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reviewer2588037 - PeerSpot reviewer
System admin at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Speeds up development while offering additional flexibility
Pros and Cons
  • "It helped in relieving some of the burden related to paperwork and regulation, making people happy and excited about new opportunities."
  • "Scaling efficiently and supporting people with technical information has been challenging."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case involves the democratization of software through the Sysen Lever and Power User Program. Essentially, we are trying to automate complex processes that can be easily rules-based, eliminating the need for repetitive motions.

How has it helped my organization?

UiPath helped relieve some of the burden related to paperwork and regulation, making people happy and excited about new opportunities.

What is most valuable?

The drag-and-drop features are useful, and having the ability to integrate technical scripting is beneficial. It speeds up development while offering additional flexibility.

What needs improvement?

Scaling efficiently and supporting people with technical information has been challenging.

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March 2025
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have encountered scalability issues trying to figure out how to make the operations work with different setups. My particular employee group is all remote.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not evaluate other options before choosing iMac.

What other advice do I have?

I rate UiPath an eight out of ten.

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Prabu Baskaran. - PeerSpot reviewer
RPA Specialist at Expleogroup
Real User
Top 5
Helps minimize on-premises footprint, which is important for our clients' environments
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features include multi-bot architecture, UiPath Studio, and Test Manager."
  • "One thing that would be helpful is if the support team could quickly help us when we raise a ticket. It takes them at least one or two hours to get back to us. With Automation Anywhere, if there is a Severity 1 issue, their support responds within 15 minutes."

What is our primary use case?

We use it mostly for the banking and insurance domains. We are a service-based company and the tools we use depend on our clients' requirements.

How has it helped my organization?

UiPath provides scalability, quality, and a high level of accuracy. It has definitely reduced human error.

It also helps minimize the on-premises footprint, which is important for our clients' environments.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features include

  • multi-bot architecture
  • UiPath Studio
  • Test Manager.

It is easy to build automations with this solution as well. We are able to implement end-to-end automation.

There are also build connectors for Salesforce and SAP. Before the connectors, we could only automate the GUI. Now, it is very easy to integrate on the back end as well.

The UiPath Academy courses are also helpful. When a feature or release comes out, they demonstrate them in the Academy.

And if there are any issues, the UiPath community forum helps us to check whether others are also facing these issues. There are a lot of benefits from that.

What needs improvement?

For some of the cognitive features we have to learn the integration side. Other than that, everything is fine.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for nearly three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The LTS version is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is also definitely scalable. I would recommend it for any size of company, from small to large. For example, if a small company only needs UiPath Studio, they can have it. They don't need UiPath Orchestrator. They can run things with Studio only. There are a lot of options with UiPath.

How are customer service and support?

Their support is good to have, especially for priority issues. 

One thing that would be helpful is if the support team could quickly help us when we raise a ticket. It takes them at least one or two hours to get back to us. With Automation Anywhere, if there is a Severity 1 issue, their support responds within 15 minutes.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

Setting it up is very easy.

The amount of time it takes depends on the client's security requirements. Some teams have restrictions and documentation on how things should be done. But once everything has been verified, deployment will take one to two hours.

Once it's deployed, it's the validation checks that take some time but it depends upon the project: the supporting files and checking that all the integrations are correctly mapped.

In terms of project deployment, we generally have three people involved. One of them will completely handle monitoring and supporting, as well as the Control Room and any logs or administrative tasks. The other two handle change requests.

As for maintenance, our setup is on-premises and we have an internal team that takes care of situations when the server is down. They will restart it and do patch updates, which they will inform us about.

What other advice do I have?

We are using the Enterprise version. We are exploring using it in the cloud, but some of our banking clients do not accept the cloud because of security issues so we go for on-prem only in those cases.

We are not fully using UiPath's AI functionality but we are doing some PoCs, based on our clients' requirements, to check the feasibility. For that, we are using the Community Edition. As for UiPath speeding up digital transformation, I'm not sure. It depends on the process involved.

Overall, I don't see a need for any additional features. I don't have any difficulty using UiPath.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
UiPath
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
848,476 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1986756 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of global process improvement and automation at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Reduces manual effort and reads emails well, but can be expensive
Pros and Cons
  • "This solution has reduced manual effort on our part. It's removed repetitive tasks which do not bring any value to the company."
  • "I would like it to be more user-friendly."

What is our primary use case?

We did AP automation. We started with AP invoice automation first. Then we did a proof of shipment delivery. That was the second concept. After, we expanded to the inputting of contractor timesheets. We moved to publish the metrics on a dashboard and log in to different databases. Slowly, the demand picked up in the last year.

How has it helped my organization?

This solution has reduced manual effort on our part. It's removed repetitive tasks which do not bring any value to the company. They have now been eliminated. It's saved maybe 1,000 man-hours every year on the AP side, and maybe on the metric side for a dashboard that we created, we saved 90 hours a month.

What is most valuable?

The capacity to read the emails and then understand what is out there has been very useful for us. This is extremely useful with the huge volume of transactions that we are taking. We get close to over a thousand invoices in a day. 

What needs improvement?

I would like it to be more user-friendly.

The one thing that we would really like to see is the licensing. UiPath is selling on a per-bot model. What I find with other companies is they give it as a SaaS solution and that you subscribe to it. UiPath manages how many bots you need, whatever intelligence you're using, and then you give us a total solution. Changing licensing would probably interest us in the long run.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for five years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is pretty stable. We have not had major issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We can scale it up. However, the cost again is a factor. The cost of scaling up is high.

How are customer service and support?

I have not been involved with technical support. Our team would talk to UiPath if there were a problem. I haven't had personal experience.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not previously use a different solution.

How was the initial setup?

I was involved in the deployment and initial setup. It was straightforward. 

It was straightforward in the sense that we used it in a very limited way first as a proof of concept. Therefore, it was simple to just deploy it on a desktop at first, where we didn't even use the server. We deployed it on the desktop to see if it was able to scan and to see if it was able to read the mail. In that sense, it was simplistic. 

We ran into issues as we were scanning it, sometimes it was classifying it right, and sometimes not. So we had to bring machine learning in for it to be accurate. Therefore, while we did run into some complexity, deployment-wise, it was simple.

Our strategy was simple: informing the infrastructure team that spun up a VM for us. 

What about the implementation team?

We did not use any integrator, reseller, or advisor.

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen an ROI. We compare it to the number of hours saved. For each process we do, we measure it by the number of hours we save across the globe. That's how we are measuring ROI now. We don't have hard dollar amounts.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is expensive. 

Initially, it maybe was $8,000 or $10,000. However, as the number of bots increases, the pricing has to come down. That said, with volume, we don't see that. 

Price will definitely be a factor if we decide to use UiPath down the road. Even looking into this Studio Web, I was thinking, "Okay, I can upgrade immediately to the newer version." Then, if we need two or three more Studio Webs due to the development that we need to do, or even the Citizen Developer, the bot, it's going to become very expensive if we need to take off. Therefore, the volume should provide some sort of discount. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did evaluate Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere was offering a SaaS model, which we like. However, the cost was expensive, and also the scalability wasn't what we needed. We are just at the beginning of the automation journey. When we were evaluating it, we didn't have that many bots that could justify that cost. Right now, we are at the point where we are maybe at eight to ten bots. It is taking off pretty fast at this point. Managing it may become an issue for us at some point, and maybe with the scalability, that model may offer more value to us. I don't think UiPath offers that as a cloud.

What other advice do I have?

We are still surfacing demand for automating processes based on sustainable or environmental causes. We aren't using any automation to promote any good causes just yet.

I have yet to be a part of UiPath's user community and have yet to understand what they offer.

We haven't gotten into the UiPath Academy. We partnered with a couple of vendors, and I'm not sure if they're Academy-certified people.

At this time, while we do use AI, I'm not sure if it's UiPath's AI. We are still surfacing the process. We've done a proof of concept, and we have to measure the metrics to see if it makes sense for us to move ahead. 

For us, at least, the cost is the biggest factor for us to scale up. For others evaluating the solution, they need to look at ten years down the road or what is their vision for automation. Only then can they effectively evaluate the products. 

This solution was simple, and it was easier to use, so we took this first, and now we're pretty much married at this point. There isn't anything to complain about, however, if we had the vision to see where we would be, we might have looked at other products more. I don't have any complaints as of this point. As of now, the cost is the biggest sticking factor for us.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

You have the studio licensing, and the orchestrator. The architecture is complex, at least from a business point of view. There are a lot of moving parts that I have to work with. As with any product, I would just want it to be up and running immediately without the hassle of maintenance. I feel the maintenance factor in this product is high.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Noel Neuwirth - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliability and asset management architect at Skookum Contract Services
Real User
Is easy to scale, helps with efficiency, and is stable
Pros and Cons
  • "UiPath is easy to scale. If we want to share the bot or the scripts, it is easy to do so with other team members. It is also easy to add licensing and grow the current bot or create a new one."
  • "Promoting its use is the hardest part for us. It's tough to get people to believe in using the assistant or Studio without fearing the loss of their jobs."

What is our primary use case?

We use it to transfer information from one system to a government system.

We also use UiPath to automate processes that track mileage on vehicles, which would then allow us to calculate some of the GHG emissions.

How has it helped my organization?

It has really helped us become more efficient. UiPath has made the lives of our data operators a lot easier because they would normally have had to manually enter all this information or transfer data.

What is most valuable?

AI Computer Vision has been great because it works through VMware. It's able to see the elements through the VMware window on the government system that we interact with.

UiPath's user community is great. I get a lot of answers and am able to talk to folks who know the products and can provide support directly.

The UiPath Academy courses are an easy way to learn how to use Studio.

What needs improvement?

The licensing has been a challenge in terms of what is included with our current license. They've changed it a bit.

The learning curve to get UiPath up and running is hard, although we're pretty comfortable with it now.

Promoting its use is the hardest part for us. It's tough to get people to believe in using the assistant or Studio without fearing the loss of their jobs.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using UiPath for about five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's very stable, and we've never had an issue with it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

UiPath is easy to scale. If we want to share the bot or the scripts, it is easy to do so with other team members. It is also easy to add licensing and grow the current bot or create a new one.

How are customer service and support?

Our experience with UiPath's technical support has been really good. We get great responses to tickets when we need help. On a scale from one to ten, I would give technical support a ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We learned Studio, started with a simple script or bot, and grew from there. Our implementation strategy was to look at our highest demand for transferring data and make the bot do that.

What was our ROI?

Our ROI is that instead of having a team of seven people to manually do the data transfer, we now have two people.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is fair.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at Blue Prism and went with UiPath because of its ease of use, the Magic Quadrant rating, and the price.

What other advice do I have?

It's great software and has helped us a lot. It gives us a competitive edge.

Overall, I'd rate UiPath at nine out of ten and would advise you to go for it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
JasonSmith5 - PeerSpot reviewer
Process improvement specialist at The Co-operators
Real User
A solution with 100% stability, a broad range of features, and the best scalability of any product
Pros and Cons
  • "The scheduler tool is valuable because I can slow or speed up run times during peak use."
  • "Our solution is on-premises so we are unable to utilize phone apps."

What is our primary use case?

Our company is in the insurance industry and uses the solution to run RPA processes for the claims department to free up staff time. 

What is most valuable?

The scheduler tool is valuable because I can slow or speed up run times during peak use. 

What needs improvement?

Our solution is on-premises so we are unable to utilize phone apps.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for three years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution's stability is 100% and really good because it never goes down.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution offers the best scalability of any known product. 

How are customer service and support?

I have not utilized technical support because that is handled by other team members. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I personally did not use another product prior to learning the solution. 

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in the initial setup. 

What was our ROI?

We track ROI quarterly and through Q2 we have saved more than $100,000 by using automated processes. 

We are getting to the point of reaching full ROI but need to build more automated processes to reach that goal. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I am sure my company evaluated other options but the solution was already in place when I joined the team. 

What other advice do I have?

I utilized Academy courses to understand the solution's full capabilities but haven't yet used many of those features such as AI. I am currently learning about OCR and plan to use AI in the future. 

Learning the solution is a case of "I don't know what I don't know" so it is important to become aware of all the tools at your disposal. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Intelligent Automation Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Offers great training, has good online forums, and saves time
Pros and Cons
  • "The initial implementation was pretty straightforward."
  • "For citizen developers, Studio is difficult. It's just too over their head."

What is our primary use case?

Often, the solution is used for a lot of connecting data from different systems, et cetera. Also, a lot of tasks involve taking data from Excel or an email and putting it into different PDFs at high volumes and then saving everything in a certain spot in the file directory.

How has it helped my organization?

With UiPath, people can do more knowledge work and don't have to spend as much time doing menial tasks. For example, connecting the different systems and handling large volumes of Excel and PDFs. From what I've seen with clients, that's really common. Typically, tasks with data like that would take like a lot of time. The same with pulling reports from a website and then having to run a tableau dashboard and refresh R code. There are a lot of different layers that RPA is able to connect to and with, which is cool.

What is most valuable?

I like that you can automatically take a picture of what you're getting the selector for. For example, the next developer can tell what was on the screen. That way it’s easy to transfer from developer to developer, which is sometimes difficult.

I also really like being able to put notes on each of the activities. That's really valuable for me. Even if I'm not passing it to somebody else, it reminds me of what I was doing.

On a grander scale, there's definitely other stuff, however, those are just little things that I find valuable.

The one bot that pulls reports runs the R code and then refreshes the Tableau dashboard saves a lot of time. I can't recall the number exactly, however, without the bot, it takes a long time to pull those reports manually. I’m talking half a day for one person. And we may need to pull 20 or 30 reports per day. The website takes a long time to load, which means for a person it's just a lot of sitting time, which is very annoying.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. It’s well-known that UiPath's training is the best of any of the tools, including Blue Prism, Power Automate, or Automation Anywhere. Power Automate in particular doesn't really have as much specific training. With UiPath, the pictures and the hands-on nature, and just the scrolling is cool. The training looks cool and it's very helpful. After you take the training, you can actually go and do something. It's not like you've just read about it.

The biggest value in the Academy is the paths. You can choose to go down a certain path. It's nice to have it curated. Also, there’s definitely the hands-on piece that sets it apart. In some other solution’s training, they just describe the different features of the tool. With UiPath, it’s interactive and you have to do it. Part of the assessment is you have to do that big RA framework process, which is good due to the fact that, with just training, you've already done it. You’re already using the tool.

Building automation with UiPath is very easy. It has a good interface. I like how you can nest certain activities. It makes things more visible. The modular approach of having different pages and then invoking them is very intuitive.

We just use attended automation right now as there is a lot of proof of concepts going on. We're hoping to get to more unattended automation soon since that seems to be a big, high-value area.

What needs improvement?

In general, and maybe this is not the tool's fault specifically, however, more awareness of the limitations for federal clients needs to be considered. There is a lot of the cool stuff that we've heard about, and I'm probably going to hear about today, that we can't really use due to security.

A particular part of the platform hasn't been ATOD. If there's any way that UiPath could help support even more the federal clients by saying "hey, this is not going to break your system" that would be really helpful as some of it would be very valuable to them. It's just getting it past the review process that is the challenge right now, and security is the main concern.

For citizen developers, Studio is difficult. It's just too over their head. They don't want to finish the training. They're getting fed up. They already have their own job and they're just not as bought in on the process which is the tone set at the top. Their management has to deal with that. It just doesn't seem very realistic overall sometimes for a lot of clients to have citizen developers.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for about two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Sometimes clients think that they can just do something and then it runs forever. People who actually work with it know that it's going to break and you're going to have to fix it. However, that's part of the process. When it first starts running, you're going to have to make it better. There needs to be managing of expectations. It's going to give you value, however, it's not going to be perfect the first time, which is just not even the automation's fault. It's sometimes the systems. You have to learn the quirks of the systems and the systems that it works with. For example, a website might have a pop-up that you wouldn't expect. It'll break, and clients will ask "why is this broken?" You have to explain the bot doesn't know how to handle everything.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

In theory, the scalability is great. In practice, if clients hear "oh, you can just build a bot and then put it out to everybody" - that's not really the case. There's going to be that deployment and configuration process where you have to work with each of the analysts or whoever you're working with to actually make it work on the computer. There might be more expectation management needed. Sometimes, for example, a computer has quirks, and we have to do this and that. That said, overall, after you get situated, it's very easy to manage from the orchestrator new packages, et cetera. My assumption is that it is good.

How are customer service and support?

The responsiveness was quick, however, in my case, I wasn't really able to get the question answered. It was actually about licensing for one client. They were not as immediate in terms of their service, however, it was still good. We got an outcome. It just took a little bit longer than we expected to come to the conclusion.

How was the initial setup?

The initial implementation was pretty straightforward. It wasn't specifically at my organization, however, one of the clients did an implementation from the ground up and we helped them get UiPath. It was us coordinating with UiPath reps, and it was pretty straightforward.

For our part, it was just knowing what licenses to get and working with, and knowing the client's situation. We were working closely with the UiPath reps to say "this is what they need" and then we just got it for them. I thought it would be a lot more complicated to know what license structure they would need, however, it turned out just fine.

I don't remember the length of that project. Deployment might have been around eight months for the whole thing to get situated and start being used.

What about the implementation team?

We worked with UiPath to help our client set up the solution.

What was our ROI?

We've seen an ROI in UiPath. We just had a bot challenge with one client where they showcased different automation that they've made throughout the organization, and the numbers were great. I cannot remember the exact numbers, however, they were impressive.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The whole UiPath model is a bot for every person, so the attended licensing is obviously where the money goes. I don't know how realistic that is for a lot of clients. It makes a lot more sense to focus on making the process mining, task capture, and those type of tools, very user-friendly for people who would otherwise want to consider citizen developers.

You have to identify like the people who want to be citizen developers. There are really not many of those people, in my experience. One time I was working with somebody, and she didn't know where the start button was - and she was one of the people they had identified as a citizen. For her, this solution is not going to work.

Companies need higher-up people who know their organization and can identify those people. That's an internal thing. Overall, I would love to see UiPath figure out their financing to re-pivot and focus on citizen developers and get really good at identifying processes. Either way, we're still going to have dedicated people who actually develop and perfect as StudioX even is way above a lot of clients I've worked with. Taking into account all of my clients there has been one guy who could use Studio.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I've looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

With Blue Prism, the pro is that the grid in the development environment makes it easy to align and then see from a very high level what your process is doing, which UiPath is lacking. Even though you have the workflows where you don't have to have everything on the page, you can invoke stuff from other pages. That's nice. However, it's still not as visually apparent in terms of what's going on, unless you put a lot of notes, which some people just don't do. Blue Prism is good at the high-level view. I don't like them for almost everything else. It's very antiquated. I know they came up with RPA, the name and everything, however, I don't think they've kept up with the current energy of the industry. Also, their training is not good and the online community is not at all as strong as UiPath. 

With Automation Anywhere, the development, everything about that has gotten better recently. It has mostly improved due to the fact that they were coming from a really low place. I did not like that tool a couple of years ago. Then, they redid their training, and the interface became a lot different. They've gotten better. However, they are still not my favorite tool. The use cases that the tool is geared toward are not always as broad as what UiPath can handle. I do not like the search functionality for the different activities. If you type into, which is a UiPath phrase for an activity, in Automation Anywhere it won't recognize the phrase. They don't use it as a search function. You have to type exactly the name of the activity. I understand that they don't want to accommodate the exact verbiage that UiPath uses, however, it's annoying. In UiPath, if you type in something similar, it'll still bring up similar activities, even if it's not exactly the name, which is nice. Sometimes you can't remember the exact wording and it's good there's an option to search in a way that will show you the closest options.

With UiPath, the pros are the training. With getting new people up to speed, you would never say "let's start you on Blue Prism." It's too complicated. The UiPath training is really good,  and the developer community and online forums are usually accurate, which is more than you say for some other stuff. Overall, the usability of the UiPath tool, the deployment, and the interfaces of everything we've seen are a lot cleaner. Even on a basic level, the solution just looks cool. The main downside is the lack of awareness surrounding what government clients can use and what they can't and then work to tailor to that.

What other advice do I have?

We are a UiPath partner. 

We have one client that is on version 20.4.3, however, most others are on the latest version of the solution.

We do not use the UiPath apps feature or UiPath's AI functionality right now.

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

I would love to see a change in the process mining and differentiation on how they're catering toward the citizen developers. That would be outstanding and would show a lot of self-awareness for the company. Maybe I'm just totally cut off from the commercial sector and maybe they have brilliant people who are just ready to develop immediately, however, that is not what I've seen across all of my clients.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
CEO at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Saves company costs, frees up employee time, and reduces human error
Pros and Cons
  • "UiPath has saved the company costs."
  • "The speed could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We're the shared services divisions to contact centers and handle back-office work. Most of our use cases with UiPath so far have been automating back-office work, taking information from Excel files, and putting them into legacy systems or some mainframe integrations. All of our robots, as of right now, are unattended automation. We haven't really used the attended robots just yet.

How has it helped my organization?

The primary benefit so far has been bringing up and updating other processes so that I can move on to other more valuable processes. I no longer need to copy here and paste there. It's taken the robot part of the job out of my hands. 

What is most valuable?

I have not actually developed anything with it directly. I manage the people who do. The little bit of training that I did, was pretty straightforward. I was using the rapid development tools. If you truly want to build something that's stable and fast, you really have to get in there and at a much deeper level than I got. That said, from what I did, it looked easy.

UiPath has saved the company costs. With the automation we've had so far, we're probably in the 20 to 30 FTE savings range so far.

The solution has reduced human error. It helps in the sense that, if you take a process of humans doing it and give it to a robot that's always following a set of rules when it encounters a certain value, it's always going to handle it a certain way. It's the consistency that the automation provides that has been great.

I’m not sure if the solution has freed up employee time. That's tough to evaluate due to the fact that the FTE that would have been doing this manual process would just mostly get moved to perform more valuable work. It has freed up time by allowing us to allocate those resources to higher-value tasks.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses. They are all good. We've had developers go through the UiPath training. In fact, that's a requirement when developing. They have to at least complete the training. We have at least one developer that's gone through it completely. It's a fundamental starting point to training people on UiPath. We've taken internal people and they train them ourselves.

We also appreciate the fact that the Academy is free to use. Right off the bat, due to the fact the Academy was free, we were able to say, okay, complete the training. You have to complete the training in order to be able to develop. Right away, it became part of our standard. We see the value in it.

What needs improvement?

The speed could be improved. In some cases, when I have to ask analysts to estimate how much licensing we need, we have to figure out how long it's going to run, and right now we go with the worst-case scenario, that the robots are going to run no faster than the human. That's been our stereotype. We've used other platforms in the past, where I could perform a transaction to some websites in three seconds, however, for UiPath it was 10 seconds. That was even after we did some enhancements to make UiPath as fast as we could. I know it's the internals with the way that the platforms work, however, from our robot's perspective, speed seems to be a barrier.

For how long have I used the solution?

We started using the solution in late 2019.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable. 

How are customer service and support?

I have not had any direct relationship with the support from UiPath. When I do have a technical issue, I'm to engage with an internal team and they are the ones that have the relationship with UiPath support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did use a cloud solution previously. We switched to UiPath on-premises as UiPath's on-prem deployment was more aligned with our security constraints. 

How was the initial setup?

We've had multiple projects. Some have been very complex and others have been perfect. It's dependent on the projects that we're using it for. Some were a little bit more complex.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

It's my understanding that, while the company likely did look at other options, I was not engaged in those meetings. While I recall some high-level conversations, they didn't say which ones we were actively evaluating.

What other advice do I have?

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

I have not used the AI functionality in my automation program yet.

In terms of functionality, UiPath does quite well. The fact that it's not net-based gives it a lot of flexibility to use it in a non-standard way. For example, we were building a robot interface with an Oracle database, and we could either build a robot to open up an access database with blank tables and pull it down. Or we, due to the fact that it did not have access to the net, could grab an in-memory data set and cycle through that. I liked that flexibility and the fact that we had options.

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Supervisor Automation Development at ConocoPhillips
Real User
Helps free up employee time but governance needs improvement
Pros and Cons
  • "The ability to do citizen development is the most valuable feature. That initiative has helped us to expand it because that gives folks that are closer to the business the ability to develop their own solutions that are tailored to what they need to do, as opposed to waiting for someone in IT to contact them to build it out. Or to wait for a business analyst to provide some type of value metric, but they can actually go and build it themselves."
  • "Governance has room for improvement but that's more of a cultural thing. It depends on your company. We have the reference architecture that we have in place, but it's easy for someone to say, "Okay, I need to make an adjustment here outside of that reference architecture." Because it's so easy for them to do that, they leave the company now that a non-compliant bot is out there running a production process, we need to be able to rank that in. There needs to be footwork that we have to do as an organization for my team as opposed to a true problem with the platform."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use cases are in our financial department. We had a bit of a downturn, but we still had work that needed to be completed. So we developed several automations to manage a lot of the financial work and a lot of our payment processing systems. We expanded that out to include more of our traders' work processes, just because we saw there were a lot of workloads coming in and a lot of repetitive work. So we used UiPath to eliminate a lot of that for our commercial traders, then we did the same thing for our operations and production teams so that they have their own automated processes.

We plan on scaling it and using it in more functions.

How has it helped my organization?

Our biggest metrics are in our financial org, they have more of a cost avoidance where we don't have to backfill those positions. It's around $2 million a year because we don't have to bring in personnel to complete the processes.

It has helped solve certain human errors but that's an unintended bonus because we're automating a process as it is that a machine is going to repeat. We don't really have a person to do it.

UiPath has helped to free up employee time. The additional time enabled us to focus on higher-value work. By removing a lot of the repetitive work, it's given them the ability to do more analytics and to dive into the data science realms of their job to do more data-driven analysis of what they're doing.

What is most valuable?

The ability to do citizen development is the most valuable feature. That initiative has helped us to expand it because that gives folks that are closer to the business the ability to develop their own solutions that are tailored to what they need to do, as opposed to waiting for someone in IT to contact them to build it out. Or to wait for a business analyst to provide some type of value metric, but they can actually go and build it themselves.

My job is to actually be the evangelist to these groups. I'd say we've been pretty successful. My developers are working with the citizen developers who help to guide them and to teach them how to build their own automations for their business process.

It's pretty easy to build automation. The no-code process has really driven the adoption by the business people so that they don't have to skill up and learn how to code anything. They only need to know how to click a button and build it out. That's the best component.

We used the UiPath Academy course. It's our training regimen for our business users. We have to introduce them first to the platform and understand how to work through the platform. It's a pretty straightforward and easy course. With our citizen development program, we also have the Academy where they can either do hands-on learning or use the Academy to get some video training as well.

The biggest value of the Academy is the ease of being able to access the training. 

What needs improvement?

Governance has room for improvement but that's more of a cultural thing. It depends on your company. We have the reference architecture that we have in place, but it's easy for someone to say, "Okay, I need to make an adjustment here outside of that reference architecture." Because it's so easy for them to do that, they leave the company now that a non-compliant bot is out there running a production process, we need to be able to rank that in. There needs to be footwork that we have to do as an organization for my team as opposed to a true problem with the platform.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using UiPath for around five years now. It's the on-prem version, but we have it deployed in the cloud in our Azure tenant. We started on-prem then we migrated it about three years ago.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's pretty stable. It's more of the architecture and how it runs because it has to leverage VDIs and as Microsoft releases an update, we have to be watching that process because it'll make the box really brittle. Any change to the UI anywhere will break and that's where we have to step in and fix it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Every corner of the business except for folks out in the field uses UiPath. It's around 200 people or so.

How are customer service and support?

We've had a little bit of back and forth whenever we have an issue and some of the solutions we got back were pretty boilerplate-type answers. We had an issue with a Microsoft update. They said, "Well, could you potentially reach out to Microsoft and have them let you know." 

They're just going to release the update. We need to be a little bit more proactive on the software side. Our account executive took care of it for us. He stepped in and enabled us to not have that response again. 

How was the initial setup?

I wasn't there for the initial setup but I heard about it. It was complex, but that was more of a cultural thing.

The deployment took around a year to get that through planning, discovery, and implementation.

What was our ROI?

Our biggest return is our cost avoidance and not having to backfill personnel.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I think the pricing is comparable. It's fair pricing for the size that we're deploying.

What other advice do I have?

My advice would be to make sure that you have a really good understanding and a really good culture in your company that understands and wants to get on board with automation because it will require that type of mindset of understanding what you're doing before you do it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user