UiPath Reviews

We are a services company. In terms of how we use UiPath, we handle a lot of the financial processes, including our customer billing, our time tracking, and our time reporting exceptions - such as looking at who has not submitted a timesheet. When this exception happens, there are automatic emails that go out using the RPA, from UiPath. 

The whole process from our inventory, which is our asset, is automated. With the asset, which is the time that our people spend on clients, we make sure that we capture what we need to create and send invoices out. The whole collection and AR process, including making sure that we get the money and send reminders to clients, that whole process, is automated - with human intervention, as needed.

The solution has decreased the processing time of the client's invoices for IT. Just IT. Not the rest of the organization. That said, just there, that’s 600 hours of annual savings in one department. On top of that, we’ve decreased processing time by 90%.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership. More than that, it creates agility so companies don't have to worry about delivering the infrastructure team and setting up sellers and all the things that they need to do to get to the stage of actually installing the software and internal security. That all takes time to go through. With the cloud, you avoid all that. You basically create agility for the clients to jump onto automation and not wait for all these things. It can be frustrating sometimes in large companies. That's why we tell clients to avoid all these headaches. With the cloud, you’ll get going very quickly within a matter of a day or so.

RPA is not the only thing we do. We do a lot of ERP, CRM, all of these things. Traditionally, we are a full-service organization for clients and their journey to the cloud. Everything's going to the cloud. There are some organizations that still have on-premise ERPs to migrate from the on-premise to the cloud. When those fundamental applications are going to the cloud, automation is a no-brainer. We would always promote the cloud version over on-premise.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect. The power of machine learning and AI along with the document understanding capability that UiPath has is great.

By implementing that portion of the solution, we get clients to 95% accuracy in reading invoices for processing into the ERP. While running basic automation will continue, the world is moving towards intelligent automation, which is with all the machine learning and AI.

Overall, the solution has saved costs for our clients.

It has reduced human error. Machines can do anything faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality than humans can do. That is just a universal fact. I don't think we have measured the accuracy, however, there's no doubt accuracy has gone up. The client recognizes that the accuracy rate has improved.

We're not talking about removing errors. In some cases, errors may happen. However, when I say we’ve seen a 90% efficiency rate, it doesn’t mean the remaining 10% are bad decisions. We're talking about how it could not read those things. The confidence level is low, and therefore, it's kicked to a human to review. It did what it's supposed to do, which is to flag for human review, which is how processes should happen.

The solution has allowed the employees to focus their time on other higher-value work. That's what we pitch to our clients. We never tell clients that oh, you can lay off people. We do not tell the clients that that's what they should do. Rather, we advise clients that what they can do with automation is free up people's time. That means either freeing up a portion of the time or fully freeing time or completely reassigning a job. 

After automation, you may have to reorganize your department. However, with the freed-up time, departments can focus on the most important thing, which is what can they do to create focus on the customer and create an experience for the customer, where the customer feels they want to be connected with your brand.

I have a case where I was talking to the CEO of a big restaurant company. HR, payroll, finance, all those areas that reported to him. He also handles customer experience. I told him about automation and the power of automation and how it will free up people's time. He said, “So what you're telling me is I can free up a portion of my staff so they can focus on all these customer complaints we're receiving?" For him, that is going to be a game-changer.

UiPath has also positively affected the employees themselves. They've become a little bit more satisfied with knowing that they can focus their time on higher-value work. In most cases, initially, there'll be fear for them. They don't know what automation is, and why they're doing it, and what it's going to do to their position in the company. That fear will always be there with humans. That's why leadership needs to focus on change management and communication. Those things become very, very important. Once you do it right, people will actually feel happy. They will no longer have to say "Oh, no, I don't have to stay until six o'clock, seven o'clock every day to finish the SaaS." Now it's much easier. They can focus on the things that they truly enjoy, which has nothing to do with the heads-down work that they do all the time.

We use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program for our clients. For simple processes, you don't need AI. However, the complex process where machines need to mimic the human thought process requires AI. AI is not perfect. It's not a holy grail that is going to solve all problems. That's not the case. We have to be careful. However, if you use it right in the right way, then you can truly solve complex problems.

I’m not sure if the solution's AI functionality enables us to automate more processes overall. It's hard to say. For me, the way I look at technology is that it is not a hammer that's looking for a nail. You have to look at your business needs and then figure out what technology will best fit or solve the problem. It could be simple AI, or, maybe in some cases, you need more advanced AI. I would look at it as what's the right technology for what purpose. That's the way I look at it.

We do use UiPath’s Academy. We have several people that we've pushed through training and certifications through the academy. It’s helped get those employees up to speed on the solution.

Also for us, as we are a services company, that gives us a stamp of quality seal in order to market our services better as we are certified and qualified.

UiPath continues investment in machine learning and AI. That's one thing they have to do. The fundamental thing UiPath needs to understand is the competition, the market, is not Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism. Rather, big competition is coming from Microsoft.

It's around the corner and Microsoft is going to come in a big way. I’d advise them of the parallel of Power BI. Power BI three years back was not a good tool. Other tools, like Tableau, were the kings of the BI space. Fast forward three years and today we do a lot of BI for clients. Almost every client of ours is migrating to Power BI, like Power BI's matured to 80% of Tableau, and that's good enough for them. On top of that, Microsoft was throwing free licenses to their customers. When you do that, versus buying $2,000 a pop or $1,500 a pop from Tableau, users line up behind the free tool to reduce their costs. Microsoft is doing that with Power Automate now. I just talked to a client, a big client, a $10 billion company, where they were at Blue Prism. They just told me that Microsoft just gave them 70 free licenses. Now, they are forced to bring Microsoft Power Automate into their RPA strategy even though before, they were not considering that.

UiPath should take several steps forward to be prepared for this competition and create differentiation with capabilities that Microsoft does not have. The innovation within UiPath is going to be very, very crucial. However, the most important thing is to clear the differentiation in the messaging. That's very, very important. They should be ready and arm their partners with information about why UiPath and not Power Automate.

I've been around the industry for 35 years, and I've seen lots of incumbents getting blown away in various technologies at various times. The big power comes down hard. UiPath has got to be ultra nimble to not get crushed.

We started working with UiPath in 2018. We partnered with UiPath in late 2018. It's been about a three-year journey so far. 

In terms of stability, I've not heard anything bad at my level. That means no bad news is good news.

We do plan to scale beyond the client's IT department and to the rest of the organization. When they scale it up to the rest of the organization, and this organization operates in 25 countries, they have over $190 billion in assets in these countries that we can add efficiencies to. The scale of efficiency that we will get with what we did will be huge. That’s the next step is to roll it out to the rest of the organization.

General scalability is an issue when it comes to processing large data sets. However, with the right creativity, you can solve those things due to the fact that you can have the right infrastructure to catalyze or do whatever you have to do to create scalability. We are used to doing that. We deal with ERPs and we create architecture and design the environment in such a way that it can scale. That said, you need to know how to do that. 

Technical support is very good. We're very pleased with that. When we ran into problems with a client, with the document understanding, initially the success rate was not very high. Then we had to reach out to the support and they actually jumped in and assisted us and told us what we needed to do. Once we did that, then things took off and we got to 90% accuracy. Initially, it was only 50%. Therefore, for us, it's been good.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

We did partner with Automation Anywhere,, however, ultimately, we didn't do anything with them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We're a consulting company, and we work with several clients. For some deployments, we were able to do the first deployment in 30 days. With other clients, it took about three months or four months, depending on the use case or the initial use cases that they picked.

Different companies operate differently. I always advise clients that they need to pick simple use cases and deploy them first before they go into complex stuff. Sometimes clients make the mistake of picking their most complex use case and say, "Oh, let's try that." No, that's not a good way. It's not a good way to embark on a journey that's long-term.

You've got to think big, start small, and be agile. If you get a complex use case at the beginning, you lose agility.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. The momentum was with UiPath. I knew where the momentum was and how we needed to align ourselves. That's why we did UiPath.

We looked at where the market demand is. For example, Blue Prism. We knew that Blue Prism is a lot more IT-centric, IT heavy, programmer heavy, which defeats the whole purpose of self-service automation. It's never going to succeed in the marketplace today as we promote self-service for everything.

That's why we didn't want to waste our time with Blue Prism. UiPath obviously has the community edition, which was brilliant. Basically, they saw a gap in the market. That's a parallel to what we do, for example, in Vtech space. Also, for example, Tableau is a good tool. So many people love Tableau. They've used Tableau. You had the established players in BI space like MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, however, they were very IT-centric and Tableau came in and beat them. They sold out into the business and you could download, pay $2000 and download a license and start creating your dashboards. I was glad that UiPath took a similar approach by creating a community edition, and then letting end-users download and then play with it.

We basically help clients think through their RPA strategy, their automation strategy and figure out what the right technology would be. We are a reseller. If it makes sense, we'll resell and we'll advise clients regarding UiPath for their RPA journey. We also use the solution ourselves. We have automated certain things, certain processes within the company. That becomes a practice round and a learning ground for our people so that when we go to clients, we can take some of these ideas and do to the clients as well as reaping the right expertise.

I'm not sure if we are using the UiPath apps feature or the applications feature. In my role, I just lay the strategy and the team executes it.

A lot of times things stall. In company setups we see a lot of cases where they did a few automations, a few bots, and then things stalled. That's a problem in the industry and the way to solve that and truly embrace the art of the possible is with automation. To get there, you need to execute across senior leadership. Without that education, they just don't put their weight on their departments to do the journey. Education is one thing that is very important. They understand the art of the possible.

Another important aspect at the outset is having RPA as a corporate strategy. Pushing to make it a corporate strategy is really going to help. That way, you can stall it for some time, however, eventually, it will have to get done. Otherwise, they are left behind when your competitors take advantage of the agility. There needs to be a center of excellence and companies need to develop internal capabilities. If they don't have capabilities, then they fear not knowing how to handle something. Those are common problems. And those need to be overcome.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

For a current client, we have around 22 to 25 use cases, and it's all based on the financial side of things. The client is in finance, and we have use cases all of which are comprised of different tools, including SAP and their in-house CRMs. It's about automating the process where we take some data from the CRM tool and upload it to SAP. It also involves uploading the files to the FTP server. 

For example, one use case is where the applications used are Oracle, and SAP, and STP. We just download the data from Oracle. There are different files that we download from Oracle and upload to the FTP server. From that FTP server, there is a different team that takes those files and creates a Tableau dashboard. 

UiPath Studio helped us automate many processes that have helped us save money. Even though the tool price is there and the license costs are there, it has given good ROI. For example, automating a process can reduce the work to half or maybe 60%. We divert efforts to different work. Therefore, it has been pretty useful in terms of savings and quality control.

For example, one client had a focus on quality control. There are instances where employees make some minor errors that could lead to major losses to the organization from the department's point of view. We automated that process and it gave us more return in terms of quality control. Fewer errors ultimately were made which saved the company from losses.

UiPath has a full suite of capabilities. It has, for example, an end-to-end automation suite. From a development point of view, it is pretty helpful to have access to all of the activities on offer that anyone can understand. 

The Studio as well as the process mining are great. Document understanding is another useful feature. It has eliminated the business analyst side where you have to go through each department and find out which processes are there, and take a different tool to get those all processes in one place and create a process workflow. All of this can be done with process mining. 

With document understanding, we have the capabilities of having UiPath understand and create documents, which previously was quite a lengthy endeavor. You just have to install it and follow the steps. It will automatically take a screenshot and create a document for you and then create a brief description of it. 

It’s easy to build automation using UiPath Studio. From a developer's point of view, it is easy due to the fact that you don't need much of a coding language or coding background. You just should have a clear logic behind it. If you're clear with the logic, a layman can handle the task. They do have Studio X features, which is for the layman who doesn't have any background, who doesn't have any coding or developer's background. They can automate their own work. Even an SME who doesn't know anything about automation could automate small tasks.

It’s great that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. That is very important actually. For example, scaling automation plus giving attention to the infrastructure can be a little hectic and time-consuming. If there is any way where we could reduce this work or optimize it, it would be great from the implementation point of view.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Right from the start, you have document understanding and process mining as well as the Orchestrator, which helps you with getting an overall view of the bots in our organization.

End-to-end coverage is the most important thing, due to the fact that, if it is end-to-end, we don't need to go to the market and look for any other application. If you can get end-to-end, you don't need to go for other products which simplifies everything. It's easy for us to maintain and work with it instead of having to integrate and manage multiple systems, multiple products, and multiple applications.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. It has helped us with quality control savings. We have saved many efforts previously requiring full-time employees. It’s one of the most important factors when we work for clients. If a client is hiring us to automate many processes, there are different intentions of doing it. If we are able to help them reduce cost, reduce and do some quality control, it is important for them. For example, previously, if work required ten employees, we have been able to reduce that down to six or sometimes four personnel maybe.

The UiPath Studio has reduced human error. It has helped us with quality control very often. In the past, mistakes have cost us. It has saved costs as well as saving us money related to fines or penalties.

The solution has freed up employee time. Instead of doing the same mundane work every day, we have just automated that part and now the employees have more free time to do more meaningful work. In terms of hours, from a department's point of view, we have saved around half, that is four hours per day, maybe about 80 hours per month. The additional time enabled employees to focus on more important work.

We have found that the product has reduced the costs of our client’s automation operations. With my previous client, we calculated an average of 40% in reduction of personnel and 40% in cost savings. UiPath has saved us money across the organization. The average saving is likely around 40% to 45%.

I'm pretty much happy with all of those tools. I don't have anything in mind that I could see improvement.

While UiPath Studio helps speed up the cost of digital transformation, in a way, it requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support, as it needs an entire setup. That setup requires support from different departments, and that comes with a cost.

I came across one problem while upgrading. We were upgrading from the 2019 version to the 2020. There was one thing that was not mentioned either on the website or documentation, and we had to take support from UiPath. The documentation needs to contain each of the scenarios which could occur while upgrading the solutions. As it is now, this is not the case. That said, when we ran into issues, UiPath Support helped us through it.

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

We've had outages once or twice. For that, they have a workaround. If a server goes down, we should have a backup server for it. If that's the case, it is just a few steps needed to migrate or we can take the setup from another server. That's it. It's pretty good in general. 

The scalability is fine. For example, if the bot count is about zero to 100, we have the capacity. And if it goes beyond that, then we have to increase the features of the systems and servers. It could take time if we scale beyond the limits, however, it's still possible. It just requires an upgrade. 

What's required is managing all the infrastructure and getting all the permissions from the client which is what could take time. Scalability can be an issue when it goes beyond the mentioned limit.

In the current organization we're working with, it's totally unattended bots where no user is actually using this tool. That said, the bots are in production, which works 24/7. No user is having this access to the tool. It is all unattended bots.

In the previous organization, there were 58 to 70 users as we had attended bots. They were using bots in their daily routine.

It's a routine for us to use this product every day and deploy this solution. We are definitely looking at increasing it and scaling. We have a lot of work in the pipeline.

I've contacted technical support many times and they are very helpful. Based on the severity and priority, they do help us on priority and they are very helpful in terms of responding, supporting, and maintaining. If they can't help us by email, even after giving clear instructions, they'll bump you to a different level and help. It can be just like spoon-feeding us. They are very patient and try to be very clear.

We were doing automation, however, it was just .com and .net. We used to write five lines of code just to click on one button, which is just an activity right now we have in UiPath. We switched to UiPath to do end-to-end processes which would require large amounts of code if we kept doing what we were doing.  

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

The process is quite straightforward. You just have to have the installer and just click install, and then after a few steps, it is done.

Setting up just UiPath Studio hardly takes ten to 20 minutes or maybe one hour if you're facing some complexity. Setting up an Orchestrator with all the robots could take a while.

Our implementation strategy is based on whatever the customer's requirements are. Different clients have different requirements. My previous client, for example, didn't want the cloud as they were pretty concerned about the security as they deal with financial data and they don't want the data to go to the cloud at all.

Clients have the option of on-premises or cloud. Based on that, we just go with the requirements. Some clients want attended bots due to the cost, and some want unattended bots due to the features. 

In terms of maintenance and deployment, how many people you need depends on how many processes you have with the client. Right now, with the current client, we have 22 to 25 processes that we have automated. We are just three users who are developing, testing, maintaining, and supporting this project. However, it varies and often depends on the process and client and how many bots.

For maintenance and support, you don't need many people. For development, if they're at 10 people, five or four could do the work in terms of support and maintenance.

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

While the clients might have released some reports, I don't have much knowledge about ROI. 

I do know about the prices of attended and unattended bots as well as Orchestrator. 

There are costs related to Orchestrator, Studio, and attended bots. There are also infrastructure costs, and, while implementing this tool in any organization, there are different costs attached to it.

The price for the attended bot is between $1,800 and $3,000. The unattended bot was $8,000 last year.

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, however, about five years back, where UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were the leaders in the market, at that time, just UiPath had the free training and Intuit training for their tool. The other tools didn't have any training, or if they had, it was paid. That's why we chose UiPath, which ended up being the best out of the three anyway.

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

There have been multiple companies that I've been working with. Two remain the same. I've been using different tools as well. It's been on and off with UiPath.

We are not using the latest version of UiPath. The latest version is 2021. We are using 2020. This is due to the fact that the client that I'm working with has a stated policy as to using a minus one version. They believe it could not be a more stable version for any product. 

At this time, we don't use the SaaS solution or the AI functionality. However, I have enrolled in AI training to better understand it. We do not yet use the automation cloud or UiPath apps either.

In terms of employee satisfaction, from the experience I had from interacting with the client and different users, they are happy as well as sad. They are happy in terms of moving away from the mundane work that has been taken off from their hands. They are, however, both sad and afraid that they could lose their job.

I'd advise users, if they're a layman, to go with the training. Just start with the training from the UiPath website itself, in the RPA Academy. That is sufficient for anyone to start with. They have all the courses that start right from scratch for every role, be it business analyst, solution or product developer, et cetera. In six months, even starting from scratch, you can excel on this product.

With UiPath, it really is possible to optimize so many things. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use UiPath for end-to-end automation. We develop both attended and unattended bots and we use the Orchestrator module, hosted in Azure.

Some of our typical use cases involve automating operations like downloading files online, analyzing and capturing details, saving them in another location, transferring them, and uploading them in other forms.

The app studio feature has increased the number of automations that we create while reducing the time it takes to create them. For example, we have a limitation when it comes to transferring files from one server to another server. However, we were able to resolve it by using a remote desktop on the UiPath server. I don't need to log into another system or another server; instead, I log in and use the remote desktop from my PC. It's really cost-efficient and it saves me a lot of time. It's superb.

UiPath helps us to implement end-to-end process automation starting with process analysis through to monitoring, and this is very important to us. Whether we are automating processes for external customers or internal purposes, there is an automation lifecycle that we follow. The end-users do not have much knowledge about automation, so we have to complete it from end-to-end.

It starts with analyzing the process to see if automation will work. We then develop it by trying to replicate what the user does manually. Once it has been developed and the functionality replicated, we test and tweak it for approximately two weeks. If everything goes well during this time, the process moves to production. In production, processes are continuously monitored.

The testing is a detailed process that involves finding the problems, then implementing error handling using try/catch statements and other methods. It is done in a continuous, agile fashion where we develop, publish, trial, error handling, monitoring, and then it starts again. When a process is pushed to production, when a change is made, it does through this lifecycle again.

How UiPath has improved the way our organization functions is clear when we look at one of our use cases. We need to have notifications about documents that describe the release of products. Our bot will start by filtering documents online using keywords, download the appropriate documents, then check to make sure that each is complete. If there is a problem then emails are automatically sent to the appropriate department.

From this point, we transfer the file into another folder and upload the current version to the release team. They will only receive what they need, rather than having to go through the document themselves. Prior to this, they needed to check it on their own and analyze everything. With this work being done by the robot, it relieves us of two person's workloads. What used to take three people to complete, is now done with one.

In terms of saving time, for our use case that involves the release documents, we save between 80 and 100 hours per week, so monthly, you can multiply that by four.

The time saved by our employees sometimes allows them to focus on higher-value work or in other cases, when we don't need the persons, we can reduce the workforce and then hire people in different roles, such as new developers. Overall, this helps us to improve our workforce. For example, we can branch into more areas, rather than do the same thing for many different customers.

With respect to employee satisfaction, if somebody loses their position then they may not be happy. However, it is important to remember at the same time that we may open a new position because of this opportunity. This allows the person to move, find new opportunities, focus on new things, and develop themselves. To me, this is a win-win because we are more focused on generating new types of business.

UiPath has definitely helped us to reduce human errors. This is a benefit to us because, before this, we used to get customers complaining quite often. However, we have reduced the complaints. We still need to have the customer complaints section but now, we have reduced it from five people to one. The robot is not 100% error-free, but it's between 90% and 99.9% error-free. With so few complaints, we don't need as many people to deal with them.

Overall, UiPath's process analysis and optimization have increased our productivity.

The most valuable feature for me is the UiPath Studio.

It helps a lot. I wouldn't really say it's code-free; however, I would say that it's 90% code-free. It's very easy to use, with most of the actions performed using the drag-and-drop interface. When you do write code, it's a very small amount of the time.

The library activities are really helpful. With the help of the library and with the help of the forums, developers can focus and it is easy to learn. It helps in terms of time-to-value.

I also find Orchestrator to be helpful. The Studio and the Orchestrator together are like your body and your soul. Without both parts, it won't function. You need to have Orchestrator to run the Studio. Right now, today, we have a problem with our Orchestrator and it's not working. I can't use Studio because it's connected and without access to my Orchestrator, I can't do anything.

The academy courses help in the process of getting employees up to speed with the solution by providing them with the fundamental knowledge and the opportunity to practice. When you start doing it, you may face errors and again, with the docs, you may gain more knowledge. When you start to use the forums, you get more knowledge, and it all helps. But, if you only rely on the forums, I would say that it would help only 60% or 70% of what you get compared to taking the academy courses. In the end, you will only get better by doing it, and then going to the forums when you have problems.

The testing and release schedule for Studio should be improved because we find that with two releases per year, one of the versions is stable and the other one is not. It would be better to focus on a single release, but make sure that it is stable. We have had problems in the past with this and we don't need any unstable versions. For example, version 20.4.2 was not stable but version 20.10.2 was very good.

Technical support and customer care are areas in need of improvement. 

We have been using UiPath for between six and seven months.

We are in Switzerland and normally, we use local support. When they cannot resolve an issue then it is transferred to the US team and we get support from them directly. In our experience, the support in Europe is not sufficient and we prefer to speak directly with the UiPath headquarters. We find that here, the people do not have enough knowledge.

We have had a lot of problems and for example, we have an issue right now where our Orchestrator doesn't work. We have had to wait about a week for the ticket to be escalated to headquarters, and because of delays like this, we are not always happy with customer care. The product is good but the technical support can improve.

We had issues where the first person tells us one thing, but a second person says that it's wrong and it needs to be done another way. Then, a third person speaks and presents another idea. This all takes a lot of time before a fourth person explains that everything is wrong and it has to be done another way. A lot of the time when you have these kinds of problems, you just have to start from scratch.

It can be frustrating because we had spent almost three weeks upgrading our system to the 20.10.2 version and now, we face the same problem. We have not been able to properly run our system for between three and four weeks.

I have not personally used another RPA solution but I have colleagues who have experience with Automation Anywhere. We primarily use UiPath but there are some developers in the company who regularly work with Automation Anywhere.

We did not switch from one product to another. Rather, they are used for different reasons. For example, I have heard that when it comes to performing file transfers, Automation Anywhere makes it quite easy and they do not have the limitations that UiPath does.

On the other hand, I feel that the AI in UiPath is doing better. We have lots of workflows and activities in UiPath and I strongly prefer it as a product.

I wouldn't say that the initial setup is complex, although when you are just beginning with a new environment, it is not that easy, either. Because it is a new thing, you will need to learn in the beginning.

We followed the guide and found that the installation was not very tough.

UiPath saves us costs, but there is more to it than that. It saves us in terms of time spent on manual tasks, but on the other hand, we pay UiPath. On yet another hand, with the money we save, we are open to new opportunities and new business.

Overall, I am very happy with the ROI.

The price of UiPath is a little bit high, although there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Overall, it is not too costly, but slightly high.

We have not yet used the AI functionality but we are trying to. We have not developed any uses cases yet but it is something that we are working on. We will be taking some courses on it first and after that, we may try some internal use cases.

We have advanced our technical knowledge by using this product. For example, we now use JSON config files, rather than using Excel.

One of the biggest lessons that we have learned is that it is nice to have a good solution design before starting development. There were times where we tried to do something one way but a problem occurred, so we had to solve it by trying different features, then testing and running it again. A lot of time is spent during this process. Now, we have learned to focus more during the design, then start to develop it.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that it works really well in Windows, so they have to have a Windows machine if they want to start developing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a diagnostic laboratory that receives tissue samples from all over the country daily. To manage these, we implement UiPath for Document Understanding to process requisitions from clinical providers. This information is then loaded into our laboratory information system, enabling us to carry out the diagnostic process. We have a dozen bots operating across various functions, assisting in tasks such as screening resumes in HR and data entry on patient information.

Automation has increased our productivity. In my three years at the company, the number of employees working on data entry has grown from 15 to more than 50. We needed an alternative because we couldn't have 150 employees in one room doing data entry. UiPath has improved our efficiency by 60 percent and reduced errors by 87 percent in the assessment process. 

In healthcare, our top priority is to eliminate as many mistakes as possible. A mistake in our business can kill someone. Our second objective is to build better security measures to protect patient privacy and the sensitive information we handle. We also hope to improve efficiency and help our employees work better. It has helped take people away from mundane tasks and allowed them to focus on what truly needs their expertise.

We've achieved some of these outcomes so far, but we've only been automating for a year. I came to this event last year knowing nothing about UiPath, but I met some people and hooked up with a partner to get started. I met some people. We got hooked up with a partner who could help us get started. Then, I started hiring developers. We're still early on in this relationship, but we've already seen tremendous gains in efficiency and error reductions. 

Document Understanding has been particularly helpful, and so has UiPath's ability to interface with other applications. AI is the next phase. Document Understanding can only process about half the documents that come in. We need the AI component to start helping so that the half we can't process has a methodology on what needs to be done with it. 

AI automation is a high priority. A year ago, I was the chief operating officer, and now I'm the chief innovation officer. Our CEO saw that we needed to have a dedicated technology group looking for solutions, and he asked me to move into this role. I have seven full-time developers on my team who are specifically looking for things to automate. When I saw the demonstration this morning, my mind was blown. They're doing so many things that we could do that will take us to the next level. We can have AI interact with our pathologists and assist them in diagnostic research. We can apply UiPath across our billing processes and everywhere.

While not a negative remark toward UiPath itself, our initial partner was limited in helping us achieve our goals. We are now directly working with UiPath support, which has been exceptional.

We have been using UiPath for about a year.

The solution is very stable.

I think it's we I think we we I think I don't have any barriers in my head of what we can do do or not do with it.

I rate UiPath support 10 out of 10. It's outstanding. Working with them has been a game-changer. 

Positive

We did not use any different solution before adopting UiPath.

We initially worked with a partner who was limited in aiding our objectives, leading us to work directly with UiPath support.

We saw a 60 percent improvement in efficiency and significantly reduced errors.

I rate UiPath 10 out of 10.

We have a lot of SAP Extract, transform, and load (ETL). We have human resources and time management. We have a very diverse tool landscape due to natural growth. We are in a very early stage of transformation, so we use it to bring information into multiple systems at the same time.

We also have a good few financial use cases related to tax. We work in Europe. Within the EU, there are different regulations, and sometimes, we have very short deadlines. On the third or first business day, we have to get information out of 16 or 17 SAP systems and format them. We have to get them out to Italy and Spain for government stuff.

The objective that we were trying to achieve by implementing UiPath was hard cost savings, but I changed that a little bit. It is not the right technology for hard cost savings. We have now changed it to quality and efficiency, and what they do with quality and efficiency is up to them.

Currently, we only use the core RPA. We joined the company only eight months ago. We worked for another company before, and that company is at a very early stage. We are setting up our CVs and our citizen development program, so currently, we only use core RPA and core automation services.

We are not using AI yet, but we are about to change that with Document Understanding. In the company where I worked before, we used Document Understanding, and it helped us a lot.

UiPath automations have increased the accuracy of our operations. We have a lot of peak sessions with finance and techs. There are quite high penalties if we get something wrong. For example, if we calculate our tax incorrectly and we pay too much, that does not mean we get the money back. If we pay too little, we also have to pay a penalty fee. We have reduced the error rate by over 25%. We saved 1.24 million last year. That is one aspect. The other aspect is the peak time work. We had a team of people coming in on the third business day at 5 am. I had to download all the reports and things like that because they had to get the report out by 12 pm. If they were not out by 12 pm, we had to pay a penalty. After automation, people came in at 8 am, and the reports went out by 10 am. 

I like the low-code/no-code approach and the graphical interface. Among all the RPA tools, UiPath is the one with the easiest interface.

Orchestrator needs an overhaul. They have added so many functions that it is sometimes quite hard to find the right settings. They have a tree hierarchy with the host and the tenant. Some settings you do on the host, and some settings you do on the tenant. You need to know at which level you are to find what you need. It all looks very same.

The other thing that I have been telling them for years is the width of the activity. You cannot change the width. I do a lot of training to show something, and I constantly have to go into the advanced editor to show what is in there, but the big thing right now is Orchestrator.

I have been using UiPath for 12 or 13 years.

I have not had any issues. If something happened, it happened because of the human network.

It is very scalable.

The USA support is okay. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Their support in Europe is good or very good if you get the right people. I would rate them between six to nine out of ten.

Their support in Asia needs improvement. I would rate them a four out of ten.

I have worked with Blue Prism. I have worked with Automation Anywhere. I have worked with what I call the Microsoft suite, which includes Power Apps, Power Automate, and Azure Logic. I worked very shortly with OpenSpan, later known as Pega. I trained at a university. I trained others in automation as part of the robotics lab at the University of Hanover. We looked at several tools there. 

In terms of comparison between UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate, given the use cases for which I normally use them, they both have areas where they are good. If Microsoft could get their documentation right, the attended series of UiPath would be in a lot of trouble. Given the whole unattended and hyper automation or intelligent automation, which is the main focus of UiPath, you need orchestration. That is where the big bucks and the big savings are, but to get the technology out with the attended bots or shadow IT, Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate are important because they help people understand what technology can do. What we see very often is that people start with Power Apps, sometimes even with a macro, and then they realize that they have hit a certain barrier very quickly. They come to us. Initially, we take what they have and just enhance it with UiPath, and then over time, we bring the functionality from the macro, Power Apps, or Selenium and migrate them into our things.

Currently, we are on-prem, but we are migrating to the cloud in November. We are currently not using the latest version, but with the migration, we will be.

I was involved in its setup. The Orchestrator setup could be easier. There are a few loopholes that you need to understand. UiPath Studio is straightforward, but the setup of Orchestrator has become a little bit more complicated over time. You need to connect them to bots, and you need to know what type of user you need for what type of robot, which has become more tricky. Overall, the setup of Orchestrator and certificates can be a bit challenging.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we took a test server and put it on. We did some testing with our network and information security team, and once they were happy, we moved it out to production.

For the current implementation, we did not take any help. The first one was done by a partner, but they did not do a good job. I did the second installation on my own because I knew how to do it.

In the previous company, they had a partner system. 

I do not like the enormous jumps that they have had in the past. The ROI has become a lot harder because of the pricing changes. When you have time to plan for it, the ROI is there. If it was cheaper, it would make my life easier, but on the other hand, it is worth it. These jumps year after year are a problem for me because then I have to go back and say that prices have increased by 30% percent, and I get asked, "For what?" It takes a lot of time.

In this company, UiPath was already chosen. In the company before, I looked at all the big ones. I chose UiPath for the ease of use. 

I would advise finishing UiPath Academy courses. After you have finished them the first time, finish them the second time.

I would rate UiPath a strong eight out of ten.

At Aeyon, we use UiPath to develop custom solutions for our clients that drive innovation and digital transformation within the public sector. We work closely with the US Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, NASA and several other Federal agencies. We have built 50+ automations for a wide range of use cases, but the ones we see most often include financial reconciliation, data extraction using AI/ML Models, data entry, data manipulation/consolidation, downloading/moving files in bulk, data validation, and interacting with various web applications.

The business objective that our organization is trying to achieve with its AI-powered automation initiative is to greatly reduce the time spent on repetitive/clerical tasks and allow the employees more time to focus on the important tasks that grow their business such as collaboration and innovation. Aeyon successfully helps our client achieve this objective by using UiPath to develop solutions that increase efficiency, reduce operating costs, and drive ROI.

Our AI-powered automation initiative has fundamentally changed what our organization is able to achieve. It has made a huge impact on the way we process documents for not only ourselves but our clients as well. It saved a lot of time and money.

We use AI Center for data extraction on structured and unstructured document types. The pre-built models are very versatile and efficient, and the ability to train custom models makes it a great solution for almost any use case. I feel that AI Center and UiPath Document Understanding were pretty easy to learn. It only took me about a week to learn. There are tons of helpful tutorials and other resources online. I like how it has the prebuilt models as well as the option to be able to go and train your own data, so I would give it a ten out of ten.

It has definitely increased the accuracy of our operations. It has reduced the risk of clerical errors. Document processing has allowed us to be able to compare data for that extra layer of making sure that everything is extracted correctly.

It has freed up a lot of time because instead of having to manually go through and find ways to track data or manually look at it, we are able to use different AI technologies to fit pretty much any use case. For most of our clients, it saves them an average of about 100 hours annually on the smaller processes, and then we have some larger ones where they are even saving about 15,000 hours annually, which is a lot of extra free time for them to focus on collaboration and those kinds of things.

A lot of the prebuilt models that are on an AI Center are valuable. Being able to go in there and train your data, give sample data, label the fields, and different OCR methods are also valuable.

The improvement is not necessarily in the product itself. The main difficulty we have usually has to do with pricing and identifying the best solution for each specific use case on a long-term scale. If there was an easier way to track the AI unit usage and determine which pricing plan would best fit the need for each use case, then that would be extremely valuable.

UiPath is very stable. I have not had any issues in terms of that. The only issue we used to have was if a website were to change or an application were to change, but we have found ways to work around that and deal with those types of situations.

I have been using UiPath for about four years.

Overall, it is very stable. There is low technical debt and monitoring. After a process has been deployed, for the most part, it is stable after testing and everything.

It is very scalable. I have had no issues in that department, and I know that they continue to make it more and more scalable, which is awesome to see with each new release.

Their support is great. There are so many resources available online. There is UiPath Academy, and there is the ability to chat with them 24/7. I have never had an issue getting in touch with their representative quickly when I needed help with something. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I started off using UiPath, and then I got a job a few years back where I used a software called Kofax. I was able to see a lot of similarities, but I still felt that it was very limited in its ability to integrate with third-party software. I remember several use cases where I thought that if this was UiPath, I would know how to do it. I noticed a lot of limitations with Kofax. It was a bit of a learning curve going from UiPath to Kofax, and then I realized that there were a lot of things that Kofax was not able to integrate with in terms of third-party software. Based on my experience with Kofax, I definitely feel that UiPath is superior.

I have used Microsoft Power Automate for a few processes. We use that for some of our smaller projects. We just started looking into that as an option as well for certain use cases. It is important to us that UiPath has orchestration whereas Microsoft Power Automate does not because orchestration gives you a way to run processes in the background rather than on your local machine. You can also do event triggering and time schedules. UiPath definitely gives a lot more options and freedom to be able to do things without having to manually run the process.

I was involved in its initial setup. I pretty much came in when it was coming from the ground up. I have helped install it. I have helped customers set their licensing plans and install everything on their local machines so that they can run the automation and get set up with orchestration and all that.

Its initial setup was pretty straightforward. You need to have UiPath Studio installed. They now offer automation. They have UiPath Cloud. You just sign into that, and you have access to Orchestrator and all of those services just right off the web. It is pretty easy to set up.

Our implementation strategy includes getting on a Teams call with the client so that we are able to look at their screen and walk them step by step through various aspects, such as:

• Where to save specific folders?
• How to get signed in to the appropriate account?
• How to access Orchestrator and the logs in there to see if there are any issues with the process?
• How to monitor it?

We look at their screen and walk them through various things. We keep that communication line open if they ever have issues or questions in the future.

We did not take any external help. Our company did it through our own team members.

We try to calculate ROI for all of our clients for projects that we deploy. We usually calculate it in terms of total cost savings annually and also in terms of how many hours of labor are being saved annually. It is cool to see those numbers continuing to grow.

The licensing is very affordable, especially when you compare its benefits. However, I know that AI units are purchased separately and can be costly depending on the specific use case. We are still trying to figure out how to track our usage and which tier or plan to go with, but overall, it is affordable in comparison to other options.

I evaluated Automation Anywhere as well as Blue Prism. At my last company, we were trying to figure out between those two and UiPath. After comparing everything on a wider scale, we realized that UiPath was going to be the better solution for us.

I would rate UiPath a ten out of ten.

We use UiPath to automate business processes.

We use UiPath Orchestrator and other products in the cloud, but we deploy the robots to our own internal network. The robots are managed by the cloud, but they run within our applications on-premises. The UiPath administration system and configuration are also done in the cloud.

The ease of building autonomous automation depends on the design. In our organization, we have developed a good design that recognizes the business process and the design features. We want to develop it in a way that is easy to follow. If we do this well, it will be easy for the developer to understand what needs to be built. The studio product, which is UiPath's development product, is also a very easy product to use to build the automation.

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

They have a large and active user community. If we are a large enough customer, UiPath assigns dedicated account managers, pre-sales staff, and developers to work with us. They also organize community events, such as the one where one of our senior managers was invited to give a keynote speech from a customer perspective on their experience with UiPath. These events are positive and beneficial. UiPath is a large company and is probably one of the top three RPA vendors. As a result, they have a large and active user community.

UiPath has helped us reduce our on-premises infrastructure. We used to have an on-premises administration or orchestration system that consisted of databases and application services. We no longer need that system, as everything is now in the cloud. This is beneficial for managing upgrades, capacity, and costs. UiPath costs us less overall, even though their cloud licenses are slightly more expensive than on-premises licenses.

We use certain UiPath Academy courses to train our developers before they start working on projects. The Academy offers consistent and quick training in all the core elements of UiPath. This saves us time and resources, as we don't have to tie up valuable staff in maintaining training materials or delivering training. The courses are self-paced, so new employees can complete them at their own pace. They are also up-to-date with the latest features of UiPath, ensuring that our developers are always learning the latest skills.

UiPath does not speed up our digital transformation as much as it reduces the cost to a level where we can afford to do our digital transformation. I always consider the RPA solution to be feasible until such time as we can properly transform the business behind the scenes. I refer to it as system automation rather than RPA automation which is a true digital transformation.

It reduces human error by automating repetitive tasks. This means that we no longer have to train people on how to do these tasks, and they can be performed consistently and accurately every time. This is especially important for tasks that require data entry into fields or applications that do not have validation. By automating these tasks, we can avoid the cost of hiring and training people, and we can also reduce the variation in the process. This leads to a more efficient and error-free operation.

UiPath has helped free up our employees' time by automating repetitive tasks that were previously done manually. For example, employees were previously responsible for entering information into multiple systems, which was a time-consuming and error-prone process. UiPath robots can now perform these tasks much more efficiently, freeing up employees to focus on more high-value work. In addition, UiPath has helped us to eliminate the need for some contractors who were previously hired to perform manual data entry tasks. This has saved us money by eliminating those contractor positions. In the last four years, we have used robotic process automation in 90 percent of our processes and fully automated ten percent. This has saved us the equivalent of 200 full-time employees.

We have saved approximately $18 million over the four years we have been using UiPath. These are real savings, as people are no longer doing those tasks. In particular, we have been able to eliminate 100 full-time equivalent contractors. These are hard savings that we can actually measure. UiPath has a tool that allows businesses to identify a process, enter the key steps, and calculate the amount of time spent on those steps. UiPath then magically calculates the potential savings. These savings are real because they are based on the amount of time that people would have spent on those tasks if they were not automated. The results of this analysis are then stored in the Automation Hub tool. This tool allows us to see which high-value processes should be automated first. UiPath is smart enough to tell organizations they don't need to analyze all of the processes themselves. They can let UiPath do it for them. The Automation Hub tool does not go into the details of the design or the automation of the processes. It simply captures the processes that the business has identified as being manual and in need of automation. This gives us a pipeline of work that UiPath can then sell us licenses to automate.

The ability to recognize screen elements and their robot technology are both very valuable features. The ability to recognize the screen element that we want to input or extract data from is very good. It is also very extensive. We also like the way that the unattended mode allows us to run it as a background process on a desktop. We can run these things quite well. UiPath's robot technology is very reliable. 

I see UiPath as a practical product that is trying to achieve end-to-end automation or end-to-end processing. They are playing in this space and bringing their AI connectivity or components into their product. However, I think the only downside is that, as we have seen recently, for some of the processes we have automated, we have documentation on the technical elements that we have automated, but people have forgotten the business rules. UiPath has a task capture product or a process mining product but it could be improved by capturing the business process and then how the automation that we have developed feeds into that overall business process, and making that available to the business so that they know what the business processes are. UiPath does not have a delivery product. For example, when we go into Microsoft DevOps, UiPath does not do that. Once we have identified the process and have coded it in UiPath, there is nothing to tell us about how we deliver that process, and who is assigned to a task to build the components. There is no project management or DevOps delivery pipeline model inside UiPath, so we cannot manage the development.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

UiPath is stable.

UiPath is extremely scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

Positive

The on-premises deployment of UiPath is complex. We had a lot of network issues because we have a secure network architecture. We had to split up our database elements, application server elements, and virtual machines that run the robots. This was complex. High availability was also complex to achieve, as we had to set up load balancing and failover. Finally, upgrading the system was a nightmare. It took forever, and UiPath releases a major release every year. Deploying in the cloud is much more straightforward.

The license cost for UiPath is about $500,000 per year.

I always say that the price of UiPath is too expensive. But if we identify a high-value business process to automate, UiPath becomes a very cost-effective product. A robot license costs $6,000 USD per year, or $10,000 NZD. This is about one month's salary for one person. If we can automate a process that would otherwise require ten people, the investment in UiPath will pay for itself quickly.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism before deciding on UiPath. We are a large organization and can afford the cost of UiPath, but it was more about the functionality of the product at the time. UiPath consistently ranked ahead of the others in terms of functionality, according to Gartner and Everest. I believe we made a wise choice. It is also easier to get developers for UiPath because of their Academy.

I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.

UiPath's AI functionality can be used to help developers build automation processes, but it can be expensive. We use the open-source TensorFlow technology from Google, which is the same technology that UiPath uses. Our developers are willing to build and manage this technology themselves, which is a cost-effective solution. However, if we use UiPath's AI functionality, it will be managed by them.

I am an architect. I have worked as an integration architect, infrastructure architect, and network architect. When I first saw UiPath, I thought it was just for scripting the front end, but it is much more powerful than that. I really like it because it allows me to find slow, expensive, and inefficient business processes and automate them. This can lead to real savings for the business. With traditional applications, there is often a business case that needs to be made before the application is built. But with RPA, we can see the savings every day. For example, if we automate a process that used to take ten full-time employees, we can see that we are saving ten FTEs every day. I enjoy using UiPath because it is a real solution within IT that can drive out real costs from the business.

I recommend that those who want to use UiPath do not treat it like any other IT system. Do not simply implement it and expect it to be of high value. The most important thing is to understand the business well enough to use the tool to its full potential. In other words, automate high-value or high-benefit processes.

We are a platinum partner of UiPath. We work exclusively for UiPath and do implementations. We provide solutions using UiPath products.

One of the use cases was for a client from the manufacturing industry for onboarding apprentices. We did this project in India. They were onboarding 300 to 400 apprentices. Their insurance and other things were done manually, which was time-consuming. It used to take them a week to complete the whole process, which was a problem in case an accident or incident happened in the first week. They wanted to do automation to ensure that on the first day itself, after the employees are onboarded, the insurance and other tasks are completed.

RPA as a technology has many benefits. UiPath comes with all those benefits. In addition, you also get flexibility, the availability of resources and new features, the ability to scale up, and an excellent partner ecosystem with UiPath.

As a tool, UiPath is becoming a hyper-automation platform. Every six months, they add something new to the platform. If you want new features, you can subscribe to those. From just an RPA tool, it is becoming an intelligent automation platform. They bring everything into the same platform. When you subscribe to Office 365, you get the entire package from Microsoft. UiPath also does the same thing. They bring automation, process mining, and all other things into the same platform. You can pick and subscribe to whatever you want. You can scale up as you want.

At this point in time, everybody is looking for intelligent automation solutions. UiPath has something known as AI Center that consists of multiple machine learning models. Solutions that have the intelligence to automatically understand and make decisions are the demand of the hour. For example, earlier, invoice processing was template-based. It was done using ABBYY and other OCR tools. UiPath now has a product for document understanding that supports the customers in extracting the details of the invoices without templates. It has a machine-learning model. I have been using their AI Center or document understanding module since 2019. It matures every year. For example, in 2019, if we loaded 15 to 20 invoices, it extracted only 20% of the data, whereas now, it extracts more than 80% of the data because over time, the model has got trained, and it gives better results. 

As a company, they are growing very fast. They are acquiring multiple companies. If they do not have competency in any field, they either partner with other firms or acquire them. They have recently added a communication mining product. It is something that is going to help the BPO industry a lot where call centers have many people taking the calls and rerouting them. Putting a machine learning model or a communication mining product on top of it will definitely help to reduce the effort. It will help with cost reduction and optimization of the existing operations. All the new features that they are adding are aligned with the usage of the platform as an intelligent automation platform.

UiPath also has benefits in terms of resources for implementing automation. If a customer wants to build a COE, they need to onboard resources and train them. UiPath is the easiest in terms of finding resources. For Pega Automation or SAP automation, you may not be able to find as many resources in the market as UiPath.

When clients want to automate a manual process, their expectation is that once automated, they do not want anybody to look into that process. It should run without any human intervention, but sometimes, there are scenarios where human intelligence is required to make a decision or trigger something. For example, if you do automation on a portal, there might be a captcha or multi-factor authentication where you enforce a human to come into the picture. Generally, everybody is looking for automation that runs without any human intervention. If 10 to 15 people do an activity, usually, the customer expectation is that none of those people should have to look into it, but realistically, only about 80% of those employees can be used for other tasks. 20% are still needed to monitor the system. 

UiPath speeds up digital transformation. RPA is normally the first step of digital transformation because it is the technology that you can add with minimal investment. The rest of the things require much more than what is required for RPA. Digital transformation starts with identifying the right candidate for automation and putting a process or a bot to do the processing. After that, you can build AI on top to make decisions. This digital transformation does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support. If any of the processes require upgrading the existing system or additional licenses, we normally do not recommend RPA for that. We can do automation using API calls and other methods.

UiPath saves time. RPA technology is generally adopted for the reduction in FTEs and time. The time savings vary based on different engagements.

UiPath is much easier to learn than other tools. Its interface is not that complicated. It is very user-friendly. Among all other similar tools, UiPath is the one that came out last. It came out in 2016 or 2017. They had the opportunity to understand what are the best features of other tools. They also knew how to put it together so that people pick it up faster. UiPath's founders are from a technical background, so there is a developer-oriented approach, which is another benefit of this solution. In the RPA market, if you want to hire resources, you will get more UiPath developers than any other technology. If any customer wants to adopt UiPath as a tool and build a team, there are more options for UiPath. You get a bigger resource pool to select from. For other tools, you will not find that many resources. This is something that we have seen while hiring people.

UiPath Community is one of the main differentiators from other tools. You can easily compare the number of subscribers of UiPath Community or UiPath forums with Stack Overflow, but Stack Overflow is not just one tool. You have everything there. You have Java, you have Python, and you have .NET. From a technical perspective, queries related to different technologies are there. In UiPath Community, you get the same level of support. I have seen developers solving puzzles and tricky questions. About 90% of questions get answered in the community. The way UiPath promotes its community is also not unique. It is not like anybody else. I have not noticed anything similar to the MVP programs that they run in other tools. They promote people who contribute more to the forum. Anybody who is giving a solution gets marked and evaluated based on the support provided in the forum. They give them exposure on the platform. They mention their MVPs for each year, which is motivating many people. I do not think anybody else is doing that. I have a team of 120 people. I see the motivation in the team to spend an hour or half an hour on a daily basis to see if any questions are there to which they can respond to have an opportunity to get into the MVP segment. UiPath is doing a lot to ensure that there are more active users in the community and people give good suggestions and solutions.

The UiPath Academy is one of the best self-training portals. They have two types of portals. One is for everybody. Anybody can subscribe and log into it and start taking courses without paying anything. They also have another portal for partners, which has more details. They do not have static material. They update the material every six months. When they have a release, they update the information. UiPath Academy is a very good platform for self-training purposes. They also have other training programs such as instructor-led training. UiPath's training and support mechanism is excellent.

Their technical support should be improved. Their support has deteriorated with the increase in the number of customers. That is one area of improvement.

They should give the flexibility to customers to reduce the number of licenses. UiPath does not want you to reduce the number of licenses. It is not easy to reduce the number of licenses even though there is a provision to do that. It would be good to give flexibility to customers to upscale and downscale whenever they want.

For low-code development, they already have something called UiPath Apps, but it needs improvement. Generally, to build a small workflow, we use Microsoft Power Apps. Even though UiPath has a local platform, it is not comparable to the Microsoft Power Apps platform. If they invest a bit more in that, for creating workflows, we can use UiPath Apps rather than opting for a third-party tool.

I have been working with UiPath since 2018.

Nowadays, all RPA vendors are trying to bring in something new every six months, but they don't get adequate time for doing the testing. As a result, there are multiple bugs. They should stabilize the release, do proper testing, and then only launch it. Otherwise, we need to wait for the next release for a bug to be fixed. Similarly, the training material for all established products from all the vendors is good, but with constant new releases, it is a challenge to get the latest material. They should release the training material before they start selling the product so that everybody is well aware of the features and the issues.

With the cloud model, you can subscribe to whatever you want and scale up as you want. You also get the flexibility of a monthly subscription from the cloud. If you want to run automation for one month or a certain period, options are available.

If a customer is subscribed to the UiPath Cloud and wants to add more processes, they just need to ensure that they have their infrastructure on-prem for only putting the robots. The load on the Orchestrator is handled by UiPath. You do not have to worry about that, so scalability is handled by UiPath. These are no issues, but for on-premises, all these things have to be handled manually. You have to increase the storage, but from the product perspective, there is no challenge in scaling up. Today, if we run 100 processes, and tomorrow, if we need to run 1,000 processes, we just need to procure the licenses and additional hardware.

Their support could be better. As the company grew, the number of customers increased, and their support deteriorated. When you raise a ticket, rather than addressing the concern of the client, they just want to close the ticket. It has gone to that stage. This could be because of the number of customers. It was not like this earlier.

We have been working with them for a long time. We know what questions we need to ask. Our concern mainly comes when a client contacts UiPath's customer service. Rather than asking them for additional details, they give a response saying that a particular feature is not supported and close the case. I would rate them a six out of ten at this point in time. 

Neutral

I have worked on other platforms, but at this point in time, I am predominantly working on UiPath. I have worked with Blue Prism. I also have some experience with Automation Anywhere and WorkFusion.

I have worked with the on-prem and cloud deployments. In earlier versions, the cloud model was not there. UiPath has a product called Orchestrator, which is an application web server. In on-prem installations, you had to put this application web server on a Windows Server. It then orchestrated the entire automation. You also had to install Developer SDK, called UiPath Studio, on a Windows machine. You had to connect that Windows machine to the Orchestrator tool. For running the process, you needed a bot. You installed that bot on another virtual machine or Windows machine. These were the three mandatory components earlier in 2018.

After that, they brought in the concept of cloud subscription. With the cloud subscription, they install the Orchestrator itself and give a public endpoint to the customer. The benefit is that customers do not need to install Orchestrator on their premises. They can directly connect to the Orchestrator that is hosted on their cloud platform. Of course, they have the authentication and all those things. With the cloud model, there is no requirement of installing their application server inside the environment. UiPath Studio and the bots still remain in the client environment. 

Previously, anybody with Windows experience could do the installation. Our developers used to do the installation, but since machine learning came into the picture, the platform changed because Windows was not able to do the processing. Machine learning requires resources, so they converted the platform from Windows to Linux. If you now want to install Orchestrator with the machine learning model and all other things, it is not a Windows installation. It is a Linux installation, so earlier, somebody with basic Windows skills could do the installation for machine learning models and other things on-prem, but now, this cannot be done by a normal developer. Somebody with Linux experience is required for installation. However, they offer a cloud subscription where you do not need to install anything on Linux. You can directly access the endpoint and start using it. They also offer a disaster recovery tool. UiPath provides something known as HA for on-prem installation. It is a multi-node installation. This HA tool is also installed on Linux, so previously all tools were on Windows, but all the new products or tools are on Linux. They require Linux expertise for on-prem installation as well as knowledge regarding firewalls, etc. You need an infrastructure engineer for that.

UiPath provides training for different roles. They have training for developers, business analysts, solution architects, and infrastructure engineers. These are the four main roles for which they provide training, and these are the four roles that are manually required for implementing the UiPath product.

In terms of maintenance, UiPath updates the product every six months. They have two main releases. They have a spring release and a fall release. They have .6 and .10 releases. If I am installing the 2023.6 release now, they will provide support only for three years, which will be till June of 2026. After that, they will not support it, so customers need to upgrade their environment once every three years. For the on-prem setup, when you do the upgrade, you need to bring down the environment because robots are there. Once they are upgraded, you need to ensure that everything is running properly. It requires the infrastructure team and the application development team to ensure that everything is working fine. It is normally a one-month activity, but it can vary depending on the number of processes. It requires at least two weeks. In the cloud model, product upgrades happen automatically. Orchestrator is hosted in UiPath Cloud, and they upgrade it. There are no issues. You just need to take care of UiPath Studio and the robots in the machine. That can be easily handled by the application development or support team. In terms of support, the number of people required depends on the complexity and the criticality of processes. If you have automated a banking application, you may require somebody for monitoring around the clock.

They have been increasing the price. The explanation that they provide is that they are adding more features. This works perfectly fine for customers who are looking for new intelligent automations, but there is another set of customers who use UiPath for vanilla, plain automations. Offering them something that is not required and asking them to pay more puts a burden on them. That seems to be a problem for the customers. Many of them have mentioned this concern because it is increasing the prices of automation every year, which is not acceptable to all customers.

As a company, they try to move from on-prem to the cloud. They give cloud subscriptions unless a customer specifically requests an on-prem solution. With the on-prem solution, you will not get the latest features automatically. You need to update it on a periodic basis. There is an overhead in terms of maintenance. In their new licensing model, they charge the same for the on-prem product and the cloud product. For an on-prem installation, you have the infrastructure cost in addition to the licensing cost. By going for the cloud version, you can easily skip the infrastructure cost.

When you start your RPA journey, you should never start with just one process. You should have a pipeline in your mind in terms of the number of processes. You can start small, but you need to have a roadmap of what you are going to do by the end of the year. If you automate only one process, you will not get value from this product. Tools such as UiPath and Automation Anywhere are capable of doing so many complicated tasks. They charge you so that you can do all those things. If you do just a small task with that, your cost and your outcome will not match, and you will not appreciate the platform. That is why I recommend having a roadmap. You should also go for a tool for which you are able to get support when you get stuck. There is no question that UiPath is the easiest one.

RPA as a technology is going to be like Microsoft Excel. Soon, everybody's system will have bots to automate activities. It could be for extracting data from the internet for your analysis or for your project. It will be used for all redundant activities or rule-based processing where you have to extract the data and follow some steps. In five or ten years, it is going to be a mandatory technology. 

Overall, I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. I am not completely happy with the way they bring out new versions or features in a half-cooked state. Stability or reliability is critical when you are launching something new.