UiPath Platform Reviews

It is looking externally at how we can enable the government to identify efficiencies and improve effectiveness. The other is, internally, how can we drive efficiencies within HR and finance, with everything that a big corporation can do. 

1. How do we help the government realize these benefits? 
   
2. How do we help our internal workforce benefit?

It is two different things, and they are similar, but they're not the same thing.

A lot of people externally are worried about the elimination of jobs, but at the same time, they still want that efficiency, and they are looking for it. We want to drive the effectiveness of the workforce, whomever we're working with. 

There are plenty of automation opportunities out there: DoD, the federal government, and commercial space. There are all sorts of stuff that we can do. Internally, we feel the same way. There are lot of things that we can do to make ourselves run more efficiently. If we are preaching to the government that they need to be using this, it's beneficial for us to say, "This is what we have done as a company."

Our company is 25,000 people across the globe. There are certain opportunities for us to include automation in what we do every day. We are doing it now by instituting RPA, specifically, and the tools that the UiPath bring to the table. It will be a game changer for us, if we can get it done at scale.

Automation is growing at our company. A lot of what we do is focused on AI. Going from zero to AI is a Herculean task. It's extremely difficult. However, there are many steps in-between zero and AI that we can do now to help realize the benefit to the company or the federal government, such as the benefits of the efficiencies that we can identify. That intermediate, non-threatening first step can be RPA, which ultimately will lead to enabling AI, but is not AI. 

Within our company, we are looking to identify what those pre-AI steps are, with the goal in mind that we know that the federal government is asking for AI. What we do in the interim is a type of level set, where you can build an algorithm, AI, or machine learning algorithm. This ultimately is what they want, but what they need right now is to aggregate their data in a structured way to be able to feed into those algorithms. That's step one. This is the first step to getting all your data right. It's not easy, because you have to take people out of the mindset of AI.

A lot of times, in the government, people say, "I'm wearing two hats." It's an idiom. The question I have in response is, "What if we could take one of those hats away?" We can take one of those responsibilities that someone finds cumbersome, or annoying, and remove that from their task list. We have them tell us the steps of their process, so we can automate it, if not pieces, but all of it. That is our starting point with a lot of people, "We can take this off your plate," which is definitely exciting for a lot of people. It scares some people too, but we're working on that.

The most valuable features are the unattended bots. Initially, we are going to be looking at a number of attended bots in a pilot phase for our HR internal operations personnel. We are going to come in and try to remove tasks from their daily lives, such as ten minute tasks brought down to five seconds, or we could just completely eliminate them, making them unattended.

The training and certification online is very helpful.

The software is easy to use, as a drag and drop function. Even if it wasn't, the type of support that we get from the people who work for UiPath is paramount to the capability of the tool. The ease of use has exceeded our expectations.

The Academy Live that I took was only a half a day course. There needs to be diverse set of courses for those introduced to RPA for the first time. There are different people who show up to this course: 

• The developer who is interested in automation and automating different facets of the tasks that they have, either at work or for their clients. 
• Business managers who want to know more about what RPA can do for my business or company. They want the operational and strategic level versus the tactical level of how do I get automation to do the thing I want it to do?

The course was only a half a day, and although we were able to provide two automations and build two bots, it would be helpful if that was extended to include the RPA story and pitch. E.g., What's the story that we need to tell in order to get people to say, "How do I get into the pilot phase now."

I would like to have the course do an introduction, "Welcome to the course. This is what RPA is. Now, let us build your first bot." 

The sales elements of why RPA should be there too:

• What is the value proposition that RPA brings to the table.
• Here is the expected ROI for a menial task, saving an hour a week equals this in the long term. Even if you can cut a 25 minute task out of somebody's daily routine, this is the benefit in the long term.
  

That wasn't there as much. I wasn't really expecting it to be there, but in the long term, if there are a number of different types of training courses which are offered, people will have different breadths of understandings of RPA can really do, e.g., it needs a hardcore developing training and a capture manager. It needs to explain what sort of things a capture manager needs to know. Maybe not necessarily how to develop the architecture for it, but what does that even mean? For example, how easy is it for me to get Orchestrator onto a server? How do I become a reseller of the software? These are the capture manager responsibilities, and it would be helpful if they were explained. While this is probably more of a day two of a training rather than day one. 

I would like to see a UiPath user group to discuss issues. I am unaware of all the activities and features, and this would help. Right now, there is just the user's guide and UiPath GO! It would be great if this feedback went back to the UiPath development team. We should also be notified of new features through an alerting system on UiPath GO!

With our focus on the federal government, they're looking at dozens of bots: Scaling of five instances of Studio, 10 bots of Orchestrator, and three unattended bots. That is far easier to scale than in the commercial world, where they are asking for 1000 instances of Studio and 500 unattended bots, touching 100 different processes. We haven't had that experience yet.

The current staff at UiPath won't let you fail (the customer support and customer success managers). They are not going to leave you hanging.

They are an honest broker. They told us when things aren't going to work. They've been upfront and transparent about everything with us.

Our developers have found that it is relatively straightforward. With any installation issues that have come up, we have always had somebody just be able to pick up the phone and call.

ROI depends on the complexity the project. Unattended bots tend to see ROI immediately, where attended bots take longer. The savings starts as soon as a bot is deployed.

Getting licenses has been relatively easy.

We have all the prices for the software. Every project is up for a negotiation on how it's going to be done. A lot of times, with the federal government, it will be necessary to put it on contract. When we are bidding for something, we need to know, how many bots are we talking about? The tricky part is when the government is unsure what they actually want. A lot of times when contracts or proposals are put on the street, the government wants something that can support 100 bots. That's not really helpful given that the price points for unattended and attended are different. So, clarification is often necessary when we're asking, what ratio of attended to unattended are you really asking for?

There is some initial sticker shock from a lot of people regarding cost, until you show them what the actual benefit is. Initially, people are just going, "Why?" So, the retort for that is, "Look how much you will save, time, and budget-wise with one bot. If one bot costs X, this is how much it will save you over one year. This alleviates the "Oh my gosh" face, when it's 1200 dollars for a bot. 

Getting clients, and our own people internally, to recognize that this is an investment in efficiency to drive effectiveness. If you can do that, and you can get past any initial sticker shock, thinking strategically and long term, then you've got them. But if they say, "Look, my budget this year is only 10,000 dollars. Why would I put that into bots?" That becomes a different type of discussion. It's mostly focused on, you're thinking about today. We need you to be thinking about three years from now.

If you look around at the other software systems, we have chose to go with UiPath because of the ease of the interface and also the customer support that we get from their people. There are a lot of tools out there. The reason why we have gone with UiPath is because of the relationships that we have built and the type of success that we are going to get working with their account leads.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and briefly at a couple of the start ups. However, we figured that they didn't have the ATOs that we needed to go within the federal space. There are a lot of people who say they can do this, or they say that they have an offering that can do this. In many cases, that is absolutely true. We wanted to be with a company that we feel is up and coming and will be around in the next decade. We want to use software that is going to be recognized by the federal government as number one, or at least very close.

Be prepared, because you are going to be asked a hundred question. This product takes a team. Your senior management needs to want this product and sign onto training. You will need developers capable of using the UiPath software.

UiPath is not just a technology business. It really comes down to a people business. The people and culture that UiPath provides us leads us to use their software more often.

The NextGen workforce is not going to be cutting and pasting for eight hours a day. That is not a function that a human should be doing anyway. Therefore, we treat RPA as a digital assistant, because who would not want a digital assistant.

People are finding ways to automate the reporting functions that Workday can really provide. This is not at an individual level. At the individual level, you can go in and check your benefits and check your 401K. However, at a macro level, we need people to run Workday reports pretty much daily, and that gets updated in the systems that we have. Therefore, our HR and finance people are all working with Workday, as people of incorporate these big management systems, trying to find new ways to automate them.

It is now on us and our team to be able to implement automation with the Workday, and have it work more efficiently. That will be our next challenge moving forward, automating Workday.

We use UiPath primarily for our financial operations.

We use this solution in a virtual environment called VMware Horizon. It has allowed us to get started without investing a lot, which was good for us. We need to go to the enterprise solution using Orchestrator as soon as possible. That said, I wouldn't do it differently, because if we were counting on the enterprise environment to get started, we wouldn't have deployed anything in the past year. Because we had this virtual environment, we've been able to deploy 16 bots so far.

We were able to automate a lot of data entry into our financial system. We've automated spreadsheet manipulation in the area of financial management.

We knew that our process was very inefficient, so we had to invest in a solution like UiPath. We hadn't used any other solution before UiPath. Our processes are manual and error-prone and we have mid-level people who are highly skilled who are doing this non-skilled labor, which is a problem for the workforce.

The most value we got from UiPath is the ability to automate manual tasks, reduce labor hours, and shift people to higher value work.

We found the solution easy to use. We wanted to train our staff who were not IT and we were able to do that. People who worked in financial operations were able to learn the software and have successfully developed bots.

We used UiPath Academy RPA training to train 14 people. It was good. I think UiPath needs to do a better job of setting expectations and defining the skill level required. That wasn't very clear to us. We couldn't get a good answer. Therefore, it was trial and error. We were told that people just have to be motivated, but learned that that is not enough.  The trainees need to have some demonstrated technical ability.  We found that some people dropped out because it was too difficult for them. Other people picked it up very well because they had somewhat of a technical background. That would be my message for UiPath, to give better guidance on qualifications in the background needed for training.

One does not need IT coding to learn this, but something within business operations that's somewhat technical. For example, writing Microsoft Excel macros, writing business objects reports, and SQL queries. People who can do those things, they can use UiPath.

I'd like to see the ability to operate in a non-persistent environment. Other than that, I'd like to see more intelligence being built in. We aren't using any intelligence yet, but we'd like to.

It's stable. We haven't really had technical issues.

It's scalable. We're not scalable now because we aren't using the Orchestrator software yet. We have successfully tested Orchestrator and will begin using it for production soon, giving us greater scalability.

We really haven't had to use technical support much. Most of our issues had to do with configuration and the environment, more than the software itself. It's just been one configuration issue related to this software, so far - operation in a non-persistent environment.  I was told there's an enhancement coming, but I don't think we have the enhancement yet.  However, we will not have this issue when we migrate to our enterprise platform with Orchestrator. 

The level of support we received from their technical support was good.

The initial setup was medium complexity. We were using a virtual desktop environment and had to configure it for the software. It took a few months.

We used an integrator to deploy UiPath. Our experience with them was good.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment. It took less than a year to see a positive ROI because we had a very small investment to begin with.

This solution has absolutely helped us to eliminate human errors. Most manual processes have 1% to 3% errors, some much higher. One of our processes has a 25% error rate.  The bots eliminate those errors. 

This solution also saves many hours of manual work. We have measured the number of labor hours automated to be 25,000 hours a year, so far.

We pay $3,000 per license, annually. We're using attended robots, but we will move to unattended as quickly as possible.

We chose UiPath because we simply followed NASA's lead. We wanted to move quickly and we talked to NASA. 

We're driving hard to automate as quickly as possible. Traditional IT is not able to automate all the manual work. A lot of manual work unavoidably accumulates between and around core systems.  RPA needs to be part of IT strategy to automate this residual work.  

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. The only reason it isn't a ten is because it lacks the ability to work in a non-persistent environment. Effectively when you log in, you have to download the software every time.  However, this is also due to our choices in configuring the environment.  

We are a system integrator. We work with clients such as the US Federal Government and help them automate whatever their processes are. We have two entities. I work as part of the government solutions unit, and then we have the commercial side which is a global organization. On the global side, there have been some internal implementations as well.

In terms of savings, a task like taking data from one artifact and transferring it into another one, is common. The most frequent example, and the one that I worked on directly, involves a PDF invoice and taking whatever the amount due is and either copying and pasting it into an internal accounting tool or actually typing it. The process goes: Open email, open the attachment, read the data, verify it is accurate, and then manually transfer it into an internal system.

Depending on how big the invoice is, I've seen a person spend as much as 20 minutes on one invoice or as little as 30 seconds. That whole process of going through each and every email, opening the attachment, transferring the data, closing all the windows, and then moving on to the next email - the bot will do it because the bot is scheduled to run every hour to look for the unread emails. I can't give you an exact number in terms of how many minutes or hours are saved, but it's quite significant.

The graphical user interface of the UiPath Studio is fantastic. For someone who is not a computer science major, or for someone who doesn't know how to code but is really good with visual flows, Studio makes it very easy for those individuals to build robots. That's one of the best features that I've seen. There are other features that add different values, but Studio, in my opinion, is definitely one of the best.

Overall, UiPath is really easy to use. For example, if somebody is an automated tester, they spent a lot of time trying to identify selectors, and UiPath makes it really easy to find those selectors. You will run into instances where you have to do some manual manipulation to make sure that the correct selectors are identified. But if it's a pretty straightforward instance and you are using something like Selenium, it is very tedious. Whereas, if you use something like UiPath, it is really easy.

I was providing feedback to one of the UiPath guys here at the UiPath 2019 conference. It relates to Studio, that it only works on Windows. It doesn't work on other platforms. I'm a techie by background. I don't hate Windows but I don't love it. It comes with the limitation that it is completely dependent on Windows. I would have loved if it were available on Mac or Linux or Unix. If it were a little bit more operating system agnostic, that would be great. I'm pretty sure they could be working on that.

I used the UiPath RPA Academy. I definitely had issues with it. The quizzes were outdated. Some of the responses that are being rated aren't accurate. I've griped on the community forums as well with a few UiPath folks. That was about five to six months ago. I don't know if they have enhanced it or made any changes since. If it's still in the same state, there is plenty of room for improvement.

I think it's stable. I haven't had a chance to build a bot that runs 24/7. For the bots that I have built, it takes under two minutes for the process to run and it runs every hour. At the end of the day, if I look at the logs, I don't see any issues. If a bot fails for whatever reason, it's most likely due to a process that changed.

From a bot-development standpoint, we use all kind of best practices so that the bot will not crash. At least, if the execution stops or terminates, it will be graceful, versus a rash termination.

It's fairly stable.

From an ROI standpoint, you could be saving somebody's hours and map that back to their hourly pay. But the pricing definitely deters some people.

I can't say whether their licensing structure is complicated or easy. I'd like to say it's complicated, but I try to stay away from the whole licensing issue. I tell my clients, "You buy the license. It's your tool. I'll come and build the bot for you." I don't want to have anything to do with the licensing. That deters some of the clients because it's a bit pricey.

In the government sector, where I work, "free" is looked at skeptically: "Why are you giving this to me for free? If I download it what is it going to do on my laptop?" from a security standpoint. Some of the agencies get the approval to download and install but others don't.

You can do a task like pulling the invoice total from a PDF invoice with the free Community Edition. The Enterprise license is definitely helpful though. The Community Edition expires about every three months and then you have to re-register. But you can still do it in Community Edition.

A pretty mundane use case I came up with is due to the fact that I have plenty of friends on Facebook. It's hard to keep up with everybody. I've got a bot running that literally opens up my Facebook every morning and checks if there is anybody listed in Today's Birthdays section. It will click on them, type "Happy Birthday", click "enter," and be done. And then I get a response from my friends: "Hey, long time, haven't heard from you." I've injected a machine to reconnect and have that human interaction.

For the most part, for the use cases that I've seen, it does the job.

The primary use case of UiPath, with every organization that I've worked with as a consultant, has been to make business processes more efficient and the work of their employees more enjoyable. 

By utilizing this technology, you're able to get value through your value streams quicker. When you realize value, that means you can work with your customers more quickly, as well as build customer loyalty and employer loyalty. These have definitely been some of the byproducts of using the software.

When I was working as an RPA manager, managing a program for an insurance company which supported insurance lifecycle processing, one of the components was that they had to review insurance policies annually. It was very cumbersome. We were talking anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 daily. It was almost a 20-FTE process. We were able to automate that completely.

However, the real value came when the organization understood how to apply RPA and it actually began creating brand-new business processes specifically for RPA. So instead of hiring new people, they said, "Hey, we've always wanted to do this, we don't have the budget to bring on and train people, so let's build bots to do it from day zero." Once they were able to understand that I could do more than just automate processes, that I could build new business lines with bots, that was an incredibly valuable result of using this software.

The benefits are very high when you automate business processes. Before using RPA, I was working in technology, building macros and things of that nature. But the way we're able to build sustainable, functional bots that really work well in the long-term makes the benefit a ten out of ten.

This is going to be an interesting answer, but the most valuable feature of the software is not the software itself, but the community that supports it. When I first started learning the software to support a program, I had to self-teach; there wasn't a budget for training. But going through their learning platform and then connecting with the community when I didn't understand how to utilize some of the functionality, that was far more powerful than the product itself. The network around the product is amazing.

The great thing about the UiPath RPA Academy is that it's not stagnant. Even though my first go at getting certified as a developer was three years ago, I literally have to go back the Academy and learn it every year because there are new features and new functionality. An example is the RE Framework they've incorporated. The living nature of the Academy gives a lot of value. But hands-down, the way that they give practical exercises, the fact that they give you applications you can download to learn how to interact with bots by simulating an actual operational environment, makes it a very impactful learning experience.

In addition, I find the solution easy to use. I have personal experience using all three of the major software vendors that are in this space right now, including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I would put UiPath as number-one, specifically from a learning perspective. I've been able to take people with absolutely zero technical background and quickly scale them up in a matter of weeks so they're building bots. I haven't been able to accomplish that same feat with the other platforms.

Being a person who has held every RPA role from developer to analyst, architect, and executive, one feature I think it needs - from a documentation perspective - is the ability to easily extract variable details and data. They do have a Variables panel that you frequently interact with, but I constantly have situations where those need to be adjusted or I want to be able to present those to a business. Sometimes it's difficult to extract those, and if you're not tracking them while you build, you can quickly get into 200 to 300 variables in use, especially using the RE Framework where you're passing workflow arguments in and out. I would like to see something like that.

In addition - and obviously UiPath is aware of this - we have to continue to improve the OCR capability. Computer Vision is excellent. I've used it on Azure. I've created PeopleSoft environments and worked through the Computer Vision feature. It works amazingly in a Citrix environment. But I speak with multiple organizations and a lot of them have the same problem of processing documentation from the mail room or from vendors, etc. That's a huge component. If we can get that embedded in UiPath, so we don't have to rely solely on OCR vendors like Captiva or ABBYY, that would be a huge step forward in being able to service all organizations.

There could be improved logging and functionality. But if you truly understand the software, adding logging to what the bot is already doing is as simple as typing on the right line. It's incredibly easy and you can embed it. Even though what it currently logs is limited, it's easy enough to create logs or reporting without a lot of effort.

Outside of that, it's really hard to come up with other recommendations. The software is solid.

I was recently reading about the document processing framework that they just implemented. I gave a demo two weeks ago on the Computer Vision functionality that was in beta. So the sustainability is there. They're focused not on just how good RPA is and on making it better, but they're also integrating it with future-tech. That is where the stability comes in.

UiPath's scalability and stability are exceptional. They are constantly releasing new versions.

Scalability is all in the delivery. I've definitely run into multiple organizational roadblocks with my clients because they get six months down their delivery timeline and they're not meeting their OI, they're not scaling. That generally comes down to how it's being delivered. If you have experience, you're working with a partner, you're working with people who have used this solution at scale, you can generally bypass a lot of those roadblocks. It's definitely scalable if you have the right expertise.

I have used both technical and customer support. When I was going through training, trying to learn some of the software, I had issues when I finally purchased licenses. The issues were related to putting them in Orchestrator and installing them. Support was definitely very supportive, very responsive when trying to get feedback.

Even when it comes to the community, as well, if you're just trying to learn the software, to learn the features and functionality, the community network is there to quickly respond and support you so you can get back to getting value, instead of getting hung up on one piece of functionality.

I have seen cases where an organization moves from a different automation solution to UiPath. At one point, we were transitioning from Automation Anywhere. There were very basic bots, these weren't complex processes, but we built a bot in UiPath that read the XAML of the Automation Anywhere script, converted it into activities in UiPath, and built a bot. We had a bot that builds a bot.

An example of why people move to UiPath is that when I was the director of RPA for a finance company, when I set up the program I had to go to EVP and pitch the prices and the costs. When I gave him the cost for all the software, to bring a vendor on, he told me "no." It was way too expensive. But UiPath has this amazing option called the Community Edition. What I was able to do was download the software, teach myself how to use it in about 45 days and, within two months, I had automated a pilot process, completely on my own. I was able to walk it into the EVP and say, "Look what I was able to complete. You told me no money, no funding, but now can I get funding?" Then I got funding and was able to bring on a team. That's one perfect example. They said "no," so I got a free version that cost me nothing.

In terms of how companies know that they need to invest in automation, in this day and age, with the speed at which information and technology move, it's at the point where this is not a new topic. A lot of organizations, through word-of-mouth, internet searches, or conferences, or events such UiPath 2019 here in DC, realize it as soon as they hear the success stories. It's impossible to ignore. Most organizations are like that. They hear about it, they realize that it's something they should consider, it's something they have to do, and they take the next step.

The initial setup is absolutely straightforward; it provides a quick and easy installation. Given that you may have to go through some technical hurdles to get permission to download it, I'm not talking about that. But if you have all the permissions and you're allowed to download and install it, it's absolutely simple. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes.

Technical prerequisites are not needed to use the software, but technical resources can speed up the ease with which you deploy. Given that you're generally not interacting with UiPath in isolation but with other business applications as well, you want to make sure that there's technical support in case you have some issues. Or, if there's something that you didn't experience in UAT but that comes up once you get into production, it's good to have some additional support. It's not a requirement but I would recommend it.

ROI is one of the most frequent questions I get from organizations. You should be seeing ROI in less than six months. If you're not returning your cost and more, from a licensing and personnel standpoint, in the first six months, then it is not a software issue and it is not a delivery issue. In that case, it is a scoping issue. You're probably looking at processes that shouldn't have been automated in the first place.

Every organization that is successful with the software is reaching their ROI in six months or under.

The amount of time saved with bots is an interesting question but it's hard to answer with a pinpoint response because it depends on an organization's strategy. I've seen multiple organizations that use attended bots, so they're just saving a fraction of the time. But then I've been in organizations where they've automated a process end-to-end. A process that previously required 20 FTEs went from having 40,000 hours of manual work to zero.

For pricing there is a variable at play, and that's scale. Depending on how you want to scale - whether working with a partner or directly with UiPath - there's a specific cost per license. But then it's all about optimizing a process, and what we call "license utilization." We try to maximize each license, and we'll have it running three or four processes.

The cost is nothing, it's peanuts, when you see the capabilities. When you're talking about one license supporting what was previously done by 14 people, what is $1,500, or whatever the licensing cost is for unattended bots?

Even more importantly, as a technology expert, I know that I could do some additional coding and automate the running of the bots. But why would I spend that extra time when they have Orchestrator. I could have a person running them as well, but the Orchestrator license is far cheaper than a resource; just click "run." When you compare the results that you get, the price is a moot point.

If I was going to give any advice to someone who was just about to utilize the software, I would say that the most successful organizations that apply this technology make it an entire team effort. It's not started in one business unit. And if it is, it's socialized across the enterprise. That's the quickest way to scale: getting everybody onboard. The second-biggest thing is that the most impactful projects you will get will come from your people, your internal workers. And until you get them to understand what the software can do and its capabilities, it's going to take you longer to scale your program. So make sure everybody's socialized, and make sure everybody truly understands what the software can truly do. They're going to give you the best opportunities to benefit from it.

Deployment should definitely be done using the support of experts. Even when I owned my own RPA program, and I wasn't in a consulting capacity, I still reached out to a third-party to get support. While setting it up is something that you can do internally, given that most objectives include speed-to-market and quick scaling - wanting to see results in 60 days instead of six months - it's going to be very difficult to do alone, especially if your goal is to have 100 bots in a year. If your goal is ten, you can probably manage it. It's important to use experts if you are looking to rapidly scale.

I have implemented UiPath in virtual environments, including on-prem, Azure VMs and servers, SQL-based data storage, as well as AWS. I've never had any issues with the responsiveness or the application having any problems operating. The biggest consideration that you have when trying to deploy robots in a virtual environment is making sure that your architecture is sound. You have to integrate through severs and you have to take into consideration firewall updates. And then there's interacting from the cloud if your applications are on-prem. You have to make sure that the bot doesn't have any issues. But if your architecture is solid and your infrastructure is set to support the applications in a cloud environment, there shouldn't be any issues. You wouldn't notice any difference compared to having them on a desktop on-premise.

I would agree that UiPath eliminates human error, but I would add the caveat that good code eliminates human error. I've been doing this for a while and I've seen bots that mess up. It's in your delivery methodology. If you have a sound delivery methodology - you're going through a rigorous UAT cycle and are having outputs audited by the subject matter experts - you should literally get to zero errors. Maybe you will have five percent exception cases, but your error percentage should be zero.

Having worked with all the tools, they all have little niche components. As long as UiPath continues to focus on knowing what the next wave of technology is that businesses really need to use to be efficient, and they start embedding that skillset in their software, that's all you could ask for. They need to stay in front of the power curve of technology, which is impossible, but they're trying.

I've never had a bad issue with UiPath. My experience with them has always been pleasant and engaging. They're never stuck at just giving you software, showing you how to use it, and then walking out. They're always focused on improving your business. If you focus on that, and focus on generating value, you can't lose.

Automation technology is the number-one driver across an organization now. Trying to find ways to do more with less has been the going mantra for organizations for years now. It's no longer feasible to simply run operational efficiency or Six Sigma projects to try to get gains. The only way that you're going to get significant gains is going with an automation-first approach. That's where I see a lot of organizations headed, even spending more on RPA software than on cloud implementation. It's a very big focus, and I don't see that slowing down any time soon.

On a scale from one to ten, I would you rate UiPath as an eleven. It's excellent software.

We currently have 150 bots in production. It is used the most where there are repetitive, cumbersome tasks. Where we do need to have somewhat of a decision made, we put it into a decision tree. This is our primary use case. 

We are looking into other use cases, such as:

• How do we use it as a platform for pretotyping?
• How do we use it as a platform to drive forward machine learning and artificial intelligence usage in our company? 

We have automated assignments where we previously used employees. The outcome of this has been a greater customer experience achievement. We simply are solving tasks faster, and at the same time, we have been scaling down employees. 

We have started to do tasks more often and faster than we have ever done them before. For instance, some of the things in finance, we only did that once per quarter. Now, we have started doing them once a week. This gives us greater insight into those areas. 

The most important outcome here is the amount of insight which you receive when you put power to a process. It gives you the insight that you wouldn't have had when you had 20 employees working. With two bots doing the work, you suddenly get a data foundation that you didn't have before. Then, you can build upon the bots, instead of thinking you know what is happening.

The platform is object-orientated. You can create and reuse objects, which is a great feature. 

UiPath has decided that people who are great at what they do can be invited into the platform and utilize services on the platform. This is another great feature, and one of the reasons that we initially chose the product as our platform.

The solution is easy to use. When you put it together with the UiPath Academy, it's easy to get it going and understand. The drag and drop feature makes it simple and easy to use. The UiPath Academy is great and helpful.

We tried utilizing the virtual environment, but we had some issues in that area. It's one of the areas that we haven't revisited over the last half year because our volume is that high for us. Thus, it is one of those things that we have sort of left on the side for now, but I do hear there is some great stuff coming with it.

We haven't had instability issues.

It can scale.

The customer and technical support are great. We have received fast, sufficient responses. There is easy access. 

We did not have a previous RPA solution.

We were in a place where we needed to do something differently. At the time, RPA was something different. So, we needed to sort of examine, "Could this help us?"

The initial setup was straightforward.

We saw ROI in eight or nine weeks, so it was fairly fast. We have seen a lot of performance benefits, which I would rate as a ten out of ten.

The solution has helped to eliminate many human errors.

Our licensing costs are roughly 1.1 million Danish krones a year. 

We see some elements in the license model that we're trying to figure out how to utilize. There have been some elements in the license model where UiPath has helped us solve them commercially, and having a license model which is more focused on scalability would be a great feature.

If UiPath really wants to put Attended Robots out to everyone, there will be a cost issue. We have some that we are testing now and what their effect will be. However, these are the robots where the license model needs to change before we go full throttle in that direction.

We also looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We selected UiPath based on its object-oriented approach.

There is something off in UiPath's licensing model. Their competitors have started targeting us now because they know that we have a lot of bots. They have different types of licensing models, and say, "Because you are having so many jobs with so many job bots, you can save money on the platform by using us instead." 

Play with it and have a playful nature. Acknowledge that you don't know what you're doing with it, then just acknowledge that you're going to make mistakes. The only difference between being good or great at this solution is your ability to learn from your mistakes, because you will be making mistakes. Also, you will be overpromising when working with this solution.

For automation technology, in general, the system landscape is quite wide. We are just starting to put RPA on the shelf for automation. We are pushing a machine-first approach. RPA is the sort of tool on the shelf now helping us become a more efficient customer-oriented company. It is a tool in the landscape with plenty of existing tools, but this is the one that is the most easily accessible for the business people.

We built ourselves some automated documentation, and it was fairly easy to copy. One of the things that people start doing is documenting what they're doing in an organization and updating the documents, then freely sharing them. We would like some sort of automated documentation, as this would be helpful.

We use it to automate administrative functions, like finance and HR tasks. We are also automating a lot of things in our SAP systems, e.g. updating prices. 

We use it for a lot of small tasks, like downloading something from an particular internal website (e.g., SharePoint in Office 365) and uploading it back, or for doing modifications, then loading them back.

We use it in a very large way across the company. Last year, we implemented approximately 22 processes and saved close to 80,000 hours total. This year, we have already saved close to 6000 hours. 

You don't need to know coding, as it's pretty straightforward. The graphical user interface is easy to use. It is drag and drop. You do need to understand the basics of what's happening, what you're doing, and how the technical things work. However, after a short bit of training, you can start doing stuff, and the more you learn, the better you become. 

There are so many workarounds. It allows you to do complicated things in such an easy way. UiPath has provided so many APIs that make it easy to interact with other databases or applications without even going into them. If I want to download something from a website, then I don't need to necessarily go into it, I can use the API function, which is very cool.

With Excel applications, it is not able to handle a lot of pop ups. It should be able to do this automatically. We just change the format of the file from XLSX to XLS, but it should be able to handle this automatically. Instead, when something pops up, it gets stuck there. This type of thing are small, but still the process gets stuck. I would like to see better integration of applications to avoid these issues.

We are also making a lot of manual changes in SAP. We are looking for a solution where we don't have to make manual corrections every time, similar to what UiPath did with some SharePoint websites.

Less than one year.

The product is definitely reliable. It gets the job done. The difference is in how you design it. When you start as a developer, you tend to always take the longest route as part of the learning process. Once you get used to the product, you realize something can be done in two steps instead of five.

A lot of people rely on what I design, so if it doesn't work, I immediately get a call that 50 people are waiting for something. This happens, but rarely, as it works perfectly.

Whenever we get stuck on something and are not able to proceed, then we get in touch with UiPath, who will help us out. Their technical support staff is pretty good. These things really help the user out.

Initially, I used the UiPath Academy when I didn't know anything. At that time, I went through the basic training, then I had to leave the academy to focus on automating our company standard products, like SAP.

I have been working with this solution for 11 months. I did not know about this solution before working as an RPA Developer. Now, you can challenge me on anything UiPath related, and I will find a solution. It is so easy to learn new things. It has good usability.

It is for automating tasks that are not meaningful for people to do, tasks that are menial and repetitive. The University of Copenhagen, where I work, is an old institution and we have a lot of different legacy systems that don't work well together. So, we have a lot of people doing administrative tasks that depend on moving data from one system to another. We use UiPath to automate these repetitive tasks and make the robots carry them out, so our people don't have to.

For example, in the case of our most recent robots, there were a set of tasks where three people had to print out 3000 PDF pages, then sort them into seven different piles, then sort those different piles into three different piles each. Afterwards, scan them and send them to different systems. We made this better. Instead of three different people taking a whole day, we did it in three minutes. This is an example of a very concrete, administrative task based on legacy systems, and we made it simpler. This was a huge improvement and positive thing for our company.

It is very easy to make beautiful, clear, well-documented workflows that clearly reflect the process. This is an achievement that is not always feasible with regular code. Even though each activity in UiPath is like a line of code, the user interface in Studio and the use of states, flowcharts, and sequences make it so easy to understand the overall process and get an overview of what is actually happening.

UiPath is easy to use, and it CAN be used by non-programmers, but it is even better to use for programmers. It allows us to make very robust and effective solutions because we have all the functionality of the powerful .NET Framework library within reach, all while the UI makes it possible to create truly beautiful solutions.

I would like UiPath to have a build-in method which informs the robot's process owner how it has managed its transactions and performed through the night. If the robot had a process that was set up for a 100 transactions, and two of these transactions had an application error, four had a business error, and the rest were fine, I would like a straight up method for the business owner to login somewhere and see what the robot managed to do and not do. There should be a method for accessing and logging into Orchestrator and see the logs for only one process, and this log should be presented in a way that makes sense for non-technical people. 

The stability is good, I've never encountered any major problems. UiPath works with websites and systems which are famously unstable, but it gives you the tools that are necessary to deal with hiccups and if something is not stable. So, if you add proper error handling to your robots, it works.

Out of the robots that I have built, three or four have had to perform on several machines at the same time. I haven't encountered many scalability problems, but then again I haven't built robots to perform on a 100 machines or anything near that. 

The initial setup was quite complex. I was not in charge of the task, but my colleague set up the whole infrastructure and mentioned some problems. He corresponded with the support team, and they did figure it out, but the setup guide was definitely more complexly written than it should have been, and some things were written in the wrong order. So, there were some hiccups in the implementation.

In our company, RPA doesn't necessarily mean less people will be hired or people will be fired. We probably won't see the ROI in cash. It will help with workplace productivity, and job satisfaction, though.

We were looking at Blue Prism and UiPath. 

UiPath is nicer to work with. The developers especially wanted to work with UiPath, but the business team was looking more at Blue Prism. However, UiPath was better for the slightly larger robots, which is good for a lot of Unattended Robots.

From what I have seen of Blue Prism, UiPath is both more aesthetically beautiful and stable. Based on .NET, UiPath makes sense as a solution.

Start small and make time to do things right from the start. The infrastructure and developer culture can vary massively from one RPA team to another, and it is really important to establish healthy code guidelines, test and operation manuals, etc. from the start. At my current company we are just starting up, getting everything right, which is very exciting, and I can see how different (and better) we are doing things that at my previous employer.  

We automate mostly finance processes, which is our largest area. We also automate some HR and logistic IT processes.

We hear from the process owners that they are very happy with the lead time and data quality, which keeps getting better. 

It is very easy to use, and you still have a lot of possibilities to modify what you are trying to do and achieve. 

We would like more API integrations, especially more API connections to SAP. While this is on the roadmap already, activities and packages with more automated API connections to other software or platforms would really help us.

Documentation-wise, UiPath could get a little better.

The support that we are receiving from UiPath is superb.

We are using the UiPath Academy. We also have our own development standards. When we are recruiting new developers, we first have an introduction of our own that we make. It's mostly to Orchestrator and our environment, then we set them free at the UiPath Academy to do training there. Afterwards, we do some additional training to our standards and best practices. So, part of our training is in the UiPath Academy, and we are using it. We have been very happy with it. It's evolving all the time, which is really good

One place that we struggled was when we were uploading the software. UiPath was helpful with getting started, setting up the server, and installing the robots. All that went pretty smoothly. Every time, when we have upgraded, except for the last time, we have struggled. We did not do it right once. We always had to retry, get some support with it, and the documentation was a little lagging. Therefore, we really struggled with upgrading. It's getting a lot better now, but this has been one place where we have struggled.

Annually, the product saves us 25,000 hours. Everyone is satisfied with that.

We have had our contract with UiPath since November 2016. 

We have had a few presentations from Kapow. They have dynamic licensing, which is something that we would really like to have, so we could scale up at peak hours or peak times of the month. This is when we really need to throw more robots at some processes. To my knowledge, that is not possible with UiPath at the moment. Though we are not considering switching at the moment.