I work in the financial sector, so my organization mostly used UiPath for disputes, fraud, and chargebacks. My organization had a pretty straightforward use for the tool as it had rule-based manual processes that required automation; otherwise, the organization had to hire temps for manual tasks. My organization used UiPath primarily for fraud and dispute bots, and chargebacks.
I found UiPath nicer than other RPA tools. I like that its enterprise version is pretty user-friendly, plus my overall experience with other components, such as UiPath Orchestrator, was pretty good.
I also found the tool's basic features, such as extracting values from Excel or PDF files and logging into applications, pretty decent compared to other tools. I haven't explored the OCI feature of UiPath that much, so I'm unable to give feedback on how good it is.
Overall, UiPath was easy to use, and building automation via UiPath was easy, with no blocks or restrictions from an application point of view, except inside a Citrix environment.
The tool enabled the organization to implement end-to-end automation. However, it was just a POC, and later on, the team didn't carry it out because the complexity was too high, not because of UiPath, but because of security reasons. The POC went well, but a closer look at the complexity made the team decide it wasn't a good business case.
As a user, I was pretty satisfied with UiPath.
The tool helped minimize the on-premises footprint, which was important because my organization wanted to go digital and had a target.
The team recommended UiPath Academy courses to some of the newly hired process analysts, particularly the UiPath basic course, but primarily, the developers already had advanced UiPath training.
In some cases, UiPath helped speed up digital transformation; in others, it slowed it. Sometimes manual handling was quicker than the bot because for some legacy applications the organization was using, you had to intentionally put some delays, for example, when pages take time to load.
UiPath also helped reduce human error and increase accuracy. My team didn't encounter any production incidents, but in some cases, when other applications or trusted applications, such as mail services, came in, sometimes the bot clicked the button, but still, the mail wasn't sent. The application was supposed to send an email to the client, but the mail didn't go through, though I cannot blame it on the bot, as it had something to do with the other application or service and not UiPath.
UiPath also helped free up employee time. The team calculated the OMDA for each business unit so each unit could focus on a more critical task, for example, where employees can be more innovative. The reflected hours were decreased by up to fifty hours due to bot usage, but it still depends on the business case. A small bot could save up to twenty to twenty-five hours, and in some cases, a bot can save up to one hundred fifty hours.
Initially, UiPath didn't help my organization save on cost, but in the long run, it did.
My organization hardly faced any issues with UiPath, except for a policy issue, mainly when my organization had to do automation inside a Citrix environment. Before that, the organization had to install another component from UiPath inside the Citrix environment separately. The team couldn't find the selectors it was trying to work with until it installed a component, which may be considered an area for improvement.
There are also many security protocols in the organization, and the team also worked with PCI bots. Sometimes, there was a block if the application didn't have the latest upgrade. There was a security block because, manually, people still worked with the older versions, but the bot wanted the latest upgrade from the application, so in some cases, there was a delay or failure, or the bot got killed. It was a mixed bag, so I cannot say it was one hundred percent successful, which is another area for improvement.
In the future, I would prefer UiPath to have built-in AI activities that an organization can quickly adopt, so you won't have to go to a third party dedicated to working with building AI components.
I worked with UiPath for two or three years until the start of this year, but now I've switched to another technology, such as DevOps.
In terms of UiPath technical support, A dedicated person attends to my organization's needs. You can email that POC, for example, when you need to register a license or device, and the response time is usually one to two days.
My rating for UiPath technical support is seven out of ten. The speed of response could be faster, and it would be better if support were more interactive, where the team could reach out to my organization monthly to check if it needed help or had some struggles with the solution.
Before UiPath, I used Blue Prism. I found that UiPath was more user-friendly than Blue Prism, as even non-technical users can use it through the drag-and-drop functionality. UiPath also has a more enterprise approach. The UiPath Academy was also free, which helped a lot of beginners.
My organization had a COE deployment where the COE team was responsible for installing UiPath. My team also builds local robots from some of the ad hoc requests, so my team does the deployment for that.
We've seen ROI from some of the UiPath bots. Still, it was quite a journey because, at first, there were many apprehensions within the organization and the teams, primarily about backups, and nobody understood that robots could be a piece of software and not a physical type of robot. It took over two years to establish trust, and from there on, it was comparatively easy.
We found the pricing for UiPath reasonable. We compared it with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, and based on features and pricing, UiPath stood out.
We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but Automation Anywhere had many limitations compared to UiPath. Blue Prism, on the other hand, was expensive, so we settled for UiPath.
If I remember correctly, the version of UiPath I last used was the 2020 version.
I used the UiPath User Community sparingly. I logged in to see what other users were saying, and that was it.
My organization didn't use the tool's AI functionality for automation as it was still experimenting with chatbots, so with a chatbot, RPA, and handshake, my team didn't go that far.
In the organization, UiPath was deployed on-premises.
My rating for UiPath is eight out of ten.
I'm a UiPath customer. It's a tool used in my organization.