UiPath Platform Reviews

Primary use cases would be within the finance sector. We supply financial services for other government agencies. The main robots that we have in use right now are concerning floating of financial periods, uploading reports, commenting on these reports, and so on. We are starting to look at invoice processing, to a larger degree. Then, we have a few quality and control robots which do checks on data quality, customer information, customer carts, etc. 

We are using approximately 20 robots right now for different uses.

We've opted for professional, traditional developers and programmers to do batch robots. We don't use it in our business units. Possibly because we are a government agency, we don't necessarily get enough IT security around the users applying their own robots. 

It is not easy to use in this way because we do use traditional programming skills. We are considering moving some tasks out into the workforce for Attended Robots, etc. We think that this will be a problem for us in regards to getting it pushed out there and still maintaining good quality. However, we haven't tried it yet.

We are able to smooth out peak workloads. Because with a lot of the period closures, like monthly and yearly closures, we work in peaks. Everything has to be done within a few days. When we can prepare a lot of the data and reports through the night, the employees can start on those in the morning. Therefore, we are leveling out some of the workload features, which is one of the main benefits.

Automation technology for us is mainly a way to get around the long-term IT projects. This is the future for us, when using UiPath, to start moving into the AI part of it. In addition, the bundling of the offerings into UiPath is quite important, so we don't have to go to several different vendors. We can try it out on our own and see if this is something we want to do. Then, we might bring in another partner or vendor to do some specialized training, debug the networks, etc. We're never going to get that capability ourselves. We don't have a large IT department nor do we have data scientists. For us, it's important that one or more of these skills are getting baked into the system.

The ability to integrate between legacy systems is the most valuable feature. We use it mainly to replicate manual processes, where you just have to pull out data or pull down large volumes of customer information, in general. We work across many individual customers, who are individual entities or individual databases in our ERP system. We work across about 220 databases. Therefore, the task of logging onto different databases alone is quite cumbersome.

The main thing is to make data available to the employees when they start working mornings, instead of them starting drawing out reports to see if there is anything that they need to act upon. With these legacy systems, which work on a one-to-one basis, we tried to batch process them a lot more.

We have looked at it with Citrix, and there are problems with it. Some of the new features coming will address it.

We have been looking at Attended Robots, which result in the inability to lock your screen. That is simply a no-go for ever using them in most government agencies, as IT security will prohibit us from using them. If UiPath wants Attended Robots to be used inside a government agency, it needs to be applicable on a virtual desktop.

A lot of what is coming is what we are looking towards: Both on the skill set with computer vision, but especially also on the enhanced identity management and security. The ability to debug and lock at a less complex level for us to look at. 

One to three years.

UiPath's stability is quite good. We don't see any problems with the stability of the platform application. All our problems stem from the basic systems that we operate on, which are quite vulnerable to network problems, time outs in various systems, etc. However, these have nothing to do with UiPath. Perhaps some of the things which are on the road map will help with the debugging of some of these issues.

One of the things that we are lacking right now is not stability, but usability with debugging, e.g., when you can't see what went wrong. We have to look through 50,000 pages of logs or so. 

The scalability is quite good. 

The main problem around scalability is the licensing structure and the inability to dynamically assign licenses across robots. While I know this is coming, this is our main gripe with scalability: the licensing structure. Because we are part of a larger setup with our own IT supplier, who does a multitenancy setup with Orchestrator, to have more flexibility with the use of licenses would be very valuable.

We are using virtual desktops to deploy and run the machines with robots. It is necessary, as we cannot scale it on individual on-premise machines.

We have used the customer support. Our main issue with them is they need to understand the problem that we are writing about, and not reply too soon with a standard answer.

All our developers are using UiPath Academy and are RPA certified. While they like some thing, some of the frameworks which were used in the Academy examples, the developers didn't agree with. This is probably because they are IT professionals themselves and are used to doing things a different way. Whether it's because the use case wasn't good or they were just used to something else, this was the main gripe.

The product has a lot of backing from our director, who has been pushing the agenda. To be able to stay relevant, even as a government agency, we have to reduce our costs every year by two percent. To be able to produce that, we need to be more efficient at what we do. The target is: Not to reduce staff, but keep up with the increased demand for production and costs.

I wasn't part of the very first setup.

We mostly did the deployment ourselves or with our own IT partner, who is not a partner of UiPath. So, it has mainly been done by our own IT people.

On the individual robots, we do have good return on investment. However, once you add in the governance, including when we are scaling up the solution and the maintenance of robots, then I don't think we are at a break-even point. This upcoming year, we are expecting positive ROI. For us, the return on investment is high quality data. 

It has helped us to eliminate human errors. We have a robot that is specifically requested to avoid, for example, uploading reports on the wrong customers because of GDPR cases, where data protection officers will have to get involved, even though, it's not sensitive data. We have seen problematic use cases drop from a couple of incidents from maybe 100 transactions to zero. We are looking to completely eliminate errors in some cases, not just reduce.

It has saved our organization time. We use the robots to try to address some of the peak workloads that we have. They are not there so much to address a certain number of hours that we want to save. We want to be able to use the robots to help address our customers' needs during designated time frames to reduce extra stress on our employees.

We would like to see improvement around the licensing and multitenancy. 

We also evaluated Blue Prism and Kofax Kapow. The reason that we went with UiPath has a lot to do with scalability, as our IT supplier has committed to a multitenancy set up, which was not possible with Blue Prism. 

We are quite happy with UiPath. We are not looking at other vendors at the moment. They are all offering similar solutions, but with a slightly different focus. We could use any other solution, but the development is so fast that even changing now would be no guarantee that we end up with what we want, because everybody is moving at a pace where we can barely keep up with the development of the products.

Try out different vendors and their labs. See how it fits to the processes that you are trying to automate right now. Some applications are better at old mainframe systems, and if that's what you will be focusing your efforts on, then maybe UiPath isn't the best vendor for you. There are others who focus more on that sort of environment. So, be realistic about what you want to automate, and choose your use case initially from that. 

We see the biggest benefit right now from Unattended Robots, but that's all we use. In the very long-term, Unattended versus Attended Robots will be able to generate a greater benefit. However, with the current licensing costs, they will need to change for it to be a positive business model. We have to be able to move licenses from one person to another. If we have to apply a fresh license to each person in the workforce, with our budget, it will not be possible.

We are primarily utilizing the platform within our department to gain buy-in for the customer's system.

We are a traditional development team, and using this platform has enabled us to work with multiple teams efficiently.

The governance aspect is very important to us. UFS Studio is also crucial for our operations.

There are significant delays between the technical team and the actual team. We are also missing some integrations with Google.

I cannot specify the exact amount of time we've been using it.

We have a dedicated development team. That said, we do have the resources to help with implementation.

I cannot speak on how it compares to other models or other components.

We primarily use UiPath for RCM and it can handle most tasks effectively, especially when dealing with data extraction from PDF files. There might be more complex scenarios where AI could be more suitable, although the implementation might be challenging. We are in the process of evaluating these AI-powered use cases.

We have found UiPath to be quite valuable as we actively deploy and use bots, which have become a significant asset to our operations. 

We were able to achieve the savings. It has freed up around ten thousand hours of time and resources for other tasks.

Improving financial and recording operations through the use of charts would be advantageous.

I have been using UiPath for approximately two years.

The stability is excellent.

Scalability is impressive, and it only requires the appropriate licensing.

The support is quite commendable, and they are very prompt in addressing issues. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward.

ROI is significant when the use case results in substantial cost savings, but it's important to note that not all use cases deliver such hard savings.

The cost is on the higher side.

My recommendation is to thoroughly assess use cases and choose the right tools to prevent possible setbacks. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

My primary use case is mainframe automation from legacy mainframes that previously hadn't been automated with other automation tools. The product worked like a dream with the mainframe automation.

We're trying to get rid of the boring, mundane tasks that people do every day so that they can spend more time doing more important things like figuring out why there are issues happening rather than just putting a Band-Aid on.

In our first year of jumping into it, we set up the infrastructure and everything, so it's been less of a year of development, but we have saved a hundred thousand hours.

The automation efficiency depends on what the job at hand is and how much it saves. But some of the tasks done constantly throughout the day, even if it's only saving five minutes, add up really fast. 

We use Task Capture all the time. We have a bank business analyst who uses it and teaches people how to use it. We're constantly getting process definition documents to review and add to our pipeline.  

Studio itself has all its great features and is easy to use. 

There are bugs here and there. My only complaint is that each time we open a new ticket, we get someone new and have to explain how everything is set up all over again. 

It would be nice if they had that somewhere on record for support.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

It is a stable solution; everything seems to be running pretty smoothly altogether. The biggest issues are not on the UiPath end, but on our company's end like, network issues and issues like that keep popping up every now and then.

The support's been pretty decent. We have a TAM, so we have someone we are constantly in contact with.

We meet with them weekly, and they're very helpful. If we do have to open up a support ticket, there's a bigger issue that they can't help with. They usually help get the ball rolling.

Support has been pretty helpful. Like any other support though, they ask all the basic questions in the beginning just to figure out what has or hasn't been done.

My only complaint is that each time we open a new ticket, we get someone new, and we have to explain how everything is set up all over again. So it would be nice if they had that somewhere on record.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. There's plenty of documentation that is easy to follow. 

The hardest part was more on our company's network and infrastructure, trying to navigate all the hoops that we have to go through just to make sure it's secure and the network's secure. Getting access to what we need to get access to.

We're still kind of new to things and working on migrating to the cloud. We're one small team in the organization. By moving to the cloud, we're hoping we can onboard more and more teams to be able to use it and spread it throughout the company.

UiPath helped us along the way. 

There are other automation tools that the company uses, but they can't do everything that UiPath can. All of the potential automations just kept being pushed to the side until we started using it.

We used Microsoft Automate for a very short time. We started looking into it for some tasks. The issue is that we're trying to automate it deep inside our corporate network, so, we haven't really been able to use Power Automate.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. The amount we could do in one year is pretty impressive. 

We use UiPath for automation.

As a consultant, we have been involved in many client projects and deployed UiPath using a hybrid model.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation.

UiPath's User Community is good.

UiPath helped us reduce our on-premises footprint.

UiPath helped us reduce human error.

UiPath's support for various types of interfaces is the most valuable feature as it aids in automating the end-user systems we want to streamline.

I would like to have the ability to make changes at different stages of the development process without having to start from the beginning each time.

Automating with UiPath is not as easy as it appears in the advertisements.

I have been using UiPath for seven years.

UiPath is stable, but not 100 percent reliable. I would rate its stability an eight out of ten. If we need to restart the project, open the file again, or close down the program and open something else, UiPath does not behave consistently every time.

UiPath is highly scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes around one month.

I give UiPath a seven out of ten.

Maintenance is required. We need to make changes to the code due to updates in the systems on which the automation is running. There are updates in the IT environments, such as operating systems, and also in the UI part. The newer features in UiPath bring new updates, and its components necessitate modifications to the code.

Our primary UiPath use case is reconciling data and getting data from the web and writing to either Excel or our system. The automations are very reliable. 

Task Capture is quite a helpful feature because it is easy to design a process flow with it. All you have to do is just capture it and then do the manual process. It then gives you the process flow and the process definition document, PDD, so it saves you a lot of time.

The database connectors I found are not fully free and expire after 30 days. That is something I would like looked at for MongoDB specifically. With regards to this, I was working on a project that needed a robot to read data from a MongoDB database. To achieve this, I used the CDATA ODBC driver because I couldn't find a direct Activity to achieve this from Studio. See the link to the CDATA ODBC driver for UiPath here https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/...

It would also be great to have UiPath Insights included in the free Orchestrator. The Insights module is currently only available for paid licenses. It would be great for developers to have it included in the free version because then we could try it out. 

I have been using UiPath since May 2018, and have recently worked with UiPath Process Mining. I am currently not very actively using this tool because the projects I'm on at the moment are using Power Automate. However, I do look at it once in a while.

UiPath is quite stable. I have not seen any inconsistencies come up because even exception handling is well set up in case of bad themes. Transformational processes are well managed, including exceptions, so that adds to the stability. Also, you can scale out from one bot to tens of thousands, so automation is quite easy with UiPath.

Very scalable

The initial UiPath setup is straightforward. You just go on the cloud, create an account, and you get the Orchestrator right away. From there, you can download the Studio. So once you build the automation, you just publish it from the Studio and you can run it. It's a very seamless process.

There is no need to hire an external team. You can do everything yourself. Also, the forum is quite busy and active. You can get a lot of helpful material there.

I cannot give actual figures, but I have seen a return on investment especially in processing invoices. It used to take us a week to read certain invoices into Excel but now it takes us only a day. So we are saving five Mondays in a week and 30 or 40 a month. 

From what I hear, UiPath's licensing costs are a bit high, but I can't evaluate that information because I haven't actually experienced the cost. We are using a free version at the moment. A good thing about the Community Edition is that they allow you to deploy even as a company as long as revenues are below $5 million I think.

I recommend automating the small processes in the Community Edition. This is the best way to evaluate how scaling would go within your organization. 

It is also important to fully understand what you want to automate. I also recommend trying the Process Mining feature to make sure you are able to pick up areas of automation within the organization's processes before committing to paying for automation. 

We're still building up the program, but right now our primary use case is for report review. We're looking to branch that out more.

It's reviewing reports. I worked for a bank and there are reports of transactions from the previous day. UiPath was looking for anomalies for fraud and things like that.

It's still very early on but we have caught a few instances of fraud that we would not have if we weren't using UiPath. 

UiPath has reduced human error. We're very early, so it's not a big impact, but we did find a few instances of fraud that we would not have found without it. 

We see time savings for our users in the sense that they now can do more tasks that should have been done all along but weren't getting done. That's more where the gains have been this far.

I like the whole ecosystem. They're not just looking at the automation tool, they're looking at automation from end to end. 

It's pretty easy to build automations. I have a coding background so it's not particularly challenging for me to use Studio, but for a person who does not have that coding background, I think that the Visual Builder guides you through the process pretty easy.

UiPath Academy is a good training program for people without that coding background. It's good to get them into the mindset of how exactly flows works of automation.

The Academy offers us familiarization with Studio and how it functions.

The API integrations need improvement. They should build a better framework for the ability to integrate with other external APIs.

I have been using UiPath for less than a year. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

It's pretty straightforward. It either runs or it doesn't. Occasionally it does crash and we've had to restart services and whatnot to get it going again.

We haven't been using it enough to see how it can scale. 

There are two ITs who use it in my company.

We have plans to increase usage. 

We don't really see our staff as being good candidates for citizen development. There are a few that could, but we do plan to expand out into other departments as far as gathering ideas and implementing processes for other departments.

Their support is pretty average. It's not good or bad. It's off-shored. There are always difficulties with cultural differences and language barriers. They know what they're doing but sometimes it takes a while going around in circles to get the question that you're asking across. That's pretty normal. Most companies are the same way. I would say all companies have huge room for improvement there.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy. The installation instructions walk you through the process. We didn't run into any problems. It took less than a week. 

We also looked at AntWorks and Blue Prism. We went with UiPath because of the maturity of the product that seemed far more mature than its competitors. The product seemed more thought out.

Based on our experiences, I would say you have to have employees that are dedicated to doing this. This can't be done as a side project.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. Nothing is completely perfect. The stability of it could use a little bit of improvement. The support is not great. UiPath is very good, but no one is perfect.

We primarily use the solution for interactions with customers. For those coming through the contact center, we are automating responses and actions.

The solution has improved the company in that when a customer needs to come in and have a consultation with an agent, it opens up a video conference to actually see the other end of the product, the full consultation, instead of being described over the phone. It makes the meetings much more effective.

One of the most valuable aspects of the solution is that we are able to automate a process that doesn't have an easy API or integration. It’s an easy way to complete an outcome without having to read another application.

I have seen a reduction in human error. The assumptions that agents were making previously via verbal communication compared to actually physically seeing something are now completely different.

UiPath has freed up employees' time. I don’t have the exact metric in relation to that, however. Also, this additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. We’re not chasing issues that can be seen physically, instead of trying to gain understanding by going back and forth via calling or email or chat.

It’s my understanding that UiPath has saved our organization money.

I have used UiPath's Academy courses. It has helped a lot in terms of helping users to understand the whole process. It goes under the hood to help users figure out how everything gets applied and then how we can write code as well. It gives a solid direction of what it takes to be a good developer.

There are definitely some changes I would like to see. I’d like to see, for example, more note code for applications. Some of the complexity of the scripting is hard. If note code was there, it would be easy to just scale it.

I've been using the solution for five to six months.

The stability so far has been good. We just have got to make sure that we don't change anything on the back end and adjust it. Right now, it's a critical path that we need to be aware of in needing adjustments. It offers a great interchange.

Scalability is good in terms of adding more RPA processes across the board. There's also a question of, when things change and adjust, how it reacts to those changes. Scalability can cause issues.

Right now, the number of people who use it in the organization is small. There are
maybe three or four engineers. It's used at a high level. There are more in-depth engineers that are involved with it.

Technical support has been pretty good for asking questions and giving responses. I'm not sure anyone would get a perfect ten out of ten, however, they are good. To be perfect, support would always have to have an answer and do all the work for me. 

The solution was chosen when I was brought on board. I'm not sure what was used previously.

That said, I am familiar with other RPA solutions. For example, Blue Prison is more foreign to me, compared to UiPath. Automation Anywhere seems very familiar from what I have seen, however, I don't really have a good understanding of all the theory, technically, except in terms of UiPath.

The initial setup started off as straightforward, however, it can easily get complex. For example, not knowing the other applications and what it takes to interact with them will make things a bit more complicated. Also, the APIs versus actually scripting information, especially when you're talking databases or backend reports, et cetera, gets complicated.

Our deployment took three months.

The CTO and development team were involved in the process of implementation.

We deployed the solution ourselves, internally.

We have yet to see an ROI, as we just started using the product.

The pricing, in comparison to others in the market, is fair. 

We don't scale that big. If we scaled larger, we might have different opinions about pricing. 

We have the solution on the cloud. It hasn't affected our footprint too much as we haven't really integrated too much at this point.

We use a mix of attended and unattended automation, however, for the most part, it's attended.

I would advise companies to train as many people as they can through the training portal and provide simple boxes and procedures to execute on things that are scalable components.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. A perfect ten can't happen. However, I'd rate it at a seven due to the fact that it's got the possibility of the cloud, which is great. While I don't have a problem with scalability, there's an issue around how much more it is going to cost. There's a question around scaling and ROI and if it is worth it.