UiPath Platform Reviews

We use this solution for automating manufacturing processes from invoice processing to accounts payables. All of these use cases are solved using UiPath. For insurance sectors, reconciliation is another process that is automated using UiPath. I have been using UiPath at various enterprise levels.

We provide professional services around RPA and UiPath, and we have certified developers in-house. I have helped many organizations to set up their Center Of Excellence in a hybrid model, wherein the stakeholders and developers are shared in-house and with our company.

UiPath is rich in features. The OCR feature is very handy to extract structured and semi-structured data from documents. A rich set of activities and an open platform is pretty helpful in creating solutions out of the box. The community forum is quite helpful in solving issues when they appear.

I would want UiPath to build as many activities as possible. The new machine learning activities in the UiPath AI fabric is something I am looking up to. There are many focused sets of activities and the ability to build custom activities is a great feature and can be made richer.

Extending the UiPath studio in terms of UI and functionality would improve this solution. This relates to adding hooks to the workflow/activity execution and extending the UiPath Studio UI with more functionality like a handy tool for activities with icons etc.

The orchestrator also can have set of APIs to work with.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

This solution has a very competitive and flexible pricing scheme that depends on the process complexity.

I evaluated AutomationEdge and Thoughtonomy.

UiPath is best at its core and with the help of plugins from UiPath and community you get solutions to a lot of problems out of the box. I have tried couple of more platforms, but the easiness, diversity and flexibility that UiPath provides is unparalleled. 

In the recent top 50 enterprise application at g2crowd, UiPath is at 18th place and topmost in the automation platforms. 

I have done quite a lot of different real-time projects with UiPath. In one big project, there was a lot of loan applications from scanned documents. We used Abbyy Flexicapture for reading OCR and ICR text and we read it very accurately. It really boosted the moral and now we are automating the whole CAD department of the bank. 

Now we are looking forward to more complex processes and try using the ML and AI into it.

RPA is our bread and butter. We have implemented projects in the telecom and financial industries. 

A good example was when we implemented a network process in the telecom sector. The time for that process was seven minutes, then by implementing the RPA, we drastically reduced it to 40 seconds. The process involved worked on four different applications. Each application required a secure login, and the speed was due to the websites being hosted on the Internet. It did not require any internet connection when we implemented RPA on-premise, and used complete network and system resources.

• The ease of the processes
• There is no coding at all required to implement a complex business process. If you have some programming background, it will help you. However, if you are a business user, you can still develop simple processes.
• The automated recording helps quite a bit. You record a complete business process along with human interactions to the desktop or web application. You can easily manipulate them. Once you are done, you have a complete recording of the interactions, which you can use to tweak your requirements.

You can't write small snippets of code. If you want to do a single code snippet, this is not available by default. For example, if I want to do some date conversions, and that date conversion requires different variables to be available in the context, but they are not there. A small snippet of code change should be available out-of-the-box. This will help me in the long run. I can create activity out of it. Support for a little bit of in-line script should be there.

There aren't stability issues, though it should have better RAM and cores. When it's overloaded you get considerable problems.

Scalability is one bit which should be properly planned at the time of license and planning. For tight budget projects, you have to be very precise in the runtime execution requirements otherwise, you might face issues.  

Tech support takes time replying to queries. The more you go to the community, the more likely you will get replies. Therefore, tech support should be improved.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We were up and running in approximately 15 minutes. UiPath is the best of breed in the market for setup.

Licensing is one of the big issues when I have been doing some pre-sale activities. One robot price licensing is quite high with UiPath. They should provide some discounts to partners so we can spread the product easily in countries, like Pakistan and other areas in the Middle East. Licensing should be reduced and price should be cut down a bit.

We also evaluated Blue Prism. We went UiPath due to the community support.

It has a lot of community support with a lot of help available. It is a very mature tool.

The academy for UiPath is very good place to start with UiPath. It is easy and the learning curve is quite low.

Our primary use case is to develop automation projects, like automating Excel activities for repetitive tasks and operations on files. We also automate operations on Citrix. With UiPath we can easily manage all of the projects in a single page (i.e. in orchestrator).

We have used this product to implement automation for several things, including:

• UI automation that updates a project's status based on conditions
• Gathering data from web sites
• Excel functions related to HR operations
• File checks, to determine the validity
• Python and .NET scripts to connect to different databases

The most valuable features are Activities, Orchestrator, and UiPath Go!

The UiPath Orchestrator is one source to easily manage all bots.

I would like to see all a full-featured version for mobile devices.

In some Activities, there are inconsistencies between versions where the most recent does not have support for throwing the same kinds of errors.

The support from the community, as well as from UiPath themselves, is awesome. Also, users have the advantage of training videos and material, including free certifications.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

This solution is priced less compared with other products.

The primary use case is invoicing and billing. The first thing that we used it for was some content migration from one video hosting provider to another. We later on moved to invoicing and billing, which included time sheets, management, and feeding data into our accounting system.

The features that we use the most for our use case include reading PDFs, email integration, and web and desktop automation talking to other desktop software.

We have generally found it easy to use, but we also develop some extensions. We are actually a software development shop, so we have developed extensions to the core UiPath platform. They have made it pretty easy to do that.

UiPath could use more OCR use cases to help with those features.

I would like to see higher end AI type features natively in UiPath. Some native integration over time would help.

We found it to be quite stable.

We have a relatively small use case. Most people have entered the market on a small scale. The maturity will come in, maybe over this year, as people start to scale up. 

I expect some issues will surface when it starts scaling up. However, that happens with any software. 

The eagerness of UiPath engineers and their salespeople to help us along the process has helped us align ourselves more with UiPath.

Support is good, helpful, and eager to help.

The UiPath Academy is great. It was one of the reasons which made us choose the tool, and align ourselves with it. It was easy to get the software, and train on it. If you're doing professional work, you don't want to have untrained people work on it. This will not lead to success.

As a software development shop, we value training quite a lot. They made it easy to help our developers come up to speed with the software and get certified.

The initial setup is quite easy. We have worked with some other RPA tools, but they took us quite awhile to get setup. With UiPath, it was relatively easier to get started.

We have seen ROI by it saving some hours for us. We are a small company. We use the tool mostly because we want to learn about the software. We also save some hours, but we do it to learn and help other customers who are doing it at much higher volumes. The savings for us is relatively lesser than the savings for a larger customer.

ROI is a bit tricky. Customers need to implement simpler use cases: Get ROI from the tool, learn it, and re-implement it. This is just the nature of how RPA works. I see a lot of opportunities for it.

When customers start scaling up their use of RPA and have learnt how to use it, that is when the real ROI will start trickling in. When you start off, it will take some effort to get it right. Once you developed some maturity with the process, and you're scaling up a lot of use cases, and you have one bot doing a lot of different things and being able to share a lot of processes with a few bots, that's when you will start seeing good ROI.

This tool gives opportunities for people to be productive in other areas, which is hard to measure sometimes. The first step is to get them there, then determine where you can go from there. ROI is a very long term thing. The product lets people focus their skills on what they are good at, which is a type of ROI.

UiPath made it easy to learn their software. When we looked at a variety of RPA tools initially, UiPath was the easiest to get started with. It has good Academy content and an open platform, which is easy to download and start using (the Community Edition).

We have been looking at other RPA solutions, but we like UiPath quite a lot.

We are using it for financial applications in the financial sector. We also have a couple of bigger federal customers who started RPA development on their own, then needed our help. 

Internally, the RPA offerings team is developing more resources, so we can support all our customers. This involves a lot Pegasystems, ERP, and homegrown systems.

We are really seeing that RPA in the production, where people are using it, they are getting benefit.

Screen scraping credentials of whatever features that it has. The robot can log into the system, scrape the data, and enter the data into the system. This eliminates a lot of the manual work that the team had to do, which has improved the performance. Our teams used to do a lot of data entry, and this repetitive work has been reduced. The same resource can now work on some high-end work.

The ease of the use is good and exceeded my expectations. The implementation became easier and more standardized. Also, our development time has been reduced. Using ReFrameWork, we saw that the code become organized very nicely by UiPath and the implementation became easier and more standardized with more prebuilt components, which reduced development time. If you load the ReFrameWork nicely, you can do things faster and more standardized.

I have found there to be setup issues with Chrome. Right now, I am using IE.

I am looking for more batching processing because of the ODI framework. While they have a process where they log everything into Orchestrator, then they process it. However, when I have 50,000 to 100,000 records being batch loaded and processed one-by-one Orchestrator, I am apprehensive about it.

Stability looks good except that we see that when we run the bot sometimes somewhere in the middle it fails. It will recovers, but I don't know why and can't answer to my customers why. I don't know if something can be done to eliminate the failing piece. I don't know whether it is a stability issue, but it should be handled in future. Other than that, stability looks great.

If you start using Orchestrator, and you put your Orchestrator on a very high-end machine, it can handle thousands of bots. I don't see any issues with running multiple processes on a single bot, then connecting it to Orchestrator.

Before using UiPath Academy, we used the customer support to answer our initial questions.

This automation is not exactly like other automation that we used to do. This is a different type of automation where we are not disrupting the existing codes. We are providing all these features to the customer.

The initial setup is simple. Once you install Studio, you can do the development within minutes.

Once the bot is programmed, it eliminates human error. It doesn't make any mistakes if you have programmed it correctly.

Right now, we are not working with other vendors.

I would recommend UiPath and its bots.

Most of our work is with unattended bots. People are more keen to work with unattended bots because they just want to schedule it somewhere in the night and let the bot run, then come in the morning and have it ready.

Everyone in our organization has used the UiPath Academy. We are certified in it. There are three levels of training, which we had to go through before the final certification. The Academy is very good and well-organized. We went through it step-by-step.

One of team members developed a bot in a Citrix environment for a project, and it looked great. From his machine, he connected to Citrix, logged into the application, did some data scraping, and built an Excel file, then provided the data.

Our primary use case for it right now is in human resources. We are using it as a recruiting capability where we receive resumes in from recruiters, one in particular. Then, we're looking at the emails, pulling data off the resumes, and loading it into a database. We are also identifying resumes which might need some additional clarification. This saves a lot of time, so somebody doesn't have to go through each email, evaluate them, and pull the resumes down.

Our customers are the DoD, mostly, and some civilian agencies.

• The ability to integrate easily within our IT environment.
• The ease in which we are able to program and tie it into our various applications.

I would like more defined processes for around use cases. This might be helpful, as it is more general at the moment.

We have not experienced a whole lot of issues with UiPath at all internally. 

In some of the pilots that we are developing for our partners or for our customers, we haven't seen any major big issues or bugs.

We are still in the initial phases of deploying different bots, one bot at a time. Once we get into the Orchestrator area, we are looking at more of shared, multiple Unattended bot deployments. Then, we will have a better feel for it.

The support has been excellent and very helpful. We have received a lot of great information and assistance from the UiPath engineers and partner alliance people, who has been very helpful and responsive.

It took us only about two days of man-hours to build it out. Thus, it is easily implemented, programmed, and deployed. The ease of use and implementation together are a huge value-add and time saver to any organization. 

The ease of use did exceed our expectations. We heard it was easy. We had been trained up and had certified people. However, this was our first endeavor, in terms of deploying it internally, and it went extremely well. 

We have seen a huge benefit time-wise, in terms of the repetitive type of activities that we do. Now, we have automated those and can do the more hardcore analysis of the resumes. In the human resources area, it would take 27 minutes to process 20 emails. With UiPath, we are doing it in about two minutes, which is a huge time savings.

Given how cheap it is to initially buy the product, the licensing methodology that they have in terms of renewing every year is appropriate. Later on, if they start charging more early on, for deployment, buying the license, and deploying it initially, then having a lower maintenance fee might be more appropriate. Now, with the scale they are at, it is an appropriate way to do the licensing.

We are a partner. We are totally onboard with UiPath. We did not look into different partners to use as a product internally.

It is the market leader, particularly in the federal government. It is getting the widest use right now.

The product is extremely helpful. In terms of usability, capability, and functionality, it's one of the best products that we have used in terms of being easily implementable and cost-effective.

We find that all the materials out there for partner use are extremely effective and organized extremely well. They are very detailed and helpful.

Internally, we use UiPath to automate financial transactions, specifically for invoice processing.

Externally, on the client side, we use automation in the financial space, primarily. There are various use cases from generic file uploads to transaction processing that we implement for our clients.

We have some processes that haven't been completed flushed out. Right now, there has not been an exact improvement yet.

Ease of use and speed of development are the most valuable features. 

The overall integration with Microsoft stack and a few other third party vendors, like Google, are very useful to us. Having these built into the product speeds up our development, so we don't have to code a bunch of connectors on our own.

I would like to see some sort of better implementation of the Python modules. Right now, any error code that Python throws up turns into a generic error that is difficult to track down. I would want to see some sort of integration that at least lets me debug the issue.

Its pretty difficult to do source control through the typical Git functions because of the nature of the UiPath and the visual element. Some sort of method to bring source control home for us would be very helpful. A way to systematically track which actions or activities were added and subtracted from a given process before adding to a repository would be very helpful to us right now. Our team of developers is growing, so control has become somewhat of an issue for us.

Ease of use has definitely exceeded expectations. Initially coming in, UiPath had some features that needed to be implemented that weren't quite there yet. Now, we are on 2018.4 and all of the features that we desperately needed are there. Thus, ease of use has been pretty great.

We have looked into scalability a lot. So far, we haven't done anything that involves a 100 bot. However, the scalability seems pretty easy. Scaling up to just five bots running in parallel has been very easy.

If we are going to build up the environment, we would run on virtual machines. We would connect through Remote Desktop Services, not through Citrix.

The technical support has been fairly good. I like that they pick up on interactions in the forum. However, some of the transitions from the forum to submitting a ticket are a little clunky. If a ticket could be submitted on my behalf on the forum, then have me boot over to where the ticket is, that is fine. Just kicking me out of the forum, then having me submit a ticket seems counterintuitive to me.

As a company and for our client, we see any sort of legacy system or too many individual systems as somehow needing to be integrated. This is the bread and butter for RPA, and where we started our conversation (and our clients' conversations).

The complexity of the initial setup depends on who you are. First time implementing, it seems a little complex. If you know how to develop UiPath, it is more straightforward. I had to walk somebody through the implementation setup of the environment because they had a lot of questions about where they were going. For software development is not that complex, it is pretty straightforward.

Having some understanding of database management and services is helpful, so you understand the inner workings of UiPath.

It has definitely eliminated human error in our internal process, somewhere between full production, deployment and testing. There were definitely some error prone tasks that we eliminated. If I had to give a ball park, maybe 10 to 20 percent of the process was error prone, which we were able to resolve with UiPath.

For time savings: What used to be a 15 minute task, now it takes the bot two minutes for the bot to run through, for example.

Generally, we push unattended. We think the cost savings is better with unattended. As far as ROI, when you are talking about returning man-hours or moving people off work, unattended does that efficiently. Attended doesn't always save much time. Thus, we push unattended for cost.

We have seen general platform survey before implementing RPA of the different market vendors.

Personally, I looked at other platforms, and it is hard to transition from UiPath. It does have ease of use that now I am used to.

If you are starting with development, start with the UiPath Academy. For the end user or client, start conversations about security and prevention now, while you get trained up on development.

Internally, there is not a lot of automation in place. We are using a good robotic process automation software to bridge that gap right now and get us further down the automation road. 

We use the UiPath Academy for new hires. The new training programs, both the previous and current versions, with the UiPath Academy work out for us. I have the previous videos, then the current new slide deck idea. It is pretty streamlined and high level, but it is good for getting new people started.

Also, I used Academy just last week. I used it for security because I had some knowledge gaps on security with UiPath.