track what's going on. It seems very dependent on the underlying operating system and things like update states of office applications. Occasionally, it'll just get stuck or hung up and we can't really figure out why, and that's frustrating. It definitely takes people time to go in and resolve those issues and figure it out.

It just seems like there's a lot of times where we just rerun the bot and then it works fine. I find it odd that it would stop at one point and then you just rerun it again and it works. A lot of those are, I will admit, due to input data issues or the system going down, or a website not being available or loading too slowly when it checks. However, I would like to see them continue to focus on stability as a platform, to avoid those as much as possible any issue.

My team that I work with directly is probably about ten people in total. There are a couple of other teams who are working more on test automation that are kind of separate and that's probably a total of about five other people right now, and we're looking to expand to another couple of teams. That will probably be about five more people within the next year, and then my team is growing. We're looking to add a few more people next year as well.

I am the automation lead, and the users are RPA developers and business analysts.

When it comes to the technical support for this solution, I feel that it may be a little bit of a weak point. When we reached out to customer support, we haven't gotten a ton of help, or it takes them quite a while to dig through the issue. It is understandable because they're going through someone else's code essentially, to try to resolve an issue. So, usually, we end up relying on internal people, more senior developers.

Sometimes it's just a matter of rerunning it or changing some input parameters and then trying it again, which is not the cleanest troubleshooting by any means. The problem is we felt like we had to, given the slow turnaround time on their support desk. We've kind of had to have the internal ability to figure things out.

Overall, I would rate their technical support a three out of five.

I know that they're a growing company and that they have a lot of new people. It seems like we've maybe had some bad luck in terms of the people that we've been in contact with when we've reached out. Perhaps they were new and maybe not fully understanding. There have been times we've reached out to support where we feel like we know the system better than they do, and that's frustrating. Again, that's why we've had to focus on internal knowledge building, which is a strength of theirs, through the training offered.

We do have a CSM assigned to us who I work with and he's somewhat spotty at times. I think he has a lot on his plate. So, at times we have questions that take a while to get answered.

We did a proof of concept that was driven by a consulting company and it was not a success. After that, we decided to implement an in-house solution using UiPath and from there it was successful.

We began with RPA because our management was interested in the potential and in trying it out. Even though the PoC failed, I think there was a promise with the software that we were able to see, so we made the purchase and dove into it. Obviously, it has been successful.

Installing the software itself, the Studio, most of the elements of the licensing and that sort of thing, were all very straightforward, which is great. I would say that the technical side, regarding the virtual machines, took a while in terms of setting up accounts and getting all the VM stuff figured out. All of that took a little bit longer than we expected before we had a stable platform. I think that there could've been some more resources available there, which I think they've partially fixed by now.

We were calculating our savings and our estimate is that in a little under a year, perhaps as little as six months, we probably earned back the amounts that we had paid for the platform for a year. Even into the journey, we felt like we had broken even and were making more money on top of that. ROI was very fast.

I can estimate our licensing costs are approximately $100,000 USD per year.

In addition to UiPath, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

My main reason for selecting UiPath, I think, was the strategy of focusing on a very open platform and allowing anyone to try out the trial, and allowing anyone to register for the Academy. I'm really focusing on democratizing RPA and making it available to everyone. It was a big focus for me because the other two had very closed-off systems and while they were able to give us demos, we didn't really get as good of a feel for how the software works as we did with UiPath where we could just download it and try it.

Also, we just had very good experiences with the salespeople and the people who demoed the product. They were very positive and very excited about RPA, and kind of matched what we were looking for. We felt like it was a much better fit for us, focusing on easy to use automation, not as much on code security like Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere didn't seem to have a clear strategy for what they wanted to do moving forward.

Ultimately, UiPath has been a successful choice, and I feel that they have continued to grow their lead on the competition.

I really liked a lot of the things I see coming in terms of the future improvements for Orchestrator. I think it's going to continue to grow into a true kind of Cloud Platform for end-to-end automation, whereas right now, it's a little more focused just on building things in Studio, and then managing monitoring them in Orchestrator. So, I'm excited about some of the further integration with the dashboards and everything for managing how it works.

Upcoming is better management of projects from end to end. I've built a lot of things myself to keep up with that. But having UiPath support, a lot of that, a little bit better, it's improved. This is including the focus on the process mining and the design phase, and it's often a bottleneck of not having enough time to go through and really thoroughly map out and document the processes.

I am interested in trying the specific Studio for test automation. I think UiPath has a big advantage in that space with their RPA software. It really solves an issue that a lot of other test automation platforms have, which is not being as consistent as they could be, or being too hard or too complicated to program correctly.

From a cost perspective, we have definitely got our money's worth on the unattended bots, which is what we have been focused on. We have bought a few attended bots to try them and this next year, we will be looking for good use cases. It requires a little more integration and using the API. We're looking at leveraging more attended bots, and we may end up buying more, but we're still evaluating how to use them. Unattended bots felt like the clearest advantage for us to implement, and we were successful in starting with those.

We were an early adopter of this solution in our region, so I often speak with people who are researching this solution. I tell them that UiPath is a really great platform and it's growing. It's moving in a really great direction, and I recommend people to take it in-house. Find a small team of people who are really passionate and interested in learning it, and then start small. Start with a few small things to get your feet under you, build an operating model that will support scaling, and then slowly scale it out over time. That's what we have done, and it has been successful for us.

Overall, I am very happy with UiPath, but I do have a few small quibbles. On the whole, it's been very successful and I'm very happy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our client's companies have extensive issues with SAP and getting information out of it. They have another technical ERP system with an in-memory database where they don't get the information out of it, then have to add it manually to SAP. That will be probably the first big use case for automation. So, we will get a bot reading it on the database from the Citrix environment and probably moving it to SAP.

The client will probably have it on-premise. They tend to be really risk adverse in terms of Cloud solutions. We have tried to get them to use the cloud more because it's just easier.

We are using Studio Orchestrator, and unattended bots. I have programmed attended bots before.

The client is eliminating human errors as they are eliminating some of the accrual processes from SAP, where a lot of mistakes can be made. If the bot is not making mistakes, then they are eliminating errors by 100 percent, but this depends on whether the bot is efficient or error-free.

You need an understanding of how to code, use the variables and arguments, etc. That was why I was excited for StudioX. I tried it earlier, and it was amazing. This is actually what they were missing. Studio is great because you can do so much stuff.

On a scale of one to five (where five is beneficial), I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four. There is some stuff that they could do better. I sampled the advanced, which is really difficult because it's just PDF. I had to use some YouTube videos to understand the framework that you need to pass for developer. They could do more videos on that.

They have three parts. The first is the foundation, and they are a lot of videos. The third part of it (advanced), there are no videos except one. That's only those PDF files, which you have to look and read through. I was like, "Okay, I probably can't do it." Then, I fell upon some community YouTube videos from other developers who just demonstrated it. This would be great if UiPath offered that, because I found out later that the developers made mistakes in their videos.

In the foundation, they get into much detail in the beginning. You're overloaded with information. You have to go through videos like three times to get it correctly. They could remove some stuff out of there. Those quizzes are really frustrating too. They are too detailed. If you sat with Uipath, you think it's really easy. However, it's not so much, if you get into those details.

Studio is a bit overwhelming in the beginning. They could get add some details, but not so many, into the foundation training. I've seen StudioX and loved the colors. Please get the colors into Studio. I loved the flow and that you got all these activities and colors too. It was so much easier. It was visually easier to understand where to click. It was really user-friendly.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform for automating our company’s processes as a four out of five (with five being very easy). I would rate it as a four because it didn't work in the beginning to get my bots active. I had to get into a lot of videos to get them running. I didn't understand how it needed to be designed or coded.

The Orchestrator training was much better, but I still somehow missed some details which I needed. However, it's not just do it, then it's done. You need some time to get into it. Though, it's much easier than Studio.

The integration with Outlook is not that good yet.

I would rate stability as a four (out of five). I had some cases where Orchestrator didn't work in it. We couldn't login and the platform was slow.

We are still small and just starting out. We have five developers/solution architects involved in automation projects. We have done our certificate through UiPath Academy.

Support is pretty good. It's responsive.

Our client was having some problems. They got a framework running on a scale: 

• Which processes should be automated?
• What are the easiest processes to automate and more difficult?

For our first client project, it took us five months from the time that UiPath license was purchased until we implemented the first bot. 

The initial setup was straightforward. They identified several easier flows, and it was like learning with the client together. I know they are phasing out some more complex issues where you have to get into the details of HTML coding and stuff like that to get some stuff done. That is where UiPath gets difficult, because it's just coding and tech.

Our client saw ROI after one month. They realized after we showed them the first process that three people would be free to do other stuff. They got to sort of afraid of what they would do with those three people, and those people were afraid, which was a big issue. 

We invented RPI and pizza. We all came to those pizza Fridays and showed them that they don't have to be afraid. They benefited from it more than not, and no one would lose their jobs.

We told the client UiPath is best. We looked for the biggest player in the market and decided UiPath was the platform.

We target medium-size companies and have long-term relationships with them. They trust in our opinion. We told them our reasons that we think UiPath is the best.

UiPath is biggest player in the market. They have this platform economy going. I'm really excited to hear that they bought the process goals. There's a lot of potential there, if they integrate process automation with process mining. That is a big thing for me.

We looked into other RPA tools, like Blue Prism. We decided it's harder to learn and implement.

I would rate the solution an eight (out of 10). They need to thrive to get better.

If you have some tech experienced people, then UiPath is the better solution because it's easier to learn and implement.

Right now, the primary use case is document retrieval from our client system. We are a healthcare billing company, so we have to pull things like medical records and different documents from hospital stays. So, we used the robots to pull those versus an FTE.

We have both unintended and attended robotics that we use. We haven't really delved into Studio a lot yet. That's going to be part of our staging and going into the next phase. We built all of our basic bots, so now we're going into the more complex bots.

We are on-premise. We were looking at moving to the cloud, so that will be something in our next steps.

It has a really good turnaround time for our operations department to start working on claims, because all the information has already been pulled upfront with the bots. Instead of having to go into an account and request medical records or a certain type of document, it's normally already been pulled on the front-end as soon as the account loads because we run everything through the bots.

The most valuable feature right now is we have been able to utilize our staff better with the bots. We can put them on more high priority items. That was the one thing that everyone was afraid of: The bots would replace them. What we did is retrain them to do other tasks that we needed, as that was more of a priority for us.

We do deal somewhat with Citrix. It depends on the client and how the bot has to be set up. We have some clients who do run through Citrix, then we have some who use a VPN tunnel to get in. So, we have it on both.

The implementations or integrations through Citrix are really good. The only problem that we are coming across is just maintenance. If the Citrix platform gets updated and we're not notified, it breaks. So, we have to reconfigure our bot to the new updates. Unfortunately, that's just the name of the game, and that would be true if we were pulling them manually versus a bot. We would still run into that with the Citrix platforms.

I would rate stability as a five (out of five). We have not actually had any issues with UiPath. Most of our issues have been with just platforms changing, breaking, and the regular maintenance.

We have about 40 bots right now with 30 ready to be made.

Our team is really small. We have roughly six people who are working with the developers and actually running the bots. We're the only department using the solution. Our department was asked to lead this on, so we've been very fortunate to be able to lead it and be able to help our own department first. Now, we're starting to look at other areas of the company to deploy RPA.

We have not used UiPath technical support.

The initial setup was a little complex, but that was because we really didn't even know what we were getting into. We were told by upper management (our CFO) that automation was the next frontier and we had to go that route. We were sort of the pioneers going through this for our company,

It probably took about six to eight weeks for us to talk with development and for them to get the context of what we wanted. It took them about five weeks to actually build the bot. Then, once they built the bot, it was in production. Of course, we had to go back and do some maintenance because it did not work first time. After we got the hang of it, it's been great.

We got some consulting from UiPath. We do use their developers. Other than that, we do not go through a third-party. We did everything else ourselves.

Our experience with UiPath services was good. There were some bumps along the way. It's just trying to understand the process and RPA from what we've seen.

It took us about six months to really see what the bots could do. We then started tracking financial savings and how it's helping the company. We set out a bit differently. Our CFO came out, and said, "Automation is where we're going," but on top of that, "This is X amount of money that you have to save in the process."

We have spent the last 18 months tracking how much we are spending and how much we're saving. We hit the goal with no problems because we were able to shift staff. We did eliminate some staff, but this solution really brought out the skill level of our employees. Those employees with the higher skills were able to transfer to more important projects.

Within the first year, we saved a little over $600,000. That totaled to almost 19 FTEs which we ended up saving.

We haven't used any other vendors.

We are on spreadsheets and data. I keep saying we're stuck in 1996. It's been nice to have the vision of being able to be in the 21st century and really be able to use the bots the way we want to use them.

We have not taken part in the UiPath training. That's something that we talked about right before this conference. We really need to start utilizing more of the training that's offered. We want to turn some of our soft coders into people who can really code for us, not always relying on developers to do all of our work. That's definitely something that we're implementing soon.

I would rate it at least a four (out of five) for ease of use. We don't deal so much with UiPath, but from what we do deal with outside of developers, we have not had any problems. It has been very user-friendly, for those of us that don't know coding. We are able to look at things, sort of fix things, etc.

I rated them a four for ease of use, not a five, because we want to see what UiPath can do. We have a lot on the table. We have 30 bots ready to go. A lot of it's more screen scraping, which will be more complex. So, we want to see really if UiPath can do what they say the solution can do. We want to test its scalability.

I definitely would say UiPath is the way, especially with everything that they're coming out with now. It helps you understand more about RPA instead of just being thrown into things. It helps you understand all that on a smaller level. It is what everyone else has said here at the conference too, "Start with a small project. Don't go out with a big thing because it's not going to work." Luckily, we did start small, and we've just grown from there. Those would be my suggestions.

I would rate the solution a 10 out of 10.

We are using attended and unattended bots. The attended ones are very low profile. We are also using Orchestrator.

Our primary use case for this solution is to automate underwriting processes.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment, yet.

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. I think that we still struggle sometimes with what kind of a bot we need to use for what kind of work. It may be a lack of understanding on our side. We need to have more clarity on this.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. This is what I have heard from my team members. I did enroll in the training but I didn't make much progress. That said, I have heard good things about it.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately a six-month transition.

In terms of eliminating human errors, I would say that this solution has done so to a certain extent. The stuff that we are automating was quite simple to begin with. As such, there was not a lot of room for error because we have multiple verification steps. I cannot estimate a percentage for the reduction of human error.

I would say that we have a time-savings of approximately fifty percent.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the unattended robots because I can schedule my jobs and it can run on its own. I don't need to pay much attention, except in the case of an exception. That is the only time that I need to deal with it.

We sometimes struggle trying to figure out what kind of a bot we need to use for what kind of work, and it would be nice to have more clarity on this.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. It is quite stable.

We have a team of ten developers who work with this solution.

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

We got involved in automation because it makes us more efficient and we save money. These are a few of the important things that we are always looking for.

The implementation of this solution was done in-house.

We have seen ROI because a lot of the work is now automated, so the people who used to do these tasks, the monotonous work, are now doing better things. I would say that we saw ROI in five to six months.

The licensing costs for the unattended bots are a little too expensive. If it were lower then I think we could use it more effectively.

We are excited about the upcoming features with artificial intelligence and document understand capabilities. I think that those are features that would come in quite handy for us.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to take a look from the grand scale to see which use cases are the prominent ones. Do not look at all of the tiny details because sometimes we can make a use case very complex. The end result is less valuable. Look for the high-level stuff that can be quickly automated, then come down to the final stuff later.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

We are in the financial services industry. A lot of what we do is background data processing, and we use the unattended robots for a lot of it. We do have some attended robots as well, but most of our processes are unattended.

I am a developer, so I primarily use Studio. I write the instructions for our Orchestrator Application Manager to do everything we need in Orchestrator. 

We are currently operating an on-premises deployment, but we're in the pilot group for Cloud, so as soon as we get a date on that we'll probably be migrating.

One of the primary processes that we've automated is reporting. Prior to automation, our users were only able to run a few of the reports, a few times a week. Now, we're running every single report that there is to run, which is probably four or five times what they were able to do, every single day. Every morning they receive a summary of that work, so they're able to just get on and look at it, rather than during the close of the day. In financial services, the close of the day is crunch time. We work really hard to make sure that everything is done within a set about of time because there is a domino effect. One person has to be done before the next person can finish, and they're not having to dig back and try to figure out when these issues happened. We're providing it to them upfront. We can say exactly what happened, which account they need to look at, and on what date. This means that we're ahead of the issues, rather than trying to backtrack and find them.

We are not currently running in a Citrix environment, but the only reason we're not is that our sister company hosts our Citrix environment, so we can't install any of the services that make those environments much easier to utilize. For example, we can't install the computer vision component because we don't own it, so they won't let us.

Our team is really small, there's only six of us on the actual RPA team. However, we work really hard with the business to get buy-in in every department. We're trying to roll out at least one automation in every single department. Our company's goals for the next year, I believe, every associate of the company is supposed to have proposed a task that they are doing, whether it's daily, monthly, yearly, whatever, that could be automated. Then our team will ingest that, prioritize that, and work through it. But, we're really trying really hard to get our whole company involved, and we're getting ready to kick off this campaign to try and get more attention to it and to try and get people using it. We want it to be more than just a buzzword. We want it to be something that everybody's talking about regularly, and using, and excited about.

When it comes to getting people interested, I think it's probably a combination of education and sharing the experience of those projects that we have rolled out. When people are really seeing that with the projects that we've rolled out, our close is shortening, they become interested. What we say is happening, or will happen when we're rolling these automations out, is happening. Getting that to be shared from process owner to their team, to the teams that they're working with, it acts like word of mouth for those that are affected. We don't like it to just all come from us, the technical team. We don't want to simply tell them that it's going to do something. We want others to talk about what it has done for them and suggest they should take advantage of that too.

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 five. We don't struggle with it.

I took the UiPath academy training, and I love it. We are looking at an unrelated tool right now, and we found no comparison between their training and the UiPath Academy. We were spoiled with UiPath Academy, and we didn't really realize how good that training really is.

The thing that I love about the developer training; the level one, level two, level three... level one really does walk you through it. It gives you, literally the walkthrough, so when you don't understand, you can go back, you can look at, and see exactly how to do it. But by the time you're in level three, it's not doing that anymore. The requirements are a little bit looser, you have to figure out how to interpret the words or the requirements, and it becomes more challenging, but I think that that's important, because, by the time that you're actually working real projects, it's not a walkthrough anymore. You have to figure it out on your own.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately three months. It did take us a little while, but we knew that we purchased our licenses before we were really ready to hit the ground running. We function out of such a small team, and we were still working with UiPath trying to figure out which partner we wanted to bring in for consultants because we wanted somebody with experience. We didn't want someone who just finished the training just run in and try, and I think we learned a lot working with that consultant.

We did work with a second consulting group, Machina Automation, and we loved working with them. They're great. They're just so supportive, and they really want to make sure things are right. It's never just sending them the requirements and pounding it out to get it into production. We work with them really deeply to try and make sure that they understand the process, we understand the requirements, they express their concerns to us, we express our concerns to them, and we work together. It's not like we just send them the documents and they send it back as a project. The whole way through we touch base with them every single morning. They're always asking what more they can do and how they can help. They ask if we're happy with what we received.

We do time card reviews, so the time that they spend with us we're actually able to go back and validate, based on that, what they've said they did, that indeed it is what they did. We had received some scrum and sprint training from them. We've had actual developer consultants, we've had mentoring hours for our developers. So we've had a lot from them, and they've been able to help us with everything. Anything we ask, they try to accommodate us. For example, we asked if they had any experience with Kibana. They did not but said that they would find somebody who does.

With respect to saving time, I don't actually track that because I am a developer, but I know that our goal for next year is twenty thousand hours. That's the big goal that we're working towards. With one of our processes, I think we're going to hit about thirteen thousand hours if we can just get that one process done. That's a statement review. We sent out tens of thousands of statements, so we'll be able to review every single one of those. This would be a huge saving in time.

I think right now we have about one hundred and thirty-six processes in production, and a lot of what we've done so far is in the finance section of the business. As such, a lot of those are only run on a quarterly, or monthly basis. We have some annual processes, and we have very few daily processes, but those daily processes add up over time.

In addition to the hours that we have saved, one of the big things we're working on is accuracy, control, and staff avoidance. Staff avoidance is the work that couldn't have been done otherwise because we would have had to hire someone to take on all of the work. So, we're able to do more than what our current staff is capable of doing. We add that into our time savings.

But, more than that, we really do focus on accuracy and timeliness. We're able to speed things up. We're able to ensure that things are exactly as expected. We spent a lot of time in the early stages of our planning, really trying to optimize our processes, so we get our original documentation, we take it, and our team works with the business to optimize that. After we get sign-off and we've optimized the manual process and got it documented and signed off, then we do a developer review and discuss ways that it can be made easier. Then we do a review for development and optimize it. Finally, once we get that signed off, we actually start our development.

We spend a lot of time on the front end of the process, making sure that everything is accurate and reliable, and we're going to be able to deliver faster as expected, and it's going to be able to handle all of these different errors or use cases. Following this process has worked well for us, so far.

I think the most valuable feature is being able to run processes in an unattended way where we can schedule them, and then have the report sent to the process owner's inbox in the morning. The is great for us, and we use it a lot. It saves the users a lot of time, and we're able to do a lot more for a user than they were ever able to do on their own.

I would like to see a biweekly scheduling option in Orchestrator. We've actually built into our automations a roundabout way to process every two weeks but it would be really nice to front end a biweekly schedule. Being in the financial services industry, we do have a lot of projects that run on weird schedules. We've kept some of our automations attended just because they're ad-hoc. They might need to re-run them. We don't want to have to wait for Orchestrator managers to kick those processes off. But, outside of that, there is no need for this one to be an attended robot. It's a perfect candidate for unattended automation, just the scheduling is the problem.

With respect to the stability, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. We haven't ever had any issues with it.

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

When I first started at the company as an intern for my department, it was only myself and my boss, who's now our COE manager. The very first thing that we did was meet with all of the different functional departments of the company, and we explained to them what RPA is. We explained the types of processes that it can help take off your desk and asked for ideas from each department about what could be done to help them.

We took that, and we built this huge backlog of perhaps three hundred different items, prioritized them, and worked with others to explain that it was needed. At this point, we did PoCs with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

I found the initial setup to be straightforward. They had me sit in on it and I don't work infrastructure, so there were some things that kind of went over my head. They did a lot of planning. After some help from UiPath, it went really fast.

UiPath helped us with the implementation. We worked with them to really figure out what our infrastructure needed to look like. 

We evaluated both Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism in addition to this solution. We ruled out Blue Prism pretty quickly. Our sister company uses Automation Anywhere, but we liked UiPath, primarily for the reason of our experience working with them and the sales team. To me, it was so much more than just working with the sales team, they're our friends now. We still talk to them and we have relationships with these people. We actually just ran into one of our developers for our PoC. It's a culture you want to be a part of.

In comparing with Automation Anywhere, one of the big reasons we went with UiPath was the support that we received. Any question we had was immediately answered. If they didn't know the answer, then they would search to find the right people in the company who did. I think that that's more valuable than just saying that they'll find us an answer. You always got the feeling that they were going to follow through, just by the conversations that we have had with them. I think that really sold us, a lot.

Also, watching the road maps for both companies at the time, initially it seemed like Automation Anywhere was ahead, and that UiPath was catching up. Then, when UiPath started releasing what they were going to be doing, as opposed to only what they were working on right now, we realized they were really going to be moving ahead. I think that kind of sold us too. Just watching what's on the road map, and how it fits in with what we see our company doing in the next few years, they aligned really well. I think that was the point where my boss really realized that it's going to be a good fit for us.

When I was in business school, they taught us that the things that users like the most are the things they didn't know they needed. I think UiPath does a great job of anticipating the users' needs, and they meet them before we knew that it was what we needed. I am excited about the next release.

I recently had a discussion with my father, who works for one of the energy companies in my state. He works at the IT level but on the infrastructure side. When I explained to him our savings in terms of hours that we have had since adopting RPA, he was very excited and is now heading their RPA initiative.

RPA is making a difference and it's really changing the way the workforce works.

My biggest advice for anybody considering this solution is to get their quality improvement, and Six Sigma teams involved because I think it makes a huge difference in terms of understanding processes. When you can get your processes understood, you can get people on board early, at every level.

I think it's really important to have proponents for automation, just in general. You want to have the automation mindset at every single level. Of course, it's important to have your C-level bought in, but it's important to have the people who are doing the work bought in too. If you don't get their buy-in, it's going to be much more difficult because a lot of the work that you're automating is at their levels. You're working with them on a day to day basis to understand their process, to understand all of the rules behind what they're doing. So, buy-in, and process understanding, that's just critical. You can't move fast without those two things.

We have nothing bad to say about UiPath. We have regular communication with them and all of the concerns we have are always addressed. They're addressed quickly and they're addressed well. They really listen to what the customers want.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.