UiPath Platform Reviews

We use UiPath Studio, Orchestrator and Robots, all unattended currently. Our primary use case is one-off for mediation projects because we're trying to set up our infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is set up, we plan on creating a federated model throughout our entire organization.

Right now, our remediation teams do a lot of large one-time projects where they have to have policies for scaling up and scaling down the volume of full-time employees. I know we have avoided that situation in at least three cases now where they have not had to hire or remove people because they have been able to automate the remediation process.

The most valuable features for me in Studio can be anything that helps me test or debug. It saves me a lot of time and it saves our QA team a lot of time setting up separate environments, test data, and things like that.

The most valuable thing in Orchestrator is just how easy it is and the fact that it's cloud-based. It is also useful in that it allows non-technical users to get information about their projects. For example, they can find out if independent components are up and functioning; if something is down they can find out what went wrong.

In the next release of the solution, my biggest hope would be getting more accessibility to test data processing information. I was told that this feature was coming already. Being able to see what my variables and my arguments look like when things are being passed and making the processes very clear to my customers when we are doing test cases for UAT (User Acceptance Testing). That would be invaluable. It would help the customer to see and understand the data flow more easily without having to go through training or being very tech-savvy.

I think Studio has a little more room for improvement and could use a few more features. They just announced Studio X and Studio 2 which actually addressed many of the issues I hope to see resolved, but that is assuming that they come through in development and do what they say they are going to do.

On a scale from one to five, where one is not stable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a four-and-a-half. I've only seen one or two buggy behaviors, so I think that qualifies as extremely stable.

In our organization, there are five full-time people involved in the automation program. We can drag people in from different departments in the business on a case-by-case basis when necessary for resolving issues with automating.

Before we started, all of us were involved in using UiPath Academy RPA training and learning through it. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the most, the Academy is something I would give a three. I say that because I don't think they went into enough detail. I understand that they didn't because they are trying to save time for non-technical people, but I love knowing everything and I would love to see more detail in their presentations or have options to do so.

Customer support overall is very responsive and they say a lot of helpful things, but I'm often able to find the same information and answers on the forums. It would be nice at times to be able to talk to someone from support over the phone. I can describe my problems without having to send dozens of emails back and forth in order to get an answer. It just isn't terribly efficient.

The decision to automate and the product selection for the solution were completed before I was brought on as part of the team. I was actually brought on as an expert from another company in order to help them stabilize their deployment. The product vendors which were on the short-list actually include some vendors which the company has licenses for in addition to UiPath, like Blue Prism. They are exploring multiple options because we are a global entity. They want to offer the option to entities to choose whatever partner they prefer to go with.

The approach to the initial setup which was selected was a complicated process. I don't know much more than it took a long time, it wasn't very successful and that's why they brought me on.

They did the entire implementation in-house.

We have seen some return on investment to a certain extent, but a lot of it's coming from one-time processes and not from recurring processes. In other words, the ROI is already there, but it is from one-time processes we've deployed. These are processes that we would run a bunch of items through one time and the circumstances are not repeatable the next year or even the next week.

I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but I know that the cost of our department has been saved roughly four times over. Again, a lot of those savings are from one-time events that won't be recurring in the following year so they can't really be seen as predicting the future results.

The solution has helped to eliminate human errors in some cases and that also has value. In addition, there is the benefit of saving the employees time. Right now I believe that we have approximated that we saved somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 human hours. That resource can be re-allocated.

Part of our deployment is in a virtual environment and part of it is not. The implementation is actually still in progress. We are in the phase of setting up our infrastructure and trying to automate some POCs (Proof of Concepts) and some early successes to show the financial benefits of RPA to the C-suite (C-level executives such as the CEO and CFO).

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a four. I think the product is fairly intuitive. Because I come from a tech background though, I feel like it is going to be a little easier for me to understand than some other people who don't have that same background. The only reason I don't give it a five is because the integration between Orchestrator, Robots, and Studio does require a little bit of intimate knowledge to be able to connect them all and make sure that they stay connected.

We have not used attended robots yet, so I'm not sure how cost-effective they are because we don't have any data on that. We use unattended bots and they seem to be effective solutions, but I don't know what they pay for them.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine. The only reason I'm not going to give it a ten is that I have struggled with certain errors and stability issues. Whether that is our fault or a general bug in the actual software is yet to be seen. I have a few open tickets, but I've really liked this software overall.

Advice that I would give to a colleague at another company researching this or similar solutions would be that they look at their organization and see if they are really ready for deploying RPA solutions. A lot of RPA solutions are sold with the promise that anyone can build solutions with the products and the bots are going to deploy quickly. I don't think quick deployment is deceiving, but I do think that trying to implement a solution that does move so quickly like this into an organization that doesn't move quickly can create friction.

Our primary use for this product is to automate processes that we are capable of automating at our tier-one level human resources center.

This product has improved the way the organization functions by helping us go through a digital transformation. RPA is able to bridge a lot of the gaps that we had in our processes and processing what we had before we moved to this platform as a solution. With a little effort, I was able to bridge those gaps and automate a lot of processes that were manual and less efficient prior to involving the product.

The most valuable features for us are the recording tools. They allow the capture of user actions on the screen and then the recordings can be converted into workflow sequences. The activities are very simple to use and easy to put together in order to automate the processes. Once we get Orchestrator, that feature will probably be the most valuable, but we are currently not able to put it into production.

As far as additional features, there doesn't seem to be anything outstanding that I can think of right now. Maybe some off-the-shelf "How To" features could be installed with Studio so that you can search for how to do something and pull it up directly in the Academy or on-screen without leaving the product.

There could be room for improvement in the ticketing feature. It's kind of hard to find that feature sometimes.

On a scale from one to five, where one is the least stable and five is the most stable, I would rate the stability of UiPath as a five. It is very stable. We have never had any issues with regards to UiPath. The actual problems seem to be network issues and our environment.

We started out sort of small in the beginning and we've invested more in buying licenses and functionality. The scalability in that way seems very good.

My experience with customer service has been very good. They make a few different types of resources available and it is usually pretty easy to find what you are looking for. For example, I have used the RPA Academy. It is pretty easy and it was very beneficial. I haven't really opted for using customer support or technical support much. I've been able to just call, text, or email somebody and get a solution.

There were really no automated processes when I first came on to work at this organization. When we made the decision to go in this direction, we made a comparison of products to solve the automation issue. What made us choose UiPath to automate our processes was price, availability, ease of use and customer services. They were also willing to be the quickest to work with us as well. It seemed to be the best mix of all these.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because, where I'm working, we had 600 or 700 processes that I knew could benefit from automation. As an industry and in total, we probably have thousands of processes that could benefit from and be improved by automation. Coming into the company and seeing how things were done just made it obvious that automation was missing but necessary. Government processes need to be automated to be more efficient because of the volume and the potential for human error.

I would describe our initial setup as complicated because of our industry. We never worked with software like this prior to implementing UiPath. Just to get permissions to use the product on our network was one obstacle. It wasn't always easy to get to ATO (Authority to Operate) and get the capabilities and rights to do certain things on the network like to have the product interact with certain programs that have sensitive information. It's kind of complicated, but that is a whole new path within our industry whenever introducing new technology.

From the time of purchase of the UiPath license until adding our first robot in production was a few months. We purchased a license in February and got a robot into production in May. Most of that time spent was because working on the project is not even my full-time job. I have a whole different responsibility in the organization. So, I was doing a lot of developing in my free time. It probably would have only taken a month or so if I was doing it full time.

We did not use an integrator, reseller or consultant. I did everything in-house.

We have seen a return on investment and performance benefits. The ability to notice a difference was almost immediate for certain things and in certain programs. I know that I've calculated that we saved $1.47 million through the automation we have already set in place. The solution also helped eliminate human errors which are more difficult to approximate as a dollar value or percentage.

Basically, using the product has allowed us to take between four to six full-time employees from doing very mundane transactional processes to doing more value-added work. That shift alone reduces human error because the human mind is not made to do this kind of transactional work over hours and days at a time.

This solution saves our organization time on an ongoing basis. I would say it saves a minute to three minutes per transaction per thousands of transactions. It certainly has value in more than one way.

We license the use of the product on a yearly basis. The licensing we bought costs $7000 in 2019 for what we have in production. That is the cost of the license plus Studio.

From a cost perspective, I believe that unattended robots can save even more time and more money than attended robots. The only reason we haven't gotten unattended processes into production yet is simply that we haven't got the authority to operate Orchestrator on our network server. The cost is not an issue given our budget, we need to be able to justify how secure it is.

The vendors who were on our shortlist were UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. All of them seemed to be good solutions.

We are currently running some of our automation in a virtual environment. The implementation performance is all right. Our system environments are pretty out of date and a bit technologically behind. Sometimes that fact will hold things up. I am the only one in the organization involved in the automation program. I'm the only developer and the only person who uses UiPath directly, but it affects thousands or even tens of thousands of people.

On a scale from one to five, one being the most difficult and five being the easiest, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a five. Personally, I had no developer experience. I never heard of RPAs or UiPath a year ago. I was able to learn it and figure it out using the Academy, YouTube and the forum. Coming to it cold and doing it part-time, that really doesn't seem like a long time.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a ten overall. It has been completely helpful in achieving the goals we set for it and the technical help and customer service I've gotten have been good. Most of the issues we have encountered with the product are because of the way we operate and not because of UiPath. The support from UiPath provided everything we have ever asked for and needed.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this or a similar automation solution is to just do it. It really creates the opportunity to make things more efficient.

We use all of the products in the UiPath platform.

We have use cases ranging from back-office to manufacturing, which include large project management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and treasury management. Most of the areas in the company have processes that we have automated.

We run our automations in the Citrix virtual environment, although we are unhappy with Citrix. It is pretty bad, and it's very difficult to keep up the performance. AVS or Azure do not offer a good service yet, but we are looking for alternatives with respect to the virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. We have been using UiPath for quite a long time, and we have seen this evolving. It has been getting better over the last few years.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training between three and four. The training is good, but the content doesn't have the depth required for people to go ahead and do something if they're not technical. It's still pretty high-level.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was three to four weeks. The process is getting better, but when we started in 2016 and UiPath was small, it was good but needed refinement. I would have rated it three out of five back then.

Using this solution is enabling us to move the drive for digital transformation to the core. We can now take automation to a level it has never been to.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we have seen benefits. With humans performing, the accuracy was at approximately ninety percent. Our accuracy with automation is now close to one hundred percent.

With respect to saving time, we have seen FTE savings but the numbers are confidential.

The most valuable feature of Studio is the ease of use. It is really easy for people to learn the basics and the learning curve is not steep.

Orchestrator makes it very easy to manage the platform.

Orchestrator needs to have better integration to include business users.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution between four and five. Stability has been getting better. For example, Studio used to have a lot of bugs when you were developing and when you were capturing the screens. Now it's been getting better, but there is still room to improve.

Orchestrator used to lag quite a bit when there were a high number of transactions, and there is still room to improve.

We have at least a few hundred people involved in our automation program.

The technical support for this solution is pretty good. Whenever we had trouble they were always there.

We did not use another RPA prior to this one. We were looking at improving the efficiency of processes and bringing some innovative solutions to automating tasks and processes. This is when we decided to try RPA. 

We implemented this solution on our own.

We have seen ROI but I cannot share the specifics.

We did a very extensive vendor review. We had all of the major providers of RPA solutions in 2016, and UiPath was the one that came through in terms of fulfilling all of the criteria.

Looking ahead at the features that are being released this year, they seem to be what we have been looking for.

My advice for anybody researching this type of solution is to choose wisely. There are a lot of products out there, but few of them actually work.

This is a good solution and they are releasing some features that I am looking forward to, but there is still room to improve. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the entire UiPath suite for healthcare revenue cycle management.

Our automations are not run in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a four. The information about the automation processes was really useful. At the same time, I would suggest including more industry-specific training and knowledge sharing.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one month. I felt that the process was straightforward. It was very intuitive. Most of the resources were available to us and we've got it up and running with no problem.

We have clients for which we provide people to perform various processes. Parts of those processes are exceptions that could not be done by these people but were very time-consuming. We have automated those exceptions so that now, we don't have a percentage of our staff evaluating those exceptions every day. They now run flawlessly one hundred percent of the time. Our clients are happier and we're happier.

In terms of eliminating human errors, UiPath is excellent at that. We have one hundred percent accuracy on all of our automation.

This solution saves us time and it saves our clients time. I would estimate the savings at ten percent where automation is deployed. Some of the automations run slowly but they run around the clock.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of deployment.

More industry-specific training and information would be highly valuable to us. We're a healthcare company, and it would be helpful to know where and how automation is being deployed within a healthcare environment. For example, what have we done that we could share with people, and what are they doing that they could share with us?

The UiPath platform is stable, but it is dependent on other platforms.

For example, we may be extracting data from or populating data in a customer billing system. That billing system might go down and someone needs to wake up the bots after that happens. It is not the fault of UiPath but it is part of the process.

This solution is easy to scale.

We have approximately thirty people involved in our automation program.

We were not using an RPA solution before UiPath contacted us.

We handled the implementation in-house.

We are very close to seeing ROI, although not quite yet.

We looked at some different technologies that were out there and it seemed that UiPath was ready. These included Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and one other one. We felt like UiPath was a solid solution that was pretty easy to use and could scale easily and quickly as well.

This is a fantastic solution and we love it, but we definitely see some room for improvement, mainly around interoperability and leveraging intelligent or cognitive RPA and educating their client base around that stuff.

My advice to anybody researching this type of solution is to familiarize yourself with the concepts and all of the market participants, and then choose the one that works best for you.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our most prevalent use case is invoice processing.

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

It comes down to saving people time to be able to look at high-value tasks.

The solution has helped us eliminate human error with 100 percent testing and accuracy. This is only where there are exceptions, which generally tends to be under five percent of the time.

The solution has saved us time. It does depends on the specific process. For one specifically, it took a week out of each month, then we were able to process the same reconciliation process within minutes.

Studio is the most valuable feature from the aspect of developing a bot. It is very nice from the drag and drop perspective. It is very easy to follow and has low guidance from the technical aspect.

I would like to have cloud in the next release. It's one of those things that allows customers to be able to have an easier access point.

There are still areas for improvement for some of the drag and drop features and moving more to a bit of a lower code perspective.

I would rate stability as a five out of five. Compared to competitors where we've had instances where either exceptions are kicked out or the workflow breaks, UiPath does not encounter those issues.

About 50 people in our organization are involved in our automation program.

The technical support is very good. They are very good partners.

The experience overall has been really great with UiPath. The culture and individuals at the company really help make the project easy to do.

We had a very manual process that needed to be addressed because it was taking up way too much time of employees' efforts.

The initial setup was straightforward. Going through the certification process, it enables you with the tools to be able to implement at an easy level for low-hanging use cases.

It took about a month from the time we purchase our UiPath license until our first bot was live.

We used a consultant for the deployment. I would rate our experience with them as a five out of five. 

I would rate ease of use as a four out of five. We had a bunch of people that do implementations from a development aspect for our use cases. The solution has been very easy to be able to implement for our specific use cases, given the capabilities of the platform.

We have seen ROI from this solution. We saw it almost immediately in regard to performance benefits around accuracy, timeliness, and the ability to do 100 percent testing.

We also evaluated Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We chose UiPath because of stability of the platform, ease of use, and the deployment factors are much easier with UiPath.

We have used UiPath Academy for RPA training. I would rate it as a five out of five. Compared to competitors, the UiPath Academy offers a very easy path to certification. The way that the curriculum is laid out, it is very nice and easy to follow.

Do your due diligence.

We have probably use attended bots more heavily. They're very nice and everybody has a good experience with them working alongside actual humans.

I would rate the overall product an eight out of ten. There are additional features that probably could be rolled out. I think there are on the roadmap.

We're starting within our finance group, so a lot of different processes in our finance group are being automated. Our main project was for our tax department, extracting data from PDFs and putting them into Excel.

We have two people involved with RPA in our company.

We just purchased this solution last week so we're still installing everything. We did automate four processes with the community edition. The length of time in development varied by the process. The longer ones required help from UiPath. They came on-site for the PoC, so that helped us out. Some other easy ones we just did ourselves within a couple of days.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it is a four. But with Studio X, I think it will probably be a five. I say four because as you get more complicated with your processes, you need to learn how to code and there's a brunt learning curve. A lot of people will get turned off by that. So, I made some good sessions with Studio X, it's all drag and drop, mostly, so that's perfect for the business users.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are actually in the process of taking it right now. It's good that they have something like that available. There are not that many who have aced it.

So far we haven't gone too far, but I expect that people will be a lot happier because they won't be doing the jobs that they don't like doing. They'll have more time to learn and up-skill technologies like this, which can help further their careers rather than just learning, or not learning by copying and pasting.

The most valuable feature is automating processes and tasks, giving users time for more value-added activities. This results in cost savings.

The free community edition allowed us to test out the technology before investing in it.

I would like a better ability to connect and integrate with other software systems. An example would be integration with data and business intelligence tools. I don't think they have a native connector yet. So, just something that a user can connect, and have RPA in the middle, would be helpful.

I would also like to see an easier UI for the user. It may have already been taken care of with Studio X, but I think if they keep improving that, it's going to get a lot of people interested because users are attracted to it.

We were just using community edition for about six months.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I mean we haven't used it too much so we haven't really pushed the boundaries, but for the stuff we've, done I would say it is stable.

Their sales and pre-sales support is very good. They've been very willing to come onsite and help us out and help with our pilot as well.

We got introduced by RPA from PWC. They came and talked at one of our finance summits.

The paid version, I'm still learning how to use, how to connect everything together. There is still a little learning period for that as well. Learning how Orchestrator works, how the licensing works and things like that, were necessary after using the community edition.

UiPath helped us with our PoC and they were great. I mean they came for free and through just a pilot or a proof of concept. We could actually see if the technology works for a use case.

Before we start anything we evaluate the process and we take down how many hours it saves, the costs, and ROI. In our main project, it took someone approximately three hundred hours a year to do all that data extraction, data input, and that also came along with errors because someone could fat-finger the value.

Then, through the PoC, they're able to turn around within two days. A bot can basically do that entire process and do it error-free as well.

It is a savings of three-hundred hours, and the cost savings is a multiplier of hourly pay.

We also use it as an ETL tool sometimes, so instead of paying for an API connection, we can use RPA. Simply just to run a simple report of the system.

I don't have any other software vendors to compare it to, but I would say if you're fully utilizing it then there's definitely an ROI in it. Obviously, if you have only one process running five minutes a day with the bot, it's not worth it. For us, what we did was we built enough use cases before we bought that enterprise license to make the ROI on it. We've got eight or ten and then we realized that we can cover that license cost easily with ROI before we purchased it.

Ultimately, we realized ROI within six months.

We got purchased the basic minimum package and it was around $35,000 USD, annually.

We tested out Kryon RPA, and we looked but did not test Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were out of our price range, and at that time, neither of them had a free community edition, so we couldn't test out the technology.

UiPath sort of fit our company well because it was priced reasonably, and they also had a free version so we could test out the technology. Ultimately, we chose UiPath because of the price. It was not as expensive as Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. It has a free community version where you can test new technology, which was huge. They also have a local office next to us so we can get their help pretty easily.

They have announced features in the next release, and I think that they are all the things that users would want. There are easier ways to document processes and a better and more user-friendly UI. A lot of people just got turned off by having to learn code. So that was a lot easier, and then being able to track all your RPA projects and the ROI on them saves time. Doing them manually is time-consuming. Fortunately, we're a small company because I couldn't imagine if you're trying to implement this for a bigger company.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to, first of all, do their own research on the ratings and independent research. Secondly, I would just say a lot of them now have free community editions, so there's nothing holding you back from testing out the technology and seeing if it works. I think Blue Prism is the only one that doesn't have it now. That's a really high cost and a barrier to seeing if the technology works. Just going and validating the software and doing a simple automation task is important. All of those vendors have free training so you can just go step-by-step and learn something. I think that's the biggest thing someone can do, and then obviously finding enough processes within your company as well.

This is a good solution but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I have used UiPath Orchestrator, and we have created both attended and unattended robots for our clients.

We have been using the new AI and OCR technologies with UiPath, and we are currently trying to implement the Citrix log capability that was recently introduced.

We are not running our automations in a virtual environment. When we automate any Citrix-based application, it's all email-based. There is a Citrix receiver and we communicate with that, which helps automate Citrix applications much faster.

Most of the clients I had seen have been running in virtual environments, although I have seen some of our clients running on the desktop. We have also seen hybrid scenarios.

One thing is that virtual environments can be standardized pretty quickly. So, that's an advantage. Normally, the companies, which are leaning towards more cloud now, will be happy with this. So, I think that is one factor. As you move virtual machines to the cloud you can migrate your bots to the cloud faster.

I have worked on various different domains including the public sector, commercial, healthcare, energy, utility, and federal. These are the different customers for which we are implementing solutions. Now, the customers are moving towards AI and natural language processing. They are more into chatbots, how they can use artificial intelligence, making use of data science, and putting more machine learning on board.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it two and a half. I'd say it is about marketing. You can develop anything. There are very small processes that you can develop with having minimal experience. However, when you start implementing complex processes, I would say you need to be a background developer.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. All of my team members have been using UiPath Academy for training and certification. It's not just with the U.S., but outside the U.S. as well.

From the point that a UiPath license is purchased until the first robot is ready totally depends upon what use case we are implementing. There are different methodologies that people use. Some build the bot without exceptions and it can go to production. Like a very simple process can go to production in two to three weeks. A more complex bot will take eight to ten weeks, and depending upon the process, it can go longer. I have seen tasks when a human is performing the job and it takes him around twenty minutes per transaction. But, when the bot comes in, it actually completed that same transaction in five minutes. But, to develop that five minutes of processing, it was understanding system availability and testing. Then you have to do load testing. It takes ten weeks or so.

Our clients decide to implement RPA for several reasons. The first reason, of course, is to have work completed faster. Second, when there is a workload, you can work on it more efficiently and with fewer people. Consider an open enrollment in October, where the open enrollment starts at 10:00 AM and there are a lot of transactions flowing in. Now you have to hire a human and train them. With the bot, we can just scale up instead. Finally, the bots are errorless.

In terms of eliminating human errors, it is a one hundred percent reduction. When you implement bots, it's error-free, as long as you have implemented it properly. The robot does not get tired, so the error rate is actually zero.

I would say, more important than saving money, it's more about business growth and client satisfaction. Our clients all serve someone, so it's more about customer satisfaction. The employees benefit because sometimes they have to do repetitive jobs, and they get bored with them. So, they can use automation and apply their brains somewhere fruitful.

Overall, automation is always improving customer satisfaction. Response time is improved, errors are reduced, and productivity increases because work is being done around the clock.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is user-friendly. I was a coding developer, so I know how to write code, and I've also used other RPA tools. This solution is workflow-driven, where you can easily relay what you had written. If someone has to read the code, it is very readable.

Second, I've always been a Microsoft technology guy, and they have provided the facility where we can implement any of the C# code into it. We have .NET code, and that's why I like it. We say it's a tool, but I would say it can also be leveraged as a custom coding tool. We can actually do whatever custom code you want.

I would like to see more machine learning features and capabilities for more accurate OCR.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. It's stable. The thing is, with the software, we have a few glitches here and there, but what I like is that we have the right support. When we actually reach out to verify, we get a faster response and also a faster solution. The responses are effective and fast.

The responses are effective and fast.

I have seen some cases where there is backend automation, but it was a series of processes. With this solution, they combine all of it into one. There were few human-interactive automations. Rather, it was batch-job processing of databases, etc.

The complexity of the initial setup depends upon the client.

There is admin access and a whole lot involved. There are safety concerns from client to client with their security policies, and it may take time. I have hardly seen any clients where it's easy to set up, within a week or two. It takes longer because of the client's own security policies. You have to get a lot of clearance because there is a lot of admin access that UiPath needs. If I had to rate the setup, I would give it three out of five.

A dedicated person is required to maintain this solution. The same way humans get sick and need doctors, the bots get sick and you need a maintenance person.

I would estimate that our clients see ROI, on average, in one year. It depends on what they are trying to save. If it is FTE then eventually you'll be getting everything. If you are trying to have a faster experience, it totally depends. There is a development cost and a tool cost that have to be considered. It also depends on the complexity of the processes and how long they take to code.

We have clients who use almost all of the RPA solutions. The most common ones are Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and WorkFusion. We don't recommend. We advise. We can implement regardless of the solution.

The choice is dependent on various factors. What we have seen is that most companies have a technology stack. Some have a Java shop, while others have a Microsoft shop, or others will use a different technology stack again. People tend to choose what best matches their technology.

When we started initially, most of the business users were afraid that the bot was going to take their job. That is not the case. The bot is actually helping them with their substantive, day-to-day work, by handing the repetitive work. So, after seeing the benefits, I've seen a lot of users now leaning towards bots, and they are very happy with RPA.

I am looking forward to the new version where they have implemented libraries. One thing they have done is merged the media packages into one. 

From a cost perspective, there is a difference between attended and unattended bots. I have implemented both, but most of the plans are moving towards unattended. The unattended bots come at a higher cost. For an attended bot, it is being used while the user is at the machine, and is more like an interactive bot. While there is a huge difference in cost, I still prefer unattended bots. I see less benefit in using attended bots and say that I would use unattended eighty percent of the time.

When I'm implementing an unattended bot, I am actually putting it on a machine. I can run as many unattended bots as I need on that one machine. I can do this with attended bots, but the thing is, you need user interactions. Now think in this way, if the user is not there, the attended bot is waiting for that user. Secondly, I see some of the use cases that are really helpful and suitable for attended, but I would rather go with unattended because it's going to show that I don't need a physical machine and it will be more efficient.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is to start with the UiPath Academy and do the training. Then, look through some videos, implement a process or two and see how comfortable you are. At this point, you can move forward with it. I would say that it is pretty easy to understand.

This is a good solution, but I'm a hardcore custom developer. I still want that flexibility in my hand to do whatever I can do. With a tool, there are always limitations in terms of policy and rules.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for insurance processes where we have redundant activity and we have pain points for our customers. It allows the employees to do more insightful work.

As we are mostly using unintended robots right now, the main value we see is the ability for the solution to take away the redundant tasks. That's the key value. But there's tremendous potential in the attended or hybrid model. The value I see there is allowing people to automate partially or at a time. Whether that's something that we've identified clearly now or something that we look at in the future, I think that lives in the attended or hybrid piece. It would be nice to just see what more we could do and what more value we could add to the business there.

On a scale of one to five, I would validate the ease of use to maintain our processes almost at five now that the solution has introduced Studio X. Studio X has the potential of empowering people to prototype and then pass along more qualified information. It's a game-changer.

Right now just being able to capture process, even without Studio X, let's say we video it or we capture it by way of a traditional Vizio diagram, enables asking work instructions, etc. It allows us to capture and standardize what people are doing as well as take steps toward optimizing processes in general. It's all good stuff.

I wouldn't know without looking at the actual metrics, but I would say in general our pay projects probably cut time by factors. Simply because people do things more slowly, more inefficiently. They're interrupting where the bot is not. That's the reason why we love it so much. The potentials of cost and time savings and the possibility of really having people get some of their time back is great.

We haven't had any problems that make the solution look unstable. I'd give stability a rating of four out of five.

As far as stability is concerned, I'm not sure what people who have deployments of hundreds or thousands of bots are seeing in terms of stability. We're small. For a small implementation, we've had a few hiccups and a few concerns where I would say, how can we triage more quickly, or how can we understand what we've caused more quickly? How can we implement strategies for redundancy and business continuity management? What guidance is there from the company on that and how can we be very transparent to our customers to be clean, concise and clear about that? 

I've talked to a lot of the technical support team. They all know that we're really happy with their responsiveness. We were really happy with the product and we're really happy with them. Just continuing to get the guidance, meeting with them, considering strategies and having them support us has been great. 

In this day and age, RPA is the appropriate tool for certain issues where a lot of times I think a lot of firms, not just ours probably go, "Hey, we don't need a longterm solution that will last forever, but we do need something that's going to automate this process and is going to take this pain point away from the business and this appeases that need." I'm not sure if that's specific to any one certain company; that's just the way that people approach it.

I'm not quite sure the exact reason why our company chose to automate. It was decided before I joined the team.

Implementations from process assessment through actually bringing something to production takes about three months. We'd like to be at six weeks like everyone else. But right now, we're at about three months.

It'll be more straightforward in the future now that we have tools like explore apps and insights. 

The complexity of the project informs the complexity of the implementation. We are an IT services company. We have a very standardized kind of approach to testing and bringing things to production, so I don't think that's terribly complex. It's kind of business as usual. We recently brought a project to 10 productions that had three parts to it. We staggered the implementation that typically might be more complex than what other people are doing. The complexity of the project introduces complexity to the implementation, which is fairly straightforward.

We have a partner that assisted with implementation.

The performance benefits are usually pretty quick. The process assessment that we do that hopefully determines the processes that we would pick, allows us to see ROI fairly soon. I'm not sure what the timeline is on that exactly.

I'm sure our process probably looks like a lot of other companies. We go and look at not only one solution but also its competitors. We look at the top of any certain field and make a decision based on what fits the need the best. 

My understanding is the solution is deployed on-premises.

We also run our deployments in a virtual environment and we have the potential to do hybrid things as we have more processes that are in the pipeline that we must review to see what our roadmap looks like going forward in the future. Our experience with automation within virtual environments so far has been fine.

In terms of the UiPath RPA Training Academy, I've taken a few courses. I've also done Academy live and watched tutorial videos. The UI path engineers and customer service managers, as well as some of the directors that are local to our area, have been very helpful in providing this information. I fully intend to continue to do that and as long as it's available. If I were to rate the training materials, I would say the training materials are probably a five out of five rating. There's a lot of information there.

I would suggest others give the solution a good hard look to see if it works for them. Hopefully, for others, it will be a successful product and a useful tool.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.