UiPath Platform Reviews

Primary use case is to find the highest value add processes and automate them to allow people to work on other things, which are of higher value and more strategic.

I currently have a team of about 15 people on my team, as a central team. We are at 35 licenses, so we have about 35 developers across the company.

We are still in the process of maturing to the point where people think about RPA first. We're still running around looking for the processes, teaching and helping people to get there. Our culture shift hasn't happened yet.

The solutions has meet our expectations, even a bit more than that.

• Rapid development: If we can develop something in four weeks, then see value back, that is big for us.
• The quick delivery is good.
• The solution is easy to use.

Managing the infrastructure UiPath is running on is a lot harder than it seems. In the app development world, there's things called Docker containers that sort of help you containerize what your thing is running on, then it is in code. If we could get that, it would go a long way. Otherwise, I will have trouble scaling, because every time I scale, it's another manual setup of the infrastructure. I could automate that too, but the right solution is to have this working in containers, not a bot running around getting rid of pop-ups, and installing and uninstalling Chrome.

Working at an enterprise is harder, because we have security concerns, infrastructure, and governance. So, how do you create these virtual users? Because now someone has to own the credentials, but that's an anonymous user who has access to the credentials, and they have access to systems. All of this stuff is hard.

The stability is not that good yet for whatever reasons. We have a lot of safety critical things that have to be 99.999% availability, so we're struggling a little bit with those. For the non-critical processes, it does a great job.

As a product, UiPath is very scalable. UiPath has to run on some infrastructure, and that infrastructure and security is not scalable yet. I'm not sure what the best practices are to avoid that. 

How do you leverage a scalable infrastructures? Let's say a Windows Server 2016 version, because I know UiPath supports it. However, in an enterprise environment, there are security concerns when I have anonymous users with internet access and interactive logins to a Windows Server. As a matter of fact, my security team says, "No." 

In these areas, there is a lot of opportunity. Because, in reality, this is what is keeping me from scaling. I have the business cases. My business users want it. I have the development talent to do it. My issue is with the infrastructure. 

Their customer support is very responsive. Sometimes it can be hard to communicate, because we are going back and forth in a forum type of environment. After three back-and-forths, it should just be a phone call. 

We put everyone through the UiPath Academy RPA training courses: The foundation and advanced framework. Some people struggle with the questions being asked which aren't on the videos. 

The advanced framework is a difficult course. People take it and they don't get the concepts yet, so it needs to be thought through again. 

We haven't actualized the value. We save people time, but then they're doing something else, and you have to quantify that into the value, which gets really grey and hard to do. As far as a head count reduction, we haven't done any of that.

The performance benefits are good. Everyone is happy. When the thing is working and it's working great, they love it because we are getting value.

There is a lot of focus on new features going forward, integrating more with AI, and that's great.

Get started using the product yesterday. You're already too late.

We're doing a pilot. It's something that we trying to use to obtain more sales automatically. It's about selling tickets, and we're building the capability to do that more quickly and reduce costs.

We seen have operational cost reductions. We have improved our efficiency and capabilities. So, there are a lot of benefits.

It has met our expectations.

UiPath Orchestrator is a tool which allows to us to orchestrate all the commands, like a manager and their employees. We can do a lot of processes, not just in one department. It has flexibility, where you can do a process then to move to another process when there is nothing to do. With one robot, you can program it to do many processes.

The programming seems easy.

We are still testing stability, but it seems okay.

It provides a lot of scalability, because we can do a lot of things with it.

The customer support is not that good. You have to send a ticket, and there is no one to call and talk to. When you are talking about operations, it has to be live. Otherwise, you lose money. I would change this a little bit. I think there's an opportunity to improve.

I'm using the UiPath Academy right now. I'm trying to understand and learn, and it is good, which I like.

We had a lot of manual tasks inside the company. People were doing things manually, then they would try to do those tasks faster, which was sort of impossible. With a robot, we automate those tasks 24/7.

When you take the training, it seems complicated, but it's not. You do have to prepare in terms of knowledge. 

We are building it right now, but I will probably have three or four developers on my team.

We saw ROI in 15 days.

I would rate its performance benefits as an eight out of 10.

We also considered Blue Prism.

We went with UiPath because they have a lot of experience in the market. People really trust them. There are also a lot of use cases of success.

Check the use cases, like cases of successes that they had with other companies first. It can be useful for them in making a choice.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Product stability
• It can't be complicated.

A lot of our business development teams (end users) use it by going to a vendor's site.

For example, end users download information at the point of sale and export it to an Excel sheet, where what happens next is usually manual labor. Whereas, we can go to a site and download a file, then that file is loaded to our business data warehouse. Therefore, we are taking an element away and leveraging UiPath, so staff can do other stuff. That is how were leveraging the UiPath.

It works without human intervention. Since it has become more popular in our company, we will see how we can leverage UiPath with our supply chain, because it seems like supply chain is one of the top five ways to leverage UiPath.

There is a big community, which is very helpful and end user friendly. 

• We would like to know the prerequisites when installing bots. 
• A bot that could provide feedback would be nice.

The stability is great. The product works. UiPath seems better at this than Automation Anywhere.

Technical support has been good. I am happy with their response times.

We have not used UiPath Academy RPA training. I plan to suggest this as a training solution when I return from the UiPath conference to eliminate people asking me random questions about using UiPath.

I came from Automation Anywhere. The UiPath GUI is better for the end user, since I don't have time to develop a bot. Any user can use it.

While UiPath can be complicated, it is much easier than Automation Anywhere.

We were able to replace what we had with Automation Anywhere with UiPath, meeting our expectations. Then, it got popular within the company, exceeding our expectations. A lot of people are interested in UiPath. A lot of people weren't interested in Automation Anywhere. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not like an SAP product that takes forever to configure something. It was easy to install. 

We haven't upgraded yet because it seems like they just released the next version.

We're a team of eight business analysts. All of us try to create a bot, so we can familiarize ourselves with the process. So, if I create a bot and someone else has to support it, everybody knows at a high level what the bot does. 

We created an orders to cash department bot, which is already saving man-hours and money. Because of it, we don't have to hire an employee.

I would rate the performance benefits as a 10 out of 10.

UiPath keeps growing, so it has met and exceeded our expectations.

Look into the data web scraping. I don't think another tool has that feature and we use it a lot. Data web scraping was probably the bonus of why we went with UiPath.

To increase the efficiency in jobs that people do not like to do.

It takes a very manual, key punch-oriented job and automates it, so the user can do more intelligent work.

It has exceeded my expectations. It took a job which would take a user up to 30 minutes and decreased the time without their interaction to three minutes.

• It is reasonably easy to use.
• The FTE payback benefit.

We would like the RPA app that we developed to fall back to one of our APIs and Visual Studio and have that take off. However, I was talking with one of the guys at the conference, and he says, "It'll do that." 

We don't have a large installation, so I can't really measure this.

We use the online forum to ask questions and review user's questions. It's helpful half the time. We don't have in-house experts. My team has just been learning it for the past three to four months, and they are still hitting a wall in certain areas that they have to dig out of. I am at the UiPath conference looking for any advanced training offerings. 

It was straightforward. It was more building the initial app. I'm a developer on .NET, so it was just getting the experience with UiPath. The biggest challenge was just understanding the small, little 'gotchas' going into certain properties, what was required to make the control work. Overall, we prefer it because of the easy user interface and the open community, where you can get a lot of responses from others.

We have had an app running since July and it has been fine. The company change their websites, so we had to go in and fix the app, because the user changed their site. It wasn't because the app broke or had a bug in it, but the user changed their site, so we had to modify it.

We have two developers inventing and developing.

We're still measuring it, because these were more test apps to get to know the system, so the benefits aren't as large as we can see coming from other development.

It does what we designed it to do. It has worked flawlessly, except when somebody changes the actual website that we are reading.

I would start small. As someone in the conference said, "Don't expect in two weeks you're going to have miracles."

In the beginning, put the time and investment into it and do it right. Once you have one victory, then that's where you start looking to train people in the company on what the benefits are, so you could get ideas flowing in their minds. Stress you are trying to automate the boring, mundane, painful jobs that they wait until the end of the month to do because they don't like doing them. Stress what you are trying to automate, and show that you will automate their whole job.

We use UiPath for automating activities that which from operations, such as policy administration, claims handling, HR activities, and finance to a little bit of underwriting support.

We are still at about a year and half of implementation, so the benefits are already being realized. Because of the size of our organization, it's going to take more time for it to make a real tremendous impact. What I already see is there are financial benefits that we have been yielding. There are also operational benefits in terms of time savings and user satisfaction of not having to do the menial, repetitive tasks.

• It scales fairly easily. 
• The UI and the back-end platform are very easy to use. 
• There is a roadmap for growth in the organization: scalability-wise and additional features going forward.

Ease of use could be improved. The newer features are easy to use and positive additions, but there is room for improvement, specifically of the UI console for the developer. There are also other features that could use improvements.

I would like to see the OCR, machine learning, and cognitive package that is being discussed in the next release.

One to three years.

The customer support is supportive and knowledgeable. I tend to deal more with the account and management directors because of the relationship. They are always willing to help and support me.

The UiPath Academy RPA feedback from my team has been positive. It's real structured. One of my guys did the RPA development course, and it should have been an in-depth development and less high-level development. So, it was supposed to be an advanced training, but it wasn't advanced from his viewpoint. I think he wanted more hands-on experience.

The version that we implemented two years was probably harder to implement than what it is now. Though, I would not necessarily say it's very complex to set up. It's fairly straightforward compared to other solutions.

We're still figuring out how much staff we need for deployment and maintenance, as it has been a much bigger requirement than initially expected. We're not at the stage yet where everything is hands-off. 

At the moment, I have a team of seven people offshore that do maintenance, support, and run operations. This is helping us have a seamless experience for the user. The staff in the those roles are support analysts and maintenance level 1 support.

Make sure you have your infrastructure correctly set up and that you are ready to scale up, because it will grow.

Ease of use has met our expectations. It would only exceed them once we see the new features come in and they all work seamlessly together. Every release gets better, which is what I want.

This is now a cognitive solution. It's leading in the industry, but there's still room for improvement. However, I know they're getting there.

We work in the healthcare industry. We are trying to establish a use case for our company to speed up our processes. Because with FDA regulations, there are a lot of processes to follow. There are a lot of phases of implementation to follow. For example, if you want a drug for cancer, a lot of time is spent, but it takes more time to release to the market because of all the manual labor intensive work which is happening. 

Therefore, I am working with legislators and the FDA to see where we can cut paths. There's a lot of scope for automation. UiPath is one of the best product for this.

UiPath is user-friendly, so when we are working with the customer, if they want something immediately they will jump in. We don't have to give the level of estimation, then how much price will be (quote) at all. They don't really talk about the price or the time. They say, "There is a problem," and they are very excited about solving that problem. This excitement is good, and that's what our CEO has always said, "Immersing yourself is always important."

Everyone feels positive when they want to talk about RPA and what they want to do. When we go and explain how easy and adaptable it is, people are happy. It is not complex, because we are simplifying the way how they use it. 

If you're able to discuss and give the layout and the architecture purposeful meaning along with the training, then people can adapt to it well.

It is easy to implement and use to provide training to people. With a lot of other tools, it is more about scripting. Whereas with this solution, it has a more hands on GUI-based feature.

It is easy to use and quick to install.

With every product that we have, there are still improvements needed in some areas. There are certain areas that we need to see improvements: performance, efficiency, and complex environment. We need to work with the product manager on these, and say, "Now that everything has met the industry standards, there's a way to go."

We need to be able to span across a bigger complex network. Right now, the decision-making is based on a five step rule. It would like to see this increased, so we can take on bigger productions and work more efficiently. Also, the performance has to be improved in some areas.

For the last three years, they have been very aggressive. They have been progressing nicely. So far, the stability has been good, because of the continuous product implementation. There has been a focus on the product and everything working. 

The people who started the company are still with the company, and this is a good sign that there is stability. This can be seen in the financial markets. 

Scalability is one of the nice features, because they're able to come up with the UiPath Orchestrator. They have improved this with the 20.18.3 version, which has a lot of good scalability features compared to the previous one. Right now, it is scalable, and there are always new use cases coming out. The more use cases that we pump into the product development team, the more scalability that we will see and more features will be added on, because they can only think of what they have on hand.

Being a partner, I have my own team that I work with.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is good, but we have a good geek squad. Our people have really gone to the community research and downloaded it, so most of my team is self-learning. However, the support people are always available, if needed, when we need some help.

The initial setup is pretty easy, because now my team has been implementing it a lot. For more than a year, we have been a partner. We have been doing a lot of PoCs.

Overall, the steps, documentation, and information are pretty straightforward when it comes to the product, so there is no ambiguity.

The staff that we need for deployment and maintenance depends on the complexity of the process. Typically, we start with a couple of people for the PoC. Depending on how many parallel approaches we have to do, we may increase to four to five people. With that number, we are able to create a good sizable environment and solution. These staff members would be responsible for the architecture, one would be the lead developer, and another would be the functional expert to understand the processes, then there could be a couple of people helping in the development environment and doing all the testing to make sure whatever they have implemented follows the process.

We have use customer support for implementation of the projects because the team is really good.

Some of the return on investments are quick. Because some of the processes that we have implemented, a person who does manual labor over two weeks will see a reduction in hours. Thus, that person is already focusing on some other intellectual work. 

Our goal is not remove all the people, but repurpose their work time in better ways, therefore these people can work better and their throughput is good. So, customers are able understand ROI very quickly.

Its performance benefits are the reduced time, making it is very efficient. If someone is taking two weeks, and now it is takes them ten hours, you already have a performance benefit. 

In terms of product performance, there are still things they need to work on.

I would rate the performance benefits at an eight (out of ten).

If you want to do a demo trial, it is a 30 days free. 

However, the community edition is completely free. Then, people say, "There is nothing to lose, let me try it."

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are competitors. They have been in the industry a little longer than UiPath, which is just coming up. One good thing about UiPath is that it is really capturing the market.

1. The company culture: We are an extended family, not just a partner. Their entire team is available to us.
2. As a product, it is really coming up in the market with a different architecture, most which is .NET and C#. For a lot of my developers, it is easy condition for my team to learn more quickly. We have not really used the Academy. My team was able to learn on their own. 
3. The product has more in terms of supportability, predictability, ease of use, and overall culture of organization.
   

We have not really seen anyone moving from Automation Anywhere to displays or some other product.

Our customers want to see:

• Whether it is a viable product.
• Does it make sense for their business. 
• If it does makes sense and are there other companies, why should they go with UiPath?
• What are the benefits compared to other products? 
• What is the benefits that it is giving to the customer?

If I can layer all of those decisions, then I have walked them down the path of the realization of ROI and why they should be doing UiPath. So, it is an easy sell.

Mainly, we are using this product for automation, the kind of automation that a human usually does.

For example, if we process where 10 people are working manually, which we can automate using RPMs (Revolutions Per Minute), we can reduce this up to eight people. We can't reduce the human manpower 100%, but we can reduce up to 80% of the manpower. But, for the remaining 20% we need human interaction. Manpower is still needed for checking the report and verifying information. For these tasks, it is still key to have a human take charge of the process.

The specific feature I find most valuable is its ability to access a database, automating inquiries, and sending emails. This is very useful. Now, spreadsheets and ledger books can be done within five seconds.

I want to improve machine learning. 

I have used this product since 2016, and uploaded three different versions. It is very stable. 

It is scalable. There are no issues with scalability. 

There is a good support network. Their response time is good. They will find a solution within two days.

It was very simple to set up the solution for our company.

It's kind of like a process which can be done easily by anyone. There is no human involvement required. It is a very easy model to work with, and it is a win-win situation for both business owner and user.

The pricing differs on the requirements. If there is a huge purchase, then we get a discount.  There is not a fixed pricing of the product. 

Blue Prism is a competitor that has benefits, but we chose UiPath. 

It is very easy to learn and easy to adapt. For example, if we have to open a browser, we need code. If we are using Selenium, or some other programming that you have to write code for, it could be 30 or 10 to 15 lines of code. But in UiPath, there's true ease of use. It is as simple as dirt.

We are accountants and consultants and there are many mundane processes in auditing. Using RPA to automate not only allows us to be more precise, but we can also audit a larger population of material. We get accuracy and speed, and those are our main goals.

We have been able to do our work in a more timely fashion, more accurately, and it opens up other paths of customer use cases which will enable us to expand our business as well. 

In terms of performance benefits, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

• The OCR capabilities, to take somewhat structured data and put them into more structured data so that we can do our analysis.
• Screen scraping.
• The overall process of integrating it with other applications that we use in our analysis.
• It has also exceeded our expectations in the fact that it's a lot quicker to implement than we thought it would be.

It's easy to use but I think it will be a lot easier as it continues to develop. Right now, we do need some development capabilities, to understand certain computer languages, to put in the bots. They're on the right roadmap to make this even easier to engage so that anyone, even people without programming language experience, will be able to use it.

I would like them to continue to build and make Studio easier to use for non-technical people.

Looking at it as a marketplace, I think it's very stable.

We have used their customer support. It has been good for us, although it hasn't been perfect because they're growing so fast that there are a lot of new employees coming on board. That's a challenge to manage for any company. Certainly, the online tools, the Academy training, allow for a nice implementation. It's more an issue when it comes to getting in touch with someone, where we need something customized and we have questions.

I have used UiPath RPA Academy training. It's been great. I think it is developing as well. They continue to add training, change and modify some of it, which is great. You can feel that it is evolving.

With most of our clients, generally, it's humans who are doing manual, mundane tasks - what I refer to as the "low-hanging fruit" side of it. They see right away, when we take their current process that they're doing, how the automation can handle it and be more accurate than what the human employee is doing right now.

The important criteria for our clients in selecting an RPA solution are price, that is always one, but also accuracy and security are factors they're most interested in.

I was involved in the initial set up of UiPath in my company. On a relative basis, it's straightforward. There are certainly some complexities to it, but it is definitely less complex than I expected it to be.

Our clients have seen considerable ROI from using UiPath. Once our customers get their heads around it, and then we implement it, they see the benefits of using it straight away.

Scalability is there. There are so many use cases, certainly for our company. There are many opportunities. We're essentially automating what I would consider to be the low-hanging fruit, and there are so many things to build on top of that, as we get that foundation.

UiPath absolutely is capable of scaling.

Usually, it's Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

One of the main reasons that clients go with UiPath is the Academy, where they can get free training, where they can send their internal people to get the training. Having access to it and learning about it is a big hurdle a lot of times. Having access to the learning is a great thing.

I think it's the best RPA solution that I've looked at and I would suggest that you take a hard look. It's easy to start working with it. You can get it stood up pretty quickly and you're going to reap benefits right away.

This is a fast-growing industry, so staying on top of, and executing, plans is important. So far, from what I've heard regarding the roadmap, UiPath is certainly on their way to doing that.

Right now, we're in an interesting spot where a discussion point is how much our customer will own of what we sell to them. We're developing bots right now. The infrastructure, in our use case, typically, is owned by the customer. For us, it's about educating our customers on what we can help them with in terms of infrastructure: We can run it ourselves or they can own it. A lot of our customers want to own that infrastructure.

I think of all of the things it can do - the integration with different applications, solving what are important problems, and saving many labor hours for those who are using it  - and they are the main reasons I rate it a nine out of ten. The only reason it's not a ten is it's not totally done by someone that doesn't know technology and programing. I think they'll get there but you still need some skill sets in your organization.