UiPath Platform Reviews

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and bots.

We are a consulting company that is working with one of our clients to automate back-office accounting processes for a logistics company. There are five people in the core team who are working on the implementation.

We run automations in a virtual environment, but I was not responsible for the implementation.

With respect to how easy it is to automate the company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it four. It's very easy, but it is difficult to explain to our customers who are not as technical. In other words, it is difficult for people who are coming from the business side.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. Without it, I don't think that I could have started the implementation. I completed the developer program just for a general understanding of how everything works, including the Orchestrator and how it all works together. For me, the training was really important. It was very good and I really liked it.

We were working with the Community Edition at first, but from the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one month.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we expect to see this benefit later. Until this point, we haven't touched the processes where there could be human errors. We just started with the really basic ones, which are so easy that people don't make errors there, and neither do the bots. We plan to get to the more complicated processes next.

With respect to saving time, I can say that this solution has helped, but at this point, I don't know by how much.

While we were implementing this solution, we were empowering people. This solution changed the way people are working because it is so open and everybody can take part in it. It caused them to think about their processes in a different way, with automation in mind and possibilities for the future. Now, when they're having strategy meetings, they have dedicated time slots where they're just talking about processes that could be automated, so the whole mindset is changing now.

The most valuable feature in Orchestrator is that it stores the credentials in a safe way. Our clients were afraid that the credentials would be stored where somebody could see them and being able to schedule bots with the credentials available is very important for them. 

We would like to see Studio made a little easier so that our non-technical customers can also implement the bots. For example, some of the features from the upcoming Studio X should be put into the original Studio, as well.

I have trouble understanding the machine learning and AI components, so I would like it to be easier to understand how and what to do with them.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution between three and four. Sometimes there are issues where something is not working, although there are probably times where it happens because we don't know how to use the solution in the best way.

Both the customer support and technical support for this solution are very good.

The technical support has been very helpful. Our team has had many calls with UiPath regarding the virtual machine, which did not work at first. Within two days it was working.

Our clients did not use another RPA solution before this one.

They are undergoing a digital transformation and wanted to give themselves and edge so that the other companies will not get ahead. They just saw the need to change and we told them about RPA and they got very excited. We showed them the first pilot bot and they were ready to implement it.

Our in-house IT department handled the initial setup.

We have seen ROI and performance benefits from using this solution. While I do not have specifics in terms of money or time saved, I think that we could see the benefits after a week. There were processes that the client no longer needed to do, so they had more time available for other things.

For our first customer, we started with Orchestrator, an unattended bot, and a couple of Studio licenses, all of which cost $25,000 USD for the year. It is definitely worth the money.

We had researched Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but we didn't look too deeply.

The choice for UiPath was made based on what we read on the Internet, including the Gartner Report. It was very easy to get started after first downloading the Community Edition and then taking the Academy to learn how to do it. It is easy, fast, and the statistics say that it is the best.

Right now, this is a good solution that I would recommend. It is really beneficial for a lot of companies. At the same time, there are things that can improve and they are working on them.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use only unattended robots with Studio and Orchestrator. Our primary use for the bots is in finance, so we only do finance use cases like AP (Accounts Payable) invoice retrieval.

The solution has improved the way our organization functions because no one has to sit for hours just spending time retrieving documents. The staff just picks up the documents they need in the morning, start their analysis right away.

What I find the most valuable about UiPath is flexibility in adding code. That ability is the most important feature for me and what I do.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see better scheduling options. Because of the schedule limitations, you can only schedule one process at a time. There are situations where I might want to build five processes that need to work together. As I can only schedule one at a time, it isn't currently possible.

On a scale of one to five where one is unstable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a five. There are not many issues at all. On other platforms that we use, we always seem to encounter small things that cause problems. For example, with other solutions, we have had problems processing things like resolution and there is always an issue. But with UiPath, I can control almost everything from the robot and get it working.

There are ten people in our organization involved in our automation program and I think it can be scaled at any time.

While we don't use technical support directly, our team has used UiPath Academy RPA training to become more familiar with the product. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the best, I would rate the Academy experience as a five. We've also used the forum. In all, between the implementation help, the Academy and the resources, I would rate the support as a nine-out-of-ten.

From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production took only about one month, and that was without previous experience with the product. The initial set up of the product was straightforward, so it was all pretty efficient.

We did not need to use an integrator, reseller, or consultant. We did the entire implementation all in house. The only exception is that we did get some help from UiPath by working with them directly. 

We have experienced some return on investment and performance benefits, and it only took about one month to see it. There is one monthly process we use and in just one run — the first time we ran it — something that took two people two days was done in two hours. So, what took 16 hours to do analysis on before has been cut down to two hours. It is hard to say how much money that saved as we just changed the allocation of resources. The solution also helped to eliminate human errors which are even harder to account for.

We chose to try UiPath because we wanted to test the SQL capabilities that it has. I don't know that I would say we evaluated other options before choosing it as a solution. We currently work with both Blue Prism and UiPath at the same time. 

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is easy, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a seven. I think that especially business users who don't have more of a technical background can get lost in all the different features that are available.

For this solution, we could totally deploy with attended robots, but our business just isn't ready for that yet. I think, with the adoption of Studio X that we might be in that position, but not right now.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven overall. The scheduling feature just isn't there yet to allow more flexibility in programming and use, but the development is much faster and the flexibility better than much of the competition. The introduction of open-source changes the game for RPA solutions.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution or a similar one would be to clearly evaluate the use case. Don't just breeze through and assume you need automation. Take a good look at what you actually need to do, make sure the solution fits, and make sure the targeted processes are processes that should be automated.

We primarily use the Studio, which is for developing the robots, and we deploy to Orchestrator.

We went through a large SAP transformation and we had a lot of issues getting the users to accept the new systems. They were issues related to the adoption of new systems. We decided to build these attended bots in order to guide the users through the system. Essentially, it is navigation or guidance assistance. By helping the users with proper data entry and design, flowing in a logical sequence that is easy for the user to follow, it minimizes end-user training.

Running our automations in a virtual environment is something that we had tried during our PoC. Currently, we have attended bots deployed in more than twenty thousand laptops, and eventually, we're planning to have more than eighty thousand deployments. Because of the large scale, initially, we were having a lot of challenges because of things that go on with the users' machines. We wanted to explore Citrix because there is just one virtual environment that every user logs on to, and then run the processes from there. Unfortunately, it did not work for us. We were seeing a lot of issues and felt that it was much more stable deploying individually to each laptop, instead of using Citrix.

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. There is always room for improvement.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. The material is very sequential and logical. You don't get lost because you just follow the modules from beginner to intermediate to advanced. You cover everything from end-to-end, and it is very structured.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one year. This included our pilot project, then the development and the UAT. When we went live in production there were three thousand users. 

This solution saves our users time. For example, on a standard SAP system where a user has no training, and you tell them to go and finish performing a transaction, it will take them between thirty and forty minutes. Now, with these attended bots, it is almost reduced to half. They can finish the same transaction with minimum training in probably fifteen minutes.

This solution has definitely reduced human errors. We have cleaned up the transaction screens and we help the user to focus on what is needed. We give them the right instructions to make sure that they enter the right information.

This solution is mainly used for navigation, position making, and reducing errors. It means that we have a quicker time to finish any transaction. We are a financial organization, so obviously, for us, it's important to record every sale that we make and every client that we have. It has significantly helped our client servers to reduce the time that they spend on these systems to finish a particular transaction.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of using it. This includes the way the activities are set up, and how easy it is to solve problems by searching with Google if we're stuck.

We did not have to do a lot of customization because the standard UiPath activities fit our needs. This is a big point for us because we end up customizing most of the products that we use just to satisfy our own business needs. In the case of Studio, we didn't have to create a lot of custom activities.

I find it difficult to set up the Orchestrator and it should be more user-friendly for non-technical people. I understand how we create packages and push them, but I find the maintenance hard to follow. As it is now, I have to contact our IT department, which takes two to three days. In the meantime, we just have to wait.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. In terms of attended automation, we did have a lot of issues. We have requested lots of product enhancements, which then came through the pipeline. Initially, we did see a lot of issues and they had to make some changes to cater to our needs. Also, we have some more requests that have been put in the pipeline to make it a bit easier for us.

We have about twenty people working with RPA in our organization. At this time we have automations running on more than twenty thousand laptops.

The technical support for this solution is very good. They're very responsive.

We have had people working on-site at UiPath too, and they have been hands-on trying to see what we are solving. They have given us very good and very relevant suggestions, which has been helpful for us. 

We did not use another RPA prior to this solution.

We knew that we needed to invest in this solution based on user feedback. When we launched our new SAP system, everybody kept complaining about how difficult it was to use. There is a lot of training involved, but it's not like you can remember the training. We replaced fourteen hundred systems and put them into a single instance, so even if you are trained for weeks it is hard to remember all of it.

Basically, we needed something that was easier and helps us navigate through the systems so that we can complete our transactions. This solution does just that. It guides the user, waits for the user to give the right input based on what is expected, and then takes the user to the next relevant screen so that they can perform the transaction.

The initial setup has been complicated for us. After we went live in production, one of the issues we saw, but didn't realize initially, was that even though the tray was not open, by default though, if the bot is pushed onto a user's machine then it will be connected to the Orchestrator. Even though the user is not running the process, the bot always stayed connected. That was causing a large load on the Orchestrator and we didn't realize it until we started increasing from three thousand to twenty thousand users. That's when we were seeing a lot of timeouts. The production connection kept dropping and we were not able to figure out why. UiPath helped us to restructure the whole SQL database and the way we established the connections.

We have not yet seen ROI, although I think it's too early because we only went live two or three months ago. The big expansion in users was just this week, so it is too early for us to say.

We do know that we have been receiving very positive feedback so far. The users with machines where these bots are deployed have been saying it is very easy to use and there is minimal training required. It's out there, on the desktop or laptop, and they just have to launch by clicking the play button and the process starts. 

When we started this project, we explored Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. I don't think that they were able to give us what we were looking for in terms of attended automation. When we looked at UiPath we found that it could satisfy all of our business requirements, which is why we chose this solution over the others.

I am really excited about the new Studio X. Ours is a consulting firm where not everybody is tech-savvy, but everyone wants to get their hands into automation. UiPath is saying that it is going to be very easy. Even for people without a technical background at all, they will be able to build their own process and bot. I'm looking forward to seeing how our users are going to make use of that within the UI.

This solution is easy to use and adopt in an existing environment. The best part for us is that even though some features were lacking, the turnaround time to have them implemented was amazing. We have always coordinated with our UiPath partner to tell them what it is that we need. When we have requested features, we have found that in the next release they are added. We found this unique among vendors.

My advice to anyone who is researching this type of solution is to definitely go for it. There are a lot of materials out there which will help them make the decision. Our own journey showed that it was easy for us to use, learn, adopt, and finally deploy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are in the finance industry, so we use Studio and Orchestrator to automate a lot of Excels and making reports.

The product has given us the opportunity to automate processes for our industry and specifically for our business. We have set up best practices. So we know what description needs to be at the top in the code. We just start there, read what's going on. Automation just makes everything simple and standardized while reducing human error.

I don't know all of the features so the scope of my view is a little limited as to what may be best or most valuable overall. For me, the ease of use is definitely valuable. Assembly of processes is just drag-and-drop and that simplifies a lot of things. Annotation is also very easy to do and it helps to make things clear to understand during development. I can go look at someone else's code and within an hour understand what it's doing without having to consult the other developer. On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is great, I would rate the ease of use of the platform a four. 

Even though there are things I'd like to see, I also know that most or all of them are already being announced for new releases. As a developer, I would probably say the most important thing I would like to see is that the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) a little bit more fleshed out. It could use more debugging capabilities, for example. But again, we've been seeing that they're adding stuff like that. It will be getting in there and playing with it when it is released to make sure that it has got all the stuff I want and I might be able to be more specific after that as to what still needs to be added.

On a scale from one to five where five means the product is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform a five. It works and nothing breaks that is directly related to the product itself.

The technical support, communities, and resources are all pretty good. We use the forums and I like the forums a lot. It's crazy how many people actually spend time on it and reply. You get your answer pretty quickly. The guys are really open to work with, so if we need help we just reach out and we get all the help we need.

We also use the UiPath Academy. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial, I would rate the Academy as probably four out of five. It is easy to use. You go in there and you know what training you are looking for and what you need to take. Most of the training is in-depth enough so that when you complete it, you really have a good grip on what's going on. It eliminates barriers to getting the information you need when you need it.

The initial setup and implementation happened before my time at the company.

A lot of our return on investment has to do with time savings. It is definitely amazing to see processes that could take eight days before actually run in ten minutes. Just because of automation. It eliminates Hangouts and just makes the whole process and the people involved in the processes more efficient. As far as how much gets saved exactly, it depends on the complexity of the project and what it resolves. We have to invest in our BA (Business Analyst) work so all together it may take a couple of months for anyone project to pay off.

We use the solution on-premises right now, but I think we are going to move to the cloud because of the advantages. We also do not run our automation in a virtual environment, such as Citrix either. Our bots run on a physical server, but there may be reasons in the future to explore virtual environments for that purpose. 

The approximate number of people in our organization involved in the automation initiative, strictly considering developers would be my team of six. It is harder to say how many are using the bot solutions who are not directly involved in the development.

We currently tend to stick more with attended bots which just helps take a measure of human error out of the way. A lot of problems that we had in the past have come from users not updating their personal machines. That can obviously cause things to break. We try to make bots unattended if we can, but it isn't always practical to deploy in that model.

In any case, the solution has definitely saved our organization time and reduces human error either way.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the product as a nine or ten. Beyond just the product, there are tons of resources that we have available. Finding things other people have already made is an additional benefit. There's no point in reinventing the wheel if something's already been built.

My advice to people considering the solution is pretty simple. Buy it.

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 have a bunch of uses for the product so it is hard to judge which is the most important. We started working with data structures for websites and then moved into more complex automation like speech detection and making more cognitive decisions based on rules. Our automation using bots is essentially on the verge of using artificial intelligence.

There are a lot of ways this product has improved our organization. Even a simple project can bring us a lot of recognition. One example is retrieving passwords on Amazon. Imagine that you have a user who forgets their password. Amazon lets you reset your password but there are a lot of steps. In the background, Amazon is validating that you are the person that you are saying that you are with a lot of manual steps. We automated that with a bot and other tools and the customer experience skyrocketed. We reduced the processing by five minutes just for that service. Not only did we apply that solution for one country, but we also applied it to seven different countries. It was a success story.

What I think is the best thing about UiPath is that it is fairly easy to understand and learn how to use it. One of the most valuable things about the product is the improvement they are making with the tools. They are offering around thirteen new products now. With these additions, there is a lot of value-added enhancement that we can provide via the automation to augment what we already have implemented.

The studio's Orchestrator is the tool that we use in order to create the scripts for the bot. It is what enables us to deliver automation. Having these new technologies within the studio is what enables us to be more creative. With the Orchestrator we can monitor the bots, we can "orchestrate" them, and we can deliver that tool to customers so that they can manage their bots. It is really like digital workforce management. If we created a bot for a business, usually it would just do its job and the customer would not see what the bots are really doing. With this tool, the client has that opportunity to see what the bots are doing. 

The bots automate the work that otherwise would have to be done with other interventions and resources, so reallocation of resources and focus is the most valuable thing overall.

There are a lot of things that can be done to the product to make it better. The feature list that I develop between releases is often covered new releases of the product. That is good. But there are still a lot of enhancements that I would like to have within the Orchestrator and the queues. For example, how we manage the queues is an important thing.

I would like to see the ability to have other ways to look for one transaction within the queue. If I am looking for a single transaction, it would be good to have a filter that you can use to specify a detail, like just looking for a reference name that starts with a particular letter — but not the entire reference, but wildcards. Those are the kind of things that can be enhanced and make a big difference. Maybe they are not on the roadmap for the company when it comes to upgrades at this point because those are tiny things within the tools. But even those tiny little things can make a lot of difference in the functionality of the tools.

On a scale of one to five where five is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the stability of this platform a five. The stability of the platform is very good. During the four years that we have been working with UiPath, we have not encountered any issues with stability because of the platform. There are always issues with the environment and that can affect stability and performance, but with the platform itself, there are no issues.

Within the RPA suite, we have around 40 people working with the product. But we also have to consider that we usually engage people from other places to contribute to every single project. There are a lot more users than are working with us within the project and within our immediate company team. The peripheral people are going to be people from security, people from IT, people with specific business backgrounds, etcetera. The number of users and the product itself are scalable.

The technical support is actually pretty good. We worked a lot with our CSM (Customer Service Management). They are always doing a great job to find someone to help us out when we have issues. They get the right person for the right issue. For now, if I had to rate it from one to five where five is the best, it is going to be a five.

At the beginning, we would try to automate tasks using spreadsheets where we had calculations. We had macros and things of that sort to automate small tasks. The next step in moving to a new era was to turn to RPAs. There were a lot of things that we needed to implement through this new technology. So we did have another solution before for some types of automation but it wasn't really a dedicated system for automation and it wasn't capable of this scale.

We have a turn-around time of four to six weeks. In order to go to implementation and production, it depends on the complexity of the project. A normal project that is not that complex will obviously take less time. We have to take into consideration the time that we have in assessment, in the evaluation of the project, and in development, and only after that do we do testing to put it into production.

There are, of course, always challenges, but not all of them come because of the UiPath platform. There's a lot of things that are an issue because of the environment or the target applications that we're using. It is often more because of that than the platform itself.

We have in-house developers, we have a QA team, and we have a training and communication team specifically for the RPA suite. We also have managers for the teams, the support team, and solution architects. We do our own implementations and assist others in doing theirs.

We usually try to calculate return on investment within a year or two depending on the project. But we start to look at the benefits from the first month we put the product into production. Not really the ROI exactly, but the benefits. What I mean by benefit is if the automation is achieving the goals it was intended to achieve. Once we pass through the cost of implementation, license cost and any additional expenditure of resources, then we look into ROI.

We have seen a lot of benefits in a variety of ways depending on the projects. Most of what we have been seeing is capacity creation. There are a lot of things that can be introduced to automate processes. If there is work that can't be handled by a team and they are not going to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement), creating bots and putting bots into their team to take over redundant tasks is letting the team use resources differently. It creates additional capacity so the team can focus on more important things — like quality or process. That enables the business unit to accomplish their tasks while raising quality. The bot can always be depended on to do a specific task in the same way. If we have the right steps and if we have the right process to execute, the output from the bot is going to be right. That is another incredible benefit. Of course and for example, giving the customer a response in one hour instead of five hours enhances the customer experience. Proper use of automation can do all of these things.

Bots can also be used in eliminating human errors. Being cautious in estimating that, it could be as much as a 60% to 80% reduction. It will be reducing human error, but there is always some level of error in processing.

The percentage of time saved using UiPath bots depends on the projects, but most processes can save teams 85% of the time they would spend on tasks that can be automated. Some other automated tasks we have the efficiency go up to 90 or 95%. That is pretty good and a great way to allow for the reallocation of resources.

The cost depends on how many licenses we have and how we use the bots. We have a rate for attended bots and a rate for unattended bots. The price itself depends on the project and the number of licenses required. The prices, in general, are good — actually they are the best — but they could always be cheaper. Right now there is no one that is cheaper. The cost is in line with what we thought that it should be.

In 2016, we started to evaluate vendors. We went through Automation Anywhere and a lot of the competing products. We decided to go with UiPath not only because of the cost and the model that they have, but also the relationship that they have with customers. They actually care for you. They are always looking to provide you with the newest and best technologies. They try to make you use it in the best ways and they try to make you test out new features and provide feedback. If you need it and you realize that it's really good, then they help you make it happen. That is the best thing. They are being humble even though they are growing a lot. It is what actually made us go through UiPath.

We are using the entire UiPath tool. We are using the studios, we are using the orchestrator, we are using the bots. That is both unattended and attended bots.

We have two different environments. One is on-prem within Costa Rica data center and then we have another in the U.S. that is on an internal cloud and we use VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Citrix.

The virtual environment is actually pretty functional. There are some pros and cons. The pro is that it enables you to add virtual machines if you need them. The con might be that sometimes you need to enable connections that are not enabled. You might have to go through firewalls, go through network issues, etcetera. With that, it is a little bit more complex to build out automation sometimes. You have to go through configuration hurdles when you encounter them.

On a scale of one to five with five being very easy and one being very hard, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a five. It is a five because when comparing it with the other RPA (Robotic Process Automation) platforms, it is easier to navigate within the studio and it is more comprehensive. There is a saying in usability that if you need to take more than five clicks in order to find what you're looking for, it is not easy. Finding what you want in one or two clicks is what makes a product easy to use.

We use UiPath Academy RPA training all the time. Every new employee or intern that we employ in our company goes through the RPA academy training first. That is kind of the bible for us. On a scale of one to five, five being very beneficial and one being not beneficial at all, I would rate the academy as a five. 

My advice for anyone considering this solution is very simple: It is worth it, go ahead and give it a try. You will like it. Try to experience everything within UiPath and go through every single feature that they have and can provide currently before you commit to it. The company's support will back you up and they will make sure that you find what you are looking for.

On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the product as an eight. To get a ten, a product should be perfect. Nothing is perfect. It is not a nine because it is just a cautious rating. In technology, we always say that for every question there is an answer that says "depending on...[something]". Depending on what you're looking at, it is going to be an eight or it's going to be a nine. It should never be a ten.