UiPath Platform Reviews

We're specializing in law and local government, so that's our target market at the moment. Obviously it's usable everywhere, but that's our market, and we find that that's where there's a lot of opportunity for sale.

In one of our legal scenarios, we had a situation where they were trying to deduplicate their database. They worked out that the man-hour cost for deduplicating that database was 11 man-years. We got that down to 30 days with a saving of 3.89 million pounds in what they would've expected their cost of that process to be.

As a sales-based operation, we get a lot of inquiries through our own website. We were finding that we were extrapolating that information, putting it into an email, I think into a spreadsheet, putting it into Salesforce, whatever. We've now got our own robot, which we've built, which opens up the backend of Wix, which is our website building tool. It receives all those inbound inquiries. It then goes out and looks at the public domain. We'll use that email address, or use a name against LinkedIn, against Facebook, against Twitter, to find out any more information we can find about job titles, maybe phone numbers or email addresses if they're missing. Get all that data out, build up a real case for that client, then the robot would enter that data into Salesforce, it will send them a welcome email to say, "Thanks for you inquiry, please find attached the information you've requested." Bring them straight into Salesforce, set up a reminder, and then send me an email to say, "Follow up this client, they've downloaded some information from our website." We've automated that whole process, and we can then use that for events, and seminars, and webinars, everything else that we hold, because they're genuinely interested clients, and we get around that GDPR issue.

For us, it's the ability to offer as a subscription model. We looked at the other competitors to UiPath, and we found that the way of delivery that we offer is a subscription model. It's a very, very small upfront fee and a monthly cost, and UiPath gives us the flexibility to do that. Some of the other vendors don't do that because they sign you up for ten licenses over three years, and it's just not practical for us.

From a cost perspective, it's not really relevant. It's really about the processes they're trying to automate. A lot of people are doing data deduplication and data onboarding, so an attended robot is absolutely fine. Whereas when we're trying to do things like answering an email, an inbound email, set up a process, respond to that client, then a 24/7 unattended robot is the way to go. We use a mix of that with our client base.

We've had some serious issues with clients that are running in Citrix environments, and we've got a couple clients that have moved away from other competitors to UiPath and to us because they just cannot do that screen scraping technology. Yeah, we're finding a lot of it in a Citrix environment, and a Citrix environment, on an Azure cloud, on a virtual machine. So there's various steps, and UiPath's the only one we've found at the moment that will actually enable us to deliver that.

I think the AI question is being raised everywhere, and there certainly needs to be a lot more intelligence involved in that. The ability for the robots to start thinking for themselves is coming out in the later versions. There are very few limitations at the moment, because we tend to pick relatively mundane, tedious, repetitive tasks, and it's all about number crunching. Really, RPA globally is all about number crunching. But in the next six to 12 months, there'll be more intelligence added, and there'll be more stuff going on that brings it closer to the AI environment that everyone's spouting about at the moment.

We've been involved in automation for ten years or so, and UiPath for about two or three. We've had no major issues from a stability perspective.

Very much so, and more so with the later revisions of the software. But we tend to start off with one project, one workflow, and then we're all about scale. But it's a land and expand approach for us.

We always say that any idiot can build a robot. In reality, it's working out the workflow, working out what's involved, making that process lean that takes all the time. That's where we get involved. Actually setting the robot up itself is very simple. Some of the discussions we've had today talk about clients setting up their own robots. It is a relatively simple, drag and drop, point and click type setup for us.

We're averaging three to six months ROI, because we offer this subscription based model. There's no massive upfront cost. I think the biggest ROI we've seen is the one I mentioned with the law firm, where we estimated 3.9 million pounds of saving, and we actually realized 3.899 million pounds of saving. That was by far the biggest ROI, but as we start working with bigger councils and bigger law firms, those ROIs can only increase.

Not sure about percentages, but one of the anecdotes I always say to my clients is we've all managed to write our own name incorrectly on a web form, so if we cannot spell our own name correctly, what chance have we got of spelling the name of a client that may be from overseas? The reduction of errors is phenomenal, especially in that mundane, workaround environment that everyone seems to be in.

The model that we offer, as I say, is a subscription model. The idea is that we land and expand. We charge a very small fixed setup fee with a monthly subscription, and a minimum commitment to us is three months. We believe that we have to prove to the client that robotics is the way forward. If you go to one of the competitors, such as Blue Prism, they will insist you buy ten licenses, you sign up for a three year deal, you do a 50,000 pound proof of concept, and then at the end of the proof of concept, they build you a live, working robot. Our argument is that we've already built you a live, working robot to do that trial with real data, with real cases and scenarios, and with real workflows, and we just make it from a dumb environment to a live environment. Yeah, we absolutely compete with those on a very different level.

We're very, very happy with the product. It does exactly what we want it to do, and it allows us to sell UiPath, or sell RPA in the way that we want to. We're not being dictated by the manufacturers to how we have to sell their product. We know our customers best, and we believe that our methodology is the way forward. That's the flexibility we get with UiPath.

We are using UiPath in our finance and accounting area but we do see it as a tool that we can use across the whole of the business.

We're really in the early days of what we're doing but even with the first robotized process, what we've seen is that it's given us the opportunity to really assess the process, understand where the waste is so that we could eradicate that, simplify the process and then really engage with the operations people to build a robust, streamlined process. And then the automation of course, has got rid of the mundane transactional work and given the people a much more fulfilling part of the process overall.

We've used a number of automation technologies previous, I mean we are a technology company so we understand automation and we've used a lot of BPMS tools in the past, but this has just given us something that we didn't have, and I think that's the advantage we're seeing from UiPath.

I think it's the relative ease of use. It's really bridging that gap between the human interface with the technology that we're using and giving us an automation advantage that you just couldn't get from any other type of solution.

I think it's a little bit early to say at the moment, I think UiPath are ahead of us in our thinking at the moment, maybe in a year's time we might have areas where we see gaps but at the moment, everything we need I think is there, out of the box.

I think like any tool, like any software technology, you have to follow the recommended framework and use proper coding standards so it's easy to use, but I think to scale up and make it robust in a scaled environment, you have to have rigor, you have to have a solid operating model in place. But we've done that and yeah, I think it's a very stable product.

Before we entered into this, we did some benchmarking and we looked at best practices and we're seeing companies that are scaling significantly using this technology. We believe we can scale to a significant level, and again, the key thing is to put that operating model in the infrastructure in place to give you that solid foundation.

I would say it's excellent to be honest with you, getting our first robot up and running we had some pitfalls as you would expect in the early days, but we picked up the phone, we got hold of UiPath, they sent people both in physical and remote support forms. And it was second to none, it was really effective and we got up and running very quickly as a result.

I think setting up the software is very easy to do. It is really about spending the time up front to think about your operating model and think about how you're going look at the processes, how you're going to simplify them and then how you're going to robotize them. So you could get up and running with a robotized process very quickly, but if you want to do it on scale, you do need to take some time to think about how you're going to scale that.

we did use a partner, I won't name who that was. We worked with them. It was good to have that experience to bring somebody in who'd seen it in other companies and could help to give us that kickstart. We do want to be self-sufficient, we do want to build our own competence but I think everybody needs that boost in the beginning.

I think the first thing is that I always see these things a starting point, it isn't cost, per se, it's really about the improvement to the process, the quality, the service and overall value that you can deliver to the customer. But what's great is that coming out of that, you do get a cost advantage and obviously unattended robots give us a significant cost advantage, but even attended robots, you're seeing very much an ROI which is in the two times plus level.

If we look at ROI, if we look at our first robot, that's the only one we've got fully engaged and in production, it's probably going to give us an ROI in about one, maximum, two months.

It's been very quick to get up and running and it's saved significant amount of time. We're basically only talking about initially one FTE, when we scale it up to the rest, globally it's going to be be three FTEs. Within one to two months, it's going to giving us a return on investment and we've now got a pipeline and a backlog of robotized processes which we expect to be giving us ROI of less than three months.

It is always difficult to say exactly the percentage, but it's certainly got rid of human errors. I think one of the most important things is that we're 100% certain that the processes run right, so we know that day, that time that the processes run correctly, or if not where the errors were.

The thing with human errors, even if they're infrequent, you don't often know until much later on that the error occurred, so it's that certainly of knowing when you've got 100% accuracy and when you've not, you can very quickly rectify that. So I think that's probably the biggest impact we've seen. So far, over 80% of the lead time and process time has been reduced.

We have acquired UiPath with both the robot and orchestrator. I want to make sure that we get the right return on investment and with the orchestrator you are not only able to use the robots during the day, but you are also able to schedule them during the night. You maximize your investment 24/7.

Lombard International Insurance is the number one in wealth investment and for us the onboarding process is a critical one. We have started with KYC (know your client) which is an extremely painful process, a lot of manual work, but now have some very good friends and colleagues that are happy to have Ruby the robot as their assistant. 

On top of this we also have tax reporting, overdraft, reinvestment, so there are several processes, some like KYC for instance.

The commitment that we have made internally is that we're going to reduce the workload as much as 20%-50% and I would say this is the promise that we have delivered.

In KYC it's 50%, in another process it's 20%, it's also very much depending on the maturity of the processes and how much manual work do you currently have because the robot will only take away the manual work.Whenever you need to have validation because you need to have the four-eye check, that still remains.

When it comes to automation in our organization, we have a certain strategy. Automation and technology is only one pillar of our strategy, but we have an integrated strategy which means that we have the business model, the operating model and the technology.

When you build a house, if you do not have a strong foundation, it's just going to fall apart, so, for us, it's a pillar. It's not the only one, but it is the cherry on the cake, that it is the one that is actually enabling the business to go further and to provide better services to our clients.

At least for our case, I would say it's not the cost that was driven by attended or unattended robots. At the end of the day, my department, business transformation, I am there to transform the business for better.

In some cases, you have processes in which you still need human interaction, you still need somebody to validate and make sure that, once all the data are prepared for you in the onboarding process, you certified and you double checked four eyes principle that everything is correct.

In some cases you do need the attended robot. In some other cases, tax reporting for instance, you can just run it unattended and it's perfectly. You don't even need to know it. Before morning, you have the report prepared for your local authorities, and that is fine, so I think it's just a mix, depending on your business and how it's bringing much more value to you. Sometimes, it's only attended, sometimes, it's unattended, but I think, in most of the cases, you will have in any companies a mix between attended and unattended.

We are proud to say that we have not encountered any issues. Yes, sometimes I hear some colleagues like, "Oh, I have KYC and he stopped." Well, there are also some reasons because, if your password expired and, guess what, somebody needs to update it before it's expiring, the robot will stop. Yes, but so is if you're a human and your password expired, you need to change it.

It is scalable for us. I will have to be honest, we do not have 1,000 robots.

We have not had any opportunity to work with them because that was very stable so far, so we had only in the beginning a partner which worked with us in this journey.

I have actually a story with a CEO in our previous company who was saying, "I didn't know when we did the email migration." I said, "Well, then it means my department is very successful. If you do not hear, if you do not see it, it means we do a good job, so I can only assume they do a good job if we do not interact with them."

It was quite straightforward. Not only this but you see they go more and more into the direction that makes this open and collaborative even for the business users. So that is a very strong advantage for us.

We selected Fujitsu in Luxembourg because our company is headquartered in Luxembourg. Fujitsu had proven not only that they have the technology knowledge, but also the market and local legislation which, Luxembourg people know that it's heavy regulated and you need to really know the ins and outs, so, for us, they seem to be the right partner.

In terms of ROI, I think it's also depending and this is probably critical and I can advise other companies that are starting this journey, make sure one of the critical success factors is select value reach processes. What does this mean? It means that you need to select critical process for your business but also those in which you do have high manual work and you run maybe that process frequently.

You will see ROI in probably 9-12 months, at least as I said, if we look at our processes. Now, we do not like to talk about savings in term of money because we have a different philosophy, meaning that what we want to create we want to create workload reduction for our users.

If I am projecting growth, if I need 10-15%  growth next year, how do I cover this? Do I hire more people? Do I streamline my processes? Well they are kind of lean. Do I use technology? Yes. Well that's your answer. So it means you need to use that technology in a smart in order to enable your people to process more, be it transaction, terms of processing, be it in finance and they have a lot of invoices, it does not matter. It's the same, it means that if we are able and we were able to save roughly around 40%, more than 8,000 hours, per year that we have managed to save, for us that was the ROI.

This is how we are able, for instance next year, to reach the five billion target. I would advise other companies to go more in that direction.

I think one of the advantages that we had with UiPath is that we tested other products such as Automation Anywhere because they are the big players.

We did not yet implement UiPath in Citrix, we have Citrix in our environment, we work with Fujitsu too because there are some aspects that you need to take into account.

I would give it an 8.9 because the extractor is not there, probably now with the extractor I would give it a 9.3. In terms of what it is as options, as I said, I think they are the only player at this moment that has attended, unattended, and an orchestrator, you can customize it.

The thing that I find very interesting with UiPath is that no process is too simple or too complex to put UiPath on it, so it can work anywhere on any type of process. This is why we're able to put in on customer facing processes, but also back office processes, for example in voice processing.

Firstly, it showed everybody that automation is possible and that it does not require much effort. The future holds a lot of surprises when you put the right technology to the right process, then you get great results. What I can say is that we see a solid return on investment, both for us and for our customers.

We have seen issues in the past, but we've also seen the actions that it can do to correct them. For example, it's just one color change or the place of a button in an application change and so on.

I'm looking more at the potential of this product, so looking back, we had support for everything that was needed, our small issues were fixed, but now I'm looking at the roadmap that UiPath has for this product. 

I can say with confidence that is a future proofing investment. I mean what other technology would come out and then bring business value.

I always appreciated technical support from UiPath, because I see both business understanding and also the technical understanding so the support team was able to get the discussion with both my business team and my technical team.

It depends on your expectation. If people have expectations that API technology is very easy to implement, it's not 100% true. It is easy to train a robot to do a specific task. But when you use more robots or you put them on complex processes, then the story's changing so you need very strong development skills and very good system architects who will understand this.

We have seen a return on investment in the longer term because we have some rather small processes. Our advantage is in terms employee experience or our colleague experience. But when you're looking at customers, we have seen numbers in hundreds of thousands of savings per year.

If we are thinking about the customer-facing processes, we have seen saving about 25% of the workforce involved in this. The main saving was in the time to respond to customer.

We did this analysis about three years ago. We compared Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and UiPath and then the decision was to move with UiPath and our first proof of concept was on UiPath.

I would rate the product eight out of ten. I am scared not to be too subjective because I would go for a higher grade. I still see some room for improvement. I still see some need for integration with other solutions, but I would certainly recommend these to all my customers, comparing it to what the competition has.

As our company's grown, we've used UiPath to automate our app end function, timesheets, invoicing, and expenses processes.

We also see with our clients that they are able to reduce headcount based on the fact that people are no longer having to do mundane tasks. We do work into claims,law companies, and document management companies. These types of organizations really see the benefit through RPA and UiPath.

I would say the most valuable features of UiPath are the scalability and the stability of the product as well as the ease of use and rapid deployment. It's easy to learn. It's easy to get return on investment when using UiPath.

We tend to see that clients tend to deploy a blend of both attended and unattended bots. This tends to balance out because the unattended bots are the ones that augment existing processes and cherry pick out parts that a human still sits doing, whereas unattended bots are probably the more valuable in terms of removing the human element altogether.

One of the major things that we've been looking forward to is around project dependencies. Previously, it's not been possible within a product to take a reusable element and deploy it as a live based piece of content, but that's now been chipped within the product. So, we're extremely excited about seeing that in there because, from our point of view where we've got many clients, that re-usability of our own intellectual property across them is going to really see some benefits for us.

We find the support absolutely superb. We've had excellent responses whenever we'd had issues, either technical or around licensing. We tend to get a response within two hours, which is exceptional in the IT industry. Sometimes with other companies we've dealt with, we might not get a response for two weeks. So, they certainly rank extremely highly when it comes to support.

It's extremely straightforward. Complexity around set up tends to come when implementing the orchestrated product and deploying live robot stakes, managing those, but again, I wouldn't describe it as a complex activity whatsoever. In terms of setting up and actually developing, that takes a matter of minutes.

From our own internal point of view, I wouldn't say we have hard and fast ROI incentive cash because it's simply free to power up and resource to doing more interesting things. I would say that once we had implemented UiPath, we saw the return in a non-tangible sense within a month. I would say it's eliminating human errors probably by about 60%.

I would say in terms of our internal organization, it's probably reduced the amount of time spent doing admin activities from a person's point of view by about 50%.

I would rate the product nine out of ten. The rapid deployment and the scalability are huge features. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is because when it comes to bugs in the product, we don't necessarily get fixes  until the next release. So, there's not always a maintenance fix release.

The UiPath robot took over the process that supported the creation of the timesheets, their insertion in Oracle ERP, and the status tracking in Oracle ERP.

• Higher standardization of process integration with the customer's internal applications
• Employees orientation towards non-repetitive work.

• Rapid ROI (return on investment)
• Running management
• Higher standardization of process
• Faster processing time.
  

• HR and finance in IT and telecom business
• Improve the ability to change the user interface or application functionalities. 

We are automating back office business processes focusing on business finance and tax, specifically. We are just recently starting our implementation, but we have been doing a proof of concept for the last year or so on the community edition. We recently signed the license agreement will be moving forward with implementing it full-time.

I am functioning as a lead developer. 

We just started the implementation. 

I foresee as we automated mundane tasks, it will free up time for the existing workforce that we already have to do more tasks where they can use their brain to make decisions. Then, they can think things through and work on the more complex processes that we currently can't automate.

• Its flexibility
• Anything you can do on a computer with enough effort, you can get the robot to do it.
• It is ease to use and user-friendly.
• The Academy training is well put together.

Once we've taken the data that the robot has done something with, we want to send it over to a human a lot of times. However, they need it formatted in a fashion that makes it a little more readable. It would be nice to have some activities without the developer having to do a lot of effort to make the spreadsheet look prettier. 

Instead, we should receive a list every time transactions are performed, and it would be nice if we wouldn't have to format it every time the robot sent us a spreadsheet.

This one area is lacking, but I attribute this to the constantly evolving platform. However, while there is some stability issues, they are quick to respond to them with updates. They are also very receptive to listening to feedback from the community, which is great.

The robots work where you can scale additional servers. They just need a place to work and process to perform, then you can add-on. 10 bots can easily turn into a 100 bots, then those can turn into a 1000 bots. From a scalability aspect, it's great.

I have not yet used customer or technical support.

I have interacted with the community a whole lot, and if the amount of responses that they give in the community is any indication about how fast they would be with the enterprise technical support, then I can only imagine that it would be top-notch.

UiPath Academy RPA training is well put together. It paces well, not too fast nor too slow. You are constantly given new things to experiment with and things to learn which keep you interested, engaged, and moving forward.

Our Director of Tax heard from word of mouth about RPA and decided with tax being what it is, we have a lot of areas of mundane, monotonous, repetitive tasks, return filings, etc.

It's a complex environment with all its moving pieces. However, it is well-documented, everything is, and as long as you're willing to spend a bit of time reviewing the documentation, it's not so complex that you can't figure it out. It's clearly there documented, and it tells you what to do, you have to take the time to read through it.

My supervisor and I were the implementation team. We were heavily involved with figuring out Orchestrator, how to connect the robots, how to build the process, then put all those pieces together. Eventually, we figured it out.

With the current implementation, we are a skeleton crew. My group consists of four people, who are in the financial systems group within the business, not in IT.  I hope that that will grow as the implementation grows, if for no other reason than the more bodies that we can throw at it within reason, the more benefit we can get out of it. To maximize gains, we are going to need to be more than four people, sooner rather than later. However, I am not the decision-maker, so I can only cross my fingers and hope. Right now, we have a laundry list of things that could be automated. We have to prioritize those, then figure out where the bodies are who can do the automating

One of the processes that we first implemented was simply monitoring an e-mail mailbox and pulling out the invoices from there that needed to be manipulated. The robot is not actually doing anything with the invoices yet, as much as just pulling them out and handing them off to the human. Because previously, there was a group of people who were spending quite a lot of time just looking through that mailbox trying to make sure that they caught everything and items still get missed and overlooked. 

I've been told that quite a large amount of savings has happened in the discounts from paying those invoices on time, because someone didn't just overlook something and forget to send it on. As long as it meets the criteria, the robot always catches it. So, that's great. We've definitely seen a return already, and we're just scratching the surface.

I don't see any end in sight for opportunities to leverage it, increasing our efficiency and revenues. It may not necessarily reduce headcounts, but it should cap growing headcounts. Because, as our markets expand, we traditionally increase headcounts in the back office, but we are trying to move away from that.

I would rate the performance benefits as a nine out of ten. The robots can move faster than you can keep track of what you are doing. It's astronomical the levels of magnitude the increase in efficiency that you can get. We have had humans who were taking, according to best estimates, eight hours to accomplish something that the robot can do in minutes.

They give it away in the community edition for free, so I use it at home.

I've only dabbled with the other products, but the UiPath software is easier to dive into and start working with.

We looked a bit at Automation Anywhere. I tried a trial of it. 

We looked into Blue Prism, but I've not interacted with it firsthand.

I have the most experience with UiPath. 

We did do our due diligence in investigating, if not firsthand, by at least reading about what the other offerings were from Pega to some of the other competitors.

What helped us make the decision to choose UiPath was how available the community edition is and how engaged the actual community is. I don't know for certain that some of the competitors don't have something similar, but I was blown away because they got us hooked on it. They gave it to us for free, then we used it, tried it, and fell in love with it seeing what it could do.

As long as upper management says it's okay, we're going to keep buying more of it and utilizing it until something else comes along that replaces what it can do, which I don't see happening anytime soon.

Try it out for yourself. Just go and download the community edition, install it on a computer, and within a few minutes you can have simple automation up and running using the recording tools, etc. Anyone really can do something just to see what it's capable of and see what RPA is. Try it out for yourself.

It has exceeded my expectations. Early on, I didn't have high of hopes for anything I could do which is rule based and have the robot to do it. Yet, I keep trying to come up with anything can't be done with a little bit of effort or through some other activities, especially with the availability of the community, which can leverage someone else smarter than me, who has figured out how to get it done.

UiPath can do pretty much everything another tool can do plus a whole bunch of extra things.

Most of the times, my clients use UiPath to automate really repetitive tasks. There are some complex scenarios that we have been seeing, but they are just trying to simplify their way of work through RPA.

Our clients see a quick return of the investment from time, performance, and scope on whatever their task is. This adds value for them.

• The fast development and deployment is what I like about the solution. 
• There is a lot of support from the community. 
• The product is really stable.
• It is easy to use.
• It integrates naturally with environments in most scenarios, which is good from an implementation standpoint.

I would like to see more integration with solutions, like SAP, especially because the biggest companies have a lot of SAP implementations going on. If they would have more packages to support native SAP activities or perform connectivity to some of those SAP clients in transaction codes, it would be awesome.

It is stable.

It integrates with Orchestrator and allows for faster deployment on multiple levels (small to large companies), which is good for scalability. Though, it does depends on the client's infrastructure. 

Take a look into joining the community and most of the forums. They have good recommendations of things that have happened in the past.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is straightforward. We use it for new people joining teams and for training. It's user-friendly, and if you don't have an IT background, it gives you good, explanatory ways to learn the solution and how to deploy it.

Clients usually through PoCs to determine if they need a new solution. They will define a use case that will make sense and add value to their operations. Based on that, they will ask for a PoC. We will work with UiPath directly to define that POC, most of the time, and showcase their flexibility and capabilities.

The initial setup is straightforward. There is a lot of guidance in the configuration and actual setup. It feels like installing Windows. It's simple compared to other solutions which tend to be a bit more complex. I think they are doing a good job.

For deployment and maintenance, small companies use two to three people to do the task. Bigger companies will have a huge team supporting the solutions, which might take up to 25 people to support a 1000 person organization. Organizations usually need developers, an architect of infrastructure, testers, quality personnel, etc.

Traditionally, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are the biggest things competing against UiPath. Those are usually what most of the clients lean towards, if they see a cheaper licensing option.

Most of the time, clients choose UiPath because it's easier to deploy and learn within their teams. That's what truly makes sense for them.

The most important criteria for clients when selecting a vendor is usually licensing, but also:

• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Ease of use

These three criteria help a lot when positioning UiPath.

Give it a try, especially for new people joining the RPA community. If you don't try it, you will never learn how to actually do it. That is the good thing about UiPath; it is simple and easy to learn.

It has exceeded my expectations:

• I have used other RPA tools in the past. The user interface is simple and allows people to learn from it faster than other applications. 
• It is stable when you create the bot in the first instance. 
• Its error handling process is easier to create.